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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And he lifted his guitar and started singing.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
