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For years, I’ve been hearing people talk about the whole Ayahuasca experience with so much awe and reverence that, at first, my inner skeptic screamed, “Ignore them!”

The line between “life-changing, inner-exploratory, and soul-healing experience” and “party drug” is often very thin.

After a while, I began researching about the plant, and at least once a week I would find a documentary about the ceremony. A few weeks later, I started talking to a patient in the waiting room of a clinic. You can guess what the involuntary topic was.

A bystander who heard the conversation disclosed his own Ayahuasca adventure. Before I knew it, I was leaving the clinic with the shaman’s details.

I reached out to her and was really surprised: the shaman was a young woman with a warm, cheerful voice. From the start, she sounded like a pro: it was like talking to an ancient doctor (isn’t that what shamans are?). She explained the ceremony, and cleared every doubt. She was extremely thorough in making sure that I was physically and mentally ready for the experience.

She called Ayahuasca, “the medicine” and “the mother,” which was nice because it was less of a mouthful.

The ceremony started around 6 p.m. I wasn’t allowed anything except water after 2  p.m. I couldn’t wait to ingest something, even if it was a psychedelic, Amazonian beverage.

The ritual space was set up with mats, blankets, cushions, empty bowls (an uplifting view), lots of water, and what I can only call “shamanic instruments”: drums, gongs, rattles. It felt like I was camping indoors. 

The space was suddenly transformed into a Moroccan-style shamanic den.

She started pouring out my dose of medium-dense consistency, brown-reddish, Ayahuasca drink into a cup. And I drank it, like tea.

After drinking, the lights were turned off. I was in full darkness (“like the Amazon at night,”  said the shaman). I remember lying down with my eye mask on in pitch darkness, relieved that I was finally about to experience whatever it was I was supposed to experience.

The shaman began singing, playing the instruments, and moving around the room. She managed to keep this up for the whole ceremony. Some shamanic stamina that was.

It took two to three hours for the medicine to kick in—impossible to tell in the darkness.

At first, I started to fall into a relaxed and heightened dream-like state. That was at first. From one moment to the other, I wasn’t so relaxed. I was sweating, shivering, twitching; my body felt trapped in a never-ending dull ache. It was like having the flu tenfold.

Thing is, the flu, I can live with, but what came after was intense. Without a moment’s notice, every single feeling I’ve ever had in my life reappeared all at once: joy, sadness, excitement, fear. It was amazing and frightful, and it came in a roller coaster of uncontrollable waves.

After the roller coaster, were images: symbols, animals, quotes, childhood memories. It wasn’t all nice. For some reason, the mask from the film “Scream,”  the one that gave me nightmares as a child, kept reappearing.

“Medicine,” what a way of calling it.

I was feeling as fragile and weak as humanly possible. I asked it to stop, but the medicine did whatever the hell it wanted. It was after some time that I surrendered and quietly said,

“Do your worst.”

The medicine was like this being living alongside me now—I felt it applauding my effort not to make an effort anymore.

It wasn’t until the last hour that I finally began purging. That’s a fancy word for vomiting. It was actually really close to being comforting. I wasn’t just vomiting (sorry), I was leaving the pain behind.

The shaman said the medicine carries on working for a few weeks post-ceremony. From what I understood, once you try it, it’s like you’re connected to the Ayahuasca Central Network forever and, from time to time, you get messages and the occasional download into your life’s software.

I believe this to be true. Something as little as seeing my reflection would remind me of something the medicine told me during my ceremony.

To all of those people who kept telling me Ayahuasca is “soul healing,” I hate to say it: “You were right.”