Biting the Bucket with Ayahuasca
How does it feel to die and be resurrected — twice?
It wasn’t until I was vomiting neon snakes — again — in the middle of my second ceremony that I started to have real doubts about taking ayahuasca.
The evening before had been a mixed affair. I had lost control of reality almost immediately, spent an eternity staring into the abyss of my bucket, and then experienced my own death in terrifying detail. However, the extreme euphoria of finding, on my return, that I was alive was a high I had never encountered before. A score draw then.
Ayawhat?
Ayahuasca is a traditional spiritual medicine that has been used for centuries and possibly millennia by the indigenous people of the Amazon basin. Translations can vary from the ominous “the rope of death” to the slightly less ominous “the vine of the soul.” To take ayahuasca, you drink a brew made from two plants with the main ingredient being the hallucinogenic drug DMT.
It did briefly occur to me that perhaps all I had needed was a holiday, rather than the world’s most powerful psychedelic.
You may be surprised to hear that DMT is found naturally in many plants and animals. The science is far from…
