"How deep do you want to go?" the facilitator asked as I knelt before a candlelit altar. It was reckless to choose a depth in an ocean I’d never seen, but I aimed for the bottom. "Very deep," I said—a flash of bravado I would soon regret.
I’d arrived hours earlier at a riverside Airbnb that badly needed a second bathroom. Six of us surrendered our phones and settled into a single common room. Our hosts—Neela and Asher, names I’ll use here for privacy—seemed entirely free of the low-level anxiety that hums through most people. They referred to the space as the “container,” a place meant to hold whatever unfolded. I sat in the dark, waiting for the effects to begin, listening as my new companions vomited one by one.
Neela and Asher led a healing community wrapped in a mystical framework that blended ritual and psychology. It was an eclectic mix of ancient religion, nature worship, and self-help, allowing them to treat the brew as a sacrament—to assert that their practice was a protected spiritual rite, not the distribution of Schedule I contraband. I was fully onboard with their self-made faith; this was serious self-work, not just tripping in the woods by the river.
As the day progressed, we socialized in brief bursts but mostly kept to ourselves. I spent the time walking and thinking, and my hand kept reaching for a phone that wasn’t there. Without digital distractions, I was left alone with my restless mental machinery, its gears spinning uselessly, its only soundtrack the hissing of daytime tinnitus I rarely noticed.
The ceremony finally began around 8 PM. We had changed into our ceremonial clothes—basically light-colored pajamas or whatever felt comfortable—and gathered in a circle on mats we’d set up using sheets and pillows from home. Some people were partially wrapped in blankets, and someone had a plush toy that rested faithfully beside them. The goal was to feel as warm, cozy, and safe as possible.
After discussing logistics, we moved into the ritual itself. One by one, we stated our intention, framed as a direct invitation to the spirit of the medicine. Then we chanted while Asher alternated between a small keyboard and a nylon-stringed guitar.
Then it was time. The ceremony hinged on Acacia, referred to as “Sacred” Acacia, but we would not drink it yet. For the brew’s DMT to produce a lasting psychedelic effect, its biological pathway had to be cleared—the role of another plant, Syrian Rue. When my turn came, I approached the altar, knelt, and was handed the small capsules. After swallowing them, we passed the time with yoga-like movements as we waited for digestion. Later, when the second phase began and true darkness had settled, I returned to the altar to drink the Acacia. Holding the cup, I tried to open myself to its guidance, and then tossed it back. It was bitter and earthy, like burnt wine left in the sun—just nasty.
By the time everyone had taken their dose, the room was pitch black. No candles, no lamps, just darkness. The front door was left wide open, letting in the sound of the river and cool gusts of wind. Each person had a bucket beside them in case they needed to vomit. The guides called this "The Sacred Purge," a cleansing to bring immense relief. Waiting for it was difficult. The first heave into a plastic bucket shattered the ceremony’s spiritual framing. It was just raw and jarring.
Then someone else purged, then another. My stomach felt queasy, though I never needed my bucket. I wondered if I was immune; maybe nothing would happen. A part of me hoped so. I told myself that would be fine, because at that point, I was scared and second-guessed everything. I found myself fixated on a point of discomfort, wondering why we sat on the floor instead of comfy recliners. On the brink of a psychic odyssey, all I could think of was ergonomics. I was failing at this.
Then came a flicker — maybe a numb lip, maybe a faint flash of light. If the effects were real, they were whispers. My fear eased and I made peace with the mildness: I had a fun story, no regrets; a quiet, rational trade with the universe, a way to hold on to control.
That was the last solid thought I had before the ground fell away.
Suddenly I was inside my own brain, watching thoughts resolve like rows in a database query. They searched for relationships, ran subqueries, spooling outcomes. Then the view shifted—I was above it all, watching through glass. It was tedious and deeply unsettling. I felt imprisoned, forced to witness the raw mechanics of my mind.
My other memories from that time are fragmented and dreamlike. I remember feeling like I was lying inside machines, watching mechanical parts from above. There were geometric visions—shapes moving, me moving inside them. At one point I was flying, but it wasn’t fun. It was terrifying, like I didn’t belong and could fall at any moment. Time sped up, then slowed to a crawl, and finally, slowed even more, painfully.
Not everything was awful. I don’t remember much clearly, and I don’t want to exaggerate by trying to force the memories, but I know I laughed some, then cried, then laughed again. Sometimes I would hear Asher’s soft arpeggios from across the room.
It was then, in that space of vulnerability, that I truly grasped the expertise of Neela and Asher. Their professionalism wasn't a matter of credentials, but of action—a living current they generated to hold us all safely in the chaos. Sometimes it was Neela's whispered reassurance, and at other times, it was Asher's hand gently resting on my arm, a silent, grounding presence until a wave of terror passed. In a state where reality felt tenuous, their combined presence was a lifeline, a steady force reminding me that the world was still there and I could return.
A moment of stillness found me as my vision settled on a houseplant perched on a high ledge, its leaves a stark, peaceful silhouette against the soft moonlight my eyes had grown accustomed to. Later, someone helped me onto the porch and I lounged on a cushy sofa. One of the house cats was outside too, and I was convinced we shared a silent moment of connection. In reality, he probably just saw another wide-eyed weirdo who’d driven up from Portland. It wasn’t his first ceremony.
The others came out of their journeys around 2 AM, when the ceremony officially ended, and moved to the next room for vegan soup, still in silence. But my journey didn't end until after 6 AM. When I finally came down, my body felt hollowed out, my mind scraped clean. It amazes me how little I remember, yet how endless it felt.
The next day unfolded much like the first. While others processed in scenic vignettes—noodling on a guitar, journaling, lying nude on a sun-drenched river rock—my own integration was far less picturesque. Stripped of my headphones—and all the usual tools I used to structure my thoughts—my mind had no external scaffolding to hold onto. I was simply adrift in the tangled mess I'd just been shown. It was a relief, then, whenever a few of us came together to talk, a chance to give voice to the bizarre journeys. Our conversations often drifted into a kind of gentle armchair psychology, with all of us trying to diagnose what “Grandmother Acacia” had been trying to tell us.
The second night, I asked for a “very mild” journey. It was easier—still uneasy, still hallucinatory, but with more awareness. The experience was less like being strapped to a runaway train and more like standing on a platform, close enough to feel its rush but not carried off by it. I could watch the geometric patterns without dissolving into them, and the fear that had ruled the night before gave way to a tentative trust in the medicine and the space. I wasn’t as afraid of getting stuck in some other dimension.
What had first felt like surreal hallucination turned diagnostic the second night. The endless subqueries exposed the cycle draining me. The visions of machines revealed the code beneath it all—rigid, outdated systems still running on the false premise that I had something to prove.
There’s a quiet solidity in surrendering to the strangeness of the Container. It wasn’t trust in the process so much as trust in my own resilience. The trip didn’t fix me or hand me a map; it only drew back the curtain to show the machinery of my mind. I learned you can’t debug a system while it’s still running; you have to be willing to step into the weird to see the raw mechanics. I never touched the ocean floor, but I did find the currents beneath—and for the first time, I knew which way they moved.
