Therapeutic vs. Initiatory Experiences

Hi everyone,

I just returned from a recent trip to the Amazon in Ecuador, where I stayed with the A’i and participated in their sacred yagé ceremonies. I mentioned that, at times, it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Honestly, I can say that the second ceremony was downright traumatizing.

I'll start by painting a picture.

Set: Exhausted, depleted from nearly four days of non-stop travel into Cofan territory to arrive at a small settlement outside the main village used for more isolated ceremonies. I was amazed by the richness of the jungle while simultaneously trying to wrap my head around why on earth I was there and not with my family. I didn't feel a particular need to drink Yagé. I didn't feel a particular need to be in the jungle. Why am I here? My best answer was, because this is where I am. Life brought me here. And here I am.

The little settlement consisted of a long, open-air ceremonial house called a maloca, where all of the ceremonies took place. There was a small wooden shack shared by what seemed like an impossible number of people, a little kitchen, some toilets, and a creek to bathe in, since the river was filled with piranha, caiman, crocodiles, and little fish that swim up your pee stream and into your penis if you're unfortunate enough not to have gotten the memo.

It was so muddy that someone fell and broke their arm on the first night. As you can imagine, it was a long, painful trip back to the nearest town by canoe.

The ceremonies started after dark and went through the night and into the morning. They took place with everyone in hammocks, with about forty hammocks crammed side by side, nearly touching and often bumping into one another. The Taitas were also in hammocks at the far side of the maloca. There were no lights, and much of the ceremony would take place in complete silence, with nothing but the sound of the night and the occasional chanting or spitting or purging.

We were absolutely blessed to be in proximity to these amazing healers, many of whom had been raised in the Amazon and had rarely, if ever, left the rainforest. Most had never worked with foreigners. Some of the Taitas were so secretive that they never even revealed themselves in the light. Waiting until night to come out, the only evidence of their presence were the haunting chants and jaguar-like growls coming from the darkness and penetrating deeply into the body and psyche.

And then there was the yagé.

Yagé, a combination of a vine containing MAOIs and leaves containing DMT, known by most of the world as ayahuasca, was served not in cups but in bowls. Yes, bowls of yagé requiring four to seven mouthfuls to get down. One of our only instructions before ceremony on how to navigate the experience was essentially, "Drink until you shit yourself, and then drink again."

The teachings were not in the songs, or verbal lectures, but in what were called, “transmissions” The Taitas would blow into the bowls of yage’ before each person drank, and transmit knowledge into the medicine. They taught and healed through the outrageous force of the Yage’

These were some of the most intense, overwhelming, powerful, challenging, and uncomfortable experiences of my life.

During the second ceremony, after the third bowl of yagé, I realized that I would suddenly forget I was in a hammock. Then I would come to. Then I would forget again. This progressed until I would forget not only that I was in a hammock, but that I was in a ceremony. I would forget that I was in Ecuador, forget that there were people around me, and eventually forget that I was Niko.

I would fade in and out of awareness into a completely alien world where there was no observer present, simply a fully immersive phenomenon not centralized around an "I." It was deeply disconcerting. All of my tools were failing. Grounding, breathing, opening, and surrendering all proved futile. Feeling my body and breathing into my heart was out of the question. Eventually the power of the experience became so much that I found myself resisting…hard. I would claw myself back from what seemed like the edge of sanity over and over again. The purging was intense. At some point I had been wrung out for so long that I felt like if I continued purging that I might actually be in a medical emergency, and before I knew it, I was sure I was going to die.

Eventually “I” would cease to exist. The fear didn't disappear; it became unbound, existential, nonpersonal, seemingly infinite. It was as if I was experiencing the fear and darkness of all humanity.

The purging continued, but I could not move. I was throwing up on myself and in the malocca. Unable to follow directions when people would try to help me. I didn't know who I was or where I was. All I knew was endless terror. It felt as though the world was ending.

Soon I was burning up and ripped my clothes off and writhed around without realizing what I was doing. Occasionally I would hear a voice from the darkness trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t able to understand. I don’t know how much time passed in that hell, but it was dark and painful.

At some point, words began escaping my lips.

"I need water."

"I'm cold."

"Where are my clothes?"

"My body hurts."

As uncomfortable as I felt, these experiences came as a HUGE relief. The first signs that my old, beloved ego was coming back online. I could hear the Taitas chanting and growling and shaking their leaf bundles.

“I'm alive... Okay. I drank yagé. There are other people here with me...” I slowly began putting the scene back together. “I have a hammock somewhere. Where the fuck is that thing?”

I looked up and, to my slow astonishment, realized I was on the ground underneath a hammock with another person in it. For a moment I wondered if I was under my own hammock, having an out of body experience. “Aren’t I supposed to be floating above myself?” I noticed a lock of hair hanging from the hammock and determined it was not me. I still don’t know how I got under someone else’s hammock or how long I’d been there. It was still so dark that I could hardly make anything out, but I began crawling across the floor in the direction I thought my hammock was. After a good bit of crawling I hear,

"Where are you headed?"

An unfamiliar voice.

"I'm trying to find my hammock."

"The hammocks are over there, you’re crawling the wrong way, man"

I had no idea where "over there" was, but I had gathered that I wasn't in the right place. And after having dragged myself across the wood floor for what felt like 20 minutes, all I could do was collapse where I was. Someone gently draped a blanket over me and let me stay.

The next several hours were pure insanity. I thought I was broken. The only way I could manage not to start yelling and panicking was my stubbornness. I mustered up the strength to force a hard psychological stop. I felt like I was beyond navigating a healing experience. This felt like pure survival.

"Nope."

"Nope."

"Absolutely not."

"No."

This went on for hours. Not the proudest of moments for my ego as a Mr. Psychedelic Guide. But it worked. I decided I was not going to die here in Ecuador, I was not going to go insane, and I would not allow these horrific visions to torture me any longer. With a hard, sharp, no bullshit intensity, I immediately aborted any flicker of mental activity as soon as it arose. I just refused to participate any longer.

When the sun came up, I found my shirt, pants, and my hammock and I finally fell asleep, only to wake myself up a few hours later saying outloud, "No. Nope. Nope." I was able to laugh at myself for this, and it was only at this point that I knew I had not permanently broken myself.

I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I swore off medicine work and decided I absolutely was not going to do the remaining four ceremonies. Long story short, I did all six.

I spent the next several days being with the terror in my body. The following ceremonies repeatedly brought me back into that vibration of death and insanity. Every time the medicine began working, I would seize up and hold my breath. I would feel totally frozen.

Now you may be thinking, isn't ayahuasca supposed to be healing?

This is where things get interesting.

Therapeutic vs. initiatory experience

For most of us in the United States, psychedelics and therapeutic experience now go hand in hand. And for good reason! Modern trauma work has taught us a lot about the importance of safety, relationship, agency, pacing, nervous-system regulation, and staying within a person's capacity to actually process what they are experiencing. We have become much more thoughtful about preparation, consent, support during the experience, and integration afterward.

In many Indigenous and traditional ceremonial contexts, the framework can be quite different. The experience may be understood less as a therapeutic intervention and more as a ceremony, an initiation, or a relationship with the medicine, the ancestors, the land, or the larger mystery of life. The expectation isn't necessarily that the experience will be comfortable, regulated, or even psychologically coherent. Sometimes the point is to be brought into direct relationship with something far beyond the ordinary sense of self. Sometimes this can even look like a period of psychosis.

That was much closer to what I experienced in the Amazon.

There was no therapist sitting beside me asking me to titrate the experience. There was no nervous-system regulation, no supportive touch, no one handing me tissues when I fell over in the darkness purging. There was me, yagé, the forest, and the chanting of the Taitas.

From a contemporary trauma-informed perspective, this was an extremely intense environment. And yet, within the cultural and spiritual context I had entered, the ceremony was operating according to a completely different understanding of healing and transformation.

I think both approaches have an important place.

There are times in our lives when we need therapeutic work: when we need safety, stability, relationship, support, and the opportunity to slowly build enough capacity to meet what has happened to us.

And there are other times when life itself becomes initiatory. Death, grief, wilderness, profound love, parenthood, spiritual practice, and entheogens can all bring us into experiences that disrupt the identity we've built and force us into territory where our usual strategies no longer work.

Those experiences can be terrifying. They can also change us in ways we couldn't have anticipated.

The important thing, to me, is not deciding which approach is better. It's developing the discernment to know what kind of work is being asked of us at a particular point in our lives.

Sometimes we need to heal the self. Sometimes we need to strengthen the self. And sometimes we need to discover that the self is not quite as solid as we thought it was.

So what actually happened?

The next several days unfolded in what felt like a release of enormous amounts of fear. I spent a lot of time observing what that fear actually did in my body: how it contracted my muscles, changed my breathing, shaped my perception, influenced my thoughts, and then fed back into itself, unendingly if I allowed it to.

I started to see how fear could become identity, how identity could shape behavior, and how much of what I had unconsciously considered "me" was actually a collection of conditioned responses to threat, whether that threat was real or imagined.

It was truly confronting to be brought so directly into contact with mortality, dissolution, surrender, and the limits of my ability to control what was happening.

On the fourth ceremony, I had learned how to navigate the fear with much more ease. My time finally came to receive a personal healing from the Taitas. Sitting in the dark while they brushed me with leaf bundles called chakapas, blew and sucked, and sang their powerful chants while I was watching material being lifted off of me in high definition was an extraordinary experience. Something major shifted. After this, the Yage’ felt totally different. I could hear the teachings, I could rest in my heart. By the last ceremony, I was in total bliss. Love flowed freely and I felt a deep connection with everyone.

Was the fear ancestral? Collective? Psychological? Spiritual? All of the above? I don't know, and I'm okay with that.

I think one of the problems we run into with extraordinary experiences of consciousness is our compulsion to explain them immediately. We want to know whether something was psychological or spiritual, neurological or mystical, trauma or initiation. Maybe sometimes it is more useful to remain in relationship with the mystery. Can I still hold my experience as valid and phenomenologically real even without an explanation?

For me, the Amazon was an encounter with that mystery, and I still can't explain exactly what happened. Coming back has been challenging, and from a limited point of view, I could easily question whether or not all of that was helpful. I don't know if I feel "better" than when I left, in some ways, it’s been so much harder to navigate a life that I’m realizing has been built around so much fear. But my awareness of myself and the world has certainly expanded, and the weight of much of the fear I realized had been in my body for years is still nowhere to be found.

The experience hurt. It terrified me. It changed me. I feel lighter, less certain, less comfortable, and somehow more trusting. An interesting combination, to say the least.

And perhaps that is part of what we are still learning about psychedelics. Growth doesn't always look like feeling better, and transformation doesn't always look like suffering more. Sometimes we need a carefully held therapeutic container. Sometimes we need to be brought to the edge of what we think we can tolerate. Sometimes we need to be held, and sometimes we need to fly headfirst, alone, into the unknown.

I'm so grateful to have moved through these experiences, returned home to the love of my family, and brought what I've learned into creating spaces for others, whether they're seeking therapeutic support or moving through an initiation of their own.