The Profile
Nationality: American
Lives in: New York
Age when taken psychedelic: 54
Occupation: Uber driver & Traveler
Psychedelic of choice: Ayahuasca
Place of ceremony: Peru
What was your intention?
To love myself.
I was self-loathing for a big part of my life. I was not walking around all sad but it was always at a low level and it was deep.
I lost both of my parents before I turned 14. It was very traumatic, and I did not have a happy childhood. I started to drink and smoke marijuana at the age of 14. Never really got into trouble but progressed to cocaine, a little bit of LSD, meth amphetamine and then I moved to NYC – in the 80s heroine was everywhere there. That became my cure, my self-medication.
So, my thinking was was: until I can really love myself, I will not be able to love anyone else, be happy, I will be fearful and I will always have doubts and follow all these things that our brains tell us, which I believe is all due to our childhood trauma.
I realised all that through the years and years of my own research into addiction, depression, social anxiety issues that I had. I tried everything: the self-help books, traditional therapy, the horrible pharmaceutical course. When Prozac first came out I was like “sign me up, there is my cure!” I have been medication free for 15 years. I don’t like pills and big pharma. Yeah, this will make you less depressed but then you’ll be constipated, suicidal, your skin will break out, you won’t eat – that’s not a cure.
Four ceremonies and a week in the jungle was like 25 years of therapy and it was not easy. two of them were the most frightening experiences of my life.
Why did you take it?
I have been aware of Ayahuasca for quite some time: almost 21 years ago I was a heroin addict, almost homeless. That is when I learned about it. I was doing internet research on alternative ways to cure addiction. At that time, some scientists from Scandinavia were starting to do clinical trials on addicts in Peru and they were doing these ceremonies. They had something like 90% cure rate and I found it fascinating.
In December last year I had a calling. I was going through a scary depression with thoughts of suicide at the time. I literally woke up one morning, I saw my roommate and said, “I’m going to Peru” and she looked at me and laughed because I do a lot of travel. I told her I was going to drink Ayahuasca – she knew what it was and just cautiously said “OK”.
What were you most afraid of?
2 things:
1 – ego death
2 – vomiting in front of other people
I was afraid I was going to lose my mind and I did – it was not pleasant.
I didn’t purge during the first two ceremonies. Nothing really happened then. It was a genuine fear – I didn’t want to be sick in front of other people. But you know, as you are going through this experience, it’s shared with people in the room but it’s also 100% personal. No one across the room is going “oh, did you see Michael?” No one is doing that.
By the third ceremony, people were telling me that they had heard me purge. They were excited for me and I understood this was nothing to be afraid of.
What did you most look forward to?
Some clarity in my mind. Basically, being cured and being happy.
I knew it was going to be a long journey. During one of my ceremonies, Ayahuasca did tell me “Oh, this is just the beginning dude. You are not just going to wake up tomorrow thinking life is great. This is the beginning of a long journey.”
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
My third ceremony was the one.
I got nauseous fairly quick. Like I said before, I was a little shy about it and was holding back, trying not to let it happen. As my shaman in Peru says, “No one escapes the purge. When it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.” And it’s deep and violent. It feels like it comes from the intestines, it’s so deep. It was dark in the temple and yet I remember seeing yellow going into the bucket.
My hallucinations started really nice. I remember lying there giggling and I was trying to touch the things I could see and I was like “This is really wonderful, I’m at peace”. Then the sounds of insects in the jungle became this massive buzz of energy and things went dark very fast. I literally felt my body being pulled into the ground. It didn’t matter if my eyes were open or closed. The hallucinations were incredibly vivid. Not quite pleasant. The communication with Ayahuasca was telepathic – there were no words being spoken. She knew what I was thinking, and she gave me an answer.
I was floating over a carnival village. There were all these little buildings, almost cartoonish. There were lots of little signs with lights going around. I couldn’t read most of them and I was very confused. I later realised that was my monkey mind. She was trying to show me that.
I kept on asking her questions and she was starting to show me bad things: sewage, worms, a monster with five heads. I kept on saying to her “Please don’t show me that” and she said “No, but you need to see this” and it just progressively got worse until I reached the point I didn’t hear the shaman singing, the insects and everything was completely silent.
She then said to me: “I’m going to destroy your ego because it’s completely damaged” and I was pleading for my life, I was afraid, I didn’t like this. It was already dark where I was and it just got darker and darker and darker. I could feel it in my body from my toes up to my head, I was losing my identity until I could not formulate a thought anymore. It was terrifying. To me it’s like being paralysed and being thrown into the ocean. I had no choice, this was happening, and I thought “This is it; this is the end of my life, I’m going to die in the jungle.”
Then everything went quiet and black and I had never in my life felt such peace. It was fleeting and didn’t last long though. I slowly started to hear the shaman shaking whatever he was holding and sing icaros. I had friends who told me that the experience was not going to be beneficial until you die and that the shaman was going to toss you back with icaros and it was 100% true.
I started to cry, deeply. I’d never in my life cried so deeply. I was so thankful to the shaman who saw me drowning and brought me back. That is when Mother Ayahuasca showed me kindness. She kept saying “You see, now we are going to rebuild your ego. It wasn’t a finale it was the beginning”. I was still hallucinating pretty hard and the shaman did a final blessing and I completely prostrated in front of him and wept at his feet saying “Thank you for saving my life”. It was so deep.
Then, I went back to my bungalow and just slept.
What was the best bit about the experience?
The best part was going through the pain and getting to the other side. William Burroughs (Beat movement writer) used to say “The pleasure in heroine lies in the absence of the pain of withdrawal”. I liken my Ayahuasca experience to that as pleasure came from getting to the other side.
None of my experiences were pleasant but they were necessary. It’s like you have a thorn in your arm and you have to go to the hospital. It’s going to be painful to have it taken out but in the end it will be good for you.
What did you get from it?
It 100% saved my life because prior to going to Peru I was planning to commit suicide. I thought it was going to be a lot of vodka and pills. I was just going to fall asleep and pass out and my liver was to shut down and everything else was to follow. I had a plan until the day of my third ceremony.
Ayahuasca asked me “Why would you want to take your own life?” and I said that it was because I was not happy, and I didn’t want it anymore. And then she showed me what my life would be if I did commit suicide. I could feel that emotion and it was as depressed and as lonely as one could feel. I remember weeping and telling her that I didn’t want to see this. It scared the hell out of me. It was like being on a roller coaster and screaming “Make it stop!”. But you can’t get off the Ayahuasca roller coaster. You get off when the ride is over, and she will decide when that is.
The morning after my third ceremony, every person that saw me looked at me and went “Oh my god, you look great! So relaxed and happy!” – they didn’t know I had this experience.
The other thing that took me a couple of days to realise: I stopped wearing sunglasses. I always hid behind them.
It really saved my life. After the two ceremonies during which nothing happened, I said to the shaman that I was broken and unfixable. My plan was to continue to travel around Peru and when I get back to New York I was going to commit suicide. I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me – this was not a call for help but a decision I made. Damn if after that third ceremony I didn’t change my mind.
I also feel I had an authentic experience. I went to an awesome retreat, but it was bare bones. I was in a bungalow with a bed, a mosquito net, a table, and a chair. It was what I needed.
How did it impact your life?
For a month after I could still feel Ayahuasca in my body, moving, flowing, moving things around. I felt it as energy.
Eventually, it started to fade and I was wondering how to bring it back in a way. I don’t do any drugs for fun. I’m a marihuana enthusiast but I smoke very little when I want to relax or sleep. So, I began to microdose with mushroom. When I eat them, I do feel the same energy as I do with Ayahuasca. Obviously, no hallucinations or great insight but I can feel some energy flow in my body. Definitely pleasant although not like I’m tasting colours. Just that something’s different – it’s positive.
What did you struggle with after?
I felt it pretty early on: when you are in the jungle, it’s very nice and quiet there. But then you get to Iquitos with piles of garbage everywhere, wild dogs, where everything smells like poo. It has its charm but when you step back and look at it, it looked messy and offensive at times.
I had that Ayahuasca glow but it’s a different story to integrate the experience into your daily life and trying to keep that positive energy and the good mental stuff that you get, especially in the United States were it’s all about money and crazy advertising, Trump, and so on. So, it has been difficult.
What improved?
If I had not taken Ayahuasca, I would have taken the virus personally. I would be saying “Why is this happening to me, why me?”, playing the victim role. The Ayahuasca experience prepared me to be uncomfortable. It’s out of my hands. We are being told it’s best to self-isolate so I’m taking this time to work on me: writing, reorganising, meditating, sleeping.
After leaving Peru, my mind doesn’t race any more – I had a very quick response to the medicine.
What do you need to work on?
Acceptance and the strength to move forward with the knowledge I was given.
What would be your advice if you were to do it again?
That’s a difficult question for me. Maybe, I would say follow the dieta more strictly. I’m a big coffee drinker, I like sweets and my salty snacks. I toned them down but did not adhere to the dieta strictly. That could help with the purge.
Just go in with a finer-tuned intention although my monkey mind couldn’t shut up during my first two ceremonies and went into my third with no expectation and that’s when it all happened. It was because I wasn’t forcing it.
Michael's story is a story of so many people who were handed a tough hand when they were little, eventually driving them to self-destructive behaviours - in his case addiction. It is really hard to judge how we would behave had we been in a situation of losing our parents at a young age, facing the toughness of life so early on with no one to buffer that on the other side.
The way we think about addiction in our western society calls for a lot of change. With various psychological studies and research done on the topic, we now know that addiction is simply a way to fill a hole where love is supposed to be and not having better tools to do that with but drugs or other tricks that are able to bring the dopamine surge fairly quickly. We also know this is a terrible cycle and that the answer lies in what Michael has discovered: self love.
As a young child, our prefrontal cortex is still in development and so cannot assess whatever is happening in a rational way. Instead, the older part of the brain, the one responsible for assessing risk is calling the shots. In cavemen days, if a baby was left unattended, it was very likely to die. So, that reptilian brain has us freak out at the sign of that abandonment because really, what it wants to do is to keep us alive. And so we cry, we get upset in order to get our parents' attention. We do that to survive.
When that attention is not provided, our ego understands it as some kind of defect with us and so it makes us develop a defence mechanism that basically scans for any sign of that going forward and when it identifies it (and it does it rather crudely), it floods us with an emotion geared at us reacting to it to defend ourselves. The problem with that of course is that the system in place is so out of date that it messes our relationships as adults because not everyone who wants to have a time away from you is actually abandoning you for instance.
I was glad to see that despite all these difficulties, Michael was able to get to the bottom of his pain and found a medicine that helped him get on a happier path than he was on. Despite the darkness he carried with him for the most part of his life, he seems to be someone who is full of humour, admiration for the world, and is sensitive to connect with others whether through his writing or the travelling he does. Kudos to Michael for the persistence and for keeping that softness of the heart we all need to be careful to maintain.
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