The Search Party

Touch Here To Support Me

As an American girl raised in the 1970s, my rite of passage into womanhood was marked not by sacrament but by two seminal grocery-store purchases: Tickle roll-on deodorant and bubblegum Kissing Potion lip gloss—also with a roll-on applicator. Femininity, I would learn, came with many types of applicators.

The Catholic Church we attended had its own rituals, but they never stirred me the way the Tickle ads did. Sunday Mass was where I perfected my quarter tricks while waiting for the collection basket. The meaninglessness of it all left me restless; even my mother’s side-eye glare couldn’t keep me still in the pew.

Rites and rituals are meant to create rhythm, belonging, and—if you’re unusually attuned (I was not)—a sense of the sacred. To me, church meant obedience, repetition, and boredom. I stopped going once I left my mother’s house. And yet something in me stayed hollow where Catholic ritual had once lived. That hollowness, I suspect, made me prone to mistaking self-improvement for devotion, and self-optimization for spiritual longing. By midlife, I was scavenging for meaning wherever I could find it.

Which is how I ended up in Costa Rica—under a moonlit sky, dressed in white linen, gripping a plastic vomit bucket.

White linen is a risky wardrobe choice for a ceremony known to empty your innards from every available exit. But that’s what we were told to wear in the name of purity—we, the mostly white, affluent seekers from around the globe. Winding along the dark jungle footpath toward the studio where the medicine circle would take place, we looked like a flock of angels with backpacks for wings.

The night air was thick enough to taste. Howler monkeys called from the trees, the sound landing in the chest before the ear. My senses were already scrambled before the psychedelic brew, ayahuasca—referred to as Grandmother—was even introduced.

Our teacher, Taita Luis, a medicine man born in the Condagua Indigenous reservation in the Colombian Putumayo, sat at the front of the room on a low platform—though the room was so dark and thick with smoke, I could only make out his brightly colored feather headdress. The burning herbs were meant to cleanse us, like the sweet herb steam baths that morning, but their acrid smell bit the back of my throat like burning plastic.

More than a dozen apprentices moved with ceremonial seriousness around him: spooning, tapping, and blowing fine powders; tucking pinches of mambé between cheek and gum, coating their teeth in a green film; blowing rapé snuff up their nostrils through V-shaped pipes; strumming instruments; singing; circling the room with smoke. They helped people settle into their spots with mat, blanket, cushion, and bucket. The buckets seemed a bit small to me, but what did I know.

When the room finally stilled, a young apprentice named Aaron translated for the Taita. He spoke of Grandmother as a spirit and teacher. “Trust that you will receive the experience meant for you,” he reassured. Under the guardianship of Taita Luis, he said, our ceremony would honor the cultural and spiritual practices of his community—the plants selected and combined in ways passed down through generations.

Songs were chanted as we drank the mud-like brew poured from a blue plastic pitcher into small disposable cups. It smelled like iron and coated my tongue with a bitterness beyond imagination. I chased it with water to no avail.

I lay quietly on my mat, waiting for the effects to come on. Purging is considered an essential part of the ceremony, a physical and spiritual cleansing. The first retching began at the far end of the room and passed through us like contagion. We’d been encouraged to delay the purge, so I hummed softly and tried to ignore my churning stomach. When I finally surrendered, my body folded over itself, vomiting until there was nothing left. Still, there was no relief.

When we were called forward to receive a blessing from the Taita, I found it hard to stand, so I crawled to the foot of his platform. The crowded air was heavy and fetid, burning my sinuses. A woman wailed. Someone laughed. Another called for help. The apprentices moved in circles, tending.

The Taita placed his palms on my head and chanted softly in a language I couldn’t understand. Even if I did, what words could possibly transmit thousands of years of inherited ancestral knowledge? What is the value of rites and rituals whose meanings are mostly lost on us? We can listen to the chants and drums, but do we actually hear them?

Before the question could settle, an assistant leaned in and spat floral water down the length of my body. Another tapped my back, arms, and legs with a long stem of stinging nettles.

Dizzy and stunned, skin aflame and mottled, I dropped back onto my mat and watched the ceiling fans turn. I was there and somewhere else. Awake and asleep. Outside, the sounds of insects pressed in, merging with the instruments, chanting, vomiting, whispering, and voices calling out in the dark.

Behind my eyes, images ran in bright, flat colors: a row of motorcycle helmets, red with white stripes; a blue sky behind a chain-link fence; cotton-candy-pink fingernails. As disoriented as I was, some part of me registered the absurdity, as if my mind had staged its own pop-art exhibit in the rainforest. This can’t be all there is, I thought woozily. But there didn’t seem to be any revelation waiting behind the chain-link fence. No message, no thesis. And maybe that was the point: stop trying.

As philosopher Alan Watts said, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” Lying there, I wondered what message I thought I was owed—and how many ceremonies, retreats, therapies, and rituals I had used as long-distance calls to something I imagined lived elsewhere.

The next day, listening to others describe grieving past lives, receiving surgery from geometric shapes, and pruning their soul’s tree, I felt deflated, like I’d missed out. My flat pop-art visions seemed embarrassingly pedestrian. But later I wondered if Grandmother had been pointing to something simpler: that much of what we call “reality” is really just the projection of a longing we don’t yet trust.

On the final day of the retreat, while everyone else lounged on the beach, I slipped into a breathwork class run by another group using the facility—a session not meant for us but enthusiastically recommended by a woman I’d met in the cafeteria line. Breathwork, I’d heard, could induce altered states of consciousness. Compared to ayahuasca, it seemed almost laughably simple.

When I arrived, mostly women and a few men lay on mats facing three massive speakers. The instructor, Sheila, moved with effortless calm. “Think of breathwork like riding a bicycle,” she said. “You can pedal faster or slower—or just coast. Don’t strain. Breathe until your breath surprises you.” Surprise was not something I associated with breathing—unless you count birthing babies.

The music began with low drums. Sheila coached us into rapid, rhythmic breaths. I followed until the tempo pushed me offbeat. Drums shifted to techno, the volume rising like a rave. Coast, I reminded myself. But the music pulled me in. My fingers tingled. My chest vibrated. My hands curled into rigid claws I couldn’t uncurl. My legs went numb. I was dumbfounded.

Then the music shifted to a boys’ choir—airy, helium-light. My chest lifted involuntarily. Somewhere in the room, a woman began to sob. Another joined. Soon the room vibrated with a rising, braided wail. Their grief opened something in me before I could think. I cried for reasons I couldn’t name, for stories I hadn’t told, perhaps hadn’t even lived. My grief folded into theirs, indistinguishable, as if we were grains of sand pulled by the same tide.

An operatic swell guided us back to slower breath. Sensation returned to my arms; my hands unspooled, reaching toward the far side of the room. For a moment I felt my hand extend beyond the mat, out the window, onto a nearby branch, disappearing into its furthest leaves. The boundary between me and the world dissolved.

A quiet, spacious calm followed. It settled through me in a way the ceremony had not allowed.

When I finally opened my eyes, the room was empty except for Sheila, seated cross-legged at the front, watching me with a knowing smile. I rolled onto my belly, astonished, my face still wet with tears and snot.

“Welcome to breathwork,” she said, with the faint smile of someone who has watched this small, predictable miracle unfold again and again.

A loud, sudden laugh burst out of me, cracking the quiet. I had flown three thousand miles, crossed cultures, and swallowed mud looking for insight, only to find that something just as potent was waiting in the simplest, most domestic place: my own body.

No brew. No buckets. Just breath.

I love you.

Juliette

Touch Here To Support Me