Beginnings

When I got to Iquitos and met my hosts, I knew that I was home. Even though we didn't speak the same language, we were able to communicate, there was such a sense of love. My first experience with the medicines of the jungle was a tobacco purge - mapacho tobacco that has been boiled and mixed with a small amount of instant coffee and sugar - used as a cleanse of both physical and spiritual negativity.

After I first drank, I could feel the heat pouring off of me, the enormous release of negative energy, I tried hard to control it, to tell myself that I'm not going to purge. Then I laid back and for several minutes the world spun around me, I could feel the positive energy of the maloca swirling around me pulling the negativity out of me and the negative energy sweating out of me.

As I lay awake that night, unable to sleep, still feeling the effects of the mapacho purge,all I could do was listen to the sounds of the jungle around me and be content with my own thoughts. As with any medicine, the medicines of the jungle have side effects, and one of the side effects of drinking tobacco is nausea. Every time that I moved I would feel nauseous, so all I could do was lay still in the darkness. Not the darkness that I was used to, but the deep black darkness of the most remote of places. Sometimes I didn't know if my eyes were opened or closed. It was in this deep darkness that I listed to the sounds of the jungle around me, like a heartbeat.

The sounds are different during the day, you hear the people sounds during the day. People singing, laughing, generally going about there day, the sounds of jungle fade into the background. But at night it comes alive, at times it sounded like someone walking around in the jungle. The distinctive "crunch" "crunch" of footsteps, yet I never felt unsafe, I knew that I was safe in the jungle, that I belonged there.

When I was finally able to sleep that night I dreamed, bright vivid dreams of my past and present mixing together. Pieces of my past I thought I had forgotten intermingling with recent experiences and people - I never realized before how interconnected all the pieces of our lives are. There was one point when I woke up and opened my eyes, that I had to ask myself if I was really awake or just dreaming that I was awake.

The next morning, I was awakened by the daytime sounds of the jungle, and the heartbeat of the nighttime sounds faded into the light. I knew that I would have my first meeting with Ayahuasca that night, I could only hope that she would be gentle.