Anyone who has ever been in Ayahuasca circles will tell you: "the medicine gives you what you need." The idea is that some experiences under the influence of this potent entheogenic brew can be extremely difficult, but ultimately good for your soul. Well... I can tell you from personal experience that it can get real rough, and I'm still making up my mind whether it really benefited me.
If you read my post on discovering Alan Watts in my twenties, and the traumatic drug-induced psychotic episode I had at 18 that he helped heal, you may be wondering: "Alex, why do you keep having these bad experiences on drugs?" Or, more pointedly: "Why do you keep doing drugs, period?" Haha, good question. I've done Ayahuasca eight times at the time of writing. (Frankly, I don't know why I add that qualifier, because I sure as shit don't feel like doing it again anytime soon.)
I'll answer both, since the honest answers are a bit more complicated than you'd expect.
The bad trips
First: why do I keep having bad experiences on drugs? Well... who knows. A typical rational explanation might be that I have some profound trauma deep down, which would be the compassionate answer. From a more austere perspective, maybe I have "bad karma" and I'm being punished, or my soul just needs a good cleaning. I'd love to know, because to tell you the truth, plant-based psychoactives, from marijuana to mother Aya herself, have always been a rough ride. That said, I've always got on better with mushrooms. Not sure why. Heck, I even had a pretty incredible time on San Pedro (a mescaline cactus, like peyote). A brief aside: people generally say marijuana and Aya are feminine energies while mushrooms and San Pedro are masculine. Go figure, maybe I have some cosmic mummy issues.
Why I kept going back
I was literally shouting "Fuck you!" at the top of my voice and smashing my sick bucket until it shattered.
Second: why do I keep doing drugs, period? As a disclaimer, I don't really do drugs at all anymore. Since getting back from travelling I've generally steered clear, because they always felt like such a gamble as to how they'd make me feel. That said, while I was actively interested in Ayahuasca, I went to three retreats, covering eight ceremonies, over just more than a year, which is arguably quite a lot. The crazy thing is that not a single ceremony was entirely pleasant, and some were outright torturous. My family were aware of how I was reacting, because I share a lot of personal things with them, and at some point they wanted to intervene. Reasonable enough.
The reason I kept going back was that I fundamentally believed psychedelics could effectively cure neurotic mental illnesses like anxiety and depression by reconnecting participants with their higher sense of self. It's well documented, through some fairly large studies, that guided psychedelic therapy with mushrooms has produced long-lasting relief from depression symptoms, and has consoled terminally ill patients by reducing their fear of death. From a scientific perspective, psychedelics reduce the influence of the default mode network (the part of the brain that runs our lifelong personal "programming") and open it to new neural pathways and experiences. From a new-age spiritual perspective, they open our souls to far higher vibrations and to divine "downloads" of information.
All sounds good in theory, but the inescapable truth is that some people have to go through hell to get those downloads. No pain, no gain, right? Yep. Some of the people at my retreat were having full-on orgasmic gratitude experiences, crying their eyes out and later calling it the best night of their lives. Meanwhile I was literally shouting "Fuck you!" at the top of my voice and smashing my sick bucket on the rocky ground until it shattered and I was carried out of the ceremony.
Who gets the good trips
Afraid of ourselves, of who we truly are and who we could be.
One thing I noticed about the people who seemed to be having these incredible experiences is that they generally fell into two categories.
The first category was people who were already incredibly fulfilled in their lives. One was a girl making bank from Instagram as a travel influencer, travelling the world full-time. Another was a dude who had just trekked three months alone in the Scandinavian wilderness, a bucket list item that had also given him some much-needed connection to nature (a heavily cited pre-retreat recommendation).
The second category was people who had already done an incredible amount of self-enquiry. They were face to face with their demons and shadows, and existed in complete acceptance of them. These were the ones who really interested me for some reason. One dude was covered in self-harm scars, hinting at some really difficult times in the past, and yet here he was, laughing maniacally at the top of his voice at every opportunity. Another, my friend George, though not entirely self-realised at that stage, had spent a lot of time backpacking on next to nothing and was fully self-aware despite a slightly gloomy disposition pre-retreat.
It seemed to me that the people having really tough times in ceremonies, myself included, had been taken off guard, and more often than not had arrived at the retreat naive about what the experience would be. We'd been going along in life in a mildly sheltered, non-optimal mental state, holding on desperately to whatever reassured our fragile egos, afraid of our shadows. Afraid of ourselves, of who we truly are and who we could be.
Of course, plenty of people, the majority in fact, have a more middle-of-the-road experience overall: some good ceremonies, some bad. These are the typical folks you meet who, though not necessarily self-mastered, are getting by just fine with the odd hang-up.
Would I recommend it?
So does this mean some people should not do psychedelics?
To answer that satisfactorily, I can only draw on my own experience.
Would I choose to do an extremely potent psychedelic like Ayahuasca just for the experience itself? Absolutely not. The bad trips (or "challenging" trips, I should say) you get with those brews aren't worth the risk, even if the upside of a good trip can be immediately and obviously life-changing. That's just me though.
Would I advise taking Ayahuasca for the life changes that could follow? This is where the inquiry gets really interesting...
What changed
All part of the process? I hope so.
My life since Ayahuasca has been categorically different to what it was before. I was 100% a regular guy seeking regular-sounding opportunities like the 9-5, being another cog in the machine, you get the idea. Since Aya, I've backpacked the world for two and a half years and I work for myself. I've met some incredible people and developed a profound sense of inner security, whatever may be happening outside of me. Maybe those changes would have come from the travelling alone? You'd probably be right, at least to an extent. But something deep down tells me that the old-reality stripping Ayahuasca forced on me in those ceremonies cleared space in my mind to enter a period of life that would set me up for a self-actualisation I defined for myself, and not anyone else.
For the sake of a balanced argument, I do have to mention that the four to five months after my last retreat were a little unstable. I had real difficulty making decisions and made some big mistakes. All part of the process? I hope so. You can make your own mind up there.
My pseudo-scientific theory
I also have a more pseudo-scientific theory of psychedelics that's worth mentioning here. You see, in a law-of-attraction type way, I reckon the vibrations psychedelics open you up to bring things into your life later down the line that wouldn't have come had you not been on that wavelength during that highly intense time. The paradigm shift psychedelics bring about on a spiritual level, mirrored on a more rational level by the deregulating of the default mode network and the opportunity for reprogramming in the brain, lets you see future opportunities in a new light. Experiences and ways of life that would have seemed out of the question before, too "out there", too "careless", too "insecure", too "fanciful", become real possibilities, and you accept alternate paths more willingly. That's essential when you want to embark on a journey towards true self-liberation.
Because at the end of the day, what are we actually trying to liberate ourselves from? It's the patterns in our current lives that we're well aware of, for the most part, but can't seem to shift. Well... maybe we just lacked the catalyst for that shift.
Maybe there's a good reason people say "Ayahuasca changed my life."