The Profile
Name: Marie
Nationality: Australian
Lives in: Australia
Age when taken psychedelics: 34
Job: Teacher
Psychedelic of choice: Ayahuasca (DMT) & Peyote (Mescaline)
Place of ‘ceremony’: Australia
What was your intention?
I have been told you needed an intention – mine was to be open to the message I needed to receive.
Why did you take it?
I started reading about psychedelics years ago with my ex husband. He was always interested in MDMA or other drugs for his own explorations. I, on the other hand, have been fascinated by spiritual practices from a young age but never married the two up until a decade ago. It was just a part of conversations and something that seemed available for people to use. I thought I didn’t need any psychedelics in order to connect to the universe the way I felt I needed it. Also, the way I thought about psychedelics was probably influenced by how they were (and still are) portrayed to the public but actually, if you want to be a good citizen, you should go and do this. Every political leader in the world should do it.
I personally found myself at the place through a series of doors that opened and the timing that allowed me to be there. I just followed that.
I was busy as a teacher but heard of that ceremony coming up. I was already going to that part of the country where the ceremony was happening and so I took it as a green light. I almost missed the cut-off point as they said I needed to be cleansing for a period of time but I explained that I had only just decided and so they asked a few questions, got me to fill in the paperwork and it turned out there was 1 spot left. I decided to go ahead with it. I was not overthinking – it just felt right. I didn’t even know where I was going to stay but I ended up meeting people who helped with every step. If it’s the right time for you, you’ll end up there.
When it comes to why, I had a little bit of my personal work that needed to be tied up and I wanted some clarification on that - that came out on the last day. My body just completely accepted it. I was not sick, I fasted beforehand (drank only tea for 2 days before - that’s what I felt I wanted) and I felt it helped with the experience.
I wasn’t even sure if I could partake in ceremonies in Australia to begin with. I’d always thought that if I was going to do it, it’d be in South America or in Europe but pathways started to open up. Obviously, it’s not legal in the country and the people who are involved in the ceremonies are very protective of it. They are proud of what they do and take a lot of respect in it. They partake in the cultivation of Ayahuasca from traveling to the plant, to making the medicine themselves. The person who ran it is involved in shamanic practices from around the world. He is a very sage human being and an advocate for the purest product that you can get from nature to allow people to use it as a platform for their own experience, their growth and exploration.
We did it over 3 days and it was a combination of Ayahuasca (DMT) and Peyote (Mescaline) – the Mother and the Farther in order to balance things out. It was 2 sessions with Ayahuasca followed by Mescaline on a Sunday. It was fascinating for me as I understand the notion of duality and balance: they worked in synchronicity with each other really well. Ayahuasca sends you on an inner journey and the Mescaline helps to bring what you have been working on through your internal work to the surface, out of your body and purge it out of your system.
In hindsight, everything just works the way it’s supposed to and I completely understand why the ceremonies were run the way they were. It was also used in conjunction with pure traditional tobacco (mapacho) used to clear out the system. It’s supposed to clear out the line for the connection to the source. I thought “why not?”. It’s not necessarily for me but I understand why people would take it, especially if they are not naturally connected to it.
A lot of people came to the ceremony not knowing what it was. It was an interesting blend from people going there once a month to the first-timers, like myself. However, I had done a lot of inner work leading up to that time. For me it was a clarifier for what I had already done and it solidified a lot of the stuff I already knew. Comparatively, there were people who went in there with alcohol addictions, trauma, whatever baggage they had, not knowing what to expect. It was interesting to see the vast nature in terms of the difference and how it individually affects people, how it would come to each of us. For me, she would come in what I would call a pure form: there was no mask, no person, just pure energy and that was clearly not the case for everyone.
What were you most afraid of?
Nothing.
I know a lot of people get fearful about what’s going to happen to them. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest fear we have is when we confront ourselves and I had done that. I had gone into deep parts of my psyche and myself already – I figured, what else is there?
All you are really doing with this stuff is just opening a channel. You can tap into that channel whenever you want in your day to day life. All this is, is a vehicle to be able to do that quickly. Mind you, it’s a beautiful vehicle and it opened my eyes to incredible truths and deep reminders about how old the earth and the universe is. We are a tiny little blip on the spectrum of all existence. We get so caught up as if we were the centre of everything but really we are not so at all. We are just moving with the ebbs and flows like our ancestors and their ancestors before that. It’s all connected. All we can do is contribute through our own lives in our own way to the spectrum to all of the existence.
What did you most look forward to?
Just releasing control and surrendering. We spend so much of our time, especially in the world of education, on boxing things into neat packages and controlling this and controlling that when really the truth is that no one is in control of anything ever and it’s just an illusion that we try to create for ourselves to make us feel better when really the truth is that we just need to surrender and that’s all. The rest is going to happen as it’s going to happen anyway, no matter how much we try to grab onto things and to make sense out of it.
How I knew I needed to surrender was through thinking and philosophy. We always feel like we are swimming against the stream. It’s just so hard but why are trying to make it that hard? Do we need to? Can’t we just roll onto our back and flow down the stream? Why are we choosing to swim against it? What are we trying to seek? What are we fighting for? Most of the time, it is something we are never going to attain, something that’s out of reach. So, we should be looking downstream: what’s coming, what’s on the horizon, what’s going to be there for us when we are facing the direction that seems easier.
I once read this book, I think it’s called ‘Learning to Live with Change’. It was a book I came across in a small little used books store. I often just close my eyes and run my hands across the shelves and wherever my hand lands, I just pull the book. It was this book and it was about how to let go and deal with change. Human beings don’t like change. We are very set in our ways, we hold on to what we know and feel very comfortable there. It’s a bit of an illusion – we like it for our own comfort but growth comes from change. The important milestones that come about in our lives come through change, so we need to just be open to it when it occurs. And sometimes it’s hard and we cannot imagine we could deal with that. But we might just have to and it’s OK as there might be a lesson in that.
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
There was none. It was just completely and utterly beautiful. It was affirming what I had already known, my path, my understanding, my self-work, my reading, the development of my own spirituality, my own philosophical understanding of life and what it means to be human and to question what makes the fabric around us as people but also atoms bumping around next to each other. What is it that makes the world tick.
I came out of marriage with a partner of 15 years some time before that. There was some residual heartache that I knew had to come out and be let go – that was a part of my subconscious intention. That came out on my final day. I think I cried for 20 seconds and felt, oh, OK, that’s done now.
I had my eyes open to all the information like the structure of the reality that surrounds us and what it’s made from and what is it exactly that composes that reality. I think a lot of people don’t realise that reality is actually their own perception. It’s information that’s taken in through their own lens. My lens is going to be different to yours and to everyone else’s because we are all individual entities that are streaming information through our own lens. The best way I can describe it is that it was like I was taking my lens away, my own personal filtration of what I perceive the world to be and I was just showing me what it is.
What was the best bit about the experience?
Shattering of the ego and being able to see things for what they were.
This is why they talk about Ayahuasca being used as a tool for relinquishing the ego because this is essentially what ego is: a construct we have built for ourselves all throughout childhood and adolescence through the experience with our family, education, friends.
I was reading a book that was talking about self-government. It’s like the ego is our self-government that we form in our mind and this is where conflict occurs because the self-government I have created based upon my values, attitudes and beliefs is going to be vastly different to the next person’s. And when two people’s self-governments conflict, because their own values are completely at the opposite end of the spectrum, that’s how conflict occurs – we stand so truly by our own self-government and we will judge others based upon their own self-government, values and beliefs but really we form them based on our own individual experiences. So, of course there’s going to be conflict because we’ve come from completely different backgrounds being raised in completely different ways by completely different experiences.
The narratives we build in childhood get so rigid and become so solidified because that’s all people know and because they are so fearful of change and of stepping outside of what they know, they end up with these systems of government that form the ego that remain in place for an extremely long period of time throughout their life.
Shattering of the ego is actually allowing that self-government to corrode and fall apart, so you are left with the pure sight of what is there and what our world is made up of. And it’s surprising. It surprised me! It surprised me how ancient it is. We know the big bang, how long it’s taken, we read history and understand science but the tangible nature of that gets pushed in the background somehow like it’s somehow written in a textbook that we learn at school from but really the fabric that makes us, that extremely ancient form of energy is mind-blowing and beautiful and just a reminder that we are here for just a fleeting second and that’s it.
Other than that, I had some interesting experiences during the ceremony itself. The person who ran it are also a fantastic musician and use different instruments and sounds: didgeridoo, handpans, the whole stack of bowls – they use music as a tool to be able to open up the experience and it was incredible.
I ended up using myself as a conduit for energy, being able to tap into that and being able to channel that to people in the room who needed that healing. I didn’t need that healing for me – there were people overcoming sexual abuse, drug addiction, trauma, alcoholism. They needed it more. There were these beautiful moments where I felt this energy completely transferring through me to the point where I was feeding it off to the room and spreading it out to the people who needed it.
There were other healers naturally drawn to the same space, helping to amass the right frequency of energy to be able to heal the people in the room. It was like a universal collective effort of being in a hospital and we were just taking part in this surgery for humanity – that’s what it felt like.
The experience and what comes out can be very painful – there were some people there dealing with some heavy stuff. They could feel it, the energy. They would say “wow, I feel so different today, so much lighter” – it’s fascinating to know the collective energy did that and they had no idea what was going on because their eyes were closed, they were completely out of it and meanwhile, there is this group of people who are light workers were helping to heal. The shaman was fully lucid and picked up on that too.
What did you get from it?
I definitely was given insight that the different levels of reality exist at the same time. Whether they call it the 3D or 5D, there are definitely multi-layered dimensions that are existing at the same time. What we seem to do with our filtration of information is combine them together into this state that’s kind of an amalgamation of all of them into the things we see and feel.
The experience that I had with Ayahuasca was allowing me to see the different layers of reality and dimensions as they were. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion with Ayahuasca allowing you to take off those outer layers and go to deeper layers until to what was left was pure energy.
I had insights about my previous life experience, about my own ancestral ties, where I had come from. I have learned that I have been around for a very long time and for many incarnations and that it’s almost time to go. I probably have 2 more lifetimes left before I’m not coming back anymore. I’m in a position of service at the moment and it’s interesting as I’m in a period of awakening my own gifts, my own healing that I’m meant to be giving back to this planet and during this lifetime. I’m on the precipice of working out what that is and how that’s going to stay with me for the rest of my life until I’m in my next incarnation where I’ll probably be figuring out the same thing and trying to reawaken and bring back my own healing.
One of the strong messages I got through was: the human mind is not powerful enough to understand the full gravity of what this is. You could be pursuing this for another 10,000 years, you will still be able to cognitively understand a tiny portion of this.
I’m a teacher – education is a microcosm of a society and it makes me sad to see the path that we are walking down as human beings. But there are also glimmers of hope – there are so many good kids out there who are going to go on and give service to the society in whatever way bringing their gift to the world is and that’s pretty cool.
How did it impact your life?
It gave me a deeper understanding and the integration that came about.
There is a difference between the experience of thought and feeling. I was so overwhelmed by the sense of beauty, the calm nurturing being, embodied by comfort. It was wonderful to just know that you are OK. You are part of all of it and no matter where you are from, you have the same DNA as everyone else and it’s all linked back to the same form of primitive energy. For you to access any of that, you can do it at any given moment because that’s a part of you. You just need to understand the tools to be able to do that, to engage with the universal energy however you feel you need to.
What did you struggle with after?
I think I integrated quite well.
It was an interesting time as it was coming up to the Christmas period and I was meeting my new partner’s family for the first time. I had no idea how I would be afterwards. Was I going to be able to handle being around other people’s energy? But I was in the state of flow. I made sure I refrained from having sex so I could keep my energy for myself for a long enough period of time to integrate the learnings I have taken.
What improved?
It’s just the feeling and the sensation that stayed with me. It was beautiful. It felt like, OK you are home, on with your life now. I felt like I could go and integrate back into the everyday life with this wider understanding and feeling that I experienced. I still have flashbacks of the key moments from the ceremony, anything from watching the moon come up from behind the tress rising into the sky to standing outside and hearing birds throughout the day. It was beautiful. Total presence in the moment and the feeling of that stayed with me.
When I go into meditation now, it’s easier to know where to go as I go back to some of those moments and I think it’s important because it’s a reminder of the reality that I think a lot of people should be exposed to. Why they are not, I don’t understand. Because it’s taboo? They have been using natural medicine for thousands of years – what difference does 2020 make?
I found it easier to meditate and to go back into my centre and calm. I had very high levels of stress and anxiety in life through my journey as a teacher coupled with being a higher order perfectionist. I once went to see a psychologist who did an assessment and said I was extreme in terms of anxiety but my level of depression was really low, which was unusual. So, being a productive person, I did what I need to do to bring the anxiety down but there was always something that triggered it. After Ayahuasca, I found it easier to go down to that threshold and stay there. Not consciously, it was just easier. I just let things go because really, how much does it matter in the scheme of things? And that scheme of things actually went from here to there and that really helped me put things in perspective.
Also, she fixed my jaw pain. It was an interesting time as I was in a period of very high stress – I get a tightened jaw because of stress that gets really sore sometimes. When I’m done with school and you get to the final deadline, when your body goes into the state of relaxation, my jaw loosens. I had this pain in my jaw that was bugging me throughout the ceremony and was bringing me back to my body – it helped to heal it. She came in, I could see her traveling over each person and scanning each body to see what it was and go in and work on what she needed to do. When she came over to me, she went straight for my jaw. It was like someone grabbing it and pulling it down, stretching it out in an intense way – in the end, it felt so much better! I had no problem afterwards.
What do you need to work on?
God, we always have stuff to work on. I just feel like f*ck man, when does it end? Now I’ve got even more to work through!
I’ve been through my fair share of dark night of the soul. Just living my life now. My next thing is what am I going to do to contribute to the world that brings my own gift to the table and what is that gift. I just know I’m walking the middle path and it’s definitely not left or right – it’s just along the middle. All I can do is to put one foot in front of the other and whatever unfolds is what happens.
I love what I do now: I’m a teacher and while it’s deeply frustrating, I have so many beautiful interactions everyday on the smallest and biggest level – the full spectrum of human emotion. I love that aspect of the job. I hate the structure and the shitty system but it is what it is. It’s going to change eventually. What you can do is just be a human being and trying to nurture people to be best human beings.
Good impactful people are unfortunately leaving the profession. Admin is too much, the workload, the time trade off. Just right now, we are in week 8 of a 10-week term, teachers have been working 21 weeks without a break. Preparing online material at the end of term, then preparing the final markings. Teachers are not getting enough downtime, not being able to inject enough energy into their own lives anymore in order to keep the cup full. You can’t give to others if your cup is not full and there’s no physical time to fill the cup up. That’s what nurturing professions are like now. They can’t invest back in themselves in order to give back to others.
What would be your advice if you were to do it again?
I don’t think I would approach the situation any differently.
One thing I’d say to people would be: make sure you clear yourself emotionally. A lot of people who were there just rushed into it. They were there as other people said it would help them fix their problem. The reality is, it’s going to highlight where the problem sits and where the roots are and it’s up to you to pull that out. She’s not going to do that for you. It’s going to take time and integration. She’s going to shine a light on it, loosen it up, shake shit up a bit and leave that with you so you can walk away and integrate that. I feel like there are some people who go in there with heavy traumas and whatever their burden is, and they expect that it’s going to be dealt with but they are not willing to put in the work afterwards to integrate and make sure they are receiving healing in the way that they need to.
When I was speaking to Marie to begin with, I started to wonder if she really understood herself as nothing in her psychedelic experience seemed to have been a bother and she described the whole thing as wonderful. I was suspicious. How can that be? Everyone struggles with something! However, as we went deeper into the conversation, I could see Marie had done a huge amount of thinking and self-work to reach some of the conclusions she reached. She is now speaking from her scars rather than from her wounds and more than that, she can see how necessary those wounds were to get her where she is now.
I enjoyed the level headedness and calamity that flew from her. It's something I noticed in people who have accepted they have no control over anything and decided to just go with what the universe brings, to swim along with the stream, as Marie said. This doesn't mean these people have no ambitions, objectives or plans, it's just the way they go about them, trusting there is a reason for things to come your way and rejecting being afraid of what that step into the unknown could mean.
Marie is still to figure out what gifts she ought to be using in this lifetime but it looks like her approach of one foot in front of the next is going to get her there. It has always worked for me and whenever someone asks me how they can work out what they should be doing in life, I always say, start with small steps - you never know what you will encounter on the way and which direction it will take you. There are no big answers lying there waiting to be uncovered. It's all about gradual discovery and experience - two things that form this thing we all partake in: life.
So, go and try things. See what works, how it makes you feel, and what benefit you bring to the world as a result. Without trying, there is no outcome. And I know, staying in and watching Netflix is a comfortable endeavor (and very necessary on some occasions) but it's also a limiting one. Figuring out your purpose takes effort. Sometimes knowing this is enough for us to want to do it. So here it is - know it's normal not to know and to struggle. Also know though, that it won't always be that way but it's something we cannot escape. One foot in front of the other...
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