Ayahuasca Retreats
I can’t remember now how I heard about it. Online somewhere I suppose, probably in my perusal of websites made for people like me who were seeking to transcend the suffocating weight of a Saturday morning by inserting a canister of nutmeg into their anus.
Ayahuasca. Normally taken in liquid form, orally, that was good to know. Heals cancer, depression, PTSD, addictions, obesity, impotence, auto-immune disorders and schizophrenia. Website seems trustworthy. Dennis McKenna is a sponsor. Says it’s the real deal. Three-toothed native shaman shuffles about in hut, smokes pipe, says it’s the real deal. Guy with schizophrenia – one week in – grins like a newborn child, like this was a deal that went beyond the horny disassociation of a nutmeg attack… and into the main-line of the real: a substantive antidote to the condition of being human.
An antidote, I breathed, unconsciously. Some lost thing inside me cried out.
Like anyone else, I lived in a big city, its neon signs bulging excitedly with solutions
ORGASM
to modern living. There was George Clooney’s visage on bus stop posters selling watches that looked like they would last forever
NOSE JOB
and recently an icecream store with three hundred and sixty five flavours opened up in my neighbourhood which
FACEBOOK
was convenient because I often felt empty.
Of course I knew, with my conscious mind that knows knowable things, that the city’s fixes were superficial and that perhaps I had a chemical imbalance going on. I read a study proving that Ayahuasca increased serotonin in drinkers by 25%. They have also been saying that it “resets your limbic brain system”. Now we’re talking: science… you know, chemicals, cells, biology, algebra and the stuff inside a computer; penicillin, Viagra, shampoo… and doctors give you pills for sleeping and you sleep; and pills for headaches and the headaches vanish; and injections that prevent rabies and polio, and since those injections I never once got rabies or polio.
And yet I also knew that because I was especially doomed, and more so than anyone else, perhaps something … magical … was required to change me. Here we are, someone who knows: SpiritUser 679 on the forum (who has 9804 posts to her name) says that you must be willing to give yourself to ‘grandmother’ Ayahuasca. But she is a fierce grandmother who demands respect … and if you pray, offer up your soul to her spirits for cleaning, she will show you what you need to be shown and then make you vomit up the horrors into a bucket. The efficiency of this grandmother at once terrified me and electrified a little half-dead body of hope inside. Truthfully I was becoming hooked on grandma even before I had rationally concluded that grandma was for me. Be smart, I told myself, do more research.
So the real name of the vine is BCaapi, that’s got the MAOIs; the DMT is in thepsychotri verido leaves… resourceful teenagers make it themselves — youtube pop-up > ‘85 year-old retired accountant trips nut-sack in backyard’:
“First you shit on yourself.
Then you go to hell and see the future and
at the end it’s like 25 years of psychotherapy.
And I had sex with aliens. They fixed my prostate.
It’s all in my new book”