Alistair A.

People who've done it before all talk about the Plant's weirdly healing powers. Healing in a psychic sense. The visions you get on the brew aren't just the random oddness of mushrooms or LSD, they seem to articulate the key issues of your mind in electrifying detail. And most importantly for me, the power of the trip then continues working once you've woken up. This idea of waking integration really turned me on. In fact, that was the single most important reason for coming. In the distant past I'd done a fair amount of recreational drugs. What had finally made me tire of them was the fact that their benefits were so limited. Once the drugs had leached out of your system, the joy, the love, the whatever was also gone. The transience of their happy effects actually left you feeling profoundly miserable. What made Ayahuasca seems so interesting was this idea that the insight you had during the big trip then translated into some permanent change in your "normal" life.... The extraordinary thing about the Ayahuasca experience is that the drug allows the brain to run real experiential vision: hallucinations which actually access the emotional experience of a given situation. I could vividly feel what it was like to be picked up from my cot and held by my Mum circa 1972 (a time when I was 2 and she was grieving for her Mum). Not only that but it creates the space for you to simultaneously see the psychological pattern that experience sets up and - if necessary - how to defuse it…. How amazing. How weird. How the hell am I going to be able to tell anyone about this!?