When news breaks, you need to understand what matters β and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today? What the psychedelic drug ayahuasca showed me about my life. When I finally puked on the fourth night, I felt an odd sense of pride. Inside the loud, stuffy ceremony room, people were laughing, crying, chanting, gyrating, and, yes, vomiting, around me.
When my time finally comes, I think: Just aim for the bucket and keep your ass above your head like the shaman told you. Nearby, a man starts to scream. I finish vomiting and start crying and laughing and smiling all at once.
Relief washes over me, and I slowly make my way back to my mattress on the floor. For four consecutive nights, a group of 78 of us here at a retreat center in Costa Rica have been drinking a foul-tasting, molasses-like tea containing ayahuasca, a plant concoction that contains the natural hallucinogen known as DMT. I flew to Costa Rica hoping to explode my ego. And I was not prepared for what happened.
Ayahuasca turned my life upside down, dissolving the wall between my self and the world. It was a Clockwork Orange -like horror show, and it was impossible to look away.
But I saw what I needed to see when I was ready to see it. Ayahuasca exposes the gap between who you think you are and who you actually are. In my case, the gap was immense, and the pain of seeing it for the first time was practically unbearable. Until fairly recently, you had to travel to South America if you wanted to experiment with the plant, but now ayahuasca ceremonies are popping up in the United States and Europe. Indigenous people in countries like Colombia and Peru have been brewing the concoction for thousands of years, mostly for religious or spiritual purposes.
