What Psychedelics Actually Do (It's Not What You Think)

Finding sisterhood in my first San Pedro ceremony outside Cuenca, Ecuador – April 2018

My intention was good. I wanted to stay sober. I wanted to understand why I was so self-destructive. Why I couldn’t seem to stop harming myself with alcohol and drugs and sex and love. I knew I needed to face the anger I felt toward my father. I knew I needed to heal. I had done the research, watched the trip reports. I wanted something to come in and save me from myself. Because I still believed I was fundamentally broken. I was ready and willing to do the work of healing. And had been humbled enough by my fuckups to know this was probably my last chance to figure it out.

Back then, psychedelic integration was barely on the radar. I didn’t have a plan or support or even preparation guidance aside from what not to eat. And that 12 day retreat experience changed everything in ways I never expected. I thought ayahuasca would come in and take my addiction. That she would clean me of my wrongness. That she would let me lie there and do her work on me and I would float out of there on cloud 9 without much effort on my part.

What happened instead was a descent into my own darkness. A full-on spiritual awakening that turned me from a skeptical atheist into a believer in miracles, magic, and the aliveness of Earth. They invited me to come home and trust that I belonged there.

The medicines shredded my ego, my beliefs, and my need to be right. They ripped me out of my sleepwalking and showed me my coping mechanisms. My anger. My old wounds. My childhood hurts. They expertly located everything that was in the way and opened my heart so that I could feel it all. They took me into the Goddess inside me. They introduced me to the guides who had been with me all along. They brought in otherworldly beings called Spirit Doctors to work on my body. And then I understood why people said it was like 10 years of therapy in one night.

I could have landed anywhere. But I received these medicines in ceremony, held by song and prayer. Led by the softest, most powerful, most wise and kind teachers with the most integrity. The care and beauty I witnessed between the shamanic leaders was like nothing I had ever experienced. I had never seen men openly expressing love. Had never witnessed divine partnership between an empowered masculine and wise feminine. I had never been shown how to pray for the water or food. How to give thanks for life itself. I had never seen the Earth as alive before. I had no reference for the ritual and intention and meaning that came with these plants. But it felt like Truth.

The strangers that arrived into the retreat together very quickly opened into a community. The family I had always craved. A ragtag group of people from all over the world who also wanted to heal and grow. Who also hurt. Who were so beautiful and authentic. We were invited to go so far outside our comfort zones that we just abandoned them entirely because it was safe to be uncomfortable.

We were supported by volunteers who had been walking the medicine path themselves for years or just a few months. I came into relationship with the sacred fire, the air, the animals, and the land. I allowed myself to receive the medicine of rainbows and bees and birds and soft clover under my feet. I sat in my first temazcal and stared at the Milky Way until sunrise singing and sharing about life and drinking chamomile tea. I swore more than once I would never take ayahuasca again.

The Medicine Is Just the Portal

It took less than a week for them to ask me to stay as a volunteer. After my second retreat, they offered me a job as a manager. And just like that, I moved to Ecuador. Over the next 18 months, I would support more than 400 guests as a yoga teacher, ceremony helper, firekeeper, and retreat manager. I would sit in dozens of ceremonies learning from true spiritual masters, listening, asking questions, and being taught through lived experience. Receiving the opportunity to give back to the medicine by caring for the family. All while getting deeper in relationship with ayahuasca and huachuma through my own inner work. Paving the path to becoming an integration coach by having long conversations with people who were having their own awakenings.

People showed up because they were excited about the hype. But also because like me, they were stuck in life. Overwhelmed. Lost. Afraid. Sick. Traumatized and angry. They often came in like I did, expecting the medicine to fix everything. And they often had similar experiences of awe and wonder. Healing on a deeper emotional and spiritual level that just can’t be explained by clinical research alone. And the ones who opened into the discomfort, who dove in and stopped resisting and just let go and let it all in, those were the ones who got it. And often people left still feeling empty, disappointed, and unhealed.

Integration is Non-Negotiable

Quickly, I started to see a disturbing trend. People came through and got torn open in the best way. They got seeds planted inside their hearts that wanted to grow deep roots. Into community, purpose, and a different way of life. They had it, and left smiling and hopeful. New.

But the problem is, most people don’t live at an ayahuasca retreat center in paradise. You don’t live in intentional community. You don’t have other open-hearted, open-minded, spiritually alive people around you in huge numbers. You don’t have teachers who carry lineage, who have walked through initiation and trial to receive the blessing to hold medicine. You don’t have wise elders who are connected to Source and Earth, who sing and pray for the water. You don’t have a village. You don’t have a language for Spirit. You might not have people in your life who understand what is happening to you.

So you end up right back in the life that made you sick in the first place. Back in the relationship or the job or the habits or the addiction. And over time, the pink cloud fades. The medicine wanes, and the freshly prepared soil of your neuroplasticity starts going back to what it already knows. This is why integration – support after medicine – is non-negotiable.

Because what the science shows is that you have to practice to lay those new neural pathways. You have to tend to them and weed out the old beliefs and ways of being so you don’t get stuck in your old life. You have to pay attention to your practices and immerse yourself in the new way for it to root in. But most people don’t have that part. Most people take medicine and it’s a peak experience that doesn’t do all it could, because there’s no infrastructure to help the change actually last. There’s no guide to show you the way, to walk with you step by step.

Lots of people desperately want to work with medicine, and so they are taking it at home, alone. Or inside therapeutic containers with standardized protocols, separate from Nature. Without containers or ritual or facilitators to hold them. With people who maybe have never had the medicine themselves. To me, these are completely different experiences leading to completely different outcomes. This is why I don’t consider myself part of the psychedelic healing industry. Why I don’t think that medicalized psychedelics are capable of offering the healing we really need, which is spiritual awakening. And why I don’t really care about the research.

I care about your soul coming back to life and staying that way.

And, I will die on this hill: medicine without Spirit and ceremony is like a deep fake. It’s like flat Topo Chico. Like a flaccid, deflated balloon. You know there’s a shape there that wants to be more, but there’s something empty in it. Something saccharine and artificial. And I would argue that pharmaceutical medicines like MDMA and LSD, while they have healing properties and do a lot of good, are not remotely the same as plant medicines. Because the plants have a Spirit. A guide. A consciousness that enters your body and co-creates an experience where you teach each other. And that Spirit consciousness is the force of life itself. It is the Godhead. The light. And it will appear to you in whatever ways you need to receive it.

Without ceremony, I would not have healed or changed. Without the spiritual component, the fire, the elemental alchemy or medicine music, or the 30+ years of expertise held by my teachers, I would not have gotten it. The ceremony is the real medicine. The family is the village.

Without those integral parts, psychedelics aren’t really reaching their full potential for changing your life. Because what we need isn’t just surface level, clinical healing. It’s not just symptom relief. It’s not another medical modality or protocol or more therapy. It’s not just taking an infusion that makes it all better. We are suffering with a deep wound of detachment from our wildness. From our Mother. We need connection. To own our shit. To take personal responsibility. To be seen, held, and to express. To speak our truth in front of others and be held through it. To grieve and howl and laugh at it all in the safe embrace of other human hearts.

This is why my work exists. I create containers that hold you in softness, from the ceremony through everything that comes next.