The day after my first ayahuasca ceremony, I lay on my back in the sun and wept. Despite the maestra’s injunction that I shouldn’t have any expectations, because ayahuasca would give me exactly what I needed, I had pinned a lifetime of hope on those little cups of thick, earthy medicine. I approached the drinking of ayahuasca with the fervor of desperation. I knew I was carrying a sickness within me that, left unchecked, would kill me. Depression, especially in its chronic forms, does kill–either by slow degrees as it methodically removes all hope and vitality from its host, or via the final coup we refer to as “committing suicide” (as if it were a crime).

I had expectations, all right. I expected to talk to God. I thought that I would be given glorious visions, that a rainbow snake would wrap itself around my heart and squeeze life back into it, like a cosmic ventricular assisting device. I hoped against hope that I would come down from the dream and, as Kira Salak famously wrote in National Geographic, find that “the severe depression that had ruled my life since childhood had miraculously vanished.”

I was giddy after I drank my first cup of medicine. “It’s in me now,” I thought. I found the taste strangely pleasing–it reminded me of chocolate, of tobacco, of the wet warm scent of decomposing leaves. It was not at all foul, contrary to reports I’d read. I lay there in the darkness, in a circle of beautiful people. Others began to vomit, to weep, to sigh. The medicine songs swelled and faded. I felt nothing. I went back up to drink again. Now I felt sick, but nothing came. I drank a third time. Finally, I vomited. But it was just me, vomiting in the dark. Disgust crept over me. This vomit was foul, offensive; I had to be rid of it. Ridiculously, I left the room and emptied my bucket into the toilet.

That’s when it started. The pain. It was like depression on full throttle. It was as if the medicine said to me, “You want to die? I’ll show you what that feels like.” And I lay there and was made to feel the pain I’d be inflicting on those who loved me, were I to bow out of the game. It was horrifying. Accompanied by the intense staccato noise of those around me purging, the suffering of others bled into my own suffering, and it was overwhelming.

Then there was a shift, and I saw myself as a child. The pain of all those years of not loving myself hit me like a lightning bolt, and it paralyzed me. It was so strong that I could not even weep. It was hell, and all I could do was lay there and take it. I couldn’t make it stop; I couldn’t go to sleep; I couldn’t distract myself in any of the myriad ways that I might have normally escaped such a feeling. I began to fear that it would go on forever, that I would be made to live with a broken heart always.

This went on for hours. And then morning came. The ceremonial silence was broken and as I listened to others share their experiences, I felt a silent, jealous rage building in me: Nothing had happened to me, save the usual suffering I lived in, multiplied a hundredfold. I hadn’t gone to other realms; I hadn’t talked to my ancestors, or been gifted my true purpose by an unearthly creature. Of course, I would be the one who was forsaken by everything, even ayahuasca, the mother of all healers.

I drove to a park. I slept a few hours. I woke to lay in the sun and weep. What was I going to do now? Where could I turn? What remained? I cried my eyes out. After a while, I sat up. I wrote a poem. I went into the bathroom and washed my face, and instead of looking in the mirror and thinking, “Why are you so ugly?” I thought, “Why are you so beautiful?” Just like that–without even trying.

At the second ceremony that night, I asked for more medicine than I had been given the first time. I had a new set of expectations now: I expected it to be hell, physically and mentally. I went into it with the attitude of a condemned person who has nothing to lose. I lay on my back and focused on my breath, repeating the word “release” as my mantra. After a while, a voice spoke to me. It was really just a thought, but I had the curious and distinct sensation that it was coming from outside me. It said, “Do you really want to carry all this around in your body?” I cried, “No! Take it from me!” At that point, something took over my body. A strange, cold, tingling energy moved through me. My hands stiffened as if with palsy. My whole body shook, violently. I yawned uncontrollably. This went on for quite a while.

When the ceremony ended, the maestra told us that despite whatever we may have just experienced, the real healing would occur later, in the days and weeks to come. I was skeptical. I left quickly, because all I felt was a burning desire to get home.

I drove for hours through the pre-dawn dark. As the light came, I was struck by a thought. It was a spiritual truism that I already knew rationally, but it hit me with the full force of revelation. I had lost so much of my life wishing that each moment was in some way, any way, different than how it actually was. Something in me cracked, and I began to bawl, grieving for all those lost moments, each of which had been beautiful and perfect just as it was. The energy that I had felt the previous night returned, coursing through my body, shaking me hard. I had to pull off the highway and wait until it passed. I gazed at the purple-brown Virginia mountains in the distance, and for once, I did not wish that they were some other, more distant, more exotic mountains.

That afternoon, I went walking through the woods, as is my habit. Sometimes on these walks I let myself get lost in fantasy; other times I make a point of being mindful, of staying focused on my breath and surroundings. On this particular walk, though, I heard a drum beating to the rhythm of my heart. The drum was saying, “Now! Now! Now!” as if calling out each moment for what it was. There seemed to be cracks everywhere, joyful tears in the usual impenetrable fabric of reality. “My God,” I thought. “It’s all happening now.” My limbs became so light that I practically ran up the mountain. It was there on top of the mountain, after sitting in a state of empty bliss by the thrashing stream, that I met my snake. He was not the giant, intrusive rainbow anaconda I’d hoped to encounter in my visions. He was a placid dun-colored fellow laying in the grass. My dog ran past him unawares. But I squatted down by him and for a long moment out of time, we were together, the snake and I. Then I stood up, called out the words, “Thank you,” to everything and to nothing in particular, and walked down the hill, into my life.