Why I Couldn’t Puke During Ayahuasca
By: Norell Leung
Tags: Ayahuasca, Soul, Consciousness, Birth, Healing

I was simultaneously myself, my own physical mother, and the Great Goddess herself. The whole time I was sobbing, hysterical, and screaming at the top of my lungs: “I don’t want to be a mother. I didn’t want to be a mother. I NEVER wanted to be a mother!”

It was unspeakable terror, not of what would emerge from my womb, but what wouldn’t.

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I hate throwing up. To the point where I would rather be sick for two hours in the opposite direction than spend two minutes of my life vomiting.

It’s one of those emotional impulses that require an avalanche’s worth of willpower to stay within the bounds of logic. I have to actively stop myself from swallowing impulsively when it’s clear that it would serve me better to just let it all go.

I’m also physically incapable of hocking loogies. If I’m sick, I just swallow the phlegm because I can’t seem to expel it, and live with the cough for 3 weeks.

When the movie, Titanic first came out 20 years ago, there was that scene where Jack teaches Rose to “spit like a man.” I practiced relentlessly to no avail.

There’s some very real, illogical, deeply-ingrained, traumatic resistance I feel to allowing anything to come out of my mouth — the contents of my stomach, the lining of my sinuses, song, and long ago, words.

It’s as if letting anything slip out of my mouth would betray my shame and the shame of all the women in my lineage for all to see. The shame of my ancestors, and that of all Asian women.

Even as a western, 3rd generation American Chinese, even despite all the loud, domineering alpha-Asian women that I have known, there still remains a heavily unspoken cultural directive for us to sit down and shut up. To brush the elephant in the room under the rug. To bear our pain in secret, stoic, soul-sucking silence.

In truth, this the burden of all races of women, of the entire feminine consciousness on earth.

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My struggle to allow myself to vomit isn’t too far away from the agonizing fear I felt to use my voice as a child. One of my earliest waking memories of myself was that I sounded like some kind of freak alien.

I remember being 3 years old and hating the grating, rough sound of my own voice so much that when I spoke, I burned with humiliation. I spoke softly. At home I only used my head voice. In music class, I only mouthed the words.

My shame made me mumble. The way I swallowed my words before they could emerge from my lips frustrated most people around me, and that fed my isolation and alienation.

It’s not that this long buried resistance interferes with saying whatever I want in my regular daily life. I grew into a functional adult. I don’t need to be drunk to karaoke. It’s simply always there, deep within me, to pull out and look at sometimes like old photographs, to learn, grow and heal from.

At Gaia Sagrada, we were amply, carefully prepared to manage the physical effects that ayahuasca often has on people. Detailed directives for clean eating to potentially offset the discomfort of constant purging were sent to us long before arrival day. We were provided with an endless supply of clean buckets and helpers were lovingly ready to hold our hair back as we barfed our burdens away throughout the night.

I hunched over my bucket, trying, salivating, mildly nauseous, dry heaving, but nothing ever came beyond that. And then suddenly I was sobbing uncontrollably amidst the cacophony of vomiting all around me and helpers the epitome of efficiency bringing fresh supplies of buckets.

There are other ways to purge: yawning, laughing, crying, stretching, fidgeting, sighing, out the other end. I could have felt mere relief that I’m wired to purge in other ways.

But Mother Ayahuasca flips everything upside down. What followed probably came from noting that what seems outwardly undesirable at other times was a sign of deep inward healing and ecstatic release in this situation.

I began to wonder, was I envious of the volcanic, DNA-filled, unleashed, quantifiably full throttle, undeniably physical evidence of my comrades surrendering their burdens and healing their pain? They clutched their buckets of vomit to themselves, and like a barren woman unable to conceive, I found myself longing desperately for something to hold in my empty pail too, something born of me.

And then I sank like a stone into what was a not a vision, but an experience so real and extrasensory that after the ceremony, it took everything I had to comprehend that it didn’t physically happen: I was spread out on my back in the birthing position, laid out on exhibit on red velvet before everyone, those present at the ceremony, my family, my friends, my country, the expectant whole world, the entire cosmic, anticipating Universe, all silent, breathless, smiling, awaiting the moment that I alone would give birth. Every soul in existence, throughout all time, smiling down at me, so, so gently.

The part of me that was supposed to be huge and round, swollen with child, was as flat as a lake on a windless day and yet nobody seemed to notice. Just as a moment before, I was trying to purge vomit that would never come, I was trying and trying and trying to give birth to a child that I knew was not inside me, that did not and would never exist, while the entire Universe looked on, worshipping me, as if it was completely unaware that I was barren, that my pregnancy was never real.

I was dragged beneath the undertow of my own fear, multiplied by all the fear in the universe that has ever been felt. I was drowning, wailing, choking on my own fluids, strangled by the humiliation carried by every woman on earth across all time who has ever been shamed, assaulted, disowned, tossed out into the gutter and left to die by her people for not being able to produce a child, a son, an heir.

I was Queen Guinevere, who was barren.

I held within me every soul who has ever been been afraid when they were expected to see when they were blind, demanded to listen when they were deaf, coerced into production when they were paralyzed, and forced to give when they had nothing.

And to my consternation, everyone all around me, every member of the entire cosmic universe, creature, human and god/goddess alike, continued to look on, no threat in their presence. They still smiled at me, surrounded me, revered me, worshipped me, not ignoring my anguish, but so lovingly, patiently, achingly gently waiting for it to burn out like a candle eventually does, allowed for the horror movie to end and the lights to come on…

And that is when I realized that I was not the exhausted, destitute human mother trying to force a void from her womb. I was the daughter of the Great Goddess being born. I was the heir. And the entire Universe had gathered to watch my birth.

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