Category

Personal Experience

When Ayahuasca Reveals Past Lives AyahuascaIntegrationPersonal ExperienceShadow

When Ayahuasca Reveals Past Lives

It's said that ayahuasca has the power to clean various disorders and misalignments at the root, supporting healing from the bottom up. What constitutes a deeper root than our past lives? Indeed, it seems ayahuasca can help us face the karmic consequences of past actions, be these from a previous incarnation or an ancestral inheritance. Let me unpack this a bit more here. We modern folks are in the beginning stages ...
May 8, 2026
WTF, Ayahuasca?! AyahuascaEmotionsIntegrationPersonal ExperienceSociety

WTF, Ayahuasca?!

Often, too often nowadays, people expect ayahuasca to be some sort of magical potion, instantly reformatting them into a completely healed state. When this doesn't happen, they feel resentful, even betrayed: "I did the work, I showed up—why did it do this to me?" This can easily segue into the very common plaint of individuals wrestling with unrecognized trauma: "What's wrong with me?" I'm seeing this kind of reaction more and more lately, due in part to the rapidly spreading…
Dec 29, 2022
Mapacho: King of Plants AyahuascaDietaPersonal ExperienceTeacher Plants

Mapacho: King of Plants

Ayahuasca use in the Amazon is embedded within a wider tradition of plant science called vegetalismo, and the most important and revered of all plants is tobacco—specifically, mapacho (Nicotiana rustica), a variety that is up to 26 times stronger than that used in commercial cigarettes. The ritual traditions surrounding mapacho are far more ancient than ayahuasca. Some say it was the tobacco spirit that taught humans how to use ayahuasca. Mapacho is considered the master plant of Amazonian healing traditions,…
Jun 23, 2021
what ayahuasca teaches
What Ayahuasca Has Taught Me AyahuascaDietaPersonal Experience

What Ayahuasca Has Taught Me

Entering my seventh year of relation with ayahausca, I've been musing on how it's shaped me, and what I've learned. What I've learned not just in passing, but for keeps—teachings that have been permanently tattooed on my being through my personal work with the medicine, and also the whole excruciating, beautiful process of plant dieta (more on that here and here). Here are three deep knowings that ayahuasca y las plantas have installed in my being: 1). We Belong to…
Mar 29, 2021
DNA, ancestors and ayahuasca
Ancestors or Past Lives? AyahuascaDietaPersonal ExperienceTrauma

Ancestors or Past Lives?

Ayahuasca leads us through subterranean memories, down into primal dungeons where we’ve locked away parts of ourselves. These are not just personal recollections, but the ancient, rejected secrets of our species (ayahuasca works with the species, not just the individual), which need to come into the light to be released. It’s not unusual to have ayahuasca visions from another place and time. Sometimes these rise up from the land itself, as in my first ceremony, when I was greeted by…
Nov 20, 2019
On the Poison Path AyahuascaPersonal ExperienceTrauma

On the Poison Path

Ayahuasca illuminates dark and light in equal measure, unleashing both terror and bliss, often in the same night, sometimes in the same breath. Ultimately, if you can open to whatever arises with a degree of equanimity and assimilate it over time, the practice can lead to a grounded wholeness that's Tantric in its depth and completeness. It all depends on how deeply you do your share of the work. The medicine stirs the pot, bringing everything you’ve buried up onto…
Oct 15, 2019
We’re Not Made to Heal Alone IntegrationPersonal ExperienceShadowSociety

We’re Not Made to Heal Alone

We humans need other humans—to call us on our stuff, to name our shadow. To see ourselves as we cannot. To initiate us into new paths and practices. And to support us through the rough ride that ayahuasca can bring, the retriggered trauma and angst-y feelings that can arise. Let’s take shadow work first. By shadow I mean all the forgotten, repressed, unseen and un-integrated psychic material we’ve left behind in the process of growing up. Very often we need…
Jul 13, 2019
Ceremony As Shitshow AyahuascaPersonal Experience

Ceremony As Shitshow

A few weeks ago I sat through perhaps the most outrageous ayahuasca ceremony I’ve ever attended, a chaotic display of anarchy that was a true shitshow. Yes, chaos is a fundamental attribute of ayahuasca, and sometimes pure chaos is exhilarating. And my own experience that night was okay, even beautiful at times. But what I witnessed unraveling in slow time in that room, the impact and effect on the people in the circle, was disturbing. It made me think about…
May 30, 2019
How Dieta Rewires Your Being DietaPersonal ExperienceSocietyTeacher Plants

How Dieta Rewires Your Being

During my last half-dozen or so plant dietas, I’ve been experiencing a phenomenon I call ‘unfolding.’ It has something to do with the way my normal life, much of which is spent staring at a laptop screen, flattens my perception, collapsing my sense of dimensionality. Technically speaking, you might say I suffer from an overemphasis on the mono-focus of the left brain, at the expense of the holistic vision of the right. What’s interesting is how I find dieta to…
Apr 29, 2019
Ayahuasca Obfuscada AyahuascaDietaIntegrationPersonal ExperienceTeacher Plants

Ayahuasca Obfuscada

Work with Amazonian plantas maestras or teacher plants is almost always enlightening, but the process can be confusing, too. The language of plants is not exactly straightforward or clear-cut. They speak to us in non-verbal ways, through images and sensations that can be vague, diffuse, difficult to understand. Plant teachers move at a different pace than our harried everyday minds, a pace that’s organic, slow and grounded, growing from what came before and connecting with what is in ways we…
Jan 12, 2019