There are moments in life when language fails—when the experience is so multidimensional, so shattering and illuminating at the same time, that trying to summarize it in words feels almost sacrilegious. This is one of those moments. What happened to me in the jungle of Urubamba was not just a psychedelic experience. It was a neurobiological reset, a spiritual reckoning, and an energetic unbinding. It was equal parts terrifying and transcendent. And it changed me.
I am writing this only days after the ceremony, while the sensations still echo through my body and the insights ripple through my thoughts. I want to capture this while it’s still raw—while the afterglow still holds truth and memory. Because this wasn’t a “trip.” It was a ritual of remembrance—of body, of spirit, of the living intelligence that exists far beyond what we can quantify.
And yet, as a researcher, I tried to quantify it anyway.
As someone with a deep passion for neuroscience and holistic health, I’ve long lived at the intersection of evidence and intuition. I trust science. I also trust the unseen. And what this experience taught me—viscerally—is that those two worlds are not separate. They are interwoven, as inseparable as breath and heartbeat.
This ceremony wasn’t just a personal milestone—it was the convergence of years of inquiry, thousands of pages read, theories explored, conversations had, practices embodied. I went in with the eyes of a student and the heart of a seeker, knowing that real understanding doesn’t just come from books—it comes from experience. Lived, felt, metabolized.
It’s one thing to study neuroplasticity, or the effects of trauma on the nervous system. It’s another thing entirely to watch those concepts play out in real time within your own body, in a sacred space with ancient medicine coursing through your blood. It’s also one thing to talk about somatic memory and vibrational frequency—and another to be inside it. To become it.
And so, I approached this experience with reverence—but also with curiosity. I asked the medicine to teach me not just for myself, but for everyone I serve, write for, speak to. I wanted to know what healing really looks like when the mind steps aside and the intelligence of the body, the plants, and the cosmos takes over.
This ceremony was my deep dive into that liminal space. My attempt to map the uncharted territory between brain chemistry and divine communication. It was not just an exploration—it was an initiation. A moment where all of my worlds—scientist, healer, writer, soul—merged.
What follows is my honest, unfiltered retelling of what happened in that maloca in the Sacred Valley of Peru—infused with cultural reverence, somatic awareness, neuroscience, and quantum theory. This is more than a personal story. It is a living field report from the edge of human consciousness. It is an offering. It is a bridge.
WHAT IS AYAHUASCA?
Ayahuasca is a sacred psychoactive brew used traditionally by Indigenous tribes of the Amazon for thousands of years for healing, divination, and spiritual awakening. The word “ayahuasca” comes from the Quechua language: “aya” meaning “spirit” or “ancestor,” and “huasca” meaning “vine” or “rope.”
Together, it is the vine of the soul—a medicine believed to connect the physical with the spiritual realms.
Ayahuasca is not a single plant but a synergistic blend of:
- Banisteriopsis caapi (the vine): contains MAO inhibitors (specifically harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine), which prevent the breakdown of DMT in the digestive system.
- Psychotria viridis (the leaf): contains DMT (dimethyltryptamine), a powerful endogenous psychedelic compound.
What makes this brew so unique is the sophisticated biochemical intelligence behind it. Without the MAO inhibitors in the vine, the DMT in the leaves would be broken down too quickly to be active. Indigenous peoples discovered this combination long before modern pharmacology could explain it. This speaks volumes about their deep intuitive connection to the plant kingdom.
In traditional settings, ayahuasca is administered by shamans or curanderos during nighttime ceremonies, accompanied by rituals, songs (icaros), and protective spiritual practices. It is not a recreational drug. It is a sacred medicine, often called a plant teacher. One does not “take ayahuasca” lightly. One works with ayahuasca.
THE SETTING: SACRED VALLEY, SACRED SPACE
Our ceremony took place in the Sacred Valley of Urubamba, Peru, at a retreat center called Raices Inkas, surrounded by towering mountains that felt like ancient sentient guardians. The location wasn’t just beautiful—it was energetically significant. The Quechua people believe that these mountains, or apus, are sacred spirits that hold immense wisdom and healing energy. And I felt that deeply. I felt like they were watching us, guiding us, softening us before we even stepped into ceremony.
We had already been living at Raices Inkas for ten days prior to the ceremony as part of a SEIKRID retreat, where we engaged in breathwork, meditation, energy work, and deep emotional processing. So by the time the ceremony came, this place already felt like home. I trusted the space. I trusted the facilitators. My nervous system felt safe.
That safety is not a small thing—it’s foundational. In order to go deep into the medicine, the body must feel held. And Raices Inkas, with its open gardens, hand-built structures, and the ever-present heartbeat of the mountains, was a container that allowed for true surrender.
The ceremony was held in a maloca, a traditional circular structure used for sacred ceremony. It was dimly lit with candles and set with mats arranged around the perimeter. There were six of us total: three participants (myself included), and three facilitators. The lead facilitator was the ayahuasquero (shaman), and he was supported by two guardians—assistants who also drank the medicine and helped maintain the energetic field of the ceremony through music, song, and spiritual protection.
Unlike many ceremonial settings where only the shaman consumes the medicine, all three facilitators drank with us, and that mattered. We weren’t being observed—we were being joined. The field was shared. We were all in it together, energetically entangled and communing within the same altered frequency. Their presence created a sense of equilibrium and sacred solidarity that gave me the courage to fully lean in.
The preparation, the familiarity, and the deep reverence of the setting made all the difference. I believe where you take ayahuasca is just as important as who you take it with. And in this case, every part of the setting—from the land, to the people, to the structure itself—felt intentional, ancient, and alive.
PREPARATION & INTENTION: A RESEARCHER’S PRAYER
I didn’t arrive at this ceremony casually. For me, ayahuasca wasn’t a spontaneous decision—it was the culmination of years of study, curiosity, and deep yearning to understand the nature of healing and consciousness firsthand. I’ve spent much of my life studying the brain, researching trauma, and walking the fine line between Western science and ancient spiritual wisdom. And while theory can take us far, at some point, direct experience becomes the most meaningful form of data.
That’s what this ceremony represented for me: a field study of the soul. A moment to move from intellect into embodiment. To not just read about altered states or nervous system regulation, but to step inside of it. Fully.
In the days leading up to the ceremony, I spent time journaling, meditating, reflecting. I asked myself big questions: What am I truly ready to release? What am I afraid to see? What do I need to feel in order to heal? I wrote pages of intention—some specific, some abstract—but beneath all of it, there was one central prayer:
“I am ready to learn. Teach me.”
That line became my mantra. It wasn’t a plea. It was a contract. A statement of humility and curiosity. And it framed the entire ceremony as not just an emotional detox, but an initiation into expanded awareness.
The preparation wasn’t just mental. For ten days before the ceremony, I had been cleansing—emotionally, physically, spiritually. Through the SEIKRID retreat, I had already peeled back layers through breathwork, movement, fasting, and energetic work. I was raw. Softened. And because of that, I was also open.
In many Indigenous traditions, preparation is seen as sacred. It’s the space where the medicine begins working before you even consume it. And I felt that. The moment I committed to the ceremony, things started shifting. I started purging, dreaming vividly, becoming more introspective. The mountains began teaching me. The silence became louder. The body started talking.
I believe intention sets the trajectory of the entire experience. Not because ayahuasca grants wishes, but because the medicine mirrors your readiness. And I was ready. Not for answers—but for depth.
DRINKING THE MEDICINE: ROOTS AND SHADOWS
When it was my turn, I walked to the center of the maloca where the ayahuasquero sat with the medicine. The brew was handed to me in a small cup. I held it with both hands. It was thick, dark, earthy—almost primordial. The smell alone told me this was not a casual drink. It was a communion. A sacrament.
I took a breath, closed my eyes, and silently repeated my intention: “I am ready to learn. Teach me.” Then I drank.
The taste was bitter and ancient—like fermented bark soaked in fire. It coated my mouth and throat, thick and slow. I could feel it settle into my stomach like a stone—dense, deliberate, sacred. It wasn’t just something I ingested. It was something that entered into relationship with me.
I returned to my mat and lay down in silence. The candlelight flickered. The air was cool but charged. I wrapped myself in my blanket and began to breathe—deep, steady, intentional. I knew that what I had just swallowed was not going to follow any familiar path. There was no roadmap. No turning back.
As I waited, I scanned my body. I listened. I breathed. For 20, maybe 30 minutes, it was quiet. Almost too quiet. I wondered if the medicine would come at all. Then, without warning, it answered.
It didn’t rise gradually. It arrived, with presence and precision. My limbs became heavy. My vision behind closed eyes shifted. The silence transformed into a hum. And then the visuals started: neon colors like bioluminescent threads moving across a black field, twisting into geometric forms. I wasn’t seeing hallucinations. I was seeing consciousness unfold—in language the rational mind doesn’t speak.
There was something undeniably intelligent about it. Like the plants were speaking their own encrypted code through sensation and image. I could feel the medicine moving through my bloodstream, whispering through my fascia, nudging open all the locked doors I had forgotten about. And with it came the shadows.
Fear, resistance, memories, doubt—all of it surfaced. Not as thoughts, but as energetic sensations. I wasn’t just drinking a plant. I had invited in an ancient teacher who came to show me everything I had tucked away. It wasn’t aggressive. But it was firm. Uncompromising.
The medicine didn’t ask if I was ready. It assumed I was—because I had asked to be taught.
And so it began.
THE VISIONARY STATE: RAINBOW NEURONS & FRACTAL INTELLIGENCE
The visuals were unlike anything I could have imagined—not just images or colors, but entire realms unfolding behind my eyes. At first, there were soft pulses of light, like distant galaxies flickering in a void. But then came the neon grids, moving like fluid circuitry across a black canvas. They formed shapes I recognized from sacred geometry: mandalas, spirals, tetrahedrons—patterns that felt both mathematical and deeply alive.
These weren’t just random visuals. They carried a language of energy. Each pattern had frequency, intention, and movement. Some visuals moved rapidly, pulsing and rotating, while others unfurled slowly like flower petals opening in hyperspace. I didn’t just see them—I was inside them. It was as if my consciousness had left the body entirely and entered the fabric of reality itself.
I could feel the visuals communicating with me, not in words but through vibration. They mirrored my thoughts, emotions, and even my breath. When I tensed, the visuals became chaotic, jagged. When I relaxed and surrendered, they softened, expanded, and blossomed. It was like being inside a biofeedback system designed by the universe.
At one point, I saw what looked like neurons firing across a rainbow web—tiny lightning bolts of consciousness zipping through a field of interconnected light. I realized I was witnessing my own mind, or maybe even the collective mind, in raw energetic form. This was the living code behind perception, emotion, memory.
The boundaries between sound and sight dissolved. When the shamans sang their icaros, the visuals would shift instantly to reflect the tone and cadence. The rattles became concentric waves. The singing created kaleidoscopic tunnels. My senses were no longer separate—they had merged into a single synesthetic language that translated frequency into form.
In the scientific world, this phenomenon could be described as cortical disinhibition—when the usual filtering systems in the brain relax, and sensory information becomes hyperconnected. But science doesn’t fully capture the sacred architecture I was seeing. This wasn’t just neurons misfiring. This was truth in color. This was reality unveiled.
And yet, even with the beauty, there was a density to it. A spiritual gravity. I felt the weight of ancestral pain, collective grief, forgotten wisdom. The visuals didn’t just entertain—they taught. They tested. They initiated. Some of the shapes felt warm and comforting; others felt alien, complex, almost uncomfortable in their intensity.
I remember thinking: These are not hallucinations. These are the layers of reality we are usually too distracted, too scared, or too domesticated to see.
And once you see them, you can’t unsee them.
THE FEAR PORTAL: SURRENDER OR SUFFER
After the beauty came the storm.
The fear didn’t creep in gently—it crashed over me like a wave I didn’t see coming. One moment I was immersed in color and light, and the next, I was tumbling into darkness. It wasn’t fear of death, exactly. It was the fear of losing control—of being dissolved, of not knowing who I was or where I was or what was happening to my mind. It was primal, cellular fear. The kind that makes your entire body brace for something you can’t name.
Ayahuasca doesn’t negotiate with your ego. It doesn’t allow you to hold onto the wheel. It strips you down, lays you bare, and shows you what’s underneath the identity you’ve constructed. That’s where I found myself—in the raw chaos underneath my control mechanisms. And it was terrifying.
Certain icaros felt like lifelines. Others felt like confrontations. When the shaman or guardian sang with only the low rattle, I saw flashes of red—not as a metaphor, but literally. My closed-eye vision filled with crimson pulses that seemed to sync with the rhythm of the rattle. It felt like I was being scanned, or initiated, or perhaps even warned. My body tensed, curled inward.
I became acutely aware of my physical body but also deeply disconnected from it. I had to pee—but the thought of opening my eyes, of standing up, of walking to the bathroom, felt impossible. Not because I was weak, but because the distortion was too much. I remember thinking:
“I would rather pee my pants—or even poop them—than get up and walk through that portal.”
The world outside my eyelids felt alien. Shapes warped, energy buzzed, shadows danced. It didn’t feel like Earth anymore—it felt like another dimension entirely, one that required full surrender or full panic. I curled up in a ball. My blanket became a cocoon. My breath became my only tether.
I cycled through three mantras like a lifeline:
- Breathe.
- This too shall pass.
- Feel your body. You’re still here.
The fear taught me more than the visuals ever could. It showed me how deeply I rely on control, how much of my identity is built around managing my environment. It exposed the roots of my anxiety—not as a mental story, but as a somatic pattern I had been living inside for years.
I realized something profound: Fear is not something to be eliminated. It’s something to be metabolized. To be witnessed. To be breathed through.
And slowly, as I breathed and surrendered, the fear began to loosen. It didn’t vanish—it dissolved in layers, like a mist thinning in morning light. I didn’t overcome it. I befriended it. I let it move through.
That was the portal. Not a doorway out, but a doorway in—into my nervous system, my trauma responses, my human fragility. And it was there, in that most vulnerable place, that the healing began.
THE PURGE: NOT THROUGH VOMIT, BUT THROUGH VIBRATION
I didn’t purge through vomiting, crying, or sweating during the ceremony itself. Nor did I experience diarrhea, which is common in ayahuasca ceremonies and often regarded as a physical release of energetic blockages.
But interestingly, I had been purging all week long leading up to the ceremony.
At the start of the retreat, I pulled the “Purge” oracle card from the deck—a synchronicity I immediately associated with the upcoming ayahuasca experience. I assumed the card was preparing me for what would come during the ceremony. But as the week unfolded, I began physically purging in real-time—vomiting and having diarrhea for days. At first, I thought it was altitude sickness, food adjustment, or maybe something I ate. But deep down, I knew: the purge had already begun.
What’s more, I also developed a head cold, sore throat, cough, fever, and runny nose during the retreat. I felt like my body was in complete detox mode. It was as though the Sacred Valley itself—those towering, sentient mountains—were teaching me, humbling me, and preparing me for what was to come. I genuinely felt like I was being purified by the land, physically and energetically, before I could receive the medicine.
By the time I actually sat with the ayahuasca, my body had already been through an intense cleansing process. The energetic doorways were open. The ego had been softened. And the medicine simply continued what had already begun.
During the ceremony, my purge was something else entirely—it was vibrational.
It moved through me not as a singular moment, but as a sequence of layered, internal releases. It began as tension. I became acutely aware of how much fear, stress, and anxiety I had been unconsciously holding—particularly in my chest, shoulders, and diaphragm. My breath had been shallow for years, my posture subtly braced, like I had been unconsciously preparing for impact most of my life.
As the medicine deepened, that armor began to crack. With each icaro, especially the more piercing ones, I felt tiny waves of electricity pass through me—like energetic tremors. These weren’t imagined. They were visceral somatic experiences—my nervous system physically recalibrating.
I experienced what felt like micro-seizures of emotional energy—twitches, buzzing, vibration. My muscles contracted and released. I wasn’t moving outwardly much, but inwardly, I was cycling through decades of stored emotion, tension, and thought-forms.
There were moments where I could almost see the anxiety leaving me. It didn’t exit through vomit—it dissipated through breath, through sound, through presence. I felt energetic “knots” dissolve, especially around my heart and solar plexus. These weren’t metaphors. They felt like true physiological shifts—the body’s neurochemical systems and energy fields adjusting.
There’s research suggesting that trauma lives in the fascia, in the vagus nerve, in the subtle rhythms of the parasympathetic system. And in that moment, I felt the science become reality. The purge was my nervous system discharging survival energy. It was as if the medicine gave my body permission to complete stress cycles that had been frozen in time.
I began to smile—not because I was “happy,” but because I felt free. Lighter. I felt like I had just lived through an internal exorcism, and what was left was clarity, space, and a subtle sense of joy. It was like my body finally exhaled after years of holding its breath.
I didn’t need to purge with my stomach. I purged with my entire being.
And the result wasn’t just relief. It was renewal.
TIME DISTORTION: HOURS AND SECONDS MELTED TOGETHER
One of the most disorienting and fascinating aspects of the journey was how time unraveled. It lost all meaning. Linear progression—the kind we live by every day—simply ceased to exist. Some songs felt like they lasted an entire lifetime, expanding and stretching into infinite layers of emotion and vision. Others passed in what seemed like seconds, flickering by like a breath.
There were moments I was certain hours had passed, only to find that the candlelight hadn’t even flickered. And then, just as suddenly, I’d snap into a realization that I had no idea how long I’d been lying there. Time didn’t pass. It folded.
In quantum physics, time isn’t considered a fixed constant—it’s elastic, fluid, affected by gravity and observation. Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that time dilates: the faster we move or the closer we get to a gravitational mass, the more time slows down. But time isn’t just bent by motion—it’s also bent by perception.
Ayahuasca seemed to strip away the mind’s need for time altogether. Without a reference point, time didn’t flow—it existed in chunks, like nonlinear chapters all playing simultaneously. One moment I was in deep emotional release; the next, I was floating in calm neutrality; the next, I was laughing in cosmic awe. These states weren’t happening one after the other. They were all co-occurring, and I was simply tuning my awareness to different layers of them.
This ties directly into theoretical physics and consciousness research. In the quantum field, everything exists as probability until observed—particles are not “real” until consciousness collapses the wave function. During ceremony, it felt as though I had stepped into that field—outside the illusion of linearity, inside the realm where all moments are already happening. I wasn’t remembering or imagining. I was participating in a multidimensional experience of “now.”
It was both beautiful and unsettling. Without time, there is no anchor. No beginning, no end. No escape into the future or safety in the past. And in that timelessness, you are left to fully confront the now—whatever it holds. For me, that meant dancing between fear and bliss, anxiety and awe, often within the span of a single breath.
And when I came back into clock-time, it wasn’t that time had passed. It was as if I had exited an entirely different dimension and reentered this one—grateful, changed, and awed by how fragile and precious every second truly is.
INTEGRATION: WHERE THE MEDICINE CONTINUES
The ceremony lasted five hours. It felt like both an eternity and a single breath.
But the real work began afterward. Integration is where the visions become wisdom—where neural rewiring becomes lifestyle change, and where insight becomes embodiment.
Since that night, I’ve begun noticing subtle but powerful shifts:
- I breathe more deeply, more often.
- I carry less fear in my body without even trying.
- My sleep is deeper, and my dreams are more vivid.
- My nervous system feels more attuned—less reactive, more responsive.
- I no longer rush through silence. I trust stillness.
Integration isn’t about returning to who you were before the medicine. It’s about anchoring who you became during the journey—the version of yourself that remembered. Integration asks for patience, reflection, and intentional action. It’s a gentle but profound invitation to rebuild your life from a deeper place of truth.
Some people journal. Some seek integration coaching or somatic therapy. Others simply walk in nature, sit in meditation, or continue listening to the whispers that arose in ceremony. There is no single path, only the path that resonates with your inner knowing.
Ayahuasca showed me that the universe is not something outside of us. It is not in the stars, or the sky, or even the ceremony space. The universe is inside us—encoded in our cells, imprinted in our breath, alive in our awareness.
What the medicine taught me was not something to memorize. It was something to become.
QUANTUM PHYSICS, CONSCIOUSNESS & THE AYAHUASCA FIELD
My experience with ayahuasca didn’t just feel spiritual—it felt scientifically significant. The kinds of things I witnessed, felt, and knew within that space didn’t just align with mystical language—they mirrored the very frameworks I’ve studied in physics, neuroscience, and consciousness research.
Let’s begin with the quantum field. In quantum physics, we understand that at the smallest levels of matter—beyond atoms, beyond electrons—exist particles that behave as both matter and wave. These particles only “collapse” into a fixed state when they are observed. Until then, they exist as a cloud of probability—multiple possibilities at once. This is known as the observer effect.
During ayahuasca, I felt as though I was stepping into that very field—before collapse, before solidification. I wasn’t confined to one moment, one emotion, or even one identity. I was in a space of quantum superposition, where many states of being could exist simultaneously. I could feel joy and fear, timelessness and embodiment, all at once. I was not “seeing visions” as we classically imagine; I was witnessing unobserved reality taking form in real-time, sculpted by my attention and the vibration of my internal state.
This connects directly to the idea that consciousness influences reality—a notion that’s still controversial in scientific circles, but deeply embedded in Indigenous cosmology and mystical traditions. In that maloca, I felt the unified field of consciousness—the idea that our thoughts and feelings ripple through the very fabric of space-time, impacting the flow of energy and information around us. I wasn’t just a passenger in the ceremony. I was a co-creator in an unfolding energetic dialogue.
Let’s also consider entanglement. In quantum mechanics, entangled particles can affect one another instantaneously, even across vast distances. This suggests that space itself may not be as separate as we perceive. During the ceremony, this wasn’t theory—it felt true. I could sense the other participants’ energy shifts in real-time. When someone across the room released fear, I felt it. When the shaman sang a protective icaro, the entire energetic structure of the room reorganized. We weren’t six individuals in isolated bodies—we were part of a coherent, entangled field of healing.
There’s also the holographic principle—the idea that the universe encodes information in a way that allows the whole to be present in every part. In the altered state induced by ayahuasca, I didn’t feel like I was “receiving” wisdom from outside myself. I felt like I was accessing something already embedded within me. The universe wasn’t giving me knowledge. It was reintroducing me to what I already knew—in every cell, every neuron, every frequency of my being.
Neuroscience has shown that psychedelics reduce activity in the default mode network—the part of the brain responsible for ego, identity, and self-referential thinking. When this loosens, other regions of the brain communicate more freely, leading to neural integration and increased entropy (or flexibility). This might explain why the brain, under the influence of ayahuasca, can process deep emotional content, experience heightened synesthesia, and unlock latent memories or realizations that feel cosmic in nature.
But more than that, I believe ayahuasca grants us access to what the ancients knew: that consciousness is not localized in the brain alone. It is a nonlocal field that our nervous system tunes into—like an antenna receiving signals from a multidimensional broadcast.
In the Western world, we’ve been taught that reality is outside of us, static and objective. But what ayahuasca showed me—what quantum physics increasingly supports—is that reality is participatory. The world we see, the time we move through, the identities we wear—they are all, in some way, shaped by the lens of our awareness.
Ayahuasca doesn’t just open your mind. It deconstructs the illusion of separateness, and it invites you to remember: everything is energy, everything is connected, and you are not a drop in the ocean—you are the ocean in a drop.
FINAL THOUGHTS: IF YOU FEEL THE CALL
Ayahuasca is not a magic pill. It is not for everyone. And it is not to be taken lightly. It is a powerful, sacred plant teacher that works at every level of your being—from your neurobiology to your subconscious patterning to your soul’s deepest curriculum.
But if you feel the call—gently, quietly, or urgently—there is likely a reason.
This medicine is not about escaping reality, but about expanding your capacity to perceive and respond to it. Research shows that ayahuasca can reduce symptoms of depression, PTSD, and anxiety by rewiring the brain’s connectivity, dampening the default mode network, and enhancing neuroplasticity. But beyond the data, it offers something our modern world desperately needs: a reconnection to meaning.
If you’re curious:
- Learn about the Indigenous lineages that steward this medicine.
- Study the neuroscience behind plant medicine and psychedelics.
- Listen to stories—not just success stories, but honest ones.
- Prepare your body and nervous system with care.
- Ask yourself what you’re truly seeking.
And when you feel ready: set your intention. Stay open. Trust the unknown.
This is not a linear path. It is not a fix. It is a mirror and a magnifying glass—offering deep insight into your own consciousness, and inviting you into greater wholeness.
The medicine will meet you exactly where you are.
Ayahuasca doesn’t give you what you want. She gives you what you need.
She reveals your illusions, rearranges your internal wiring, and asks only one thing in return: that you listen.
She doesn’t play. But she heals. And if you let her? She will change everything.
With love, reverence, and neural fire,
Jocelyn Kate
justjocelynthings 
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