Thanks for your kind comments concerning my well-being when I was away. I wasn’t in a great space when I left for Bahia two weeks ago. But I have to say I can’t imagine feeling any better now.

I’m sitting in my sunny sitting room with the snowlight reflecting up from the gardens below. It’s cold and icy here in London and yet 48 hours ago I was sitting on my balcony in Bahia with hummingbirds churring past my head, redhatches pecking at the cashew fruits that grow there, and the sounds of the jungle weaving out in vibrant tendrils from the green, green of the palms.

I know that I always wax rhapsodic when I come back from my adventures with ayahuasca but I can’t help but rejoice in that amazing Plant. This time, more than ever before, I recognized the very distinct external presence of the Vine.

Previous to that I’d been struggling with / hiding in the smug Western intellectual attitude that somehow it was my brain chemistry, my consciouness, my intellect that was working on my own psyche. There was no external entity, the Plant was just neurotransmitters. But I’m more respectful. From the Shamanic perspective, this world is full of many more things than just human brains. The spirit of Ayahuasca is a big presence in the world. And it’ll whup your ass if you disrespect it.
For the Amazonian Indians there is no doubt that Ayahuasca is a real presence that you interact with (if you’re lucky). It’s the World in fact. The jungle, the soil, the birds, the water, the rocks. It’s everything but my intellect.

In this sense, Ayahuasca is profoundly ecological and deeply suspicious of Western individualism.

I’ve been reading a lot about the ancient Greeks and their attitude to Gods. When a God appeared on Earth, in a human, in a tree, in a shower of gold, then those nearby were struck with terror, with awe. The place where the god appeared became numinous and bright, reality quivered a little and those who witnessed it felt sick to their stomachs before being lifted up into the brightness.

That’s exactly how I feel about the Plant. The day before I feel quite excited, intellectually, I can appreciate the honour of having this one-on-one with the Goddess, but then the afternoon wears on, the darkness descends like a bolt and then I feel sick to my stomach and intellect is useless. This is the emotional body of a child before he is able to speak. Experiences only register on a gut level.

But the ceremony begins, we stand in a group, share our intentions and drink. And then it’s done. There is no going back. The Plant’s bitter, fermented, moist substance is inside and the only strategy is surrender.

It was a great group this year. Small but very courageous. Almost everyone was working with their childhood memories and the constellations of life that spring from them. And everyone bravely threw themselves into the work even if it involved going to the most challenging, dark places of memory.

I received amazing confirmation of all the work I’ve been doing in therapy this last year – which has been painful and challenging on all sorts of levels. But in the arms of ayahuasca, it raced on and become turbo-charged.

I don’t need to go into it all here. The need for external confirmation is much less. But I did want to share the tremendous benefit of the work Silvia does in Bahia.

It’s been a very difficult year for ayahuasca-healing and Silvia’s project on the Land. She is such a great therapist and she is getting better and better. But this work with light is not without it’s unfortunate side effects. In her psycho-spritual therapist role, she is so egoless and works without any of the clonky self-presentation of many group therapists. My friend Joshua saw her as a hummingbird – a potent animal totem – hovering over us as we dreamt.

And yet, her positive work also pulls dark moths to it.

Despite the enormous benefit of her healing work, people, disgruntled with her for other reasons, have come out of the woodwork and tried to discredit her work. But I will not stand for that. I have to speak out in her support.

I have never come across therapeutic work that has the fast and powerful effects of Silvia’s work with ayahuasca. It’s interesting that the psychologist Deborah Quevedo had been in Brazil doing research into the effectiveness of ayahuasca therapy in treating things like neuroticism and shown astonishingly positive results.

I am convinced (especially since I’ve been studying psychotherapy) that the combination of childhood therapy, transactional analysis and the enormous spiritual power of ayahuasca will have a massive impact in years to come. And I’m proud to be associated with Silvia’s work and will always speak up in her favour.

The silly and frankly absurd slurs made against her in the internet are actually testament to how challenging her work is. If I had my way, I’d pay for planeloads of people to go to Bahia and experience the beauty of the place and the healing potential of her work. What a priviledge it is to be involved.

We did the last session during the day. Traditionally ayahausca is drunk in the night, in the pregnant dark, digging and dealing with unlit world of the unconsious. After the 3 main sessions, the five of us that were remaining were allowed to drink a very small dose during the day.

We walked through the jungle down to the river that runs through the Land and waded through the shady, fast-flowing waters, following the thickly overground curves.

I had to sit down as the ayahuasca state came on suddenly.

The sound of the insects and the birds, the flow of the water, the weed moving in the current, the shimmering sunlight through the curtains of vines and ferns. It suddenly seemed almost too much.

But i am familiar with that overwhelming and sat and settled. Allowed the wonder to unfold.

To be in nature, to be with plants and water was incredible. I walked so gently back up the red earth path, past plants that seemed to reach out to me, so electric was their life.

Everything shimmered with an super-real intensity. I lay down on the soft grass by the lagoon and watched – laughing and shaking with pleasure – the antics of a little white wagtail, dancing by the waterside.

Have I ever mentioned how paradisical the Land is where we drink ayahuasca? It’s like walking through Eden.

Scarlet breasted weaver birds with lemon-yellow bills and bright blue eyes darting in and out of their long sock-shaped nests, hanging like fruit from a cashew tree by the lagoon.

Swallows and yellow-tufted jays scooping across the water surface, snatching water boatmen.

The constant, gentle rustle of palm leaves stroked by the wind.

Bright butterflies, branded with flaming orange and yellow stripes loping past the hibiscus hedges.

Coming dreamily back to my bungalow I sat in utter stillness as a female humming bird perched on a branch right in front of me, panting, staring straight at me. Me and a hummingbird in direct communion. It was astonishing. I’ve never seen a hummingbird – with its exquisite long beak and tiny piercing eyes – so close or so still. We stayed for 10 minutes or so in silent rapprochment.

To sense that mystical intensity of all life with my eyes open, moving round this field of vibrancy was very intense. It really did feel like walking in divinity. And I – who have struggled for many years with an alienated sense of what ‘divinity’ might mean – saw very simply that life is divinity. That God is that quiviering vibration underneath everything, the fundamental goodness that Christ and Buddha and all mystics have spoken about.

Later as the intensity mellowed and we all sat, gobsmacked on the pontoon of the lagoon, feasting on apples and bananas and coconut water, we felt unbelievably lucky. (I remembered that in German the word for lucky and happy is the same). And even today, two days later, when the fierce dreams that always mark the end of the session have passed, I spent the day on my own on the Land walking round almost laughing at the absurd beauty of it all.

This space, away from the Bahian coast and cupped in a bowl of the rainforest is the perfect space to drink the brew. It was created and crafted by the energy of ayahuacsa and everything here is energized by it. It’s also exquisitely beautiful.

The more important first for me was that this was the first time that I approached drinking the Plant without violent terror. Up until now it had always seemed like I was going towards something voodoo, something otherworldly and alien that happened to have enormous benefit. This time I realized that I was going towards my own unconscious.

Various experiences in the last year, most significantly my work with Rob Nairn and an approach to Jung, had taught me that nothing must be ignored, and nothing rejected. The unconscious is an enormous reservoir of energy and stories, desires and wishes that power our life.

While I was in Bahia, preparing for the first session, I read Guy Claxton’s wonderful book, The Wayward Mind which traces our varied and often antagonistic stance to the unconscious. Far from being the devil in the works, Claxton illustrates with history and neuroscience that we are largely Unconscious and the conscious part is just a little icing on the cake.

Making peace and welcoming in the energies of the unconscious becomes essential work.

This is how I approached the ayahuasca ceremonies this time.

Using the techniques of mindfulness and acceptance I’d learnt with Rob Nairn, I was able to stay with the huge volume of fear and full-body tension that always arises before I drink (no matter how amazing the previous session has been). I was able to practice with staying with whatever arose no matter how strange and how alien it seemed. I was firm in my belief that what I plunged into during those overwhelming night sessions was the depth of my unconsciousness. Those powerful currents and archetypes that Jung sees as powering our conscious lives.

And so it was.

The extraordinary match between my intention going into the ceremony and the insight that flooded me during the peak of the experience, seemed to bear out my hope that I was surfing the very engines of my unconscious. I was able to stay with everything that arose – not pushing anything away into the ‘alien and frightening’ category, but instead welcoming in into the ‘personal but not-known’ category. That way arose enormous understanding.

I am more and more convinced that this work of bringing the unconscious into the conscious is of enormous psychical benefit. Energy that is expended in repressing potential sources of energy is doubly debilitating. Energy is lost both in the repression and the refusal to tap those enormous stores of power.

I was able, for example, to free up enormous resources of tenderness and compassion that had been frozen around the emotional pain of several broken relationships from my 20s and teenage. A teenage love that had held me in its ban for 3 years at least had been pushed into the dullest, numbest regions of my unconscious – filed under ‘trivial’. But revisiting it, with the incredible emotional and memory acuity that ayahuasca brings (I was that 17 year-old again, I felt everything he felt), I was able to re-connect to that pain I felt when I was rejected and allow it arise up again. Not to push it away or ‘cure’ it but to feel it in all its powerful humanity.

I felt this very strongly. That nothing that arises falls out of the remit of being human. Therefore, it’s fatal to want to remove stuff, or push it elsewhere. There is no elsewhere to push it. A better strategy is to embrace it and bring it joyfully into a sense of being fully human.

As I lay there on the mats, heart full to bursting with sadness and pain, I have never felt more beautifully human. Or more alive.

I wanted to give a little bit of a follow-up to my Ayahuasca experience, since it was hard to film me afterwards as I live in New York. Those first Aya journeys in Brasil were probably among the most profound days of my life. The plant works in peculiar ways. She presented herself to me as an entity of almost unimaginable love and intelligence, and in a short, compressed period of time, taught me extraordinary things that I will never forget, that have changed my life and way of thinking forever. Since then, I have had amazing experiences with a variety of healers, totally magical occurrences, and have been placed on a path that has been gathering mystery and revelation as I proceed. I am not completely separated from Parkinson’s Disease yet, but I am better than I was in the film, and continue to incrementally improve – an enormous feat, considering it is a disease that only degenerates and it has been with me it now for almost 20 years. I am learning how much I can actually accomplish in and for the world through having this disease, and so my experiences now have great meaning and logic for me. And yes, I am still dancing, and active with my dance company. I know that so far Mother Ayahuasca has only shown me a tiny portion of the majesty of her kingdom, and my sense of astonishment keeps growing. Thank you, Alistair, for being my companion in those first days and in my heart ever since.Fiona Marcotty Dolenga

I heard one, maybe two bars of the chorus and choir and suddenly, out of nowhere, I was in floods of tears: sobbing, choking out the words, my voice broken with emotion.

There are other places..

But this is the nearest, in place and time,

Now and in England.

I’ve been back from Brazil for four days. It’s been almost a month since I drank ayahuasca.

I haven’t really written so much here about ayahuasca the last few times I’ve been. The things I’ve experienced there in the visions have been so personal and so intimately woven into my childhood and family that it didn’t seem so suitable for a blog. But this last visit to Brazil was so wonderful, so profound. I feel like writing about it.

I was away for a month this year. A whole month of Brazil in all its beautiful moods.

But the beginning of October was a week of ayahuasca in Bahia with Silvia. There were ten of us, a nice mix of Americans and British, all hungry from our sugar and salt fast. All nervous. My friend Will and I flew in with an air taxi to arrive 2 hours before the first session. I’ve done it loads of times now but still I get wretched with nerves before drinking.

Silvia makes people drink the brew three times over a week. There’s a day rest in between each session. And each session can be completely different. And the important thing to bear in mind is that the effects build up over the week. It’s a tri-partite lesson.

For me, often (though never always: the Plant is notoriously tricksterish) the pattern is as follows: the first session is difficult, I fail to negotiate it properly and spend a lot of time wishing it were over and telling myself that I’ll never do it again. Ie. I fight.

The second is very often, transcendently beautiful. I am swept away into a place of utter love: surrounded my friends and family and understanding them perfectly and aching with love for them. In this blissful state, I feel like I am being tanked up with grace. Learning over and over, how beautiful the universe is and how beautiful I am. Never forget this, I tell myself again and again. Never forget it. Let it light up my cells from the inside.

But increasingly, it is the third – difficult and challenging – session that teaches me what I need to learn.

I suppose the last couple of years in Brazil have been about travelling back to my childhood and seeing the events that programmed my life a certain way. They say it’s like doing eight years’ therapy in eight hours. There were heart-shaking sessions where I sobbed at mistaken views I’d adopted as a little boy – blindly making sense of my sexuality – and which had effected my life ever since.

One of the great wonder of ayahuasca is that you can access all your memories. Nothing you’ve experienced in your life is lost. Not one second of your life – consciously or unconsciously lived. Every colour, smell and texture is there recorded in your mind. Everything can be accessed and re-experienced. You can swoop back to one afternoon when you were six and lying on your candlewick bedspread in the sunshine and thinking a sad thought that went on to colour your whole life.

This is extraordinary enough – but for me the real wonder is to then see that the past is not fixed.

This sounds a little odd, but I realized that the past is not linear, not forever frozen and unchangeable. Rather than being a line stretching back horizontally, personal time is a column, layering vertically, down below the present. It’s like a shifting column of different coloured fluids. One floating on top of the other. And when you change one layer at the bottom all the layers shift and change colour above.

In ayahuasca visions you can go back to the past and you can re-live it. Correct it. So, in previous sessions (in April 2006) I was able to go back to my little 6-year-old self and tell him that the world didn’t hate him, that he didn’t have to survive all on his own, that on the contrary his sexuality was a delight, a joy and he would be happy. In fact I spent so much time telling my 6-year-old self this that he eventually smiled told me not to worry so much – and went off to play.

The rest of 2006 – my life back in London as a 36-year-old – was enlightened by that insight. The column of liquid time shifted and lightened and I lived more easily. I loved more easily and felt at home in a friendly world.

The third session this year was even more profound. I was able to go back to the moment just after birth and feel what it was like to be newly born, gasping, dazzled, terrified. And again, with effort and what seemed like titanic struggle, I was able to relive that experience and instead of being born into terror and resentment, to be born into excitement and delight.

Silvia plays music through the sessions. She’s a brilliantly intuitive DJ, giving you just the energy and the sustenance you need, to push you on or to inspire. While I was fighting to be reborn she played the most terrifying, ear-splitting, endless, endless shamanic rattling. And then directly afterwards, an exquiste female singer chanting the namaste blessing over and over, into the night. I could imagine myself embracing my mother who was embracing me, newly born

I can’t adequately explain all the details of that extraordinary night but the cascade of little liberations and insights that have showered down over the subsequent days and weeks is dizzying. Not least because, a week after finishing the ayahuasca course, my parents came out to stay with me in Brazil for a fortnight.

Being swept away in the ocean of universal love etc. is all very easy when you’re under the influence of powerful plant hallucinogens – but the real lessons come in real life. I wouldn’t be interested in this if it were just the pretty visions and nothing else. No, the really delightful thing about ayahuasca is that it changes the real world not just the dream world.

It was the most inspired lesson from the Universe. After all my insights during the sessions about my childhood and my relationship to my parents and their childhoods, suddenly here I was in Brazil with my sixty-plus Mum and Dad who speak no Portuguese and who (unfortunately) had their money and cards stolen on the beach. In effect, I became their parent for the duration – and we all learned loads. I love them so much for throwing themselves into the trip and there were a thousand moments when I recognised stuff about myself watching them.

I can’t say what all the ramifications of the sessions at the start of October will be. All I know is that I’m feeling more happy and content in the world than I have previously and life feels a lot easier.

And I have to say a big thank you to Brazil, to Silvia and to meu filho, meu irmão Leo, who was the midwife of so many insights in Brazil. Not least the very Brazilian truth that life is an invention anyway, so invent it full of joy and happiness, not full of misery and hatred.

Obrigadão.

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