Ten Years with Ayahuasca: What Really Happens After the Ceremony Ends

Ten Years with Ayahuasca: The Night My Heart Came Back

What actually happens when you stay with ayahuasca for a decade?

Not one “big ceremony,” not a tourist retreat, but ten years of returning, listening, resisting, surrendering, and learning how to live differently when you go back home.

This episode of the Ayahuasca Integration Podcast marks that threshold for me.
It’s the first in a series where I look back at ten years with the medicine and share the real gifts it brought, starting with one of the most important:

The night my heart came back online.

This article is the written companion to that episode.

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Waking up from a long, unconscious nightmare

When I first drank ayahuasca, it didn’t feel like a cosmic love story.
It felt like waking up inside a nightmare I didn’t know I was already in.

I began to see just how much of my life I’d lived half asleep:

• A constant background hum of anxiety and trauma I had normalised
• A nervous system that felt like a basement with a heavy metal band playing 24/7
• A “functioning” adult life built on dissociation, compensation, and control

The early ceremonies were not gentle.
I shook for hours, cried until my ribs hurt, begged the medicine to stop. It felt like being buried alive in my own memories, drowning in emotions I had spent decades avoiding.

And yet, underneath the terror, something in me knew:

This is not punishment.
This is precision.

Ayahuasca wasn’t randomly torturing me. There was an intelligence at work, moving through my body like a surgeon that knows exactly where the infection is and has no interest in leaving it there.

I stayed because of that. Not because it was pleasant, but because I could feel it was real.

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The Barcelona dome and the flute that cut my heart open

One October night in Barcelona changed my understanding of ayahuasca forever.

We were about 50 people inside a white dome. Two brothers from Putumayo, William and Jairo, were leading the ceremony with a small support team. I didn’t understand their tradition. Their clothes looked like “costumes” to my Western eyes. I noticed all the wrong things.

Then William picked up a small handmade flute.

At first, the sound was light, almost innocent. Then it started going straight into my chest. It didn’t feel like music anymore. It felt like the air itself had teeth.

The sensation in my heart was so strong I was sure I was having a heart attack.

I panicked.
I wanted my bed, my Netflix, my ice cream.
I wanted out.

I stumbled up, couldn’t find the door, and literally pushed myself out through the wall of the dome. Out into the cold night air, one thought was crystal clear:

I am never coming back to ayahuasca.

As I tried to run, something else happened.
I felt the medicine moving through my body like an anaconda, calmly switching muscles off.

It was the first time I understood in a direct, undeniable way: this is not a “drug.”
This is an intelligence.

My legs stopped working. I fell, dragged myself into a bush, and tried to hide. When the retreat psychologist found me, I told him:

“Do whatever you want. Just don’t bring those shamans. And don’t bring that fucking flute.”

Five minutes later, they came. With the flute.

I did what terrified people do: I attacked.

“Get away from me, jungle boy. Go away, Mowgli.”

They didn’t leave.
They sat down. They didn’t argue. They didn’t explain. They just started playing again, directly over my heart.

The sound tore through me like a laser. My chest started to convulse. I vomited, sobbed, gasped for air, drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain was unbearable. I hated them, hated the flute, hated the medicine.

And the whole time, they didn’t flinch.
They stayed with the work.

At some point, William reached his arm forward, into my chest in a way that was not physical and yet fully real. I felt him grab something deep inside my heart and pull.

What came out was a black thorn, almost as long as my forearm. Sharp, cold, perfectly formed. Like a rose thorn, but made of coal.

They looked at it. They looked at each other. I stared in disbelief.

One thing is drinking a substance. Another is seeing something pulled out of you that feels as real as the grass under your back and, in the same second, feeling a pressure you’ve carried your entire life suddenly disappear.

Jairo blew mapacho smoke over my heart.

The pain was gone.

They stood up, said, “He got a new heart, he’s good,” and walked back into the dome.

At that moment, my entire framework shifted:

• These were not “jungle guys with costumes and flutes.”
• They were surgeons working on a multidimensional level with a lineage older than my culture.
• And ayahuasca was not just a vision-inducing plant. She was a teacher with surgical precision.

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The return of my own love

The second that thorn left my chest, something I hadn’t felt since childhood returned:

Love.
From my own heart. To myself.

Not “love” as a concept. Not romance. Not performance.

A pure, wild, innocent current of warmth pumping from my heart into my whole body.
The energy I had been chasing in work, relationships, substances, food, and spiritual experiences was suddenly flowing from me to me.

The hole I’d been trying to stuff with:

• Work
• Ice cream
• Netflix
• Nicotine
• Achievement
• Spiritual performance

…simply wasn’t there in the same way.

Everything went quiet. The constant inner noise, the background panic, the internal war.
What remained was a heart that felt alive and sacred, not as an idea, but as a lived reality.

When I walked back into the maloca, I looked like a deranged forest creature: covered in leaves, grass, and mud from wrestling my own shadow on the ground.

People stared. I didn’t care.

Inside, something fundamental had changed.

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Three full moons and the wild child returns

In the integration that followed, the shamans told me:

“You’re starting this path. Traditionally, you do three retreats over three full moons. One process, three months, nine ceremonies.”

So I did.

At the ninth ceremony, another piece came back that I had forgotten even existed: my joy.

A musician, Darwin (you’ll know him from episode 3 if you listen), picked up his guitar and started singing “Ayahuasca Curandera.”

Something snapped.

My body started jumping from mattress to mattress. Not controlled, not polite, not “ceremonial.” Wild. Laughing. Screaming with joy.

It was the return of a kid I used to be before the trauma:
The one who wanted to move, dance, roll, laugh, not sit in a circle and dissect his own pain.

For almost ten ceremonies, I had been crying, shaking, drenched in terror and grief. This night, everything flipped:

• Life felt fun again.
• My body felt like movement and breath instead of a prison.
• The world felt magical, present, alive.

That song became my anchor.
Every time I heard it, it tethered me back to that part of myself that existed before things broke.

My life had been organised around trauma for so long that I didn’t realise how completely it defined my sense of self. That night gave me a new reference point:

“I am not only the person who survived what happened.
I am also the one who existed before it.”

That changed the entire direction of my integration.

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Life after the thorn: from orbiting trauma to living from joy

Once that frozen energy was released and my inner child was no longer buried, something very simple and very radical happened:

My life stopped orbiting the trauma.

It didn’t erase what happened. It didn’t turn me into some enlightened being.
It just shifted the centre of gravity.

Instead of organising everything around:

• Avoiding pain
• Controlling outcomes
• Managing anxiety
• Performing stability

…I started moving from a more wild, joyful centre:

• Life felt more like a dance than a fight
• I wasn’t pushing against the universe; I was finally moving with it
• My heart could rest in its own love and also receive love from others without leaking everything out through old wounds

This is what I consider one of the first true gifts of long-term ayahuasca integration:

Not a vision. Not a supernatural story.
A quiet, embodied return to joy.

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The hard part no one should skip: choosing who holds your heart

There’s a cost to this kind of work, and it’s not financial.

For some of us, trauma doesn’t come out gently. It comes out loud, messy, and violent.
Nervous systems scream. Bodies convulse. People regress. Old terror floods the room.

If you’re going to work with ayahuasca, especially if you have a trauma history, you need to understand:

• The medicine is powerful.
• Your system may open in ways you cannot control.
• Who holds the container matters as much as what is in the cup.

After ten years on this path, here’s what I stand by:

• Work with indigenous or deeply trained medicine carriers whenever possible.
• Don’t treat ayahuasca like a lifestyle accessory.
• You wouldn’t let someone do open-heart surgery because they watched a course on YouTube or did a weekend in the Bahamas. Don’t hand your psyche to the spiritual equivalent.

The organisation that hosted those early retreats later made enough mistakes that the shamans chose to stop working with them. That alone tells you something.

I eventually started helping this family from Putumayo host retreats in Spain, because I wanted to be in service to the medicine and to the tradition that had literally operated on my heart.

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Ten years in: what this first “gift” really means

This episode is only part one of a larger series on ten years with ayahuasca.
But if I strip it down, the first decade gave me this:

• A heart that’s no longer organised around emptiness
• A nervous system that has tasted silence after decades of internal noise
• A relationship with joy that isn’t pretend or performative
• A deep respect for the lineages that carry this work

Ayahuasca did not fix my life.
She confronted me with it and refused to lie to me.

The ceremony didn’t “heal me.”
The ceremonies opened doors. Walking through them, again and again, in integration, is what changed my life.

This first “gift” is simple:

The return of my own love, from my own heart, into my own body.

If you’re considering this path, or already walking it, I’d offer you this:

• Expect the trauma to surface.
• Expect it to be louder and less glamorous than the marketing.
• Choose people and lineages that can actually hold that level of work.
• And remember that the real miracle is not the vision. It’s the life that slowly grows around the healing once you go home.

In the next episode, I’ll share the next gift this medicine brought into my life — and probably another song.

For now: if your heart feels numb, noisy, or far away, I want you to know that mine once felt the same.

And it came back.

TRANSCRIPT:

0:00
What happens when you devote 10 years of your life to working with ayahuasca, when this plant is not just a number of ceremonies, but a real, intimate relationship with a teacher, where there is loyalty, respect, and deep trust, and also profound gifts and healing?

0:19
That’s what I want to explore with you today: the blessings, the gifts, and also some of the challenges that this path has brought to my life.
Because next year marks 10 years since I first drank the cup with the medicine.
And over the next weeks, I’ll share weekly some of these gifts that ayahuasca, this incredible grandmother, has brought to me on my path.

0:43
Because when I drank the first cup, it was as if I was waking up from a very long, unconscious nightmare.
I hadn’t even realized how much of my life that I lived half asleep and how used to I’d become to the background noise of anxiety and trauma and pain.

1:01
It was like a heavy metal band had been playing in the basement of my mind or my subconscious for years, and I didn’t even know it was there.
Every moment of my life had a screaming shadow trying to get my attention.
I’d just gotten so used to it, and these early days with ayahuasca weren’t easy.

1:21
It was some of the hardest work that I’ve ever done in my life.
It required so much trust and surrender.
People might imagine ceremony as only songs and visions and maybe some crying, but for my first retreats, I had serial, consecutive, difficult experiences.
It was only hard and difficult, and I didn’t even know that people could have a positive experience with ayahuasca.

1:39
But I kept going because something inside of me said, it gets better.
Just trust the process.
And in these early days I cried until my ribs hurt.

1:57
I was shaking as if I had epileptic seizures.
For hours I could not control my body, and I sometimes begged the medicine to stop.
It felt like being buried alive in my own memories or drowning in an ocean of emotions I didn’t want to feel.
And still, something in me knew this was not punishment.

2:17
This was a multidimensional precision.
It was an intelligence at work here, moving through my body like a surgeon who knew exactly where the wound was.
And if I trusted this, if I went through this, I would get to the other side, even though I didn’t know what that would look like.

2:39
And one night in particular changed everything for me.
That’s when I went from “ayahuasca is a drug,” like you will hear some people say, that makes you trip, to “ayahuasca is the most sacred of medicines and carries one of the most advanced forms of healing that exists on our planet today.”

2:59
And she deserves my deepest gratitude and respect.
It’s when I went from thinking that when you drink alcohol, you get drunk, when you smoke weed, you get high.
But with ayahuasca as a medicine, you never know where she will take you.

3:15
And that is what makes it such a powerful medicine, that every single ceremony will be different.
And on this October night, we were around 50 people inside a big white wooden plastic dome in Barcelona.
It was my second retreat, and two brothers from Putumayo, William and Jairo, were leading the ceremony with the facilitators and a psychologist.

3:40
I didn’t know much about their way of working then.
I looked at their outfits, more like a costume, and I only knew the songs in the room were alive and warm in this cold October air.
And at one point William started playing a handmade flute, and the sound was kind of light at first, almost innocent.

4:01
But then it started going straight into my chest.
It felt almost like it was cutting into my heart.
And it wasn’t just music being played.
It was like the air and the vibration of the flute had teeth, and the pain in my heart was so strong that I thought I was having a heart attack.

4:21
Later, of course, I learned that these instruments aren’t just used for decoration or nice music.
Every song, every instrument, every ícaro that they sing has a purpose.
It is one of the most advanced forms of healing that has been passed on for thousands of years.

4:41
The drum, the heartbeat of the mother, the first sound that we ever hear inside our mothers’ bellies, that brings and stirs all the emotions that we have stuck inside of us up to be released.
The rattle, waking up the energy centre, making the medicine move inside of us.

5:00
And the flute travels through the entire energy body, from the root to the head, and of course through my heart.
And ayahuasca, the medicine, moves with this music.
It searches for the blockages in the body and the spirit, and it helps them release.

5:18
But that night I had no clue of any of this.
All I felt was terror and pain, and I was so annoyed at these people from the jungle, as I called them, and I couldn’t stand it.
I knew I needed to get back to my bed at home with my Netflix and my ice cream, and out of this shitty cold dome, far away from that horrible flute that felt like a laser blade cutting into my heart.

5:45
I jumped up.
And since I couldn’t find an exit because I could barely see, I ran towards the wall in this dome and I just pushed myself out through the walls.
I literally broke myself out and started running.
And in the air outside, cold and wet, I was 100% clear that I would never come back to an ayahuasca retreat or this medicine.

6:05
And as I ran, I started feeling the medicine moving inside of me, almost like a large anaconda.
And suddenly I understood that she was very intelligent and could do more things than just give me some visions.
I could feel her quickly starting to turn off muscles inside of my body to make me stop running.

6:25
And when I realized that she could do this, I swore to her.
And I screamed, “Don’t you dare.”
But I was also amazed at the same time that she could even do that.
She was alive and intelligent.
And when I suddenly was paralyzed on the ground, I only had mobility in my shoulders, and I started to crawl like a little worm into a bush so I could hide from the shamans and the flute.

6:52
The psychologist at the retreat eventually found me lying inside this bush.
And I told him, “Do whatever you want to. Just don’t bring those shamans and no flute. For God’s sake, don’t bring that flute.”
And five minutes later they came.
And of course they brought this tiny little horrible flute that I hated more than anything in this world.

7:11
And I screamed to them in the most arrogant, vicious way that I could think of to try to push them away.
I screamed, “Get away from me, jungle boy, go away, Mowgli.”
But the shamans, they didn’t move away.
They came closer.
And somehow, without speaking the same language, without sharing anything with them, they knew that my heart was hurting and needed healing.

7:38
And they sat down with me in silence.
And then they started to play again over my heart, and I screamed, “Not the flute, fuck the flute. I hate flutes. Get away from me, jungle boy.”
And the sound went straight through me as a laser cutting through the flesh, and I could see and feel the heart chamber opening up, almost like it was trying to push something out.

8:06
My chest started to shake, I vomited, I cried, I gasped for air.
I went in and out of consciousness and I could feel the medicine going deeper and deeper inside my heart, vibrating, moving and healing.
And they played over my heart for what felt like hours.

8:24
It could have been 20 minutes, it could have been two hours.
I honestly don’t know.
I screamed, I fainted, I woke up, I screamed again.
But they never stopped.
They just focused on their music and their cleansing.

8:47
And then suddenly William reached his arm forward and he started pulling something out of my chest and deep within my heart.
He pulled out a black thorn almost as long as my forearm.
Sharp, hard, cold, and perfectly formed as a thorn—as a thorn that you would find on a rose, but black, almost like coal.

9:05
They held it up and looked at it, and they looked at each other, and I was in total disbelief.
Because one thing is drinking a medicine, another thing is seeing something being pulled out of you that is as real as anything else, and feeling the instant relief once it’s out.

9:23
Jairo blew smoke over my heart and suddenly all of the pain was gone.
They got up and said, “He got a new heart, he’s good,” and walked back into the dome.
And that’s when I realized that they were not just jungle men or Mowglis with a flute.
They were ancient medicine carriers, carrying traditions that have travelled thousands of years from the jungle to Barcelona.

9:49
They were working as surgeons on a multidimensional level that I could not even comprehend.
And the second this thorn was out of my heart, I felt something I hadn’t felt since childhood:
Love. Emotions pumping through my own heart.

10:08
I could feel deeply again this pure, wild, innocent, beautiful love pumping from my own heart, inside of me to me.
The energy that I’d been looking for my entire life was suddenly flowing from me to me and no longer leaking out of me.

10:29
There was no longer this hole in my heart that I needed to stuff with work or ice cream or Netflix or nicotine.
I felt complete again. Whole.
And then everything went quiet.
The noise in my head, the fear in my body, it just stopped.

10:47
I could feel my heart not just as a muscle or an organ pumping inside of me, but something alive and sacred, like the greatest treasure that I ever found.
And when I walked back into the maloca, everyone was looking at me because I looked like a spiritual Christmas tree covered in leaves and grass and mud.

11:08
After wrestling myself and my shadow side on the ground, projecting it on the flutes and the shamans.
And that was one of my turning points.
After years of chaos and terror, something inside of me cracked open.

11:24
The heavy metal noise inside of me went silent.
The inner war stopped, and the numbing and constant searching for something to fill the gap within me could finally calm down.
The shamans then shared with me that since I was beginning this journey, one of the traditions was doing three retreats over three full moons, as you go into a deeper process with the moon in one larger galactic process that spans over three months.

11:54
And I did.
And at this third retreat, in the ninth ceremony, I experienced something that I’d totally forgotten.
Daravindra Alis was holding space, the Shitguru from episode 3 that was in my first ever ceremony.

12:10
And he lifted his guitar and started singing.

14:35
And as he was singing, suddenly I could not control my body.
I was jumping from mattress to mattress, screaming of joy, like that wild inner child that I had inside of me before the trauma happened was suddenly liberated inside.

14:53
And he didn’t want therapy.
He didn’t want to sit in a circle and cry.
He wanted to dance, to move like wildfire, to laugh and jump and roll around.
He was just filled with joy.
And suddenly I remembered how fun, how alive, how completely free life used to be.

15:13
So open, so magical, so present, and my whole being was movement and breath.
That child inside of me, the one that was buried for years under layers of fear and shame, was free again.
Darwin had just played “Ayahuasca Kurandera.”

15:32
I will add a link in the description.
And what became my favorite ayahuasca song also became my anchor to this part of myself that could dance wildly and free from having spent almost 10 ceremonies crying and in terror and inside a nightmare.

15:49
It was like having this new reference point opening up inside of me.
For so long, my life had been anchored in the trauma, in the memories of what went wrong.
Everything I measured myself against came from trauma.

16:05
And now, for the first time in a long time, I had it before—I had access to that pure, innocent energy that existed before everything broke.
My inner child was free, wild, and alive again.

16:21
And what happened after that was nothing short of magic.
Because once that energy was freed, my whole life stopped orbiting around the trauma and the pain, and I started living from this wild, joyful place instead.
Life began to feel like a dance instead of a battle.

16:38
I wasn’t fighting against the universe anymore.
I wasn’t dancing against it.
I was dancing with it.
And that’s the first gift I feel that ayahuasca really helped me receive within myself: the return to joy, the release of all that terror and trauma, and that quiet heart

16:58
That can finally rest in love again, in its own love and in the love it shares with others.
And this is also the first gift that I wanted to share with you if you’re thinking of starting this process, or if you’re on this process and if you’re considering your retreat, know this:

17:16
For some of us, the trauma inside can surface dramatically.
The healing can be loud and wild and messy.
So always choose people who can truly hold that space and have traditions and experience from their lineage.

17:34
If you can, always sit with indigenous medicine carriers.
Because we would not stop someone on the street and ask them to do a multidimensional surgery on us because they have watched some videos on YouTube or because they went to a retreat in the Bahamas.

17:52
And I wouldn’t recommend beginning in a ceremony also with 50 people.
And after what happened at these retreats and other retreats, the mistakes that this organization used to make, the shamans chose to stop working with them.

18:07
And I actually began helping these brothers and this family hosting retreats here in Spain, to be of service to this incredible plant teacher and sacred medicine.
And for all of this, I’m deeply grateful for this decade of getting to work with this family from Putumayo, for the ancient lineage that they carry, for the jungle that guards these medicines, and for the medicine itself.

18:39
So thank you.
Thank you to all the ancient carriers of this tradition.
Thank you to the jungle, thank you to our ancestors, and a big thank you to ayahuasca.
And next week, I’ll share the next gift and hopefully also another song.