Ceremony #7: Moonlight
Beginnings
Months had passed since the last ceremony with Gina. Continuously working on myself and learning what seems now like the baby steps of spirituality. I would try to go to Gina’s group breathwork classes as often as I could. Eventually, they started to become harder and harder for me to drop into.
My mind would overpower me and hold me back from moving forward. It was a hard wall of resistance. I remember going through a period of intense insecurity in my life during this time. I just felt so uncomfortable in my body.
Over a weekend, a close friend of mine mentioned to me that he would be doing his first Ayahuasca session on Saturday night. This plant medicine truly was the first one I heard of listening to Joe Rogan, and it was the one that piqued my interest in the first place.
I was super intrigued and interested in finding out about his ceremony. The night passed, and the next day when I saw him, he seemed completely drained and out of it. It seemed like he had gone through an exhausting night of intense work. I couldn’t really speak to him the day after, but over the course of the week, he shared his experience with me.
Strong visions and the energy of a woman teaching him more and more about himself and the world seemed to be the theme of his Ayahuasca ceremony. It impacted him deeply, and I could feel the change in his eyes and voice. It resonated with me, and I knew at some point I was going to participate in an Ayahuasca ceremony soon.
Spiritual Awakening
At this stage, I felt like I was already becoming very spiritual. Constant dreams that felt like ceremonies and crystal-clear visions that took over my physical eyesight became the norm. It felt only natural that when the time came for me to participate in a ceremony, the dreams truly started to appear more and affect me.
There were two dreams that I vividly remember that moved me a lot during that period. The first one involved a spirit that guided me through a museum of my own history to show me the power of true love. In essence, true love isn’t about pushing yourself or another into becoming a better version of themselves. It’s about letting them (or yourself) know that you love them regardless of where they are at so they can step into the present moment and relax into themselves.
The next dream I had was the morning of my Ayahuasca ceremony. I remember waking up that day full of excitement and nervous energy. I got up, and before doing anything else, I ran into a meditation. My goal was to cleanse myself for the night to come. I ended up falling asleep on the couch and woke up in a sort of dream meditation.
Before me stood God who took me as his form and a woman who seemed to represent the spirit of Mother Nature. They both hugged and kissed as they showed me memories from when I was younger. I understood that these two beings were there with me and guiding me the whole time. I felt their deep love and affection for me. As I turned to them, a flood of open palm hands poured out in front of my view of them in the shape of flowers. This ending prompted me to awake to eyes full of tears. I felt ready.
The Ceremony Begins
I made my way down to the retreat center where the ceremony was going to take place. The shaman seemed very young and cool, filled with confidence. I had heard a lot of great things about him and his seriousness during the entire event, so I was really looking forward to working with him.
I met the fellow attendees and the shaman’s helpers, and they guided us to set up mattresses on the floor in a big dining room. There seemed to be a lot of Russian attendees that night, which I found interesting since I always believed Russians were religious and devout Christians.
As we all sat down, the shaman turned the lights off and lit a few candles in front of an altar, which was made in the center of the room. He gave a speech about what to expect and how to work with Ayahuasca, along with a few other helpful facts so that we all felt calm.
Before beginning, he asked us if we wanted to lay anything on the altar in the center of the room, which would help gather our energy and receive a sort of blessing throughout the night. I looked through my things to see what would be best to lay on the altar. Sifting through, I found my tefillin bag, which contained scrolls and leather wraps used during prayer for Jewish men.
I thought it would be great to place this religious relic I held dear in the center of the room. My intention was to spread the holy light I felt in my tefillin not only for myself but to everyone in the room. I stood up, placed it in the center, said a quick prayer, and sat back on my mattress.
Once the shaman finished his speech, he began to hand out the first serving of Ayahuasca in a circle formation. When it was your turn, you joined him at his seat, and he offered the Ayahuasca, which was brewed into a tea, for you to consume in front of him.
The First Dose
I need to add a disclaimer here mentioning that this ceremony was very strong, and although I pride myself on my vivid memory, a lot of it is hard to remember in its proper order, so I will do my best.
My turn came, and I took my first serving. I laid back down and listened as everyone took their turns. After about 15 minutes, the room turned silent, and the shaman asked us to join him in a light breathwork meditation. During this meditation, I wondered to myself what I was going to experience. I remembered the stories my close friend told me about his experience, and the things I had heard on Joe Rogan came to mind, and I noticed they both shared a similar intense quality.
I believe about 30 minutes had passed since I took my first dose, and at this point, I truly didn’t feel anything. In this sort of bodily space of feeling like nothing is taking place, a vision appeared to me of an old static TV. As I got closer to the TV, a game turned on, and I found myself sitting down to play. The game was Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and as I started playing, I found myself moving further into the TV, eventually becoming part of the game. For a moment, I snapped myself out of this vision and back into the mansion room with everyone again, believing I was not feeling any of the medicine.
The Inner Children
As I sat there, I remembered talking to Kim a few days before the Ayahuasca ceremony, and she mentioned making it an intention to talk with my inner child. I didn’t really know how I was going to do that, but I had an interesting idea. What if I stood up and called out to all the inner children and let them know that I was here today to help? Pretty crazy considering there were other people in the room, but sure, I thought, let’s do it.
I stood up and yelled out to these inner children, and to my surprise, they all slowly started to pour out of the shadows and into the room.
After a few moments, I found myself in front of an army of Elis, and they all cheered for me while awaiting my next command. I pulled out my sword and then directed them into the TV game from the previous vision. Not sure if you realized it, but yes, I was in another vision going back into the first vision.
In this video game world, we started moving room to room, battling all sorts of monsters. In one room, there was a giant half-man, half-horse monster. As I pointed my sword towards the monster, directing the army to attack, the Elis swarmed him and slayed the beast with complete ease.
This battle continued for a bit until I stopped myself. “Wait a minute, I’m just getting lost in my thoughts here. This isn’t really happening,” and poof, I found myself standing back in the ceremony room. As I turned, I still saw the army of Elis waiting for my next command. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I stood there staring at them.
One soldier shouted from the back, “Give us your next command, sire,” and another shouted, “What should we do next?” to which I wasn’t sure how to respond. One Eli standing in the front line walked towards me and said, “My king, we’re here to help you with whatever you need, all you need to do is tell us what that is.”
I took a moment and responded to them, “Okay, how about this… I want you to bring me THE Eli that needs the most healing. The one that’s hiding in the shadows and is afraid to come out.” As I uttered the last letter of my request, the soldiers all placed their hands together like the vision I had earlier that morning and lovingly handed me a baby.
In shock, I held baby Eli in my hands and stared into his face, completely unsure of what to do next. And then, in an instant, everything vanished, and the path of the ceremony was set. The funniest part is that when I woke up from this vision, I truly believed I still wasn’t feeling any of the medicine, and I started growing impatient for the second dose.
The Second Dose
The shaman called out for the second dose, and I quickly zoomed up as the first participant to take it. “So… do you feel it?” asked the shaman with a funny grin on his face, to which I responded, “Nope, nothing at all.” He then began pouring a massive dose of Ayahuasca into the cup and mentioned that I should take a double dose to help get me into it. He gave me a lot.
As I finished it, I remember walking back to my mattress moving in slow motion. That walk felt like an eternity, and when I finally got there, I laid down immediately and began closing my eyes. As darkness filled my vision, I started to hear the clinking sound of a chisel. As I woke, I found myself in a dark cave.
The clinking got louder and louder as I walked through until I finally saw a man bent over near a candle chiseling away at a flat piece of stone. The man was laughing hysterically, and as I got closer, he turned to me and started laughing even harder. He looked like me, but as a crazy caveman wearing nothing but a thin dirty piece of cloth and a long, uncut full head of hair and beard.
“Come closer, Eli... I want to show you something,” said caveman Eli as he revealed to me what he was carving into the stone:
The Ten Commandments of Eli Levitas
You are not worthy
You are not worthy of a partner that loves you
You are not worthy of a family that loves and accepts you for who you are
You are not worthy of being rich and successful
You are not worthy of being beautiful
You are not worthy of having friends that love you and that you can trust
You are not worthy of your connection to God
You are not worthy of being a spiritual guide
You are not worthy of bridging other people with God
You are not worthy of talking with God
As he read each commandment, his laughter grew louder and louder, filling the room. It was so loud that I couldn’t help but laugh with him too. In this cloud of laughter, I mustered whatever courage I had and weakly told him that those commandments weren’t true.
“AHAHA, are you crazy? It’s true, Eli… don’t kid yourself… it’s true, and I know you know it, Eli.” As you can imagine, I started crying and felt hurt by what was unfolding, and then in an instant, the vision vanished.
Breaking the Cycle
Although I thought the medicine wasn’t hitting me yet, at this point, I couldn’t deny that I was starting to feel it. Back in the ceremony room, I turned over onto my stomach and stared out at the night sky, looking at the stars. I was wondering if perhaps the stars were going to turn into something spiritual or if a spirit animal was going to appear to me, but nothing.
As I grew tired of staring out the window, I looked back down at my hands and realized, quite obviously, they counted to 10. I started counting, and after each number, I would hear crazy caveman Eli’s voice reciting each of the commandments. I put a finger down whenever I finished one commandment, and when I got to the final one, I noticed how when my fingers were closed, they created a fist, and when I placed both fists together, palms facing me, they took the shape of a heart.
In that moment, I knew that those 10 commandments were carved into stone onto my heart, and that realization created such an explosion of energetic power that I passed out. All I remember was seeing the shape of a maze in a neon forest green take over my consciousness.
There was no way to understand what was happening or where I was. I woke up in this confused nothingness, and I didn’t even remember how I got there in the first place. All I remember feeling was as though I was traveling through this sort of tunnel, and I was starting to get to the other side.
Worthiness and Unworthiness
On the journey, I felt so dizzy and nauseous. One of the fellow attendees next to me began purging into the little garbage bins the shaman’s helpers handed out at the start of the night, and in a blink, I found myself headfirst in my garbage bin, ready to purge.
As I puked, I felt my consciousness pour out of me, and my vision would spiral into the garbage bin. Nothing physical came out of me, but it just felt like energy was being purged out of my system.
I finally landed after purging and then laid back down on my mattress, absolutely confused about what had just happened. All I could do was breathe and stare up at the ceiling, which had these two lanterns hanging as chandeliers. In a weird spiritual way, these two lanterns were the eyes of the spirit of Ayahuasca that guided me that night.
In silence, I looked at the lanterns and I started to feel the presence of a stern principal teaching me something. “Eli, the same way you choose to be worthless, you can use that same energy and choose to be worthy… you are the one that is choosing… it all comes from within you.”
I would ponder this insight, and excitement would start building inside of me. “Yes, I understand! I choose to believe I am worthy! Yes!” I would shout in my mind. The excitement started to die down, and now again I found myself moving through a baseball field sort of structure. Home base was the classroom with Ayahuasca; first base was where I would understand the insight and get all excited; second base would be me building up the sandcastle shouting, “I believe I am worthy!”; and finally, third base was where I would walk onto the sand, destroy the sandcastle, and convince myself with such ease of my unworthiness.
In the end, I always found myself back in Ayahuasca’s classroom, learning the same lesson repeatedly. Repeating the same steps. Moving from each base and experiencing the exact same teaching countless times. I must’ve repeated the loop I was in easily a couple thousand times. It felt like hell.
Honestly, I truly believed I was in hell, and I became awakened to it. The torment my mind was putting me through. I swear I thought to myself that I’ve been dead this whole time, and I am just now realizing I have been dead. I couldn’t bear it anymore, and my body was giving out.
The Shaman’s Guidance
At some point, I looked over and saw the shaman standing by my side, asking me how I was doing. All I responded was that I am worthless and always will be, and that’s the cold, hard truth.
He denied it and shared a few stories of people he had witnessed go through something similar and get through to the other side. Regardless of what he told me, I didn’t believe a word he said. How could I believe something I perceived as a “lie”? I told him I knew he was lying to me, and he said he would come back later to further help me.
Funny enough, after about 10 minutes, he came back and put his finger on my forehead, where the third eye is located. He then explained to me that I needed to breathe in through my third eye, and slowly that would help me break this curse I found myself trapped in. I nodded and followed his instructions, but as soon as he left, I thought to myself, “Really… breathing in through my third eye? C’mon now… as if that bullshit's going to help.”
As soon as I finished these thoughts, I heard a loud thunderous roar from Ayahuasca, shouting for me to sit up from my mattress immediately. I zoomed up and sat on my pillow. “Look at the shaman!” she shouted to me. As I found him in the dark room, I noticed how he was walking through the room with his eyes completely shut.
“I am the one guiding him, and I am the one telling him what to say and do,” and in an instant, I saw him quickly run over, and only as he got next to my face, he opened his eyes and asked me how I was feeling. I understood her seriousness, and I laid back down and began to breathe through my third eye.
A Space to Breathe
After what felt like thousands of years of torture, I finally gave up and let go of the loop thanks to the breathwork. The suffering had left, and silence emerged. In that silence, I found myself with a very calm and relaxed spirit of Ayahuasca, seated by me as if she were a nurse tending to me in my hospital bed.
I finally found space to breathe and space to ask her a question. I asked her how such a powerful belief could be created and where it all started so that I could work on uprooting it. All I felt was the same feeling God expressed when I asked him that question during the breathwork ceremony. Once I asked, she agreed and took me on a journey to discover this.
She instantly disappeared, and I found myself in complete silence, with everyone around me in their own ceremony.
No thoughts. No mind activity.
Out of this stillness, a song started playing. Shaman Omar took a break from his flute and singing and played us a few songs through a speaker. The song he put on was called Madre Selva by Mariana Root.
The song was in Spanish, but I just felt like I knew what she was telling me. The story of pain I experienced as a child.
I felt transported back to being a baby, waking up in a room of darkness with so much pain coming from deep within my hips.
All I could do was toss and turn, and in this scene, someone came into the room, most likely my mother, and tried helping me, but it only resulted in more pain.
The Dialogue with God
After about 20-30 minutes of this intense tension and soreness coming from my body, it finally started to release, and now I found myself in the presence of not only Ayahuasca but God was here this time in a very raw form.
He showed me how out of nowhere he woke up and found himself in a place with a multi-dimensional machine located in the center of the room. He knew that his job was to tend to this machine and make sure that it was maintained properly. “Always growing… always getting better,” is how he described his first impressions of it.
I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but then God looked at me and told me how he tried to figure out the purpose of this machine. He spent trillions of years trying to understand its purpose but couldn’t do so. Then he decided that if he couldn’t do it, it was time for him to create someone stronger and more powerful than him who might be able to solve it.
This led to him creating us. “You guys are stronger and better than me; you just don’t know it. Whenever one of you proves to me that my invention works by doing something extremely powerful, it gives me hope that one of you will be able to solve this puzzle so that I can finally go to sleep and die forever.”
Returning to Earth
The next scene I found myself in was by the Amazon river. Here I stood by the edge of the river. The area was filled with trees. I was at a part of the river where it made a slight turn to the right. The turning section was larger and surrounded by heavy trees.
The sky was gray and cloudy, and the sounds of the forest were strong. I listened to the stream and the birds echoing in the distance. I looked down at my hands and saw myself in possession of my tefillin. They were made of solid gold to represent my dad’s love and hard work going into them, making sure he got me the holiest pair money can buy.
I stared at them in this silence and then noticed God was standing right next to me, shoulder to shoulder. In this scene, he looked like an indigenous man with ruffled shoulder-length hair, a tan body with only a loincloth on.
“Eli… I want you to know this… I want you to know that if you chose to wear those tefillin, I would always love you… and if you chose to throw those tefillin into the river, I would still always love you. Those tefillin do not matter to me, but you do.”
I looked into his eyes to see if he was telling the truth, and I knew I could trust him. I turned to the river and threw my tefillin in. I saw it splash into the water and sink to the bottom, and all I could feel was God’s eternal love expanding and flooding my heart.
I disappeared into this feeling and slowly started to come down from the experience. People around me were fully sober and moving about the room, which made me feel weird. I felt stuck in a sort of in-between place between this space with Ayahuasca and the space back on earth.
The Final Lesson
This part was particularly hard because Ayahuasca was not letting me leave until I accepted her final lesson. I fought with great resistance to just come back to earth. I looked outside, hoping to see the sun because I knew it would symbolize that the night was over, but I was met with darkness.
“Until you fully accept this lesson, I won’t let the sun come up and will keep you here for as long as it takes,” rang in my head as I sat there hopeless. I turned to my side and realized the girl sitting next to me appeared to be in a similar state. We looked at each other, and then I asked if she was stuck in between too, to which she replied yes. It felt so good to have someone with me in this space.
We tried to figure out how to get out of it together. We first spoke about each other’s ceremonies, looking for clues on a possible exit. Weirdly enough, we shared a similar character and a similar experience as well.
We spoke for a bit and decided to call out to one of the helpers for guidance. He told us to go outside and ground on the grass. I wasn’t able to stand, so he helped me up and walked me outside to where we were met with the most mesmerizing lightning show.
There was a storm in the distance, so it wasn’t raining, but the lightning would spread across the sky, and I was left in complete awe. After a few moments, the shaman explained to us that although we came to him for help, he told us that we were the only ones able to guide ourselves back. We couldn’t even help each other. We had to help ourselves.
Once this clicked, I asked him to help me back to my mattress, where I laid down and proceeded to focus on my breath. Music started to play, and I continued with the breath. “Remember, Eli… you are the one who chooses to be worthless… you are the one who holds on to the pain of the past… you have the power to let go and choose.” This teaching rang through my mind, and as my heartbeat slowed thanks to the breathwork, the teaching slowed and eventually stopped. It was finally quiet in my mind, and when I opened my eyes, I was back home.
Integration
This experience transformed me so deeply. It took me about three days to truly come back to a baseline state, but I was completely changed forever. I felt my ties to the pressures and guilt of Judaism lifted. I knew God loves me regardless of what I do and doesn’t want me to do anything other than just being myself. That is all I have to do. I no longer needed to earn love, as I was already more than enough to be loved.
Looking to integrate your plant medicine experience? Discover practical steps and insights on processing and applying the lessons learned from your ceremony in our comprehensive guide. Read this post.
