Tag: ayahuasca

great expectations

by nathaliedanielle1 Comment on great expectations

The prevailing advice proffered to those who are new to plant medicine or psychedelics as a healing modality is to set intentions, but release expectations. Nevertheless, that line is indeed a fine one. In my experience, it’s easy to name a desire an intention, but a certain degree of mental and spiritual maturity is required to remain sincerely unattached to outcomes. This challenge confronted me as I returned to Costa Rica for the second time this year to sit in ceremony with the same ancestral Ayahuasca carriers I met in April. It was a “do-over” of sorts; as I recounted in a prior post, my body had an alternative plan for me eight months ago. But as 2024 concludes, a retreat opportunity paired with my inner calling led me back to reflect on an enormous year of growth and to make space for feeling the profound grief that will forever cast its shadow on the Christmas holiday since losing my mother on that day three years ago. Last but certainly not least, I intended to deepen my spiritual practice to support all I am creating for this coming year and beyond.

For those familiar with numerology, 2024 marks the completion of a nine-year cycle for me. In sum, it’s the end of an era. Energetically, I’ve felt the magnitude of that as I released limiting identities and habits, dedicated myself to restoring optimal physical health, and contemplated shifts aligned to the next chapter of life that I am manifesting. How apropos, then, to bring it all to the medicine and ask her for help (another skill I am practicing). Most of my past ceremonies have been physically and emotionally challenging – some of the hardest nights of my life, in fact. Yet, there is something so restorative on the other side of the inevitable purge that occurs upon drinking Ayahuasca’s potent brew, resulting in an ineffable lightness and spaciousness. Still, I had high hopes (one might even call them expectations) for the kind of earth-shattering, transcendental apex I’ve only heard described by friends and strangers alike. Throughout two sequential night-long ceremonies conducted by masterful indigenous shamans and gallant facilitators, I felt nothing but debilitating nausea, a weakness that confined me to the limits of my small mattress on the floor, and an amplified awareness of my chattering brain responding to every raucous sound that reverberated throughout the room. 

As my peers regaled each other with stories of their eventful journeys in the subsequent days, I couldn’t help but witness a familiar pattern of comparison arise in me. Why didn’t I receive the beautiful visions and mystical messages like so many others? What is wrong with me? Yet, if I’ve understood anything in this year of endings, I choose whether I am a victim or a creator, and I’m done with stories of victimhood. I’m reminded of the very beliefs that brought me to this healing medicine; I trust in the divine design, and I always receive that which supports my highest good. I may recognize it in a future moment of clarity, or it may impact me in more subtle ways, but the path to awakening is an exercise for life. Just as we don’t practice yoga to strike the perfect pose, but instead to apply its teachings off the mat, we don’t drink Ayahuasca (or work with any other spiritual or therapeutic tools, for that matter) for one peak experience. When we fall out of poses, or when our expectations are unfulfilled, it’s like a big developmental Christmas gift whose lessons are waiting to be unwrapped. And just as our retreat group danced to traditional Amazonian melodies at dawn to conclude each night of ceremony, I am dancing into 2025 with one intention: to welcome it all…even the feisty Costa Rican scorpion hiding in my shoe.*

*Ancient Egyptian mythology associated scorpions with the goddess Isis, who represented healing, fertility, and protection. The morning I was leaving Costa Rica, I stuck my foot into my shoe where a scorpion was inconspicuously hiding. After the adrenaline wore off and the relief set in that I wasn’t stung, I couldn’t help but smile at the magic of this symbolism at the close of my retreat. The medicine gave me exactly what I needed, indeed.  

grandmother’s medicine

by nathaliedanielle2 Comments on grandmother’s medicine

I prepared for months. Daily meditations and weekly practice of tools for emotional resilience, nervous system regulation, and ancestral wisdom set the stage to travel to Costa Rica’s jungles to sit again with the great plant medicine mother, Ayahuasca. It was abundantly clear in advance that in this lineage of medicine carriers from the Amazon in Colombia, women on their moon (as the menstrual cycle is tenderly called) are not permitted to participate in ceremonies. Yet, the probability of that impacting me was low. Since discontinuing my 18-year reliance on hormonal birth control, my cycles have been irregular and sparse. For me, this is just one unfortunate side effect of a larger, longstanding repression and denigration of my feminine body and energy, which I’ve dimmed with shame, judgment, and an impossible quest for perfection.

Imagine my disappointment when, the night before the first ceremony with my retreat group, my moon arrived. Normally, I’d rejoice as I’ve shifted my relationship with this biological reality, no longer viewing it as an unnecessary nuisance but rather as a vital sign and guardian of my dream for a future child. But this time, it triggered the old story of “inconvenience” and “weakness.” Yet, after speaking with some of the female facilitators and processing my disillusionment, I started to shift my perspective. Anyone on this medicine path will share the same message: the plant’s spirit works in mysterious and mystical ways. In fact, one doesn’t even have to drink her potent brew for the effects to manifest. We set intentions and attempt to release expectations, trusting that we don’t necessarily get what we want, but we do get exactly what we need.

Not coincidentally, my intention for this trip was to ask Mother Ayahuasca to show me my authentic self and reconnect me to the divine feminine that I’d locked away so that I could succeed in a man’s world, especially as I ascended in my corporate career in particularly masculine cultures. In the opening circle with my retreat group, I lay in meditation with my eyes closed, holding my intention in my heart. I felt warm, delicate hands resting on my womb, but when I opened my eyes, I realized there was no one with me. Looking back, it seems like a premonition. While the rest of my group spent their first night in ceremony drinking Ayahuasca, I communed with two medicine women, learning about their spiritual reverence for the moon cycle and how indigenous cultures across the world have honored it as a medicine ceremony in and of itself. It’s a time to gather, rest, cleanse, and give thanks. Since the womb is a portal for life, it must be cherished in the most sacred way. Thus, the combination with Ayahuasca is too strong, as they are both powerful purifiers of energy, and we can only safely process so much healing at one time. In fact, the elders say that long ago, women didn’t drink at all because it had no effect – it was the disconnection from our bodies that required the medicine to bring us home to ourselves.

Many traditions refer to the lunar moon as Grandmother. She is honored for watching over the waters of the Earth, regulating the tides, and nurturing the feminine because she also governs our cleansing cycle. Water always comes before new life, and I felt the spirits of my mother and grandmother united through Mother Ayahuasca and Grandmother Moon in support of my rebirth. Instead of the brutal purgatory that I anticipated and somewhere deep down felt I deserved, they gifted me an intimate, three-part ceremony surrounded by four female angels. We spent one evening gathered around an altar, as I was offered a ritualistic healing fortified by different sacred plants including nettle and tobacco. The next day, my soul traveled the celestial realm as we shared mushrooms, music, and pure magic. I grieved for time past, for loved ones lost, and I danced and played as the inner child within me was liberated from her cage. Indeed, my communion with the plant spirits offered me exactly what I needed. On my journey to radically loving myself in her totality, I am giving myself the medicine I was seeking outside – at last, coming home to myself.

Dedicated to Sathya, Dali, Mishy, and Sylvie at The Nature Within

Read about my previous Ayahuasca ceremonies in The Silence Between the Words, January 2023, and My Undoing, June 2021