I was 17 and standing atop a large boulder along the shore of Lake Willoughby. My mind was in torment. I was a gay boy in such painful denial of my sexuality and I wanted to die so badly. I was raised Catholic and brought up to believe that suicide was a sin punishable by an eternity in hell. That same Faith taught me that being gay was also sinful and also led to hell. What a pickle! To live or to die was to invite the same fate, so what was a religious boy to do? I felt so powerless, but in that moment I screamed out in pain and begged the God-of-my-Childhood to strike me dead on the spot. And my faith was strong. I imagined lightning striking me down, my limp body rolling off the granite edge and splashing into the freezing water below. People would think it was some terrible freak accident and I’d be off the hook. I’d be free.
I’ll spoil the ending. The God-of-my-Childhood died that day. I stood there, still alive, body trembling, with my arms pointed up to the sky and I waited. I waited twenty years for that day to make some sense to me. At 37-years-old I sat in an ayahuasca ceremony and in that clearer frame of mind I could see that my lifepath forked that day, and in the moment when I called out for my death I went the other way. I don’t know the details. I don’t know what the other path was or where it led. But it seems there was some kind of test, which I passed, and that the end result was good. I know this to be true.
For months I’ve thought about writing an update on the lasting effects of last year’s ayahuasca ceremonies. I’ve had moments this past year so magically and joyously experienced like I never experienced in life-before. I’ve also experienced my first panic attack and moments of such intense anxiety that I was certain that all the magic was gone, that I had landed back in an ordinary world free of ayahuasca’s rewards.
Towards the end of the second ayahuasca ceremony, after I had fallen into the pit of hell and climbed back out again, and as I was re-entering my current understanding of the world, a conversation took place within my mind. And there were two present. One was the voice of my mind. The other, I hesitate to label it. I sometimes call the second voice “God,” or “Mother Ayahuasca,” or “my subconscious mind,” and they all feel equally true. What I know is that I asked and it answered, and that it was all-loving, all-knowing, and all-merciful. And as ayahuasca’s immediate effects drained from my body the Voice-Which-Spoke seemed to drain away with it. And my internal conversation once again became a monolog.
The monolog-mind of our ordinary consciousness can be such a lonely place. At its worst, it’s an echo chamber one can’t escape. The same thoughts repeat again and again and no sense of resolution comes. I imagine we’ve all experienced this madness. On the other hand, during the Conversation-of-Two there was a knowing that my words, my thoughts, were being received by something, someone, somewhere, elsewhere. My words were lovingly received and held with all the affection of a mother holding a newborn baby. It was the opposite of madness. It was love.
Last week, and I can’t recall what brought me to do it, I stood beside my altar one night and my mind said the words “Help me to come into an understanding of my ancestors. Help me to understand where I come from.” And the words were received!! I don’t know how to explain it any better. There was a profound sense that the words went out and were once again received and held. They set sail and docked on the other side. It was that sense of love, once again.
And the day after this little prayer at my alter, a friend lightly criticized me in a text and I crumbled. A complete crumble. I became a mess. For the first time I contacted my therapist outside our ordinary schedule and asked him for help. I texted him, “I’m depressed and barely functioning.” We worked together twice that week and during the second session I cried for 45 minutes and spoke only a handful of sentences. I spent the session watching the movie in my mind and he checked in with me from time to time.
In the movie: Young Walter, banished from the Kindergarten classroom for bad behavior, sitting on the bench by the shoes in the hallway in the dark all alone. He sat there looking down, quiet, all alone, unable to speak. He sat there looking down, quiet, with the teacher trying her best to connect with him, still unable to speak. He couldn’t speak! Just like me, when I received the text and became a mess and couldn’t speak! As a little boy my voice had already left me. And in that moment I knew that my ancestors’ voices, too, were gone even before mine was gone. I could see that my powerlessness was their powerlessness. I saw clearly that I came from them and how they live through me. And that as I change, they change.
And today I sat nervously in our house meeting knowing that I planned to broach a topic my community’s been avoiding. As one-who-lost-his-voice, I too have enjoyed avoiding hard conversations. The words don’t come and the energy feels stuck. I feel powerless. It feels terrifying to speak and frustrating and resentment-building to not speak. And today, as a change for me, I brought up the hard topic. I pushed myself through the zone of discomfort.
And what a change! The words came! And I was alive, sitting there on the couch, with the sometimes difficult words. The energy flowed. And my whole body trembled with nerves. It was both difficult and easy. It happened and it was over. Housemates said nice things after the meeting. My body kept shaking for some time, in a way that was neither good nor bad. But intense. There was a sense of a great shift taking place inside. A sense of a vigorous, familiar energy returning to the body after a long, long absence.
Warm Summer Nights 