Tabula Rasa

Grandma and I met for tea last month.  It was my seventh visit with her, and the fifth time I drank her potent tea.  Drinking Grandma's tea  is one of the bravest things I've ever done, because she's not my paternal or maternal grandmother - both long gone - but the spirit plant known as  ayahuasca.
 Ayahuasca is indigenous to the Amazon rainforests, and is considered to be the grandmother spirit of the hundreds of thousands of plants that grow there.  Brewed along with her companion plant, chacruna, it makes an elixir used for healing and spiritual growth.  It has been drunk in ceremony by Amazonian healers and participants for thousands of years.  I've written previously about my earlier experiences with ayahuasca (ref. 9/11/12), and believe me, none of them was a walk in the park, but my most recent visit with Grandma was the hardest and deepest of them all.  And the most healing.
Grandma is sometimes called la purga, because of the intense vomiting she induces.  When I first went to Peru three years ago to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies, I naively thought that I'd have beautiful visions of Grandma's spirit world, and commune with Nature, the Cosmos, and All That Is.  Grandma does indeed bring such visions and knowledge to the seeker, but she's first and foremost about healing, which is the purpose of the vomiting.  It's meant to cleanse and purge the body and soul.
I've always been a magical thinker - tempered with an understanding of the basic physical laws of nature - so I initially thought that Grandma would bring me straight into the heart of all Creation, visions and all.  Boy oh boy was I wrong.  Instead, every time I drank her brew, Grandma took me on a ride that had me reeling from the worst motion sickness I've ever felt.  The ups and downs of a gigantic roller coaster are nothing compared to drinking Grandma's tea.  Each time I drank her elixir I ended up heaving and whirling, and silently vowing that I'd never do it again.  Obviously, I changed my mind.

Ayahuasca changes the body on a cellular level, and I must have unconsciously felt it, otherwise I can't explain why I kept coming back for more - more healing, that is.  Because I sure wasn't coming back for the nausea.  The day after the ceremony participants experience an afterglow that's akin to feeling reborn. At least that's the way it feels to me.  Once the afterglow wears off, there are insights and revelations that come to light for weeks afterwards.  It's magical.
Grandma's magic sought me out this last time.  I was riding the subway in the large city where I live, when lo and behold, I saw Jessica, the ayahuascera, a.k.a. shaman, who works specifically with Grandma A., sitting and riding on the same train.  I had first met Jessica in Peru a few years ago when I participated in some ceremonies, and then a year later at a retreat in the boreal forest of my home and native land.  But bumping into her on a subway train many miles from her haunts was truly uncanny.  Jessica informed me she was back in my neck of the woods for another retreat, and had arrived in town just that morning.  The chances of my running into her were slim, but as Jessica pointed out, Grandma had most surely arranged our meeting.*  Thus began my recent magical, devastating, nauseating, enlightening journey with Grandma.
*(One of the more notable indications of Grandma's presence is synchronicity, which is the lay person's term for magic.  Credit for that apt and clever description of magic goes to the author O.R Melling, as described in her fantastic book People of the Great Journey.) 
I couldn't go on the retreat in the northern woods, but fortunately I was able to attend a ceremony for one night in the city the following week.  Not surprisingly, I vomited numerous times throughout my visit with Grandma, but it was the penultimate purge that was the most memorable.  The others that preceded it were hard, of course, but the second to last one was truly scary.  Hellish, in fact.
Just as I was beginning to think the nausea was finally coming to an end, I felt my stomach turn over again, warning me to pick up the bucket I was keeping at my side.  Before heaving, I emitted a sound deep from within my solar plexus. It sounded utterly chthonic and fiendish.  It came from me, but it wasn't me.  I couldn't recreate that sinister voice if I tried.  Nor would I.

Ceremonies are done in complete darkness, and the bucket I happened to grab that time wasn't mine, because I could feel that it was empty and unused.  I wondered at the time how that could be, but didn't dwell on it because I was too nauseated to care.  It's a good thing it was empty, too, because it collected the largest volume of yucky stuff I had brought up all night.  I was surprised at how much I threw up because there was nothing left inside me, nor had there ever been, since I'd eaten next to nothing for twenty-four hours before the ceremony.  But the contents of one's stomach aren't the only things that Grandma's brew eliminates.  She also cleanses the soul.  Although I couldn't see the crap I was vomiting, I knew instinctively it was blacker-than-black.  When I finished my business I returned the full bucket to where I'd originally found it.
A while later, although I have no idea how much later - time has no meaning during ceremony - I had my final purge.  Within moments of spinning and heaving up almost nothing, I felt a cool, refreshing breeze waft across my face.  Afterwards I sat in pure physical bliss for several minutes, somehow grateful to know that the purging was over.
In the morning I found only my own bucket.  The bucket I'd "borrowed" for my subterranean purge was nowhere to be seen.  For weeks afterwards I obsessed over not finding any evidence of  the deepest experience I'd ever had during ceremony.  I even wondered why no one had been alarmed by the guttural voice that came out of me before purging.  It sounded like something out of The Exorcist.  But none of the brave women who were in ceremony with me said a word about it later.  It seems that the most vivid, substantial purge I'd had all night happened in my imagination, and yet it felt even more physical, and just as real as all the others.  Despite visions and altered consciousness, ayahuasca renders one hyper-aware.  I always knew exactly what was going on.
So what was going on?  The purge that finally rid me my inner demons may have happened in my imagination, but as Jessica reminded me, everything that happens in ceremony is real, imagined or not.  I was beset with knowing for sure that what I experienced was real because I'd forgotten something Harry Potter taught me - Just because something isn't real, doesn't mean it isn't True.
The Truth of all that transpired is still with me, and shall be for the rest of my life.  I expelled the last of the bitterness and anger from old wounds and trauma from the long past, mostly manifested as a history of depression.  And although I haven't been clinically depressed for a number of years now - wobbly maybe, but not in deep despair - I still harboured bitterness about my life not turning out the way I'd always dreamed. (A recurring theme on my little web.)  That bitterness, which I sometimes refer to as bile in my soul, has gone.  I spewed it into the "phantom" bucket during ceremony.  It's more than six weeks after I met with Grandma, and I'm still learning and growing, and free of the loathsome comparisons and envy that heretofore had been holding me back from complete healing.

Forgiving any persons who may have inflicted pain or trauma is one of the most powerful ways to begin the healing process.  Although I'd done my forgiving and made peace with my past a number of years ago, there was still a vestige of resentment that hung around like a pesky mosquito.  Despite years of therapy, self-reflection, and antidepressants - which alleviated the symptoms but did nothing to get rid of the cause - I wasn't able to completely let go.  It was Grandma who made me realise that the one person I hadn't forgiven was me.  I wasn't able to forgive myself for not being a better person.  I figured I was old enough, smart enough, and wise enough to peel off the worn-out "victim" label I'd been wearing all my life.  I could talk the talk, but I couldn't walk the walk.  I was my own worst enemy, and it was that lingering, embittered part of my self that finally spewed out of me during ceremony.  
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Grandma didn't heal me overnight, and I know I have more learning and growing to do, but she cleared the slate for me to begin anew.  And she taught me how to heal myself.  I know I'm not to blame for my faulty wiring, but I've still got a perfectly good brain that can be reprogrammed.  So I'm rewiring this and wiping out that - laying down new neural pathways with new habits and routines.  It's a discipline that requires constant attention and awareness.  Sometimes I slip up, but I immediately forgive myself for being human, do some quick re-framing, and then move on.  It's what yogis call practising yoga off the mat.

Earlier in this blurb I mentioned how my life hasn't turned out to be what I'd hoped or planned since childhood, and within a few minutes of writing those words, I received an email from a website that sends me daily quotes.  The message was so timely and magical it sent delicious shivers up my spine.  I knew Grandma had a hand in that, and was showing me her approval.  It also fits the theme of this particular blurb perfectly, so I shall use it... 
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell.
Thanks to two changes of residence in the last nine years, I regularly purge physical "stuff" I don't use or need.  (Another favourite topic of mine.)  I always feel lighter and freer after I've cleared stuff out of the house, and out of my sight.  Grandma's brew does the same thing, but on a deeper, more intimate level.  She's opened me up to a new life, and it sure as hell wasn't easy.  But real, true change never is.  During the last ceremony, as I reeled and rolled, I kept chanting to myself, ad nauseum - I get it. I get it. I get it.  I'd forgotten about that until this very moment, when I was trying to find a way to end this not-so-magnum blurb.  It seems so obvious now, and it's really quite simple... 
I get it, Grandma.  I get it.
- G.P.