Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  My hands shot up in jubilation as soon as my left hook detonated on Ludwig’s chin. As a fighter, you just know when you’ve landed one that signals the beginning of the end. A split second later, however, I realised I needed a killer blow to force the referee to call a halt. Because of all the respect I had for Duane, I just wanted to land one clean shot on his jaw to seal the deal without damaging him, but as I threw it he was beginning to sit up out of instinct, and my punch whistled past his head. The position we were both then in meant I had no option but to drop elbows, which opened a large cut on his forehead, before the ref dragged me off. It hurt me to leave him bloodied, but that is the nature of our sport. I stood up, walked to the centre of the Octagon, dropped to my knees and kissed the canvas in relief.

  There must have been a line of forty journalists waiting to interview me backstage. Duane and I were the final fight of the preliminaries that night because it was a special show featuring five heavyweight bouts. Frank Mir, Junior dos Santos, Cain Velasquez, Stipe Miočić and Roy Nelson were all in action, but rather than watch the first of the main events, virtually all the press corps were waiting patiently in line for me. One after another they expressed their genuine elation for me. Having not felt particularly valued after the GSP fight and throughout subsequent match-ups, it was great to get that love from media, fans and all the people behind the scenes within the UFC machine. For the first time in a long while, I felt appreciated again.

  • • •

  Win, lose or draw against Ludwig that Saturday night in Vegas, I had a trip already booked well in advance which I wasn’t going to miss. I returned to the MGM Grand to see Van Halen in concert the following night, travelled to California to meet my friend Beto on the Monday, flew to Peru on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I was deep in the Amazonian rainforest, ready for my first ayahuasca ceremony. Ayahuasca, sometimes translated as spirit vine or vine of the soul, is a potent brew that the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region have taken as a traditional spiritual medicine for millennia. Made by combining the fibrous body of an ayahuasca vine with a companion plant containing the potent hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, the foul concoction is imbibed as a religious sacrament and a means to view ourselves as we really are, stripped of personality traits like ego and pride that often obscure true introspection. I first came across this teacher plant in the work of Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis, but it was a chance meeting with an old Rough House teammate at a MMA show in London that convinced me I needed the spirit vine’s help.

  Nick Ospiczak was a naturally talented guy who could seemingly turn his hand to whatever held his attention. His interest in MMA peaked and his life took him in a different direction but he had been good enough to fight four times in the UFC. A loss by split decision to Ludwig in Germany in 2010 eventually put paid to his career in the Octagon, but his mind always seemed to be going a million miles an hour, as if constantly searching for the next chapter. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years before I bumped into him in London, but I had been told he was a very different character now after taking part in an ayahuasca ceremony and I was eager to ask him all about it. I remembered him as this pretty hyper guy who always seemed a little restless in his mind, but he just looked at me serenely and smiled. I asked him about his experience and he sort of shrugged his shoulders and quietly told me that all he knew now is that everything was going to be all right. Seeing that calmness of energy and apparent peace of mind, particularly from a character like Nick, really struck me. I wanted some of that. And I was prepared to go to the source, to the Amazon, to find it.

  The experience began long before I crossed the Equator and entered Peru, however. I adhered to a special diet in the two-week-long build-up to my first ceremony that was effectively vegetarian with the additional requisites of no oils, spices, seasoning, excess fat, salt, caffeine, acidic foods or sex. The idea is to cleanse the body physically before accepting the spirit vine but, just to be sure, we all endured a tobacco ceremony when we arrived to fully purge ourselves of toxins. This involved drinking copious amounts of a heavily-sweetened mix of tobacco and coffee that left a bitter aftertaste and caused you to sweat and vomit everything out of your system. It wasn’t pleasant and there were a lot of tears and shivering uncontrollably in the corner as the foul mix did its worst. The following day it was time for ayahuasca. I fasted for six hours after a light lunch, and then took my place in a circular wooden structure, ironically about the same dimensions as the UFC Octagon, known as a maloka. From around waist height up to the leafy, thatched roof there is nothing but netting to keep the worst of the insects at bay, so it really feels like you are just sitting in the jungle. That night a full moon cast a ghostly, silvery-blue sheen over the forest and as we fell silent the chorus of frogs, toads and weird and wonderful insects created a cacophony like nothing I have ever heard before. At one point we even heard the high-pitched roars of two jaguars fighting in the distance and it all added to the intensity of the situation. I was nervous, scared even, but that is exactly how you should feel before you embark on an ayahuasca journey. The shaman, or ayahuasquero, then began blessing the space and reciting some prayers. He sang chants of protection called icaros – term deriving from the Quechua verb ikaray, meaning to blow smoke in order to heal – which were his way of communicating with the spirits and energy around us. He keeps these icaros up throughout the five or six hours of the ceremony and uses them to set the mood and tone of the night.

  I deliberately sat on the opposite side of the maloka from my friend Beto because this was a very personal quest for both of us and we were there to work. Having shaved my Mohawk off before leaving home so as not to draw attention to myself, I entered the hut with no psychedelic paraphernalia whatsoever. All I had was a bottle of water, a torch, my prayer beads and a warm jumper for later. I sat in silence and tried to prepare myself mentally and spiritually for what was about to happen. It is necessary to go into an ayahuasca ceremony with specific intentions, just as I did with psilocybin. I had four main questions I hoped would be answered. First of all, am I still a fighter? Second, do I still want to fight? Third, why do I fight? And finally, with a silent nod to Nick Ospiczak, will everything be all right? I was keeping myself to myself, focusing on my intentions and listening to the icaros when, just as we were about to begin, the guy to my right leaned across and whispered, ‘I just want to let you know I’m a big fan.’ As much as I will forever appreciate it when someone makes the effort to say something positive like that to me, there is a time and a place and that just wasn’t the right moment to wrench me from a semi-meditative state and back into Outlaw mode! But I thanked him, refocused and the ceremony began soon after.

  The shaman worked anti-clockwise, calling each participant up one by one, beginning with the person seated on his immediate right. He handed out a dose in a cup, the quantity determined by a combination of his judgement and personal requests from those who had drunk before and knew what quantity they needed. The receiver accepted the cup with both hands and drank the gritty, repulsive concoction, before returning to their place in the circle. Even as I waited for my turn, I could see the medicine begin to take effect as it worked its way around the room. Everyone to my left was gradually hit by the toxic mix and commenced crying, sweating, writhing, retching and vomiting in equal measure. It’s coming for me, I remember thinking. There is no turning back now. When I had the cup in my hands I was more anxious than ever, but I kept concentrating on my intentions and telling myself: Accept the medicine, surrender to it, be with it, allow it to work, allow it to take over, I am open to this.

  I drank the rancid tea and suffered like the others. I then sat in the dark and waited for around an hour for the medicinal effects to take over. With mushrooms, it feels like the information and knowledge is already inside me and the psilocybin simply allows me to open a few doors, have a dialogue with myself, and discover it all. But with ayahuasca, it was more like my whole mind was opened a
nd the knowledge was poured in by the gallon from another, independent source. It began with the sound of popping and fizzing all around my head. It felt like all the myriad noises of the jungle were right in my ears. I kept looking all around me to double-check I wasn’t somehow attracting all the insects and animals from out of the nearby foliage. Then my eyes started to stream and I became really cold so I put on my warm top. Minutes later I was sweating and too hot so I took it off. I was yawning like crazy and then I suddenly felt sick and grabbed my purge bowl and violently puked an oily, black liquid into it. I continued dry retching long after even my reserves of stomach bile were exhausted, but this is encouraged as a means to rid the body of spiritual as well as physical poisons. Finally I set the overflowing bowl to one side and sat back, heavy-limbed. As I did so, it felt like someone grabbed me from behind and was dragging me deep into the jungle. All the leaves and branches were flying past, brushing against my face, and then they changed to a stream of geometric patterns, fractals and psychedelic colours. I realised that I couldn’t physically move and I remained in that paralysed state for what seemed like hours although it is difficult to tell for sure. It was all very intense then as the strange visions began. I was outside a circular building that appeared to be my house, standing in the back garden with a woman and two girls I presumed to be my wife and daughters. I could see all of my family around me, laughing and smiling, and generally looking well and happy. That was my reassurance that everything was going to be all right. I took a deep breath and pushed on with my other intentions about being a fighter. It is basically the same questions every fighter, whether they care to admit it publicly or not, asks themselves before walking into the arena. What the fuck am I doing this for? I could be any one of those 20,000 sitting there with a beer and nachos in my hand, laughing and enjoying this spectacle, instead of being the guy about to put his life on the line for their entertainment. What the hell am I doing? I wanted to know what drove me to fight.

  The ceremony then took me on a very emotional journey through what felt like past lives. Even now, recollecting some of what I saw causes me to well up. When I was thirteen or fourteen I had three dreams on consecutive nights that I now recognise to be similar visions. In the first I was a British Redcoat in the American War of Independence, standing in a line with my rifle facing a battalion of blue-uniformed American soldiers. We opened fire on each other in the violently senseless way battles were then conducted, and I died. In the second dream I was a miner somewhere in England who perished in an underground tunnel collapse. The third was probably the strangest of all. In it I was a Jewish woman in what I assumed to be France during the Second World War. I was running through wet-cobbled streets, trying to escape the SS, with four young children in tow, two of whom were mine and two were orphans from a family close to my own. We huddled in an arched doorway and as the kids stifled their tearful sobs I realised it was a church and pushed the door ajar. We ran inside and downstairs into a crypt where we hid on the dusty floor of a long room with no other exits. Minutes later, the Nazi soldiers found us, lined us up against the wall, and shot us all dead.

  But while these teenage dreams felt rather remote to me at the time, the emotions in my ayahuasca visions were viscerally real. What I saw in the ceremony was not essentially me, Dan Hardy in 2012, but I connected so profoundly with the emotions that it felt as if they were experiences from past lives that still echoed in my subconscious. I started off as an old samurai warrior in ancient Japan, wilting under the weight of personal disappointment and shame that I hadn’t died an honourable samurai death while giving my life to a cause. It seemed I had let everyone down and was going to drift away and die as a disgraced and lonely old man. From there I became a dragon and was immediately slain by St George with a spear through the heart. Then I became the last wolf in England, tiring as I was chased through a forest by a gang dressed in medieval clothing brandishing spears, bows and arrows, and nets. I could already feel the pain of losing every member of my family, and the ache of loneliness was unbearable. I stopped running because there suddenly didn’t seem to be any more point in continuing. If it is not this group of humans today that kill me, it’ll be another group somewhere else tomorrow or next week. And there are no more of my kind left alive so what is there to live for anyway? Panting, I decided to make a last stand. If I have to die, I’m taking at least one of these bastards down with me. I ran, and it truly felt like me inside this wolf’s body, on all fours surging through the forest undergrowth, and leaping onto one of the men. I mauled the arm that held the spear and then turned my attention to savaging his throat. Just as he spluttered his last bloody breath, another arrived and drove a spear through me, followed by two arrows that were fired into my body at close range. The final vision was the most vivid and detailed. My skin was dark and inked with the traditional markings of my South American tribe and I was standing in the corner of a huge pit around eight feet deep. My wife and daughter were pressed against me and we were all packed in tight alongside the rest of my community, about fifty of us in all. I looked up and all around the perimeter of what was to become our mass grave stood Spanish conquistadoras armed with swords and spears and muskets. I was a warrior of the tribe and I had failed to protect my family. Sitting in that maloka in Peru, I intimately felt the pain of anger and frustration and despair as the European invaders opened fire and slaughtered us all. It was very, very real.

  At last I had an answer to my question, why do I fight? Because I never really knew before. My life had been pretty comfortable growing up. I had been blessed with a close, loving, loyal family unit. We weren’t rich but I was certainly never conscious of wanting for anything. And yet, from very early on I seemed to find myself in situations where I felt persecuted, either by a person in a position of authority or a group who didn’t like the look of me for whatever reason. When I passed a certain age I began responding aggressively, refusing to be pushed around and making no effort to appease anyone that took issue with me. It was as though I sought to test people’s discriminatory inclination to see if they would react to me. If they judged me based on my look or personal tastes I would bite back, and their breaking point always came before mine. Now I understood that I could be carrying this fighting energy either from past lives that I couldn’t fully recall but experienced in psychedelic dream states, or a collective consciousness that we can all access on different levels. Not only that, but I had failed to survive the circumstances and protect my loved ones. In this current life I am a fighter and although the winning and losing isn’t a case of life and death, it provides me with an arena to confront these things and learn about what drives me. But the message that was coming through was that everything in this life would work out fine. Soon after this realisation I started to come round and become aware of the others in the maloka with me. It was then I met my wolf.

  When I arrived in the jungle retreat a few days before, one of the first things I did was take a look at the books on the shelf in the communal area. I find I can learn a lot about people before I’ve spoken to them if I can see what they have been reading, or, in this case, encouraging us to read. I must confess I was a little disappointed when most of the literature on show was about spirit guides and spirit animals, supernatural beings out there in the ether guiding someone through their life. I was searching for an authentic, tribal ayahuasca experience and the idea of a kindly animal appearing to hold my hand felt a bit too out there and more fitting in a Harry Potter book. So when I looked to my side towards the end of my first ceremony and saw a wolf sitting to attention beside me, my first thought was that someone was playing a prank on me. I thought someone must have let an Alsatian into the maloka and it had made itself comfortable next to me in my altered state. But the strange part of the animal’s appearance was that my eyes were open and I could also see the other people around me who I knew were definitely there. I was used to weird and wonderful visions from regular mushroom ceremonies, but I always had my eye
s closed when they appeared. Here I was awake and alert with a wolf apparently sitting beside me. I reached out and touched it. I ran my hand along its back to its neck against the grain of its fur and when I took my hand away I could feel the oil from its skin on my own. That wolf is there, I decided. I don’t care what others can or can’t see, but that wolf is really there. And it never left me. For every minute of each ceremony from that point onwards, my wolf was present. On another night I looked across the maloka and saw one of the group struggling with the medicine. There was an ugly red energy surrounding him and he was lying on his side in a lot of discomfort. I remember thinking that my wolf should go and help him, and immediately it rose, strode across the room and sat beside him. Just like that, my perspective on spirit animals changed beyond all recognition.

  When everyone in the group had returned to a manageable state, the shaman lit a candle to signal the end of the ceremony and advise that it was time for us to go to bed. The next morning we all returned to the maloka to share our experiences with one another and get feedback or interpretation from the ayahuasquero. In the two weeks I spent in Peru, I took part in three such ceremonies and two San Pedro ceremonies, in which a drink made from an Andean cactus containing mescaline, another powerful medicine native to South America, is consumed. They were all similar, but unique in their own particular ways. The second time around I was more prepared for what was coming and that certainly helped in terms of the purging if nothing else. I took a larger dose of the brew and actually walked outside into the jungle in my underwear. I was fire-breathing and shape-shifting and all sorts. The shaman, who just pointed and said the Spanish word luchador (fighter) the first time he saw me, also spent a lot of time working directly with me during that ceremony. My overriding memory is a strong vision of myself as a tiger with a litter of cubs to protect. A friend that I met there made an audio recording of that night and I was able later to listen back and have Beto, a fluent Spanish speaker, translate the shaman’s words when he was alongside me. There was a lot of protection stuff and he was placing defensive iron on my chest, arms, hands and legs. He then began striking my body with the ceremonial branch and leaves while chanting, ‘Spirit of the tiger, spirit of the wolf!’