Saved By the Dragon
a tale into and out of the Dark Night of the Soul
I am broken. I admit it, finally.
Moving from New York to Denver hadn’t quelled the noise. On the outside things got quieter, but inside there’s still loud noises. If I don’t do something about it, it’s going to consume me. I need to face this demon inside me.
I turned to ayahuasca again, this time in Denver. I’d done it several times before. It was never pleasant — always miserable, often terrifying — but I always came out the other side feeling lighter.
On a Friday evening in April, I drank the medicine in a house in Denver. Over the next two days, I drank it again, and again.
I purged. I vomited.
I saw the Dragon.
Journey into The Dark Night of the Soul
Something has felt off ever since I graduated from college and took my first job. The pay was decent for a new grad, but there was no joy in any of it. Stale. Old. Archaic. Colleagues running through the motions like clockwork, and me, just another cog in the same machine. This was the first time I felt something is off -- deeply off, like something deeper within me is itching and no amount of water-cooler chit-chat is scratching that itch.
I hopped jobs. Went to grad school. Changed countries. Cities. Careers. Girlfriends. Still, something is still off. Something within me is not being lit, and I can sense it.
My nights weren’t better than my days. Doomscrolling. Swiping dating profiles. Cycling through first dates and canned openings. Empty.
Also something deeper is catching up to me. I never met my father nor had any father figure. Both of my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandfather died before I was born. Family was always violent and abusive. I moved around a lot; home became an abstract thing and also elusive. I don’t quite know what family means anymore. Spiritually and emotionally, I had been in a desert. I felt like an orphan.
What does it always “feel” like somethings off?
Why does happiness and joy only come only few times in my life?
What am I supposed to do with myself? What are my gifts? Why does everything I touch feel empty?
Why do I feel so so alone and abandoned?
I just want a warm and supportive family, yet it is so elusive
I shouted to the heavens. Nothing came back.
The Dark Night of the Soul. This was the phrase St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet, penned to describe a soul’s journey to discover it’s true self and pains it must go through to shed off the pleasures, identity, experiences that it soul had accumulated before finding itself.
I realized I had been in a long journey into the Dark Night of the Soul, searching for myself, and journey had been dark, lonely, and painful.
I was lost.
Into Hell I Come
The ayahuasca came on slow.
Lying on my mat with my eyes closed, patterns started to appear — twirling, spinning, geometric, every shape. A subtle current ran through my body. The DMT and whatever else is in the medicine began opening up my nerves, and discomfort slowly built up throughout my torso and organs.
Then it came.
I vomited, so deeply that I thought my guts were coming out. Nothing solid came out — I’d had nothing in my stomach for hours — but an avalanche of black fog. These are all the trauma, negative memories and energies, that I had experienced since birth and was holding on to. They were embedded so deeply into my nervous system, that these sharp pains I am experiencing in my torso, are manifestation of the energy, blockages of my prana.
As these energies starts coming out, I relived these memories. My childhood abuses. My mother’s own grief and the trauma. My grand parent’s traumas. Judgments, resentments, rages, wraths. Pictures and emotions of these memories flashed in my head. I was terrified, tormented. I didn’t want to relive through these again.
Tears started rolling down my eyes, and I pitied this pains that this soul had gone through.
My head was already semi in the la-la-land, and I felt pain and extreme discomfort. The vomiting wouldn’t stop.
I am trapped in a loop of reliving through my nightmares.
I cried out to God to make it stop.
Hell was not a metaphor, I finally realized. I am in it.
The Dragon
Eventually the medicine waned and the purging stopped. I crashed onto the mat completely emptied out — body, mind, spirit. What I had just been through felt like an eternity of hell, and now I was back in the ordinary world.
I was shocked at how deeply these trauma had been embedded in me. Almost like the traumas and despair from my lineage -- from my parents, to grandparents, and the generations that came before them -- all inherited in my nerovus system.
My organs ached.
Exhausted. I made my way to the bathroom to clean myself up.
The owner of this house do have unique taste, I thought. The bathroom is entirely covered with toys and pictures of dragon.
A dragon themed bathroom. How cute for a daycare, I thought.
I sat on the toilet to regather myself for what i had gone through.
In front of me, I saw a holographic picture of a dragon. It was a Dragon of the East -- the long serpent-like body.
I couldn’t look away. It had cast a spell on me, and I could feel myself being pulled in.
The more I gazed into it, the more the dragon became alive.
The dragon casted its magic, and I got pulled into its world
Remembering My Lineage
The dragon is flying above me -- orange, ancient, and majestic -- with clouds of blue and green surround it and a temple gate in the far distance.
I am in its world, and I am shocked to my core looking up at it.
Then, instantly, I remembered my lineage.
From the myths of the ancient Middle Kingdom, to the kung fu novels I read as a child, to the symbolism that had pervaded through the Chinese history and culture, the dragons had been there all throughout my culture and my life, I just didn’t realize it until now. I am not alone. I am connected to the dragons and their wisdoms.
The orange dragon continued to float in the sky. Something settled within me -- that anxiety feeling that had been running in the background. My heart calmed down, and for once I felt my being -- spirit, mind, and heart -- all grounded in one place.
I am grounded. found my roots. I am not an orphan
Epiphanies from the Mother Ayahuasca
“Fear, my dear. You had so much fear in you,” the facilitator said when I asked her later what had happened to me.
I had been carrying all these fear and weight my whole life. I just hadn’t known how much, or how heavy it was, until now.
What surprised me was what came after puring the fears. Inspiration. Creativity. Aliveness. Possibilities I hadn’t been able to imagine for years suddenly felt obvious and available. New paths. New ways. New possibilities of where I can take my life. The dragon I saw forever stayed within my psyche — and I am forever grateful for this encounterance with it.
This ayahuasca experience was one of the most intensive ones I’ve experienced, but with it I also had deep and profound insights:
The body really does keep the score.
The trauma I purged wasn’t just mine. My mother’s grief, my father’s death, the suffering of grandparents I never met — all of it had been living in my nervous system, passed down like an inheritance no one signed off on. Generational trauma is real, but it is up to use, our generation to resolve them and transform them, if we want to end the cycle.
Every cage I’m in, I built with judgments
The cages I’d been living in — were they my parents’ doing? No. Society’s doing? No.
It was my doing. I built them, and I locked myself inside.
Every career choice I made was out of fear, and for money. Every judgment I cast on others — my parents, the people who’d wronged me — came out of my own insecurity. The resentments lived rent-free in my head because I kept reliving them, day after day. Each choice compounded the next, a downward spiral I couldn’t climb out of — a new cage built on top of the last one. To stop building these cages, I need to stop casting judgment on others.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” (Matthew 7:1) really hits home.
More Play, More Gratitude
Play. How long have I forgotten to play.
The weight that I carried -- whatever they are -- bore down my spirit and soul, and life became drudgery.
After the ceremony, I jumped into the hothub. Warm water on my body. Cool breeze on my hands. Stars. Clouds. Leaves. I’d walked past these things every day of my life and never actually seen them. How lucky am I to be here at all. This is the gift. Not the achievement, not the destination — the living things, living life. Grateful to be alive. This is the most important thing, and now I’m grateful I get to sit in this hothub.
Looking up at the stars in the hothub, I just can’t keep the smile off of my face. The wonders of the stars, the vast universe and its limitless possibilities, ushes out all the inspirations, joy, and creativity within me, and it was so fun just being here and playing with my imaginations. I am grateful to be alive. I just want to play.
Dawn of the Soul
After a weekend of intensive ayahuasca cermonies, I finally can walk out of Dark Night of the Soul and embrace the good morning -- the Dawn of the Soul. Filled with immense gratitude and joy, I see the sun with new inspirations and refreshed spirit. I still don’t have a clear direction for my career, but I no longer worry about that anymore. It’ll still be there no matter how much I worry, and I’ve worried all my life to no benefit, so it’s time to change how I operate -- just play, and let things sort themselves out.
I feel so much lighter now, emotionally and energically, and I can also feel that the zest in me is pointing me in the right direction. It is such a relieve to “feel” and not over-think.
When i see the sky, I see the dragons in the clouds and them flying through the skies. It reminds me that I am not alone, that I had a lineage to something more ancient and wise, and this reminder helps me see events in my life as just that -- events. There are many of them -- just like a dot in this grand universe -- and there are infinite of them for me to explore and not be “stuck” by any particular ones.
Freedom. This is what I feel now after such a long time of being stuck in the Dark Night of the Soul.
I welcome Dawn and all its surprises.