Sitaramaya speaks to a packed house at the Los Angeles Ayahuasca Monologues: Tales of the Spirit Vine event.
In this video she talks about the benefits of Ayahuasca and her encounters with it while drinking with an Asháninka Shaman deep in the Peruvian Amazon.
She had taken Ayahuasca in other countries, mostly in Brazil–for Sitaramaya, ayahuasca called to her and that is why she went to the jungle.
Before she had this Ayahuasca experience she believed that it was like visions she had seen before. She had all these red abrasions on her skin and they itched so she thought she had chicken pox. She didn’t speak the language, but she had really bad chiggers everywhere. That night was the first ceremony and knowing that everything would be intensified so it would be difficult to deal with.
Watch the full chigger filled recounting of a truly powerful ayahuasca experience below:
After she drank the Ayahuasca she was miserable from all the chigger bites and the itching. She was thinking correctly that it would intensify the misery of the chigger bites tenfold; yet, she still had visuals of plants growing from her navel and pristine castles, but it kept coming back to the misery.
After a couple of nights with similar experiences, she gave up and wanted to leave because she was miserable, and thought it would be her last ceremony ever. She drank quite a bit of Ayahuasca, and braced herself for the misery. She sat with the misery this time and opened herself up to it. That allowed her to realize something about her life.
“I realized my whole life I had been seeking solace and comfort.”
She had tried to get it from drugs and alcohol. Realizing that she had always been seeking the comfort outside of herself and she should have been looking inside. That moment she found peace within herself. It was inside, and the itch didn’t get better.
“I found the comfort within the discomfort.”
This is what led to her epiphany and the reason she advocates for the medicine or ayahuasca treatment. The message she got from the ayahuasca experience recounted here is one of love and being inspired to be with what is at any given moment. The potential for the medicine to help change people like that is why she continues to spread the lessons available via ayahuasca today.
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