The Ayahuasca Years
This essay describes several years of my personal experience with Ayahuasca. It is not meant to encourage the use of any substance, nor to simplify the risks involved. People with nervous systems like mine can be especially vulnerable in these altered states, and nothing in this essay should be taken as guidance.
I’m sharing this because these ceremonies intersected with a long and complicated journey of mental health, sensitivity, and spiritual struggle. One I’m still learning how to live with. Ayahuasca did not “fix” me. But it helped return me to parts of myself I had abandoned, and the integration that followed has been a part of shaping the way I currently move through the world.
This story is offered as a record of personal truth, nothing more.
The story of how I went from a forcible psychiatric hospitalization, to years of surviving the ups and downs, to where I am now would be incomplete without the Ayahuasca years.
I was in my early forties, and everything was falling apart. Waves of insomnia gripped me. My partner and daughter had left for good reason, and I was desperate to get to the heart of things. Even in my darkest moments, I could sense the wounding, the trauma, and some faint, buried awareness that my true nature was hiding beneath it all. I just had no idea how to reach it, or what to do once I did. I was afraid that if I didn’t find a way through, everything would unravel completely.
Around this time, some friends of mine began an Ayahuasca circle. I remember feeling I had nothing left to lose. There’s a kind of fearlessness that comes when you’re standing on the edge, so I went for it.
I want to be careful not to romanticize or glorify these experiences. For people with sensitivities like mine, there are real dangers in entering these spaces. For one, you just can’t do this while on medication. And once you begin, there’s really no turning back. Being “blown open,” as they say, can bring on more difficulty before anything gets better, which was certainly true for me. Yet as I look back now, it’s clear that these experiences were an important ingredient to the relative health and self understanding I feel today.
The second weekend in the circle was the turning point. I sat with this group for about three years, doing weekend ceremonies every three months or so. The first weekend had been, in retrospect, a preparation for what was to come with some sweet visions and a gentle introduction to this powerful medicine. During that second one, I found myself with my ego seemingly dead beside me. A sense of being completely naked and alone, a stranger in my body, seeing all my pain and wounding laid bare. A sense of profound terror. It was overwhelming. I didn’t know what to do with it all until the tears came.
I had forgotten how to cry. I hadn’t known that my capacity to feel so deeply is one of my true gifts in this lifetime. I had learned to separate and contain this part of myself for most of my adult life up until these moments. But there I was, praying over my purge bucket, releasing pain, old stories, and generations of trauma that weren’t mine to hold. Then I was on all fours, uncontrollably weeping as something inside me had broken open. A dam had burst. And in many ways, I’ve been crying ever since.
As a boy, I learned early to hide my emotions. “Big boys don’t cry.” My father, a scientist and man of logic, didn’t know how to relate to my sensitivities. I had no sensitive male elders to help me understand and realize this is were my true masculine power resides. Emotions were for women, my dad thought, so I buried that part of myself and tried to fit the mold. But that was never going to last and a root cause of so many of my struggles as a younger man.
Ayahuasca is called the death vine for a reason which became abundantly clear the night of my ego death. It felt like a real death in the moment. But in that space, something also felt strangely familiar, as if I had stepped back into parts of the same inner territory I had crossed during earlier upheavals in my life. The intense waves, the psychic unraveling, the sensitivity that had so often pushed me to the edge.
In many ways, those years with the medicine became a kind of practice: learning how to sit with my own cycles of disorientation, loss, and reemergence. Ayahuasca reminded me that being truly alive requires the willingness to move through these inner deaths and births, not to escape them. The teaching was to lean in rather than turn away, to trust that each ending carries the potential of a new beginning waiting just beneath the surface.
The ceremonies that followed continued to bring me back into these same territories. But something had started to shift. I wasn’t simply being thrown into the darkness anymore: I was learning to stay with myself inside it. I could find small pockets of calm, and in that calm, I began to notice that the darkness wasn’t actually empty. There was illumination there, if I stayed long enough to let my eyes adjust.
I slowly began to feel a strange kind of comfort in places that had once terrified me. The purge bucket, which is so many people’s least favorite part of the ceremony, became, for me, a kind of altar. It was where I learned to let pain move through me instead of sealing it inside. Night after night, I was wiring into myself a capacity I didn’t know I had: the ability to hold pain without collapsing, to stay connected to my own goodness even while falling apart. A real Buddhist sensibility started to emerge as I began to find comfort within the storm. A knowing that this is actually the way.
Some nights I would rise out of these darker spaces and find myself flooded with a sense of connection—to the people beside me, to the forest, to the stories of my ancestors, to the great mystery that holds all of this. The medicine kept telling me, again and again: This beauty is yours. This connection is yours. But you must do the work. And when the time comes, you will have to walk away from this place and take the teachings with you.
If I had to sum up my years with Ayahuasca, it would be something like this: I learned how to be with all of myself—my fear, my grief, my darkness, my tenderness, my sensitivity. I learned how to cry and grieve again . And within those tears, I found compassion. I began to see myself clearly, to name what hurts, and to begin the long work of loving all of who I am. And with that came a deeper sense of connection. As opposed to the isolation I had learned through the years of struggle and uncertainty.
The key ingredient though was this feeling part of myself and its ability to show me how connected I really am. All of it! The part that shines as a respected preschool teacher. Or as my astrologer friend would say it’s just your moon in Pisces:-)
In the months and years that followed, the ceremonies didn’t stop echoing through me. The nights in the circle were only the beginning; the real work came afterward, in the quiet, unremarkable moments of daily life. I began to understand that healing wasn’t about chasing transcendence or getting back to the medicine, it was about learning how to live gently inside my own skin. Ayahuasca had given me some essential teachings, a re-connection to my true nature, some visions of what's possible and a long home work list. The call was to get to work, one day at a time.
There were long stretches of confusion and exhaustion. The tears kept coming, often at inconvenient times—walking down the street, standing in line at the grocery store, running into a friend in town. At first, I worried something was wrong with me. Then I began to see that these tears were washing something clean, that they were part of how my body knew how to heal itself and keep me connected to the heart of the matter.
Integration for me wasn’t a neat or linear process. I didn’t return from Ayahuasca “fixed.” If anything, I came back more open, more sensitive, and more aware of how fragile my human heart really is. I had to learn to care for myself in a way that felt intimate and deeply personal with a clarity that I am my own healer, who also needs witness and support. I had to learn how to hold and move through pain, as well, not avoid it. It was more like tending a garden than following a treatment plan.
I started paying attention to rhythm. I learned that I need slowness, rest, and space for solitude. Too much stimulation, noise or social demand can send my system into chaos. I’ve come to see this sensitivity as both my challenge and my gift. It’s the very thing that, when honored, keeps me balanced.
Ayahuasca didn’t cure me. What it did was help reintroduce me to the parts of myself I had banished. It showed me that my so called “breakdowns” were often the language of my soul asking to be heard. It helped me see that my health isn’t about stability in the conventional sense. It’s about harmony, about being able to move with the waves rather than fight them.
These days, my life looks quieter from the outside, but inside it feels more spacious. The storms still come(not as often or acute,and shorter in duration) with waves of energy, sleepless nights, old wounds that flare up, but I meet them differently now. I no longer see them as signs that I’m broken or failing. They’re just reminders of how finely tuned I am, how close to the surface my inner life lives. A wake up call if I’m not being true to my innate nature and the care I’ve come to see as essential.
The man who once felt shattered, desperate, and alone is still somewhere inside me, but now I can hold him with compassion. I can thank him for surviving long enough for the rest of me to emerge. I don’t pretend to have found a cure or a single truth, only a deeper relationship with what is real in me.
If Ayahuasca taught me anything, it’s that healing isn’t about escape or transcendence. It’s about remembering how to belong: to our bodies, to our stories, to the earth itself. It’s about being willing to feel, to be seen, and to trust that feeling itself, in all its variations, is an essential form of wisdom.
Much Love!
The Mad Preschool Teacher (He/Him)
this is such a powerful testimony! Somehow, I feel like I missed this part of your story, and it’s obviously really important. There’s so much writing on the web from people talking about their journeys with the plant medicine, but I feel like writing like this from someone. Who is Claire that they struggle more than most is really useful. Thank you so much for the gift. You were giving us of writing it down.