Why the Hardest Nights with Ayahuasca are Often The Best: Lessons We Learn from Difficult Psychedelic Journeys
Sometimes we bring can bring about healing or understanding with ease and grace, but often when we are working with something deep, it may require effort, sacrifice, and resilience on our part. Most often, we come to Ayahuasca with our greatest challenges which can often mean that the experience itself will reflect that. However, the deeper we go with her, she reveals great rewards in the form of healing and growth.
Learning to Release Our Resistance
Some of my really difficult experiences have been created by holding on to resistance. When we fight letting go and diving fully into the experience with Mama Aya, she typically responds by intensifying what is happening. Really it is us bringing on this intensity because we refuse to release ourselves into the experience that we asked her for, but in the midst of it, it can feel like she has us in a vice. While I can offer suggestions like sitting up and welcoming everything that is happening and learning to breathe through it, there is a teaching within the stress of this kind of experience as well.
Once, I was in this place and felt like ayahuasca was smashing my face off of a visual representation of my edges for hours. When I realized that it was actually me doing this to myself, I was then able to also be shown by her how I was doing this to myself in a variety of ways in my life. Hence, she was able to use how I was showing up in ceremony to demonstrate to me what I was doing to myself outside of it as well.
When a Plant Medicine Ceremony becomes a Dark Night of the Soul
A personal experience that regularly brings people to the medicine is what is known as the Dark Night of the Soul phase. These periods of life are challenging to say the least, and can feel like a descent into darkness as everything around and inside of us crumbles. Not exactly a fun ride. However, once we make it through the destruction of the dark night, there is often a rebirth that happens. I have likened this experience to going into an energetic womb and being forced out into a birth within our life.
Ceremonies with Mama can feel this way sometimes too. When discussing this, I often remind people that we love the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes. That’s the fun part. Yet, we don’t usually remember that in order for her to rise, she first has to set fire to her nest, everything around her, and herself to burn down into those ashes. We can have experiences with ayahuasca where we feel the very essence of who we are crumbling, our ego disintegrating, or everything we believe to be true coming into question. These are all examples of this type of experience where we descend into the darkness of the unknown and have to trust that we will reemerge.
As challenging as this is, as well as the integration period afterward, where we learn how to put ourselves back together, the incarnation of ourselves waiting for us on the other side is an incredible gift. Aya is willing to assist and support us through the fire and both into and out of the ashes so that we can receive this. Having known many dark nights in my life as well as ceremony, I can say that one aspect of our lives that commonly falls away during these periods is relationships. One particular dark night I felt like I lost almost everyone dear to me.
However, it was that period that brought me to the medicine, and it was ayahuasca that held me and pulled me through. And it was also her that helped guide new, more aligned relationships into my life as I reemerged. Even if this was all that she ever gave me (and it’s not), I could not think of a better ally than a being that does this for us.
Discovering our Power and Strength
Needless to say, these experiences guide us to rediscover our strengths. Everyone has heard what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Aya can bring you through many forms of spiritual death, and with that, rebirth also surfaces a strength and empowerment we likely could not have found another way. Only through diving into our depths, can we find the power hidden in there. Rarely do we come to ayahuasca with simple requests. Our intentions alone initiate us into deep experiences to allow for our healing.
These are not quests for the light-hearted, and it takes a ton of personal stamina and resilience to heal the traumas, addictions, habits, etc, that we bring to her. However, outside of supporting us through healing all of our deepest wounds, she shows us that we had the power to heal ourselves all along. Frequently, we come to her because we do not know what to do with what is happening in our lives. We ask her to heal us. But what she does is so much better because she shows us how to heal ourselves and that we have what it takes to create that healing within us all along.
Breaking Through to the Other Side of Love
I would like to end this by revealing one of my favorite parts of ceremony with ayahuasca. Of course, it doesn’t happen exactly the same every time, but fairly consistently I have this experience with her as a part of the process. The ceremony itself can be intense and wild and bring up fear, pain, and sorrows from our life, but there is a reason that Aya is most often worked with as a communal medicine.
By the end of the evening, you have gone through the gates of your darkness with the group you had this experience with. You have heard each other scream and cry, purge in many forms, and can feel each other’s struggles in ways that you normally would not. When Aya finally starts to loosen her grasp, the intensity switches to one of absolutely deep love and compassion.
The connection and absolute love that I usually feel at this point in the ceremony to every being in the circle, all of nature, and to Aya herself is at times, almost overwhelming. Usually, I end up sobbing in love and gratitude for the experience, no matter how difficult it was, because it brought about the gift of this deep well of love. And if there is no other reason for you to barrel through a ridiculously rough night with this mother medicine, then the overwhelming, full-body felt, and all-encompassing love that you can feel as you emerge from this experience is worth it all in itself.
Curious to learn more about integrating Ayahuasca and her challenges, check out our blog, “Can Ayahuasca Make You Go Crazy?'“ by our CEO and Ayahuasquera, Kat Courtney.
About the Author
Lindsay Calliandra Rose is a Medicine Carrier, an accomplished herbalist, Plant Medicine integration specialist, and a woman with a profoundly sacred relationship with nature. She began her Plant Medicine journey many years ago with Ayahuasca and Huachuma, and she has completed multiple Master Plant Diets with beings like Rose, Bobinsana, Juniper, Jurema, Cacao, Oak, and Blue Water Lily. Lindsay is an initiated server and carrier of Hapéh. She now works as a preparation and integration guide for those answering the call to work with sacred medicines, and she is apprenticing in the art of guiding Master Plant Diets as well. She is a passionate advocate of safe and transformative experiences with the plants, and she loves helping people navigate these mysterious spaces with grace, love, and support.
