Most people talk about ayahuasca healing in terms of trauma, darkness, and purging.
This episode is about what happens after that: when the medicine stops showing you what’s broken and starts revealing the gifts that were buried underneath.

In “Ayahuasca Healing: Discovering the Gifts You Never Knew Were Yours”, I share the real story behind one of the deepest initiations of my life:

• How my voice literally changed after years of ceremony
• How a single childhood moment with my best friend – a goat – shut my throat down for decades
• How a brutal throat infection in ceremony cracked open the frozen scream I couldn’t make at five years old
• And how the “shamanic voice” works as medicine in ayahuasca ceremonies, not as performance, but as a way to move energy and reclaim power

If you’ve ever felt like your voice is tight, unreliable, “not really you,” or like you’re performing a safer version of yourself in your work, relationships, or spiritual life, this episode will hit close to home. It’s not theory. It’s the exact night my system stopped being terrified of my own aliveness and started letting my real voice back in.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• The full story of My Goat and the day my nervous system decided love was too dangerous
• How that single event created years of throat issues, infections, self-sabotage, and hiding
• What ayahuasca showed me about the throat as the bridge between head and heart
• Why almost everyone I work with has a wounded voice, and how the medicine goes straight to it
• What it actually looks like to reclaim your voice as part of your integration, not as a nice metaphor, but as lived practice

If you’re walking the ayahuasca path, leading groups, creating, or quietly knowing there is a truer voice inside you that you haven’t fully let out yet, this episode is for you.

👉 Listen to the episode: “Ayahuasca Healing: Discovering the Gifts You Never Knew Were Yours”
Tune in, listen with your heart and your throat, and see what your own voice is trying to tell you.

TRANSCRIPT:

Ayahuasca Healing: Discovering the Gifts You Never Knew Were Yours

We talk so much about trauma, shadow, and pain.
But what if your healing journey isn’t actually leading you back to the past at all?
What if the real turning point is the moment you discover the gifts you were born with but never recognized — the ones that only reveal themselves when the wounds finally loosen their grip?

That’s what happened to me.

Ten years, more than a hundred ceremonies, and suddenly the medicine began showing me not what was broken, but what had always been there, waiting.
And in this episode, I want to take you into that part of the journey — the moment where healing stops being about repair, and starts becoming about remembering who you truly are.

I’ve sat in over a hundred ayahuasca ceremonies across ten years. I’ve held space for over a thousand people in their ceremony or integration. And I still don’t know how to talk about this medicine without sounding like a missionary, because it truly has been the greatest experience of my entire life. Without this, my life would have had ten percent of the value it now has. She has helped me release trauma, helped me see, own, and accept my gifts, helped me see my patterns and self-destruction, and sent me on an integration journey that transformed every fear I had.

One of the greatest gifts she has given me is the discovery of gifts I didn’t even know I had. One of them so physical that I can prove it isn’t the same as when I first came into ceremony. It feels absurd that this can be true — and if it can be true for me, I’m sure it can be true for you.

The first time it happened, I was maybe ten ceremonies in. Something shifted in my throat — not like a muscle relaxing, but like a door I didn’t know existed suddenly swinging open from the inside. And a sound came out of me that I hadn’t made since I was a child. Rich, deep, untamed. It could sing any note. It could go so high. It was pure, and it felt like it came from my heart.

Before ayahuasca, I had a normal voice. Maybe slightly better — I did Pop Idol when I was nineteen and got the golden ticket — but it was a boy-band, boring voice. Nothing special. People would say nice things if I sang at a party, but nothing you’d record songs with.

But in ceremony, what came through wasn’t about sounding good. It was true in a way I can’t explain without sounding precious. It had been waiting underneath everything, patient, for decades.

It was pure, untouched, and without limitations. It felt like singing with a voice made of warm butter that could roll to any high note without restriction. And it only got messed up when I started thinking about what someone might think. Then I could feel the character and physical restrictions come back. But if I sang from my heart, to my heart, it was the deepest, most enjoyable energy I’ve ever touched. And it had always been inside me.

The problem was that I could only access it inside ceremony. And even then, I was terrified to let anyone hear it.

This is the thing no one tells you about ayahuasca: she doesn’t invite your capable adult self to do the scary thing.
She invites the exact part of you that is scared.

When she first asked me to dance in the maloka, I wasn’t thirty-two. I was seven — the kid who got mocked for moving in a “gay way,” for taking up space, for being too much. When she asked me to sing, I was twelve — the boy whose voice cracked at the worst possible moment and was bullied for being gay because he sang, the boy who decided that silence was safer.

She brings the wounded part into the center of the room and says: Now. Here is the invitation. Dance. Sing.

So I spent years learning to sing in ceremony. Not technique — but allowing myself to be heard while feeling like a child with no right to make sound. Every ceremony was a different age. Sometimes I was two, preverbal, just vibration and breath. Sometimes seven. Sometimes twelve, right on the edge of shutdown.

It took nine years before I sang a song I’d written myself in front of the group. People were annoyed when it finally came out. “Why did you keep this hidden so long?”
Your real voice doesn’t come because you decide it should. It comes when the thing that locked it away finally loosens its grip.

Ironically, my last name is Vox. It means “voice” in Latin — a name I chose when I was nineteen, wanting to choose my own name.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to ignore how cosmically absurd that is. Like the universe tattooed the assignment on my passport and I spent forty years pretending I couldn’t read it.

Before ayahuasca, I hated my voice. It felt too exposed, too revealing, like it would betray me if I let it out. I didn’t want to be seen that clearly. And when I work with people now — in integration circles or one-on-one — nearly everyone carries blockages in the same place. The throat. The voice. The hinge between head and heart where truth either moves through you or calcifies into silence.

It’s the meeting point. The place where your inner voice either attacks you all day or finally aligns with you. The place where the strings get pulled too tight with old grief and rage and terror, and your whole instrument plays out of tune without you even knowing why.

Here’s something I’ve learned after a decade of this work: when you listen to someone’s voice — not their words, but the voice itself — you can hear their entire story. Where it tightens. Where it goes quiet. Where it gets loud to cover something up. You can hear the seven-year-old who got laughed at. The teenager who made themselves smaller. The moment they decided speaking was unsafe.

Every voice carries its history. The grief lives there. The fear. The places where love was allowed, and the places where love was punished.

You don’t need someone to tell you their trauma — you can hear it in the way their voice catches, or doesn’t catch when it should, or stays perfectly controlled when they talk about something that should make them cry. Every time someone speaks, they are playing the only instrument that connects the head and the heart — their entire history.

And if you stay with ayahuasca long enough — years, not weekends — you become the medicine. Your voice becomes part of the transmission. Not because you’re special, but because you finally stop strangling the thing that wanted to come through.

Anything in the universe that is in its authentic nature becomes medicine. Has vibration. Moves in the river of its purpose.

But I didn’t understand any of this until she brought the memory back.
The one I’d been running from my entire life.

When I was five years old, I had a best friend.

I called him My Goat. Not “my goat” like a description — that was his name. My Goat.

He was brown and grey, with horns that curved slightly at the tips, and eyes that were impossibly warm for an animal.
If you’ve ever bonded deeply with an animal, you know some of them feel like conscious beings — like an ancestor or old soul borrowing a body to accompany your journey.

People don’t tell you this about goats. If you look at them, really look, their horizontal pupils seem like they shouldn’t be able to show emotion. But My Goat could. He saw me.

I was living in foster care at the time. One of the bad placements. The kind where you learn quickly that noise gets you hurt, asking for things gets you punished, and expecting comfort is a joke. I was afraid most of the time. Always waiting for something to go wrong. Always scanning. Always small.

Except with My Goat.

Every morning he waited outside my door. Not near the house — at the door. And he learned to open it. He’d hook his left horn on the handle and pull it down.

And there he’d be.

I’d walk out and he’d lower his head so I could scratch between his horns, at the soft fur. Then we’d just be together. Sometimes I’d talk. Sometimes I’d sit quietly. Sometimes he’d rest his chin on my shoulder. Sometimes we’d play until evening.

I spent so much time with him and his family that I forgot parts of me were human. I developed goat behaviors and struggled to speak human words fluently.

He never hurt me. Never yelled. Never disappeared without warning. Never told me I was too much or not enough. He was just there — every morning — solid and warm and real.

Anyone who loves animals knows the feeling. They are sanctuaries for innocence. Guardians of the heart. Holders of unconditional love.

I loved him more than I’ve loved most humans. That might sound sad, but it’s true. He was the only being in that house — those three years — who made me feel like I wasn’t broken or unloved. Like I didn’t have to perform or hide or apologize for existing.

I didn’t have language for it then, but he taught me that love didn’t have to hurt. That presence didn’t need conditions. That I could be safe with another being.

He was, in every way that mattered, my first real experience of unconditional love.

The Morning

One morning, something was wrong. My Goat was in the yard, but not at the door. He was near the fence, making a sound I’d never heard. A low, guttural bleating that made my stomach drop.

I ran toward him.

There was blood on his head. Not much — a dark patch between his horns where he loved to be scratched.
His breathing was heavy. His whole body heaving. His eyes were scared, confused, asking me what was happening.

I didn’t understand. I was five. I didn’t know what blood meant. I thought he’d hurt himself on the fence. I thought if I stayed with him it would be okay.

I turned around and saw my foster dad next to him. Holding an axe.

My brain couldn’t process it.
He didn’t look at me. Then he raised the axe.

And my entire universe collapsed.

Something in my throat closed — not metaphorically. Physically. Like a hand reached inside and clamped shut. I couldn’t scream. Couldn’t cry. Couldn’t move.

I froze.

Afterwards, he told me: “Now you don’t have any best friends. You’re all alone now.”

And an anger was born toward myself. A guilt for not saving him. For not screaming. For not crying.

And I promised myself that day: never let anything or anyone close to my heart again. Keep them miles away. Because what I love can be taken, and the pain is too great.

The Ceremony

Fast forward three decades.

I’m in ceremony — the last night of a long retreat. And I’m sick. Not purging sick — real sick. Brutal throat infection. Fever. Chills. Glands swollen so badly I can barely swallow. I can feel it getting worse. I know I need antibiotics. I’m scared.

But I drink anyway.

I tell the medicine: If you can heal this, I surrender. Fully. No negotiation. No half-measures. No holding back.

Within an hour, I feel better. Fever breaks. Swelling goes down. Not subtle — unmistakable.

But that wasn’t the initiation.

The initiation came after.

I’m sitting outside the maloka, in the bathroom, and suddenly I’m not on a mountain anymore. I’m five years old, standing in that yard, watching My Goat die.

Not remembering it — reliving it. The morning air. The smell of earth and blood and fur. The exact weight of his head against my chest. His breath. His confusion. Everything.

And I feel what I couldn’t feel then.

The terror. The helplessness. The confusion.
The absolute annihilation of being five years old and watching the only being you love be destroyed.

I start crying — not adult crying, but the crying of a child who held it in for thirty-five years. Huge, racking sobs that shake my whole body. I can’t breathe.

And I realize:
This is what has been locked in my throat my entire life.

Not just grief — the sound of the grief.
The scream I couldn’t make.
The crying I wasn’t allowed to do.
The voice that shut down that morning and never came back.

Every ceremony where my throat closed — it was this.
Every time I tried to speak truth and choked — it was this.
Every time love felt dangerous — it was this.

That moment.
That morning.
That axe.

The tears flowed for hours. Like a sacred river finally moving. I could feel the blockage releasing. And I wondered whether this yearly throat infection I kept getting, always needing antibiotics — whether this was the root. Cutting parts of my throat out hadn’t helped. The infections kept coming. Now I understood some of this was emotional and energetic — psychosomatic pain and pattern.

These tears were sacred. And when they flowed, they healed everything in their way.

I cried for hours. Letting it move through. Letting thirty-five years of locked grief finally have a voice.

And something shifted. A physical release in my throat — like the clamp that held me since I was five finally let go.

What Came After

Later that night, after the crying and shaking and release, I entered the death process.

I’d touched it before, but always with one foot in the “safe zone.”
“I need to get back to my dog and my family,” I’d say.
A way to avoid going all the way.

This time was different.
This time I said: Take me. I’m ready. Show me what’s on the other side.

I expected darkness. Fear. The small powerless boy who watched his best friend die.

But what met me wasn’t death.

It was life.

Not the careful, protected version I’d been living.
The real thing — wild, untamed, radiant.

Waves of energy moved through my spine — erotic and sacred at the same time — like my body was remembering something ancient. A sound rose in my chest that wanted to sing to the sky, to howl, to roar. My body wanted to run, dance, take up space, be loud and big and too much.

All the tension that held me small, all the monitoring and self-surveillance — gone.

What came forward was an ancient animal inside me, caged since the morning My Goat died. Wild. Unafraid. Alive.

I remember laughing through tears thinking:
I’ve been afraid of this for thirty-five years.
And it turns out my biggest fear wasn’t dying.
It was being fully alive.
Fully expressed.
Fully aligned with the deepest, wildest, most undefended parts of who I actually am.

Because if you let yourself be that alive, you can be hurt again.
You can lose again.
You can watch what you love be taken again.

But the medicine showed me something else:
You can also love again. Really love. Without walls. Without bracing for loss.

That five-year-old who learned to shut down and stay small — he was trying to protect me. He did the best he could. Sabotaging everything — my book, my platform, my business, my relationships — terrified that he’d get his head cut off for taking up too much space.

The Song

After this, I went back into the maloka.
I had released tears and rage into the earth.

Everyone was deep in their process. The shaman was singing an icaro that moved through the room like smoke.

I knew I had to bring this into integration. And one thing I’d been reluctant to do was sing in ceremony, even though the shaman invited me every year and looked sad every time I said, “maybe next time.”

I had to wait until morning to dare it.

When I finished singing, someone across the room asked, “Why did you keep that hidden so long?”

And I wanted to say:
Because it took me thirty-five years to find the part of my voice that died the day I started to distrust love.
Because my voice isn’t just sound — it’s everything I’ve survived, everything I love, everything sacred to me. It’s the inside of my heart. The most gentle and vulnerable part of me. It’s what was locked away. It’s everything I’ve been too afraid to let anyone see or hear. It’s all of me, naked.

But I just said, “I wasn’t ready yet.”

What I’m Still Learning

I’ll be honest — I haven’t fully integrated this. Not completely.

Outside ceremony, I can’t always access that raw, open, fearless sound. I’m trying to reverse-engineer it — the breath, posture, inner state that lets me open the way I do with the medicine. Because in ceremony, I’m free from the character I built to survive. The hypervigilant kid who monitors every word and keeps one hand on the exit.

I’m grateful for these senses — in my work, I have an “all-seeing eye” that can feel and see things others can’t.
But in normal life, the character comes back — and so does the tightness in my throat.

I catch myself mid-sentence and realize I’m not speaking from the true place. I’m speaking from the safe place. The place that won’t get me hurt or judged. Or the place that makes me sound silly, unserious, like a clown — so nobody takes me seriously enough to feel threatened.

And then I have to stop and ask:
What would I say if I wasn’t afraid?

It’s humbling. Ten years of this medicine, hundreds of ceremonies, and I’m still learning the most basic thing: how to use my actual voice in my actual life.

But I’m learning that this is the work. Not the ceremonies — those are the download. The real work is what you do afterwards. How it changes the way you show up. The way you speak. The way you love.

Why This Matters

When I work with people in integration — whether it’s someone fresh off their first retreat or someone years into this path — the same pattern appears:

The throat.
The voice.
The place where truth gets stuck.

It’s not a coincidence. Most of us were taught our real voice isn’t safe. That full expression is dangerous. That love makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability gets you hurt.

So we modulate. Perform. Say what we think people want instead of what’s true.

And then wonder why we feel disconnected — from ourselves, from each other, from purpose.

It sounds crazy, but the voice you’re using might be the voice of the character you created to survive — not the voice of your truth.

The voice isn’t just sound — it’s where what you think, feel, and say finally align.

When your voice opens, everything else shifts.
Your relationships.
Your work.
Your creativity.
How you move through the world.

Because you stop performing a version of yourself designed to keep you safe.

The Grandmother

Ayahuasca isn’t a quick fix. Not a weekend workshop or a life hack.
Even though she can perform miracles in a weekend — that’s not why I’m here.

She’s a relationship. A long one. Measured not in how many cups you drink, but in how deeply you let yourself work with her.

She works across years, lifetimes — like a grandmother who knows you better than you know yourself. She gives you seeds — not instructions. And then it’s your job to integrate and grow them.

For me, one of those seeds was a single word: voice.

It took a decade to understand it. I’m still understanding it.

But I know this:
that five-year-old boy in the yard, watching his best friend die, learning that love is dangerous and silence is safer — he’s still inside me. He probably always will be.

But he’s not alone anymore.

The voice that shut down that morning has come back. Not perfectly, not every day, but it’s coming back.

And every time I let myself sing, every time I speak a truth that scares me, every time I let myself love without armor — I’m healing. I’m integrating. I’m expanding.

In every micro-choice where I catch myself, breathe, connect to my heart, and choose compassion over protection — I’m doing my integration homework.

I’m telling that kid:
You’re allowed to make sound now.
You’re allowed to take up space.
You’re allowed to love things fully, even knowing nothing lasts forever.

Because the alternative — the silence, the smallness, the constant self-protection — that’s not safety.
That’s just a different kind of death.

As the shamans say when someone asks about illness:
When did you last dance, last sing, last look up at the sky in awe?

Because that’s the moment your heart closed.
And when you go back and heal that moment, you end up — as we always do on the last night of ceremony —
Dancing. Singing. Looking up at the stars in awe.

The Voice in Shamanism

If you’ve sat in ceremony, you know sound moves differently there than anywhere else.

The shaman’s icaro isn’t just a song. It’s a living thing. It moves through you, reorganizing something you didn’t know was out of place. And if you’re paying attention, you realize:

The voice itself is the medicine.

Not the lyrics. Not the melody. The voice.

In shamanic traditions — Amazonian curanderos, Mongolian throat singers, Nordic völvas, Indigenous healers everywhere — the voice carries frequency. Frequency moves energy. And energy is what we are. Vibration temporarily taking form.

When a shaman sings an icaro over you, they aren’t performing. They’re reading your field and responding in real time. Every pitch shift, sustained note, sudden silence — diagnostic and prescriptive.

I’ve watched this hundreds of times. Someone deep in fear or nausea, and the shaman comes over and sings directly into their field. Within seconds, their entire body language changes. Something that was knotted comes undone.

The Voice as Bridge

In shamanic cosmology, the voice is the threshold between worlds.
The bridge between spirit and matter.
Between the inner world and outer world.
Between what you know and what you can’t yet say.

This is why shamans use the voice — singing, chanting, speaking in tongues — to navigate non-ordinary reality. It’s how they call spirits, communicate with plant teachers, retrieve soul parts, extract intrusive energies, and seal the body afterward.

And it’s not just the shaman’s voice that matters.
It’s yours too.

Because when ayahuasca asks you to sing — and if you sit long enough, she will — she’s not asking for performance. She’s asking you to move energy. To open a channel that has been blocked for years.

I’ve watched people who “can’t sing” channel languages they’ve never heard. I’ve heard voices come through people that sound older, deeper, stranger than they ever sound in daily life. I’ve watched someone sing over another person and their body responds as if hands are physically working on them.

It’s not fantasy.
It’s what the voice can do when we stop treating it as communication and start using it as transformation.

The Wounded Voice

Almost all of us have wounded voices.
Voices that learned to stay quiet.
Voices that learned to perform.
Voices that learned to be smaller, softer, less threatening.
Voices that shut down after trauma and never reopened.

In shamanic terms, this is soul loss.
And often, the fragment is lodged in the throat.

I see it constantly in my clients. Smart, articulate, capable — but unable to access their true voice. They speak from anxiety, worry, goals — but not from truth.

There’s a gap between what they feel and what they say. A hesitation. A self-censoring so automatic they don’t notice it.

Ayahuasca sees it immediately.
She goes straight to the throat.
Straight to the moment the voice shut down — the humiliation, the silence, the punishment, the betrayal of safety.

And then she asks you to sing anyway.
To make sound while terrified.
To use your voice while shaking.
To speak into the room when every instinct says stay silent.

This is the shamanic initiation of the voice.
Not singing perfectly — but using your voice while it’s still wounded.

That’s when it becomes medicine.
When you stop waiting for it to heal before using it — and start using it as the healing.

Reclaiming the Voice

Reclaiming the voice is literal.
You retrieve the moment you lost it.
You go back to where you handed it over or it was taken from you.
And you bring it back.

Sometimes it happens spontaneously in ceremony.
Sometimes through soul retrieval.
Sometimes slowly over years.

But when it returns, you know.

Your speaking voice changes.
Your singing voice changes.
Your presence changes.
You stop apologizing.
You stop shrinking your words.
You stop performing a safer version of yourself.

And suddenly, your voice carries something new — transmission.
Weight.
Presence.
Medicine.

This is what shamans know: once your voice is clear — not choked with old grief or fear — it becomes a conduit for something larger.

You become a voice for the medicine.
For the spirits.
For truth.

Here’s a song I made — and a thank you to Sara, another singer, for sharing her appreciation for this song and this podcast. It came through in her first retreat. Thanks to you, I’m sharing it. This one is for you.