Before I decided to take this journey with mushrooms I had worked with Ayahuasca on about 50 different occasions over a span of about 2 years. I would like to begin sharing about some of these most profound journeys starting with the first one.

About two years ago I was in a very different place in life. I had just completely transformed my life and was searching for answers while at the same time feeling equally guided to find the places I would find the answers I was seeking.

This led me to Ayahuasca. I have the coolest and most amazing mom in the world. In my personal opinion. She is a wise sage and is a shining example of being positive and loving. My mom had approached me 10 years earlier about her first Ayahuasca experience while I was a minister at a Christian church. At the time I was far too engulfed in religion to see outside of my point of view. I told her she was working with the devil and cried as I pleaded with her not to do it anymore. My mom, being the wise sage she is consoled me and made a decision not to talk to me about ayauaska anymore because I was not in a place yet to understand. Good on her.

Ten years later I was in a different place and I approaced my mom about ayahuaska. She was overjoyed to hear about my interest as she had continued to work with this plant regularly for the past ten years. She helped me find a ceremony to attend which turned out to be a 3 day ceremony in the wilderness and I signed up.

Looking back I believe that ayahuaska began working with me the moment I decided to partake in the experience. I didn’t know what to expect but my expectations were very high. One day about a week before the ceremony I took a hike by myself to meditate on what was coming. I was in so much gratitude as I thought about how lucky I was not only to work with Aya but to work with her with my mom there with me. As I reflected on this I sat down by the river. Without looking I put my hand down on the rocks I was sitting on and picked up a stone. This stone I randomly picked up was a piece of petrified wood with stripes throughout from the wood grain. I got the immediete sense that this stone meant something and I pulled out my camera to make a video about what I was feeling.

In the video I share about what I am doing at the time. As I share about my current life and carreer I begin laughing because I had this knowing that my life was about to change drastically and spectacularly. I even spoke to the love of my life who I had not met yet on this video because I had the sense that I was about to meet her also.

A week later after returning from a business trip to San Diego it was time for my first ceremony. My mom had asked me to give a ride to a friend of hers who had traveled from out of town to attend these 3 ceremonies. I was fine with this. I expected a woman my moms age. When I arrived to pick her up I was taken aback as there before me was laterally and by a long shot the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my entire life. She was so beautiful to me that she didn’t even seem real. Not in a plastic sort of way, but in a magical sort of way. We drove out to the ceremony and I learned that she was the same age as I was and we shared a similar life path of seeking the unknown but we had been seeking in very different ways. I was in love but I didn’t allow myself to get to attached because this woman was “Way out of my league!” the way I saw it. She was beautiful as ever and the most successful and wealthy woman at her age I had ever met. More than this she was very intelligent and strong. I had never had much success with women of this caliber so I was surrendered to just driving in the car with her and put away any pipe dreams of us being together.

After we arrived I got my things set up and found a place by the river to write. Someone had left some paints by the river and I decided to pain a picture. For some reason, maybe because I was in a sacred symbolic space I pained a picture of a man shining with purple lines all over his body and purple on his head. I ran out of space because of the size of the journal so the arms were a bit disproportional. Here is the picture I painted and it will come up again later.

I wrote about my excitement and my trepidation. I knew this was going to be a powerful experience but I recalled a few terrifying psychedelic experiences I had years ago in high school and I did not want to experience that again. I asked for a gentle first night.

Before the ceremony started I met with the shaman who said. “Try to sit up the whole time with your back straight. Often times people purge after drinking the medicine. If you do know that its normal. If you need anything during the ceremony let me know.”

I found my place and waited for my turn to drink. I had heard about ayahuaska tasting horrible and was pleased when I found the taste not bad at all. Different, and herbal tasting, but far from bad. After drinking I sat back down, the lights went off and gentle singing started.

At first I didn’t feel anything. But then about an hour in right before me a beautiful, feminine, colorful spirit of light showed up right in front of me. She put what seemed to be a hand on my heart and a hand on my stomach. I sat there in meditation and allowed her to do whatever she was doing. To this day I wasn’t sure if she was meeting me and scanning me or healing me. While she did this out of the corner of my right eye I could feel a chaotic “dark spirit” It was using words while the light spirit was working on me. It was saying, “Hey! Hey!… Look over here. Hey you! Look over here at me. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me!!!!”

I thought to myself, this beautiful spirit is working with me. I am not going to look at or even acknowledge this dark spirit. So I didn’t and it went away never to return again.

This first night was perfectly gentle as this light being sat across from me with her hands on me the entire evening. The communication was minimal that night but the overall message of the evening was, “This is a taste of what this experience is like. See there is nothing to worry about. Tomorrow will be much different but we wanted you ease you in gracefully.”

I felt like I was in very good hands. In fact I felt like I was in the hands of the most powerful being in the universe who could destroy me with a thought. But there was no possibility of me being destroyed or even hurt. I was being treated like an infant new born child with the utmost care.

And that was it for my first experience. But I do want to bring up another interesting thing that happened. This was the first day of my new life. Everything changed after that day as I will tell in future posts about the experiences that followed.

One month later I was still working with my previous company and had traveled a few hours to work on a malfunctioning radar on a boat. As the engineer that was with me finished with the repairs I stood at the end of the dock on looking at the water. I noticed that my reflection was shining. There were beams of light coming off my body in all directions. I had never seen this before and took several pictures. Here is one of them below.

The next day I showed the picture to a friend of mine who I had shared all of my ayahuasca experiences with. When she saw the picture she said, “It looks like your paining.” It did in fact look my painting in a strange way. I pulled out my painting and was amazed to see that the reflection in the picture could have very well been a refection of the guy in the painting. Even the arm being cut off in the painting matched the photo as one of my arms was short because I was holding that arm in front of me to take the picture.

Here is a picture of both images side by side.

Strange? I thought so. This was the one of many strange and wonderful experiences that left me saying, “That’s weird. I don’t know what that is supposed to mean if anything. I’m just going to leave this one alone as something cool I’ve experienced and not build up too much story about it.

After the ceremony I slept so soundly. I had nothing but excitement now for night number two. And for very good reason.