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Soul Retrieval – Dr Alberto Villoldo

Last night, I survived the ayahuasca ceremony, but only by the skin of my teeth. If I never do this again, it will be too soon. The old man kept telling me that the funny thing about death is that we all survive it.

I felt like my brain was stuck in a crack in the wooden floor most of the night, while I observed my body rotting, the skin peeling off in strips, until l was pared down to raw bone - white,  glistening bone - with my brain in between the floorboards. Then all I could see was my skeletal form and images of someone I recognized as myself in Greece, in Pompeii, and in the American Civil War. All different people, but all me - and all being speared, lanced, shot, bayoneted, and left to die a thousand deaths.

"These are the stories that live within you," the old man told me this morning. "Only by knowing all the ways you have lived and died do you exorcise the death that lives inside you”