A Journey Between Worlds: The Story of My Ayahuasca Experience

In October 2023, I took part in my first Ayahuasca ceremony.

I had heard about the substance and its effects for years when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I didn’t want to do it in some random apartment in Oakland. I wanted the “real” experience.

I had always thought that meant flying to Peru and spending a week camped out in the jungle with a shaman. But with two kids and a business to run, that prospect seemed less likely than ever. Luckily, earlier last year a friend invited me to participate in a ceremony in what seemed like ideal conditions.

It would take place in a U.S. state where Ayahuasca (known as “aya”) had been decriminalized, which meant I wouldn’t be breaking the law. The site was a beautiful retreat center that had hosted such ceremonies many times before, facilitated by an experienced team that deeply believed in its potential to help people. Secluded high in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by autumn forests and snow-capped peaks, it was the perfect set and setting.

I boarded my plane at LAX and decided to use the flight to set my intentions, a crucial part of any such experience for me. Initially, I had no specific goal in mind or problem I wanted to resolve, so I was surprised to see a long list of desires and hopes pour out onto the pages of my journal:

• To reconnect with my childlike sense of wonder
• To access the deeper reasons why I do what I do
• To find my sense of self-love again
• To awaken myself to the deeper reality of existence
• To change my relationship to stimulation, numbing, avoidance, and repressive behaviors via food, media consumption, and my body
• To fully experience the love and happiness available to me
• To heal the wounds from my past
• To unlearn any resistance to certain emotions
• To connect with my ancient and timeless relationship to the universe
• To gain relief from my throat pain
• To uncover the next chapter of my life and career
• To learn to open up to people and share myself without barriers
• To discover what I don’t know I don’t know
• To find out why I resist being present with my two children, Caio and Delia
• To see who I’m being with them and what they need me to be
• To deepen my love for my wife Lauren and see her more fully
• To be a vital force for good in my family and with my friends
• To go deeper into the psychological/emotional aspects of my work
• To reconnect with nature and the groundedness it provides
• To change my neural pathways and remap limiting beliefs and behaviors
• To surface and resolve any intergenerational trauma manifesting in me
• To understand the potential of medicinal healing to give people freedom
• To find the root my relationship with my dad, what was missing and how it can be healed
• To get back to my essential, authentic self that’s been obscured by adult responsibilities and modern life
• To generate a new vision for my future that is worth living for
• To calm my nervous system and learn to let all my emotions flow
• To be in awe at the miracle of existence

I would call this a “general” set of intentions for my personal growth. They make up the background motivating force that drives me to seek transformative experiences of this kind.

It could be a 10-day silent meditation retreat, doing LSD at Burning Man, a weekend seminar on group dynamics, a week-long coaching intensive, visiting spiritual teachers who’ve inspired me, or hosting business masterminds with entrepreneurs I admire. Sometimes, even reading a particularly impactful book can do the trick.

The important thing is that the experience disrupts my current perspective and way of thinking about my life. It usually has to be an embodied, immersive experience that takes me out of my comfort zone and into a different environment. And I often need a teacher or facilitator to guide me toward the parts of myself I least want to see.

Every time I seek out one of these transformative experiences, it shatters my identity and gives me at least a small taste of ego death – the temporary dissolution of the ego that is constantly narrating my life and defending against new ideas. I know it’s time for the next round of transformation when life starts to feel dull and loses its color.

I wanted Aya to both remind me of who I’d always been – hopeful, enthusiastic, in wonder – and to hint at what the next chapter of life had in store for me. Little did I know, my psyche had its own ideas of what needed my attention, and I’d spend most of the weekend exploring just a couple of these intentions.

Touching down in a mountain sanctuary

I landed in the mountain town near where the ceremony would take place and stepped out into the crisp autumn air. I had no checked bags, as I’d be in and out in just three days. Along with another friend from LA who was joining me, we jumped into the white Jeep Cherokee I’d rented and began the 30-minute drive out of town.

The retreat center was nestled in a secluded valley, surrounded by towering mountains on all sides. Sturdily built cabins of various sizes dotted the gently sloping hillside, covered in wild grasses and alpine trees. A picturesque stream wound through the property, emptying into a small fishing pond. At the center of the property, a large two-story lodge housed the eating area, offices, and reception desk.

I checked in, stowed my bags in a shared room down the road, and met some fellow participants. They ranged in age from their 20s to 70s, but most were in their 30s to 50s. I never found out what most of them did professionally, but got the sense they were mostly in creative fields like art or music, tech, education, fitness, or other healing mediums.

About half of them seemed to live nearby, and the rest had flown in from various parts of the country. I was surprised to learn there were only a handful of newcomers to Aya. For most of the people I talked to, the number of times they’d taken it had become part of their bio (“I’ve sat 5 times”). This was an experienced group who knew each other very well, and had been on a journey I was just joining.

Day 1 – First Encounters

The experience I signed up for included three ceremonies: one per day for three days. Each ceremony lasted around 5-6 hours.

The first of the three took place on Friday, the day we arrived. I nervously prepared my supplies in my room, including a yoga mat, a couple pillows, a meditation chair, a blanket, an eye mask, a water pouch, a headlamp, a journal and pen, and all-white clothing, before heading to the tent.

The ceremonies took place in a large tent-like structure in the middle of a meadow a couple hundred feet from the main lodge. It was white and rectangular, with an entrance door at one end. The walls of the tent were made of transparent plastic sheets, tied down at the corners, which were kept open during the day to allow air and sunshine in, and closed at night as the temperature dropped. The floor was made of plastic sheets, with straw-like mats on the outer edges where the participants laid out their mats.

Stepping inside and surveying the space where I’d spend the next few days, I got a sense of the size of the group. With 30-40 people, it looked like we were taking up almost every inch of the perimeter, leaving only the middle of the floor open. The roof was pitched, about 25 feet high, and at the far ends of the tent, large mandala-like patterns were the only hint of the psychedelic experience to come. Otherwise, everything seemed purely functional.

We gathered at sunset on that first day, settling onto our mats and wrapping ourselves in blankets as the night air turned frigid. Finally, the facilitator walked in, peering at us with an amused, joyful grin as he walked the length of the floor. He was middle-aged, white, tall and thin, with a goatee and cowboy hat framing an angular face that radiated solemnity. He unpacked his gear, which included all sorts of thermoses, bottles, cups, spoons, and other mixing devices as well as candles, incense, and other artifacts I couldn’t identify.

After setting up, he started to speak, introducing us to the shape of the ceremony we would take part in that night. He explained that the Ayahuasca “medicine” or “brew” (the two terms experienced practitioners seem to use most) would amplify whatever was inside us. He explained that the tea we’d be drinking was completely natural, a mixture of two plants found in nature that had been consumed ritually by humans for millennia. He shared a little of his background, his discovery of Aya at a low point in his life as a musician, and how it had changed his mind and his trajectory. Finally, he encouraged us to be open to whatever arose during the ensuing hours and to ask the “helpers” – four or five people who would stay (mostly) sober and roam the tent – for anything we needed, like extra blankets, tissues, water, or a bucket.

A notebook was passed around, and we each wrote down our intention for the night. Struggling to summarize my long list of intentions in one sentence, I wrote simply, “To feel more joy on a daily basis.” Candles were lit, giving the space a mystical vibe as the darkness fell outside. Our facilitator took a few minutes to prepare the tea, and we lined up to receive it. As we reached the front of the line, we asked for the “serving size” we wanted: small, medium, or large.

I asked for a large serving (I wasn’t about to come all this way just to have a mild experience). It was served in a small metal cup, about the size of an espresso. The brew tasted sour and fermented, and was very earthy, like coffee with the grounds mixed in. I drank it immediately, toasting the room as the others had done. Then I returned to my mat, propped myself up with pillows and blankets, and put on my eye mask as recommended to see what was in store for me.

And the answer was, at least that first night: not much. I sat for hours feeling only a slightly heightened sense of perception, which could very well have been due to the unusual circumstances I was in. I tried not to be attached to any expectations, but I could still feel myself already being disappointed that I wasn’t having a mind-blowing, eye-popping vision from the get-go. In my head, I was already composing explanations and theories as to why it “wasn’t working,” and imagined how I would explain to my wife, family, and friends why I’d traveled so far just to sit quietly in a tent.

A couple hours in, around my usual bedtime of 10pm, I started getting very sleepy and lightly dozed for about an hour despite my best efforts to stay awake. When I awoke, I could hear people around me making a variety of sounds – moaning, crying, sobbing, grunting, sighing, growling – indicating deep experiences I had yet to share.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to peek out from my eye mask to see what everyone else was up to. Most sat motionless or barely moving on their mats as instructed, with eye masks on. Other, more experienced people walked around, swayed to the music the facilitator had started playing on his guitar, or danced.

Toward the very end of the night, as the music finished and everyone started to emerge from their layers of blankets, I started to feel something. What came to mind was how hard the last few years have been. The pandemic, becoming a father, writing my book, managing the ups and downs of the business, the war in Ukraine and the people I cared about there… it had all been too much, too fast, and I realized I hadn’t given myself permission to feel the weight of it. I think that’s because it had also been a wonderful time, full of so much novelty and joy and accomplishment. I hadn’t thought I deserved to feel the pain and the grief of it as well.

In the final moments of the first ceremony, I saw clearly who I had to become to survive all of it. I had hardened myself, shut myself down in certain ways, to “make it through” just the next few days, and then the next few weeks, which had then turned into months and years. I’d pushed away people, hobbies, and parts of my life that brought me fulfillment but hadn’t felt essential to my survival amid sleepless nights, crying babies, and a business that had skyrocketed and then plummeted. I’d built a wall between myself and my emotions, telling myself I’d get to them later like a pending to-do list.

As the weight of these realizations settled onto my shoulders, it wasn’t a good feeling. I felt the blackness of it, the hopelessness, the fear that if I let the pain in, it would trap me forever like a prison sentence. But in the presence of so many brave souls, hearing their heartfelt singing and chanting, and hearing what each person took away from the night, I knew I had to find the courage to try.

Day 2 – Confronting Fatherhood

Most of the participants had stayed up late into the night after the first ceremony, excitedly catching up and talking about what they saw, learned, or discovered. Not me though. I’m almost always sleep-deprived because of the kids, and went straight to bed the first night to try and catch up, so I wouldn’t fall asleep again the next day.

I didn’t need to worry though, as the next day’s ceremony took place in the middle of the day, starting around noon. I slept in, enjoyed the wonderful breakfast prepared by the staff, and did some journaling about the night before. We were asked to start the ceremony on an empty stomach, and as midday approached, we gathered our things and started making our way to the tent.

The setup for day 2 was the same as before, following prescribed steps that felt like they’d been refined countless times. I began to see how incredibly thoughtful every little detail of the whole experience was. The way our mats, pillows, and blankets had been organized and folded before we got there. The way distracting sounds like the door opening and closing were minimized so as not to interrupt people’s inner experiences. The way the helpers were always firm yet unobtrusive, leading anyone who needed to make more noise to a separate place outside the tent. The atmosphere was warm, friendly, and informal, but that didn’t mean they missed any attention to detail.

As the second ceremony began, I once again chose a large serving, and this time I was determined to ask for a refill and take another helping, as I’d seen others do the night before. I returned to my mat, put my eye mask on, and peered intently into the darkness of my mind like a magician waiting to see what his incantations would summon.

An hour passed, and once again I felt disappointed, embarrassed, and even ashamed that I wasn’t getting a message. What was I doing wrong? What was wrong with me? This was the dialogue of my conscious, rational mind, and even as it kept railing against me, a rising tide of emotion came up from behind and below me, like a house flooding from the ground up while I waited impatiently upstairs.

Before I knew it, my train of neurotic thoughts was gone, and I saw a vision in my mind’s eye of a giant statue rising ominously before me, like a pillar at Stonehenge, ancient and mythic. And then I realized the statue was my son Caio. It was in that moment that it hit me what I was here for: to grapple with being a father. That aspect of my life had barely appeared in my long list of intentions, but in truth, had been my main preoccupation for a long time.

I found myself bowing before the statue of my son, prostrate, apologizing again and again: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I repeated as tears started pouring down my cheeks. “I’m sorry for not being the father you deserve, for not being patient with you, for not loving you enough, for not allowing all your emotions because it was too hard to allow mine.”

A recent incident arose vividly in my mind, from just a few weeks before. I had been at my parents’ house with my wife and two kids, where we often visit for dinner. Caio had moved a piece of plywood that was blocking a stairwell, preventing our fast-crawling daughter Delia from ascending it. My father reprimanded him sharply, telling him not to move the barrier. It was such a minor interaction, but in that moment, I saw red, and confronted my father just as sharply, telling him not to speak to my son that way.

An argument unfolded, as our differing views on discipline, obedience, parental authority, and childrearing in general clashed like never before. I said I wanted to be gentler and more understanding in my parenting, but it was hard for my father to hear that without feeling defensive, like it was an attack on the way he had raised me (which it kind of was, to be fair).

We talked it through and came to an uneasy resolution, but that incident stuck with me for weeks. I lost sleep over it, wondering if I was spoiling my son on one hand, or perpetuating a disciplinarian style of fatherhood on the other. I could see the good in both sides, but also what each was missing.

Should I insist on my son obeying me always, so I could keep him safe and teach him to respect authority? Or should I always be patient and kind as he expresses and explores his emotions, knowing the importance of self-expression and self-acceptance? Should I discipline him for misbehavior, risking the emotional repression I had experienced myself? Or embrace newer parenting philosophies that emphasize listening and empathy, but which I often don’t feel I have the patience or energy for?

These questions had cycled through my mind incessantly. I felt caught between them, unable to find a compromise but also unable to choose which side of the spectrum I belonged to. But sitting with Aya, I started to see that a lot of my confusion and turmoil stemmed from my own past. I was projecting my own baggage onto both my son and my father.

I was soon transported back to the past, to memories of being spanked by my father. The Ayahuasca amplified those memories, making them far more vivid and lifelike, as if I was really there. I noticed details of my parents’ room, the pattern on the bedspread, the style of the furniture, and the way the light filtered through the windows, that I didn’t even know I remembered.

As I was taken back to that moment, I could suddenly feel all the emotions that had raged inside me at the time. Fear at the next slap of my father’s hand, shame over what I had done, anger that he was doing this to me, and fierce indignation at how I was being treated. I sensed that indignation turning into determination to prove him wrong, a feeling I’d have many times in the coming years anytime I was trying to prove myself to someone. And then eventually I moved through all that and felt the emotion on the other side, which was grief.

The grief came from the interpretation I had made of this discipline: that I had to be different to be loved. That I needed to obey and conform to the demands of others to be worthy. That I needed to become useful, to become indispensable in fact, so that I would never be treated this way again. I found myself asking, again and again, the question that lay at the core of my wound with my father: “Why couldn’t you just love me the way I am?” I wept on my mat, wailing in my mind’s inner voice, expressing the need my child self hadn’t been able to articulate in that moment.

Now here is where Aya is so different from other therapeutic methods. As I was moving through these memories and emotions, all witnessed through my mind’s eye, the feeling of nausea in my stomach was slowly rising. I began to sweat, like when you know you need to throw up but are trying to resist it. Somehow that feeling of nausea became linked to the stories and emotions I was reliving, and the act of resisting that nausea came to represent my resistance to feeling and accepting them. I don’t know how exactly it works, but there came a moment when I realized I would never be free of this story in my mind until I was free from the associated feeling in my body.

Each of us had a small plastic puke bucket ready at the foot of our mats, and this was the time to use it. I slid the eye mask up onto the top of my head, threw off the blanket, and leaned forward onto my hands and knees with the bucket beneath my head. I hate vomiting, but the nausea had gotten too strong.

I vomited hard several times. And in that act, the act of letting go and allowing my body to have the response it wanted to have, something also clicked in my brain. Suddenly that whole experience of being spanked was encapsulated and expelled from my body and mind like a rejected virus. By purging my stomach, I also purged the contents of my mind. The relief that washed over me was the usual relief of having vomited, combined with the relief of finally accepting what had happened to me.

The weird thing is, after all this, I could now see the entire situation from my father’s perspective. Being a father myself now definitely helped. I could see that he wasn’t trying to send any of the messages I had thought I was receiving. In fact, he was trying to send me the message of love, coded in his own language. That he was protecting us siblings from each other by forbidding hitting and kicking. And that he was maintaining his own boundaries – what behavior he would allow and what he wouldn’t, to maintain his own sanity and preserve the calm and order of our household.

My memories of being spanked no longer felt all-consuming and overwhelming. They now felt like a snow globe I was looking at from the outside, turning it this way and that, peering curiously at the chaos and drama unfolding within but knowing that, in a strange way, it wasn’t personal.

I had always heard that vomiting was a common part of Ayahuasca, and it was the main part I dreaded, like many people. The role of vomiting in our culture is secretive and shameful, either something to be embarrassed about (because you drank too much) or gotten over with as quickly as possible (if you’re sick). I had assumed it was just an unfortunate side effect of drinking the brew, but it was through this experience on the second day that I understood it is essential.

Here’s my theory as to why: When you have an insight or realization about your past or your trauma, that happens primarily in the mind. It is the mind that comes up with theories, explanations, stories, interpretations, justifications, and reframes. You might have a profound realization that completely changes your perspective, but the body doesn’t know anything about that. The body speaks in a much more primitive language, the language of bodily fluids and internal movements such as yes, vomiting.

And it’s critical that the realization you’ve had finds its way into the body, because that is where the trauma actually resides. Trauma isn’t merely intellectual; what happened to you remains embedded in your nervous system, in your muscles and fascia, even in the way your metabolism functions, your lungs breathe, and your shoulders hold themselves. This is why trauma is so hard to heal from – it remains lodged in the tissues of the body, which continue to send the same urgent signals of fight or flight no matter how many insights you think you’ve had.

As far as I can tell, the disgust/gag/vomit reflex is your body’s way of purging something at the most visceral level. It’s not just an inconvenient side effect. It’s your body’s way of rejecting a thought or identity the same way it would reject poison or a spoiled piece of food, as something that is hurting you and needs to be expelled at all costs. Each time I found myself fighting the nausea and the urge to throw up, I also noticed I was fighting a realization or idea in my mind. Once I surrendered to one, I found relief from the other as well.

Day 3 – A Warrior’s Gift

We sat for the third ceremony on Sunday afternoon, once again gathering in the white tent around midday.

The previous day, our guide had explained that the active ingredient in Ayahuasca is DMT (short for Dimethyltryptamine). It’s a psychedelic compound that occurs naturally in a variety of plants found in South America. The Ayahuasca brew combines several of these plants together and distills them, making the effect much more potent and longer-lasting.

One reason to partake in the ceremony on consecutive days is that the level of DMT in your blood builds with each session. This might explain why people often report minimal or no effect on the first day – their DMT levels have not yet reached a certain threshold.

On day three, I think I was right at that threshold, because I plunged straight into a trip as soon as I drank my first cup.

I found myself in a large field, with tall, tan-colored grasses swaying in the wind around me in all directions. A few small clusters of trees stood together in the distance. I was face to face with a well-built man, with coffee-brown skin and a thick mustache, eyeing me intently from a dozen feet away. He was wearing leather armor, and a thick cloak, and I could see he was an experienced warrior. I was in Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, over a thousand years ago (I somehow knew). And this man was my ancestor, a warrior from the steppes who had entered Europe across the land bridge from Asia.

Checking in briefly with my rational mind, the scenario was plausible. My family and I are obsessed with genealogy, and have spent many years tracing each branch of our family tree as far back as the 1500s in France and Northern Italy. It made sense that at some point in the past some ancestor of mine could have entered Europe this way.

But the factual details of the scene weren’t the point. The point was the message this man gave me: that we had always been caught between two worlds. I didn’t understand the significance of this at first, but as I thought back through what I knew about my family’s history, it began to make sense.

My father was born in the Philippines shortly after World War II and moved to California as a toddler, but had always felt there was “something missing in his heart” from his lost homeland. My mother had immigrated from Brazil to the U.S. and wholeheartedly adopted her new culture, but had always missed the feeling of togetherness that the more individualistic U.S. lacked. My grandfather had left the working-class neighborhood of his youth in Upstate New York to become an Air Force captain, successful entrepreneur, and world traveler, yet never lost the extreme frugality of his roots. And my grandmother had left the Philippines to start a brand-new life in Santa Barbara after World War II, but lingering anti-Asian racism had always lurked in the background.

Going further back, I had ancestors who’d moved from Canada to New York because they couldn’t own land in Canada as Protestants. A couple generations before that, they’d fled persecution in France as Protestant Huguenots, settling in the United Kingdom briefly before departing for North America. As far back as the 1600s, I knew of a distant ancestor of ours in Italy named Marco Vincent who had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism during the Reformation, only to convert back once he saw the division and infighting among the many proliferating sects. He was executed by the Catholic Church for his idealism, hanged from a bridge in Rome as an apostate. In the Philippines, we had less information but knew our family had originally come from China centuries earlier.

I don’t know why I had never fully connected the dots between all these stories, but once I did, I could clearly see that for many generations in my family, we were a people caught between worlds. We were always immigrants, seekers, explorers, and entrepreneurs, willing to risk it all to find a new homeland or a new faith or both. 

Facing this mythical Anatolian warrior in an open field, I suddenly understood where the feeling I’ve always had—that I don’t belong anywhere and can’t fit in—might have come from. It wasn’t something uniquely wrong with me. It was part of my inheritance.

And then I suddenly saw the other part of my inheritance – why my entire life, I had felt compelled to serve as a bridge between worlds: between the U.S. and Brazil, between Christianity and secular culture, between conservatives and liberals, between masculine and feminine, between left-brained and right-brained ways of thinking. I’d felt an irresistible urge to bridge the worlds I was a part of because I could clearly see how they could learn and benefit from each other tremendously. This was, I realized, the other side of the coin of the alienation and isolation I had always felt: a precious birthright, to transform the pain of separation I’d inherited into a source of love and connection.

Our guide had explained the night before that people often have some combination of three experiences during their Ayahuasca journey: the hospital, the school, and the church. The hospital represents healing—a sickness or wound the medicine is going to work on. The school symbolizes learning—a lesson or idea the medicine is teaching you. The church represents transcendence to a higher plane, where the self dissolves and you are left in wonder.

Day 2 had been like school for me, but the rest of day 3 would be all about the hospital.

I next found myself returning to that child self that had first emerged the day before. He wasn’t done with me. It felt like a cork had been unstopped, and powerful emotions poured out as a result. I felt rage, sadness, indignation, and fear coming together in a full-blown tantrum. I could sense my adult self standing aside and allowing that child to fully express everything wrong and bad in the world.

I was confronted by the recognition that so much of the time I’m still trying to survive, still just trying to get by. Trying to make it through a busy day at work. Trying to make it through a grueling workout at the gym. Trying to make it through the dishes, or the laundry, or email. Trying to get this Ayahuasca experience itself over with to get on to something else. But to what? What was the place I was always waiting to arrive at?

“Where is the joy I was promised in life? Why do I have to do all this? Why can’t I just be free and play and have fun? I was told that if I worked hard, and was responsible, and followed the rules, and achieved my goals, that there would be a life full of joy on the other side that I could just enjoy. Instead there’s just more chores, more responsibilities, more waiting. I’m tired of trying to be useful all the time. I’m tired of trying to take up less space, of trying to have fewer needs, of trying to get appreciation so that one day I can be happy.

As these thoughts and accompanying emotions ricocheted through my mind and heart, I knew that this was healthy and good. These were thoughts and feelings that had been bottled up for so long, suppressed under the weight of adult logic. I knew they weren’t necessarily true, but they were useful.

It was time to let the body express itself too. I felt like I needed to walk and so I stepped outside the tent, puke bucket in hand. Before I knew it, I was on all fours in the dirt, heaving and then vomiting harder than I ever had before. I vomited so hard that my whole body was being lifted into the air each time, like a bucking horse, my entire spine convulsing as if to get every last molecule of this pain out of me.

I was by a creek bed by myself, and as I vomited again and again, I had what felt like a memory of being an animal, alone and sick and secluded, purging itself in the wilderness. I felt that child self expressing himself through writhing and hitting the ground and shaking all my limbs. I could understand my three-year-old son so much better in that moment, what he was feeling when he lost control and screamed and hit me and threw things.

Often in the past, I had taken his tantrums personally, as if he was purposefully trying to hurt me and make my life more difficult. But mirroring his experience, I could see that there was something pure and righteous and beautiful in his anger. When he screamed at the top of his lungs during timeouts – “I’m not a bad guy!” – he was fighting for his needs, and for his wants, and not apologizing for them. He was defending his boundaries, trying to find his voice. He was fighting for his right to be heard, and to be seen, and to be loved even in the midst of his most fierce rebellion.

Realizing that, I was again transported back to my parents’ bedroom where I’d been spanked as a child. And I found the words I needed to say to my father in that moment: I’m not bad. I’m good. I’m not bad. I’m good. And now my adult self could interpret those childlike words: All I needed then was to be heard and accepted and loved. I needed to know that you could still love me even in the midst of my anger and rebellion.

Returning to the present, I could see the ways I’d perpetuated the story that my son wasn’t lovable when he was angry or defiant. I couldn’t be with his anger because I couldn’t be with mine, because my father couldn’t be with my anger as a child, because he couldn’t be with his own anger…stretching back for probably many generations.

Emerging from this experience, I could now see my son’s rebellion as sacred. I could see that sometimes he acted out with me because he knew he was safe with me. I could see that what he most wanted was for me to be with him. Not to fix or change him, but to go with him through the eye of the emotional storm he was facing.

Knowing what to do during his misbehavior, acting out, or tantrums has been one of the greatest challenges for me as a father, and having processed the emotions it was provoking in me, I suddenly had an incredibly clear insight into a better way of approaching them: being with Caio during his tantrums could be like a sitter taking care of someone who was tripping.

In both cases, they aren’t themselves, aren’t in control. They are undergoing their own process and don’t need my intervention, either by rescuing or trying to change them. It isn’t about me, so there is no reason to take their behavior personally. They are giving voice to something within themselves, and all they need is for me to keep them safe, stop them from hurting themselves or others, and witness them without judgment or shame.

This was all so intense, that I needed a break, which was as simple as taking off my eye mask and flooding my senses with the outside world. I was surprised to find I had complete control over entering and exiting the experience, like hitting play and pause on a video game. But the DMT was peaking in my bloodstream, and I felt the medicine calling to me to come back, like a steady gravitational pull inward.

I sat beside the creek again, closed my eyes, and within minutes felt so much information rushing into my brain, it was like staring into the sun. Beams of pure truth, beauty, and love flooded my brain so fast I couldn’t resist. I felt like I was being obliterated into a million pieces by the sheer magnitude of the universe, crushing me with its magnificence.

For a brief moment, I vividly remembered what it was like the last time I’d felt so much love: as a baby, wrapped in the pure, unconditional love of my parents. I felt something in my relationship with them healing. I understood what they had been trying to do back then, and accepted it, and appreciated it. I could see our relationship, then and now, from both sides, as a child and as an adult. Everything had happened for a reason, even (especially) their mistakes – to give me the chance to heal myself and to feel this beautiful array of emotions, here by the creekside in the mountains in 2023.

The Aftermath – Returning to life post-Ayahuasca

Although the retreat was only 3 days, coming back from it felt like rejoining society after months away. I felt calmer, more centered, more joyful, and clearer than I ever remember feeling. I was also almost unbelievably emotionally fluid, moving seamlessly from sadness to elation and back again.

During the first week, I found myself brought to tears holding my daughter in my arms, seeing my son playing in the garden, or hearing a beautiful song. All my emotions felt so close to the surface, so accessible, and those days were filled with wonder.

I called each of my siblings and my parents and told them about my experience, and shared how deeply connected I felt to them because of it. With my parents, I told them about remembering that infantile feeling of being completely immersed in their unconditional love, and how much that meant to me, and I felt they received the ultimate gift of a child: unqualified gratitude for bringing them into the world.

For the first two weeks back, I noticed I had zero cravings for anything—sugar, coffee, social media, TV—these seemed almost repulsive to me, designed to numb and distract me from a beautiful state of mind I had no desire to leave. I was kinder to myself, and to others. More patient, more loving, and strangely, more “myself.”

I gained tremendous clarity about my work and business, making dozens of decisions that had stymied me and been left unresolved for too long. I suddenly had so much perspective about what mattered in the business, and which projects and goals I’d been pursuing to inflate my ego, or defend my pride, or impress someone. I forgave myself for that and quietly let those fall by the wayside.

It’s now been over two months, and while many of the benefits of that temporary high have subsided and life is largely back to “normal,” I can still feel the lingering effects of my Ayahuasca journey: more ease, more peace, more presence, especially with the kids. I have less need for coffee and other stimulating or numbing agents to feel okay. Oddly, my anxiety has subsided so much that I’ve lost all motivation to meditate or exercise, which I normally do as a response to stress. I’ve remained closer and more connected to my wife, my brothers and sister, and my parents, a closeness that finds expression through small moments of intimacy and vulnerability that now feel more accessible to me.

I often find the long-term effects of transformative experiences to be this way: a kind of subtle softening of my mind’s hard edges, and a background feeling of joy that almost unnoticeably pervades my days without making a big show of itself.

On the subject of childhood discipline, you might think after all the healing and inner work needed for me to make peace with being spanked as a child, I would be very reluctant to discipline my own child. But I’ve found the exact opposite to be true: now that I’ve processed and integrated my own past, I’m much more clear and direct in my authority with our kids. Instead of constantly second-guessing myself, and appeasing them to avoid confrontation, I’m more confident in drawing boundaries and creating consequences for crossing them. The result has been a happier household where my son knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

Reflections – Plant medicine as information technology

I’ve tried to share the details of my personal breakthroughs with Ayahuasca to convey their depth and impact. But the experience also gave me a lot of ideas and insights into how the medicine interacts with our minds, illuminating long-held theories of mine.

One way of understanding the effects of DMT is to imagine the connectivity of the brain increasing exponentially. Parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate find themselves suddenly talking, which is the source of the insights and realizations.

Looking back through the many pages of notes I took from this experience, it strikes me that all the information I needed to make these connections was already present in my brain. Ayahuasca itself is “content neutral” – it doesn’t impose its own doctrines or dogma on you. The guide provides some context, but there is nothing you have to believe, accept, or understand to receive the benefits. All the wisdom I needed was within me the whole time, not just at a mystical level, but on an information-theoretic level. I just needed more connectivity to make it all make sense.

This suggests to me a fascinating way of understanding what Ayahuasca is doing to achieve its transformative effects. This theory is my own, and I’ll present it here with the disclaimer that it’s based primarily on my own experiences.

In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk cites recent neurological discoveries indicating that trauma causes actual physiological changes in the brain. Among them are changes in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. This makes the world overwhelming and threatening since the brain can’t distill what it needs to know and pay attention to. In other words, trauma from our past can contribute to information overload.

What if we understood trauma not just as a specific event involving personal injury, but as a distortion in the information system that is our brain? That would allow us to remove the lens of trauma as something inherently “bad,” and reframe it as simply “the way our nervous system is tuned.”

Dr. van der Kolk notes that the introduction of psychiatric medications in recent decades has provoked a revolution in the treatment of trauma and mental illness. Yet they also have limitations, such as possibly deflecting attention from underlying causes.

Studies of Prozac found that it doesn’t help combat veterans, for example. Antidepressants haven’t led to a remission of depression in society; in fact, the diagnosis has exploded, with 10% of Americans now taking them. Medications for attention deficit disorders have skyrocketed in popularity, especially for children, but Dr. van der Kolk says they may interfere with motivation, play, and curiosity and are linked to childhood obesity and diabetes.

His conclusion is that psychiatric medications can alleviate some symptoms of trauma, but not “cure” it. This is where I think Ayahuasca and other “plant medicines” have such a crucial role to play: they work not just on the mind, but on the body. They aren’t just cognitive, but somatic.

Unlike pharmaceuticals produced in a lab, the ingredients of Ayahuasca are naturally occurring. Because they are found in nature, they are part of a long tradition of shamanic practices, with established rules, guidelines, and rituals that provide a lot of context and mitigate risk.

Another difference is that Ayahuasca doesn’t merely suppress or alleviate the symptoms of trauma. In fact, just the opposite: it reveals the symptoms and amplifies the thoughts and emotions linked to them. The “container” of Ayahuasca is designed to give you the courage and safety to go straight to the root of the trauma causing you pain.

And what exactly is that root? Even when it comes to the experience of one person, my own, it can be quite varied. Sometimes it involved specific events from my past, including the interpretations or narratives I created to explain those events, or who I believed I had to become in response to those events. In other cases, the root of psychological symptoms was a mindset or belief I had adopted in order to survive a situation, which had served me well at the time but no longer. In still other cases, it was a limiting assumption about how other people saw me, or an old identity that had once been true but no longer was, or a “way of being” in the world that increasingly didn’t serve me as that world changed, or a bad habit I’d adopted as a coping mechanism that was now spiraling out of control.

This makes me wonder: is there really any difference between all the above mental concepts? Aren’t they all just labels we’ve invented for bits of information in our brains? By reducing everything to information – to bits, encoded as 1s and 0s, or neuron firings, or the thickness of a myelin sheath – couldn’t we treat it all as just ripples and eddies in the constant flux of information making its way through our brain?

We can examine each element of my Ayahuasca experience through this lens:

• The location in nature provided me with information that grounded me in the present moment and reminded me of my evolutionary environment
• The healthy food and drink communicated to my body that this was a place of nourishment and refuge
• A group of warm, welcoming people who had experienced this before gave me role models for how I should conduct myself through the weekend
• Having the helpers and so many other forms of support available allowed me to let go of worries that I would “lose control” or not have a basic need met

I’m astonished looking back at how every element worked together so harmoniously to create an experience that I would describe as deeply meaningful and profoundly healing. It strikes me as an incredibly efficient process: how many hours of talk therapy and thousands of dollars would have been needed to reach the same conclusions? Would such realizations even be possible, or sink in so deeply, without something shifting at the somatic level?

Ayahuasca and other plant medicines are gradually gaining acceptance across the United States and abroad. They are being sanctioned for therapeutic uses in a number of states, often under professional care or in the context of a religious tradition. When I look at the vast landscape of trauma in the world, I think we need every tool available. And Ayahuasca is one of the most promising and transformational I’ve ever encountered.

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