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For fifteen years, Rémi tried to stop feeling. He was so lonely and so unhappy that he began trying to switch off his emotions so he would no longer suffer. He exposed himself to the most unbearable images he could find online. He wanted to desensitise himself. He worked at it methodically. For a while, he believed it was working. He felt empty, but he could keep going. Like a robot.
Then, he says, something gave way. He began to implode. He could no longer hold himself together. He saw therapists and took antidepressants. In his account, the emptiness remained. Before the retreat, his therapist told him she could no longer see him if he would not talk to her. For him, that was precisely the problem: he was seeking help because he could not speak. He needed words that would not come out.
Six months earlier, on an evening when he was reading about psychedelics, he had booked the retreat almost on impulse. He knew that thinking about travelling to Spain and joining a group might make him back out. He did not arrive with much hope. Yet he held on to an image: beings of light taking him by the hand and showing him that life could be beautiful.
That is not the experience he describes. Instead, the emotions he had buried returned with overwhelming force. For four days, he says, they broke him down. He describes neither a gentle journey nor uninterrupted joy. Fifteen years spent trying not to feel, followed by days when emotions took up all the space again. His account keeps the intensity and difficulty of that passage.
And yet, on the final morning, Rémi says he has never felt so good. To explain what is different, he does not begin with big ideas. He speaks of the wind. Of the sunlight he can feel through the trees. Of sensations he had not been paying attention to. Before, he spoke of emptiness. Now, he says he feels full, filled with something else.
He feels as though he is alive in a way he should have been for years. That is how he describes his present, in front of the group he thanks. In his words, we hear a different place for feeling: what he had tried to silence also becomes a way of being in the world. It does not prove that all his difficulties are resolved. That morning, after years of trying to feel nothing, he can feel the wind again.
What Rémi describes is his experience alone. Every person's journey is different. Thank you for listening. This was Ayahuasca Stories.
