Spiritual Awakening with Ayahuasca! With Hamilton Souther

Hamilton Souther 0:00

But the first time I met God in Ayahuasca was, I think, one of the most powerful moments for me. And I was calling into the darkness, God, God, God, over and over again. And this very clear voice, what I consider to be the voice of God, and it just said yes, and then exclaiming to God in a very youthful and innocent way, like, Where have you been? What happened in that moment was a series of visions through everything that had happened in my life, every difficult moment and where God had been invisible to me, God now was revealed.

Jannecke Øinæs 0:42

Hello, Hamilton, a warm welcome back to the show.

Hamilton Souther 0:45

Hi. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me back.

Jannecke Øinæs 0:49

I'm excited to have you back. I interviewed you back in 2020 and a lot has happened since then, and you are a master shaman with over 20 years of experience. Now you have your own academy and Mystery School, and you're helping people really transform from within in this plant medicine Renaissance. I think you called it and being a plant medicine experiencer myself, I am very curious and interested in this topic, and I know that it also started for you through these mystical experiences, that you actually didn't have a lot of spiritual experience. You were, I think, sort of an atheist, and then life or spirit one is a different path for you. So I'd love for you to share how you got into ayahuasca and the spiritual journey in the first place.

Hamilton Souther 1:45

Sure, in my early 20s, I had come to this place in my life where I wasn't sure where to go or what I was interested in, and my mom said, Well, if you don't want your life anymore, just give it back to spirit. And I didn't have much of a spiritual background, and it was, like, a big, I don't know, kind of watershed moment, like, okay, fine, I'll give my life back to spirit. So I did, and I really meant it when I did it, I just gave my life back to spirit, like, not in a specific direction or to a specific thing, just, well, spirit, you can have my life, and at that moment, it was like a moment of deep truth inside of me and just a deep feeling of compassion. And I felt kind of a release, emotional release. But then I started to have visions within 24 hours of that moment that I had never had before. And the visions were very clear, and they sent me on a path. And at that time, I talked to a shaman and I talked to a psychotherapist to try to figure out what was happening, and both told me I actually had to go follow the visions and go see where they would lead me. And they led me, in less than six months, to the Amazon and ultimately to my teachers and a traditional apprenticeship in ayahuasca and plant medicine practices mysticism and healing down here in the Amazon. And I've been here for the last 22 years now.

Jannecke Øinæs 3:13

When you say I had visions, I've heard of visions. I can imagine how a vision is, but I've never experienced it myself. So how does a vision happen? And how do you know that it's actually something real and not your mind playing tricks on you?

Hamilton Souther 3:31

That's a great question. I think most people have had visions. They just don't know how to relate to them, and so some people have had dreams that are a little bit visionary, or they kind of think they see something in the future that happens similar to the way that they dream it. Or a lot of people will walk into a house and feel a presence like, you know, they feel like they're not alone in that space, and often they just brush it off. I think the difference for me at that time was that kind of experience was just very intense. So I felt presences that were there. And instead of them going away, I just continued to feel them there. And then it was very important for me to test. I needed to, like, really test this and see if there is any truth behind it, or if I was just making it up. And so I just did test after test to get corroboration and understanding, like one of those presences I could see very clearly in my mind's eye, and I described that person to my mom, and it turned out to be a person my mom knew that I never knew. She knew exactly who it was based on the description, she knew everything about that person, and so I just kept looking for corroboration, and that's what ultimately convinced me that the experiences I were having were true. And sometimes I would demand that I would be given some kind of, like deep clarity about it. So for instance, when I was sent to go to Peru, I didn't know where I was going or how, or anything like that, and I was told directly where to buy the ticket at what. Time to buy the ticket, the cost of the ticket before it happened. And when I went to go look on the website, there were the tickets. There were exactly everything the way I was shown.

Jannecke Øinæs 5:10

Now I assume that many are thinking now that I want that kind of instructions, like where to buy things and what to do with my life. And you said that you gave your life to spirit. What does that mean even?

Hamilton Souther 5:25

Well, I think it's a transcendence of a kind of ego and ownership of yourself and your life, to where you recognize that there's something much bigger going on with the world and being alive, and most people treat it as their life like this is my life, not this is spirit's life, and spirit can flow through me and guide me. And so because of that, their ego stands in the way of being able to hear that kind of connection or being guided in that way. For me at that time, because I didn't really want to live my life anymore in the way that I was living it, I let that part of myself go and I, instead of thinking I would know what to do, I started to listen to what I thought of as great spirit, which to me, is the great force that is governing the whole universe. And so I think if you open up to that level and really mean it from the heart, you have a shift in consciousness that allows that kind of guidance to be there for anybody.

Jannecke Øinæs 6:24

Maybe our paths are different, because I feel like I've tried that to surrender and, you know, guide me, and then I'm listening, and I still feel like that ego voice is like, I want to do this, or I want to do that, and then, like, maybe I'm not sincere enough or and then I'm thinking, Okay, can I use willpower to do this surrendering? Or does it just happen? And maybe, for some it happens when you are in the midst of really difficult things, that that's when the real surrendering happens. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts, if you can use willpower when surrendering.

Hamilton Souther 7:09

Actually, I think willpower is the opposite of the kind of surrender. We can use will to force certain situations, but I think it's more like you go into a really deep meditation or a trance. You can use ecstatic dance, you can use breath work, and then you just have to really listen through that chaotic ego mind that thinks it wants to do things and thinks it wants to choose its own direction. And instead, you have to reorient that to listen and listen really deeply, to hear through that kind of static, deeper direction, or through your own fears, to find a deeper direction in that and then actually decide to follow it and see what happens. So you know where I lived here in the Amazon before. Now, everyone has cell phones. They don't need it. We would have to find people and not know where they are. And we would use spirit to find people. So you would, you know, put in mourning in your intention a person that you'd have to meet, and you would just go through your day listening to where you needed to go to meet them. And pretty soon you would see them on a street corner, or they would be at a store, and you would cross paths. And so it's more like that, I think, that you just, you know, surrender to the fact that there's something guiding this, and ultimately, listen for it, and train yourself to be able to follow that, that voice,

Jannecke Øinæs 8:29

I'm still curious of the great shift you had from not believing in this and to go to Peru following these instructions. And you've said a little bit that, you know, I put it to tests and stuff like that, but were there doubt along the way? And could you also share a bit about how these mystical experiences started really to become so real that this became your new reality in your life?

Hamilton Souther 8:59

Well, the the tests that I did were, like really specific, so that I could have, you know, an understanding of what was happening. It was a transition, and there was a lot of doubts and a lot of fears along the way. I think that'd be natural for anybody going through that kind of awakening. I now think of it just as, like a pretty traditional awakening experience that I think lots of people have had, and it just comes at different times in people's lives. And I think sadly for a lot of people, they have it at the end of their life. It's when all of this starts to become real. You hear of lots of people at end of life or in near death experiences, saying that they saw their ancestors and people came for them, and they start talking to people that aren't there, that other people aren't seeing in the room. But you know, it seems like something opens up for them, and so I think that's what was happening for me at that time. And to give you an example of how I got through those doubts and fears, I would have, these just unexplainable experiences that would happen at the time that I needed them, like I. Was really scared one time about what was happening. I wasn't sleeping well. I was, you know, very tired. And I met somebody randomly, and the person looked at me strange and said, How have you been sleeping? And I just said, you know, I don't know if you believe in this, but not well because of having these visions. And she said, Oh, well, I have a book for you. I was told I had to bring this book for you today. And she hands me this book, and I opened the book, and I started reading it that night. And as I was reading it, I realized, kind of like a cold shiver through me, that the introduction to the book was describing exactly the kinds of experiences I was having. And through the first three chapters of the book, it described every kind of aspect to the awakening experience I had. And it was a book by someone describing their initiation into a shamanic tradition. And so that's kind of what sent me in the direction of shamanism as a way to explain and understand what I was experiencing. Because I would have these corroborative moments, or before going to Peru and just through a meditation, do, like a trance theta meditation, I asked if I could meet one of the people that I was going to meet in Peru so I could know I was on my path. Because I said, like, how am I supposed to know where to go? And the understanding that came through in the vision was, well, just, you know, go like a backpacker and just backpack around, and we'll tell you where to go every day, and, you know, just go like that. And so I asked, Well, can I meet somebody? And in the vision, it was a meditation, you could say you made it up. You could say you didn't make it up. It's entirely how your interpretation. But a spirit guide of mine, which was a Pegasus, flew to me. I got on the back of the Pegasus, and we flew up to this cloud. And then in a couple minutes later, on the cloud came this Andean looking gentleman who is, you know, dressed in traditional Andean clothing. And he just said to me, in that time, brother, I'll see you in six weeks. That was all he said, Brother, I'll see you in six weeks. And he took off, and then I ended up in Peru six weeks later, and on my second day in Peru, I met the guy. I don't have any other better way to explain it. And when he when we met, we started to talk, and he looked at me, and he's kind of smiled, and he said, so six weeks ago? And I go, yeah. And he goes, brother, we'll meet in six weeks. And it was just like that. It's, it was very both magical and amazing at that time, but also very matter of fact. And so it was those moments that got me through the fear and got me through all the doubts as I started to listen to this kind of higher guidance.

Jannecke Øinæs 12:36

So there you are in Peru, and then you were introduced to Ayahuasca. What happened in your Ayahuasca experience, and why did you decide to do Ayahuasca?

Hamilton Souther 12:50

Well, I decided to do Ayahuasca. It seemed like it was part of my path, and also out of curiosity, I had heard a very small amount about it, just from a couple of people, and I knew it was a plant that could help you find vision. And it was so sort of something that I was looking for, and I kept being guided in this journey to find my apprenticeship. There I'd had a vision in a San Pedro ceremony where I was ended up in the Amazon in this kind of like glorious sunset. So I just needed to go and see and I wanted to see the Amazon for what it was. I didn't think that's where I would ultimately end up by that point in my journey. I didn't think much of anything I had, kind of had a lull in feeling guided and directed, and I was just going along. And in my first Ayahuasca ceremony, we drank Ayahuasca. I thought in the first, you know, 1015, minutes, it felt like home. It felt like the right thing. It felt like I was in the right place. Everything felt perfect. And then it started to get strong, and then it didn't feel that way anymore. And I purged heavily. I threw up many times I had incredibly chaotic thinking. I thought I was going to die many, many times I thought I had been poisoned, and I was just reacting to the fact that I had drunk ayahuasca, and I was very scared. And little by little, i i It felt like being torn apart into tiny little bits of light. And as that happened, a kind of life review of everything that had ever happened in my life down to almost like a nanosecond, all happening at the same time, like 50 or 100 flashing strobe lights. And in that flashing light, these little bits of my life and I had to reconcile every single aspect of my life, and it happened over and over and over and over again, over the course of hours, and I remember looking up and seeing bushes that had turned into animals that were talking to me and huge, 30 foot wingspan hummingbirds in the trees that were rainbows and explosions. Doing rainbows, and it was a very difficult and very beautiful experience, and also incredibly terrifying. And when I thought I couldn't go on any longer, it'd been maybe four or five hours, and I was exhausted and covered in sweat, and I thought I was, you know, now, going to die from just pure exhaustion, the shaman came over to me, and he blew smoke over me as mapacho smoked this tobacco smoke, and I thought it smelled so wretched and caught and caustic to me as I breathed in the second hand smoke. But then I felt this like invisible set of hands first collapsed my stomach and then collapsed my esophagus, almost like trying to walk something out of my throat and gelatinous ball the size of about a lemon, a small lemon came out of my mouth. It was physical in size. It had constitution, and it glowed and pulsated and stayed that way for about a minute or two before it oozed into the ground. And when that came out of me, all my depression, all of my pain and suffering from my past, everything about me left. It was just gone. It was it had been completely liberated, and all the scary aspects of the experience turned into light, and all the what seemed like dark beings all left, and all these beautiful beings of light showed up, and it was filled with ancestors and angels and kind of this really glorious celebration. And in that moment, I was told, you found your apprenticeship. This is this is what you've come looking for. And I thought to myself that that was an impossibility. It sounded like the most audacious thing I had ever heard. I had barely survived the experience. And so my last thought in that process was just to ask, you know how? And they said, learn how to live here first. And so that started my journey. I got permission to live in that part of the forest, and was very remote. There were no inhabitants upriver from where I lived. So, you know, there was one family that lived downriver, and there was then upriver, there was just nobody. It was just forest. And so I first had to learn how to live there, and then my formal apprenticeship started about a year and three quarters later,

Jannecke Øinæs 17:23

wow, that was an intense first experience. Did you feel that you were sort of healed completely, or did you feel that you had to take a lot of other Ayahuasca sessions after that to heal, to peel the audience, so to say and that we are in a continuous healing process.

Hamilton Souther 17:45

Perhaps, yeah, healing is a an enigma and kind of a great mystery. I felt like what was healed in that moment had been healed forever, and it never came back. But what it showed me was that there was a lot more that was coming. And the nature of healing and peeling the onions very real, because as you shift in consciousness, the way you relate to everything changes. And so I think as you each each layer of the onion is like a big shift in consciousness, and then you relate to your entire past in a new way, and you realize there's lots of healing to do within that that can have similar themes that relate back to the past. And so it can feel like things aren't fully healed, even though, really you're just healing, you're still healing at a different level. And what you have to relate to in terms of that healing process, especially psychologically, is the life that you've lived. And so I don't think you're actually going back and having to reheal over and over and over again. I think you're actually reorienting your consciousness, and as you do so, you use similar themes to understand that process. And so it seems like it's over and over again, but it's a constant progression. And then that takes me to the idea that those things that happened in our lives that required the need for healing are continuous. It's the kind of interactions we have with other people, it's the conflicted dynamics in our family, it's the ever present need to grow in our lives, which requires us to move past certain blockages. And so I think we're on a continuous healing path, as we're also on a continuous learning path or thriving path, and it's kind of something that just goes hand in hand. And so I think you're always healing as you're learning and as you're you know, you continue to learn. You have experiences that ultimately need healing. I like to think of the healing journey now is functioning very much like an immune system that you don't have to wait to get healing. You can have a day that's a really tough day, and by the time you're you know, already in the end of the day, you've already healed. Most of it.

Jannecke Øinæs 19:49

Interesting perspective. I'd love to unpack what Ayahuasca is for those who are new to it. However, before that, I'm curious why there are so many. Different experiences with Ayahuasca, that some have these amazing healings where they heal, you know, they go to a therapist for 20 years, and then they go to one Ayahuasca session and they feel completely healed in a way. That's what they've said. I've heard they say on documentaries and stuff like that, and other people are like, I didn't notice anything. Nothing really happened. So it's this huge spectrum of experiences, and I find that so interesting. But again, I mean, our lives are individual, but still, why do you think that some are not experiencing anything and they really want to have a deep longing to change and transform.

Hamilton Souther 20:43

I think with the the ceremonies, first, it helps to have a series of ceremonies in a short period of time. So one off ceremonies, I think it's really hard to have everybody break through. So typically, you see down here a traditional treatment with Ayahuasca, when somebody's sick and they're going to get help from a healer who uses ayahuasca, they normally diagnose and then prescribe three ceremonies, and those three ceremonies will take place within a week or within a month, and so just depending on the kind of illness somebody has. So I think first of all, it's the need to have multiple ceremonies helps. Then there's a different thing, differentiation in the strength of ayahuasca and the way each person relates to it. And then there's blockages within somebody that's chemical, and depending on the kind of things they've been consuming and the way that their consciousness has shifted because of that, there's a cleansing process that somebody has to go through before they typically open up in that way, there's also a preparation. So, you know, some people need to have a preparation through their first few ceremonies to be able to get to that big breakthrough moment. And so you can't really compare one case to another. As a trained healer down here, you treat each person uniquely and individually, and you support them to fulfill their healing intentions. And so I think it's kind of a it's a very difficult process to compare between one person and another. And then also, people have heard so many stories now they contextualize the nature of those stories in their head, and they spend a lot of time wondering why they're not having the experience that somebody else had, when ultimately, I think they're having pretty similar experiences. It's just the way someone relates to it. And so I can give you an example. We had a person say that they didn't have any visions, and then when you talk to them, they said they shape shifted into an owl, flew with the owl, became a tree. After they were a tree, they became a dolphin, but in their mind, that had no meaning for them, so they didn't have any visions. And then you'll say to another person, did you have what did you see last night? And they'll say, nothing. And then you'll say, Well, did you see? The air become very dense and then become multi dimensional? And they say, Yeah. And you say, Well, did you see, you know, little faint geometric colors and patterns start to pulse with the rhythms. And they go, yeah. He said, Did you see that become complex sacred geometry? And they go, yeah. And then I say, so you had no visions? They go, nope, I had no vision. And so it's very hard to tease that out when it's coming from somebody who's relating the experience with very limited numbers of sessions. I found now, after 20 years of practice, that there's a sort of a range, and it's a very wide range of experiences. And if somebody has enough opportunity to participate, they'll ultimately find themselves within that whole range, from very intense experiences to very light experiences or very gentle experiences. And it just requires that many opportunities.

Jannecke Øinæs 23:50

Hi there. Since you have been watching this video for quite some time now, I assume that you like it, and maybe you've been watching some of my other videos, and if you appreciate them as well. And my show, please go and hit the subscribe button that really helps us to reach out with the videos. We put so much love and work into what we're doing to help to raise that collective consciousness. So be a co-creator. Subscribe to my channel. Thank you so much, and may you shine the light that you are. Thank you for sharing that. So let's unpack it a bit for those who are new to ayahuasca and wondering what we are speaking about now, what is it? How is it made, and what are the benefits of actually doing Ayahuasca?

Hamilton Souther 24:42

So Ayahuasca means vine of the soul, and it's a combination, traditionally, of two plants and then potentially a lot of admixtures. So it starts with just two core plants, the vine of ayahuasca and the leaves of the chakruna tree. And the combination is. Oiled into a tea. And there's different recipes. Every lineage has its own unique recipe of how to make this tea. Some are very gentle and light and very watery, and some are very thick, so thick that it's like cold honey. So you know, you can't even swallow it. You have to let it dissolve in your mouth. There's wide variety of preparations associated with this and the tea. It also happens to be a very, very strong medicine that is, for many people, quite visionary, and that comes from being a mixture of the alkaloids that are in the tea, mainly harmine and hormone and Dimethyltryptamine. And the combination of the harmine and hormone interrupts a natural enzyme in the stomach that breaks down Dimethyltryptamine before it's absorbed into the brain. Dimethyltryptamine is actually common in a lot of plants and a lot of other foods, and so when you you know if you would eat them and you would absorb Dimethyltryptamine, people would be basically having visionary experiences, or mild visionary experiences all the time. So our bodies evolved to break that down before we absorb it, and the hormone and hormone disrupts that process, which allows you to absorb the Dimethyltryptamine that goes into the brain, and then the hormone. And hormone serves another function, which is that it inhibits the uptake of the DMT, which normally is about 15 or 20 minutes. So it allows it to stay in the brain for much longer, anywhere from three to eight hours, typically. And so that gives somebody a much longer time to go into this altered state of consciousness caused by the combination of both the Ayahuasca ingredient and the chakra ingredient, and then that's when the Ayahuasca session, or healing ceremony, takes place. And so it's really simple in the sense that it's a tea. It's boiled for anywhere from three to six hours, up to two three days, depending on the lineage. And then it's considered a very sacred plant medicine. And it can produce this wide variety of experiences, from, as you said, people having very little recognizable experience to people having transcendental healing and communication with things that would otherwise seem impossible, like direct communion with the spirit world, direct communion with source or God, direct communion with an ability to understand the universe. Great spiritual awakenings and awakening process for themselves, the healing of trauma, the healing of childhood trauma, the healing of ancestral trauma, anxiety disorders, addiction, depression, and then this kind of transcendental ability to get beyond self imposed blockages, self sabotage, limited, limited creativity, etc. So it's just this incredible way to expand beyond our current state of consciousness. Have a deep spiritual connection and awakening experience healing necessary to allow for that. And there's a amazing correlation between our intentions and the outcome of the experience. So we can almost code, program or guide the experience with intention that we think of as a sacred communication between yourself and the universe and the outcome of the experience itself.

Jannecke Øinæs 28:42

Yeah, I find intentions very powerful, especially also I use it before I go to sleep at night and set intentions for my dreams. And I'm actually amazed by how I'm programming my mind to have certain dreams or to feel certain things in the morning. It's incredible. And I'm like, why do we not speak more about this how powerful intentions are? I would love for you to share if you've had any you know, amazing, deep spiritual experiences through ayahuasca, like some experiences where you met God or source, because I know that you had a near death experience, but I'm not sure if that was in your first Ayahuasca experience or if that was later on. If you could share a little bit about what you have actually experienced yourself?

Hamilton Souther 29:30

Yeah, well, I've had a near death experience outside of ayahuasca, which was very powerful and formative, and I've also had deep experiences like that inside Ayahuasca. In ayahuasca, it's it's harder to think of them as a near death experience, because it's a visionary experience, and there's no way to know what's actually happening with your physical body. But the first time I met God in Ayo. Alaska was, I think, one of the most powerful moments for me. I was in a place of like, you know, really deep pain and wonderment about life and just what life was in existence, very existential moment. Things had been very difficult during my apprenticeship, and hadn't gone the way that I had thought it would in my great fantasy of what an apprenticeship was. And I was in an Ayahuasca ceremony, and I started to call to God. I wanted to get past whatever barrier there was, or prove one way or the other to myself if God existed. So I just started to call to God. The call was very simple. It was just God, and I was looking up at the conical roof of the ceremonial house, and I was, you know, just calling into the darkness, God, God, God, over and over again, very emotional, very loud. And then all of a sudden, as I got more and more ecstatic myself. There was no ceremonial house. It was gone. There was only this, this infinite and eternal expanse above me, and I didn't see anything. It was just an infinite and eternal expanse and this very clear voice inside myself, not outside, inside myself, that answered yes. And it was not my own voice. It was what I consider to be the voice of God, and it just said yes. And I remember thinking to myself, like, Uh oh, I've opened up a door I can't close, like I called for it, and now it's happened, and it was shocking. And then I remember getting my courage up and then exclaiming to God in a very youthful and innocent way, like, Where have you been all this time? And I've found over the years that you can never one win an argument with God, and God doesn't argue fair. And what happened in that moment was a series of visions and memories through everything that had happened in my life, every difficult moment and where God had been invisible to me, God now was revealed, and I realized that God was omnipresent, listening to everything, part of everything, not separate from everything. And it made sense in my life, how, from that moment, I would never feel separate from God. It was impossible. It would be an impossibility to feel that way. It was like something like on a Rubik's Cube clicked in my head, and it went from not being able to see it to seeing it. And it was everywhere. It's through the air, it's through the walls, it's through your body. You can't get away from it, like it's impossible to actually get away from it. And that's what came really clear to me through that experience. And it was very overwhelming and very beautiful and a great revelation. And then little by little, over the last 20 years, I've been looking to how to better align and understand that kind of connection.

Jannecke Øinæs 33:14

Wow. I got goosebumps there. That was really Wow. What a lovely, amazing experience. And I get a bit envious as well, like I would love to have that feeling you had also a near death experience, and that was similar, no different, you said. And it was outside the Ayahuasca experience, I find that fascinating, that you have so many mystical experiences, and then also a near death experience. And so many people have none of those. So would you like to share what happened?

Hamilton Souther 33:48

Sure, I sought mystical experiences once I started to have them. And so I think if you seek those experiences and you give the opportunity to yourself to have them, you'll have more of them. You know, I don't think I'm special in that way. I think that once I had my first awakening, which could also be thought of as a great interest in all of this, that I just opened up to it and started to allow it to happen, and then sought it for 20 years. And so if I think you do that, and you practice plant medicine shamanism, you'll ultimately have many of these kinds of experiences that I'm talking about. And it's also the nature of the frequency. So to kind of put that in perspective, I've participated now and held myself over 3000 plant medicine ceremonies, which is a lot of opportunity to have these experiences. So in 3000 ceremonies, there's highlights of, you know, like the top 50 mystical experiences that I've had. But I also dedicated my life to that. I was a mystic, and it was my passion. It was what most fueled me in interest. Did me in life. The near death experience was in my third month of apprenticeship, and I got what's called falciparum malaria, and it's a small microorganism that lays eggs in your red blood cells, and it bursts your red blood cells when it hatches. And you typically have high fevers and shivers. And if it's not, it incubates for two weeks, and then hatches, and it does it over and over again. And if your body can defeat it, you survive, and if not, you die. And in my case, the first two weeks were missed. It wasn't diagnosed. And so now I was going into the second emergence of it, and it started at about 1030 in the morning, and the when the hatching started and the red blood cells started to burst, and you get a very high fever very quickly. You know, you can easily get to incentivize like 4243 4445 445, fever, maybe even higher, it can kill people. And so I was in a house in the city of Iquitos when this happened, and all of a sudden I just felt like I was going to collapse, and I needed to get to a bed. And so I was helped to a bed, and I lay down and over. About the next five or 10 minutes, I felt this lack of oxygen start to take over my body. You would breathe, but not feel like you're getting any oxygen. Yeah. So normally you take a big breath, if you do it with me right now, you feel something in your body happens, the chemical reaction with the oxygen only. Now, when you don't have the red blood cells, you take a big, deep breath and you don't feel anything. And so that started to happen, and I realized something systemic was wrong, and there was no time to get to a hospital or anything like that. And I remember being very calm about it, and just kind of relaxing as this started to happen. There was nothing I could do. And then I felt different organ systems shut off, and it was like, oh, that's the liver, and then, oh, there's my kidneys. And I just felt these parts of my body stop working. And before I felt like my last breath, I just was already going and so I felt like the body just got calmer and calmer and calmer and calmer. And then I was off, and I was in this space that was kind of nebulous. There wasn't defined walls or anything about it. And as I was looking around, I realized it was my life. My life was this multi dimensional, nebulous space that was now coming apart, and it was filled with spirits. It was filled with these energies. Spirits, to me, are just animated energies. So it was just filled with animated energies. And my ancestors were there, and all the people I had known in my life were there, everybody from childhood, everybody from school, everybody that I had known, my whole family, everybody was there, and they were just kind of watching what was happening. And little by little, I was taken on this journey, and it would it was progressive, and it was recognition and a life review of everything that had happened in my life up until then. And so it was very slow. I felt like it took a very long time. Felt like it was years that it took to go through this process. And then as the process was over, I did find myself now in a place that was a shining bright light, and it was the quintessential tunnel of white light, and it was very vast and large. At first, it had no end to how big it was, and it started to draw me into it. And I got further and further and further into the tunnel. I couldn't tell the distance. It just kept going and going and going. And it felt like a to infinity, that it would just continue to go. And as it did, it got denser and denser and smaller and smaller and denser and denser and smaller and smaller. And I remember getting to what all of a sudden looked like the end of it. It was right here. It was about 20 yards away. And I had this moment when I realized that that meant that I was truly gone, that I was that was it, that was death. And I remember stopping myself at that point, almost like waking up from a hypnotic trance. And I looked at it and I said, I'm not ready to die. There's more for me to do here. I'm not done. Send me back to my body and the end of the tunnel burst into light and burst into aliveness and consciousness. And it was aware of me, and it knew me, and out of it formed a shape almost cupped like like my like Kong. Caved like, like a big hand, but not with fingers, just a big shape like that came right out of it, and it hit me. And it hit me really hard. I remember it feeling like an explosion. It wasn't soft or gentle or anything like that. And I felt like that thing shoved me right back into my body, just like what had felt like taken years to get there. Just went boom right into my body, and it was very violent, and then boom, I woke up in my body, and I was on the same bed, and I don't know how much time had passed in, you know, clock time from the moment that it started to that moment that I was now awake in my bed. I just know that everybody in the room was sobbing that I was dead, and they were screaming, what are we going to tell his mother? He's dead, he's dead, he's dead. What are we going to do? That's the first thing I remember in the room. And then I was now awake, and I said to them, I'm alive. I'm alive. Get me to a hospital. And they went into shock and panic. They just could not it was not a positive moment for them. They had very scared that that I had come back from the dead for them. And so it took them a little while, a couple minutes, to calm down and realize I was okay. They were scared of me at first, and then they came and got me and carried me to a taxi and then rushed me to the hospital. And so that was my my experience.

Jannecke Øinæs 41:29

Wow, wow. Um, what would you say is your biggest spiritual insight from all the experiences you've had about the nature of reality.

Hamilton Souther 41:43

Think it's a combination now from the experiences, but I think the biggest takeaway is that what we think of while we're alive as separation is an illusion, and it's a very powerful illusion for our mind, and it's been so powerful for so long and intergenerationally programmed and passed down that it's now what we call reality. And instead, in that illusion, I think of it as a language. It's a way to understand perception, and that reality itself is transcendent of separation, and and there's an omnipresence of the Divine and spirit. There's an omnipresence of supportive energies that are within our consciousness. And this idea that we're separate and isolated is just not true, and that that's the fundamental like teaching and takeaway that I've had from all of these experiences, that when we learn to see through that illusion, we understand that it's not over there where the illusion is, but it's in here, and it's actually something that we can train ourselves to see beyond, and something that we teach in the Mystery School and on our retreats about how to seek through that illusion so that we can understand the connection, not that we have, but that we are, the connection that we are, and how to ultimately relate to that and go through the awakening process to live in that union.

Jannecke Øinæs 43:17

So let's say we were going for a walk, the two of us right now, would you then see other things than I would on that walk?

Hamilton Souther 43:27

Possibly, I don't know, you might see more than I see. I think on that walk, what would be different is that the way we relate to the same things we see might be different, you know. So what's changed for me compared to the way it was before, is that I don't think I'm walking on an earth. I think I'm walking within the earth, and that we both are inside the earth, not walking on it. So I think most people like, Oh, I'm walking on the road, and I think that I'm not walking on a road. I think that the road is stopping me from the center of gravity, sucking me to the center of the earth. And the way I think about that process, instead of it being so object oriented, I think of it as like a quantum, subatomic phenomena. So we're both walking on a big pillow of electrons, and we're just walking on electrons. And it's actually a fact. So it's not like I'm making it up in my head. It's actually true. The atoms that we're walking on are all of electrons, and they're these, like squishy balls of this energy, and that's what we're walking on, and that's how I frame just walking. So I see everybody walking on electrons. And then, you know, the wind would blow. And for you, it might just be the wind, but to me, that's spirit. So the same wind blowing, for me is a spirit, but a spirit means a consistent form of patterned energy. And someone would come to us and say, Oh, well, the winds cause. By convection currents and different heat and low and high pressure. And I'd say, Yeah, that's exactly how the spirit of the wind works. Like you've learned how to describe how the spirit of the wind works. I go, Yeah, that's exactly right. And then we would see the sunlight, and I would see the sunlight coming from the spirit of the sun. And someone would say, Yeah, but those are just light, you know, rays of light. And I would say, Yeah, that's exactly how the spirit of the Sun works. That's what that Spirit does. And it creates the heat here, and it creates everything that creates all of life. That's That's what its purpose is. And then we would, I think people get lost in the space itself, like I would never forget the fact that while we're walking, having that talk, going down the road, that we're surrounded by trillions of galaxies, and in the time that we're taking that walk, trillions of more galaxies are being seated like I've been spent so much time in the astral I'll always remember that, that aspect of being alive, that the earth is the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest, little miracle inside this incredible Cosmos, and that the cosmos is continually growing all the time. And most people feel they're separate and alone. And instead of feeling that way, I feel like we're part of an immense web of gravitational forces and interconnectedness. And most people will think that there's a great distance between themselves and the building or the park or the next tree. And for me, what connects everything is what people call God. So when people look at the stars and they see the stars all separated, and they think they're, you know, separated by vast distance, I think they're connected by God and that great emptiness they think they see. I don't think is empty at all. I think that is God and that we're inside it as a phenomenon that we experience and that, I think it's a nature of perception. I'm not sure we would be seeing such different things, but rather how we frame and understand those very same things to make sense of it. You know, from that near death experience, I saw everything as spirit. That was a huge takeaway for me. So I didn't see that there was like normal reality and spirits. That experience showed me that normal reality was actually constructed of spirits. And so that was the energetic imprints that everything was so like in architecture, you have a blueprint, which is an imprint of someone's mind that draws out walls and and and spaces, and we're all in those right now. I looked at the energetic imprint of the wall as the spirit of the wall, and that would be like, it's quantum, subatomic resonance that would be like, built right out of what we studied in physics itself. And I saw the whole world that way after that near death experience. That's what, what came away like, I couldn't look at a wall and just have it be a wall anymore. It looked to me like that. There was a quantum imprint that was changing the shape of Earth and the shape of the universe at the same time, and that stayed with me forever, that has never shifted, that was like a true shift in consciousness that happened in that near death experience, and everything became energy to me. And I see it as a physical object. It's not that it's not physical, but I also see it as the nature of its energy. And so, you know, I think you know, if we went on that walk and we saw a tree, lots of people see trees as objects, and we got taught to see trees as beings. So people are willing to let the dog be a being, and they say hi to the dog and but they don't say hi to the tree as another form of being that's aware and, you know, like energetically present to its environment, but we got taught to see the forest that way. So I just think it's the way we relate to these things. And so I just see everything as a as a construct of spirit and energy. And within that, there might be the presence of phenomena and there might not, I think that depends on like, what we're focused on in that moment,

Jannecke Øinæs 49:13

I loved how you explained that. Thank you so much. That was so exciting. There might be some people are interested now in trying out ayahuasca, and I know there are some cautions. I've done it myself, and I had great experiences, but I know that people have had not so great experiences due to many different reasons, but also due to shamans that were not coming from the right intentions, perhaps. So could you share what we should be cautious about when it comes to Ayahuasca?

Hamilton Souther 49:52

The cautions with Ayahuasca really come down to first, basic safety and so. You know, are you going to a place that understands your basic safety or not? It's not required in ayahuasca for there to be basic safety. So it's a choice of the people practicing. For our practice safety is our number one concern, and we consider it our responsibility. So where you go needs to be safe. Where you're doing it needs to be safe. The ceremonial house needs to be safe. You go all the way down to like, Are there sharp corners and you know, places that if somebody acts just accidentally tripped and fell under the influence of ayahuasca, would they be in a safer situation than not, etc. So it's just, you know, safety from the macro all the way to the micro. You want to make sure that it's like that, so that you can be calm there. And then you want to go to people that understand the needs from people from other cultures. So a lot of the Ayahuasca cultures, you know, our tribal societies, etc. So you want to make sure that they understand, and have had the experience of working with international people to understand the needs of those people, and so that's just a focus and an awareness and an understanding. So I think those are the two main concerns. And then do you resonate with the kinds of practices that they do? Because it's it's very different once you get into the Ayahuasca based on the work of the practitioners or the shaman. So they can be invoking healing spirits. They could be invoking anything you need to understand their practices and what they believe in and why they're holding the ceremonies in the first place. So I think of that always as a kind of resonance or vibration, if you resonate with them. So if they're safe, if they're professional, if they have a good track record, and most of that can be found online now and then after that, you know, do you resonate with their message? Do you resonate with their vibe? Can you understand them? Do you have an opportunity to interact with them and talk with them? And if you do, I think then you've lined up all of the possibilities to be most in your favor. I think going into it, then you need to follow a preparation to cleanse yourself as best as you can going into the week, so at least a week before stopping alcohol, stopping spicy food, stopping foods with high saturated fats, et cetera, all greatly helps the process. If you can do your own kind of cleanse beforehand, that's all you know, supportive of the experience as well. So your own personal preparation, I think, is key to that. And then, you know, going to a place where you have the opportunity to at least have three ceremonies, because the first ceremony now we're finding, requires people to really release what we think of now as environmental toxins. So this wasn't as pronounced 20 years ago, but now it's part of every group that we see that there are people that are coming that just have molecular load inside of them of something that is very difficult to say exactly what it is. We believe it's coming from the greater pollution of hydrocarbons, microplastics, you know, the fertilizers that are inside foods, etc. But there's the need to cleanse that first, and it usually takes at least one or two ceremonies to go through that. So if you can help that process before coming and then having at least three ceremonies so that you can really break through. And I think it's also important to understand if the group that you're going to work with will be willing to adjust the dose for you, because not everybody needs the same dose of ayahuasca. But many of the cultures are just that there's one dose, and everybody drinks the same amount. And so I think in working with international people, there needs to be a little more sophistication in the dose itself, and offer a person the opportunity for less or more as needed.

Jannecke Øinæs 53:58

All right, so do you do part, or do you do all the ceremonies at your center with international people and with groups that are coming?

Hamilton Souther 54:07

I do, yeah, no, I'm the core practitioner, and I have some people who support in the ceremonies, who are helpers, but I'm the Lead Master Practitioner in our center, or master Shaman. And yeah, if you come to us, it's an opportunity to do everything that we talked about in the podcast. We offer four ceremonies on an Ayahuasca retreat. We also have ayahuasca and San Pedro retreats where we'll do two ayahuasca and two San Pedro ceremonies with three ayahuasca and one San Pedro ceremony. We have an opportunity to go through introduction, and then we go deeper into the experience. So we start with an introduction, and then we go deeper. And then we really have the in the third ceremony, the opportunity to expand and, you know, go into really the totality of what the experience can be. Once we have. A little bit of experience and practice together. We do it as a group, and everybody learns together. I share in depth everything that we've learned over the years to help you accelerate your process with the ayahuasca and to better be able to understand it, assimilate it and grow within it. And our core of our practice is to fulfill your intentions in the safest container possible.

Jannecke Øinæs 55:23

And I would say that it's probably not for everyone, right? Like you need to be grounded, you need to be off medications, you need to sort of be mature and ready for it. That's my experience, and I felt that Ayahuasca was calling me, and it took me four years before I did it, and I'm glad that I didn't just jump into it, because it was quite intense. What would you say about that?

Hamilton Souther 55:54

I would agree. And you know, there are restrictions, and at our center, you go through a screening process to make sure that you're an appropriate candidate. You have to, especially now, with as many people taking as many pharmaceutical drugs as there are, you have to be careful about which ones have drug interaction, and a lot of people have to wean off medications to be able to be a candidate for ayahuasca, you have to prescreen for different kinds of mental health disorders like schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder bipolar are typically not candidates for Ayahuasca treatment. The personal calling side is, I think, confusing for some people, but also very necessary. I think it's enough that you have a really deep desire to have this experience. The way I try to describe it is like, is this something that you understand can be very powerful and very impactful, and could take a year after it to integrate it into your life? So are you willing to come to this understanding that if you have a very intense experience, that it could take a whole year to go from that experience to your new, stable reality that you're living with. It's not just something to just try and if you're willing to give that level of commitment to it, then that's this is the right place for you to go to, because the Ayahuasca, I think of it as like taking a snow globe, like, you know, those little snow globes, and you shake it up, and then it creates a new pattern. That's what it does to your whole consciousness. So it takes your whole consciousness and it shakes it all up and energetically, little by little by little by little, you make changes in your life. You make changes to your diet, changes to the your relationships, etc, to the point that you have a new stable version of life that comes from this. And you can go from never having had a really deep spiritual experience to having a full spiritual awakening and having experiences like I talked about, like going from never seeing spirits to seeing spirits, from never having conversed directly with God, to having conversed directly with God's source of the universe, feeling like you're in your little bubble, and that bubble is now gone, and you're part of a really big universe that you're now navigating. And that the comfort of that bubble, even though you wanted to get out of it, is not really sure that it's not just, oh, it's a little bit bigger bubble. It's actually there maybe isn't. Maybe is no bubble. Then you have to assimilate that and be okay with that. So, you know, it's not so dramatic, but for most people, but you have to be willing to go through that experience. And then I think that, you know, there's in the psychedelic Renaissance and the psychedelic culture, there's an understanding that people have can have these experiences just on a whim, like, you go to a party and someone offers you some mushrooms, and you're like, Sure, I'll have some mushrooms. And you don't know what you're getting yourself into. You don't know the container, you don't know the energies that are there, etc. So I think that's really like, where I see the big difference. This isn't something that you do on a whim. This isn't something that you just one night decide, Oh, I'll go do that instead of these other things. You know, because now the ceremonies are becoming shared and expressed all over the world, so people are getting invitations like that, like they're bored on a Friday afternoon and someone says, Oh, you want to come to the Ayahuasca ceremony tonight. You know, it's like that kind of a thing. I think that's where we draw the line and say, you know, I think you need more preparation, you need more awareness going into it, and you need to feel that deeply within yourself that this is a process that you'll take very seriously. It's a very sacred process, and I think it's okay if your goal is exploration and to just have the experience, but you have to understand that it could be very impactful.

Jannecke Øinæs 59:46

This has been highly interesting. It was wonderful having you back now, three questions that I ask my guests, and my first one is, what is self love to you?

Hamilton Souther 59:59

I think self love. Love is the recognition that from our heart and our heart consciousness, we love ourselves, and we love the universe, and we love life, and our mind gets in the way of understanding self love. And I like to go back in my mind to the time when we were all in utero, and we were all embryos, and we had a heart, but we didn't even have a brain yet. And our hearts there beating our love for life, and we didn't have a mind that gets in the way of that yet at all. We haven't even had our first thought yet. And so I take that awareness all the way until now, and I see that that's the same heart that we're all still living with right now, and this heart that we are, that beats within us, loves us more than anything, and that that's self love,

Jannecke Øinæs 1:00:48

Lovely. What is happiness to you?

Hamilton Souther 1:00:53

I think happiness is the natural state of the universe. When we stop creating pain, suffering, dissonance and chaos. When we decide to change our focus, what naturally happens is happiness and joy, and it's the natural state of being, and we don't give ourselves that opportunity so often because we create so much dissonance, pain, suffering and chaos,

Jannecke Øinæs 1:01:21

and what is the deeper meaning of life? From your perspective,

Hamilton Souther 1:01:27

the deeper meaning of life is the evolution of our soul and spirit, because that's the thing that goes beyond this life. So from all the things that I've studied and looked for, of what actually exists beyond this life of who can I find that exists beyond this? What are they? What's left of us after we go through the process of death? The only thing that I find is soul and spirit, where we are, the union of soul and spirit. And so I think how our soul and spirit evolves while we're alive is the most important aspect of life, because it's what goes with us.

Jannecke Øinæs 1:02:04

Now, if people want to connect with you, how can they do so?

Hamilton Souther 1:02:09

To connect with us, come to bluemorphotours.com/. If you want to come on a retreat bluemorphoacademy.com/. If you want to be part of our mystery school or our certification programs, if you want to learn more about plant medicines and how to be able to work with them yourself. And I'm on social media, on Instagram, Hamilton Souther and Blue Morpho retreats, and those are the best places to find me.

Jannecke Øinæs 1:02:33

Thank you so much, Hamilton. This was so interesting, and it opened my mind to even new perspectives. I love that. It was really inspiring. So thank you so much for the work you're doing and for coming to the show today.

Hamilton Souther 1:02:46

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure. It's been a great opportunity to be back on your show.