deep soul truths from Ayahuasca
deep soul truths from Ayahuasca
what this mystical medicine taught me about healing ancestral pain
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Hi friends,
I’ve been wanting to share about this here for some time now, and it finally feels right. Here goes.
We sit in a maloca on my Reiki teacher’s property, high in the mountains just outside of Pisac, a colorful and mystical town nestled within the highly-charged vortex of Peru’s Sacred Valley. The maloca is a large and hut-like, circular ceremonial building with a domed ceiling. She and her partner have built it after the fashion of the Shipibo tribes, with whom my teacher has trained.
I am seated before one of many altars I will find myself worshipping at in Peru. This one is different, though—specially made for tonight’s ceremony. Brimming with flowers, candles, and a riot of color, it’s housing a plant medicine potion brewed specially by A, my Reiki teacher and guide.
A has shared with me that she brews her Ayahuasca without as much of the DMT traditionally used by the shamans leading myriad retreats that populate Pisac. Walk a few steps in any direction in town, and you’ll see the many flyers lining the crowded, narrow streets, each depicting just this line of work—plant medicine retreats, spiritual teachers, coaches and mentors, and ceremonies abound.
This Ayahuasca may not be as hallucinogenic (though I’d later still argue its potency in this department, frankly), but it proves to be just as mighty as it needs to be.
I drink the brew, allow it to wash over me. It’s strong, earthy as you’d think. Time to lean back on my blanketed pallet and wait.
“The medicine is for everyone, but not everyone is for the medicine.”
Old Peruvian saying
The above is true, and journeying with plant medicine is work, profound and sacred as it is. What’s also true is that Grandmother Aya held my hand, that my journey with her was an exquisitely painful and utterly transformative experience. And yet, she was gentle with me—for the most part.
She awakened parts of me I didn’t even know were in slumber; some that I didn’t even know existed. She activated me in ways I couldn’t have foreseen, even with the visions she gave me weeks before we truly met in ceremony. Well, what A told me was—you enter into ceremony with Aya as soon as you set the intention to meet her. To welcome her in, as I did.
And on that night in the Sacred Valley, I follow the sound of her green-beating drum and crawl down into the heart of the earth, where I hear the following soul truths.
She invites me into the heart of the world, into the full-throated drumbeat, the lushness of her verdant womb.
This is where I meet her: my new teacher, ally, guide. She treats me as an old friend would. Trusted Grandmother. Queen of her domain.
It’s here where I experience a terrible gaping pain in my chest—an intensity I later discover, with A’s help, is an ancestral one. I now know that this pain and trauma is a wound that has been carried through many lifetimes.
The wound is somehow both dull and stabbing. Tears spring from my eyes as I clutch my chest, as if to rip it from my Self. It’s while I’m deep in this ache that Grandmother Aya shows me the heartbeat of the earth.
I am shown our beautiful planet as if from space, a cosmonaut tripping on this great blue marble, and I can hear it, feel it, as clearly as I know my own: the vibration of Pachamama. Schumann’s resonance, or the frequency of Earth’s own electromagnetic field. So many names for the direct communion with this gorgeous teeming heaving rock we all exist upon, that we are living breathing extensions of.
Yes, I am sensing the frequency of the Earth.
The salty wet of my tears graces my cheeks as I feel the ache of all we’ve done to her. Knowledge of all the damage we’ve caused her comes crashing down over me—
the enormity of the Anthropocene and the planetary-wide crisis that we are in—
the interminable nature of humanity’s destruction, terror, violence, and chaos—
I thrash back and forth on the pallet, attempting, unconsciously, to take it all onto myself… But no.
Aya sweeps in again and gently gifts me with a firm and resounding No. This is not your pain to bear; let me instead take some of yours.
I feel her pulling, then, the stuck energy, this old wounding, directly from my body; it’s as if she is the gardener, and I the soil. She grips and tugs and pulls the toxic sludge from my chest. I hear the rhythmic sound of A drumming, she and her partner E singing icaros—powerful medicine music—in order to help move the energy along.
I am desperate. I am roiling. It fucking hurts, and it is not all my pain to bear but what does that matter when bearing it I am regardless?1
And so I ask Ayahuasca, What should I do? What can I do? with my pain and grief and despair.
with all I feel I cannot hold, even still.
What I hear in return: give it to the Earth.
It’s a direct line from Spirit, one I instinctively know to take with me beyond the walls of the maloca. It’s one I know to share with you now.
We can give our pain to the Earth.
When it’s impossible and overwhelming. When we feel unbearably alone. When it feels as if it’s all too much to hold within our own bodies, these bearers of heart and soul, we can place our feet on the ground.
We can move it along the channel of the body, from crown of the head, past the birds’ wings of the shoulders and down the spinal column, out through the vessels of hands and fingers, sinking through the pelvic bowl, along through the thighs, knees, calves, ankles and finally rooting from the soles of the feet as if we are seeds being planted into the dirt. As if we are the seeds.
We can walk the forests, swim the rivers and lakes, climb the mountains—laughing apus or stern patresfamilias, their love hard-won, unfurling over the work of centuries. We can marvel at the specks of dust we ourSelves make amidst the sand dunes of deserts scraped-white as bone. We can feel the brine of the oceans lay their deposits along our skin, experience the way terrestrial waters make voiceless claim to a part of us, too. We can rest close to the silt of the land that bears us, feel its very aliveness, that green-beating heartdrum—that which we’ll return to when these physical forms have gone.
Aya is my translator through all of this, my instantaneous conduit. She holds me and our Pachamama holds us. The Earth holds us all, together, and I am expanding beyond this physical form and hearing that gorgeous low-pitched vibration with my entire being, my heart and soul if not my ears, and I am moved beyond belief.
Still, throughout it all, there is that pain in the right side of my chest. It is so immense that I cry out more than once. A stabbing so deep and severe that I know it cannot possibly belong entirely to me. And yet… the lingering remnants of this pain of my ancestors ends here begins to be healed and processed here. I can carry it no longer, of this I am convinced. Not alone.
But here in this space, I am gifted with the knowledge that I am not alone. I am not alone. Nor are any of us, if we can manage to open our eyes to the illusion of separateness.
I wrote a poem years and years ago, one that ended up the culminating piece of my 2017 poetry book, The Luminary. Its last line reads: “I am the world and the world is inside my chest.”
This is exactly how I feel as I write these words six months later. I’d reached through time and space in that ceremony to heal the wounding of past and future Selves, as the Ayahuasca did to help heal that of my lineage.
It is a healing I will carry with me, both forward and back in time. One that still ripples through me.
In May, I sat with the medicines of Rose and Cacao in a plant medicine Dieta held remotely by A.2 In that container, Rose gently disavowed me of so. much. of the fear and pain I was still carrying. She also brought forward my desire to share more about my experiences sitting with all of these beautiful plant brews, and so I have slowly been unpacking what I’ve integrated so far.
And truly, I am still integrating the experiences. I didn’t know, when sitting with Aya, that ancestral healing would come up again so powerfully with Rose; nor did I know that it would color the entirety of my experience for months on end. That it still is.
Enter: the journey of the generational curse breaker, which I’ve taken upon my Self in surprising and novel ways. I walk its way as I do that of the Rose.
The path is yet unfolding.
Before I leave you—guess what? I’m starting a new email newsletter, off of Substack.
The whole of my archive will still be up here, and this is not to say you’ll never see me on this platform again. But the appeal of a newsletter free of the social media noise is, well, very appealing at this point.
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xx,
Kimia
Read: hello epigenetic inheritance! to the tune of “Hello darkness my old friend…” Ok, so that doesn’t quite fit, but you get what I’m saying.
Find a brief explainer of what a plant medicine Dieta entails on my Instagram (as well as some of the profound gifts Rose bestowed me with). I’ve also shared, lightly, about my experiences with Rose and Ayahuasca on my YouTube channel.