Let’s fast forward to a few weeks ago. One of my clients but also a good friend, was excited to try this new vape he acquired in Bui Vien. He was travelling through Saigon while working on his new website for start-ups. I thought I would give it a go and tell him if it was a good investment. I took a deep breath and inhaled a large amount of marijuana vapour and tried to keep it down my lung as long as possible until I started to cough hard. I felt it hit my throat and it smelled of fresh leaves. 20 seconds later, I started to feel the effect. I decided to lie down because I couldn’t trust my co-ordination and the tripping began. It was the same feeling when you were sick with flu. You would feel lethargic, empty inside your head and your mind just floated in the air. It was light but it was beyond feeling great. I don’t know about you but I usually get high when I am under the weather. The drug entered the deepest corner of my brain and triggered all my buried, hidden memories. When I was a child, my mom would make some garlic wine to keep the body warm. Then she fed me that when I caught a cold. I took a turn for worse with a high fever. I was then hospitalised and had delusions. I got into a trance where I could see images projected from my brains to my eyes and of course, nobody else could see them but me. I screamed out “monkeys and bikers”. My mom and relatives stayed in hospital for 3 days, watched over me and called out my names with the hope of snapping me out of it. They were scared that they would lose me forever and that I would stay crazy. That day, when I took that breath, I started to feel I was slipping into an alternative reality, a delusion that I would fail to get out. I told my friend to keep talking to me and call my name to bring me around. He put on a movie to distract my mind by asking me to focus on the screen. As I concentrated, my brain began to play back different movies I have seen over the years at an incredible speed, then it went through 30 something years of my life in minutes. I started to repeat subtitles I saw in those movies, one line from another, so fast that I thought my tongue couldn’t keep up with my thoughts. The next thing I knew was the sound of my tongue. I could hear it touching and moving around in my mouth. It sounded like popping candies or balloons- tingling and awesome. I could see tiny particles and pixels of the images. It felt like I unveiled other parts of the brain that I could never reach in normal conditions. The TV distraction idea only worked for a few minutes, then I burst into tears. I cried so much and let go of all the feelings suppressed and bottled up in me over years. I told my friend almost all deepest secrets. I have always tried to do the moral, rational, thoughtful and expected things. There are thoughts and actions that are barred from nurturing and executing. The thoughts that can destroy other people’s life and my life such as acting irresponsibly and getting fired for it. I know exactly what to say or what to do to make people hate me, hate themselves and turn against one another. I started to say things that make my friend concerned a bit then I struggled to stop it. I believe there’s a dark side of me, which is a combination of selfishness, self-destruction, inconsideration, rebellion, stupidity, irresponsibility that has been waiting to be liberated. Only then I understand what my French client meant by “almost uninhibited”. I stopped myself from doing something stupid to be forever regretful. I suddenly felt dry and my throat hurt a bit. We thought it might be a good idea for me to try to spit out the rest of marijuana to reduce the effect. It was then all hell broke loose. I threw up and threw up. My stomach could have never been cleaner. I even saw the food that I ate earlier that day. This puking experience was the same effect I had when I drank too much. I couldn’t stop kissing the toilet till I had this dreadful thought that if vomiting continued, something would be suck up and go back out the wrong way. I was terrified at the thought that I forced myself to swallow back what was about to come up through my mouth. We meant to order some food before we went out but we tried doing it for 3 hours without success. We finally settled with a cup of instant noodles. We moved from the couch to the bed then back to the couch and vice versa. My friend had to follow me to make sure I was hydrated and kept me safe. I felt so sleepy and I bet I would sleep very well but I fought to stay awake because I was worried I would sleep so deeply that my soul would venture somewhere else and I would wake up a few years later. I also switched my voice, changed my tone and accent to a different character, the ugly side of me. I was in and out of consciousness for 5 hours before the effect wore off. The first thing I did was to tell him that I would never try weed or any other drug ever again. We agreed and he apologised to me since he didn’t know it would affect me that much. I know it wasn’t his fault. It is my job that makes me intense. In the past, after one extreme Nuru massage, I could hear blood run in my right foot vein. It took me a while to identify the noise and pinpoint its exact location. I had to listen to music to drown out the sound to fall asleep easily. In another case, I just sat there on my bed staring into the air for about two hours doing nothing, then I came down to earth and realised I had wasted two hours of my day. In other instances, I would sleep very deeply, but when I woke up, I felt like I was ten years older and I had lost 10 years of my life for sleeping. Most people associate nuru with sexuality and sexual acts. It could be but it is much more than that. It can be very spiritual and up-lifting. For nuru recipients, they always feel like a new person, full of positive energy, stress-free for at least 24 hours to 1 week. It is because I might have given them my best energy with a sincere hope that they will be happy in exchange for their emotional baggage and stress. Whatever the result is, there is one thing I can say for sure about Sheila’s Nuru: don’t try drugs after receiving or giving one because it might enhance the effects of drugs to a point that you might not find pleasant.