DOSE:	150 g	oral	Banisteriopsis caapi	(tea)
	50 g	oral	Diplopterys cabrerana	(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

200 lb

About 150g caapi, 50g chali, boiled in distilled water w/ 3 tbsp white vinegar per wash, 3 3-hour washes, concentrated down to about 8oz cocoa-thickness brown liquid.

Drank about 1 oz at a quarter to 9, on an empty stomach. Setting was my bedroom, with the lights out. My partner was in the room, but was asleep for most of my trip. We’d both had aya made with chakruna the day before, which had mild effects on him, but essentially none for me, which is why I was drinking again. I had worked through my anxieties in previous journeys, but now my intention was to work on my shame and difficulty connecting with others, along with my usual “whatever she wants me to see”. The brew was extremely bitter and sweet, but less strong in flavor than aya made with chakruna. It was hot, but after drinking, the inside of my mouth felt cold. I could tell immediately that it would probably be a potent brew, since I felt a slight shift as soon as I drank it: a sense of sacredness, a feeling of warmth in my body and a need for movement. I have felt this when drinking strong brews before. This was my seventh journey with ayahuasca.

I decided to listen to a playlist of icaros while I waited for it to kick in. After half an hour, I could definitely tell that it was working. I felt a familiar sense of hollowness behind my eyes/face (I thought perhaps I was just keenly aware of my sinuses), and saw little pink mandala-like designs spinning in my peripheral vision. I also felt an emotional shift. Before drinking I had felt frustrated and left out after my failed trip the day before. Now I felt comforted, expansive, curious. I began asking questions and getting answers that didn’t resemble my typical thoughts. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what these were.

After 1 hour, I felt I needed to drink more in order to go deeper, and drank approximately 4 oz more. I often do this: drink a little at first to get the MAOI working, and then chase it with a bigger dose. I find the effects are stronger this way than if I drink it all at once. I left the rest in the mug, but at some point (I don’t remember the time), I went back and drank that as well.

Now I felt apprehensive. I could feel the ayahuasca tugging at me, like she was trying to uproot a plant. I laid down and looked at the ceiling. I realized I didn’t want to close my eyes, because I would feel too lonely if I did. I tried to follow the loneliness to its source. There was a fear of not coming back, of being unable to talk to my partner again, or other people. It wasn’t a fear of annihilation, but of isolation. I remembered feeling profoundly isolated and claustrophobic during my last journey with chaliponga, but also, underneath it, there was a deeper, constant loneliness. I began to see branches, or neurons, reaching out to connect with each other, and felt a deep longing, of all beings in the universe reaching to connect, but always leaving a little space between, the inability to see anothers’ minds. I felt that everyone else was reaching out, communicating, participating in this great network, but I had been focused inward for so long, I had forgotten how.

I asked my body, “please keep breathing, so I can come back”, and “please hold on to my memories for me” and felt reassured that it would (I also thanked my body, afterword, for doing this).

I felt a sense that the left side of my body was stretched, so it was taller than the right side. A loosening. I saw the veins inside my arms, the nerves, my intestines, as though I had x-ray vision. They flashed between realistic depictions, something like black and white block printing, and snakes or tree roots. I suddenly heard crickets so loud and strange, I had to ask my partner whether they were real crickets. It felt as though they, as well as the music, were speaking directly to me in that moment. There was a sense of being strapped into a roller coaster, ready to go, a mix of anticipation, fear, resignation and trust. There was a presence with me (aya herself) to guide me on my journey, but I could feel it would not be easy. She told me, “you have to look where you don’t want to go”. I was drawn into my solar plexus by a slight feeling of nausea. It was motion sickness, I thought. I felt a strong wind come from my right side and blow me away, as though I were made of sand, and then opened my eyes (not physically), in a new place. There was a feeling of intense reality that was familiar to me from previous journeys with aya, but also from childbirth, and, I felt, from my own birth and before. I felt as though I was finally awake from a dream of my mind, intensely present in the moment, everything so sharp and clear it was almost uncomfortable. I don’t remember the visuals I was seeing, just the intense feeling of reality, a feeling of self stripped down to pure consciousness. I had lost my history and my name, I was nothing but a consciousness, a camera lens, a sensor, and all I could do was look and feel, helplessly. And I felt lonely again, locked inside this solitary consciousness.

I had been here on a previous journey and felt it unbearable. There was a sense of claustrophobia as well as isolation. I was trapped inside a sort of amniotic sack of visions. Every thought manifested itself, and every sensation or vision revealed itself as part of me. I heard mother ayahuasca whisper to me: “you have to feel it”. So I went in, and I felt it, the claustrophobia, the isolation, the sadness of the only being in the world longing for a true other: someone I couldn’t see inside, whose actions I couldn’t predict. I realized I was longing for an illusion, just so I could enjoy the experience of breaking through that illusion bit by bit – communicating with someone, and learning that they were indeed the same soul. A great cosmic hide-and-seek game. Surprise, and play. This had been the conclusion of a previous trip, but now it was the starting point.

Sometime around midnight, aya offered to perform a sort of surgery on me, to restore my ability to turn outward. I was afraid. I knew intuitively that turning toward others meant feeling overwhelming suffering, which was why I had avoided it. Even though I had a partner, I spent most of my time inside my own head. I asked him to hold my hand. I had a sense of getting my consciousness out of the way while the medicine operated, and a jolt went through my body, and it felt as though my mind rebooted – as though I was waking up, yet again.

She told me the integration was the important part: “that is where you change, you change in time.” Instead of the outside reflecting the inside, I now felt as though there was no inside or outside, just a shifting pool of consciousness, the lines drawn wherever society decided to – self as a cultural construct, but there was no actual boundary between self and other. This was simultaneously a great relief, and terribly painful, for as soon as that boundary was gone I began to be flooded with all sorts of pain and suffering that were not my own (and yet, I realized, they all were – the suffering of every soul was my own suffering). Aya told me I needed to feel this suffering with acceptance and love, and so I could heal it. This would be a practice for the rest of my life, and after. I knew there was no real choice because I was every one of these beings, and love was the reason any of us existed. It must be done – a tremendous backlog of pain, voices crying out to be heard, understood, needing compassion. The compassion itself was the work, but it was – is – daunting, terrifying, hard and painful work. It could only take millennia, I felt.

I had a funny thought: even the richest man on earth was not free. He went to space to seek freedom, because even he could not escape the suffering of all humanity. We were all tied together, rich and poor, exploiter and exploited, and even those at “the top” of the hierarchy were prisoners to it. Only love, only compassion could undo those chains and move forward into an experience of joyful play and connection that lay beyond.

I began to see, or become, different people, animals, plants. It started with family members, and a feeling of their pain, and my own pain associated with them. A deep, thorough feeling of the pain that was therapeutic, I felt, somehow to them as well. Then I began to see strangers, random people in random places. Soldiers dying on a battlefield. Starving children. People who felt trapped, alone, terrified, and I had to feel their pain, intentionally and with love. It seemed endless, so many varieties of pain, but as I went through them, they all became suffused with a golden light. I felt that love was something round, like the full moon, and I could see it working, simultaneously, on them and on me, the energy flowing like water. Tidal waves of pain running through humanity. Then I began to become animals – a rabbit, a variety of insects. I realized at one point I had spent what felt like 15 minutes genuinely believing I was a honeybee. It made me laugh out loud.

Then there was a strange flood of Japanese imagery – buildings, landscapes. I wasn’t sure where it came from or what it meant, but I enjoyed their beauty. They felt familiar.

Then the waves of psychological pain returned. I began to feel exhausted. The work was more than one living human could handle, I was overwhelmed, and my body was starting to complain. I had barely eaten in two days, it was now well after midnight and I was tired, and my mouth was incredibly dry, but I knew I had no choice but to go through, and into it, with willingness and love, for as long as it lasted. I was just lying there feeling pain – not really seeing a lot of visuals except shifting colors representing the waves of pain that I would go into, feel, and heal – for what seemed like forever and actually was the rest of the night. I occasionally opened my eyes, looked at the clock, thought “it will have to wind down soon”, but it wasn’t until around 6 am that I began to have moments of lucidity and peace. At around 7, I ate a piece of bread, extremely slowly. I had to spit the first bite out because I lacked the saliva to swallow, and with the second bite, I suddenly felt the pain of the wheat berries being harvested. I nibbled at the rest for an hour, laying it on my belly or chest between bites, where it seemed to alleviate the pain. I drank a little water, but every swallow seemed to “shake some DMT loose” and I would spend the next ten minutes in outer space. By the time I finished the bread, this stopped, and at 9 am I finally was able to sleep, although I was definitely still feeling effects.

I woke up at noon, ate a banana, drank some water, chatted with my partner, and wrote this. I’m exhausted, but otherwise, I feel fine. There is a sense of finality to this trip, as though something has been fully resolved. I feel prepared to move forward into the unknown, into the future, and to put this into practice. Not eager, not afraid – just a sense of readiness and peace with existence.

Exp Year: 2022	ExpID: 117286
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 43
Published: Aug 6, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Huasca Brew (268), Diplopterys cabrerana (157), Banisteriopsis caapi (169) : Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Entities / Beings (37), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17)