'The medicine has been swallowed as I return to my space.
I sit up straight and work on my breathe and focus on my intentions for being here.
I am grateful as my mind starts to clear, my heart beat is steady as the medicine starts to work.
My body starts to feel lighter as Ayahuasca works her way around, I feel her inside. And slowly the visions come, mild at first but as my heart pumps faster more come.
I breathe deeper and slower while sitting up, although my body would like to lay, and I begin the journey. I look at the environments my mind travels through, the colours and details, around 10 minutes into the first journey I stand up and walk to the table with my paper and pens to begin.
Sometimes I draw the visions as I am in them, detailing as much as I can. As I go deeper into the medicine I continue to sit up and draw, page after page.
Other times I place my hand on the paper and just let it draw.
It is an incredible experience to be with Ayahuasca and my Art at the same time, it is also the most difficult thing I taught myself to do. But I want to document this experience and I cannot take a photograph, but I can try and download with creativity.
I am not here to argue if these places I go to and entities I engage with are real, I am more interested in sharing the experience because I do have a kind of faith in it.
And while some might say that makes me no different to the religious fanatics of the world, I personally think it is different, because this experience is unique to the individual,
it is a personal enlightenment, not one you just hear about in the words of preachers or read about in the pages of books. And with this experience the religious stories of the world start to make sense,
not in a way that it makes you religious as a result, but maybe that the [trip] is behind the prophets visions of God in the first place.
Humanity has been shamanic longer that its been dogmatic, this experience helps you to let go of the dogma not hold on to it.
And while some may say its dangerous to say something could save the world, in my heart I feel this medicine, or the psychedelic experience in general could help many.
Because it is very hard to continue with symptoms of fear such as hate, anger, racism, once you had a psychedelic epiphany that none of these illusions matter, that no ideology can save you, only love.
And that is the thing that makes us human, our ability to love.
So while a large part of the world are more and more lost in separation as the mainstream culture promotes paranoid ideas about religious groups or political agendas, this medicine and the psychedelic experience offered me a way out of such a world because a world of fear is not one I want to give energy too.
The medicine helped me to focus my energy towards the creative parts of my brain and reminded me all you need is love even if you have to suffer one of the most intense experiences to remember. And love is not just something you tell the person your in a relationship with or family members, love is the power you posses inside.
The power that helps you be compassionate to people whose mind may be in dark or ignorant places, the power that helps you walk away from situations and environments that are not good for you, and the power of selfless giving expecting nothing in return.
This is a natures revolution at a time the environment is in crisis. So instead of going to Syria to fight change your ticket to Peru, and instead of feeding your head with ideologies about how we are all separate and we need to have pride in that, drink some medicine to help heal that mentality and the virus that is making it sick.
~Art and Words by Emma Lucy Shaw
~We call it medicine because it is what we have used to heal ourselves.