“Malo esperiots y diablos” the Shaman told me after my first rather uneventful ayahuasca ceremony at the center. That was all I understood of the Spanish and what I understood concerned me, though the shaman seemed unfazed and planned to remove these bad spirits and devils from me in the coming ceremonies.  A few days later another traveler arrived with better Spanish speaking skills than me, and I was able to get the full story of these bad spirits and devils that had attached themselves to me.

He said that these spirits we working to pull me to the dark side (kill me), which as I write it seems crazy but it did make some sense with the health problems I had suffered from in the past 6 months.  Since a hernia repair surgery in March, I had suffered from a constant low-grade infection that had slowly been running me into the ground. Before I left for Peru, the doctor had told me re-doing the surgery was my last option to try to get rid of the infection after running me through numerous courses of antibiotics. Even that was not guaranteed to fix the problem, as the scans and tests they had done on me at two different hospitals showed nothing wrong.  As a healthy and active 27 year old, firstly I should not have even had a hernia, and secondly I should have been able to bounce back from the surgery. There was a bit of comfort that came from the shaman telling me he could see something wrong and that he would fix it, more comfort than I had when the doctor told me the scans showed nothing wrong and they would try another surgery to fix me.

Removing bad spirits and devils is easier said than done, well maybe easy for the Shaman but it was most definitely not easy for me. The first preparation began the next day, the shaman prepared a special plant bath for me containing the leaves of three strong trees know as Palos Fuertes, that would help loosen these negative entities. Due to the nature of the energetic strength of the plants in this bath, the female shaman had to bathe me with this mixture and during the process I started to feel queasy. Whether from the smell which was reminiscent of the type of ayahuasca brew I drank in Ecuador my very first time working with shamans, or that it was from loosening the bad spirits from me I can’t say. I was given a tea to drink called Limon Dulce (Sweet Lemon), though it was neither sweet, nor lemony and should actually be called Bitter as ****.  This tea was often prescribed to older people and would help strengthen my physical body that had been significantly weakened overtime by these spirits.

Then it was time for what I like to refer to as “the exorcism.” Which the events took place over two or three ceremonies (I’ve tried to repressed the events in my mind), but I’ll describe them as one. Now the average person’s ayahuasca ceremony is no walk in the park, and will usually involve some vomiting and/or diarrhea (I’ll leave the story of one of my first experiences with ayahuasca where these two things happened simultaneously for another time). This physical purge is usually all but forgotten when the hallucinogenic effects of the dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in the ayahuasca take effect. DMT is considered to be one of, if not the strongest known psychedelic compound known to mankind and visions can range from intense and colorful geometric patterns to transversing dimensions and conversing with aliens. I am not the average person though, and for me my ceremonies usually consist of me feeling really ill, puking or dry heaving, shitting, praying for the effects to wear off, and then seeing the beneficial impacts slowly over the next couple days. Who needs to see shapes and talk with aliens if the healing is the same in the end right?

The exorcism began like every other one of my ceremonies. As the shaman started calling people up one by one to drink, I closed my eyes and tried to build up my courage to drink. The taste of ayahuasca is something hard to describe, it is not enjoyable by any means and after you’ve thrown it up a few times the smell will send shivers down your spine. Having drunk my fair share of ayahuasca, I can barely watch people drink it without feeling nauseous.  All too quickly it was my turn to drink. I closed my eyes as the shaman poured the ayahuasca, held my breath as I took the cup and downed it in two gulps. I continued to hold my breath as I returned to my mat quickly rinsing my mouth out with water to try to remove the taste to no avail. Fighting back the initial urge to vomit, I settled in for what would be a long night. Once you’ve swallowed that cup, it is the same at the point during a leg wax where they’ve put the wax on, now there is only one way out and it’s going to be painful.

The effects of ayahuasca usually take a half hour or so to come into effect. The point at which the shaman will start singing “icaros” which are songs used to help clear out negative energies. As soon as the shaman starting to sing the icaros I began to feel uncomfortable, physically and mentally. I felt nauseous, though all I could manage to do was dry heave into my bucket. The shaman called me up to his mat for a limpieza, an energetic cleansing through the use of icaros, chapuka (a type of fan made from leaves that is shaken over the head), agua de florida (a scented alcoholic liquid that the shaman will pour into their mouth and spray onto the top of someones head), and/or a soplar (smoking tobacco and blowing the smoke on the person). This process did little to make me feel better, and I stumbled back to my mat now with my head feeling scrambled like a static TV channel with the volume turned on loud.

As the ceremony progressed I began to feel more and more uncomfortable, dry heaving, sweating, and having scrambled visions of bulbous and grotesque graphics similar to those you would see in a supermario video game. When the shaman finished the limpiezas of the other participants in the ceremony he came to my mat and really began to work on the removal of the malo esperitos and diablos. His singing intensified the experience and brought on more dry heaving, with occasionally a small amount of bile coming up. I fought off an overwhelming urge to attack him, to make him stop singing, and instead ended up making growling and hissing noises between the retching. Chaos was building in my mind; my thoughts seemed to just be screams adding to the static TV channel feeling.

The shaman continued to work on me, for how long I don’t know, singing, soplaring, using agua de florida, and at some point giving me a volcanic rock to hold onto (I never asked why he gave me this rock, but I would bring it to every ceremony thereafter and ended up gifting it to a good friend). Finally the physical and mental effects of the ayahuasca seemed to ebb, the shaman handed me a glass of malba (a plant to sooth the stomach) which I managed to get down and the retching subsided. A plant bath was prepared with lemon, jungle basil, and a few other plants, and I doused my head in that until the mental pressure was relieved. Too weak to walk back to my room, I fell asleep in the ceremony hut. The exorcism was complete.

The morning after my final exorcism ceremony, which ended with me violently projectile vomiting up more contents than I can remember putting in my stomach, the shaman told me the spirits were gone but I still had work to do to complete the healing I had come for.  As my body and mind was weak from the bad spirits and their subsequent removal, I was told not to drink ayahuasca for a month and instead would diet with a tree called Manchinga, a “Palo Fuerte” literally meaning strong stick in reference to the healing power of this tree.  The shaman was adamant that I must have invoked these spirits somehow, as it was rare that someone had so many and such strong ones attached to them. He didn’t seem to believe me when I said I had never so much as even read a book or made a Google search about evoking spirits (though I had some grade school friends that might have).  In my 2.5 months at the center, only one other person who came through had similar spirits attached to them, and they were suffering from a extreme case of depersonalization/disassociation disorder for the past 3 years with measurable imbalances in their brain activity. Immediately after their exorcism they said that they were 40% better, and by the end of one month they were completely back to normal.

I could only come up with two possibilities of where these spirits had come from. The first theory and the theory that the shaman thought the most probable source of the bad spirits, was from two years ago. I had traveled to Ecuador to work with a shaman and upon arrival I felt really uncomfortable at the center. The shaman was ill from “brujero” attacks, when other shamans send bad energies and spirits to make someone ill, sometimes even resulting in death (see Peter Gorman Ayahuasca in my Blood).  I ended up leaving after two days, and taking two other travelers with me.  Had this shaman sent me bad spirits in revenge? I didn’t want to believe that as I had worked with him on prior occasions and had good results, but I would learn later some uncomfortable truths about him after a recent and suspicious death at his center (I will talk about this more in my blog post “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”).  My second theory was that I had created these bad spirits and devils from negative thought processes, resulting from avoidance of grief after my father passed away by moving halfway around the world and keeping myself too busy to face it by taking an intensive MSc course. Whatever the reason, all that mattered was that they were no longer there.

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