I Witnessed My Own Birth. It was Horrific but Necessary.
How Ayahuasca Showed Me What Unconditional Love felt like
This year I went to my first Ayahuasca retreat in Brazil.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew made by combining 2 plants: chacruna and caapi. Shamans in the Amazon have used Ayahuasca for thousands of years as plant medicine and a teacher.
For me, this retreat wasn’t about going to the jungle and tripping balls. I had a clear intention of wanting to understand myself better and letting go of past trauma. I have struggled with self-hate for most of my life and a very important facet of my personal development journey was to find a way to unconditionally accept myself; all parts of myself.
Having the right setting to facilitate this exploration was crucial.
I chose Spirit Vine Ayahuasca Retreat because one of the facilitators was a close friend whom I trust. Also, the owner Silvia had 40+ years of experience in clinical psychology and working with modified states of consciousness.
The retreat also had an elaborate application process and a rigorous preparation routine which started 3 months before the retreat. It was clear that they took the welfare of all participants very seriously.
I felt safe here.
Return to Child Workshop
Before each Ayahuasca ceremony, we had workshops that taught us techniques that we could apply during the ceremony.
The first workshop was about reconnecting with our inner child.
Silvia guided us through a meditation which put us in a deeply relaxed altered state. While we were in this state we were asked to go back to the scene of one of our earliest childhood traumas.
There was a strange twist. We explored the incident from two different perspectives
The first-person perspective: Here we relived the trauma and reconnected with how the inner child felt when they were the victim of this trauma. What was the message that this child accepted in response to this trauma?
e.g. “I’m unworthy”, “I cannot trust anyone”, “I don’t deserve love”, “Good things never last so I won’t get attached”, etc.The third-person perspective: Before the practice, we were asked what we would do if we saw a child crying, and the entire room said in unison that we would pick up the child and hold them.
And that’s what we did in step two. We went back as the present-day versions of ourselves to be there for our inner child and rescript this traumatic incident.
The workshop was incredibly powerful even before we drank Ayahuasca.
It added a layer of detachment between our childhood trauma and us. In the past, a trigger made us relive this trauma as powerless victims each time. This technique gave us the tools to review these incidents from an empowered perspective.
It also helped us uncover the limiting belief that our inner child accepted as the truth and how this belief impacted us in our lives today. Once we had an awareness that this was untrue, we had the ability to let go of this baggage.
Here’s a working example that I used for one of my childhood traumas
The craziest thing that I have ever seen
It was 10 pm and we were all in the ceremony room, an octagonal maloca in the middle of the rainforest.
I had no idea what I was getting into. We were asked to state our intention before the ceremony and my intention was,
“Mother Ayahuasca, I surrender to you. Show me what I need to see most right now.”
And then I chugged away.
I didn’t notice much during the first hour so I sat upright and meditated but my mind wouldn’t let me. It was racing and there were so many random thoughts.
“What the hell am I doing?”
“Why am I here?”
“Is this a cult?”
During the second hour, I was staring at a firefly that had entered the ceremony room. I wasn’t sure if it were a real firefly or a projection or a vision. I learned the next day that it was just a firefly and not something out of a sci-fi movie.
At around the 2-hour mark, a song triggered me and I started feeling very uncomfortable. I was in pitch darkness and completely alone. I couldn’t move. My eyes were open but I couldn’t see. I wanted to ask for help but I couldn’t speak.
And this was when I saw a knife coming for me.
I thought this was it. This was the end of the road. When I made peace with my death, the knife stopped right before it reached me. And it had sliced across something. And in the next moment, I saw blinding white light.
And then I saw a room full of people with masks looking at me. Some of them were cheering on. At that moment I became hyper-aware of what I had just seen.
I had just witnessed my own birth. I was a c-section and the knife that was coming for me was a scalpel to make an incision.
I saw my mom on the table still under the influence of anesthesia and I was so confused. I had been cleaned up wrapped and placed to the side. What was happening? Why isn’t no one holding me?
This was a perfect opportunity to apply the inner child techniques from the workshop.
I showed up in the room as an adult version of myself; an illuminated father figure. I picked up this confused child and held him tight. I could see these visions switch back and forth between two perspectives: that of the inner child and that of the inner adult. I was also hugging myself physically while this was happening.
It was at this moment that I experienced unconditional self-love and acceptance. Something I have never felt before. I felt like a huge weight was lifted off my chest and my heart was light as a feather.
Tears were flowing out of my eyes. Tears of love.
The ceremony went from extreme discomfort to pure bliss within minutes and I learned a valuable lesson that day.
Self-acceptance is the only acceptance that matters and we can make a choice to experience it in every moment.
This article was originally published on Medium on May 18, 2022