Filed under: Alternative Healing, Breast Cancer, Juicefeasting Days 1-30, Spirituality
Dear Sun,
Today is the first day of the rest of my life. May I rejoice and be glad in it.
My mother taught me that prayer. She died suddenly in a car accident when I was 15. It was an extremely shocking experience for me. I remember the room spinning when I found out, my heart seemed to stop. I believe I let out an earth shattering cry. I could barely catch my breath. I didn’t think I could live without her.
The memory of that experience reminds me of a woman I saw four years later, when I was on a bus in Guatemala. My friend and I were on a day trip from Guatemala City on a dirt road, and this one woman crossing the road on a trail, took one look at us and shrieked and ran away as if she had seen a ghost. The bus driver explained to us that she probably had never seen a bus before and that she was scared and was afraid of bad Spirits. Her shrieking was haunting – like a woman in terror.
When we got to the end of the road the bus stopped and we got out. We took a walk to some waterfalls and had a picnic. We had topographic maps of the area so we knew where to go to find unusual but glorious nature spots. I was travelling then with my Swiss partner Reto- who later became the father of my oldest son Krishna. I was 19, having recently taken a leave of absence from Trinity College in Hartford, Ct, and he was 21, a travelling vagabond who was also taking a break from his studies. We had met in Guatemala City and then again in Puerto San Jose, the black beaches of Guatemala, and from there we began travelling together.
When it was time to start heading back to the bus and to our hotel in Guatemala City, we went back to the bus stop, but there was no bus there. We waited and waited and then a man came by and told us in Spanish that the bus sometimes comes and sometimes it doesn’t. We were on 3rd world time. Geez we really were a long ways from Hartford.
This kind man invited us to the community longhouse for dinner since we were out of food and there was no store there. We walked down into the small village. It wasn’t much of a village. A few huts and a long house which also served as the church.
Inside the house was a long table with men seated. They made a place for us. The women were serving the food which consisted of rice and beans and a special treat that the priest had brought them from the city— canned chili peppers!
We must have looked strange to these people. Reto with his long blond hair and me with my blue eyes- everyone commented on how Reto looked like Jesus and I had Jesus’ eyes. Some of these Indians had never been out of the village nor had they seen white people.
Most of the villagers did not speak Spanish – they spoke an Indian language, maybe Quiche, but our Spanish speaking friend was happy to translate for us. Mostly though it was obvious what they were trying to communicate. There is a universal language of facial expressions and hand gestures common to all peoples. They challenged Reto in a game to see who could eat the most chili peppers? They had local wild chilis, very small, that were much hotter than the canned variety the priest bought (and better if you ask me). There was much laughter and they seemed to be thoroughly entertained by his efforts. Needless to say, Reto lost.
After the meal they said goodbye to us and we started walking down the road. I had no idea where we were going in the middle of the night far from a hotel. We thought maybe we would catch a ride with someone, but the road was abandoned at that time of night. It was getting dark and the sounds of the jungle were eerie. If we stayed on the road we did not worry too much about strange animals- at least we were headed in the right direction.
As the sun set it got colder and colder and so we walked faster and faster to stay warm. We had only brought a small back pack for a daytrip so we did not have a sleeping bag or even a sweatshirt. Then we went around a bend in the road and came across a construction site. Someone had cut down some of the trees and there was paper from construction materials. We gathered the wood and paper and made a fire. We gathered some leaves to make a cushion under us and fell asleep listening to the sounds of the jungle protected by the fire. As the fire burned down we woke up and stoked it again and again, sleeping, stoking, sleeping stoking, until the sun rose. We got up and started walking. About an hour later we hitched a ride into Guatemala City on the back of a worn out truck that in Hartford would never even been allowed on a road.
During my travels through Central America and Mexico for a year, I learned to respect the indigenous cultures and love them. After two years of travelling, Reto and I went back to school at the University of Arizona where I majored in Anthrolpology and he in linguistics. I was always curious about the shamnistic practices of the indigenous peoples in America and I read all the Don Juan books. While in Mexico I tried peyote and mushrooms and enjoyed the sacredness of the experiences, but I never encountered anything exactly like ayahuasca.
During the ayahuasca ceremony I felt the Spirit of the plant communing with me. She took me to places of plant consciousness that I had never been before. It seemed as if she took me through her stalk, tunnels upon tunnels of psychedelic designs racing by, as if it would never end, and then suddenly, I burst forth through her magnificent flower which reminded me of a sunflower. Glorious and Divine! Behold our mystic opulence!
During my experience, she answered many of my questions and told me she was here to help humanity in whatever way she could. I told her I was worried that we were cutting down the rain forest and her life on earth was threatened. She told me not to worry- that she was much bigger than the plant. That there was Don Diego and the others that recognized her value and her teaching and were willing to dedicate their lives to help her help us. I recognized we were all in this world together and it was about evolving the planet as one being. GAIA.
Unlike the people around me during the ceremony, I did not purge. I figured maybe it was because I was on a raw food diet. But others told me they thought not. Purging is not just a physical experience it has to do with your thoughts and your emotions- it’s a purging of energy.
I had very little resistance to the ayahuasca plant. No matter how foreign the experience was, I trusted the Spirit. I let her heal me. Unlike others, I did not experience fear. I did not experience the terror of the day my mother was killed. Madre, the Ayahuasca Spirit, was gentle on me. Ther terror of that day has long since dissapated…. no trapped emotions here…
Cancer doesn’t scare me anymore and neither does death… Cancer healed me of my fear of death. That has been her biggest teaching. We are part of a sea of consciousness one with nature and there is nothing to fear.
Just as my life took a sharp turn when my mother died, and things did not go as planned when our bus did not come; just as around the bend of the road we found a safe place to rest and stay warm, and just as at the end of miles and miles of tunneling through the stocks of the ayahuasca plant which I thought would never end- I burst forth through a magnificent flower into the light of day…-life is full of change and we can never be sure what is right up ahead…but if we pay attention and are creative, if we relax and trust the experience of it all, there may be something quite different than we have ever experienced before and it may be something wondrous.
Every step of our journey is critical as it leads to the next. Life is an adventure and when our life on earth is complete, I am sure the adventure continues. There must be zillions of experiences to be had in this universe.
Blessings,
Melinda
PS To read about healings from cancer with Ayahuasca and to watch a video interview of the artist Alex Grey describing his ayahuasca experience go to http://www.raw-wisdom.com/ayahuasca.
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