Ayahuasca And Fear: Dissolving The Ego

It’s safe to say that Ayahuasca and fear go hand in hand. Before my ceremony in the Brazilian jungle, I understood fear in a rather limiting way. But when I first experienced a complete dissolution of Self, fear revealed itself as something entirely different.

This is the story of my unplanned Ayahuasca ceremony, how I got ripped apart by giant thorns, fell through eternal darkness, and somehow came out the other side more alive than before. (???)

Meeting a wizard

During the COVID pandemic, like many others, I found myself starving for inspiration, and I promised myself to go out of the country as soon as travelling was possible again. And so, after a while, I packed my backpack and happily fucked off to Brazil, one of the few countries that weren’t travel-restricted. After a few days of Caipirinhas on Copacabana Beach, I travelled to an island near Rio. It was an amazing time to be a tourist, since due to the pandemic, there was only a handful of tourists on the entire island. Since this posed a special opportunity to see the place from up close and without masses of tourists, I decided to dump the sightseeing list for Brazil and spend the remainder of my 5 weeks on the Island, until I had to go back to Amsterdam.

Being there, I became friends with Afonso, the owner of the hostel I was in, a man whom I later suspected of being either God himself… or a wizard. We’d smoke stogies, share stories, and go for walks in the jungle. He’d speak of the energy of the forest, how the giant rocks on the Island came to be, and how they possessed magic. We’d go out in the night and into the jungle to listen to the choirs of insects, gaze at the dancing reflections of moonlight on treetops, and drink water from the river like jaguars. He was full of surprises, and to top it off, he had a gargantuan “Jiu Jitsu” tattoo covering his entire belly. He was a fascinating figure, having lived a particularly hard life, as he was born in the violent favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Nonetheless, he was by far the lightest person I had ever met.

How it started: getting into the ritual

One evening, while we ate hamburgers around a campfire together with two Chilean travellers, the topic of Ayahuasca came up. Afsonso happened to be friends with a shaman and still had a bottle of the substance lying in his fridge. He then asked if we’d like to join him on a ritual. I kept myself somewhat quiet, remembering the prior advice not to seek it out yourself, but to let it find me instead.

Three days and a fruit-only diet later, the four of us set off into the jungle. Afonso took the lead, guiding us off-road, through dense jungle bushes, past a place riddled with snakes (supposedly), to eventually reach what he called “the heart of the island”: a jungle stream with rocks and pools, the water flowing freely through the jungle. We built a campfire, sat down, and began chanting along with Afonso: 

After the chants, the four of us would drink the Ayahuasca and top it off with a passionfruit. Afonso said that we could talk if we’d like to, but that it was more important to let each other experience ourselves in silence. Then, each found their place, sat down, and all became quiet.

The river was calmly flowing along…

…birds were singing…

…it was a beautiful day. 

But even so, the rocks that we were sitting on were uneven, and for some reason I started feeling like I couldn’t really sit ‘comfortably.’ I began stressing over whether I had chosen the right spot: what if I were to collapse? What if I’d hit my head?! I looked around and could see how the others sat there so peacefully and zen, and I’d think to myself, “How come they’ve got all the best spots? Why, for fuck’s sake, did I have to choose this shitty spot? What if I tip over and fall?“

From there, I was hit with an immense wave of insecurity, which then pushed me over some sort of weird edge and into a freefall.

All became pitch-black.

The freefall seemed like an eternity and a millisecond at the same time.

There was no sound, no wind.

It was quite a banal, heck, can I say “dry” experience?

After a while, giant plants and leaves appeared in the far distance beneath me. The plants carried thorns and spikes the size of daggers, or kitchen knives, as if I had shrunken down to the size of an ant. With the impending approach, there was nothing I could do as I was hurling directly towards the razor-sharp plants. 

Then, impact.

Fear as a mere sensation

My body began ripping apart. I could see the thorns tearing off my skin, rupturing the flesh, and out came my intestines. All the blood, pus, and body pulp flew through the air and disappeared into the shadows.

Eventually, the plants disappeared as well, with nothing remaining of me, except for my thoughts that, strangely enough, were still somehow subject to gravity. I remember how I found that realisation so stupidly funny; I’m not sure why, but the idea of a disembodied thought still able to fall through eternal darkness felt like an island of joy in a sea of existential dread, but only for a brief (…I think?) moment.

The joy then quickly made way for fear again, and I remembered that during a bad trip, it helps to cease resisting and fully surrender to the experience instead. A difficult thing to do, since in that moment, I felt like I basically had to accept the fact that I had died, and had been reduced to merely a falling thought. But when I finally accepted my surrender, it felt like a crystal clear moment, a moment of consciously choosing to “let go” and experience what was there to be experienced.

What was striking about that moment was the experience of being full of fear, without actually feeling fearful. Since anxiety became the sole element that confirmed any awareness I considered to be “mine”, it became the sole confirmation that I even existed at all. Fear had been stripped of its demonised appearance and was reduced to a mere sensation, and nothing more than that. From there, things started to calm down, even though I had been ripped apart a few moments prior.

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Awakening from darkness

Suddenly, I woke up from the fall, feeling crystal clear, sober as hell, and still sitting exactly where I was supposed to be. Afonso was still sitting across from me, quietly and peacefully. I also noticed my whole body was intact again, which, funnily enough, didn’t make much of an impression. I had a body again, and there’s that. It was neither good nor bad.

However, I rejoiced in the ability to see light again – light, and the rays of the sun, had my deepest, deepest appreciation from that moment onward. It’s difficult to articulate this adequately, but in the darkness prior, I had missed “the light” so, so much. Then, out of nowhere, a voice appeared. Even though it was a stranger’s voice, it felt heartwarmingly familiar. It greeted me, calmed me down a bit more, and started yapping about the world around me. The place, the jungle, the trees and their leaves; everything was discussed in detail.

In that moment, with the voice still talking, any question, any doubt, any thought or internal debate was being addressed. It was as if any existential question mark I had carried in my heart was being touched upon, even without me realising I had such questions to begin with.

At one point, the voice went, “See Afonso over there? Moments earlier, just the sight of him sitting there ever-so peacefully became the source of all your doubts. But as you will notice, your doubts are in vain, which they will always be and have always been, for he will now stand up and move, and his place will once more become like any other place.” Then indeed, Afonso got up, as if by command, and found another place to sit. I remember thinking I had lost my mind in that moment. “All along, his spot became a better spot than yours, because you made it so.” 

I was awestruck: In that moment, this simple realisation made so much fucking sense.

The voice went on, “You sow your own misery because you look around and see what is out there, only to conclude that what is out there is only out thére because it is not where you are. What you need to understand is that no place is special. They’re simply places, places like anything else. And just like that, most things that are, simply are. Your perspective on them ultimately determines whether you experience misery or joy… but here is the caveat: you shouldn’t prefer either of them, as you’ll again be turning it into something that it’s not: good or bad. You could also see them for what they really are: mere happenstances.

Understanding Fear During Ayahuasca: What I Learned

To experience events stripped from what the “I” makes of them is a liberating sensation like no other. It allows one to experience happenstances as nothing more than a happenstance; even though that sounds pretty dull, it’s a mesmerising thing, especially when confronted with the things that strike our hearts with grief, anxiety, or fear.

This is perhaps the central “takeaway” of that particular Ayahuasca experience, and it’s had a great impact on how I navigate my life ever since. Again, Yagé is by no means a “shortcut” for resolving trauma, but to me, it’s certainly been a key ingredient for letting go of personal resentment towards past experiences, in ways I could have never imagined. Even like, for instance, losing a parent at a young age; when such a loaded event is stripped of ego-sentiment, it is liberated from its one-sided negativity, and open to be experienced in a way that is more light, more at ease, more accepting.

Don’t mistake this as a plea for existential indifference, as it’s quite the opposite: by liberating an event from what our Ego consciousness has made of it (and clings to), all sensations or sentiments become once more available to be experienced fully, instead of partially. “Fully” in its positives and its negatives. In the case of losing a parent, the thoughts of this person are now freed from the weight of illness, pain, grief, or parental absence. The grief is still allowed to exist, but it can co-exist with the good memories, the ones of parental love, the little insider jokes, the moments of laughter we shared. This may even re-ignite a genuine appreciation for having experienced these moments at all, even though the person is gone.

What it’s like to experience Ego Death

In the end, what’s made that Ayahuasca moment so insightful (and terrifying) is because of what some refer to as the experience of an “ego-death”: the total dissolvement of one’s own ego, and the sensory observation of what remains in its absence. This is by no means a “comfortable” experience, as we spend our entire lives creating our Egos… something you don’t simply dispose of.

It’s hard to explain, but during my trip, the initial freefall with plants ripping the flesh off my bones felt exactly like that: a dissolution of Ego that experiences itself, from itself. What became tangible is that when the “I”, the body, and any sense of placement ceased to exist, there remained only a clear, sensory experience of whatever was happening, free from “what you think of it, or how you feel about it”.

Enabling existential courage

I guess what I tried putting into words here is that a brief liberation from the ego opens one up to a newfound perspective that allows you to rejoice in life’s duality, rather than to suffer because of it. To do this, you don’t even necessarily have to undergo an Ayahuasca experience yourself. The mere idea that it is possible to see your Ego’s interpretation from a distance is not a “life-changing” thing per sé, but it’s definitely a “life-expanding” one: an expansion of the present moment.

As simple as it may sound, you could integrate that particular idea, the expansion of the present moment, as early as today.

Doing so is a vital part of self-reliance: the ability to see events as mere happenstances, and through that, experience them in their full richness. By stripping events from what our Egos default them into, we reclaim the ability to steer through our ever-changing environments, but aligned with our authentic Self and our authentic desires (while also having a blast).

From here, one might start to cultivate something I like to coin as “existential courage”: an attitude to life that doesn’t shun fear, but replaces it with the courage to rejoice in life’s dualities; the courage to experience authentically; and the courage to serve or create something bigger than ourselves, despite fear or resentment.

Wouldn’t that be LiFe-ChAnGiNg?