Who Are You?

And by "you," I mean Ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca.

Who are you? What are you?

Well, according to Wikipedia...

Ayahuasca or ayaguasca (in Hispanicized spellings) from Quechua Ayawaska (aya: soul, waska: vine), or yagé, is an entheogenic brew made out of Banisteriopsis caapi vine and other ingredients. The brew is used as a traditional spiritual medicine in ceremonies among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin and is known by a number of different names. B. caapi contains several alkaloids that act as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). Another common ingredient in ayahuasca is the shrub Psychotria viridis which contains the primary psychoactive, dimethyltryptamine (DMT). MAOIs are required for DMT to be orally active.

Okay, who found that helpful? A raise of hands? Yeah, it is hard to take it all in and the one thing you would never get from that description, is that Ayahuasca is a gift to mankind that can save each person on the planet and maybe the entire world as well. But, before I get to that, let's get a little more nerdy and look at one other definition, a powerful one: DMT. Once again we call on Wikipedia...

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or N,N-DMT) is a chemical substance that occurs in many plants and animals and which is both a derivative and a structural analog of tryptamine. It can be consumed as a psychedelic drug and has historically been prepared by various cultures for ritual purposes as an entheogen. Rick Strassman labeled it "the spirit molecule". DMT is illegal in most countries.

DMT has a rapid onset, intense effects and a relatively short duration of action. For those reasons, DMT was known as the "businessman's trip" during the 1960s in the United States, as a user could access the full depth of a psychedelic experience in considerably less time than with other substances such as LSD or magic mushrooms. DMT can be inhaled, injected, vaporized or ingested, and its effects depend on the dose. When inhaled or injected, the effects last a short period of time: about 5 to 15 minutes.

Effects can last 3 hours or more when orally ingested along with an MAOI, such as the ayahuasca brew of many native Amazonian tribes. DMT can produce vivid "projections" of mystical experiences involving euphoria and dynamic hallucinations of geometric forms.

DMT is a functional analog and structural analog of other psychedelic tryptamines such as O-Acetylpsilocin (4-AcO-DMT), 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenin (5-HO-DMT), psilocybin (4-PO-DMT), and psilocin (4-HO-DMT). The structure of DMT occurs within some important biomolecules like serotonin and melatonin, making them structural analogs of DMT.

Okay, still not real helpful, but the thing to get is that DMT is maybe the most powerful hallucinogen on the planet and it is naturally occurring in plants and animals (including humans). A normal DMT "journey" last no more than 15 minutes, but because of the MOA inhibitor present in the ayahuasca vine, this is stretched out for hours. So, yes, there is a powerful chemical reason for the affects of drinking Ayahuasca, some of which, you may even think of as fun, but Ayahuasca is not a recreational drug; it is plant medicine: "The brew is used as a traditional spiritual medicine in ceremonies among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin."

Ayahuasca is a sacrament and it has escaped the Amazon basin. Though historically (and they have found physical evidence of ayahuasca brew in 2,000-year-old medicine jars), the brew was used by peoples of South America, notably in the Amazon, for ceremonial and religious purposes, today, Ayahuasca has reached the western world. Various neo-shamanic practitioners and circles have cropped up in response to its growing popularity. There are two legal churches in the U.S. that use ayahuasca for religious purposes: The Santo Daime Church and União do Vegetal (UDV).

There is also an aspect of Ayahuasca that has nothing to do with the DMT and everything to do with the ayahuasca vine. Unless you believe that every person who sits with ayahuasca has a shared vision, which is preposterous, then what you get with ayahuasca is Ayahuasca, herself. You get a spirit and she comes to you. Some see her as a Grandmother, some see her as a mother. You bring her your intentions for the night and she guides you through the mess of your life and usually will provide some sort of assistance with that intention.

She works with you to make you a better person. Part of this work, and one of her most misunderstood gifts, is the purge. Ayahuasca will make you vomit or have diarrhea or (joy of joy) both. It is called the purge and many of the Western World have issues with it. Ayahuasca has the ability to scan your body and find what is not serving you, and remove it, sometimes very violently. you may look at this purge as purely psychological if you wish, but the results of sitting with Ayahuasca are not merely mental gymnastics. It is a purification of body, mind, and spirit. Ayahuasca is most certainly medicinal first, hallucinogenic ride second. She pulls toxins from our bodies and  our spirits and aids us in expelling these things from our being. The purge can heal the physical, the mental, the spiritual and it is one of her greatest gifts.

Around the purge(s), Ayahuasca guides you through the non-ordinary reality, helping you make sense of the world, helping you find your place in it, healing you in every way. It has been successfully used to cure PTSD, depression, addiction (Ayahuasca enhances creative thinking while decreasing conventional thinking. This increases psychological flexibility and thus helps with addiction) and cancer (by increasing the number of white blood cells that kill cancer cells (Th1 and Th17 lymphocytes and natural killer cells), suppressing cancer cell growth, killing cancer cells and blocking glucose usage in cancer cells [the Warburg effect]).

All on top of the short term positive effects, which include: A feeling of excitement, Change in rate of thinking, Change in quality of thinking, Euphoria, New insights, Hallucinogenic visions, Emotional arousal, Increased introspection, and a Positive mood. this is all great stuff to get, but what you also get is a fundamental shift in your view of reality.

The Spirit of Ayahuasca is real. Spirits are real. The world you see though your eyes, is not nearly the whole world. It is one thing to say these things, it is quite another to experience them. Ayahuasca is an experience.

Something

Something does not feel right to me. I have gone without eating meat for three weeks now and it is wreaking havoc with my weight.  OK, maybe just a touch of hyperbole there with the "wreaking havoc" line. What I have noticed since I have started going meatless, is that I am hungry more than before.

My whole approach to eating for the past year+ has been to eat only when hungry and to stop eating when no longer hungry. By doing this religiously, I would fast four or five times a week. Every four or five days I would eat one really nice meal, still not eating too much food, but a really nice meal. My body never had a problem with the fasting because at some level it knew I was not starving it. Since I have started to go meatless, I'm not sure my body is so certain of my intentions anymore. Meat was good enough for us for almost 63 years; so why not now? You would have to ask Ayahuasca that one, or rather, I need to ask her that one the next time I sit with her. 

I think my body has learned that a bean tostada is not quite as satisfying as a ribeye steak, and I eat a lot of bean tostadas.  

Baby Come Back

So in late January 2012, I returned home from the hospital, all arteries in my heart now coursing with blood, happy to be alive but saddened by the realization my marriage was a regret. I'd been married for 27 years. The past few years had been hard; I knew something was wrong with my marriage in 1994 when I had an affair and moved out for a year, but we had moved past that, or so I had always hoped.

The truth is, after my affair, my wife never wholly trusted me again, and it showed in a hundred different ways. I eventually moved back in and worked hard to make the relationship work.

I went to therapy twice a week and got us to see a sex therapist.  When some of the men at Landmark (the new name for the parent company of what was once called est) told me how they had tried a new program, the Sterling Men's Group and that it had saved their marriages I jumped at it. I read about a new book by a therapist that was, or so it promised, "saving marriages." I bought it for my wife, and she read two chapters, called it male propaganda, and gave me the silent treatment for a week because I gave her a book she disapproved of. She would argue with me about what the book said. Finally, I told her I didn't read it, didn't know what it said, only what it promised.

My wife started going to weekly therapy with me at some point, but when the therapist called her on her shit, she bailed; too hard for her. She also ignored a few of the suggestions from the sex therapist and did not want to do the women's equivalent of the Sterling Men's Group.

Once, my therapist had me write out a letter to my wife containing everything I tried to do to save my marriage and all of her negative responses. I was not to give her the letter, this was just for me to process the facts, or so I thought. It ended up being two pages long and detailed all of my attempts to rescue us as a couple and her lack of response and worse, her lack of effort; I could not come up with a single thing my wife had done to try and save our marriage. I read the letter to my therapist, and she told me to read it to my wife. I will let you imagine how well that went.

The day I came back from the hospital, I was contacted on Facebook by a woman I dated in high school when she was 14, and I was 17. She wanted to apologize for how she had treated me 39 years prior, that it had always bothered her, and that she just wanted to explain why she did what she did: I basically scared the fuck out of her because when she was with me she felt in love and at 14 that was the last thing she wanted. This was my first real exposure to the results of my naivete regarding relationships, and to be honest, she had devastated me at the time.

We began chatting on Facebook, then on the phone.

At the same time, my wife, who had been a real bitch to me lately, was treating me like I was made of porcelain and walked on water. I knew it was just a reaction to my near death and nothing more, but it still made it more difficult to leave. I had tried before and failed.

Two weeks after I returned home, I left my wife.

(Don’t Fear) the Reaper

I don't. I haven't for a while now. Many people who have done Ayahuasca lose their fear of death; it is one of the first gifts she gives you. I was already not afraid to die when she and I first met. I lost my fear of death seven years ago.

It was a normal Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 and I was done with my nightly Internet surfing and I crawled into bed. It was midnight. I couldn't sleep. I had indigestion. I got up and took something for it. I still had it. Then my left arm started to ache and I just knew I was having a heart attack.

I woke up my wife, she woke up my son, who had been an EMT till a traffic accident broke his clavicle and he was forced to retire. He looked at me. He had my wife call 911. He gave me some nitro to whiff. He looked at me in an odd way. Later he would tell me that as an EMT he had learned the look of death on people; he said I had it, was radiating it.

The EMTs got there and after an EKG said I was not having a heart attack, but they would take me in anyway. At the hospital they said the same thing, no heart attack but they sent my EKG over to the head of the cardiac department and were waiting for instructions.

I was there about 20 minutes when something changed. All of a sudden my mostly empty room was crowded with people poking and prodding and sticking and taping. Finally someone said, "The head of the department saw your EKG, has woken up his team and they are all coming in; you are having a heart attack."

Dr. Tumati was a small man of Indian persuasion and had built the Catheter Lab at the hospital. As someone was shaving my groin he came in and spoke to us. He thinks I am having a heart attack. He thinks it is my LAD (Left Anterior Descending) artery. They call it the "widowmaker" as it does not show up on EKGs.

Before they took me in my son told me, "You are in good hands Dad. That is the kind of guy I want in my heart as well, if the time ever comes."

The Cath lab is a modern miracle. They pumped me full of morphine (my favorite), and wheeled me into the lab. It was cold, I remember that, but with morphine in your system you don't really care. they opened up my artery in my right leg at the crotch and pushed the catheter up from there to my heart. Being awake for this is a very strange experience.

I lost track of time as I lay there waiting to die. They were really pounding on the catheter. I didn't know that my LAD was 100% blocked; had no clue. They pounded at the blockage in my artery over and over. I didn't know what was happening. Then I felt my heart jump, I mean really jump in my body and I knew for certain that I had just died.

Everything I ever regretted about my life swept over me. I was fairly ballsy and brave at work, but in my private life, I had always settled. I loved my wife, but I knew she was not enough, that we were not enough for each other. I craved passion and settled for comfort and security and now I had blown it completely., Life is not a rehearsal and I had treated like it was and now it was over.

I held my breath and waited to see what happened next. It took me maybe three seconds to realize I was not, in fact, dead. Quite the opposite; it was the renewed flow of blood through the artery that caused the organ to "jump." And in that instant, I knew I was leaving my wife. I also knew the only scary thing about death, was meeting it before you were ready.

I continued to lay there as they slowly placed four stents inside my artery, pushing them one at a time up from my groin and into my heart. Four months later in Cardiac Rehab they would notice something while monitoring me on a treadmill and Dr. Tumati would once again take me into the Cath Lab. Some of the original stents he had used were not coated with an anticlotting drug, and they had started to block the artery again, so he cleared it out and placed coated stents inside of the non-coated stents.

Perhaps the strangest part of this procedure was that unlike the first time, for some reason I could feel the catheter as it entered and moved through my heart. I was not an unpleasant feeling, just something you are not supposed to feel in your heart. I guess what surprised me the most is how unafraid I was as I lay there. It could have just been the morphine, but I do know better than that.

Years later when I sat with Ayahuasca for the first time, I could have my intentions on something other than death.

Sugar, Sugar

A few years ago I weighed almost 280 lbs. That was on top of being diabetic and hypertensive. I worked on my weight and by January of 2018 I was at 265 and not progressing any. Then I got the terrible flu that hit that winter and I had a real hard time shaking it. I could not eat for a few days and as I started eating once again I decided that I would try only eating if I was actually hungry.

So I started doing that, only eating if I felt the need to. I also decided that I would no longer stuff myself, that I would make a large, stretched out stomach, something other than the norm. So when to stop? Not when I am full, but rather when I am no longer hungry. I found that I might miss dinner or breakfast or sometimes both; I wasn't actually hungry, so I would not eat.

The weight dropped so fast I was constantly going into hypoglycemia, my blood sugar was going low, which can be fatal if unchecked. In January 2018 I was injecting 95 units of insulin twice a day, to lower my high blood sugar, but as my weight dropped, so did the high blood sugar. I had to constantly monitor and adjust down my insulin.

I started 2019 weighing 205 lbs. and injecting 30 units of insulin once a day. that is a reduction of 25% of my weight, but 85% of my insulin. How did that happen? Well, we have to look at the nature of Type 2 Diabetes.

In Type 1 Diabetes, a person's body stops making insulin altogether and they need it injected daily or they will die. Because they have no naturally produced insulin, without the shot the sugar they eat stays in their blood, resulting in the symptom of high blood sugar. Now in Type 2 Diabetes, you can still make insulin, but for some reason, your body has decided it does not want to, or rather, does not want to make enough.

The reason you become a Type 2 Diabetic is because your body is a bowl of whatever you put into it. In our modern diet, that is a shit-load of sugar. You eat it, it is processed and enters your blood, the insulin allows for the cells of your body to extract the sugar and use it, only, you have been putting in more sugar than you can use for years, and the excess sugar in your body is killing you.

Your body is a sugar bowl, and it is full. Sugar is now toxic to you. It will blind you, it will lame you, it will destroy your nerves and it will turn your brain to mush. So, being a sensible body, it has decided that this is not a path that leads to longevity, so it slows down your insulin production. Your body is telling you to stop killing it. The bowl is full.

Modern medicine's solution is to give you the insulin you are not naturally producing, basically telling your body to go fuck itself, take the damn sugar anyway. The added bonus is that they can point to your blood sugar and show how it has been lowered. They just forget to tell you the part about this not actually being a good thing.

So what happened to me?

As I ate less, I naturally needed less insulin, but, as I began skipping meals, particularly dinner or breakfast, what I was doing was going on mini-fasts, sometimes three or four a week at first. When you deny any human body fuel, it will find a new source of power. It will begin to burn the sugar in the cells built up over years, decades. If you are a Type 2 Diabetic, it is the thing your body has been begging you to do and as the sugar exist your cells, its response is to increase your natural production of insulin. This is why my need for insulin injections has dropped so dramatically.  

"As it should be"

The last time I sat with the medicine, I noticed that I was purging a lot less than most, and, though I knew better, I wondered to myself if that was because the only thing in my stomach was a few fruits and vegetables. At that precise moment I clearly heard the words, "As it should be."

I felt sort of sucker-punched. I didn't see that one coming.

I love meat, but I know better than to ignore the spirits.

Tomorrow will mark the end of the second week I have been without meat. I'm surprised by how little has changed. We still go to our favorite Mexican food spots; I just order the tostadas now instead of the chili verde pork burritos. In our favorite Italian places, Pasta Primavera, or with mushrooms and broccoli, is pretty damn good too.

A friend was sharing on Facebook today that Aldi has Ribeye steaks on sale. I was real excited for a second there.

I never thought I would go without meat and maybe this is just a passing thing, but I try to honor the spirits by heeding their council. I sit with her to garner knowledge, to learn lessons, to find answers; it would seem rude to not at least explore the avenues opened by her guidance.

We Gotta Get Out Of This Place

When I was fourteen I learned that there was more to life than what I could see. I didn't know how to handle the truth I had been given, so, as any child might do, I suppressed the information. I hid its real meaning from my conscious mind and tried to forget.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation and not know how you got there? The pieces that had to fit together in just the precise manner in order for your current reality to exist, seems impossible, yet here you find yourself? I was spending the summer in Oregon with my sister. I had been there a month or so and was bored. She had a friend who had a daughter that was around my age, so my sister contacted her friend to see if we could do something together.  It ended up the daughter was going away to church camp for a week and they wanted to know if I would I like to go too.

I had been to church camp a few times in Southern California. It was where you went to take girls out into the woods and explore each other's bodies. Now it could be that she said a "camp with her church" and I just assumed she meant a "church camp" and not an "Evangelical Christian Camp" which is where I found myself for the week.

I wanted out, but was trapped in the woods. I was alone. They figured out very quickly that I was not like them. Turning me into one of them became their mission. Even the "friend" who took me there was in on it. I could not hide, I could not escape.

They wanted to "save" me. What they did was show me that there was much more to reality, to life, than what I could see, and that my indifference to this actual reality affected it not one bit.

Years later, during my first sitting with Ayahuasca, the first thing she did, was remind me of that night, so long ago, and she gave me a new way to frame the incident, a new way to hold it. It still startles me, but I have learned to trust in her lessons.

Welcome To My Nightmare

I grew up very privileged in the 1960s; not monetarily, mind you, but rather, emotionally. My mother died two months ago at 94, my father died a few years prior at 92; they were married for over 70 years. I never saw them raise their voice to one another, never. I can recall on one hand the times I saw my mother mad at my father. They were a bubble of love and light and as their youngest, they had it perfected by the time I came long.

Ozzie and Harriet, June and Ward Cleaver. I lived in one of those types of TV families. And it fucked me up bad. It in no way prepared me for the real world. It left me naïve in the ways of love and life and that hurt me more than anything in the years that followed. My reason for starting out by sharing this is because I want you to know that I am not dealing with some great dark episode that scarred me for life; for the most part, I am not a broken man.

When I look for the dark to overcome, I find little.

But I longed for love.

I was too naïve to understand it.

I was too fearful of losing it when it was found.

It was the early 1970s when I began to self-medicate. Beer. Pot. Speed. Mushrooms. LSD. Food.

I noticed that when I did the LSD that I was able to tackle personal problems more efficiently afterwards. Then I realized through the chemical, I was able to step outside of my life and look at whatever my current situation was, from a new perspective. I began to use LSD whenever I had a "big" decision to make. Well, they seemed big at the time; I can't remember what any of them were anymore.

I didn't know why it was working, but I don't think I really cared to know. In the 1980s I did est, the Erhard Seminars Training, assisting at est trainings and eventually doing the est "Six-Day Course" in Northern California. For a while, est worked for me, but like the LSD before it, I didn't really know why it was working.

In the 1990s I did the Forum, the program est had evolved into by then. Like est before, it worked for a while. In the 2000s I was a part of the burgeoning Men's Group movement. I also started about 10 year's of therapy beginning in the mid 1990s.

My point is, I have been searching for a very long time, but not to wipe away some great dark event from my past. Thanks to the love and the incredible heart of an amazing woman, I have dealt with much of my issues with love, so I no longer seek those answers.

As one ages, one searches for meaning. I search for meaning.

A little over a year ago we discovered ayahuasca, the true power of the sacred plants, the true nature of reality and how I had been covering up the truth I learned when I was fourteen.