The Ayahuasca Purge: La Purga’s Infinite Blessings
By Kristin “K” Blinman
‘Sometimes, you know, your physical body does not want to take it. It totally rebels, rejects it. But the spirit does want it because the soul wants the healing. It wants the cleansing, the purification. It is because of our rationality, our reason, that we have such a reaction, but the soul does want it because it needs it. It needs it so it can calm down, so it can be tranquil. The spirit of your soul wants to expunge or throw out something in the physical body that is not good for you. That’s what I see. That’s why I like it.’ - Don José Campos, The Shaman and Ayahuasca
I was talking with a friend a while back, sharing stories about our most recent journey with Madre Ayahuasca, the ups and downs of integration, as well as the insights we had gleaned. It had been several months since we had sat in ceremony, and it felt wonderful to recount all the magic of visions, deep exploration of our innermost world, and the joy of sharing space with loving community.
And yet, at the end of the conversation what flew out of my mouth, wistfully, was, ‘I’m really looking forward to sitting again, it’s been a while since I’ve had a good purge!’
All said and done, that’s a huge part of what I love about her. When the ceremony space ripples with the sounds of vomiting, retching, and rushes of liquid into bucket (or better yet, into the earth) it’s music to my ears. Laughter, tears, sweats, shakes, noises, groans, toilets flushing, deep breaths, sighs, yawns - everyone adds their own instrument to this ‘getting well’ symphony.
Even in the throes of my own purge, at times feeling like each icaro or medicine song is teasing out more than I have to release, I can’t help but find a cheer inwardly, ‘Yes! Amazing, let it out! You’ve got this’ to myself and everyone in the room. I have yet to perfect my non-intrusive celebratory confetti-cannon - distracting, you might rightly point out? Perhaps….
The Beauty of La Purga
Silliness aside, the number one thing that many people express the most nervousness about, or completely balk at, when I talk with them about communing with Ayahuasca is the purge, specifically: ‘Will it make me throw up?’ I find it interesting that most of the time, people have very little resistance to the other ways of purging. Intestinal jumble with diarrhea? A few hours of shaking and chills and sweats? Iffy, but much less of a problem, so long as there’s no vomiting involved.
I can relate. For various reasons, I have had a massive aversion to throwing up for most of my life, and not too many years ago, couldn’t even image finding it healing let alone celebrating it. It didn’t even register for me that Ayahuasca is often called La Purga for a reason leading up to my first ceremony. I was too enamored with the idea of transcendence and personal insight.
Long story very short, I got to learn all about her superpower of purge my second night. Since then, Mama Aya has showed me through my experiences with her, as well as receiving the experiences of others, why la purga is intertwined so closely to our deepest healing, self-realization, and recognition of our connection/place within this beautiful world we are blessed to live on. In the purge, she brings us right back to embodiment!
A Grotesque Little Grasshopper
‘All of this makes us Westerners nervous. We distrust our bodies. We find vomiting wretched and miserable; we struggle to maintain our body boundaries; above all, we seek ways to evade the ferocious physicality of the Ayahuasca experience. When we drink Ayahuasca, we focus on vision, insight, transformative experiences. We seek … a flight from the reality of human embodiment.’ - - - ‘I think the healing power of Ayahuasca lies precisely in its connection with the earth, the body, with suffering, passion, and mess. The healing is not conceptual - an insight, a realization, an epiphany. Rather it is a visceral impact on the body … That this links to catharsis - cleansing or purging - should come as no surprise … The grotesque body in fact celebrates the victory of life, its renewal and regeneration, true fearlessness in the face of our ineluctably human condition.’ - Stephan V. Beyer, “Ayahuasca and the Grotesque Body
For this blog, I had considered diving into the why-behind-the-whats of our western acculturated resistance to purging, notably in contrast to other cultures where purging is a regular part of life, for both physical health as well as spiritual reasons. Just Googling ‘purging’ returns pages upon pages of descriptions of pathology, clinical assessments, and survival stories, particularly related to eating disorders, but also including other illnesses where vomiting is a primary sign of dis-ease.
It makes sense. If we westerners have been attuned to consider (with quite a bit of collective and self-judgement, I might add) purging a sign of compulsion, weakness, and/or illness, why there would be so much learned resistance to it. Learned being important here, as I’ve yet to see a baby intellectually, morally, or psycho-socially resistant to purging when a good spit-up is needed.
We could consider an energetics POV where the action of vomiting in particular triggers a complex ‘bridging’ of the Solar Plexus, Heart, and Throat energy centers, often in need of cleansing/restoration, and which may feel deeply unsafe for many people in our modern culture, who tend to live ‘neck up, in their heads,’ so to speak.
Don José Campos, as well as Stephen Beyer, also make wonderful observations about the resistance to the purge - in summary, the story of the mind, or rational self, bypassing/fighting being present with an unpleasant lived, human experience. I will expand on this later.
It’s all useful information. To a point.
Still, I am reminded that any understanding my mind gleans from this means very little when I am sitting in a bathroom stall, pants around my ankles, facedown in a bucket. In this state of vulnerability (regardless of whether it feels awful, amazing, or anywhere in between) what I am confronted with is a feeling. A feeling that speaks and says, ‘Be with me and let me go’.
Hasn’t the same feeling arisen outside of ceremony, in the throes of grief, laughter, or unspeakable joy? Or sitting and typing up a blog post for a website dedicated to Plant Medicines. ‘Be with me - get INVOLVED with me; and let me go’.
It is in these moments, both in ceremony and out, where I feel my body as a grotesque little grasshopper; quite twitchy, something that at first blush feels almost inhuman, until I realize this feeling of foreign-ness arises from the association of my humanity with a very specific, and very narrow, cross section of my mind rather than the totality of what I am. It’s quite the miracle to be taken so deeply into an experience (which a purge, particularly vomiting, cannot help but do) that this cross section melts into the whole and that jerky, bouncy body, with all its emotions, thoughts, sensations, and impulses is revealed to be Soul.
A Gift of La Purga
The gift of Madre as La Purga is not just the release of the things that are not good for us, painful or pleasurable, that she and our body-souls in their wisdom know we need to let go of. What Ayahuasca teaches us is that before we can begin to let go of anything (as we learn to do, because change, like the tide, is inevitable) we have to become deeply involved with whatever it is. Which in embodied practice (i.e. day to day living) means we must become deeply involved with our lives, and this can only happen when we bring every part of US (body, mind, spirit, soul, ego, feelings, thoughts, etc.) to our experiences, exactly as WE are.
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, that’s being deeply involved with a spectacular purge! Hmm. Does this sound a little too much like attachment? Aren’t we supposed to be grateful for our flesh-vehicle, and treat it well, but also not get too close? You know, cause it’s gonna die and besides you gotta get detached and enlightened; you can’t take it with you and you don’t want another spin through Earth school. Or, if reincarnation isn’t a thing, and life is just a one- shot galactic anomaly, being deeply involved sounds like a slippery slope to willy-nilly hedonism, and that surely leads to the degeneration of our already very frail existence.
What a mind-pretzel. We are so fearful of and titillated by the idea of attachment!
Is it possible we’ve confused attachment and involvement? Because to be deeply, messily, completely involved in our lived experience doesn’t mean we are trapped, bound, or clinging at all - in fact it releases us from the need to ‘attach’ to anything we experience because (surprise!) we actually let ourselves live it completely.
Disassociation does not spare us from attachment. Being half-in/half-out with our life does not spare us from attachment. Attachment happens the moment we resist our full involvement in experience.
And that’s ok. Cause we’re meant to get attached too, it’s part of the play. We’re meant to feel our way into more and more involved, embodied living, and sometimes that means getting REAL attached.
But here’s the kicker, as Mama Aya helped me summarize after a recent call with some amazing plant-people:
A: ’Listen, that person that you might call ‘unconscious’ is actually more in integrity lost in the experience of their life and not knowing it than the person who is ‘conscious’ and chooses to only go half-in to spare themselves the experience of grief, letting go, pain, and/or pleasure. I’m not saying you’ve got to be perfect and pure, I’m saying be all in, be messy, bring it.’
Me: ‘How do I know when I’m all in? Every time I think I’m all in, I’m really not.’
A: ‘Keep it simple, no need to overthink it. Trust your experience. Trust the purge.’
Relish, enjoy, welcome, resist, abhor, adore - give all of it to the gift of La Purga.
About the Author
Kirstin “K” Blinman (they/them) is a certified energy medicine practitioner with a deep understanding of body alchemy, alignment and overall physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
