Deep in the middle of nowhere in a Oaxacan Valley. All photos taken by Mery Cahojova.

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‍Introduction & Disclaimer

In March 2021, I sat for a peyote ceremony with Wixárika (or Huichol) shamans in a valley in Oaxaca, Mexico. Taking peyote was an awe-inspiring experience, even if it was challenging emotionally, physically, and spiritually for many reasons, which I’ll get into. The purpose of this piece is to share my experience of it with you so that if you are considering taking peyote, you might have an idea of what to expect and be better prepared than we were.

That being said, I am from Europe, and I am writing this piece in English about a cultural institution that is not my own. I do not claim to be an expert on the practices of any indigenous americans who have used peyote for thousands of years. The details of this piece are subject to change if I learn new information. So, let’s dig in!‍

What is peyote?

Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small, spineless cactus that contains psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline, which is a strong hallucinogenic. It’s a Spanish word derived from the Nahuatl word “peyōtl,” meaning “caterpillar cocoon.” It’s been used by indigenous cultures throughout North America, including Central and Northern Mexico, for over 5,500 years.

The peyote we took was made into a cinnamon-colored powder. This powder was steeped in hot water for some time on a fire before we drank it as a gritty tea (at least they offered us honey to sweeten it).

Beyond Mexico, Peyote is important in many indigenous cultures, including the Lakota, the Comanche people from the Southern Plains, the Navajo Nation (Diné people), and followers of the modern Native American Church. The Native American Church, also known as the Peyote Religion, combines elements of indigenous practices and Christianity, and it is practiced in many places including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Canada. Their ceremonies are often held in tipis, whereas the Wixárika ceremony I attended took place outside. In the United States, Native Americans faced the threat of persecution for their peyote meetings until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978. While the Wixárika people in Mexico can be open to tourists taking part in their peyote ceremonies, the Native American Church of North America only allows Native Americans with tribal membership cards and a certain level of native blood to attend theirs.

Who were the peyote shamans?

Our shamans were a small family of Wixárika, or Huichol, people who originate from the state of San Luis Potosí in Central Mexico. Today, the Wixárika mostly live in Jalisco and Nayarit, so I honestly have no idea what they were doing in Oaxaca. Still, what is fascinating about their history is they were some of the most resistant people to Spanish colonialization, especially when it came to resisting Western Catholicism and continuing to practice their way of life and their religion, of which peyote is an important part. I do not doubt that it is because of their strong resistance for hundreds of years that there are still mara'akame or shamans holding religious ceremonies that include the use of peyote today.

The peyote cactus itself, also known as “hikuri,” is one of the four major deities of the Wixárika religion, along with corn, Kayumarie (Tamautz Kauyumari or Blue Deer), and the Eagle, all descended from their Sun God. Hence the Blue Deer imagery we received on the flyer for the ceremony (see image). The type of hikuri ceremony I sat for is used by the Wixárika to communicate between the earthly and the divine worlds.

Where do they get the peyote?

The Wixárika collect the cactus every year on the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, their original homeland in the San Luis Potosí desert, Mexico, which is currently being threatened by a Canadian mining company, First Majestic Silver.

Where did the peyote ceremony take place?

We found out about the peyote ceremony accidentally after I asked my Mexican friend from Oaxaca City, whom I knew from university, if she had ever done ayahuasca (like the shameless tourist I was). I didn’t understand that we would be doing peyote instead of ayahuasca until we were driving in the middle of nowhere and had almost arrived at the ceremonial space. I wrote a much longer story of our whole peyote experience, which you can read about here.

The ceremony took place in a field in a gigantic valley about an hour outside of Oaxaca City. The scenery was vast, the sunset was golden and mesmerizing, and the great mountains in the distance looked like the curved hips of a woman’s body. We met the group on the side of the carretera (freeway) and then drove a further couple of miles into a deserted part of the valley. There was no leaving now! The valley was enormous, powerful, and beautifully lit by stars at night, but it was equally unforgiving when it came to the cold night air.

How did the peyote ceremony start?

Our peyote ceremony was a whole night-long affair. We arrived in a group of about ten people, and the others set up their sleeping bags around a campfire (we forgot ours). The shamans and the people helping them, including our guide, Maria, steeped the peyote tea and prepared offerings for the night’s festivities. The large campfire was at the center of the ceremonial campsite, as well as a dry toilet off to the side and a tent set up for where the Marakame (shaman), his father, his wife, and their five-year-old daughter would be camping out for the night alongside us. We were instructed to only walk around the fire in an anti-clockwise direction.

Maria assisted the shaman and instructed us not to hug or touch anyone else once we had taken the peyote. We were not allowed to speak while the shaman was speaking. Because of the intensity of the peyote, she said, we should focus on our own individual experiences.

As I mentioned, my two friends and I did not bring sleeping bags, which was a huge mistake. At that moment, I decided I would stay awake the whole night next to the fire to stay warm. At this point, the sun had set, and my friends and I were already starting to get cold. We arrived at the campsite at around 7:30 pm, and they didn’t start the campfire or the peyote ceremony until about 9 pm.

What other ceremonial preparations were there?

Before we drank the peyote, we had the option to do rapé, a powdered form of tobacco that you snort up your nose and which is supposed to make the peyote more intense. Maria and another woman helping her, Fernanda, came around the circle to each of us with a long, thin wooden pipe. They blew a bit of hot, spicy tobacco up my nose (not very hygienic or COVID-friendly at the time). They said that it was normal to vomit after both the peyote and rapé.

Doing rapé feels like getting water up your nose, except that it feels like a burning, firey powder that also burns your throat. My eyeball basically started watering and was soaking with tears immediately, like it was going to pop out of my head, and the entire left side of my face went numb. But I was ready. As soon as it happened, I ripped the hairband out of my hair and let my hair hang loose. I opened the buttons of my coat so I could breathe deeply and fully. This was the first part of opening myself up to the night and the experience.

Then, of course, before my eyeball had time to stop wincing and weeping, it was time for the other nostril. A shock to the system. My whole face was on fire, my right eyeball tearing up again. Maria again reminded me that it was normal to cry and vomit. I felt shaken but also kind of moved like I was being woken up from my resting state of normal life and being brought into what would be a crazy and exciting spiritual world. At this point, I felt ready for whatever the night was going to throw at me.

‍How do you receive the peyote?

To take the peyote itself, we each had to go up and receive a cup from the Marakame. I was nervous about doing it wrong because the instructions were in Spanish, but luckily, they started from the other side of the circle, so we could watch the rest of the group go first. One by one, each person got up and went around the circle anti-clockwise once. Then, they approached the shaman and his wife and sat down in front of them. The shaman blessed us by tapping us gently and intentionally with a stick with feathers on the end of it and chanting. I was offered honey in my peyote tea, and I asked for extra, hoping to make the powdered cactus as palatable as possible. I returned to my place by the fire, stirring my tea with a stick, not because it was hot but because all the gritty bits were stuck to the bottom.

The other people in our group started to vomit. They had finished drinking theirs, and I was struggling to drink mine without retching as I listened to the sound of them vomiting. That made me nervous because the rest of them had drunk their peyote just before us. Somehow, I managed to keep mine done. The peyote powder itself looked like light cinnamon, but the tea’s liquid also had green bits in it, which tasted like leaves. It didn’t taste like mint or spinach or anything. It was just kind of a gritty, leafy mixture. The bitter grittiness of the dirt was what made it so hard to drink. I couldn’t even taste the honey, though I wanted to. I just drank mine as quickly as possible to get through it.

What happened after you drank it?

After I drank the peyote, I didn’t feel anything for about an hour. We gathered around the fire in a circle. Maria and Fernanda gave each of us a piece of red string and a stick. The first exercise was to tie five knots into the string and think about five things we wanted the fire to provide for us, as we referred to the fire as “Grandfather Fire,” “Abuelo,” or “Fuego.”

I asked for a couple of things. I asked to be open to being surprised by what I was going to discover during the night. I asked to learn how to be less judgmental of other people. I wanted some guidance for my life. I also wanted to learn how to forgive others and myself. I liked the intentionality of tying the five knots. We then threw the sticks with the red strings into the fire so that it would come true.

For the rest of the night and the morning, i.e., the next 10 hours or so, all we did was sit around the fire in a circle, and as Maria encouraged us to do, we took turns to express whatever was on our minds. Sharing was optional, but you could also share whatever you felt called to say. This is where Maria’s role as the guide in the ceremony was so key. Even though I was struggling to understand her in Spanish, it was her guidance that basically made the difference between a random lsd trip in the forest with my friends and a deeper, meaningful, spiritual connection with my ancestors.

As each of us in the circle shared something, Maria would encourage us to say, “Aho” (pronounced a-ho, translates from indigenous languages as thank you or amen), basically setting it free. Or they would say, “Ometeotl.” The idea was to get rid of whatever pain you were feeling, kind of like an offering to the fire. We took it in turns, not necessarily in a circle. Whenever we felt called to, the group would encourage us to offer our pain to the fire and get rid of it.

The men in our group had all gone to sleep, including the shaman, so we were women-only around the circle, and the experience was very powerful. We also shared songs and I sang one of my favorites, Ojos Del Sol.

What was the role of the shaman?

Basically, we would share for a while, and then the shaman would wake up and come around the circle and bless each of us occasionally. It was a heartwarming and transformative experience. He would press on our hearts with one hand on our front, and one hand on our back and then also tap the stick and the feathers on the end of it on our forehead and, at times, across our chest.

For example, when I was crying a lot, the shaman and Maria came over and gave me extra special coals that they blessed me with. Throughout the night, I would see the shaman rub his hands and hold them, hovering above people’s backs or bodies or arms or hair. If they were experiencing a lot of emotions or pain, he would kind of pull the pain off their bodies.

What was funny was that at some point early in the night, the other older shaman had gone to sleep and was snoring loudly. The shaman’s wife and daughter had also disappeared and were sleeping in a tent. The shaman woke up to bless us and, after doing some chants, also went back to sleep.

What did it feel like to be on peyote?

I began to feel the peyote after our round of introductions sitting around the campfire. It felt like incredibly heavy heat throughout my body, in a painful, heartbreaking kind of way. There was some physical pain involved, but it mostly came from my head and my heart areas. I think this was the pain of the lost dreams of my ancestors, but it was all combined with different forms of pain across generations, so it was very intense.

I cried for hours and hours. When we each took turns to share, it was as if the rest of the circle was holding our energy; I felt the pain physically leaving my body.

While I started out speaking Spanish with the group, once the peyote started to hit me, I found it very hard to speak in anything other than English, my native language. We took turns translating for each other throughout the night. Each person will be dealing with their own demons. This was not going to be a happy-go-lucky runaround and frolic in the forest like I have had in previous psilocybin or psychedelic experiences.‍

What kind of things did you discuss and learn?

With Maria as our spiritual guide and Fernanda assisting her to keep the fire going all night, we each went deep into our life stories, our traumas, our pain, our family, and our past. Deaths, addictions, miscarriages, abortions, murders, and cancers. It all came up. People cried. People shared their struggles, addictions, and feelings of being lost. Sitting in front of the fire together, it felt like the group collectively held and processed the pain of each individual.

When Maria encouraged us to think of our ancestors, past and present, I was suddenly overwhelmed with pain, and I could barely breathe. Once I shared my full name with the group, Natasha Roísín Doherty, a lot of very moving things came up for me.

Firstly, my middle name means “Rose” in Irish Gaelic, a language that is almost extinct. I suddenly felt that I couldn’t connect with my ancestors because I didn’t speak their languages, Irish Gaelic and Yiddish. Because of this loss of language, I felt the pain of losing their customs, traditions, ideas, and stories.

I cried a lot because there was so much, specifically coming from my Irish family and possibly parts of my English family, too. Until this point in my life, I had felt like I was traveling alone throughout the world. But then I realized that everything that I was living was a culmination of all their lives. In their lives, they wanted to do many things that they had not been able to do. Maybe I was living out some of their dreams. Maybe they were just expressing to me how hard their lives had been. But they had wanted to do things:

• Perhaps be educated
• Perhaps learn to read
• Perhaps have their own thoughts
• Express these thoughts
• Perhaps be honest with the people closest to them in the world and their families

But for whatever reason, because of circumstance or religion, or their finances, or their husbands or wives or children or duties or access, they had not been able to. They had been stuck. They could not live their lives as they had wanted to. They could not realize their potential in whatever way that was. I felt all of that, and it was incredibly painful.

Specifically, I felt the pain of my female ancestors in needing to hold their tongue. And with that, they gave me a sense of duty. I felt their love, but it was kind of like a gentle finger-wagging. It was a small cautionary tale: don’t fuck this up, they said to me. Haha. Unlike them, I was alive. I had energy and life in me; I had everything at my fingertips, including education, the ability to travel and be independent, I had birth control, and the ability to learn new languages and connect with foreign people. I have no religion or responsibilities towards a family and not as many rules, for sure. And so, it felt like a bit of a finger wag. Then I laughed at this a lot. Don’t mess this up, they said.

In fact, while I had thought I was traveling through the world alone, I began to see myself as a vessel for life and energy. And when I had my own children, I would pass that energy on to them, and then my physical body would die. And it felt really nice to be surrounded and loved and comforted by my ancestors. I got a very strong sense that right now, each of us that is alive is the sharpest point in the spear. We are the pinnacle of the culmination of everything that our ancestors have lived through and experienced and survived before us, which is an astounding and incredible thing. And soon, we will no longer be the sharpest point in the spear. But we will have carried the energy forward, and we will have been grateful that we were able to live at all.

With this sense of duty, I now realized that I had all the tools I needed to write, express myself, and be honest. There is no point, it all said, for me to not tell the truth as I see it. I felt the need and the desire to write. I write so that I do not forget. If we can capture this information in our collective consciousness, not all will be lost. This is what I felt strongly from the Irish Gaelic side because they didn’t have enough money to write things down, and the history was, I think, a very oral tradition, which has since been lost. But then, from the Yiddish side, I saw my Jewish great-grandmother’s cat eyeglasses. From her side of the family, I got the scholarly nature of what the Jews were doing and how the Jews wrote things down and kept the traditions alive, and so, in this sense, they were not suffering from as much a collective loss as my Irish ancestors. So, the Jewish side of me was giving me the pen, and the Irish and English side of me was giving me the need to express myself honestly. And my goal was to write honestly, from my perspective, so that I would not forget.

Many people in our group shared how concerned they were about the environment and how much they felt the pain of the earth. As the night went on, we stopped translating as much. Language didn’t really seem to matter; as long as we were sitting around the fire and listening to each other’s pain, that was all that mattered. Each person also shared love and blessings for their family.

One word I learned was “jardinería,” which translates directly into English as “gardening,” but it has a slightly different meaning. If a word ends in “ería,” it's more about the process of creation or preparation of some kind. For example, “panadería” means bakery, but it includes the process of baking bread. So basically, the word “jardinería” has what “gardening” doesn’t: the idea that you are growing food to eat, and that closes the loop between the human systems and the natural systems. So I brought this up with the group, that this could offer us new ways to reconnect with the natural environment and that we can continue to discover new ways to fit these humans and natural systems together, as we were all feeling the collective loss of our ancestors, our natural habitats around the world, and really the languages and traditional aspects of culture that help us feel connected and that tell us who we are.

I also began to think that wealth was not keeping track of how much money I had but how much money and gifts I had given away. I realized I had felt the most joy when I gave money away and performed random acts of kindness or gave gifts.

I thought a lot about colonial languages, and that’s when I realized that with colonial things, it's either that you die or you adapt to become the colonizer when you are colonized yourself. It fascinated me that the ceremony was largely in Spanish and English, the language of colonizers. In terms of the survival of my Irish and Jewish ancestors, I have come to believe that because of the hegemonic nature of things, you must colonize or be colonized in order to survive. The English colonized the Irish, and there is no single monolingual speaker of Irish Gaelic in the world today.

At one point, Maria directed us to look into the fire and describe what we saw. I remember seeing myself, kind of like a hooligan woman with long hair, running through a huge field, and the ashes I was running on had all the messages and words and languages of my ancestors, which was my foundation. At first, I thought that I was just running through a field, but then I realized that the flames of the fire itself symbolized the fact that the world was on fire. I was running through the world while it was on fire. So that was interesting.

I also realized that I was done with my family squabbling over some property my grandfather had left in his will. I began to think that his apartment building was cursed ever since his new wife at the time had killed herself following his death. My mother and her siblings argued over the apartment building for many years, and now, not all of them speak to each other. I decided that my relationships with my family members were more important to me than any amount of money or material things. ‍

How did you get out of there?

After pouring out our hearts and pain and tears into the fire all night, finally, the sun began to rise. As the sun came up over the mountain, I was desperate to leave the field and get back to our hotel. I didn’t feel particularly hungry; I just wanted to be able to rest. It was 6 am, but we didn’t leave until around 11 am. We were relying on the other people in our group to take us back to the freeway in their car, and we had no other way to get out of there otherwise. When we finally got back to the highway, we took a public bus from Toluca and then a taxi back to the hotel. It was the classic case of being all sorts of exhausted, hungry, and filthy and not being sure of which need to tend to first.

How to prepare a peyote ceremony

Having gone through the experience, here are all my tips for how to prepare for a peyote ceremony, including the advice that our guides gave us. I hope you find this helpful:

• Don’t have sex, drink alcohol, or eat red meat for two days before the ceremony.
• Don’t take any antibiotics.
• Bring a lot of bedding, sleeping bags, and warm clothes because if your ceremony is anything like ours, you will be spending the entire night outside in a field, essentially camping under the stars. It will get very cold, so bring as many warm layers and things to sleep on as you can. You may not be able to sleep, but you definitely don’t want to be cold.
• Don’t eat before the ceremony. My friends ate esquites (corn on the cob) beforehand and felt nauseous for most of the ceremony, and the peyote didn’t have as much of an effect. You will not feel hungry once you start to feel the peyote, and if you have anything in your stomach, you’ll want to throw it up.
• Bring a cup, a thermos, or some vessel you can drink the peyote tea out of. We learned this the hard way: We had to cut up a plastic bottle and use an old candle holder to craft glasses for the three of us.
• Try not to judge other people. Imagine that everyone is coming into the peyote circle with love and good intentions, no matter their background, beliefs, or nationality.
• Be respectful, aware of your surroundings, and quiet. In other words, read the room. Don’t take pictures during the ceremony. Be mindful of videoing or capturing the experience. This is a sacred medicine, and it’s important to respect the indigenous people who are inviting you to be a part of something very powerful and special. Behave during the entire time as if you are in a temple or sacred space, like a Christian church.
• Pro tip: if you remove your layers and expose your skin directly to a campfire, you’ll feel more heat and stay warmer for longer. To stay warm, get your bare skin as close to the flames as possible in a way that’s safe, obviously. The layers that you’re trying to use to keep you warm are getting in the way of your actual skin receiving full heat.
• Bring cash to tip your shamans and guides. While the touristic nature of the ceremony can make things feel a bit awkward, at the end of the day, your contributions are supporting the livelihoods of these indigenous people and ensuring they can continue to practice their religion and maintain their culture. Our peyote ceremony cost 1,500 pesos, about USD 75 at the time, and we tipped each of the guides about 500 pesos each.
• Get ready for it as you would any kind of psychedelic trip.

I hope you found this piece interesting and helpful. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any more questions, and good luck!