Grandmother's House

Learning the hard way about Ceremony and true communion.

As of this writing, it’s been about two months since I did my first ayahuasca ceremony.

Before the ceremony, I told myself I wasn’t going to write about it—at least not as a typical trip report, describing my personal experience on the journey. That ground has already been thoroughly trampled. Ayahuasca ceremonies, for better and for worse, are in danger of becoming fashionable among a certain class of wellness influencers. Lord knows I don’t want to get mixed up with that crowd.

But certain parts of the experience are worth analyzing. As is often the case with Ayahuasca, when the medicine is allowed to run its own course, the lasting insights are subtle. There’s more to write about than just a cosmic light show.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the themes I’ve written about before are relevant here—particularly my recent series on metaphysical conservatism and re-enchantment.

With Ayahuasca, as with everything else, Westerners have a hard time separating the symbolic interface from the actual experience. Participatory consciousness is an embodied thing. The protocols that develop into traditions over thousands of years can’t be separated from the somatic experience of communing with the more-than-human world. There is a logic to these practices—but it’s the logic of an inside joke among friends, or the wordless gestures of couples in love. It’s a conspiracy. Only those who have shared the same air for long enough can read the subtext and fully understand what’s happening.

For many modern Westerners, this feels deeply unfair.

Anyone able to read these words has been trained, from a very young age, to take special pride in their intellect. We grow into adulthood feeling entitled to shine the bright light of rationality on anything we choose. Even people who consider themselves religious—those who believe in a higher Truth than science can describe—tend to retain the idea that anything valuable should be distilled into a legible text. Something wild might have happened up on the mountaintop, long ago, but the important parts were ratified and written into law; supposedly, we can learn everything we need by referencing the relevant scripture, without trudging up the mountain ourselves.

The idea that some mysteries should be withheld from people in our world ignites a kind of intellectual jealousy. Reductive materialism isn’t simply the most rational way of looking at the facts: it’s an epistemological tantrum, a petulant attempt to turn everything into a text—an arrangement of mechanical pieces that can be dissected and understood by anyone with the right schooling. The suggestion that something might be more than the sum of its parts is maddening for people who believe in the boundless capacity of their own intelligence.

This leads to people using accessibility as the basis for authenticity. Tourists bulldoze into indigenous communities, looking for a commercial product that suits their preconception of a genuine experience—one that is unreservedly available to people like them. They try to carry off the aesthetic elements of a particular culture, without preserving the metaphysical obligations those symbols represent. With this mindset, only the things that can boxed up for export are important; the rest is just primitive superstition, if not willful fraud.

Some of my past criticisms of cultural appropriation might have seemed contradictory. To clarify: Ayahuasca stands in stark contrast to the disenchanted symbolic interfaces I’ve previously described. Ayahuasca is alive and well. Her traditional custodians are preserving a vital form of participatory consciousness, which still demands respect. Unlike the case of Halloween—fetishized, struggling to fulfill its purpose as a ritual interface for the Dead, in need of rescuing from its self-appointed cultural wardens—Ayahuasca still has the power to very literally bring us to our knees. That power should be respected above all else.

Unlike the false idols of modernity, Ayahuasca does not come pre-packaged. She still lives in the realm of the elder gods. She does not come to us. We go to her—and while she might be a benevolent teacher, the place where we go to meet her is not entirely safe.

The ritual structure isn’t just observed for the sake of tradition, in the materialist sense. It’s not just a collection of old relics handed down as mementos, or souvenir reproductions of the real thing. The symbolic interface is important because it allows us to reach Ayahuasca, safely, and get home again.

So the prescribed diet, which starts two weeks before the ceremony, isn’t just something “they” do. It’s a sign of respect; a preparatory offering, to get us into the appropriate (heartfelt, embodied, somatic) state of openness; a purifying process that sharpens our senses, and allows us to reach the liminal space where the encounter happens. It’s also a very practical way of preparing our bodies for the physical rigors of the ceremony.

The traditional medicine songs aren’t just mood music. They’re not sung in spiraling strands for hours at a time, just to recall a distant and more exotic culture than our own. They’re a rope bridge woven out of words and melodies that don’t exist in our language—a shaft of moonlight shining down from another sky, illuminating a space that only intersects with our reality while the ceremony is open.

The mapacho smoke that cleanses the ritual space and seals the doorway isn’t just a superstitious genuflection. Whether or not you “believe” in evil spirits when you’re outside the ritual space—when you’re in a state of extreme physical and psychological vulnerability, when the walls between the metaphorical and the literal start to melt, it’s all real. That smoke feels like a very tangible blessing when you need something to tether you to the physical world, to hold the door shut against all the imps you hadn’t noticed lurking in the shadows outside¹.

Even referring to Ayahuasca as “Grandmother” can sound like a pretentious affectation, until you actually go to meet her.

All these things can, and should, be part of the vessel that brings us to Ayahuasca, even when our point of departure is far from the physical jungle—a yurt out in the redneck farmland of upstate New York, which is where I attended ceremony.

And I thought I knew all this, before the ceremony. I guess I did, in an abstract way; I’ve been banging on my keyboard about this stuff for a few years now, reading the relevant guidebooks, studying the dual-language dictionary. But of course, that never fully translates to putting your feet down on foreign soil.

I told myself that I was ready to humble myself, to be knocked down. And I was.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the spiritual exertion of maintaining the ceremony space. There are no idle passengers. It’s a spaceship, not a tour bus. Everybody is helping to build the reactor that contains the energy of communion, with their bodies and their voices and their presence, rising above the physical and emotional discomfort.

I was ready to have a personal experience; I wasn’t ready for an intensely communal experience, because there is nothing analogous to it in my home culture. So when things got heavy—instead of being swept away, or clapping on and holding fast—my mind popped to the surface like a cork in the ocean.

I thought I was up for it because I was ready to surrender, to be carried along by the whole thing. I hadn’t reckoned with all the weight I was carrying myself: being a husband, being a father, losing my dad. Those burdens didn’t get magically lifted away, because—properly handled—they would have helped drive the momentum of the ceremony. But I wasn’t ready for that. Hadn’t come prepared with the right kind of endurance.

So I swam out of the energetic surf and stumbled out of the yurt, to the ceremonial fire burning outside. After a while, I pulled myself together and tried to rejoin the action. But the moment was over for me. When the invitation went out for a second cup of medicine, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Too weary. I could only sit by the fire outside the yurt, mumbling under the weight of my head: “I’m so tired, Grandmother.”

I hadn’t built up the right muscles for that kind of work. The emotional intensity of communal effort is a rare thing, in our culture. We talk about “holding space,” but it’s almost always rhetorical: we mostly hold space for ideas. There aren’t many opportunities for holding space when the space is physically hard to hold. We rarely perform rituals that require so much commitment.

In my normal life, I experienced a deliberate building of somatic energy when my wife gave birth. But without a ceremonial structure—an established set of social handholds—I had to figure out how to support that energy on my own, while dodging through a crowd of medical professionals. My family doesn’t do funerals, where the energy of shared grief would traditionally be built up and released. And when I’m playing with my kids, with practice, I could certainly use this same kind of energetic weaving on a smaller scale. These are all things I hadn’t noticed until I really felt the difference².

Musicians and poets know more about building an emotional space. Still, in our consumer culture, the relationship between a performer and an audience is deliberately one-sided. As those relationships scale up, from intimate circles to arenas, the energy transfer becomes more extractive. Most of the ostensibly communal experiences available to us—concerts, art shows, religious services, political rallies—are mediated by transactions. We give our time, our attention, and our money; in exchange, we get a spectacle—an aesthetic event that looks like something, but isn’t really designed for the shared work of building communion. As audience members, we don’t have to play along. We’re not compelled to risk anything, to buckle down, to put our weight into the proceedings. We can just sit back and watch the show.

This is why I’m allergic to pop culture and hype. I’m not just a curmudgeon who begrudges other people their fun. What sets my teeth on edge is the delta between the empty calories of these performative spectacles, and our culture’s comparative lack of anything genuinely nourishing. We go to church and listen to a bland recitation of the bylaws³. We go to a concert for a quick sugar buzz, which quickly fades while we’re stuck in traffic, trying to get out of the venue. We watch TV shows and listen to political speeches that are billed as transformative—Everybody’s here! We’re all doing this together! Can’t you feel the excitement?—even though they’re obviously counterfeit versions of a real communal experience.

Once the show is over, we’re left feeling acutely that we are not, in fact, all in this together. Somebody, somewhere, is counting the ticket money and tallying up audience numbers, putting together a presentation for their boss’s boss about how big this whole thing was. But for us, once we’ve served our purpose as a unit of commerce, there is no lasting experience of participatory consciousness. We did not actually encounter something transcendent, something bigger than ourselves that truly brought us together with the rest of the crowd. So we keep chasing the next spectacle, and the next, and the next, trying to salve the ache of a phantom limb—something that was once a fundamental part of being human. Something that was stolen and is being sold back to us.

There’s a palpable difference here. The contrast is striking, even from the periphery of a successful ceremony: the realness is unmissable. Ayahuasca is so powerful because she is so present: there is no debating with the raw, crackling energy of people united in the spirit of invocation, in a way that’s challenging and uncomfortable, in a space that’s hard to hold. Participation isn’t dictated by having the right beliefs or the correct opinions. There is no philosophical minutia to haggle over. Once the dimensional shift happens, out of ours and into hers, you only need the capacity to gut it out with everyone else—to hum along with all your heart, even if you don’t know the words. That elemental realness is what truly brings people together.

My first encounter with Ayahuasca showed me all the places in my life where that kind of energy is lacking, and could be cultivated. I got knocked down this time; when I go back again, I’ll be ready to carry my share of the weight—because now I understand what the real practice is about, what all the work outside of Ceremony is meant for.

Experiencing that realness decodes the logic behind the metaphysical praxes that wash up on the shores of modernity, in boxes labeled “wellness” or “spirituality.”

For example:

• Yoga wasn’t invented to make people in ancient India look toned and feel good. It was designed to prepare the body for what we call now “meditation,” which itself has been denatured by Western wellness culture. Rather than just sitting and thinking nice thoughts—or no thoughts—real meditation is much closer to an active trance state. Ceremony also requires sitting, for a very long time, and having the strength to sit comfortably without support is enormously useful.

• Mindfulness practices weren’t developed over thousands of years as stress relief, as they’re practiced now. Meditation and active imagination are ways of strengthening the mind to hold its focus during altered states of consciousness.

• Drum circles and other forms of rhythmic repetition? Not just something “they” do for fun. Communal drumming synchronizes consciousness with other participants, and also subdues Left hemispheric activity, which opens up the altered states experienced in an activated Right Brain.

• Litanies, mantras, chanting, and and other forms of sacred singing? Same as above. Not mere signifiers of an abstract concept of “belief”, or something done for the amusement of a distant god. These modalities, properly performed, are meant to hotwire your brain into generating an altered state of consciousness, in a very immediate way.

• Even something as deceptively simple as “prayer” takes on an entirely different significance, once you’ve felt the hum of communion down in your ribcage. There is a vast chasm of difference between quietly talking to an invisible sock puppet, a stand-in for the Renaissance vision of a bearded White God—the kind of prayer I learned in Sunday school, and the kind atheists regularly sneer at—and being in a place where you can feel the Ground of Being resonating with the words that echo in your chest, reverberating across reality like the skin of a drum.

The Ceremony space is where all the academic and philosophical distinctions between different modalities—religion, magic, mysticism, art, medicine—collapse into a single point. And it’s completely illegible to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves, felt it themselves.

“Community” has a new significance, too. We talk about communities as a group of people who all share something in common: physical space, cultural traits, religious or political beliefs. What gets overlooked, in our materialist culture, is how interdependence is strengthened by ritualized somatic intensity. These aren’t just things to be done for aesthetic purposes—for entertainment, or to establish a particular identity. It should be more than just imitation. Listening to somebody on a stage reading from a familiar script is not the same as performing together. The fires stoked in spaces of genuine communion forge the bonds of mutual support; over time, those bonds form the foundation of a healthy and vibrant community.

That’s the kind of participatory consciousness that transcends cultural signifiers. It’s what we need to be fully human. It makes us more resilient, when we inevitably get rocked by something bigger than ourselves. And we’re in danger of losing it, if we continue treating these things as nothing more than a sideshow—a childish distraction from the serious business of making the world safe for modernity.

We need to keep rejoining the circle and connecting the circuit. Even when things get too heavy. That’s what these elder cultures are pointing towards, across all these varied symbolic interfaces. It’s a fundamental part of the old covenants—the only way to keep the current of life flowing. Giving up our place in that circle is perilous for us, and for the whole world.

1. I will share exactly one example of something I saw. After the ceremony was closed, I went out to my car to get some rest; I was still sparkling a bit, even though the immersive visuals had long since faded away. I fell asleep propped up in the driver’s seat. Some time later, I was bumped awake by a person-shaped presence stepping into my mind, glaring at me. Usually, in a normal dream, the people I encounter are part of a scene: like actors on a stage, placed in an unfolding story with an identifiable setting. Whoever this was—for some reason, it registered as ghost—stepped straight out of the undifferentiated darkness in my mind, directly toward me, with no preamble and no narrative cue. No words were spoken; still, it was clear that I wasn’t welcome in… wherever I was. I didn’t argue. Grabbing my blanket, I scooted back inside the yurt, where the mapacho smoke was still lingering, and stayed there until sunrise.

2. We’re not supposed to romanticize other cultures, but I suspect this communal energy was once taken entirely for granted as part of daily life, in other times and places. We have evidence of this in the folk songs that survived the death of their parent cultures. Whenever a group of people were doing something together—birthing, working, dancing, healing, mourning—there were songs to focus the communal energy toward the task, which was only partly performed in the physical world. Everybody knew the words, and everybody could sing along. And in many cultures, nobody ever thought of themselves as “alone”: whenever they were doing a solitary task, they would sing, to/with the other non-human beings joining in the work—physically resonating with Creation Itself. So there’s one example of a very tangible and vital part of life not factored into That Asshole Steven Pinker’s stupid goddamn graphs. (I’ve never said this publicly, but something’s been hitting Mars in my chart lately, so I will say it now: that Muppet-haired grifter needs to empty out his desk, go alllll the way back up to the Great White North, and find something useful to do for the rest of his life, like ice fishing, instead of writing apologetics for the wholesale spiritual destruction of human civilization.)

3. Callback to an essay I wrote for Another World, published in 2022, on the subject of ritual construction and sacred spaces.