When I came out of my second ayahuasca ceremony at the retreat I felt exhausted. I had just vividly experienced two of my deepest fears. One of them was a fear I remember having as a child that I had never discussed with anyone, afraid it would somehow manifest if I did. The second was a core fear that underlied all the other fears, insecurities and doubts in my life. I had no idea I had that fear, nor do I think I would I have found out easily: it was the deep, fundamental fear of being alone.
In this blog series I open up about my experience with the medicine of uní (more commonly known as ayahuasca) and I will share some of my experiences from doing the Mamé dieta. In the previous post, I wrote about my first experiences with taking uní (ayahuasca), the retreat and how to prepare for taking ayahuasca. In this post, I will talk about a core fear that came up during one of the ceremonies and, looking back on my life, why it came up.
If you know me at least a little, you know that I am very independent and that I do many things alone. So learning that I was so fundamentally afraid of being alone initially surprised me. Right after high school I went to work on a camping in France for the whole summer. In that same gapyear I left by myself to live in Milan, Italy for five months. In the first summer of university I left to Luang Prabang, Laos to do an internship for five weeks and then travel by myself for the remaining three. Since then my travels outside of Europe have mostly been mostly by myself. Other than that I love doing other things by myself too, such as going to museums, sitting in a cafe with a coffee and my journal, or taking a long walk through the park. In fact, I love doing things by myself. And don't get me wrong, I adore my friends and families and I am absolutely an extraverted person in many ways. Even just sitting with people that I love without talking brings me joy, talking to strangers and meeting new people energizes me, and after a full day of not interacting with another soul I will be bored and craving connection. But all is in balance with my precious alone time.
Although at the time of the second ceremony I was surprised by the depth of the fear I had encountered, in hindsight I am not surprised at all. There had definitely been signs. During my years in university I lived with one roommate. Whereas I would rarely ever go home, for many reasons, the most practical one being that I had volleyball games in the weekend, she would go home almost every weekend. The first year I only sometimes struggled with being alone over the weekends, but the second year was a lot harder on me. During the Christmas holidays in 2019, that I spent mostly in Nijmegen rather than with my parents, I asked many of my friends if they would please have a sleepover with me. I do not exactly know what I was so afraid of, but I was terrified of being alone for that long. One part was definitely that being alone meant being alone with my feelings and thoughts, which was confronting at the time. And another part of me was afraid that without the external source of energy, namely that of being and connecting with other people, there would be nothing left to keep me going. What was behind this was that I was not comfortable with myself and my shadows.
Since then I have worked on those shadows a lot and that work precedes both my decision (and the courage) to take ayahuasca and the depth of experiences that came up during that second ceremony. One of the key changemakers through the years was a Zen buddhist meditation course. Alongside the course, in which I learned a lot about the Zen buddhist philosophy and its practices, I committed to two times of 20 to 25 minutes of silent meditation per day. I did that consistently for nearly 10 months. During the meditations I was forced to sit with my feelings and thoughts which led to getting to know my inner self, learning which thoughts and sentiments kept coming back, and eventually understanding what was underneath most of them. In that time I also started journalling more, which in itself was a sign that I had become less afraid of facing what was going on inside of me.
A year later I started haptotherapy which made me realize that many of my childhood experiences and feelings I assumed I had processed were not so processed after all, and were in fact still shining through many the issues I was currently facing. In that same period, I took LSD for the first time. Even more so than therapy, that LSD experience changed my life significantly. I have a friend who says that everyone should do in their life at least once therapy and LSD, and I think (although depending on each person's personal context) that I agree with that. During the LSD ceremony I went deeply inwards, quite literally, and one of the most tangible things that came out of it was that I found a safe place within myself for all past, current and future versions of my being.
I have a friend who says that everyone should do in their life at least once therapy and LSD.
This safe place within me, where I felt at home in myself, was a place I now knew but still had to practice consistently getting back to whenever I felt lost. My abroad semester in Hawaiʻi was another key changemaker. In this semester, I learned to be comfortable with feeling my emotions fully and I discovered how good it could feel to express and share them with others. A lot of this I learned through the people I got to know, and the energy I got to experience, via a weekly spiritual event called Soulday (link to the video showing the vibes). After Hawai'i, I went to Ecuador and the plan was to travel in South America for several months. But then my dad got married and there were protests in Ecuador that limited travel, so I flew back early and stayed in the Netherlands for several weeks. In those weeks, despite all the positive transformation I had gone through in Hawaiʻi, I was struggling. Looking back a large part of that was definitely reverse culture shock and in that period I learned two essential lessons: first, that when I did not feel good I had to go and be with friends and family, and second, that I was afraid of both commitment and separation. The first one I seem to be relearning over and over again as if I have not had that insight a zillion times before, although the realization that what I am missing is connection does come a lot faster to me now. The second one became one of my main reasons I wanted to take ayahuasca: I wanted to get to and understand the root of this fear.
And so that became the intention I set for the second ceremony at the retreat: show me the roots of my fear of abandonment and commitment. If there is one thing I learned about the spirit of ayahuasca, usually referred to as Mother Ayahuasca, from my experiences with the medicine is that you get exactly what you ask for.
If there is one thing I learned about the spirit of ayahuasca, usually referred to as Mother Ayahuasca, from my experiences with the medicine is that you get exactly what you ask for.
In that second ceremony, Mother Ayahuasca taught me that my fear of abandonment and commitment was rooted in a deep fear of being alone. She showed me exactly where these roots had shown and grown in my life and that these roots were entangled with the generations before me. But what do you do with such profound knowledge and understanding of your fundamental fear of being alone? The answer to that question is one of the main lessons she taught me during the Mamé dieta.
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