Ayahuasca stories online are often told as stories of arrival and insight. Published reports and surveys tell a broader one. In the Global Ayahuasca Survey of more than 10,000 people, 69.9% reported acute physical adverse effects, mostly vomiting, and 2.3% needed medical attention afterwards (Bouso et al. 2022). This composite story is about a night where the hard part was most of it.
The circle
The person in this story had travelled for a group ceremony led by facilitators they had found online. About a dozen people sat on mats in a circle in a dim room, each with a bucket, a roll of paper towel and a bottle of water. There was a short talk about intention. There was no talk about what to do if things went badly, and no one asked.
The brew was thick and bitter, and the taste stayed in the mouth for a long time. For the first half hour people sat in silence, some with their eyes closed, some looking at the candle in the middle.
The hum
The first change was a sound. A low hum seemed to come from the floor and then from everywhere, and it grew until it was louder than the people in the room. With closed eyes there were moving patterns, very detailed, in colours that felt slightly wrong.
Then the nausea arrived, fast and total. In laboratory research the effects of ayahuasca peaked at around one and a half to two hours (Riba et al. 2003), and in this story that peak and the stomach arrived together.
Waves
The purge came in waves, maybe ten minutes apart. Between them there was a short window of calm, and then it started again. The room was full of the same sounds from other mats, coughing, retching, someone crying, someone laughing, and every sound seemed to land inside the head as well as in the room.
Published reports describe this part in very different ways. In this story it was simply exhausting, and it made everything else harder to bear.
Fear without a subject
In the third hour a fear arrived that did not seem to be about anything. It was hard to tell what was real: whether the facilitator walking past was actually there, whether the floor was still a floor. Holding the edge of the mat with both hands helped. So did counting breaths, which turns up in many published reports as one of the few things that still helped.
A facilitator came over once, put a hand on a shoulder and said it would pass. It did, slowly, but not because of anything that was said. It passed because the hours went by.
The second cup
At around the four hour mark the facilitators offered a second cup to anyone who wanted it. A few people went up. The person in this story felt pressure to go too, because the night had not brought what they had come for. Saying no took all the courage that was left. In a large survey of difficult mushroom experiences, difficulty rose with dose (Carbonaro et al. 2016), and ceremony reports describe the same pressure to drink more when the first cup has not delivered.
The rest of the night was cold and long. Sleep came in pieces on the mat, interrupted by other people's ceremonies.
The week after
The following days were not dramatic, only heavy. Tiredness, a sensitive stomach, a sense of having been through something without knowing what it had been. The person wished someone had described this part honestly beforehand: the buckets, the noise, the pressure, the days after.
That is why this story is on this site. For a short and strange story that ended in laughter, read the sitter's sandwich. For one that stayed calm, read the afternoon the kitchen clock slowed down.