The first thing I will tell you is the thing nobody told me, and that I wish someone had: the night you drink the medicine for the first time, the medicine will be far less interesting than the room. The maloca, the lit candles, the rattle, the songs. The other people, sitting on their mats, having their own private weather. The hour, which arrives more slowly than any hour you have ever lived inside. The medicine is the smallest part of all of it.
This essay is a field guide for your first ceremony. It is unromantic on purpose. It is written for the person who has read perhaps too much about ayahuasca, has spoken to a friend who attended a retreat, and is now nine days from their flight to Quito with a particular kind of quiet panic that nobody else around them seems to share. If that is you: this is for you.
The hours before the medicine
You will arrive at the retreat on a Sunday afternoon. You will be tired in a way that feels disproportionate to the journey — the body knows what is coming and has begun preparing for it without consulting you. You will eat a simple dinner that night, take a plant bath, sleep poorly, and wake on Monday to a day with very little structure. This is intentional. The first day's job is to do nothing well.
The second day, you will sit with one of our facilitators for ninety minutes. They will read your intention statement back to you. They will ask you what is happening in your body right now — not what you think, what you feel — and you will be surprised by how hard it is to answer. They will not tell you what the medicine will do. Nobody can tell you what the medicine will do. What they can do is tell you what the room is going to look like, what the songs are for, what the rattle is for, what the bucket beside your mat is for. They will say all of these things plainly.
By the time the sun sets on Tuesday — your second day in country, your first ceremony — you will have eaten a small meal at four o'clock, fasted from six, and gathered with your cohort at half past seven for the opening of the ceremony.
The opening
The maloca is a circular wooden structure with a thatched roof and an open floor. Mats are laid in a ring around the perimeter, each with a pillow, a blanket, a small enamel bucket, and a small bottle of water. You will be assigned a mat by chance, not by request. You will lie on it for somewhere between five and seven hours. You will, at various points, also sit, kneel, weep on it, sing on it, and (rarely, gently) be sick into the bucket beside it. None of this is a failure. All of it is the work.
The opening is held in silence. The curandera or curandero will light the candle at the centre of the room, walk a circle, blow tobacco smoke, and begin the first icaro — a song from the lineage that calls the medicine to the room. The song is in Shipibo, or Quichua, or sometimes in Spanish. You will not understand the words. The medicine has not arrived yet. This is the most important hour of the ceremony. It is the hour the room becomes a place where what is going to happen can happen.
The medicine itself
You will be called to the centre, one at a time. The curandera will hand you a small wooden cup. The medicine is dark, viscous, bitter — it tastes like nothing else and slightly like everything you would expect a forest to taste like if a forest had a flavour. You will swallow it. You will return to your mat. You will wait.
Forty minutes will pass. Some people feel the medicine rise in twenty. Some people, on their first ceremony, feel almost nothing — the body is sometimes shy. If you feel nothing at the forty-minute mark, you may be offered a second small cup. Drinking a second cup is not a way of trying harder. The medicine is not measured by quantity. It is measured by what you are willing to let the room do.
What happens after the medicine arrives is best described not by what it is but by what it is not. It is not a hallucination, in the sense that what you see is not a substitute for the room — the room remains, the people remain, the candle remains. It is more like the room becomes a different kind of room, and the people a different kind of people, and the candle a different kind of candle. Your mind remains your mind, but it begins to converse with parts of itself that, in your ordinary life, do not return your calls.
What people do not warn you about
Some things that are common, that people don't warn you about, that are entirely fine:
- The medicine often makes you cold. We will bring you a blanket. Ask for it.
- You will hear other people in the room being moved by their own work. This is not a thing for you to manage. Stay with your own.
- You may laugh, sometimes for what feels like a very long time. Laughter is also work.
- You may want to leave the room. You will not. The facilitators will sit beside you. You will be all right.
- Time does not behave the way you have been taught it does. Three hours can pass in twenty minutes. Or the reverse.
- The most common emotion, on a first night, is not awe or fear. It is relief — the relief of meeting something you have wanted to meet for a long time.
The closing
Sometime between two and four in the morning, the curandera will sing the closing icaro. The medicine, by now, is mostly gone. Your body is exhausted. The room feels very warm. The other people, whom you have not really seen all night, suddenly look very specific to you — that man weeping; that woman sleeping; that boy singing softly to himself.
You will be led back to your room and given a cup of warm tea. You will sleep. You will wake on Wednesday morning into a body that feels new, or feels old, or — most often — feels like the body of someone you have not been for a long time but recognise immediately. The integration begins now.
What you can do before you arrive
If you are nine days from your retreat and reading this, here is what is useful:
- Read your intention statement, slowly, every morning. Do not edit it. Read it.
- Eat simply. Avoid alcohol, caffeine, and sugar where you can. Walk daily.
- Stop reading other people's ayahuasca stories. They are not your story.
- Tell one trusted person what you are doing and ask them to be available the week you return.
- Pack light. Pack a journal. Pack a single thing that reminds you of who you have been.
That is all. Everything else is what you came here to find out.
I will see you in the maloca.
