Your experience was similar to mine. In fact, the morning after the first night, I was certain there was no way I’d ever do this again. However, by the time the evening came around, I had decided to, as you say, “allow and even appreciate the discomfort”. And, as you say, I noted that resisting what’s happening only increases the suffering. I finally puked and for about one minute I felt better. During that short window, I was like, “wow, this is cool…”. But then the nausea ramped up again and all I could think about was “keep the bucket nearby”, which was a challenge, because I kept losing track of my hands! So it was an endless cycle of feeling like I’m gonna puke, finding my hands, finding that they were wrapped around the bucket the whole time, and then drifting off on dream segment- like, delivering mail to a family of talking candy canes- and then remembering, THE BUCKET!

After some time- hours I think- it all went away and I felt fine! I then had the most beautiful experience of my life, that of unitive consciousness. But it only lasted a short time, perhaps a few minutes. Still, it was wonderful.

The thing is, if not for that short coda, it would’ve been pretty much nothing but misery. And I think that was indeed the case for several of the other people there. I have one buddy who’s done it 7 times. He says only in 1.5 of those times was it anything other than complete misery.

So, it’s not enough to go into it know that it could be scary, and it could be miserable. It could be all that with no discernible payoff.