You went through hell when drinking Ayahuasca.

Maybe you’re afraid you or someone important to you go and things change, you’re trying to understand: What happened?

Two things:

When most people say they went through hell what they mean is that they felt tormented, maybe they saw some demons, some ugly spirits, a lot of darkness.

To some degree, they felt that what they faced broke them in some way, maybe they acknowledge for the first time the amount of evil that is present in the world.

When people go through hell, they get very scared, because they think: “Oh my god, i’m doing witchcraft!“, “Why was this experience so dark, what is there to gain from such darkness?“

The truth is that most of the times, it’s not actual hell they’re going through, but a projection of their inner landscape.

Ayahuasca and some psychoactive substances do this, where your emotions can manifest and take shape.

Why? Because it makes it easier for you to understand things.

Because if you think: “This is me.“

Then you’ll think you’re your emotions, your pain, your mental health complications.

If you identify as this, it’s very difficult to separate the truth of who you are from the nonsense that you have gathered.

Sometimes the plant medicine will put up a drama, a play where you see a lot of things happening, a fight between good and evil, light and darkness.

It is nothing but similar to a holographic representation of your consciousness, it’s trying to show you in a very animated manner the dilemma, confusion and struggle that goes within, for you to learn from it.

Now, there are some cases in which people can actually go through dimensions of existence that are of a very, very dense quality.

This is what people describe as hell, for many participants this can be quite overwhelming and unsettling because they don’t know what to make out of this.

They imagine that Ayahuasca is meant to make them feel loving, compassionate, joyful and like they’re gonna blast into a million rainbows.

It is possible, but not always.

Because life has both, consciousness and unconsciousness, light and darkness.

Ayahuasca is not a tool/teacher that wants you to be happy, she wants you to be free, to be whole.

These are very different things, because to be whole means that you have integrated all of who you are, which is your capacity for goodness and destruction.

It means that you have integrated your creative energy as much as your rage.

You’re able to look at the worst within you and another human being, yet remain in a state of acceptance instead of love, equanimity.

This is true freedom.

Wanting to always be happy and dismissing the more difficult parts of life will make you unfit to live, it’s like going through the jungle…

You only wish to breath the nice scent from the flowers, see the colorful birds and the beautiful sunset. yet you don’t wanna experience the torrential rain, to witness the tiger ripping the head off a gazelle.

You don’t want to see the worms that are eating the leftovers of that carcass, even though it is those worms and that death which nourish the soil for the beautiful flowers.

It’s those worms that feed the colorful parrots that you see in the jungle.

The heavy, scary rain gives that vibrancy to the leaves, to all that is green.

In life, if we want to live fully, we must be equipped to welcome all of it.

Not only the part that is comfortable and nice, the one that wants to be forever sheltered from everything that is uncomfortable, that’s not freedom.

You might as well build your own cage where nothing comes in and nothing comes out.

Going through “hell” is an experience that challenges us, I speak from personal experience.

I struggled a lot with what I saw because I wanted so hard to believe that life was only sunshine, rainbows, fairies and beautiful god/goddess playing.

No, that’s a part of reality, there’s also a part that is ugly, a part where people take advantage of each other.

Where there’s destruction, chaos, abuse, rape, torture, violence and my being afraid of that only makes it bigger.

When I don’t shrink in the face of darkness, only then can I understand that love, that darkness also lays within me and I can embrace it, understand it.

And through curiosity, acceptance and love, I can integrate it so I’m never again scared of it and therefore not easily controlled by it or at the mercy of it.

Which is the way that most people operate.

Most of us want life to be so good, fluffy and comfy, when it gets a little bit rough we get scared, we hide, get traumatized so easily.

Most people are unfit for life, this is why somebody may call them a name and suddenly their whole life is over.

Going through hell teaches you that darkness is real, but that you do not have to be afraid of it.

Who you are is deeper, bigger than all of it. the presence, the witness beyond the chaos of existence.

Who you are is not the Yin or the Yang, not the light nor the darkness, it’s not the music with its high-ups or low-lows.

It’s the silence beneath all of it, the source from which it all springs – nothing brings a person faster to this realization than going through hell.

If you have gone through hell I invite you to consider this perspective, if you’re afraid of going through hell – then I hope that when you’re ready, you go through this experience so that it can become and embodied wisdom.

And above all, to understand that most of the time, the plant is showing us what is within, letting us know how our mind works, how our energies work, the constant struggle that we have between doing what is right and doing what is pleasurable.

The struggle between following virtue and following comfort, in one side you want to be spiritual and really go on this path.

On the other side, you want to be promiscuous with your sex life, you want to eat poorly, you want to take it like a joke, you want to live in integrity, but you want to work in a place where you don’t feel aligned.

It’s not going to work like that.

Spirituality is a love affair where you must give yourself fully or not give yourself at all.

But if you’re still undecided or half-ass it, then you’re bound to be torn apart eventually.

If you feel the calling to sit with Ayahuasca, in a container held by Colombian shamans at a sacred temple in the middle of the mountain forests, please check:

www.ayahuascacolombia.com/retreats