Ayahuasca Part 2: Fear, Flow, and the Infinite
What the vine of death unraveled in me — and how it put me back together
For two weeks before setting off to do Ayahuasca in June 2015, I felt anxious and low. Some people say that the medicine starts working on you before you drink, and I’m not going to say that’s true, but I certainly did feel out of sorts.
In the days before the ceremony, I was gripped by anxiety and dread. The first night’s mild dose calmed my nerves. But on the second night, the shaman handed me a full dose, staring deeply into my eyes as if to say, ‘There’s no turning back now.’
About 30 minutes later, I started to feel strange and a bit panicky. The Palo Santo that was being burnt was starting to irritate my lungs, and as I’m mildly asthmatic, I spoke to one of the organisers and asked if he would accompany me outside.
By now I was feeling pretty grim, but I remember thinking, ‘if it stays like this, I’ll be able to handle it’. I had no idea what was about to hit me.
We were sat away from the rest of the drinkers on the grass, when all of a sudden I lost my train of thought and started laughing. And I mean laughing, like a maniac. As if I had been let in on this huge cosmic joke.
I was rolling around on the grass in an absolute fit of hysterics, having basically lost touch with reality – when experience suddenly flipped. I was engulfed with the deepest fear I have ever felt.
It was utterly existential and terrifying. I was truly in hell, where I was to stay for some time. Eventually I stopped resisting the experience – and it switched again. I was enveloped with an overwhelming feeling of love.
I had the surreal realisation that I was a historical religious figure, surrounded by my ‘disciples,’ though the shaman wisely reminded me: ‘We all are.’
The experience was far from over. Suddenly another powerful wave came over me. I was trying to magic my sister to appear in front of me (she was back in the UK) and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t materialising.
Then I started to feel like I was dying – and began melting into reality at large. But it wasn’t as if this was just happening to me, the whole universe was melting into itself, and all boundaries and limits were dissolving.
I was experiencing non-separation, a deep sense of non-duality. Everything was one, but even that didn’t make sense. There wasn’t anything other than this, and so the word one was meaningless. I lost complete touch with reality.
Some two hours later, I started to come round – as I sat in a chair back in the ceremonial hall rocking back and forth, muttering under my breath to no-one, ‘it’s so big. It’s so big’.
The next day was similarly eventful, and I purged – albeit not in the way that many do. Mine was emotional, expressed through sound. An energetic blockage in my solar plexus was released through hours of deep guttural moaning and screaming, all of which was coming through me rather than being done by me.
I also had a vision of myself as a French philosopher in Paris, hundreds of years earlier, before being enveloped with a deep sense of despair that I was a modern day sports reporter. It seemed so shallow and meaningless.
As I look back now, I see that I was wrong in that moment. Years later, when making my podcast for the BBC, I increasingly came to recognise that sport was itself a deeply spiritual pursuit, and I have increasingly explored that recognition.
When we enter flow, or witness someone in flow, and sport is one of the best windows into this deeply revealing state, we lose our sense of self and merge with the entire flow of reality, if only for a second. This is the beauty of sport – not the trophies or winning. It is non-duality – but on a micro scale.
We all long to return to a state of non-separation, and sport is one way we have created to experience this.
There was so much more that happened over those three days, but eventually I came round, with a profound gratitude just to have survived.
I remember the morning after the final ceremony, looking out on the fields and woods unsettled (a picture I took that morning is at the bottom of the page). It was abundantly clear that reality was not what I had assumed it to be. In the immediate aftermath, my senses were so much sharper, as though the dust on my windows of perception had been wiped clean.
The months after drinking ayahuasca that first time (yes, I did go back – and got my arse kicked all over again) were initially tricky. The energetic hole in my solar plexus took weeks to close, and the only place I truly felty calm and grounded was sitting on the grass, under the tree in a park. I couldn’t communicate with colleagues, friends and certainly not the person I had been seeing prior to my trip to the Netherlands, so we promptly split up.
But eventually things settled down and I started to feel great. I was sleeping deeply, and numerous people told me how well I looked. The insights into my life and various relationships kept coming, until about 5 months later when an emotional dam broke.
Having had the energy cleared from my solar plexus chakra, there was no longer a blockage and so emotion that had previously not been able to pass was suddenly free. In the weeks that followed, a floodgate of emotion opened. Tears flowed almost daily - triggered by the smallest things. It was as if years of unprocessed feelings were finally being released.
But eventually, I got the sense that I had felt everything I needed to feel, and again things settled down. Though it was turbulent, I can now see it was a necessary clearing. The sadness and tears gave way to clarity and peace, a peace that has stayed with me and grown ever since.
After drinking ayahuasca, certain patterns of thinking and behaving stopped abruptly, never to return. There’s no question drinking Aya changed me basically overnight, and in a deep way. I am sure I wouldn’t have met my wife had I not drank the ‘vine of death’. It deepened my interest in, and understanding of, spirituality. It has shaped my life and career ever since.
That experience of non-duality has never left me. I know what it feels like to be nothing and everything all at once, limitless and infinite. It is impossible to describe. The closest thing I can say is that is what I expect dying to be like. Not a contraction into nothing, but the obliteration of the ego and an expansion of consciousness back to infinity.
Drinking ayahuasca was brutal, the most challenging experience of my life by some way, but I am so grateful to have been through it. In the end, ayahuasca didn’t give me the answers I thought I was seeking, namely to ‘fix myself’ (there was nothing to fix I now see clearly) but it opened the door to profound questions I hadn’t truly considered - about who I really am, what reality is, and what life is about. And for that, I’ll forever be grateful.
