We sit silently on our mats as smoke slowly fills the maloca, the circular longhouse where group work takes place. The jungle’s massive leaves and alien foliage fill the windows, brilliant green fading to blue-black silhouettes as night falls, a ring of paraffin lamps quickly becoming our only light source. We carefully arrange our barf buckets so they’re within easy reach in front of our mats, along with bottles of black, grainy perfume that the healers will sprinkle on our hands and spit into our faces as part of the treatment process.
It’s the first ceremony of my first ayahuasca retreat, which I spent weeks preparing for before flying halfway around the world to the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. It’s also the first retreat designed to help LGBTQIA+ people heal from trauma, combining traditional medicine with the psychotherapeutic model of Compassionate Inquiry. By day, Western-trained facilitators will help us integrate the otherworldly journeys we take at night, guided by the Shipibo healers who serve as interdimensional intermediaries. They call us pasajeros, the passengers, and we’re waiting for our ride to arrive.
There’s a lot of quiet scene-setting between arriving at the maloca and actually ingesting the brew, and my stomach churns with anticipation. The facilitators sit in the center of the room puffing on Nicotina rustica, the sacred tobacco colloquially known as mapacho, smoked in fat blunts or ceremonial pipes to provide energetic protection and facilitate progression through difficult parts of the journey. It’s essential to working with ayahuasca, and an example of how nothing in the rainforest happens in isolation.
The Shipibo healers finally enter and sit with the facilitators, adding clouds of mapacho smoke to the tiny weather system beginning to form. We wait longer, until one of the healers tenderly whistles a tune into the bottle of ayahuasca and passes it to another. Then, one by one, we approach them, focus on our intention for the ceremony, and drink the thick, black brew. With the taste on our tongues like ashtrays full of spoiled licorice, we watch the facilitators remove the lamps, and we descend into the penetrating dark of an Amazonian night.
The sounds of the jungle envelop us like a cloud, so visceral we can practically see them—and in a way we can, because ayahuasca works through synthesia. The plant spirit reveals her medicinal songs, the ikaros, to the healers in intricate geometric patterns that appear before their eyes like psychedelic sheet music. As the brew begins to take hold on me, a disembodied voice hauntingly delivers the first ikaros; the others follow, each singing their own tune, songs colliding and combining in ethereal symphony.
While the visionary properties of ayahuasca get all the press, they’re not actually the treatment—they’re the diagnosis, highlighting areas of unwellness and revealing the healing that’s needed. For that reason, ayahuasca is sometimes called a “spiritual X-ray.” Unlike the Western framework of one-medicine, one-cure, ayahuasca is considered part of a comprehensive health care system that uses psychological, physical, and ethereal methods and tools to treat body, mind, and soul. The ikaros, for example, is like shamanic surgical equipment, removing negative energies and “cleaning” us from the inside out. Ayahuasca also works in concert with other medicinal plants, such as mapacho, from the jungle’s vast pharmacopeia, amplifying the healing potential.
The retreat begins with a physical consultation where the healers give us prescriptions for ailments from headaches to allergies and gynecological problems: aggressive massages; dousing body parts in murky baths; drops that unleash a controlled burn into our eyes. Each morning, we consume a regimen of non-psychoactive plant remedies, downing shot glasses full of extracts like ginger, camu-camu, and fouler-tasting others.
Plants, the Shipibo say, are wiser than we are, and they impart their knowledge through dietas: a system of nutritional and behavioral restrictions where “teacher” or “master” plants are ceremonially ingested, establishing a relationship between the dieter and the plant spirits. It’s like a metaphysical medical school, where healers-in-training learn from the plants about ailments, cures, treatments, preventions, risk factors, and contraindications. The dieta requires isolation that can last for years, opening the dieter to receive healing, strength, and guidance. In the process, they heal their own afflictions, because you have to heal yourself to heal the world.
A less restrictive dieta is part of pasajeros’ preparation, and before the retreat, cutting out my comestible crutches intimidated me more than the ceremonies. Yet psychedelic healing works by embracing what scares you; opening the doors of perception to let in your deepest fears. That which you resist persists, and the harder you fight, the more you suffer.
I found this especially true of ayahuasca, which at the right dose is an immersive experience. The first time consensus reality began to dissolve, I was afraid. I desperately grabbed at shreds of meaning as the plant spirit hurtled me through the infinite layers of the multiverse, bouncing in and out of worlds that turned the laws of physics, language, and perspective upside-down.
I was pinballed across realms ruled by spiders and jaguars; giant cogs turning indescribable machines; interdimensional beings presenting me with contextless objects. I watched family members die and walked through a lifetime of shame in Scrooge-like reprise. Years of repressed memories flooded back in full sensory detail. I sobbed as if my heart would break and feared it would never end; I forgot how to go to the bathroom and spent hours dry-heaving, writhing in pain. I became convinced that something had shattered, and I was losing my mind.
Yet freedom came by saying “yes” to it all. What if I am losing my mind—and I just let it go? What if all my greatest fears were the best thing that ever happened? What if I die, get sick, pee my pants, end up alone? As I welcomed each worst-case scenario, it unlocked a higher level of love, growth, and self-forgiveness. It was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had, leaving me both completely transformed and back to who I always was. My psyche collapsed and rebuilt itself stronger than before; my body disintegrated and was returned to me in its original factory conditions. My ego dissolved and drifted back in, gentler and softer, like the tide.
The prevailing message I was left with: Behind the door you least want to open lies truth, beauty, and release. The key is surrender, turning it over to forces greater than yourself. In the process, you find those greater forces are yourself; you already have the answers, your systems know how to self-repair, and you are the healer you seek. Ayahuasca doesn’t make the changes, you do, and you don’t do it alone. Aided by plant and human teachers and strengthened by the group, you open the door to your traumas, leap into the void, purge what has plagued you, and emerge into joy. And then you get up the next morning, and you do it all over again.
As I lay in my bunk that first night in the jungle, I dreamt that snarling beasts were bearing down on the door of my parents’ bedroom. I was trying to hold the door closed from the inside as snapping jaws and bared teeth pushed through the widening crack. My parents just sat there serenely as I strained with all my might, screaming, Why aren’t you helping me?
My mother turned to me with a smile and said: Let them in.
So I did, and the beasts devoured us, but it didn’t hurt at all. It was a gentle death, just like falling asleep, moving from one dream to the next.
