The Practice of the Purge

Composting the empire and making space for what comes next

Sending love to you, and a song that has been my mantra today. As I finish a new essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about a piece I wrote four years ago that is resonant as ever. I’ve updated and republished here. I see you, and I am with you.

I’ve been a walking fist lately, struggling to feel much of anything at all and resisting what I can feel because it’s so unpleasant. It’s creating an untenable level of discord inside me, the sensation of being burned alive from within. It inevitably seeps out as insufferable petulance toward the people around me. A few nights ago, I picked up a Sharpie in desperation and started to draw, my body’s reflex when under duress. And as if in direct answer to my existential call for help, these talismans of purging appeared.

Purging came into my world about ten years ago when immediately after getting off a boat with 20 other travelers and hiking into the Peruvian Amazon, a medicine woman lined us up, handed us each a bucket of water and a cup, and instructed us to chug as much as we could as fast as we could until it all came back up. This was followed by seven nights of ayahuasca ceremonies, many hours of which I spent curled over a barf bucket in the darkness. Several times a night, I would crawl on my hands and knees across the ceremony hut to the outhouse for expulsion from the other end, too mareada — literally, “seasick” — from the medicine to walk.

There was the night that I fumbled in the darkness, taking off or putting on my socks for the 80th time as I rode the waves of my hot flashes, and accidentally spilled the contents of my barf bucket into my lap. And the morning that my friend, who labored in the medicine across the circle where I couldn’t see her, told me she’d spent most of the previous night convinced she’d shit her pants, paralyzed by the horror and shame of it, lost in the timeless expanse of the medicine and caked in her own lukewarm poop, only to discover in the morning that it had all been a dream of the medicine.

Most of us carry negative associations with throwing up. It is usually a bodily sign of illness and distress, an alarm bell. And vomiting makes us extraordinarily vulnerable — dehydrated and weak at the very least, on the edge of life at the worst. So it begs the question, who would willingly sign up for ritual purging? Sounds like some kind of nightmare or bad trip, right?

The thing is, it was those shaky nights in the jungle when I stopped being afraid of purging and began to embrace it as a much-needed release of that which does not serve me, whether literal pathogens or pent up energetic garbage.

I’ve come to appreciate vomiting as a sign of the body’s caretaking. It is a tangible expulsion of toxins, our biological cleaning service taking out the trash. And the purging incited by psychedelic medicine has the ability to shake free our deepest, most limiting belief systems and send them out to the cosmic recycling center. The medicine targets the demons with their talons clenched so deeply into our psyche that we have completely forgotten they are invaders, built from our conditioning and our survival mechanisms, aggressively guarding our tender human hearts but cutting us off from the sustenance of real connection to the creator within and all around us.

This is because ayahuasca, like all entheogens, has the ability to present us with our own minds when used conscientiously in a safe, intentional setting. The term “psychedelic,” first coined in the 1950s, is derived from ancient Greek, meaning “mind-revealing” or “soul-revealing”. Psychedelic experiences can give us access to the subconscious programming that underlies our conscious thoughts, actions, and behaviors.

Like George Clinton sings on Funkadelic’s “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts”:

Every thought felt as true / Or allowed to be accepted as true by your conscious mind / Takes root in your subconscious / Blossoms sooner or later into an act / And bears its own fruit

In almost every psychedelic experience, I enter a period that I think of as a tour of my relationships. The medicine shines a spotlight on the fault lines where I’m leaving gaps and shows me without blame or judgment where more love is asked of me. More forgiveness. More patience. It invites me into this review in relationship to myself, as well, and to see with kindness and clarity the experiences that have seeded my current operational standards. When I discover fear-based storytelling that I have taken for objective truth, it invites me to eject the bullshit that I excavate and plant seeds of connection and abundance in its place.

And there is a particular humility that perhaps can only be conferred by sitting for hours in the cooled effluence of one’s animal body, whether real or imagined. It is a bold confrontation with the biological machinery that controls so much of our daily emotional experience. It reveals the many ways that modern technology allows us to ignore and even deny the existence of our own viscera, whisking away our excreta and dumping it in someone else’s waterway, on someone else’s garbage mountain. These systems allow us to navigate the world as disembodied heads incidentally mounted on eating-pooping machines without ever reckoning with the cost of our consumption on the greater network of life.

In this regard, ayahuasca is particularly strong medicine. She is relentless in her pursuit of truth and healing. When the medicine first begins to come on about 20 minutes after shooting a small cup of the thick brown brew, I experience her undeniably sentient presence entering from the top of my head. She investigates every part of my physical being, sussing out the darkness where her work awaits. As the medicine continues to bloom inside me, these nooks can open into canyons, exposing entire universes of experience and memory that I may not have visited since they happened to me, so strong is my body’s will to shelve unpleasant experiences in neat tomes of ancient history.

As my conscious mind travels at lightning speed through the history of the universe and I work to simply keep breathing in this vortex of light and sound, a crescendo of nauseating carousel music begins to build behind it. Visions of decaying corpses, balls of spiders, and masses of writhing eels begin to coalesce in relentless, churning patterns.

Sitting with this feeling can be torturous. My many hours alone in the dark with these visions have taught me profound patience and forced me to make a home in discomfort. Learning to observe these unpleasant sensations until my body is ready to expel them has also shown me that these nauseating patterns are running in the background of my day-to-day life even when I don’t consciously observe them. Fears that I am bad or lazy or incapable or not what I should be — that I am ultimately unlovable — and that existence itself is an empty, hostile endurance challenge can take up enormous space in my subconscious. Just because I ignore them, does not mean they aren’t running the show.

As George Clinton sings:

Be careful of the thought-seeds you plant in the garden of your mind / For seeds grow after their kind

In particularly challenging passages of these journeys, I have found myself in supplication, forehead pressed to my mat, exhausted physically and mentally beyond what I have ever known. “Please,” I beg of all that is greater and wiser than I am. “Take it. Take it all. I can’t hide anything from you. Whatever you are looking for. Please take it.”

And it is usually someplace in this utter surrender that the wave breaks, and with profound relief, a purge surges through. Sometimes it comes in the form of vomit or diarrhea, other times as prolonged shaking, laughing, crying, or yawns that ripple through me from scalp to toes. I’ve shat out maggots and larvae. I’ve choked up spider webs.

In my first ceremony after leaving an abusive relationship, I struggled with the medicine all night, begging to be released from my agony but unable to let it go until finally, just before dawn, I ran outside and using every ounce of my will and muscular strength, coughed up a very small, very dense black slug from what felt like the depths of my soul. I beheld this glistening lump, visible only to me, in the palm of my hand, and knew at once that I was free from the manipulation and gaslighting that had colonized my spirit over the course of that relationship. When people talk about plant medicine being a kind of spiritual surgery, I think of exactly this kind of tumor extraction.

A great gift of the medicine has been learning to midwife my own purges, to recognize and relax my resistance more quickly, and to trust that I am held in the ultimate benevolence of the universe, safe to do such work. What magic is it that the universe, as embodied by these entheogenic plants, is willing to take our trash? Rather than leave us to fester in the anxiety and violence of our human making, they want to help. They want us to feel better. They want us to be our best selves, our best collaborators in the universe’s mycelial conspiracy of procreation and balance. That seems to me to be the very definition of love.

By the end of my time in the jungle, the incessant pace of purging had subsided, and in the negative space it created, the most wondrous beauty blossomed. I spent most of my final ceremonies on my back, the songs of the medicine women falling upon me like lullabies rather than scalpels. Into my left arm, the tendril of a vine entered my vein like an IV. And from the rest of my body bloomed an incandescent garden humming with life. I looked down upon myself with the reverence of one sitting on the side of a mountain and watching the moon rise over the land. I was able to see myself as god embodied — creation and creator — with the power and responsibility to grow beautiful things with the gift of this lifetime.

According to Hindu cosmology, we are currently living in the Kali Yuga, the last of four stages in a cycle of eons described in the ancient Sanskrit scriptures that translates to something like "the age of darkness" or "the age of quarrel and hypocrisy". It is a long cosmological period marked by strife, greed, jealousy, immoral rulers, manipulative ideologies, flagrant lechery, extreme weather events, shortened human lifespan, mass migration, the degeneration of spirituality, and hardship for people with ideals and values.

From our human perspective, this is terrifying. Relentless news of destruction is forcing us to live in persistent awareness of our tenuous hold on survival, and the prevailing culture offers very few tools to accept this with agency or grace. We are taught to distract ourselves with the internet, the accumulation of material, social status, or devotion to “work,” and many of us are wildly unprepared when our mortality grabs us by the collar. It is an aching awakening into the awareness that many of our institutions keep us unwell, that we have been denied access to our ancestors, and that we must grieve all we have lost. And we forget that we are not alone in the breaking of our human hearts.

One morning after a long night in ceremony, I recognized the expression in the face of a quiet woman from Switzerland who had left her toddler with her husband in Lima to come to the jungle. With luminous, weary eyes, she whispered, “Last night I spent a long time at the edge of an ocean, and I realized… it was the ocean of suffering.” She spoke deliberately, finding the English words. “It was infinite. And I was terrified that if I just touched the water, it would swallow me and I would never be able to get out.”

Yes! I thought. I know this ocean, too.

And then: Is it possible to learn to swim this ocean without drowning?

A few years ago, I struggled to finish Octavia Butler’s visionary 1998 science fiction novel Parable of the Talents because it all felt a little too… real. Set in 2032 amid water wars, the collapse of social order, and the proliferation of guns, a Christian zealot runs for president with the motto “Make America Great Again” (for real!) The heroine, Lauren Olamina, adapts to the times with the philosophy “God is change,” and establishes a cult-like agrarian community with a ruthless commitment to accepting reality. Butler was a sage, and the read was harrowing in its dystopian prescience.

But when I mentioned this to a friend, a storyteller in her late 60s with a vitality and wisdom I aspire to, Jeanette surprised me with her take. “Lauren is a seed-saver!” she said. “What could be more optimistic than that?”

These days, I recognize that when I cannot touch tenderness, it is because I am gripped by fear that our world is on fire and all that I hold dear is just tinder awaiting the flame. I try to insulate myself from the horrors of devastation, and I shut down my ability to love a suffering world in the process.

And yet — “The infinite intelligence within you knows the answers,” sings George.

At the end of the Kali Yuga comes the Satya Yuga, a golden age lasting roughly four times longer when humanity is governed by gods and the physical world reflects intrinsic goodness. Might the chaos that we experience now reflect the chaos of the birth canal? Just as the baby experiences the obliteration of the womb, the only home it has known, and emerges into the sound and vision of our reality, might we be experiencing a vortex of transition far beyond what our human consciousness can hold, a shift making way for a new order built on cooperation and life-sustaining practices? The possibility allows me to lay down the maddening anxiety of future-scaping a broken world and look instead for the ever-present “helpers” — human and otherwise — that Mr. Rogers so tenderly named.

And so I remember now that our work is not to resist change, but to become its midwives. We must lay our wounded, weary selves in supplication before the universe and say, “Please take this” and, “Thank you.” We must allow ourselves to die and be reborn in that trust. We must till the fertile soil of regeneration, water it with our tears of grief and rage, take pleasure in our practice, and tend a garden of good fruit.

The oak sleeps in the acorn / The giant sequoia tree sleeps in its tiny seed / The bird waits in the egg / God waits for his unfoldment in man / Fly on, children / Play on.

— Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts, Funkadelic