Ayahuasca by Javier Regueiro

Author:Javier Regueiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fear and concern can be triggered by difficulty in breathing or an inability to move, but there is no need to worry because the medicine doesn’t provoke respiratory failures or paralysis. Breathing consciously is always a powerful way of relaxing and allowing the experience to flow with ease. After singing, the activity that takes most of my time during ceremonies is reminding people to breathe: to inhale as deeply and gently as possible, and to let go as much as possible upon each exhalation. I find it particularly useful for most to exhale through their mouth: this allows the jaw muscles to relax and induces a deeper state of surrender.

Gentle concentration on the breath allows us to regain a certain feeling of safety and increased awareness. When I lead a ceremony I am particularly aware of how deeply the rich and conscious breathing involved in singing icaros helps me expand my awareness and consciousness, and how easily I can change the quality of my experience through breath and song alone. The trance, altered, and expanded states of consciousness induced by the sole use of singing are common in rituals all over the world, and the breathing involved in singing is one of the main factors in the power of singing.

It feels important here to stress that breath or body postures shouldn’t be used to try and control the situation but simply to facilitate the surrendering to it. People with a meditation practice may want to try and avoid their meditation posture and attitude, which sometimes can become an unconscious way of armoring oneself against unpleasant feelings. I have witnessed various cases of experienced meditators, who hold a very Zen and tranquil attitude during the ceremonies and then end up spending the rest of the night throwing up and in a general state of discomfort. This is because during the ceremony they skillfully avoided whatever the medicine needed to do, and once the ceremony was over and they relaxed their physical and mental postures, the medicine started doing its work, often without the support of the ceremonial space, which had long been closed.

I usually advise people who are stuck in their usual thought patterns to put their hands on their bellies and breathe deeply, feeling their hands rise and fall with their breath. If familiar thoughts (those famous “old records”) persist, one can ask oneself what he or she is afraid of experiencing and feeling: the mind is usually the best refuge one can find to run away from fully experiencing something. Thinking about something rather than directly experiencing it gives us often just enough distance: it is a common survival strategy designed to help us feel less, but also one that prevents us from being fully present. We remove ourselves from the experience at hand and seek refuge in the tiny tower of our mind. From that little place we look out onto the world, scouting for dangers, devising strategies and courses of action, and try to make sense of an existence by which we often feel overwhelmed.

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