Reflections on psychedelic shamanic rituals

On September 19th, I experienced a 5-MeO-DMT ceremony conducted by Richard assisted by Gillian, the two co-founders of The Sentinel retreat centre where we held the 5-MeO-DMT retreat. The ceremony followed what seemed to be a shamanic tradition and practice. In light of this and other minor experiences I had of shamanic psychedelic rituals, I want to elaborate on the characteristics, value and limitations of these practices.

In the days and hours leading up to the ceremony, I perceived a sense of sacredness and importance about it, a mixture of high-stakes and convergence of powers. I think what led me to have this impression was both the enthusiastic and superlative reports of retreat participants that attended such ceremonies as well as the vibe that I have learned to associate with spiritual and religious practices.

It seems to me that holding this sense of sacredness had mixed effects on my and how it primed my mind for the experience. On the one hand, it led me to carefully prepare for it. Before the ceremony, I fasted for about half a day, indulged in gentle personal care through my shower and morning preparations, meditated for one hour and practised qi gong for half. I think that this preparation contributed to generate an open and calm state of consciousness before the ritual, a clean state prone to transform relatively fast during the ritual. This state was similar to what I experienced a few days earlier when preparing for a mettāannealing 5-MeO-DMT trip by doing a Wim Hof breathing exercise. When the medicine hit my consciousness after the breathwork, my state of consciousness was clean and relaxed enough to evolve extremely quickly upon the effects of the meditation.

On the other hand, I think that this sense of sacredness also brought with it a sense of seriousness and high-stakes that dampened attitudes of silliness and playfulness. In turn this had the effect of making relaxation less accessible and creating a background vibe of intensity.

Before the intake of the medicine, Richard and Gillian explained how the ceremony would unfold and performed a variety of spiritual rituals such as cleansing the space and my aura with sage smoke, providing me a Tarot card and reading its content to me and asking me questions about my intention. I did not really enjoy these activities and while performing them, I did not feel a sense of strong connection to me. They felt impersonal and performative to me and created a sense of distance between me and them in my subconscious. The vibe of these activities reminded me of religious rituals I often experienced within Christian communities during my childhood: unexplained, standardised, general-purpose and impersonal.

On the contrary, when I think about shared 5-MeO-DMT experiences that I had with other retreat participants, other as sitters or joint-trippers, an aspect of them I really enjoyed is how the experienced played a part in the development of our relationships, how we discussed and explored each other realities, world-views and beliefs before, during and after the trip. Those exchanges, both while sober and psychedelic, carried a sense of openness and possibilities. We didn’t fully know what was true and what we were aiming for, but we had ideas worth exploring, while being open for changes and new discoveries. To some extent, this created a vibe of openness and flexibility, which perhaps also made it easier for me during the trips to move between perspectives and feel more empowered to make mental moves that helped me bind with more pleasant states of altered consciousness. This reminds me of a quote from Teafearie’s piece on Carrying the Light which hints at the benefits of tripping with a peer rather than someone who elevates themselves to the status of shaman:

“I’ve never claimed to be a shaman and I’ve never understood why all these posers misappropriate some culture when they could just say hey I’m another human who’s discovered something good, and I really love to share and hold the space. I probably would say yes if you approached me. But that not a guarantee. I’d want to meet you before accepting that responsibility. I’d want to know what all you’re on, and if you have a history of mental illness or if something else sets off alarms for me.”

Now onto the trippy part of the trip. Richard prepared for me a pipe with around 5 mg of 5-MeO-DMT. I felt calm, relaxed in my body and breath and ready to give this experience a full shot. I felt eager to hold the smoke for as long as I could and so I did a couple of simple breathing exercises I did before during freediving so that I could hold for longer. I smoked and started holding my breath, I don’t know for how long, but it felt long. As during the mettāannealing, once I released the breath, the medicine hit me really quickly, really fast. In a matter of what seemed like a phenomenological snap of a finger, I was in a very deep and very simple place, which for a brief-moment felt very pleasant. Nothing really existed there other than the sense of my existence and the sounds that Richard started to make. Gillian, who was sitting the trip, said that at times I had my eyes open, but I was saying that with my eyes didn’t really play any role during that state of consciousness, at least during the initial and strongest moments of it.

Given the calm, equanimous and meditative priming, my sense of existence felt incredibly clean, unstructured, unattached and unidentifiable with anything specific. Or at least that’s what I recall. However, the strange and startling slurping and squirting sounds that Richard started making created a strong contrast with the clean and empty state I felt in. Through a rapid and unconscious mental move this contrast bound me to a novel, and somehow conspiratory and antifragile worldview in which I was experiencing a secret death ceremony. A ritual that, under this worldview, happens in the undergrounds of our society, where people are given the choice to let go of everything and kill themselves. A ritual that, because of its sacredness and sensitivity, is never spoken of in public. And so, I felt I was given a choice, and I pondered and lingered on this choice. I felt the unavoidable circular nature of life, full of ups and downs, attachments and separations. I contemplated the option of letting go of this circle and merging with pure, untainted, non-existing nature. I doodle a picture of how the contrast between my sense of existence and the sounds felt like.

At this point in the trip I think I was already on the comedown and I could see Gillian, the sitter, looking at them. The way she looked at me felt strange. She seemed confused and apprehensive. My sense is that because she didn’t know me very well and we did not develop enough mutual understanding about each other’s background and worldviews, she may have been feeling uncertain about what I was feeling and how the trip was going for me. In fact, both Richard and Gillian told me after the trip that often they didn’t know “where I was”. Anyway, given the anti-fragility of the quasi-conspiratorial worldview I was experiencing, I interpret the way in which Gillian was looking at me as a confirmation what I was given the choice of whether to kill myself or not and that she was apprehensive because she was not sure about which of these two very important directions I would take.

However, the effect of the drug kept wearing out while Richard’s sounds were not stopping. And so, what seemed like a choice, slowly dissolved away into a non-choice. The contrast between my state of mind and Richard’s sounds remained, making me feel that I somehow chose to stay alive. Later on, after the experience, I reflected as to whether I actually had any choice and it seemed to me that I didn’t. The sounds continued independently of my interpretation and the sense of contrast between life and death dependent on the contrast between my states and the sounds. So I am unsure as to whether I really had any choice.

Anyhow, after this first soul trip, I was now absorbed in a rather wacky worldview. Had I been actually given the choice to die? Had I failed some kind of ego-death test? Was my ego the part that wanted to keep savouring the bittersweetness of life and not die or was my ego the part that wanted to chase enlightenment, liberation and death? I was quite confused but somehow I re-found a sense of openness and flow. I felt again equanimous and willing to welcome anything that wanted to happen. In an attempt to affirm this to myself, I removed my wedding ring. Consider that my relationship with my wife is one of the most important and nourishing relationships I have in my life and if I was to actually die, preparing for the separation from her would be one of the main things I would spend my time on. So in doing that I affirmed my readiness to equanimously let life flow: dying or living, let’s go.

Richard and Gillian asked me if I wanted to take another dose, which I interpreted as giving me a second choice and I affirmed. It took what felt like a very long time to approach the pipe and smoke. This time, I didn’t feel I inhaled very intensely nor that I could hold the smoke for long. Which is perhaps why, the second trip didn’t feel very remarkable and whatever happened, I cannot recall any of it.

After coming back from this second trip, the ceremony ended quite unceremoniously. I perceive a sense of awkwardness and incompleteness in the room. This was perhaps induced by my internal sense of having failed some kind of spiritual sense linked to my historically inability to really fully believe in anything, which is something that I actually value and enjoy when sober. We interacted in what felt to me a little tiptoeing and then I left the room. Up to this point, the parameters of my experience felt like along these lines:

Then, I left the ceremonial room, went to the living room, had a nutritious lunch and, on and off, started reflecting on this experience. First I chatted with my friend Roger Thisdell, who is an advanced meditation and had attended the ceremony as a witness. He mentioned a few interesting things. Regarding the ceremony, he said he had the impression that Richard and Gillian were not really familiar with the state of high-equanimity he saw me being immersed in, and that they could not quite understand how to relate and interact with it. He also mentioned that he had the impression that Richard’s sounds were quite random and did not follow any specific pattern or journey. The way I interpret this is that either Richard could not quite connect to what I was experiencing, which corroborates Roger’s first observation, and kept making sounds somewhat at random, or that his shamanic practice is somewhat impersonal and simply the application to preforming or random noise that people can either grab onto or not to release their trauma. Or perhaps a bit of both.

Moving on, Roger also told me how Buddishm can be interpreted as a practical of gradual, progressive suicide of the self and that, during his meditation journey, he had experienced similar moments facing the possibility and fear of death. These considerations pushed me onward to reflect about the role of death in my life and whether, as another retreat participant asked me, I had some kind of attraction for “the void”. Later in the day I also approached Richard and Gillian to discuss the experience with them. I shared a brief account of my journey and they offered me two different lenses to interpret it.

Gillian asked me whether I know why I am alive and whether my relationships with others are a sufficient reason for living. Honestly, this lens didn’t click with me very much. I am not fond of spending time seeking my One True Purpose. I tried in the past and I did not find it enjoyable nor effective. I am pretty happy with my life. I enjoy researching psychology, my relationship, my community and hobbies, and all these things together form a sense of place in the world, which would probably be there regardless of whether I had an explicit purpose or not. In the end, life seems to happen regardless of meaning.

Differently, I felt resonance with the perspective Richard shared with me. He said that given that my intention was to “allow”, the medicine may have shown me something that I am not allowing, that to some degree I may have some attachment to death as something special, transformative and transcendental. That I may not be allowing death to happen as the everyday and mundane part of reality that it is. I found this compelling, and as a result, kept digging into the meaning of death.

The day after this trip I was driving alone to the airport. Listening to music, I started crying. I was crying out of joy for my connection with life and its multifacetedness.

I am now writing this essay about a month after the ceremony. Throughout this month, I have engaged with materials on the topic of death and reflected about it. I learned about The Tibetan Book of the Dead, watched the movie Enter the Void and read the book Living Our Dying (a community-based collection of experiences related to death curated by my friend Sukhema). Learning about and pondering on death allowed me to see it more for what it is rather than for what I may have been projecting over it. I see death is a symbol of the transformation that happens continuously and at all scales, impermanence. I feel less scared of it, more specifically, less scared of what I may make of my life before it. I don’t see death as separate from my life anymore but rather as a fundamental part of it.

In conclusion, my take on this experience, and more or less on psychedelic shamanic rituals in general, is that they can be very powerful experiences but also somewhat rigid in their structure. On the one hand, the high-stakes and seriousness of the vibe that they tend to carry with them can easily lead someone to being unable to relax and thus experience unpleasant journeys. On the other hand, the same seriousness can direct a lot of energy towards mental structures that bear a lot of weight on our worldview and create the motivation to reflect on them and refine the perspectives that one holds about them.

However, constructive belief update is a difficult and complex business that requires a lot of care and support. Personally, I think I was in a lucky position that I had practised a lot of constructive belief updating prior to this experience and I was then able to integrate it in a more or less smooth way. I also had a lot of kind and wise support from the other participants of the retreat just after the experience as well as from members of my community when I started asking them about death in the days after the experience once I was back home.