Sarah Haider
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sarah Haider’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That is what it's referring to. So ayahuasca evidently is so powerful, such a strong drug that you can one-shot yourself. You can take it once and then... lose the mind that you had previously entirely, or you can lose your ambition for whatever it is, whatever passion project that you pursued up until this point, you could decide to leave your life behind and go braid hair in Peru.
Yeah, I was seeing that discourse. I was seeing many people react to others around them having taken it and being alarmed by the extent of the changes they began to make in their life. So to me, it's strange because I was seeing a lot of evidence that this is possibly too dangerous of a thing to try. And I'm thinking, okay, then maybe it's worth doing.
So I'm going to try and just anonymize it, just a reasonable degree. But it was through a friend of a friend I found a connection to a ceremony. Now, you can find ceremonies online. There's these retreat centers that are primarily housed in Peru.
Yeah, it's legal in Peru. It's legal in, I think, a few other places under certain circumstances. So you can go and have like a 10-day retreat in Peru or a seven-day retreat. You purchase your ticket and you go there and go to the middle of the jungle, I presume, with a bunch of strangers. I found that concept to be very alarming.
I was always just afraid that I would end up in the hospital somehow. And then now I'm in a Peruvian hospital with no way to contact my family or limited ways of contacting my family. So that was kind of a nightmare scenario that I did not want to live in this life.
So I asked around if anybody had a connection and it just so happened that somebody brought it up without me bringing it up first at a dinner party. She and I were talking about autism. I was talking about how I think I'm a little bit on the spectrum and she said she's definitely on the spectrum and she is.
And she said that she recently did ayahuasca, went to a retreat, and it helped her connect with others, like normies, helped her connect with normies better. And I thought that was really interesting. And that opened up a new way of thinking about it for me as well.
Yeah.
And then did you say to them, oh, can you just, like, put me in touch with... Yeah, I said, can you let me know if there's a retreat that you can... get me in touch with. It's kind of a shady thing to do. I mean, not just because it's highly illegal, but also because you don't know these people. And this is an incredibly powerful substance.
So you're in this like very vulnerable state for five hours, six hours for every ceremony. And you might have more than one. In my retreat, there were three, but sometimes people have like five ceremonies throughout the course of their retreat. And And it's fascinating because every day you're a little bit more sensitized to the substance.
You are on a special diet with ayahuasca because evidently there are certain foods that can interact in a not pleasant way with the compounds in the brew itself. You're kept on this kind of very restricted diet. It really feels like you're not eating very much. You're not supposed to eat past a certain part of the day because ayahuasca makes you incredibly nauseous.
Many people purge, you know, what they call purging, but it's really you're just vomiting a lot. You're using the restroom a lot. So it's better if you don't eat too much. or eat it all actually after 1 p.m., 2 p.m. for a nighttime ceremony. So you're going through this day after day.
You're in this environment that sensitizes you to the drug more and more as each day passes because you're on this restricted diet. You're not sleeping very much. You hallucinate five to six hours each time. And so every next day is a more powerful experience.
So it's interesting because they talk about set and setting so much, and I try to prepare myself as much as possible for this experience. And the setting is very interesting with ayahuasca because it is approached very much with this kind of spiritual, shamanistic approach. really religious. It's a kind of a religious context. You have somebody there who is kind of like a shaman.
I don't know if there's like a more official word for it, but... I think sometimes they're called ayahuasqueros. That's not what the lady called herself. She called herself something else. I forget. What did she call herself? I forget exactly what she called herself, but I mean, I just knew her name. I called her by her name.
She was somebody who was educated on the medicine, which is what you call it. You call it the medicine, not a drug. She was educated on it. She's grown up with it. There are tribes in various parts of South America that really, I mean, it's part of their routine ayahuasca ceremonies. And they start participating in these ceremonies since they're kids, which is really interesting.
It's interesting that they seem normal as They don't have a lot of anxiety. They just seem like normal, happy people, I guess. And yeah, so she was conducting the ceremony. She was also taking it with us, which I did not realize she would be doing. But she takes the plant. She offers you one cup and then you can take more as the night progresses.
She gave us two more opportunities to take more ayahuasca if we felt as if we weren't where we wanted to be that evening. Yeah. And there's this chanting going on in the background. It's incredibly dark. There are no lights on, just like a candle or two.
So this environment was, if you can imagine being on any kind of psychedelic and being in that kind of environment, it could be maybe a little bit disturbing. In this case, it was like the most powerful, one of the most powerful psychedelics around.
Very anxious, yeah.
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