Various factors came together to make the day a very painful but mind blowing experience. I had caught a cold and felt pretty bad. My face was congested and I had a mild fever. I was starting to feel slightly better the morning of the hike and so decided to go ahead. After a 45 minute taxi journey, we arrived at the home of one of the locals, half way up the mountain. By then I also had a bad stomach ache, no doubt thanks to the amount of rubbish I was swallowing back from my nose. We had a much larger group on this hike, over 10 instead of the 4 from our last hike. The initial ceremony went on for longer, and we were sitting in quite a cramped space between some rocks, next to a hot and very smoky fire. My eyes were starting to burn from the fumes, and I was beginning to really regret coming. We set our intentions to ourselves before drinking. Mine was to open my heart and release what is holding me back – if only I knew what I was really wishing for! I don’t think I really even acknowledged or thought through my intention – I just wanted that loving trip through nature again that I’d had on the first hike. I drunk the San Pedro and had to use all my focus to keep it down because it tasted so bad, and I felt so bad.
Miguel would ask each of us if we wanted to drink again, every half an hour or so for the first part of the hike. When I was asked, I remembered back to the last hike – how beautiful the experience was, how connected to nature I felt, and how much I learned. I thought, “wow, I can have that again times 2!” I went ahead and drunk half a cup more.
15 minutes more, and my stomach was hurting badly, my nose was blocked solid, and I was wishing I was anywhere but on that hike. The San Pedro hit me hard, and I was overcome by anger, sadness and pain. My stomach was hurting so badly that I was desperate to vomit, but it just wouldn’t happen. I coughed and wretched along the way, but nothing. The anger that I felt towards myself and towards the rest of the group was indescribable – they were all talking, laughing and enjoying the experience, whilst I was trying to keep up, holding this huge bag of physical and emotional pain. I felt so physically heavy and burdened.
I kept walking, at the back of the group, crying, retching and couching. After some time I finally threw up, over and over again. It didn’t seem to help the stomach pain one bit though. Sure, others were crying and emotional, but it seemed insignificant compared to the experience I was having.
After about half an hour more of this, I eventually stopped and got myself into a real state. I just lay on a rock praying to be swallowed up and have an end put to this pain. I felt such deep despair and immense anger towards myself and others, all tied up with guilt at feeling that way towards myself and them.
Javier who was on the hike as a participant came talked to me, and spent some time with me until I was able to continue. He asked me if I was ready to let go of this pain yet. I just looked at him like he was crazy, and thought to myself, “I’ll tell the ambulance crew that I wasn’t ready to let go of my pain yet when they air lift me out with a ruptured stomach.” Shortly after, I vomited again, and continued on just as angry and upset as before. I saw no beauty in anything – my surroundings looked as bleak and miserable as I felt inside.
I continued on in the same way for the next hour, before the sun came out and I started to feel a bit better. We reached some grazing donkeys, and I sat with one for what seemed like forever, even though it was only about two minutes. We continued, and I felt slightly stronger. I was now at the front of the group, feeling more like a leader, and working on accepting the physical pain. In hindsight, I was walking on in a bit of a daze, empty of feeling and emotion and mentally disconnected from my body – not really present at all in the moment. The last hour was a real struggle, but finally the hike had ended and we were back at the local house. I collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table where the others were gathering to eat potatoes and soup. Physically, I felt awful. I had a pounding headache. I managed to eat, but I really wanted to just get back to Paz Y Luz. I just sat in silence, praying like never before for everyone to hurry up and finish so we could leave.
As we arrived back to Paz Y Luz, Javier invited everyone to his house next door. Everyone went, but after announcing that I was never going to take part in a San Pedro ceremony again, I declined and said that I just wanted to be alone. As I went to leave, Javier told me to come to his house at 9am the next morning. I was certain that this was going to be to tell me that I had too many issues and could not come to his retreat.
I went back alone to where we were staying and started cutting up wood to make a fire. The wood was so damp that it took about 45 minutes to get the fire started properly. I then decided to do what I’ve often turned to when I don’t want to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling – smoke a joint.
Smoking was about the worst thing I could have done at that time – it numbed me even more than I already was, and it was that from which I was trying to escape. I sat in front of the fire for hours, alone, just gazing at it, slowly losing my mind. Like a bolt from nowhere, I suddenly switched into observing my passing thoughts rather than being the thinker. I could see my thought patterns, my role playing. I finally understood what Javier meant earlier when he asked how long I wanted to hold on to my anger and pain for. Yes, I felt physically bad, but I chose to play the suffering victim throughout the hike. It was comforting and I didn’t know what else to do. I was quite repulsed when I had this revelation. I became critical and angry at myself for acting in that way. I immediately realised that I had now switched to the angry, judgemental father role. This was another role that I adopted, to scold the naughty child – for showing emotion, weakness, and wanting to explore. I was angry that I’d sat in front of the fire, alone, for 3 hours and no one had even bothered to come and see how I was. I was now playing the hurt child that needed attention, rejected by others. Next I was back to scolding myself for playing the victim. I was in the angry father role, rejecting that emotional and needy child.
My thoughts were melting into each other, I felt like I was dying. Every thought that I had was just another role play – another identity that I was adopting to try and shield my ego from being broken. I was still heavily under the influence of the San Pedro. My heart was racing, head ache getting worse, I had a fever and my chest was hurting, but it was my ego that was dying. I finally gave in, and decided that if I died that night, it would be OK.
I could see that I wasn’t able to have a single thought without it being one mask or another coming up. I identified a number of masks that I would wear, or characters that I would adopt, and had adopted in the past. The naughty rebellious child, the rebellious teenager, the strong husband that shows no emotion and can handle everything, the angry father, the caring mother, the computer geek, the wise one, and more. These were all built to avoid painful emotions. The masks were intended to; avoid rejection by rejecting first, reject aspects of myself or others that I didn’t like, or avoid dealing with issues and fears surrounding rejection. It wasn’t that I just didn’t show emotion – I didn’t even allow myself to experience it.
Sometimes the characters came out almost consciously, other times it was unconsciously – automatically. Usually, it was the superficial characters that would come out consciously. The character of the angry hurt child or the critical father would come out quite unconsciously – they ran deeper. The conscious ones were often easy to snap in and out of whilst the unconscious ones, particularly anger and hurt were difficult to snap out of and I felt that I had to wait until they passed of their own accord. The more I tried to get out of them, the worse they usually got. After reading various chapters from “Heal your wounds & find your true self” by Lise Bourbeau under the Javier’s guidance, I realised that rejection was to be my key issue to address at that point.
I just sat in silence, gazing at the fire for hours, in a trance and so heavy that I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. I could watch every thought and feeling go by, and see how it was part of some character or story I’d been carrying around since a young age. I became more and more confused and conflicted. I could see these characters perpetually fighting inside me, and I was watching them from this empty space. What was left without them? I immediately noticed myself trying to think of anything that might comfort me, in order to avoid these feelings. I sat for what seemed like an eternity, becoming more worried and confused as to what would be left without the characters and the mental dialog.
Eventually my wife came back. Of course, I was ultimately grateful to her for leaving me to work through this experience alone as I had asked. I could clearly see that my anger towards everyone leaving me was just another story of rejection, and resistance against this experience of letting go. I had so much that I wanted to say, but I just couldn’t communicate – I could barely speak. Over the next hour, I managed a few yes and no answers.
Two others from the hike came to join us, and I really couldn’t bare the prospect of trying to communicate with them. I was in a completely different place. I started to try and make conversation before seeing the obvious again – rather than sit there in silence, working through this experience for which they may judge me, I felt that it was better to do something that I didn’t want to – make small talk, in order to avoid rejection. I gave up, and sat in silence. Shortly after, I decided that I was ready to sleep, and went up to bed.
I lay there seriously considering the possibility that a major psychiatric intervention was going to be needed the next day. It took about half an hour to an hour to get to sleep, and I slept a deep and dreamless sleep from about midnight to 6.30am.
I woke up the next morning feeling slightly better, but still very ungrounded, confused and empty. I had a small breakfast before going to Javier’s house. I met Javier and he asked me what happened the day before. I recounted the story and explained my experiences of the evening by the fire. I told him that even this morning as I was deciding what I was going to say I was subconsciously deciding whether I was going to play the suffering victim, or try to impress him with my great insights. These masks and ego patterns were just so obvious, they were driving me crazy.
I was confused and I had no idea what might happen if I were to drop these characters and the life story. I also didn’t know how much deeper I would have to go or be able to go. Just how much was left to come out?
Wishing that I’d never embarked on this journey, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. There was no way I could push this back in a box and pretend I hadn’t seen it – not when it had been made so obvious to me. I couldn’t turn back now. Was I going to become powerful, or continue to get thrown around like a puppet by imaginary characters I’d invented in my head to protect something that was never even there? That’s insane. The only choice that I had was to start the retreat and go further.
Javier assured me that my experiences were not abnormal, and were in fact common during this kind of powerful work. He advised me to take the rest of the day to rest. I had come to believe that this work is the most challenging and the most important work that there is to do – the rest is just distraction. I went for a walk to the market and relaxed with my new perspective, as I continued to catch myself, each and every time, playing my theatre out throughout the day.
