Five years on the medicine path

Five years ago I sat in my first Ayahuasca ceremony, and I did not walk out of it the same person who walked in. Since then it has become one of the steadiest threads of my life: work held by Colombian and Peruvian shamans who carry lineages far older than anything I understand fully, in circles with people who travel from every part of the world for the same reason I do.

The medicine does not tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what you already know and have been avoiding.

Peyote and Wachuma have walked alongside Ayahuasca in these years, each with its own temperament, its own lineage, its own way of asking the same question from a different angle. I don't treat any of it as a shortcut. It is slow, often difficult work, done in community, under the guidance of people who have devoted their lives to holding this space safely.

What keeps me returning is the community as much as the ceremony itself: a shifting, international circle of people who show up to sit with themselves honestly, retreat after retreat, year after year. Five years in, I still don't think of this as something I have finished learning. I think of it as the practice I'll keep returning to for the rest of my life.