She had done ten ayahuasca ceremonies in six months and wanted to know how to go deeper. Each one showed her more, she said. She was finally starting to understand everything.
She was also months behind on rent, barely speaking to her family, and watching her business fail. She used rapé every morning and called it meditation. Every part of her life that needed attention seemed to be funding the next ceremony.
The details change. The shape does not. People mistake transcendence for transformation, and confuse visiting other worlds with fixing this one.
I should say plainly that I run retreats. People pay me to sit in ceremony with them, so I have a financial interest in you not taking all of this to heart. Take it anyway.
I know this trap because I lived inside it for years.
My work with the medicines started in the States, but I did not understand their weight until I began spending long stretches in Peru. The ceremonies at home were real enough. They were also fenced in by ordinary life, by work and errands and the phone, and I did not notice the ceiling until it was gone. In Peru, away from all of it, a different kind of surrender became available.
Training with a Shipibo lineage taught me something I have never fully translated for Western students. The medicine path there is not carved out of life as a special category. It is life. Curanderos begin young, families carry the work across generations, and the plants sit inside the ordinary rather than above it. Nobody there is scheduling a ceremony to escape their Tuesday.
In my own early years I was in ceremony nearly every week, certain that each one was reaching another layer. Some of them were. What I could not see was what the frequency was doing to everything else.
The medicines made me porous. The city I had loved for years turned unbearable. Noise, crowds, the density of other people’s states, all of it came through with no filter. Restaurants became too much. Nights out became too much. I sold my place downtown and moved an hour into the country.
That was not a bad decision. The quiet suited me and still does. But it was less a choice than an accommodation, made by a nervous system that could no longer do the other thing. My yoga practice, which had anchored my days for a decade, quietly disappeared. I stopped following anything happening in the world. If you had asked me who the vice president was, I would have guessed.
At the time this felt like transcendence. I was rising above the mundane. Looking back, I was building a parallel life, beautiful in its way, that had fewer and fewer points of contact with the full range of being human. That is not a life. It is a preference expanding until it becomes a constraint.
Meanwhile the marketplace has arrived. I scrolled past a medicine worker last week promising a quantum healing and a total consciousness upgrade, thousands of likes underneath. This is what happens when optimization culture meets an old tradition. We try to hack our own interiors, fast-track the enlightenment, get the download.
But the medicine is not the cosmic unity. It is what happens when you come back to your body, your bills, and the relationship you have been avoiding. It is Tuesday afternoon, when nothing is glowing and you are just a person again.
Here is the mechanism as best I understand it, offered as my own reading rather than anyone’s clinical finding. In Internal Family Systems, protective parts form early and work to keep us from feeling more than we could once handle. Ceremony stands those protectors down for a few hours. That is much of what makes it useful, and it is also what makes it habit-forming. With the guards off we feel free, connected, wildly alive. Everything seems workable.
Then it wears off. The protectors clock back in. The expansion contracts. And rather than doing the slow, unglamorous work of changing an actual life, we start looking at dates for the next one.
I have watched people construct an entire identity around being a medicine worker while the wound underneath goes untouched. I have watched others become connoisseurs, collecting increasingly exotic experiences while their daily lives quietly come apart. Some rotate through everything available, ayahuasca to huachuma to bufo to rapé, which is less a path than channel surfing. And that daily rapé is worth naming for what it usually is, which is a nicotine habit wearing ceremonial clothes. I have had that habit. Calling it medicine did not change what it was doing.
Then there is the rush to facilitate, which I am in no position to be superior about.
When something helps you enormously, wanting to offer it to others is a decent impulse. I had it. I also stepped into holding space before I had integrated my own experience or dealt with my own core material. Ten years of working with people in other modalities gave me some ground to stand on, mostly in the form of do no harm, and I still made mistakes I now hand to my students as cautionary tales.
What took me longer to admit is that facilitating was doing something for me too. Watching other people let me see patterns in myself I could not see head-on. That is not shameful. Plenty of therapists will tell you the same about why they chose the work. But in a field expanding this fast, with this little supervision, almost nobody names it out loud, and unnamed it becomes a problem.
I have also seen this go well, and the people it goes well for have one thing in common. Time. Long stretches of it. Six months minimum between ceremonies, often years.
They tend to understand something about the Western context that enthusiasm hides. Our culture is not built to support frequent ceremonial work. The legal grey zone adds a layer of secrecy that carries its own cost. The fasting, the dietary restrictions, and the sheer depletion of regular ceremony land badly on lives that already run at capacity. Some people solve this by relocating somewhere the practice is supported, and I understand the appeal, though I would want anyone considering it to be honest about whether they are moving toward a community or away from a life.
For most people staying put, the transformation comes from restraint. A strong initial series, and then the harder part: stepping back, sometimes for years, letting it work through the ordinary days. Meditation, therapy, writing, movement. Building a plain life that has been quietly rearranged by something extraordinary, rather than trying to stay in the extraordinary at the expense of everything else.
So the question worth sitting with is not whether the medicine works. It works either way, which is the problem. The question is whether you are using it to enter your life or to leave it.
Coming home from Peru was always the hard part. The gap between the two worlds can feel unbearable for weeks. I have come to think that gap is not an obstacle to integration. It is where integration happens, and there is no version of this where you get to skip it.
Most of what changes a person happens on days when nothing is glowing, when no one is watching, and when there is no mystical state around to tell you that you are doing well.
The people described here are composites. The patterns are real and I have seen each of them more than once, but no individual in this piece is a specific person.