He had been trapped by behavior that made his
life miserable and came with inexplicable and horrific random visualizations.These images confused him, paralyzed
him, made him disassociate and sometime even puke, even without drinking any Amazonian vine called Baanisteriopsis Caapi.
He’d read books by a
well known Vancouver doctor more than once, inhaled them in fact, and then one day,
uncharacteristically, he e-mailed the doctor who eventually invited
him to a retreat of about 25 people where Ayahuasca was consumed. The doctor ingested it himself, as if he was John C. Lilley doing his first hits of
L.S.D. because this doctor liked to be different, he was different, he’d built
his reputation on it.
Before this play, I’d first heard of Ayahuasca in 2008. I saw a
documentary film on Salt Spring that played to a full house with the filmmaker, Richard Meech, present. In his film, Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca, he'd documented the experience
of three thirty to 40 year old Caucasian Torontonians who'd travelled
to the Amazon and, like this actor on stage before me, went through their own
little private versions of Hell and back as part of their purging experiences. Only one had experienced pure bliss.
I thought to
myself, Jesus, why are middle class white people so tortured and why must
they participate in rituals considered “cool” because they've been stolen from ancient
cultures? Sweats. Ayahuasca. Take your pick.
The guy who hosts the
groups was on stage to answer questions on this particular night as well. A medical doctor. Written a bunch of
books. Good books. Books worth reading. I've read a couple myself. He had a ring on every finger,silver rings, which unnerved me. It reminded me of someone who had been a therapist in
my life in my past. Be suspicious, very suspicious of any health care provider
who wears a ring on every finger. They just
might come with side effects. Who you trying to impress? Why you
trying so hard to be cool? Don’t agree
with me? Go get five rings, if you own five rings, out of wherever you keep them, put each
one, one by one, on your fingers and see how it makes you feel.
This guy, the
physician on stage, he had a very masculine presence even though he’s not a
very big man. After the play, on stage, he was wriggling around like a football coach, preparing to give the pre-game talk to his
jocks. A not so undisguised whiff of disdain was wafting off of him and I
couldn’t figure out why. He’d agreed to be there hadn’t he?
I asked him a
question, a rather innocuous question I thought, “What personal experience had
he had that convinced him that this should be incorporated as part of his
therapeutic technique.” His response
came back with such defensiveness it was as if I’d challenged him. I wonder if he
realizes that his manner, on stage, is arrogant and defensive and maybe all
those years of working with clients reeling against “the man” had rubbed off on
him except I didn’t believe that. I believed it had always been there, right from
the beginning, and that’s his shit, entrenched and perhaps why he's able to have, such compassion, I
guess, with the addicts he treats.
But, I also wondered what his story is, the other story, the one that he tells himself when he’s
home alone right before he goes to bed at night and whether it would ever be possible
for him to just sit in a room and do nothing, be a nobody, just a human being, minus the notoriety because
eventually we will all have to be what we are, just that, flesh and blood and bones, that's it, just ask the elderly.
I wondered
why it would be okay for the doctor to take the Ayahuasca while he was hosting these retreats and I wondered why cultural misappropriation wasn't an issue for him and when he
referred to a Shaman named Dave, I didn’t even bother to suppress a laugh. Would
you go to a shaman named Dave? Where do you find Dave? In the yellow pages
under S?
Sometimes middle class Caucasians really make me sick with their first world desperation and their
cloying need to be rescued out of their first world problems and it’s not as if I haven’t been there myself because I have.
Those are the kind of thoughts I was having at
the end of the evening. It made me wonder if maybe I couldn't benefit from a little
Ayahuasca intervention so I might discover, Yes and thank you, why that sort of thing really
irks me more than it should.
When I left the
play, my friend looked at me and said, "That guy, the doctor, he has a lot of
anger. I feel agitated," she said and we continued on to the corner of main
and Hastings where we saw three or four cops in the middle of a take-down and
my friend, who has an anxiety disorder, insisted we get on the wrong bus
just to get away.
"It's all bullshit," she said. "People looking for a quick fix
and there isn’t one and it's only when you've been through hell and back and done the work that you know that."
When you’ve become really attuned to others' feelings because
you've had to become attuned to your own because there was a time when you were more removed from them than the Grand Canyon is long and wide, then you can see other people's bullshit. The lies they are telling themselves become so obvious because their body language is betraying them. And then you can see false prophets as if you are an astronaut on the space shuttle looking back at earth shocked by a huge clearcut or like you’re
reading a new adult version of the Emporer’s New Clothes.
You want nothing to do
with anything that isn’t about you finding your own inner strength, not expecting
external sources to rescue you, not even
from some doctor who thinks he has all the answers even though he thinks he’s fooling some people by
saying, out loud, that he doesn't.
PS: Kudos to the guy
who wrote and performed the play. It took a lot of guts. There's no need for the doctor in the house, except for ticket sales. Maybe.