[Part 4] Integrating Mother Aya’s Wisdom🌱
**This newsletter is part of a series sharing my experience of my recent Ayahuasca healing journeys in Peru. To read the April part 1 click here, part 2 click here and part 3 click here. To read the August Journey part 1 click here, part 2 click here, and part 3 click here. For two important parts about finding love, part 1 click here and part 2 click here.**
On the final day of ceremony in Peru, I felt scared.
Not of what would happen but of the taste of the medicine. It's disgusting. I always want to throw it up.
Yet I was so excited about breaking the dieta the next day. I couldn’t wait to eat fruits again, and even salt….
The lesson from the strict diet was clear though. Like maestra Matilde always says: be grateful for what you have, and not crave what you don't have.
Since the last ceremony, I felt so joyful. I felt like something huge had shifted in me. At the time, I didn’t know yet how it would impact my life, but I could feel that I got a new start.
The morning of the final ceremony, I got two cups of Ajosache to drink. The maestra then gave me the second massage.
She worked my stomach first and went into some painful places. Again, she knew exactly where to go. She then massaged my chest, then my back, my neck, and the back of my legs. In the neck, she pushed on points that were unbearable with pain.
The massage was really good, and really long this time. A massage has no specific length here. It has to do with what is needed.
The final night was powerful and soft….
Francisco was in the hospital (Matilde's husband). According to Katja, whenever he specifically sings the Icaros, I puke, purging it out.
I went in with the last intention, which I will keep close to my heart. 😉. What came after was not short of miraculous. I felt such a deep shift.
Mother Aya shared with me deep insights.
I felt a few times during the night while they were singing that I needed to puke it out, yet, nothing came. Eventually, at the end of the night, it came out after all the shamans had left. And what a relief.
In the morning, Matilde arrived at 6am instead of 7am to break our plant dieta. She wanted to rush to the hospital to be with her husband. She gave us lemon with salt and this was it.
I can't even describe the joy of eating salt after so many weeks. Later I had fruits, honey, even a lightly fried egg (oil! yum yum!), and soup. I was in heaven.
I was strict with my dieta, preparing my body for a month before traveling to Peru, and especially the week before - no oil, sugar, salt and more. I still had another week ahead of me of food restrictions, but at least I was able to bring some yummy flavours back.
On my last day, I finally slept and was able to build up my strength while continuing to integrate the wisdom Mother Aya shared with me.
Integration - Coming Back Home
There are two important parts to the integration process for an Ayahuasca journey. For me, the integration process starts while I am on the journey, not just when I finish it.
When you are with the medicine, you get insights into what you need to work on or what you need to do to shift things in your life. Sometimes you need to talk to a person, or sometimes it’s something that is blocking you that you need to now ingrain into your life - a new alignment.
But when you receive the wisdom of what you need to do, you still need to do the work. Receiving the wisdom from Mother Aya and understanding the insights… that’s one half of the integration process.
Implementing Them Into Your Life is the Other Half.
During the retreat, I start working on what I want to say (for example, if I know I need to speak to someone in my life to shift a relationship) because when the medicine is in me I’m hearing the wisdom of Mother Aya. She guides me on what and how to do it.
The integration begins while I’m there. I’m preparing myself, I’m journaling nonstop, I’m planning for what I need to do when I get home.
Continuing the integration when you come home requires continued courage, introspection and guidance.
At the beginning, you still feel supported by the medicine when you come back home from your journey, because the medicine is still strong in your body, so you still hear the guidance very clearly.
Yet, the more time passes, the more it depends on you (and less on the medicine) to to feel it, to pay attention inward, and to integrate it back into your life. Like a muscle you need to strengthen till you hold it alone.
If you decide to go on this journey and receive all these insights, and you take no action in your life after the journey to integrate the lessons…
… then you go back into what your life was before and you might even lose the changes and insights you gained.
Integration is really the journey after the journey. It’s one thing to feel what you need to shift in your life; the second part is to take action to change what needs to be changed.
And when you’re moving in a direction that the medicine showed you - when it feels right, you feel a deep knowing and sense of alignment in your whole body.
For me, I’ve looked at my habits and how I’m running my business and interacting with my team to create more spaciousness and abundance. I’m finding ways to speak to all of you from a place of more vulnerability, sharing more of my own story and what it’s taken me to get to where I am, and not only from a place of courage and strength.
But it’s also been about having conversations with people in my life, either to complete something or communicate how I want to show up in the relationship differently, bringing my full self - parts that I might have not shown before.
And it’s also for me about coming back to my day-to-day life and seeing that I need to change the pace at which I'm moving to stay in alignment with this newfound divine feminine energy I feel so strongly in my body now. It requires me to move differently through my days.
An Ayahuasca journey is not a one-off experience–there is work to be done when you get back home.
It is an ongoing process, and it requires a lot of courage to speak your truth, have hard conversations, and do things from a different place inside you.
Yet for me, the expansion, lightness, and tenderness that are now available to me is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.
I’m so grateful to Mother Aya, maestra Matilde and her phenomenal family of healers for their love and wisdom. They gave me one hell of a gift - they healed me more.
I feel even more whole now ✨ 💖
With love,
Chen
PS - And I am happy to say that I’ll be taking 10 people with me on an exclusive, transformative Aya retreat to the healing center in Peru that I went to later this year..
If this interests you, please send me a message, and I’ll share all the details with you. 💗