Spiritual Background
When I was eight years old I had my first mystical experience. It was about the existence of God. In a dream I said "God, if you exist, show yourself to me". Then I saw these mountains in my homeland, and in between two mountains there was this incredible thundering light and a voice. I'm from El Salvador, so my religion is Roman Catholic. Then my mother became a converted Protestant and went from one evangelical sect to another and another. She took me along with her until I was 13 when I told her: "You can kill me if you wish I'm not going to church with you again, and that's that", but I felt that I had cut myself off the source and that I needed a connection with God.
When I was 23, I came to the United Sates where I came across the esoteric teachings of Alan Watts, and the mysticism of India, and Zen and Tao and all that. I read a book by Alan Watts called 'This is it', and discovered yoga, and I found the mushroom. It was just like I fell into this incredible world, and I felt free, I felt free of the guilt of the other religions, and I really felt my longing was being satisfied. Twenty years went by where I read and participated in all of these traditions.
I found Buddhism closest to my heart, the most forgiving and accepting of all. Then I went into the goddess tradition and women spirituality which gave me a different look at the world and at myself. All of these things gave me answers, but there was still confusion in my mind and there was still the longing.
Five years ago I was studying the Church of Religious Science. This is a branch of Unity that believes that there is just one mind, the one mind which we all belong to, and that this is a perfect world which we can claim so that everything else that isn't perfect stops being. I was studying with a practitioner of that church when I fell in love and stopped practising the religion. I got married but my husband died three weeks later. That turned my life upside down, it sort of put me into an altered state. We were so much in love. When my husband died I had a lot of mystical experiences, I felt that with his death he took me along with him to the other world and I understood a lot about life and death in a very mystical way, where it was just perfect.
First Ayahuasca Experiences
A month later I met my first shamanic teacher accidentally in a book store, Alberto Reoldo, who follows the shamanic ayahuasca tradition of Peru. I studied with him and we travelled together, and that led on to other shamanistic experiences using sacred substances. He was a person with twenty years experience with ayahuasca and has written many books about his experience. He's a psychologist and anthropologist, but he doesn't call himself a shaman.
My first ayahuasca experience was with a man who worked with Alberto, three nights in a row in California. That was four years ago, when I was fifty, and was my first real drug experience. I had previously smoked pot a little bit, but didn't like it because it made me feel out of control.We did a lot of preparation beforehand, the diet, the food, and that also included high doses of a certain kind of amino acids, vitamins for the brain and stuff like that, so I was well prepared.
The first night we took it in an outdoor setting, a very, very sacred place. We did the Inca medicine wheel which is what Alberto does. I saw people vomiting, and I thought carrying on and I thought "why are they doing that?" "they're just a bunch of crazies or what, what is all this about, I don't feel anything". So the whole evening I spent judging other people and feeling nothing except a little discomfort to make me vomit, and then the night was over.
The second night it was a totally different story. The medicine took effect within 15 minutes and then to my own surprise I was acting like the people I had seen the night before! I was not in control at all. For me it was a purifying experience. I vomited quite a bit, and what came out of my body was like black oil in the shape of an octopus, and it was alive. Then I made sounds that I have never, never done in my life. They were very primal, like repressed feelings, repressed anger - everything repressed came out for hours. I felt it was an alien, an entity that had been living in me all those years, and when a little tentacle was still left in my intestine I said "Oh no, you're not staying there, you've got to come out", so I willed it out and with a final vomiting experience.
I got very tired at that point and sat down on a tree trunk, and then the blissfulness began. I had my eyes closed and I saw the beginning of creation. The earth was being created from one little grain of sand which multiplied into many liquid and solid substances with different colours almost like a dance, and, from that, little salamander-like animals began to appear, very primary animals without eyes and I just loved watching that.
Then my shaman asked me what I was doing. I said that I was fine and then looked up to the sky and spent many hours just travelling in space among the stars. The milky way formed the shape of a goddess, with the hair and the dress and everything, who spoke to me like the mother, my mother, our mother...
We moved from that space through the forest into another space to do another exercise. And I could see in the dark, first time in my life that I could see in the dark and this is with ayahuasca, it was incredible. And then a spirit guide appeared to me, this male figure from the Amazon who had a blunt haircut and was very tall, a warrior who accompanied me for the rest of the evening. Every time I looked over my shoulder he was there, he didn't speak to me or anything, he was just there for protection.
The third night I expected nothing more because I was already blown away, but we did a different kind of exercise and there was a lot of dancing, singing, laughing and all of that. The shaman said we should all lay down with our heads touching each other in a wheel on the ground where there were rocks. I didn't like been told what to do, so I asked the shaman if I could leave, saying that I felt completed and that I wanted to go to my bedroom. In Alberto's tradition you never let a student leave the circle, but he let me go while I had ayahuasca in my stomach that was burning me just like fire. I was very uncomfortable, I couldn't sleep or trip, I was stuck inbetween worlds until about four o'clock in the morning when somebody said I could drink some water which made me vomit.
It was still dark and I looked down at my vomit falling from the upstairs window, it was like fire but more than fire because this was like crystal light, all sparkles like stars. I just looked and I was totally fascinated by it and then I just went to sleep. When I shared that with Alberto he said "You just puked the milky way, that's because you took it in the night before so it was burning you". Those three days were a very good initiation.
I felt that this ayahuasca sessions was about discovering my own power, and about not wanting to work with this shaman again because he didn't feel supportive of my work as a woman. I discovered that my female principal was a very intrinsic part of myself, one that I valued. I also discovered that I wanted to be a medicine woman working with ayahuasca. Other people speak about the plant talking to them, but no one talks to me in my experiences.
The experience needs a certain amount of time to integrate and manifest into something else, that's been my experience. A month after my first three intense ayahuasca experiences I had very restless sleep waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning without being able to go back to sleep. After several sleepless nights I sat in bed and said "OK, what is this" and then a picture was shown in my mind about what I needed to do with my life: I had to begin a journey, leave everything behind and go on a long vision quest. There and then I decided to sell my busy jewellery business, go to Costa Rica, go look for shamans, become a medicine woman and it felt right, it felt perfect. I said "Oh of course, that's exactly what I need to do". And I did it six months later.
Peru
I did my vision quest journey and I sold all my things and I bought a truck and I invited my son to come along with me and we drove down from San Francisco, California to Costa Rica where he left me. Several months went by and I was feeling restless because I wanted to find a Shaman, and there are no visible shamans in Costa Rica.
Then I received a phone call from a woman in New York who was looking for a translator. I had given her some jewellery when we met a year earlier, and when she touched it she said 'Anna', so she tracked me down to Costa Rica and called and said "are you interested in being my translator in a Peruvian shamanic journey?" I said, "I have been waiting for this phone call for six months, so of course I will".
Two weeks later I was in Peru. The journey was two weeks long journey with three ayahuasca sessions in the journey. I was to be the translator for the shaman because he doesn't speak any English and I had the privilege to relay back to him the experiences of everyone in the group every time after we had the session. We would have a session all night long and the following afternoon we would get together in a sacred circle and relay the experiences.
The shaman would sometimes interpret the experience and other times he would say nothing, just acknowledge. At other times there was a need to work directly with the person to bring about a more complete healing and integration. So it was varied, it was always different and on the third time after being together for two weeks there were several who had common experiences. They saw the same thing, like there was a time when several people saw a bear in the session. There was also another occasion when there was a group consensus that they had been visited by an extra-terrestial space ship and some of them went on it. I'm a bit sceptical, but it was an incredible evening: there were strange sounds, lots of sky movement with the full moon between the lightening and a storm. The following day most of the people in the group reported having seen space ships, some having been in them and one even went as far as saying that the whole temple had been lifted into another realm. Nobody had been communicating at the time - the rules of this kind of tradition are that we don't speak to anyone, we don't touch anyone, we don't get up and dance, we don't do anything: we just sit in the dark with ourselves and own discomfort or our own whatever. The shaman is the only person who is singing all night long with his healing tradition of tobacco, rattles, daggers... all kinds of things. If he senses you are having a bad experience and you need help, he will come to you with his music, and his magic brings you back to the present moment.
Ayahuasca Teachings
Sacred substances have brought my longing to completion in the sense that I know my place in the universe. I have experiences of belonging; I don't need to search any further, I have sort of come home. When I come out of the experience it's hard to remain in that space, but it's there, you know, you've been there and it just changes everything, it changes your perception about yourself and about life. It's what Castaneda calls the 'silent knowledge'. There is a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous: 'take what you like and leave the rest' and that's what I do with my life and the teachings that I get. Carlos Castaneda has a lot of good teachings in his books. But still, you see, when I read Castaneda it was an intellectual exercise, but when I started doing the medicine it stopped being intellectual. It becomes a direct experience. One that is so personal, so, so personal that it cannot even be interpreted and shared.
I became interested in taking ayahuasca to open the door to that other dimension. I wanted to have visions, but that has hardly ever happened although I have taken it many, many times. Nor have I been taken to that dark place that ayahuascaros speak about. Perhaps it is because I'm a very controlling person, although I am not sure how much control people really have over their minds when they take medicines.
For me, the experience of colours and movement, other dimensions and the earth being alive only lasts for a few minutes. The rest of the time it's just a struggle to remain aware of whatever ayahuasca is trying to teach me. Sometimes it seems like it teaches me nothing, but later I see that's exactly what I needed: to be in that space between the being and the non-being. I think that it's important to process the experience with someone else who will act as a witness of what you saw.
I believe we are programmed for spiritual experience, but that doesn't even guarantee that we will have the longing for it. I think what makes the difference about shaping our destiny is the intent: we want to have that experience and we will go through whatever lengths to get it. Those are the people most likely to have a mystical experience with a sacred substance. Perhaps they would have it anyway, but the sacred medicine is a short cut, it just makes it happen sooner. When we say we want to know ourselves, we are talking about having a mystical experience. If we know ourselves we will know our creator, because we are created in its image, I believe. The quest of knowing oneself is one of knowing that.
The intent has to shape one's life, and the taking of a substance should be part of that rather than an isolated event. I think what made me have mystical experiences is not just taking substances but living with the quest everyday of my life: living with the mystery, wanting to belong, wanting to know. The medicine is part of my life: reading about it, speaking about it and examining the experiences that happen to me and how those experiences relate to the questions "Who am I", "What am I doing here", "Where did I come from", and "Where am I going".
I believe that the desire to find an answer can be found in many practises, Buddhism, Taoism... any practise. I just think it takes longer. I have friends who are practitioners and meditators who seem to have found a lot of answers but it has taken them a long time. I personally feel that... I'm middle-aged now, I'm 54... that I don't have time. I think I need to accelerate my learning and I have to do my work faster.
©Nicholas Saunders . Interview took place in Brazil, May 1996
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