The Sky Speaks — An Ayahuasca Story That Changed My Life

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Sunday, everybody. Got a special bonus episode for you today.

In what follows, you're going to see a talk that I gave, really a story that I told at a storytelling event called the Ayahuasca Monologs, which was hosted in a variety of different cities, New York and Boston being the main ones. And this storytelling event in Boston featured a story that I shared, an Ayahuasca story that I recounted.

What's unique about this story is that it was this story at an Ayahuasca Monolog that I told in New York City, which then I was asked to retell at an Ayahuasca Monolog event in Boston, that really launched my career as an astrologer. In a roundabout way, I told the story first at Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors Art Museum, which at the time was located in New York City, maybe a year or two prior to this version of the story, which I then retold at the Boston Ayahuasca Monologs.

Anyway, the point is that after that story, Reality Sandwich, a web magazine that I was writing for, took an interest in the book that I was writing, which contained this and many other Ayahuasca stories; it was kind of an Ayahuasca memoir. Anyway, because of that, I really got an opportunity to develop my voice on the Reality Sandwich platform as someone who wrote about Ayahuasca, but then was given some freedom to explore other topics, and astrology became one of them that I started writing about regularly.

So in a weird way, this was my first YouTube appearance. This was the first public talk I gave that was recorded, or I guess the second version of it, if you count the very first version I did at Alex Grey's Museum. It was a kind of public storytelling performance that really launched my career in social media, in astrology, in eventually YouTube.

And you can, I think you can see in this story, first of all, it's a beautiful story. It was a part of my first book, and the story kind of gets at the heart of some of the personal transformation and change that I saw in my life, in my father's life, my grandfather's life, around the time that Ayahuasca was entering the picture for me. But also just as a snapshot, I guess I was 28 or something in this video; it's a long time ago now, almost 20 years.

In this video, you can see a young version of me that was maybe just a year away—I can't remember the exact timeline, but it must have been about a year prior to launching my career as an astrologer, through the same platform that was starting to really recognize my capacity for storytelling, my interest in psychedelics, eventually my interest in astrology. None of that would have happened if I hadn't told this story at a live Ayahuasca Monologs and had people on staff at Reality Sandwich really take an interest in me and give me space to develop and grow into what this is now.

So I thought, just for history, and also because it's kind of a fun story, that I would share it with you. Credit to Evolve or Boston, who no longer exists, but that was a meetup group that recorded this and still hosts it on Vimeo. I actually got the video from them years ago and just had it sitting around. I thought, "You know what? This would be so cool to just do a flashback," and you can see a very young version of me telling my first sort of Ayahuasca-based story that would open all of the doors to me doing what I'm doing today.

So anyway, I hope you find it, I don't know, fun, interesting, hopefully a little bit humorous. This, for me, was a story and a performance that opened many, many doors in my life. I always thank spirit for giving me the opportunity that was this storytelling event. I'm deeply thankful for people at Reality Sandwich, Ken Jordan, an old friend of mine named Jonathan Tao Phillips, just a ton of people that were instrumental, Daniel Pinchbeck and others who gave me an opportunity like this to share a story, to shine, to show something of my gifts as a storyteller, to have a platform to write a book, to have a platform to write about astrology. None of it would have happened if it weren't for these people giving me a chance to tell my story.

So anyway, on that note, I hope you'll enjoy it. Hope you're having a great Sunday. Take it easy.

It's the early 1970s and it's summertime. My dad's home on his father, my grandfather's property over summer break, and he's with a friend, and they're laying in a field of wildflowers in the back 40 acres, doing what any college students would do over a summer break. They ate a whole bunch of acid, and they're laying in the flowers and enjoying the afternoon. They had, of course, the way my dad's told me the story, they had found the center, or the ground, of all being and had solved all problems in the universe, and were just basking in Divinity for most of the afternoon, I guess.

And so, just kind of imagine that scene, and then there's this noise in the distance. My dad explained this, and very quickly when he realized that it was my grandfather coming through the woods on a tractor, they started freaking out and the ground of being disappeared. Then they all started really flipping out. So this veritable Wonderland was instantly transformed into the worst possible acid trip scenario, where this grandfather is coming through the woods with an ax on a tractor. He's back from Korea, and he's killed many men, and he's hard, a fundamentalist Calvinist Christian. He's coming through the woods, and my dad's just freaking out.

So he gets there on the tractor, he's like, "Hey you girls," and he's got a cradle filled with axes, and he's like, "Come on, we're gonna go chop trees." And so my dad, as he's explained the story, was also very ashamed. And at this moment, he couldn't stand up to his father, and so we chopped down trees on acid the rest of the day. And it was the worst experience ever. So this was a terrible experience.

So in my early 20s, I'm in graduate school, and I'm living on my grandfather's property. My parents have built a retirement cottage near the same field of wildflowers, and I'm trying to clean up my act, because I'm just coming through a period of doing a lot of seeking and rebelling and some drug addiction. I kind of came to my grandfather's land to clean my soul. And so, of course, I'm using a lot of psychedelics. And the irony of psychedelics, right, is that psychedelics help people get out of addictive patterns.

So I'm laying in the field of wildflowers with a friend, and we've taken a bunch of mushrooms. And, of course, we also have discovered the ground of being. We are actually having a conversation about generational healing. We're sitting there talking about our families, and it's all very beautiful. And isn't it great that we've become so enlightened, you know, because we've found these mushrooms, and we're in this field. And all of a sudden in the distance, I'm like, "Oh my God, I know exactly what that is. Holy shit. It's happening." And it was my grandfather coming through the woods on a tractor, 30 years later.

And so there it is. It's happening. And my friend is like, he tiptoed off into the woods somewhere. He's like, "I'm gonna let you take care of this one." So my grandfather comes into the clearing, and "Hey, sissies, what are you doing laying down?" And I'm like, "Oh my God," here's this crazy karmic confrontation. And I'm sitting there, and I get up and I look at him. The key description of my father's recounting of his story, his encounter with my grandfather, was what my grandfather looked like while my father had this altered state of consciousness. He said he looked like a machine, like this machine that was the industry of America, a second-generation Dutch immigrant, working hard and Calvinism. It was just this thing.

And I looked at my grandfather as he's approaching me. And now, of course, the cradle is filled with chainsaws because it's 25 years later. So he's coming toward me, and I'm seeing him as a machine, and my head is just being totally blown. I stand up in the field of wildflowers, not by my own volition. Something deep and powerful, something incredibly transformative welled up within me, and I kind of rose up. It was like looking at my grandfather the machine, and I felt from within my core exactly what I was going to say before he could even go into his rant about why he needed my help and why it was my responsibility on a Saturday to be chopping trees down.

The answer was, "No." All I needed to say was one syllable, and it was just "No." So I looked at my grandfather, and I was like, "No. No, I won't work." And my grandfather was incredible, because I thought it was going to be this epic confrontation, and all I would have to do would be stand there and just keep repeating the word "No," even if I started peeing. So just do it.

And then my grandfather, quite opposite of what I thought would happen—it was like looking at a machine sort of melt down. He kind of went like this, and he bent over, and he started holding his back. He said, "You know, Grandpa's back just really hurts. I just can't do this work. I need your help. I can't do this. This is ridiculous." And I said, "I'm not working today. It's a Saturday, Grandpa. I help you a lot. I'm not working." "Okay." He grumbled off. It wasn't an epic thing. But what was epic about it was the simple "No," and the firmness of the first time I said it, and how it immediately—just the machine that I thought he was just crunched into an old man with a tired back. And it was impressive.

About six months later, I had continued to explore and follow the breadcrumb trail of synchronicities, watching a television show about shamanism that exposes me to an author that leads me here, that leads me there, until I heard about Ayahuasca shamanism. Within six months after the encounter with my grandfather, I was in a canoe going 24 hours up river from the city of Iquitos in Peru, going deep into the Amazon, a circle of about six of us and a shaman to drink Ayahuasca.

I remember we pulled into this green lagoon, and it was like anything could happen. You might be entering the jaws of heaven, or maybe the jaws of hell, or maybe both. It was crazy, because the jungle is a freaky place. There's a million different sounds all happening at once, and it seems orchestrated. There's a conspiracy of animals and insects to make the wildest intermittent sounds that just kind of freak you out. Then, you're dealing with that, and it can just start raining at any moment, like the gods got pissed at you and just dump a bunch of water on you, and then it can just stop. So it was really magical.

Nighttime comes and you drink a cup of Ayahuasca, and it just tastes awful. I'm echoing the same thing that our other servers said: it's just awful. The funny thing, as I was saying earlier to Jonathan, it really is like you taste it, and before you even get the full experience and go through your healing, as soon as you taste it, you're like, "Medicine. Real medicine sucks." That's how you know it's medicine, because you taste it and you're like, "Something's gonna happen to me that's probably gonna be good, and I'm not gonna like it, but it's gonna be good for me." It just has that feeling.

So I took the Ayahuasca, and I was sitting on the mat, and it very, very much like Kara described, just like this jet fuel of animate Earth life, just building from my toes up, just like crazy vines and piranhas starting to swim through the air, and just gnarly jungle stuff going on everywhere. I was just like, "Oh my God. This is not mushrooms. Oh my god." It was really impressive.

As this is going on, at first it was just about the sheer, "Holy crap, Narnia is real and you've just walked through the door." And then you're in this place, and it's really amazing. Then, as I was getting deeper into it, the medicine started to plunge into my depths and start to work with my issues. The main issue that started coming up was this issue with my father and my grandfather.

My father was a United Methodist minister in a church for 20 plus years. I grew up in the church, and a big part of my rebellion had been religious confusion growing up in the evangelical setting. You see a weird dichotomy, right? You see a father who ministers to people on their death beds, which is very charitable and compassionate, but you also see the preaching of a doctrine that is sometimes exclusive. So there's this weird confusion, because love and exclusivity are weirdly combined.

My father back home was going through a bit of a disillusionment through it right around the same time that the incident with my grandfather had happened. My father and I didn't notice this at the time, but the medicine started showing me, "There's a healing happening in your family. Your dad's starting to loosen up some of the ties. You're starting to figure out that the universe is called the universe because all of this is universal." And I really started going into this work, the spirit of work that's been on the men in my family. I could feel it on my back, in my spine, in the same location that my grandfather was holding his back in the woods, and just feeling this heavy pressure of having to prove myself to God, having to prove myself to other men, having to prove myself to my father in some kind of spiritual way. Seeing my father trying to prove himself through the act of being a minister, in some ways doing it from his heart, but in some ways doing it because how else do you get love from your father, Father God, and all of this heaviness.

I just started vomiting all night, so hard that sometimes it really felt like the bones in my face were going to break. But after every heave and every release came the accompanying feeling as though light, love, and divinity were just pouring into me, and that my heart was being opened. I saw that every single moment, every single difficulty that anybody ever faces, is an aspect of life being born. Life goes through death, and it goes through life over and over and over again, and that process is called life eternal. This is the grace of God that we all get to experience this, and redemption is just realizing that there's nothing to be afraid of, even pain. It was just like, "Wow, this is so amazing."

In the morning, I dove into the river, and I just remember getting out and being like, "Wow, baptism is so real. I totally get this. So cool. That was like baptism. Maybe you can do it 50 times, if you want. You can get up and baptize yourself every day. This is amazing." So it was just this beautiful experience.

When I came home, my father was really going through this breakdown over his career in the church. He was really probing, "What do I do? I can't do this work anymore. My heart's not in it. Am I abandoning my faith? Am I abandoning my family? Am I abandoning my values, my son, my kids, my church members?" Hundreds of church members. My dad's status in the church had grown to very large proportions. "Am I letting all these people down?" I could see the same burden, and he's starting to develop back pains. I'm just thinking, man, what a blessing that here I am, and I can start having these open conversations with my dad about what I experienced in the Amazon.

Through this dialog that opened with my father and I, my father actually made a pilgrimage during a mental health leave of absence from the ministry, and he went down and he drank Ayahuasca, and he had a phenomenal rebirthing experience. I got back, "How was your experience?" "Crazy. There's this heavy fundamentalist Christian demon on my back, and I was puking all night. I felt like my bones were going to shatter, and then Jesus was there, and there was light, and it was something totally different than I had ever thought it was. There's no shame in my life. There's no shame in my ministry. I've done good work. I can retire now." Crazy. Fine.

So that's what happened. My father retired from the ministry. He's in a PhD program right now, studying depth psychology. He's studying Carl Jung now. This is funny, but I'll leave you with this scene.

My father's now living in the retirement cottage that's near that same field of wildflowers. A little bit after he came back from the Amazon one morning, he got a knock at the door outside. That's really weird, it's like 5 a.m. So he goes out and he finds my grandfather, who's in a pair of flannel pajamas, no shirt on, his stomach's all bloody, and he's just collapsed. He says, "Joe, I can't do it anymore. I can't do this work. My stadium has fallen apart." He's delusional because he's overdosed on his painkillers for his back, and in his delusional state, he's completely destroyed his house with a hammer, throwing things, breaking things. He then crawled under the house and tried to rebuild it with a handful of nails and a hammer, but was cutting himself on glass underneath. He then crawled over to my dad's house and asked my dad for permission to stop working.

My dad said, "You can stop working now. You don't have to work anymore."

Every time I tell a story, I get teared up. So that was the story, and just that last line, "You don't have to work anymore. It's okay."

Thank you.