Traditions vary, but you'll be faced with about 2 ounches of a brown fluid.

A typical batch tastes like you'd imagine motor oil would.

If you're lucky, it will taste like espresso that's been left out overnight.

You take a drink, wait.

The longest 30 minutes of your life....

If it's your first time, you've read blogs and listened to some podcasts. But you're about to learn that you're not prepared.

If you'd gone under before, you may be more on edge than the newcomers.

You know *something* is about to hit, and don't know what.

You sit and wait...

"The fear of the thing is always greater than the thing itself," is true 99% of the time.

You dread asking for something, because you fear rejection. But the rejection is never that bad.

As you're sitting, waiting, wondering, you brace for the thing you fear.

Before experiencing ayahuasca, first-time users obsess over whether they will throw or take a crap.

Going in, that's what you're afraid of. "Will I shit my pants?"

You have NO IDEA how trivial such banal concerns are about to seem...

When you're hunched over a bucket, yes it hurts. Puking like the worst food poisoning you've have.

And you're so grateful.

Because you're back in your body.

You're alive.

You may have felt like you'd never return.

Anyone who has been in a stressful life situation has two things going for him or her:

- Will power,

- Time.

You know eventually you'll get through it, by virtue of time.

On ayahuasca, you have neither.

Your free will evaporates.

Time no longer exists.

What does it mean to say you no longer have free will?

Right now if you watched a scary movie, you could turn away. Or tell yourself to not feel afraid. You can "will" it away.

During a spiritual journey, you may lose this ability.

You cannot look away.

You cannot escape.

If you're with a responsible shaman, you'll prepare ahead of time. There may be a dietary requirement. Logistical stuff. Rules of the road.

More than that, you spend some time alone beforehand, asking what you want to get out of the medicine.

Why are you doing this?

"Why am I doing this?"

You ask yourself this throughout the days or months or maybe even years ahead.

You develop a private answer, one you need not share.

As you sit waiting for the medicine to land, you may start to ask yourself, "Why am I doing this? This is stupid!"

Judgement sets in.

Just as people are judging me right now. Or waiting to somehow use these writings against me.

The voices in your head were put there by the same voices you can read right now acting as if they are God issuing edicts on how I should live my life.

The true reason you feel judgment set in is because you're terrified.

You are about to lose complete control, in a way you've never imagined possible.

Judgment comes from Ego.

Ego cannot accept losing control.

Because we are afraid of the pain that inherently derives from authenticity, we create Rules.

We become Judges of others, and develop an inner Judge to enforce Rules for our lives.

Sometimes these are useful.

More often we build prisons within our own minds - and stay there.

As you wait for those 30 minutes to pass by, you figure it all out. You have a clarify that comes from focusing singularly on your life in a way you rarely do.

Then think, "Wow this was great. Glad to came out. Pretty please make the ayahuasca not kick in now. I'm good!"

By then it's too late, and the medicine sets in.

If you're experience, you know it's good to go once your hands feel a mild numbness, like you've been typing too long.

And then....

And then.... you never know at first.

Once I slept in the warmest blanked on the coldest night - or that's how it began.

It then went dark, where I was confronted with visions of plagues and witnessed historical genocides.

Because of Terence McKenna's influence, people ask of machine elves and other such frivolities.

That's not what the medicine is about, or what it offers.

Or what you return with.

"The only way out is through."

No matter how tough you may be on this world, on ayahuasca you are not even a child.

You're *maybe* as powerful as an amoeba on a microscope slide.

Fight all you like, you are powerless there.

You can't turn back.

You push through.

"Push through" isn't the best way to put it, as the harder you fight, the more you will be humbled.

You flow through.

In many traditions, they advise you to focus on one word:

- Surrender.

"No! I won't surrender. I've fought for everything I've had."

This may be true, you may be successful. You may be feared by men. In man cases you may be a decorated combat veteran who has killed me.

To ayahuasca, you are no more nor less than any of God's other creations.

"Surrender" is one way to conceptualize the experience, though at points there is no "you," which is a necessary antecedent to context.

Faith is another.

When you go under with the FAITH that you will make it through, and be a better person, the medicine heals.

"The only way out is through."

You hear it, it's one of those sayings people say, it doesn't mean much.

And then it hits, you stop trying to reject the universe, you lean into it, you will go through.

Then the process begins.

What's it like to be connected to the universe?

Many will roll their eyes at that question, as I did years ago.

They can't understand, because what's it like to have found something you didn't know you were missing?

What does it feel like to find something you didn't know was missing?

How can you begin to answer that question? You can use analogies, none will hold.

What you feel is sublime.

You feel, for lack of a better word, home.