People come to me for depression. For anxiety. For the thing that happens somewhere around forty-three, when the life you spent twenty years building stops answering when you speak to it.

That is what they say on the call, and it is true but it’s not the whole Truth.

Because what they are actually asking for – without knowing they are asking for it – is to be relieved of something they have been carrying for so long that they have stopped experiencing it as weight. And here is the part that never makes it into the brochure: it will not simply be lifted off them. They will have to hand it over. Consciously. Knowing what it costs. Knowing they will grieve it afterwards.

So let me try to draw the map. Not the map of a retreat, not a protocol, not another framework with phases. Simply the way it looks from inside, using an image the Greeks worked out three thousand years ago.

Between Scilla and Charybdis

You know the story even if you have never read it. Two monsters. Scylla on one side, a thing of rock and teeth and heads. Charybdis on the other, a whirlpool that swallows the sea three times a day and spits it back.

The Greeks put these two across a narrow channel from each other, they did not put these at opposite ends of the world. Close enough that a ship passes both at the same time. Close enough that steering away from one is steering into the other.

That geometry is the entire psychology.

Scylla is the mind. The rock. Structure, intellect, rules, the part of you that names things and organises them and knows what should happen next. Solid. Defensible. Yang, if you like that language. It is the part of you that answers the phone.

Charybdis is everything underneath. The subconscious, the deep, the material you have never looked at directly. It is not evil and it is not chaos for the sake of chaos — it is simply enormous, and it moves according to laws you did not write. Yin. The part of you that produces the dream you cannot explain, the reaction that is four sizes too big for what just happened, the grief that arrives on a Tuesday for no reason at all.

And the point of the myth is that there is no course through life where you deal with one and leave the other alone. You cannot forever manage your thoughts and let the deep sit. You cannot dissolve into the deep and keep no structure at all. They are the same passage. They were always going to be the same passage.

Most of us spend the first half of life hugging the rock.

The thing that says no

Socrates said he had a sign. It had been with him since childhood, and he described its behaviour very precisely: it never told him what to do. It only ever stopped him. Mid-sentence, sometimes. It arrived before the reasoning arrived, it did not explain itself, and its entire vocabulary was no.

He called it his daimon. Centuries later the Church took the word and made it demon, and the inner voice was reclassified as the enemy. The operation of telling a person that the thing speaking inside them is not to be trusted is very old, and it is still running.

I think most people know exactly what he was talking about. The drop in your stomach when you say yes to something and don’t really mean it. The strange emptiness a week later after finally getting the thing you wanted. The ickiness in a room where everyone else is glowing.

It speaks in the body. It speaks almost entirely in refusal. And it arrives before you have finished thinking.

Now: what happens to a person who does not listen to it for twenty years?

It gets louder. It starts quietly, as a preference. Then as a mood. Then as a sleep problem. Then as the Sunday evening thing. And when all of that has been overridden long enough, it stops trying to persuade you and simply takes away your capacity to continue.

That is the depression. That is very often the anxiety.

I am not saying every hard state is meaningful; sometimes the body is depleted, sometimes the biology is genuinely broken and needs feeding before it needs interpreting, and I have written elsewhere about how badly the psychological world neglects this. But very often – more often than anyone wants to hear – the symptom is the call arriving in the only form left to it.

Which means the person on my call, asking me to help make it stop, has come to have the no silenced.

And what they have actually come for is to finally hear it – they just don’t know it yet.

Stage one: carried

Our hero, Jason sails the same strait. And he survives it — but look at how. Hera intervenes. She sends sea nymphs, and they physically pass his ship from hand to hand through the channel like women passing a bowl across a kitchen. He does not steer. He does not choose. He does not lose anything. He goes through the most dangerous water in the world and pays nothing at all.

Reads like a nice story, but I think it is a warning, and a cruel one, because of how Jason ends. Not in glory. He ends as an old man sitting in the shade of the ship that made him famous, the Argo rotting on the beach, and the hull comes down and kills him.

He was favoured. He was never tested. And a man who is never tested has nothing inside him to fall back on when the favour stops.

This is stage one, and there are two kinds of people in it and only one of them is obvious.

The first kind has never met Charybdis. They function. They are competent, often extremely competent, and they have arranged a life in which the deep is simply not consulted. They are not lying to anyone. They genuinely do not know it is down there.

The second kind has seen it — and thinks that seeing it was the crossing.

This is the one I want to talk to. You had the ceremony. Something opened. You saw, with a precision that no conversation had ever given you, exactly how the thing in you was built and where it came from and what it has cost. You wept, or you laughed, or you lay there and understood the universe. You went home glowing. You told people you were changed and you meant it and for a while it was even true.

And then it wore off, and you were the same person with a better story.

That is Hera. The afterglow is grace, and grace is real, and grace builds nothing. You were carried. The ship was never tested. And when the glow faded you did what Jason would have done: you looked around for someone to carry you again.

I say this without any superiority. It is the most common shape in this whole world, it is the natural response to having been shown something enormous and given no instructions.

The crossing nobody notices

Maybe being carried through is not the end of stage one. It is the beginning of stage two — and almost nobody recognises it as a beginning, because it feels so completely like an arrival.

The mystical experience is not a graduation. It is a summons.

Something opened, you saw the scale of it, and now you cannot unsee it. That is all that has happened. That is genuinely a great deal – it is the difference between a person who does not know the deep exists and a person who became aware of Charybdis. Because of our narrow psychological frame, we often stop here. But the entire work is what you do afterwards, on your own, with nobody’s hand under the hull.

I have said before that no amount of ayahuasca will change your life; you change your life.

The call has been answered. Now comes the price.

Stage two: the things you leave behind

Odysseus gets no nymphs.

Circe tells him in advance what the strait will cost. She is completely explicit: you cannot pass both. Charybdis will take everything — ship, crew, you. Scylla will take six. Steer for the rock. Take the six. Row hard and do not stop.

And then she tells him one more thing, which is the line I think about most: do not arm yourself. Just as I say in my retreats: Do not fight the process.

He arms himself anyway. Of course he does. He puts on his armour, takes two spears, stands on the deck watching the cliff, waiting for the monster so he can fight her. And while he is standing there braced for a fight that was never available to him, she comes down and takes six men out of the ship and he does not even see her do it.

The armour changed nothing. The loss was the same. He simply paid it and kept the illusion that he might not have had to. Ego death will still happen.

I cannot count the number of people I have watched do exactly this. Arriving armoured. Researching, preparing, optimising, reading everything, arranging to go through the strait without the loss. It is the most understandable thing in the world, but it does not work and it costs the same.

The six men are – the sacrifice

They are not traitors. They are not the weak ones or the ones who mutinied or the crew he was glad to be rid of. They are six loyal men who had rowed with him since Troy, who did nothing wrong, who were at their oars doing their job when the heads came down.

And that is exactly what psychedelics ask of you. You give up the armour that once protected you, for an open heart. You give up rigidity, for flow. Often you give up friendships and toxic relationships, that once were useful. Sometimes you give up careers that have no meaning.

What has to go over the side is not your bad parts. Your bad parts are easy; everyone is happy to give those up, that is why the resolution lists are so long and so useless. What has to go is your loyal parts. The behavioural adaptations from 2 or 3 decades ago.

The hypervigilance that kept you alive in a house where you had to read the mood across a room to know whether the evening was survivable. The competence that made you so necessary that nobody could leave you. The performing. The earning. The managing of everybody’s feelings before they have them. The charm. The self-sufficiency you are so proud of.

These served you. They are the reason you survived long enough to be sitting in a ceremony at all. They rowed you here.

And they have to go over the side, still loyal, still rowing.

We need to prepare people for the fact that healing involves grief – real grief, with a shape and a duration – for the defences that saved your life. You will miss them. You will reach for them. There will be an evening about four months later when you would give almost anything to have the numbness back, because the numbness worked, and the thing that replaced it is raw and slow and does not protect you at all. But that’s the crucible where you find yourself – if you’re courageous enough.

This is what I mean when I say the sacrifice is not optional.

And it is not optional in a very literal, geometric sense, which the Greeks understood perfectly: if you refuse to choose, you do not get to keep the six. Refusing is itself a course. The channel is narrow. Not choosing is a drift toward the whirlpool, and Charybdis does not take six, she takes the ship. That is what the collapse at fifty looks like. That is what the illness that arrives out of nowhere often is. The people who would not pay six paid everything, and they paid it later, and they paid it without the dignity of having chosen.

There is no third channel. I have looked. There is no gentle route where you keep the defence and lose the suffering it produces, because they are the same object seen from two sides.
The people who willingly do the sacrifice are the once that succeed on their hero’s journey. Everyone else still fixes symptoms.

But which six?

If the sacrifice is not optional, and if what must go is not your worst parts but your most loyal ones — then how on earth do you know which?

You cannot reason your way there. The mind is Scylla; it is a rock; it will defend the defence with extraordinary sophistication and it will do it in the language of insight. I have listened to people describe with total precision exactly which pattern is destroying their life, and then explain, beautifully, why in their particular circumstances it must be kept.

The daimon knows. That is what it is for. It is the selection principle. The thing that has been saying no since you were small is saying no to something specific, and it always was.

And this is precisely where a person in stage two is most vulnerable – because they can feel, correctly, that something must go over the side, and they cannot yet hear which. That is an unbearable position. I call this stage “The void”.

What it looks like when someone else chooses

I spent some time inside an organisation called Inner Mastery. Most of what I know about it I know because I was there; the rest was documented in an investigation by Sam Edwards for the Guardian, which is worth your time if you want the full account. I do not want to write the full account. The man who founded it is dead and I am not interested in a crusade. I am interested in one mechanism, because the mechanism is the point of this essay.

Every couple of months, a group flew to Colombia to journey with Ayahuasca in an “Authentic setting”. Facilitators in training, mostly, and a few guests. They paid for the trip. That is the first payment.

Then they worked. They gathered the vine, cleaned it, cut it, cooked it down over days, drank part of what they had made. That was the second payment, made in labour, and nobody experienced it as a cost, because it does feel special to be close to the plants. It felt like the opposite. It felt like finally being let in.

Then they packed it into their suitcases and flew home.

Which is the third payment, and it was quoted in a currency nobody mentioned at the time. On a first field test, ayahuasca reads positive for methamphetamine. It takes a proper laboratory analysis to establish otherwise, and that analysis takes months, and you spend those months somewhere you had not planned to be. So the third payment was potentially months of your life, carried through customs folded between your shirts, on behalf of a man whose affairs were arranged so that nothing was ever in his name.

And then the medicine they had paid for, worked for and carried was sold back to them at the gatherings in Madrid.

You could call those people fools. They were not fools, and if you decide they were, you will learn nothing from them — because look at the structure. Pilgrimage. Labour. Risk. Those are the three features of every genuine initiation that has ever existed anywhere. The people in that airport were not confused about what initiation looks like. They were right. The sacrifice was real, and it hurt, and it meant something.

But the decision what the sacrifice is was coming from an outside authority and that never works.

So how does this work then? How do we pass the narrowing between Scilla and Charybdis? We established we have to give something up. Not to an outside authority. But to ourselves. Here’s some guidance:

Does it end? A genuine initiation terminates. You go in, you pay, you come out initiated, and then it is over and you go and live. Many people in that organisation spent three years and around ten thousand euros on a training cycle that kept not completing – and understood later that the delay was because they had money. Something that never finishes is not an initiation. It is a subscription.

Which way does the risk run? In any container worth the name, the person with the authority carries the risk. Here it was inverted, elegantly, through companies inside companies so that no one could see the whole shape at once. The man at the top could never be caught holding it. The people at the bottom held it in their luggage.

And what did the losses connect you to? This is the one that decides it. Look at everything that organisation asked people to throw overboard: end the relationship. Leave the job. Move into the house. Take payment in the company’s own tokens. One woman was told that caring for her elderly father was a prison.

Every single one of those is a counterfeit six men. The grief was real. The person genuinely gave something up and genuinely felt the weight of it. And what went over the side was always, without exception, the thing that tied them to a life outside the group.

That is the tell. Real sacrifice throws off the defence and leaves the ties intact. The counterfeit throws off the ties and leaves the defence completely untouched — because the defence is what keeps you rowing.

And underneath all of it, one mechanical fact: that system could only ever say yes. Go deeper. Take more. Commit harder. Your doubt is resistance, your exhaustion is resistance, your fear is your ego defending itself. A woman stopped breathing after a dose of yopo and was congratulated on having had the best process in the room.

There was no NO anywhere in the machine. Which is precisely what makes it the opposite of a daimon, and precisely why it had to teach people to distrust their own. Nausea became purging. Terror became process. Disgust became resistance. Every alarm the body raised was renamed as evidence that the work was happening — and I have written before about the body being the part people most want to skip, but this is worse than skipping it. This is recalibrating the instrument to read danger as progress.

The founder wrote something once, back in his marketing years, long before any of this: that people pay to be told lies. He found it remarkable how easily a man can be led.

That was the thing he never threw overboard.

The same failure, alone, at four in the morning

Now the part that actually concerns you, because you are almost certainly not in a cult.

Everything I have just described happens inside single people, constantly, with no organisation required.

A part of you takes the throne. It is usually the part that got you through — the disciplined one, the spiritual one, the one who reads. It starts making all the decisions. It cannot be questioned. And anything that contradicts it gets reframed, in exactly the same vocabulary, as resistance.

You tell yourself your exhaustion is a lack of commitment. You tell yourself the thing you want is proof you have not done the work. You override the pull in your stomach and call it non-attachment. You choose the sacrifice that impresses you rather than the one that is actually due, and you feel the grief, and the grief convinces you it was the right one — because it hurt, and you have learned that healing hurts.

That is a one-person Inner Mastery. It has a guru, a doctrine, a mechanism for converting every internal objection into evidence of insufficiency, and a follower who never leaves. The commune is only the externalised version, with a payment plan.

This is why the map matters. Not so that you can identify a bad organisation — you can usually do that eventually, at cost. So that you can notice when you are running one on yourself.

You need to do the work. To say not to that job that demands too much of you. To leave that toxic relationship. To ask for some distance from your demanding parents. To stop lying to yourself that everything is fine. To do that grounding practice. You name it. You need to sacrifice something.

Stage three

Once you’re on that path, stage three is when you recognize that there is no battle. You don’t choose between Scilla and Charybdis, you dance with them.

The Taoists have the better language here. Odysseus survives by over-steering — hard toward the rock, hard toward structure and control, because the whirlpool means annihilation. That is correct for stage two. That is what stage two is. But it is still a fight, and a life spent hugging the rock to avoid the deep is a narrower life than it looks from inside.

Wu wei is not passivity and it is not surrender. It is what becomes available when you stop treating the current as an enemy. The structures of your daily life and the movements of your deep are not two hostile territories that you must broker between. They are one system, and a person who has genuinely integrated them uses structure as a tool and the deep as a well, and stops needing to defend one against the other.

In practical terms, here is how I would recognise it. In stage three, the no arrives early and quietly, and gets acted on the same afternoon. Nothing has to escalate. Nothing has to become a symptom to get your attention, because you are already listening. The daimon does not need to shout, because it has never once been ignored.

And this is the part I would put in bold if I put anything in bold: in stage three, people are free of me, and free of the medicine and it brings me so much joy when I find them there.

That is what the work is for. Not a practice you maintain, not a teacher you return to, not a ceremony twice a year forever. A person who can hear their own signal does not need me to reflect it back to them, and does not need a substance to turn the volume up. The whole apparatus – me included – exists to be outgrown.

Which is also the simplest test you can run on anyone offering you anything in this field, including me. Ask what their work is aiming at. If the honest answer is that you will still need them in five years, you have your answer.

Integration is not a straight line, it’s a spiral.

You occasionally end up where you started.

I am not always in stage three.

I still journey two or three times a year. I am not free of the medicine, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in an essay whose entire argument is that pretending is the failure mode. Sometimes I need the volume turned up. Sometimes the no has been speaking for a while and I have been too busy to hear it, and I need a night in the dark to be told something I already knew in April. It’s hard to let go. I love my mind, and I tend to spend too much time embracing Scilla, rationalizing everything. And I still pay the price.

But I know the map now. I know what I am doing when I do it, and I know what it means that I still need it, and I can steer toward the far side instead of drifting back toward the rock. Many days that is the whole of the practice: noticing which way you are drifting and correcting, in small amounts, more often.

That is not modesty and it is not a disclaimer. It is the only honest position available to anyone who is still in the strait, which, as far as I can tell, is everyone.

Circe told Odysseus the price in advance. He did not pass it on to his crew — he judged that six men, told they were already chosen, would stop rowing. He was probably right. He also spent the rest of his life carrying it.

I tell people. It is why I turn so many of them away. You need to be ready to pay the price of freedom.

On the blaming, shaming, guilting game

There are about twenty-five children in a classroom. At the end of the year, one of them gets the prize.

We have agreed to call this normal. We have agreed, without ever really discussing it, that the correct way to teach twenty-five human beings is to rank them against each other and hand something to the one at the top. Which means that in every classroom, in every year, in every country I have lived in, twenty-four children learn something that was never on the curriculum.

They learn they are not good enough.

And then we do the second thing, which is stranger still. We send children to school because they do not yet know. That is the entire premise. They arrive not knowing, and we are meant to walk them from not-knowing to knowing. And then, for the whole of that walk, we correct them, mark them down, compare them, and make them feel small for the exact thing we invited them there to fix.

We punish them for not knowing yet.

I would like to ask a simple question about this. How is that supposed to produce an adult who wants to learn for the rest of their life?

What the ranking actually installs

There is a body of research on this that has been sitting in plain sight for fifty years, and almost none of it has made it into how we actually run schools.

The first finding is about rewards. When you reward a child for doing something in a way the child experiences as controlling — do this, and you will get the star — you reliably reduce their interest in the thing itself. The effect has been replicated so many times it has its own name, the overjustification effect, and what makes it worse is that it is stronger in children than in adults. Grown students can absorb an incentive and keep their appetite. Children mostly cannot. Even praise, delivered in a controlling tone, does it. They are still assembling a sense of who they are, and they read our approval as an instruction rather than as information.

The second finding is about ranking.

It is called the big-fish-little-pond effect. Across a meta-analysis of more than a million students, the average achievement of a child’s class has a negative effect on that child’s sense of their own ability — independent of what the child can actually do. Put a competent child in a room of very competent children and their belief in themselves goes down. The same child, same skills, in a different room, believes more.

So a child’s sense of their own capacity is not built from their capacity. It is built from their position.

And it does not stay in the classroom. The effect has been shown to still predict how people evaluate themselves two to four years after they have left school entirely. The room is gone. The ranking is not.

Two ways to carry “not enough”

What we hand a child in that system is not a grade. It is a sentence, in both senses of the word: you are not smart enough, not quick enough, not enough.

And a child cannot argue with that. A child does not have the equipment to say “this is a badly designed measurement system with a sample size of twenty-five”. A child concludes something much simpler. There is something wrong with me.

From there, in my experience, people go one of two ways.

Some try harder. They become very, very good at things. They collect the qualifications, the promotions, the titles, the salary that would have astonished their parents. And none of it works — not for a day. Because the feeling was never about competence in the first place, so competence cannot touch it. They just keep raising the bar to stay one step ahead of a verdict that was passed on them at age seven.

The others do something that looks like the opposite and comes from exactly the same place. They stop reaching. They find the level at which they will not be humiliated, and they stay there. They call themselves realistic. They are not aiming low because they lack ambition; they are aiming low because aiming high means exposure, and exposure means the verdict gets confirmed in public. Freeze is not the absence of a response. Freeze is a response.

I know the first path from the inside.

I spent more than twenty years as a consultant in large delivery teams, implementing systems for organisations that were considerably more confident about themselves than I was. I was good at it. I was, in fact, exactly as good at it as everyone kept telling me. And each time I moved up, I did not feel proud — I felt found out. Every promotion arrived as evidence that the gap between what they saw and what I was had just got wider, and that I would now have further to fall when it closed.

Nothing on the outside can fix a feeling that was installed on the inside. I know this because I ran the experiment properly, over two decades. When you outsource your sense of self-worth, every even mildly negative feedback will send you spinning for days.

It all ended in burnout, depression, my life fell apart. And in the evenings, wine and beer and cigarettes, the way people drink when they need something to take the edge off a weight they cannot name and would be ashamed to describe. If you had asked me then, I would have said I was tired. I was not just tired. I was carrying something, and I had no language for it, and alcohol is very good at making a thing you have no language for temporarily liveable. I often think alcohol saved my life in those days.

Capitalism, incidentally, has no complaint about the first path. A workforce of people who cannot stop proving themselves is an extremely efficient arrangement. Nobody has to motivate them. They were motivated in year four. And you see the symptoms: what do consultants do with their evenings while on a business trip? They work and drink and smoke way too much, while their family life and health are slowly falling apart. 

Addiction – a failure of character?

Here is where it gets interesting, when it comes to the blaming, shaming, guilting game.

The popular version says: we used to think addiction was a moral failure, and now we know it is a disease. Clean, tidy, progressive.

But the evidence is messier than that. Reviewers looking at whether the brain-disease model actually reduced stigma have found that public acceptance of it is largely lip service, and that explaining human difficulty in purely biological terms has often made stigma worse rather than better. Tell people that something is a disease and a good number of them will simply relocate their contempt.

The real shift — the one that is actually happening, the one Gabor Maté has spent his career on — is not from failure to illness. It is from failure to adaptation.

Not: what is wrong with you. But: what happened to you, and what did this behaviour once solve?

In the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which followed more than seventeen thousand ordinary insured adults, a childhood adversity score of six was associated with a forty-six-fold increase in lifetime risk of injecting drugs. Not forty-six per cent. Forty-six times. When the researchers ran the analysis the other way and asked how much injection drug use in that population could be attributed to childhood adversity, the answer was sixty-seven per cent overall, and seventy-eight per cent among women.

And Vincent Felitti, who led the study, wrote something in his conclusion that I think about constantly. He said the major factor underlying addiction is childhood adversity that never healed — and that is concealed from awareness by shame, secrecy, and social taboo.

Read that again. Shame is not a side effect of the problem. Shame is the lid that keeps it in place.

People do not self-medicate because they are weak. They self-medicate because they are carrying something, and because at some point they found something that made it lighter for an hour.

Other things we still call failure of character

If that is true of addiction, then I do not see how it stops there. And I think within a decade or two we will look at procrastination, at “laziness”, at eating that has nothing to do with hunger, the same way.

Nobody wants to be lazy. I have never in my life met a person who woke up and thought: “today I will deliberately underachieve at my own existence and feel terrible about it”. What I have met is a great many people who cannot generate the energy — physical, mental, emotional — to face a task that overwhelms them, and who have been told their whole lives that this is a defect of will.

The research already points this way. Procrastination, as Tim Pychyl puts it, is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem. You are not failing to schedule. You are avoiding a feeling that the task reliably produces, and buying yourself an hour of relief at the expense of a self who exists tomorrow.

And now the finding that I would put on the wall of every school and every prison in Europe:

Students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before one exam procrastinated less before the next one. The effect ran through a measurable reduction in negative feeling.

Shame does not correct the behaviour. Shame is the fuel of the behaviour. We have been treating the disease with the pathogen, for centuries, and calling it discipline.

The weight you cannot put down

There is a physical layer to this that I think is badly underappreciated.

Martin Picard, Robert-Paul Juster and the late Bruce McEwen proposed something they called mitochondrial allostatic load. The idea is this. Your mitochondria are where energy actually gets made. Chronic stress does not only exist in your thoughts; it makes continuous metabolic demands, and those demands, sustained over years, appear to damage the very machinery that produces your energy — with chronically elevated glucose damaging mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA, generating products that drive inflammation and accelerate cellular ageing. The researchers themselves say clearly that the prospective human studies needed to nail this down have not yet been done. 

If this is even approximately right, then holding trauma is not a metaphor. It is a standing withdrawal from an energy account, taken every day, before you have done anything. You are carrying something heavy and invisible up every set of stairs, and then being asked why you are out of breath, and then being told that other people manage.

And on top of that we are feeding people fuel that makes the problem worse. A high-glycaemic diet has been associated with increased odds of developing depression in large cohort data — modestly, but consistently. In controlled feeding studies, people on a low-glycaemic-load diet report significantly more vigour and significantly less fatigue than the same people on a high-glycaemic-load diet. Refined carbohydrate spikes you and then drops you, several times a day, for decades.

So: an unhealed nervous system, running on unstable fuel, in a body whose energy production may itself be compromised by the stress it has absorbed.

And this is what we call lazy.

Where this ends up

I’m not saying all of this as an excuse for certain behaviours. I am saying this as a cry for compassion, towards a possibility of healing. 

Among incarcerated men, forty-six per cent report four or more adverse childhood experiences. Among men in the general population, nine per cent do. Among incarcerated women, fifty-seven per cent. Among women in general, fifteen per cent. Five times. Nearly four times.

My claim is not that trauma makes people commit crimes — most people carrying heavy childhoods never harm anyone. The claim is narrower and, I think, far more damning:

Our criminal justice system is, in practice, a sorting mechanism for unhealed childhood.

It is where we put the people whose adaptation to suffering happened to inconvenience other people, as opposed to the people whose adaptation to suffering only destroyed themselves quietly, in the evenings, with wine. I was in the second group. It is not a moral distinction. It is a matter of which coping strategy was available in which neighbourhood.

And if you take Maté’s definition of trauma seriously, not the event but the wound the event leaves, and how early it arrived, and whether anyone was there afterwards, then we should consider turning our jails into rehabilitation centres. 

The young man

I know of a young man, twenty-one years old, in a European country I will not name.

Over a period of about two months, he sold drugs. Bad drugs. Then he stopped. Not because he was caught, and not because anyone made him. He stopped because he worked out for himself that it was wrong, which is the thing we claim to want and almost never notice when it happens.

A few weeks after he stopped, the police came for him. He was sentenced to three years. His career is gone. Not paused — gone, in the way that only a criminal record can end a life that had not begun yet. He will spend the rest of his life explaining eight weeks of his life to every employer, every landlord, every border. For a foolish thing that a very large number of us did some version of at that age, and got away with.

And here is the part that I find hardest. He believed he was helping people. He was needed, it gave him a feeling of being important. That is not a legal defence and I am not offering it as one. But it tells you something about what was actually going on in him, which is that he was a young man who wanted to be of use and had a badly calibrated map of how. We had a person in front of us who had already corrected his own behaviour, unsupervised, for free, and who wanted to matter to somebody. And we removed him from society for three years, incarcerated him, locked him away, so we don’t need to look at how society has failed him.

The country I live in now, Portugal, has been held up across the world for its drug policy, and rightly — after decriminalising personal possession in 2001, drug deaths fell, HIV infections fell, the number of people imprisoned for drug offences fell, and treatment rates rose. It is genuinely one of the most humane experiments any European state has run.

And even here, selling still sends you to prison. Even the most compassionate drug regime in Europe kept a category of person it was still willing to throw away. It just drew the line somewhere else.

The outrageous part

So let me say the thing plainly.

If we actually believed what the evidence has been telling us for thirty years — that adaptation to unbearable circumstances is what most harmful behaviour is, and that shame reliably makes it worse rather than better — then a prison could not go on being what a prison currently is.

It would have to become a place of repair.

Not a softer prison. Not a prison with better food and a yoga class in the afternoon. A fundamentally different institution, whose stated purpose is that a person leaves it understanding their own impact, having faced the harm they caused, and equipped — actually equipped, not rhetorically — to contribute rather than damage.

And before anyone reaches for the word naive, I would point at the strongest piece of evidence we have. In Norway, researchers exploited the fact that criminal cases are randomly assigned to judges of differing severity — which gives you something very close to a real experiment. They found that imprisonment reduced reoffending by twenty-nine percentage points over five years. But look at who. The entire effect came from people who had not been working beforehand: they entered employment and training programmes inside, and came out with more work and higher earnings. For people who already had jobs, prison did lasting damage.

Which means the prison worked precisely to the degree that it was not functioning as a prison. It worked where it functioned as a rehabilitation centre. Where it functioned as removal, it made things worse.

We have the result. We have had it for years. We simply do not like what it implies about what we have been doing.

What I am not saying

I am not saying nobody is responsible for anything. That is the escape hatch, and I do not want it.

The word blame is doing two entirely different jobs, and we have let them collapse into one. One job is explanation — how did a person arrive here. The other is responsibility — what does this person now owe, and to whom.

Society explains. The person still repairs.

What I am arguing is that our current system delivers neither. It explains nothing, because it never asks. And it repairs nothing, because the person harmed gets no restitution and the person who caused the harm gets no path back. We take three years of a young man’s life, return him to the world less employable and more damaged than we found him, and call the account settled.

That is not accountability. Real accountability would require him to look directly at who was affected and how. It would require him to do something about it. It would require him to stay in the community he harmed rather than be removed from it, which is the more uncomfortable option by a considerable margin. Prison, for all its brutality, lets everyone avoid the actual conversation.

So: any crime is a societal failure and a personal responsibility. The failure is ours — that a child’s adversity went unaddressed for twenty-one years until it became a police matter. The responsibility is his — to understand his impact, and to make mends.

Punishment is the one thing in that sentence doing no work at all.

The question

We built a society on competition, punishment, and negative reinforcement — and we did it at a moment in history when we did not know any better. That is a real defence. For most of the time humans have been organising ourselves, we genuinely did not know.

We know now. We have known for a while.

We know that ranking children installs a verdict that outlasts the classroom. We know that shame does not reduce the behaviour it targets and frequently increases it. We know that most addiction traces back to childhood adversity that nobody attended to. We know that the prisons that work are the ones that stop behaving like prisons.

And we carry on. In the classrooms, in the workplaces, at our own kitchen tables, in the voice inside our own heads at three in the morning — the same game, blaming, shaming, guilting, generation after generation, because it is what was done to us and we have not yet stopped to ask whether it was ever for anything.

So, isn’t it time to reconsider whether we still need the blaming, shaming, guilting game?

Sources

• Deci, Koestner & Ryan (1999, 2001) — meta-analyses on extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation
• Fang et al. (2018), Frontiers in Psychology — big-fish-little-pond effect meta-analysis (N = 1,276,838)
• Marsh et al. (2007) — persistence of the effect after graduation
• Felitti et al. (1998), American Journal of Preventive Medicine — the Adverse Childhood Experiences study
• Felitti (2003), “The Origins of Addiction” — 46-fold figure and population attributable risk
• Heather (2017), Neuroethics — on the brain-disease model and stigma
• Sirois & Pychyl (2013), Social and Personality Psychology Compass — procrastination as emotion regulation
• Wohl, Pychyl & Bennett (2010), Personality and Individual Differences — self-forgiveness reduces future procrastination
• Picard, Juster & McEwen (2014), Nature Reviews Endocrinology — mitochondrial allostatic load
• Gangwisch et al. (2015), American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — glycaemic index and depression risk
• Breymeyer et al. (2016) — mood and energy on high- vs low-glycaemic-load diets
• Washington State DOC survey of 2,100 incarcerated people — ACE prevalence comparison
• Bhuller, Dahl, Løken & Mogstad (2020), Journal of Political Economy — “Incarceration, Recidivism, and Employment”
• Transform Drug Policy Foundation / EMCDDA — outcomes of Portuguese decriminalisation since 2001

I started singing loudly on the street — not a quiet hum, but full voice, loud enough for strangers to turn their heads. I danced in train stations while suited professionals hurried past with their eyes carefully averted. I made silly jokes with people I’d never meet again, simply because human connection felt good. I let myself feel real anger when something was wrong, without softening, qualifying, or packaging it into something more palatable. And I hugged people so fully, so without reservation, that I could feel their nervous system soften against mine — that beautiful moment when a guarded person exhales, their shoulders drop, and their body remembers that safety and presence are allowed.

This is not how most consultants or high-achieving professionals are “supposed” to behave.

The Hidden Weight of High-Functioning Armor

For years I wore the armor that so many of us learn early: competent, composed, appropriate, endlessly adaptable. I could walk into any meeting room, read the energy in seconds, and calibrate myself perfectly. I was good at it — because we’ve all been practicing since childhood. Since the first time we sensed that certain versions of ourselves were welcome, and others were not.

We learn the rules fast. Then we forget we’re following them. The armor becomes so familiar it stops feeling like protection and starts feeling like skin. The daily exhaustion feels normal. The low-grade emotional flatness — even in good moments — feels normal. The quiet sense that you’re always subtly performing, even alone at home, feels normal. Because it’s all you’ve ever known.

What I didn’t realize was the weight. The constant nervous system vigilance. The low-level anxiety and burnout that high-functioning people learn to carry while still delivering results. The unresolved trauma quietly shaping how we show up in the world — making love feel conditional, presence feel dangerous, and usefulness feel like the only safe path.

Putting Down the Armor: What Actually Happened

Then, through years of deep inner work and experiences I could never have explained to my former project-manager self, I began to put the armor down. Layer by layer. Slowly. Until one day I noticed I was simply standing there — without it.

And do you know what happened?

Nothing catastrophic.

The world kept turning. People who loved me kept loving me. The structure I thought was holding my entire life together turned out to be mostly dead weight. What emerged instead was flow. Presence. A version of me that could meet the day, the people, and the moments as they actually were — not as I thought they needed to be managed.

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) perfect. Old patterns still reach up sometimes and grab me by the ankle. Healing isn’t a straight line or a one-time breakthrough. The levels keep coming. But they no longer crush me the way they used to. Because I am no longer that frightened little girl who learned that being impressive was the only way to be safe. She got me this far. I honor her. But she is not who I have to keep being.

The Strength on the Other Side of Vulnerability

On the other side of the armor is a self that is louder, more colorful, more fully and gloriously alive. She laughs at the wrong moments. She says the true thing before she can stop herself. She dances in train stations and hugs until nervous systems exhale. She is not less professional, less intelligent, or less capable — she is all of those things, and she is free.

This kind of transformation — moving from chronic high-functioning burnout, anxiety, depression, and unresolved trauma into genuine nervous system regulation and authentic presence — is exactly why I created Vine of the Soul Retreats.

I work with high-functioning professionals who have tried the conventional routes and still feel something is missing. People who are tired, disillusioned, carrying invisible weight, and seeking something they can’t quite name. My trauma-informed approach combines ayahuasca and psilocybin-assisted work with structured preparation, nervous-system regulation practices, and the BioPsyche Renewal Protocol — all supported by an AI-powered preparation and integration app. The goal is never intensity for its own sake, but durable, lasting transformation that continues long after the retreat ends.

If you recognize yourself in this story — the competent exterior and the quiet exhaustion beneath — know that you don’t have to keep carrying the armor alone. There is a version of you waiting on the other side: more real, more free, and more fully alive.

You deserve to put the mask down and discover what flows when you do.

If my story resonates…

Here are two gentle next steps:

• Explore upcoming retreat dates and see the full 2026 calendar. View Retreat Dates →
• Book a free discovery call with me — a safe, no-pressure conversation to explore whether this work is a good fit for you. Book a Discovery Call →

I’d be honored to walk beside you.

On March 23rd, 2026, Bryan Johnson — the centimillionaire biohacker who spends $2 million a year on his Blueprint longevity protocol — livestreamed himself taking 5-MeO-DMT to nearly 700,000 people on X. It was the latest in a series of psychedelic experiments that began with a psilocybin livestream in December 2025, and it may turn out to be one of the most consequential moments in psychedelic awareness this decade.

His first words after returning from the experience: “The preciousness of our existences is unfathomable.”

Within days, interest in 5-MeO-DMT retreats surged. We started getting inquiries from people who had never considered psychedelics before — executives, health optimisers, professionals who follow Johnson’s Blueprint protocol and trust his judgement. One told me this week: “I saw the video and thought — I need to experience that.”

I understand the impulse. And I think Bryan Johnson did something genuinely valuable. He brought mainstream visibility to a molecule — sometimes called the “God molecule” — that has been quietly changing lives in small ceremony rooms around the world for years. He approached it with curiosity, submitted to the experience rather than trying to control it, and spoke honestly about what happened.

But I’ve been facilitating 5-MeO-DMT ceremonies for years, and there’s something important in his story that almost nobody is talking about.

What Made Bryan Johnson’s 5-MeO-DMT Experience Safe

Bryan Johnson didn’t just walk into a room and inhale a molecule. He walked in as arguably the most physically optimised human being on the planet. Five years of data-driven health protocol. Hundreds of biomarkers tracked daily. Sleep optimised. Inflammation managed. Gut microbiome monitored. Nervous system resilient from years of deliberate body work.

He also walked in with psychological awareness. He’s spoken publicly about his past depression, his divorce, his relationship with the need for control. He’s done therapy. He sat with psilocybin before, in a monitored setting where his brain was being imaged with a Kernel device. He already had a tattoo of the 5-MeO-DMT molecular structure on his forearm — this wasn’t a first encounter with the compound.

And he walked in with professional support. Two experienced facilitators at the Enfold retreat centre. His partner beside him. A medical context. A team that could hold the container if something went sideways.

Bryan Johnson was running this psychedelic experiment on a stable system. Body regulated. Nervous system resilient. Psychological history at least partially processed. Support infrastructure in place.

That’s not where most people start.

What 5-MeO-DMT Actually Does to the Brain

5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is often called the most powerful psychedelic in existence. That’s not marketing — it’s pharmacology.

The compound acts primarily as a potent agonist at serotonin 5-HT₁A and 5-HT₂A receptors, flooding these receptor sites within seconds of inhalation. A 2026 study published in Communications Biology found that 5-MeO-DMT induces a dissociated brain state characterised by prominent slow oscillations in the cortex — the brain enters a pattern that looks like deep sleep even while the person is behaviourally awake.

What this means in practice is a rapid and often total disruption of the default mode network (DMN) — the brain’s self-referential circuitry that maintains your sense of identity, your internal narrative, and your sense of being a separate self. A systematic review of 28 neuroimaging studies confirmed that psychedelics consistently decrease connectivity within the DMN while increasing connections between the DMN and other brain networks, creating a more flexible, less rigid brain state.

This is what neuroscientists mean by “ego dissolution” — and it’s what Johnson described when he said the experience forced him to release all attachments, all desire for control, before the terror transformed into what he called indescribable bliss.

The neuroplasticity angle is real, too. Research shows that 5-MeO-DMT promotes structural neural plasticity in brain tissue, increasing dendritic spine growth — the physical connections between neurons. A 2025 randomised controlled trial found that 5-MeO-DMT produced sustained remission in 78% of treatment-resistant depression patients at six months, with lasting reductions in pro-inflammatory cytokines and increases in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). The FDA has granted breakthrough therapy designation to BPL-003, an intranasal 5-MeO-DMT formulation developed by Beckley Psytech, for treatment-resistant depression.

So Johnson’s framing of 5-MeO-DMT as a longevity tool with neuroplasticity benefits isn’t wrong. The science supports it. But the science also tells us something else — something he didn’t need to say, because it didn’t apply to him.

What Happens When the Nervous System Isn’t Stable

Here’s what Johnson himself described during his 5-MeO-DMT experience: his ego resisted. He felt panic. He had to surrender completely — release every attachment and every desire for control — before the experience shifted from terror to bliss.

Now imagine that same moment — that panic, that overwhelming loss of control — happening inside a nervous system that’s already dysregulated. A body running on cortisol from years of burnout. A mind carrying unprocessed grief, or childhood trauma that’s never been named. A person who has spent decades performing competence while something underneath has been slowly unravelling.

The molecule doesn’t care what you came for. You may have come for neuroplasticity. It may hand you your mother.

This is not a theoretical concern. I’ve sat with hundreds of people through psychedelic experiences — with ayahuasca, psilocybin, San Pedro, and 5-MeO-DMT — and the single most important predictor of whether someone has an integrable experience is not the medicine, not the dose, not the setting. It’s the state of their nervous system when they arrive.

A dysregulated nervous system — one stuck in fight, flight, or freeze — doesn’t have the capacity to process what 5-MeO-DMT opens up. The experience can feel not like ego dissolution but like annihilation. Not like bliss but like psychosis. Not like a reset but like a destabilisation that takes weeks or months to recover from.

This is the gap between Bryan Johnson’s 5-MeO-DMT experience and what the average person inspired by his livestream might encounter. He had years of preparation built into his life. Most of the people now searching “is 5-MeO-DMT safe” do not.

The Preparation Work That Doesn’t Make for a Good Livestream

When someone contacts us about a 5-MeO-DMT ceremony, my first question is not “when are you available?” It’s “have you done any inner work before?” Not because there’s a right answer, but because the answer shapes everything that follows.

Proper 5-MeO-DMT preparation means medical screening — checking for contraindications including SSRI and MAOI interactions, cardiovascular conditions, bipolar spectrum history, and medications that interact dangerously with tryptamines. It means a conversation about what you’re actually carrying, not just what you think you want to let go of.

It also means nervous system work. Learning to regulate before you deregulate. Breathwork. Somatic practices. Understanding — in your body, not just intellectually — the difference between feeling safe and being safe.

And it means integration planning. What happens in the days and weeks after the experience matters more than the experience itself. Who will you talk to? What practices will you use? What support structure exists when the insights start fading and the old patterns start pulling you back?

None of this is glamorous. None of it fits into a 30-second clip. But it’s the difference between a 5-MeO-DMT experience you can integrate into lasting change and one that destabilises you.

This is why experienced psychologists who commented on Johnson’s livestream urged caution. Dr. Joseph Barsuglia called Johnson’s combined dose — 18mg inhaled plus 9mg injected — “a megadose with unproven safety” and warned that people copying the approach could be severely harmed. Dr. Bianca Sebben emphasised the principle of starting “low and slow” with such an intense compound.

What’s Already Working

I want to be clear: this is not a critique of Bryan Johnson. I genuinely believe his psychedelic livestream advanced the conversation. And this is not a complaint about the state of the psychedelic therapy field. There are serious, skilled practitioners doing extraordinary work around the world — quietly, without livestreams, with small groups and deep care.

I’m writing this because the conversation right now is dominated by spectacle on one end and horror stories on the other. There’s a vast, quiet middle — facilitators who screen properly, who prepare people physiologically and psychologically, who hold space with skill, and who follow up after the experience to help people integrate what they found.

In our work at Vine of the Soul Retreats in Portugal’s Algarve, 5-MeO-DMT is not the starting point. It’s something we offer within a larger container — after screening, after preparation, and often after a person has already sat with other medicines that build capacity first. Ayahuasca does deep clearing work — what I sometimes call the spring cleaning of the psyche. Psilocybin opens perspective and emotional flexibility. San Pedro grounds and stabilises. Each medicine has a different therapeutic character, and the sequence matters.

We built our approach around the BioPsyche Renewal Protocol — a three-phase framework (Stabilize → Illuminate → Embody) specifically designed for the reality that lasting transformation requires nervous system regulation alongside inner work. Integration cannot happen without a stable physiological foundation.

When someone does sit with 5-MeO-DMT in this context, the experience is held — not just during the ceremony, but before and after. They have tools. They have community. They have a framework for making sense of what happened, including an AI-powered integration app that provides micro-practices, grounding tools, and reflective prompts in the weeks that follow.

This is what we’re already doing well as a field, in the places where psychedelic therapy is practised responsibly. It’s not as dramatic as a livestream. But it works. And it works precisely because it takes the things that made Bryan Johnson’s 5-MeO-DMT experience safe — physical readiness, psychological awareness, skilled facilitation, and integration — and makes them accessible to people who haven’t spent five years and $2 million preparing.

The Question Worth Asking

If you watched Bryan Johnson’s psychedelic livestream and something in you stirred — good. Pay attention to that. It might be the beginning of something genuinely important.

But before you search for “5-MeO-DMT retreat” and book the first thing that comes up, ask yourself a harder question: Am I ready for what this molecule might bring up?

Not “am I brave enough.” Bravery isn’t the issue. The issue is whether your nervous system, your psychological foundation, and your support structure are in a state where this experience will be integrable rather than destabilising.

If you’re not sure, that’s not a reason to wait forever. It’s a reason to prepare properly. Talk to a facilitator who will be honest with you — including honest enough to tell you if now isn’t the right time, or if a gentler medicine might be a better starting point. A good facilitator doesn’t sell you an experience. They help you decide if you’re ready for one.

The most powerful psychedelic in the world deserves the most careful preparation. Bryan Johnson had that, whether he framed it that way or not.

You deserve it too.

About the Author

Bianca Diana Stumm is the founder of Vine of the Soul Retreats, a trauma-informed psychedelic retreat centre in Portugal’s Algarve serving guests from across Europe and beyond. She is a certified RTT therapist, hypnotherapist, and human potential coach who has facilitated ceremonies for 800+ guests across ayahuasca, psilocybin, San Pedro, and 5-MeO-DMT (Bufo Alvarius). She developed the BioPsyche Renewal Protocol, a three-phase framework for lasting transformation that bridges nervous system science with psychedelic-assisted therapy. Her approach draws on 20 years in enterprise consulting (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics) and firsthand experience of the healing these medicines can offer when held properly.

Further Reading

• 5-MeO-DMT Retreat Portugal — Vine of the Soul Retreats — ceremony format, screening, and what to expect
• Bufo Alvarius & 5-MeO-DMT — Knowledge Base — deeper dive into history, pharmacology, ethics, and safety
• BioPsyche Renewal Protocol — the Stabilize → Illuminate → Embody framework
• Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies — overview of evidence-based psychedelic therapy approaches

If you’re considering 5-MeO-DMT or any psychedelic experience and want to talk it through honestly, set up a screening call.

I want to start with an admission: I admired these people.

Aubrey Marcus built something rare — a platform where vulnerability, masculinity, and genuine spiritual seeking could coexist. I respected that. I’ve read the books, followed the journey, and even attended the Eros Mystery School in person. I went as someone genuinely curious, genuinely open.

So this isn’t a takedown. It’s not a culture war shot from someone who never engaged with the ideas. It’s a reflection from someone who did engage — and came away with questions that nobody else in this conversation seems to be asking.

Everyone has an opinion on the Aubrey-Vylana-Alana throuple. The internet has taken sides on whether polyamory is valid, whether “Radical Monogamy” is a meaningful term or a contradiction, whether spiritual relationships can transcend conventional structures.

What I haven’t seen — in any of the think pieces, the podcast responses, the social media debates — is anyone asking the obvious question:

What about the children?

The Conversation We’re Not Having

I work with adults. Trauma-informed psychedelic-assisted therapy, nervous system regulation, deep integration work. And what I see, day after day, are grown people metabolising the consequences of their childhood environments. Not just the dramatic ones — abuse, neglect, violence. The quieter ones. The divided loyalties. The sense that they had to compete for a parent’s attention. The confusion of never quite knowing which version of “family” was the real one.

I am also a mother. Of twins. I make mistakes — probably every day. I like to joke that I’m saving for the therapist while other parents save for college. So I’m humble about the fact that most parents have the best of intentions… and they still fail.

What the Science Says — Clearly and Without Apology

Children don’t understand sacred union, soul contracts, or womb alchemy. They understand who is tucking them in at night. Whether their parent is present or distracted. Whether they have to compete for love.

The developmental psychology on this is not ambiguous. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s foundational work on attachment theory — confirmed and extended by decades of subsequent research — shows that children thrive when they have:

• Secure attachment to primary caregivers
• Predictable, consistent emotional responses
• Clear boundaries modeled and respected
• Freedom from triangulation and adult emotional complexity

A 2010 study by Beebe et al. found that the quality of caregiver interaction at four months predicts attachment security at twelve months. Not years later — months. The nervous system is forming its map of the world that early. It is logging: am I safe? am I seen? is love reliable?

A 2020 meta-analysis in Health Psychology Review confirmed that secure attachment in committed relationships correlates with better immune function, longer life expectancy, and greater stress resilience in adults. We are still living out what happened to us before we could talk.

There is little to no scientific evidence that three-parent romantic configurations — particularly volatile or evolving ones — offer equivalent attachment security for children. What research exists on communal and experimental family structures points toward a consistent pattern: complexity, divided loyalties, and emotional instability in the caregiving environment create lasting imprints on developing nervous systems.

This isn’t conservative moral panic. This is developmental biology.

“Ayahuasca Told Me…” — and Other Dangerous Absolutes

Now we get to the part I’m uniquely positioned to speak to.

I’ve heard the phrase “Ayahuasca told me…” or “Spirit told me…” or “The Goddess told me…” more times than I can count. Often from people still in the radiance of ceremony, still metabolising an experience that hasn’t been integrated. Still confusing intensity for truth.

I’ve been in that loop myself. And I paid the price.

Psychedelic experiences can carry profound personal revelation. I believe this deeply — it’s the foundation of my work. But these insights are starting points for reflection, not permission slips for radical life changes that affect others. Especially children.

The medicine shows us our fears and our deepest desires. It speaks in symbols, in longing, in the language of the psyche. Without grounded integration, what we receive in ceremony is raw material — not instruction.

This brings me to Abraham.

In one of the Aubrey Marcus podcasts, Marc Gafni references the story of Abraham and Isaac — God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son — as a parable about learning to distinguish the authentic inner voice from external authority. It’s actually a profound psychological point. Jung explored the same territory in Answer to Job — the question of how we relate to a God we’ve created in our own image, how we find moral autonomy without simply inverting one authority for another.

I love this framing. I think it’s genuinely important work.

But here’s the contradiction that troubles me: if the lesson of Abraham is don’t follow divine commands blindly, find your own authentic voice — then why is “Ayahuasca told me” being treated as an absolute? Why is Spirit’s instruction to restructure your family, have children within an experimental container, redefine monogamy — why is that different from the command Abraham questioned?

Abraham, in the end, didn’t sacrifice his son.

The whole point of the story, psychologically, is that we must find the internal authority mature enough to say: no. Not this. Not my child.

What I Witnessed in Person

When I attended the Eros Mystery School, I came as an admirer. I came open.

What I witnessed in the throuple dynamic live was different from the curated narrative. The tension was palpable. The undercurrents were difficult to ignore. Whatever the public story, the energetic reality felt strained — still very much in process, unresolved, alive with friction that hadn’t found ground yet.

I wouldn’t want to raise children inside that atmosphere. Not because friction is wrong — friction is human — but because children shouldn’t be holding the emotional charge of adults who are still figuring out the shape of their own container.

The Influence Problem

To their credit, the trio has been careful to say they are not recommending this as a model for others — only that it’s what feels true for them. I respect that nuance.

And still: when you have millions of followers, a charismatic platform, and the language of spiritual evolution wrapped around your personal choices, your life becomes an implicit recommendation whether you intend it or not. Influence carries responsibility. And I’m not convinced that responsibility is being held with the depth it deserves.

“Radical Monogamy” as a term for a triad dynamic is — let’s be honest — linguistic acrobatics. Monogamy means one. When we start coining phrases that make contradictions sound enlightened, we’re not evolving. We’re bypassing.

We’ve Seen This Before

This is not a new story.

From Osho to Keith Raniere to Father Divine, spiritual leaders have used elevated language and mystical frameworks to justify multiple partners, scattered families, and catastrophic consequences for the children raised within those systems. The adults who grew up in these environments — I’ve sat with some of them — carry wounds that are remarkably consistent: confusion, divided loyalties, emotional neglect wrapped in the language of freedom.

This isn’t theoretical. These are real people with real damage.

The trappings change. The neuroscience doesn’t.

The Real Question

So the debate isn’t really is polyamory valid? For consenting adults, navigating their own nervous systems, their own attachment wounds, their own lives — that’s a conversation worth having.

The question is: Are we willing to use our children as the test subjects in our spiritual experiments?

In a world already overwhelmed with insecure attachment, abandonment wounds, and children exposed to adult emotional complexity before they have the developmental resources to metabolise it — are we helping or harming when we build family systems that defy everything we know about what children actually need?

This isn’t about shaming desire. It’s about remembering what’s sacred.

And sometimes what’s most sacred isn’t the ecstatic edge of personal transformation. Sometimes it’s the quiet, unsexy, deeply regulated consistency that helps a young soul feel safe enough to become themselves.

So by all means — evolve your love. Explore your edges. Heal your wounds. Use the medicine. Find your authentic voice.

But if you’re going to bring children into the mix, do it with reverence, not rebellion.

Because they didn’t choose the path. You did.

Questions Worth Sitting With

Is polyamory harmful to children? While polyamory can work for some adults, most developmental research emphasises the importance of stable, secure attachment to primary caregivers. Three-parent dynamics often introduce complexity, triangulation, and emotional inconsistency — factors that can compromise a child’s sense of safety and identity during critical developmental phases.

Can secure attachment exist in non-traditional family structures? In theory, yes — but it requires extraordinary levels of emotional maturity, co-regulation, and consistency from all caregivers. In practice, most experimental or evolving relationships struggle to provide the predictability children need. The question isn’t whether it’s theoretically possible. It’s whether the conditions are actually present.

Is ayahuasca a reliable guide for major life decisions? Ayahuasca can reveal deep emotional truths, but these should be understood as starting points for integration, not absolute commands. Without grounded follow-through, psychedelic insights can become spiritual bypassing — or projections of unresolved trauma and desire dressed in the language of revelation. Abraham didn’t sacrifice his son. That’s the point.

What does the science say about children and secure attachment? Extensive research — Bowlby, Ainsworth, Beebe and others — shows that children thrive when emotional responses are consistent, boundaries are clear, and primary caregivers are attuned and present. Secure attachment correlates with better mental health, social development, immune function, and life outcomes across the lifespan. It is not optional. It is foundational.

If You’re Carrying This

If you were raised in a household where adult spiritual experiments took precedence over your need for safety — you’re not alone. The confusion, the divided loyalties, the sense that love was conditional on going along with something you didn’t choose: these are real wounds, and they can be healed.

At Vine of the Soul Retreats, we work with attachment trauma, nervous system dysregulation, and the kind of deep integration that plant medicine can open but can’t complete on its own.

If this resonates — let’s talk.

Sources:

• Ainsworth, M. D., Blehar, M., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., Markese, S., et al. (2010). “The origins of 12-month attachment: A microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant interaction.” Attachment & Human Development, 12(1-2), 3–141. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20390524/
• Chopik, W. J., O’Brien, E., & Konrath, S. H. (2017). “Associations among relational values, support, health, and well-being across the adult lifespan.” Personal Relationships. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pere.12187
• Fisher, H. E., Aron, A., & Brown, L. L. (2006). “Romantic love: A mammalian brain system for mate choice.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 361, 2173–2186. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2006.1938
• Jung, C. G. (1952). Answer to Job. Rascher Verlag.
• Moors, A. C., Matsick, J. L., & Schechinger, H. A. (2017). “Unique and shared relationship benefits of consensually non-monogamous and monogamous relationships.” European Psychologist, 22(1), 55–71. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000278

Most people arrive at a psychedelic retreat psychologically prepared. They’ve set intentions, done the reading, maybe worked with a therapist. What almost no one considers is the body — and whether it is biochemically ready to receive what the medicine offers.

That gap is one of the strongest predictors of how a ceremony unfolds. Getting the right supplements before a psychedelic retreat isn’t wellness optimization. For people carrying burnout, depression, or chronic stress, it’s nervous system rehabilitation — and it can be the difference between an experience that heals and one that overwhelms.

What Is Actually Happening in Your Brain During Ceremony

All classic psychedelics — psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, mescaline — create their primary effects by binding to the serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2A) in the prefrontal cortex. But the neurochemical cascade that follows is far more demanding than a single receptor interaction.

Serotonin is massively redistributed, affecting mood, memory, and emotional processing simultaneously. Glutamate surges, stimulating BDNF — brain-derived neurotrophic factor, the driver of neuroplasticity and trauma rewiring. Oxytocin rises. The limbic system activates fully, processing suppressed material that may have been stored somatically for decades.

This is an immense metabolic event. The brain burns through ATP, neurotransmitters, and their key cofactors — magnesium, B vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids — at an accelerated rate. If those reserves are depleted going in, the experience doesn’t just become harder. It becomes less healing.

Why a Depleted Nervous System Struggles With Plant Medicine

Burnout, depression, and chronic stress are not only psychological states. They live in the body as measurable biochemical depletion: dysregulated cortisol, elevated neuroinflammation, exhausted neurotransmitter precursors.

When someone in this state enters a ceremony, the medicine amplifies what’s already there. The window of tolerance — the neurological range in which experience can be processed, not merely endured — narrows. Instead of flowing through insight, they fight through chaos.

You see it across ceremonies: journeys that are dense and disjointed, dissociation, emotional flooding with no capacity to integrate what’s emerging. And after: low mood, brain fog, fractured sleep, and insights that evaporate before they can take root. Not because the medicine failed. Because the physical vessel wasn’t ready.

This is why preparing the body with the right supplements before a psychedelic retreat matters as much as preparing the mind. Healing requires a stable substrate. Integration requires a regulated nervous system.

The 4 Foundational Supplements Before a Psychedelic Retreat

These are not exotic interventions. They are targeted nutritional support for the specific biochemical demands of a psychedelic ceremony — and for the integration window that follows.

1. Magnesium Glycinate or Threonate

Magnesium is involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions, including serotonin synthesis and the GABA-glutamate balance that becomes critical during peak ceremony states. It reduces neuroinflammation, supports emotional regulation, and deepens the slow-wave sleep where integration actually happens.

Chronic stress depletes magnesium rapidly. Estimates suggest up to 50% of Western adults are subclinically deficient — depleted but not diagnosably so. It is the single highest-leverage supplement in this protocol and the one to prioritize if you can only do one.

• Glycinate form: best absorption, minimal GI effects
• Threonate form: crosses the blood-brain barrier; preferred for cognitive and emotional regulation
• Dose: 200–400mg | Timing: Evening, 1–2 hours before sleep

2. Activated B-Complex

B vitamins are cofactors in almost every step of neurotransmitter synthesis. Without adequate B6, the brain cannot produce serotonin or GABA efficiently. Without B12 and folate, methylation — the process that regulates mood, detoxification, and gene expression — breaks down.

The activated forms matter. Many people carry MTHFR gene variants that prevent conversion of synthetic B vitamins into usable forms. Activated versions — P5P, methylcobalamin, methylfolate — bypass this entirely and are essential for anyone who has struggled with mood, fatigue, or treatment resistance.

• Dose: 1 capsule activated B-complex | Timing: Morning, with breakfast

3. Omega-3 Fatty Acids (DHA + EPA)

DHA integrates directly into neuronal cell membranes, improving how efficiently neurons communicate — particularly relevant during the heightened connectivity state that psilocybin and ayahuasca produce. EPA is primarily anti-inflammatory, targeting the chronic neuroinflammation that accumulates in people carrying unresolved trauma.

In the post-ceremony integration window — a period of elevated neuroplasticity — omega-3s become even more important. Neuroplasticity requires a healthy neural substrate, and DHA is its primary building block.

• Dose: 1,000mg combined DHA + EPA (high-quality fish or algae oil) | Timing: With meals

4. Glycine

Glycine is the quietest and most underestimated supplement in this protocol. As an inhibitory neurotransmitter it smooths emotional intensity during and after ceremony. It supports liver detoxification — especially relevant with ayahuasca. And it enhances slow-wave sleep in the critical nights after ceremony, when the subconscious continues to process and integrate.

• Dose: 2–3g | Timing: Evening, in warm water or with dinner

When to Start — and How Long to Continue

Begin: 7–14 days before your retreat. This allows biochemical reserves to meaningfully replenish, not just top up.

Continue: For at least 2–4 weeks post-retreat — the full neuroplasticity window, when insights are most available to become lasting change. If you purchase a month’s supply, finish it.

All four supplements are compatible with the ayahuasca dieta, provided you choose clean formulas without synthetic fillers or additives.

If You Can Only Start With One

One supplement: Magnesium. Within 7–14 days it can meaningfully shift anxiety, sleep quality, and emotional reactivity. Add a second: Activated B-complex — mood, energy, neurotransmitter foundation. Add a third: Omega-3s — neuroinflammation and integration capacity. Add the fourth: Glycine — sleep depth and emotional smoothing, especially if these are significant concerns.

The Larger Container: Body, Mind, and Ongoing Support

Supplements stabilize the biochemistry. But the deeper work — processing what the medicine reveals, keeping the nervous system regulated through the weeks that follow, translating insight into lasting change — requires more than a supplement stack.

At Vine of the Soul Retreats, our approach to psychedelic-assisted therapy is built on the understanding that integration cannot happen without a stable nervous system, and that mental wellbeing can only fully emerge inside a healthy body. The supplements in this article are the first step in that preparation.

For clients who want structured support through every phase — before, during, and after their retreat — our BioPsyche Renewal Protocol AI Companion is available as a responsive web app. It offers personalized Resonance Menus of micro-practices built for people without bandwidth for lengthy routines, nervous system regulation tools drawn from Polyvagal-informed clinical practice, emotional processing support, nutritional guidance, and daily wellbeing tracking. Already in use with our retreat guests, it extends the held container of the ceremony into the weeks and months where real integration happens.

The plant medicines open a door. A prepared, nourished body — and real support for what comes after — is what allows you to walk through it.

Vine of the Soul Retreats offers psychedelic-assisted therapy retreats in Portugal (Algarve), Spain, and the Netherlands, guided by the BioPsyche Renewal Protocol. Maximum 8 guests per retreat. Rated 4.7★ on Trustpilot, 5★ on Google Reviews, BookRetreats, and Retreat Guru, and 5★ across 49 reviews on ReviewMyRetreat.

Curious whether a retreat is right for you? Get in touch here.

What now – how to choose an Ayahuasca retreat? Where will you find the right retreat for you? Are all retreats the same? (Spoiler alert: no.) How can you make sure you’ll have the best possible experience? How can you make sure you will be able to feel safe, so you can dive deep into your journey and not worry about a thing? In other words, how do you choose the right retreat for yourself?

Since Ayahuasca originates in the Amazon, and you heard about shamans who offer this magical brew to whomever is ready to embark on this journey, your first impulse might be to buy your tickets to Peru, or Costa Rica, Colombia, or Brazil. With the consistent decline in mental health, and the failure of modern medicine to provide a sustainable solution to it, many people are looking for alternative methods. To respond to this increasing demand, the number of shamans and retreat centres has increased significantly over the last couple of years. But is the traditional way always the best? And to what extent is the traditional way still traditional?

I’m not writing this article to convince you either way — my aim is to inform you, dear reader, so you can choose what’s best for you. And part of informing you honestly means naming something the industry rarely says out loud: the rapid growth of this space has outpaced its ethical development. When vulnerable people in non-ordinary states of consciousness are the clientele, the responsibility carried by retreat operators is not ordinary. It scales with the power differential — and that differential is enormous. A guest mid-ceremony cannot advocate for themselves the way they can in any other consumer context. Which means the burden of care falls entirely on the people holding the space.

At Vine of the Soul Retreats we respect the wisdom that has been passed on from generation to generation over thousands of years. More than that, we collaborate with Shamans whom we share the same values with. Those values are:

• integrity — as in walking the talk, which is embodied by every single member of our team
• safety — physical, mental, and energetical
• an end-to-end service — as in pre-retreat preparation, continuous kind support during the retreat, post-retreat integration and community building to be able to share your experiences long after the retreat

With this sentiment in mind, if you would like to experience an authentic shamanic retreat, we organise groups to Taita Juan in Colombia on a regular basis.

Your First Ayahuasca Retreat: Why Environment Matters More Than You Think

However, you don’t necessarily need to travel to the Amazon to have a transformative, healing, mystical experience. I believe that more often than not, it is better to have a first Ayahuasca experience in an environment that is closer to your usual one. Here’s why.

Imagine yourself in an altered state, having one of the most profound and somewhat scary experiences of your life, while being in the middle of nature, with all the usual creepy crawlers, the sounds of the jungle, in complete darkness. Your shaman might not speak your language. The amenities might be very basic. You don’t really know what to expect, the preparation is very basic (often due to the language barrier). There’s a feeling of mysticism in the air, that you can definitely perceive, but cannot make sense of. Even if there is no language barrier, the sharing circles that should help you make sense of the experience are often held in a — let’s call it magical, spiritual language framework. Often there is no post-retreat support. This is usually not due to mal-intent of the retreat leaders, but simply because they have a different lens through which they see reality. The people who are connected to the land, to their environment, to their ancestors, live in a world of magic that we are unable to see. For them it’s obvious that the plants and animals have spirits who communicate to us, while teaching and guiding us. Their ancestors are whispering to them through the wind and guide them through their dreams. The way they make sense of reality is inherently different from ours. And that’s the framework through which they will try to help you make sense of your experiences.

And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, this framework is incomplete — it’s not enough for the western mind. Because in the end you’ll come back to your “real life” and have to integrate here. You must make sense of your experience through a framework that is more practical to the lens you see the world through. This is where the language of psychology comes in, helping you make sense of your subconscious symbols. I guarantee you: it won’t take anything away from your experience. I’m not trying to take away the mystical, but to help you hold both the magic and the “real world” practicalities.

How to Choose an Ayahuasca Retreat: What the Stories Don’t Tell You

Through the many stories I hear from participants coming to our retreats, who have experienced Ayahuasca in the Amazon, to me it’s clear that it’s not always the best option. Many times introductory calls with these people turn into integration calls of the past experience. Someone once shared a story with me, how the participants needed to sign a liability waiver where one of the clauses stated that “the facilitators do not take responsibility if the participant is getting attacked by a jaguar.” Some others described ceremonies where the shaman was so deep in the medicine himself that he couldn’t attend to the participants’ needs. Another has reported how they were serving alcohol with the medicine, apparently for cleansing purposes.

These are not isolated curiosities. They are the predictable result of an industry growing faster than its accountability structures. The suffering that comes from a badly held ceremony — the re-traumatisation, the weeks of dysregulation, the experiences left without integration support — is largely preventable. That word matters: preventable. Which means choosing to ignore it is a choice, not an inevitability. As someone holding space in this field, I believe we have a collective obligation not just to avoid harm, but to actively build the conditions under which people can genuinely flourish — before, during, and long after the ceremony is over.

So if you do want to experience this in the Amazon, then a good option is to go for a well-established retreat, one of the big names. The downside is the price tag, and also the large groups, where personal contact suffers. The upside is your safety and better creature comforts.

At Vine of the Soul Retreats we hold space for you in a way that is nurturing, gentle, kind. There are always sober facilitators present, and we keep groups intentionally small — a maximum of eight guests and never fewer than four facilitators — so that no one gets lost in the crowd when they need support most. The retreat itself is embedded within the broader BioPsyche Renewal Protocol (Stabilize → Illuminate → Embody): a structured, trauma-informed framework that begins before you arrive and continues long after you leave. The medicine work sits inside the Illuminate phase, which means you come in with a regulated nervous system and leave with a real integration roadmap — not just a profound experience with nowhere to put it. If you live in Europe, our retreats in Portugal are also significantly more accessible than flying to the Amazon. And if you don’t resonate with our approach, we’re genuinely happy to recommend another centre we trust.

To find out more, watch our Q&A video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6IZm2zERUw

It wasn’t a typical romance, and I won’t flatten it by calling it “the love of my life” — because, frankly, I’m still alive, and life may still have a few surprises in store. But this connection was different. It had depth, texture, and a kind of sacred intentionality that felt extraordinary. We weren’t just playing roles or clinging to chemistry — we were doing work. Real work. Soul work.

We brought our wounds into the light, not to use them against each other, but to examine them with tenderness. We tried — genuinely tried — to see our conflicts not as failures, but as maps. And instead of blaming, we asked: what is this trigger pointing towards in me? What is still unhealed, unloved?

We had a shared mission, in a way — one that could almost fool you into thinking love could conquer anything. Us against unlove.

Until, eventually… it wasn’t.

Because somewhere along the way, he stepped back. Not violently, not dramatically. It wasn’t betrayal, and it wasn’t abandonment in the classic sense. It was, on paper, a consensual letting go. But the truth is — I wasn’t ready.

I had held onto the belief that we had found a model that could withstand anything. That if we stayed honest, curious, open, and willing, we could make it through any storm. And finding out that this wasn’t true — at least not with him — was its own kind of rupture.

There was no one to blame, really. Not him. Not me. Just a heartbreak that didn’t come from drama, but from the quiet collapse of something sacred. And that, in some ways, was even harder to metabolize.

When the Sacred Collapses

We didn’t scream. We didn’t wound each other on the way out. And yet, the silence that followed held an ache so vast it swallowed every reference point I thought I had. I had spent so long anchoring myself in the “we” — not out of co-dependence, but out of trust. I believed in the work we were doing, in our shared capacity to face whatever came up. And I trusted that even in the face of fear or contraction, we’d meet it with maturity and heart.

So when the ending came, and I was left alone — not in a dramatic storm, but in the eerie stillness of something that once pulsed with life — I didn’t know where to put the grief. There was no obvious rupture. No fight to rehash. Only the “why” and the slow, reluctant recognition that one of us had stopped holding the edge of the container. And it wasn’t me.

What made it even harder was the timing. My life was already stretched thin — physically, emotionally, spiritually. I was recovering from serious health challenges, rebuilding a retreat center from the ashes, processing betrayals I hadn’t seen coming, and trying to keep the vision alive for my team, myself, and my children.

In the middle of all that, losing this relationship — the one thing that had still felt solid — hit like an earthquake.

When the Medicine Lies — Or Tells a Different Truth

There was another layer to this loss that I haven’t spoken about publicly. One that felt too intimate, too vulnerable, too easy to misunderstand.

In ceremony, I had seen us. Not just in this life — across lives. A bond so old and so deep it felt less like romantic love and more like recognition. Like coming home to something ancient.

I know what you might be thinking. And yes — I know that ayahuasca doesn’t deliver objective truth. I’ve said it to guests a hundred times: the medicine shows us our fears and our deepest desires. It speaks in symbols, in longing, in the language of the psyche. I know this. I teach this.

And still, I believed it. Or at least — I needed to believe it. Because what I saw felt so real, so precise, so tenderly specific, that it bypassed every intellectual safeguard I had.

So when it ended, it wasn’t just heartbreak. It was a kind of spiritual betrayal. Not by him — but by the vision itself. By the story I had been carrying as sacred truth. The ground I thought was eternal turned out to be made of hope.

And underneath the grief, something older stirred. A child’s voice, fierce and exhausted:

“I am such a good girl. I do everything right. I show up, I stay open, I love with everything I have. And still — still — I am left. Again.”

That voice knew this feeling. It had been here before. Not with him, but in a thousand smaller moments across a lifetime of trying to earn safety through goodness. The world, it seemed, did not reward kindness. Openness was punished. Love was a debt that never got repaid.

I sat with that voice for a long time. Not to argue with it. Not to fix it. Just to let it be heard — probably for the first time.

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand, both personally and through the work I do: when a relationship ends and it breaks you open in this particular way — when it touches something ancient and pre-verbal — it’s rarely just about the person. It’s about every time before. Every abandonment, every diminishment, every moment your nervous system logged as evidence that you are fundamentally too much, or not enough, or somehow unworthy of the love you freely give.

The medicine didn’t lie to me. It showed me what I longed for most deeply. And in losing it — or the possibility of it — I found the wound that had been running the show all along.

That, I think, is the real alchemy.

Heartbreak as a Neurochemical Crash

The emotional pain was expected. I knew it would hurt — I just didn’t know how deep, or how physical, that hurt would become.

It wasn’t just sadness. It was apathy. It was depression. A heavy, slow fog that settled over everything. I had no energy, no motivation, no real sense of time moving. I wasn’t numb — I felt everything, maybe too much. The grief was sharp and constant, like a pressure behind my sternum that never let up.

And yes — I cried. A lot. Sometimes with meaning. Sometimes just because my body didn’t know what else to do.

The self-loathing came in quietly. Not dramatic, not theatrical — just this slow, grinding erosion of self-worth. And while some people lose their appetite in heartbreak, I go the other way. I craved sugar, carbs, the emotional comfort of junk food. I hated it, and I hated myself for not being able to stop.

My sleep broke down. My nervous system stayed wired at night, tired in the morning. My body felt like it was running on smoke and stress. I knew, at some level, this was biochemical. That my system was crashing. But when you’re in it, knowing why barely helps.

Eventually, though, the “why” gave me something to hold onto. Because heartbreak like this isn’t just emotional. It’s physiological.

Romantic bonding releases a potent blend of neurochemicals: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. When that bond breaks, the system crashes. And withdrawal kicks in. Understanding that helped me see the cravings, the compulsions, the emotional volatility — not as weakness, but as chemistry. And that shift made space for something else to begin.

The First Ritual: Mushrooms and the Decision to Live

When I realized I couldn’t think or cry my way out of the hole I was in, I turned to what I know I can rely on when nothing else works: ceremony. I entered a mushroom journey — not to reconnect with him, not to ask the universe for closure, but to reclaim myself.

And in the beginning, I did fight him. In that ceremonial space, I felt the weight of his absence and the energetic threads still tying me to him. I let that battle happen. I let my system shake him out, tear him off, purge the psychic residue.

And then, the focus shifted.

It became about me. Not the broken-hearted me. Not the woman left behind. But the woman still here. Still alive.

That journey took me somewhere I didn’t expect: into a deep curiosity about how I could support myself. Not just to stop hurting, but to start thriving. To live fully. To live longer. It dropped me straight into the rabbit hole of longevity.

Truth be told, I already knew that supplements, nutrition, and certain tools could help me. But that ceremony gave me something else entirely: the will to help myself. The desire to become strong again. And that shifted everything.

The Collision of Worlds: Love, Language, and the Nervous System

One of the hardest things to digest after the separation wasn’t the loss itself — it was the confusion. The cognitive dissonance. I kept circling the same questions:

• How can someone say they love me… and still not want to be with me?
• How can we share the same words but live in completely different realities?

Because when I say “I love you,” it means I’m in it. I’m all in. I show up, I stay, I go deep. I choose the hard conversations, the vulnerability, the shared vision.

But for him, love meant something different. Affection, care, softness, gentleness — yes. But not necessarily commitment. Not building. Not staying.

Once I saw that we were operating with different definitions of love, things started to click.

And then came the understanding of attachment styles. His being insecure. Mine being the rock. The one who tried to hold the container steady so he could feel safe. And ironically, that very steadiness may have pushed him away. Not because I was too much. But because, to a nervous system unfamiliar with safety, real intimacy can feel like danger.

It took me some time to internalize that. But once I did, a layer of unworthiness dropped off. I didn’t fail. We just weren’t wired to dance together long-term.

The Addiction Loop: Loving the Hit, Starving for the Safety

Even with all that insight, the cravings didn’t stop immediately. There was still the loop. I’d find myself replaying conversations, reading his poetry, scanning for meaning, checking my phone for a message I knew wouldn’t come. It wasn’t longing. It was compulsion.

Romantic love doesn’t just live in the heart — it lives in the limbic system. In the hormonal circuits of reward and memory. And when it’s gone, the body doesn’t just miss it. It aches.

Once I named it for what it was — withdrawal — I could start to loosen its grip. Not perfectly. But sometimes. And those “sometimes” started to add up.

The Turn: From Craving to Cellular Clarity

After weeks of looping, crashing, craving, and shaming myself for it, I stopped trying to feel better. I started trying to feel stronger.

Not emotionally. Biochemically.

Because I knew that clarity comes after energy. And energy comes from the mitochondria.

So I went practical: supplements to feed my cells, fasting and a low-sugar diet to reduce inflammation, red light therapy, movement — not forced, but invited.

But the biggest shift? I chose kindness. I let myself grieve, eat the bread, skip the training, cry in the car. And I didn’t make it mean I was failing. I was just going through a process. And the more the kind part of me grew stronger — not blaming myself for failure — the more I started to do the things that were actually good for my body and mind.

The Porch Moment

Two weeks into my protocol, I was sitting on the porch. No ritual. No journal. Just me and the sun and a cup of tea.

And suddenly, I felt… okay. Not euphoric. Not healed. Just me.

The thought came gently, not as a judgment, but a kind of astonished tenderness:

“Where was I this whole time?”

And the answer, of course, was: buried. Behind the noise. Behind the chemicals of grief and heartbreak. But not gone.

The Return

That moment on the porch wasn’t about triumph. It was about presence.

It was about finally being able to hear my own inner signal after weeks of static. I wasn’t fixed. But I was back.

And that made me realize — a lot of healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you were before your system went into emergency mode. The heartbreak didn’t make me better. But it stripped away the distractions.

And it brought me home.

The Alchemy of Loss

People like to wrap heartbreak up with platitudes. That it makes you stronger. That it was meant to happen. That love will find its way back.

But here’s what I know:

Alchemy is not poetic. It’s not clean. It’s not gentle. It’s messy.

It’s violent, sacred dissolution. It’s death and rebirth without the Instagram glow filter.

And still, it leaves you with gold.

Not because you found closure. But because you found you.

This loss didn’t teach me that I was unlovable. It reminded me how deeply I love. How willing I am to show up, to see, to stay. It reminded me that I don’t want a relationship that asks me to shrink.

And it taught me how to help others walk through this fire with more tools, more self-respect, and more softness.

Because heartbreak isn’t a weakness. It’s an opening.

And on the other side, you might just find that the person you were always looking for — was you.

If you’re walking through heartbreak right now, I see you. And I promise — there is a way through.

If plant medicine has shown you something about love, loss, or your own longing — and you’re not sure what to do with it — we should talk.

Ayahuasca as an aid in the healing of depression

Mental health today

With rising levels of depression in this fast paced world, many look at alternative methods to tackle their mental health and wellbeing. Medicine fails us at many levels. Antidepressants and other medication may alleviate the symptoms temporarily, but they do not address the root cause.
Psychedelic substances like psilocybin, ketamine and MDMA are being gradually legalized in more and more countries, for the treatment of conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Anxiety Disorders and Depression.
What about Ayahuasca and depression? Can Ayahuasca help with Depression? In this article we talk about this topic, the possible benefits and the risks involved. (Find out more about Ayahuasca in our FAQ section.)

Why would someone with depression want to consider taking Ayahuasca?

In our experience many people see Ayahuasca as the last resort. They have tried psychotherapy with modest results, they have maybe even tried antidepressants, but they just could not reach the life quality that they where looking for. It is only natural for each human being to seek a certain level of peace and happiness. Some do not want to go down the medication path, for the fear of a lifelong addiction to the medication. Others intuitively know that, while the antidepressant medication can work wonders short term, it does not eliminate the root cause, thus may not be a long-term solution. Which brings us to the next topic.

What are typical causes for depression?

For a long time it was believed that there is a genetic component to depression, meaning that if you had someone in your family with depression, your risk of experiencing depression would be higher. As a consequence, the treatment approach tended to be somewhat shallow, since by not looking into other possible root causes, the only solutions would lie in managing the condition, not in actually healing it.
Recent studies however show, that the correlations are more complex then that. In simple words, it is not that the genetics where necessarily past on - not everyone who has a depressed parent, will experience depression. But if you grew up with a depressed parent, it is likely that you have not had the nurturing environment that you needed as a child, thus developing depression in life as a result of childhood trauma.
But obviously not only depression in the parents cause childhood trauma. And what is trauma anyway? Trauma is not only the negative things that affected you as a child, but also the positive things that you may have missed, the nurturing that should have happened and did not happen.
Then of course, not everyone who has experienced childhood trauma, will get depressed later in life. Which closes the loop: when looking at depression, there are always several factors for the onset. Here are some them:

• There are studies who show a clear correlation between gut health and depression.
• There are studies who show a direct correlation between a vegetarian/vegan diet and depression. (Sorry for the bad news beautiful souls, but you need to be very mindful of your nutrients when on a long-term vegetarian/vegan diet. Make sure you get all your essential amino acids, as well as minerals and vitamins.)
• Low levels of vitamin D can cause depression.
• A burn-out that has not been addressed can cause depression.
• One of the consequences of frequent sleep deprivation is depression.
• Grief, physical illness, divorce, addiction, financial problems, everything that causes high levels of stress are all factors of depression. 

However, studies also show, that someone who grew up in a nurturing environment, naturally has a higher resilience to deal with stressful situations, then someone who grew up in an environment with a lot of distress. In fact it was shown that the more Adverse Childhood Experiences someone experienced, the higher the risk of physical and mental illness later in life.
So then, how can Ayahuasca help?

Ayahuasca and depression

First things first, Ayahuasca is not a panacea, a miracle cure. You should be wary of statements that suggest that Ayahuasca (or for that matter any psychedelic substance, be it in a ceremonial or a clinical setting) will be the cure for your condition. Also statements like “Ayahuasca is like 10 years of therapy in one session” are not necessarily useful. Some people will experience very fast results indeed, while others might struggle for months or years even. We would all wish for an over-night betterment of our lives. But it is slightly more complicated then that, since taking Ayahuasca, will not change your life-circumstances, YOU will have to change the life-circumstances that are not conducive to your healing.
What Ayahuasca (and other psychedelic substances) does is that it allows you to gain a new perspective on your life, on your trauma, on your unique circumstances. It is an experience specifically tailored to you. It is typical for the depressed person to have a narrow view on their possibilities. Ayahuasca can open up, loosen those narrow perspectives. It can support you with the healing of the inner child, so that the grown up person can make better decisions. It can help you see things in a more positive manner. It can help you find the strength to feel through the negative feelings that you have been repressing, so you can heal. It can help you see the reasons for your addiction(s) thus supporting the healing.
But in 99% of the cases, it does not happen overnight. You will have to critically look into all areas of your life. This could mean tackling questions like:

• Am I truly ready to come out of the victimhood and take back my life? Many times there is a subconscious block, that sabotages the determination for healing. That needs to be uncovered and removed.
• Do I have a happy relationship/marriage, where I feel supported? Many depressed people find that they are in relationships that trigger their trauma. However, loneliness is also a factor for depression. Human beings need connection. That does not necessarily need to be in a marriage or partnership, but the more isolated you are, the more depressed you could be. In situations where there are no supportive friends or families, a support group might be a temporary solution.
• Do I like my job, is it meaningful? It was shown that having a meaningful purpose will increase mental wellbeing.
• Are my close friends and relatives supportive or are they dragging me down? Often the expectations from our family and friends are completely different than our own needs and desires.
• Do I eat a healthy diet? Am I drinking or smoking to much? Most depressed people are struggling in these areas. That affects their physical health, deepening the mental struggle.
• Am I suppressing feelings like guilt, shame, anger, helplessness? By suppressing the negative feelings (and we do so because they are too painful), we also suppress the positive feelings.
• Do I love myself and make good decisions for myself or do I criticize myself often? Many times we are more critical of ourselves, than we are of others. But in order to heal, we need to create a loving, nurturing internal environment. Self-loathing and criticism have a huge negative impact on our physical and mental health.
• Do I have enough time for myself, for exercise, for hobbies, for spending time in nature? Often we are there for others and never have time for ourselves.
• Do I feel empowered over my life? Do I have a sense of choice, of possibilities for change? The feeling of helplessness can be very overwhelming, leading to depression.
• Am I good with keeping healthy boundaries? Often we live the life of others, by doing what is expected of us, instead of following our own desire.
• Do I understand my needs and wants? Sometimes we are so disconnected from ourselves, that we don’t even know what we want. We just follow. But that can only lead to a feeling of disempowerment and misery.
• Are there any physical factors to the depression, like poor gut health, hormonal imbalance, low levels of essential amino acids, minerals and vitamins? Even if I have worked on my childhood trauma and all the negative factors in my life, there might be biological factors to the depression. In fact they might be a consequence of the depression and need to be addressed for a full recovery.

Ayahuasca can open the door for you to deeply understand yourself and how you relate to these topics, but you have to walk through it. If you go back to life as usual, no amount of Ayahuasca will help you. There has to be a strong desire (also called intention, when working with Aya), paired with the decision to do whatever change is necessary. This might sound as too much to do, especially to the depressed person. But this is where Ayahuasca (with the aid of the facilitators that you work with) steps in: it can help you gain strength and determination. It can help you heal the underlying pain and can help you see yourself through a new pair of eyes. When people follow these steps, they regain full control of their life and their internal environment within months. Even autoimmune diseases like allergies or psychosomatic pain tend to disappear, when following this holistic approach.

What are the risks and contra-indications?

Ayahuasca cannot be taken if on antidepressants, or if you have high blood-pressure or a heart condition. There are extensive lists of medications that in conjunction with Ayahuasca pose a health risk or can even be deadly.
Also, suicidal ideation is often a topic with depression. Ayahuasca tends to bring up all the negative emotions that are repressed, which sometimes means that for a couple of days or even weeks after taking Aya, it might get worse, before it gets better. Of course, this is a natural healing process of the psyche, but for the depressed person it can be very unsettling and the suicidal thoughts can become stronger. It can also bring up repressed memories of the cause of the trauma.
This is why a good screening and evaluation of the persons mental state is imperative. Making sure the person is supported through this phase, mental preparation and a very good integration is absolutely necessary. In lay words, you can only take Ayahuasca, if you are in a somewhat stable state.
That being said, one must not despair. Tools as meditation, psychotherapy or Rapid Transformational Therapy and even spirituality, can help people prepare to hold the Ayahuasca experience and the findings that come with it. Bringing the person to a place where they are ready to take on the challenge, paired with integration support holds the key to success!
If you feel ready to embark on this amazing journey, check out our Contact section and schedule a call with us, so we can evaluate your situation and give you advise for your next steps.

Ayahuasca is a concoction made of (usually) 2 plants from the Amazon, used by the indigenous people for thousands of years, to treat physical and emotional ailments. Also, people tend to refer to one of the plants used in the brew as “the Ayahuasca vine”, the botanical name being Banisteriopsis Caapi. The other plant used in the brew is usually the Psychotria Viridis, also known as “Chacruna”. When prepared together, in a long and tedious cooking process, these two plants will send the drinker on a psychedelic journey, where they will get insights into their emotional or physical trauma.
So how does this “magic” work? The Chacruna contains a psychedelic substance called DMT (Dimethyltryptamine), a substance that is endogenous to the human body. Recent studies show that the human body produces  DMT levels comparable to serotonin , however it is very quickly broken down by our body through a process called Mono Amino Oxidase, so we do not notice the psychedelic effect. Here is where the Ayahuasca vine steps in: it contains a so called Mono Amino Oxidase Inhibitor, which basically makes the DMT in the Chacruna active.

Myth 1: Ayahuasca is an illegal hallucinogenic drug
Facts: well, not necessarily. Regarding the illegal part, the brew or the plant is explicitly illegal only in a couple of countries around the world. What is illegal is DMT, which puts the brew in many countries in a grey zone from a legal point of view. As a schedule I drug in most countries, it is illegal to use or own DMT. Which of course is absurd, considering that our body produces it, as do countless plants and animals around the world. Science believes that DMT plays an important role in dreaming.

Regarding the hallucination part, a definition of hallucination is:
“A sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch that a person believes to be real but is not real.”
Although the Ayahuasca experience tends to heighten the senses, the subject always knows what is real and what is not. It’s like dreaming and being awake at the same time. Ayahuasca can send the drinker into unimaginable beautiful sceneries, geometries, patterns, stories, past or future lives, but at any time the subject will know that this imagery is happening inside his/her mind, not outside of the subject.

Myth 2: Ayahuasca is placebo or “woowoo”
Fact: Although there is not so much research on Ayahuasca as there is on Psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms) or MDMA (aka Extasy), the research done so far shows measurable physiologic changes going on in the body during an Ayahuasca session. There’s a change in brainwave activity, which can have a long lasting change on the subject. It is comparable to peak experiences of meditating Buddhist monks. It restores homeostasis and it is believed to balance right and left brain, that is emotion and logic.
It was shown that during an Ayahuasca experience the so called “default mode network” of a person is less active, allowing other areas of the brain to be more active. In this state a person is able to review certain aspects of his/her life, from different points of view. In the case of trauma, this can initiate a healing process for the subject. As we know from hypnotherapy, dialing down the default mode network gives the subject easier access to parts of the subconscious mind, thus enabling them to see and “reprogram” certain patterns or behaviors.

Myth 3: Ayahuasca is like 10 years of therapy in one session = it will solve all my problems
Facts: Just as the body, the psyche also has the ability to heal, given the right conditions. As with physical ailments, healing the psyche may imply changing lifestyle choices or habits. Ayahuasca will show you the trauma underlying your pain, unwanted behavior or limiting belief. It will raise your awareness and it will give you tools to handle the triggers, but you have to do the work.

Example: let’s say someone takes Ayahuasca to rid themselves of depression. Ayahuasca will show them the underlying trauma — for example this person was constantly verbally abused in childhood by it’s parents. That is the original wounding, resulting in low self esteem. Now this person is in a relationship with a partner that is also verbally abusive, because this was the mental image of a relationship, this behavior was familiar. In order to heal the depression, this continuous trigger has to reside. So either our subject is learning to draw clear boundaries or they need to separate. Both these scenarios can be very difficult, but if our subject does not do these life changes, the Ayahuasca can not help them. So in this particular case it may be beneficial to work with an integration coach or a therapist to build up the strength and resilience to make these changes. It may also take a couple of more Ayahuasca sessions to solve this. But the real work is not drinking the Ayahuasca, but integrating the learnings into ones daily life.

Myth 4: Ayahuasca is addictive
Facts: There is no physical addiction to Ayahuasca. Period. Also, adding to the horrible taste of the brew, taking Ayahuasca is physically and mentally draining. It can involve vomiting, diarrhea, nausea and head aches. Also it brings up repressed emotions, like pain, grief, anger, all those emotions we tend to avoid feeling. It is definitely not a walk in the park. That being said, many people do choose to come back to Ayahuasca, for healing, but also for advice, for creativity and for the peak experience itself. Once someone worked through their pain and trauma, it tends to become a more mystical experience, connecting you to God or the universe or giving you insights on the nature of reality. There are people who take Ayahuasca once and then never again and then there are those who take it yearly or once in a while.

Myth 5: You must go to the jungle to experience Ayahuasca
Facts: Although taking Ayahuasca in the jungle with a well intentioned, experienced shaman can be a life changing experience, most tend to forget that we, as westerners, lack the spiritual framework (language) that the indigenous people of the Amazon have. Whereas for us an altered state of consciousness is something extraordinary, the people of the Amazon feel connected to their environment and have a completely different perception. In their eyes, the plants have a sprit that speaks to them. The souls of their ancestors are showing themselves in the form of birds and animals to give them signs and wisdom. Planet earth is a living being, the mother of all things earthly. Lacking this understanding (language), in order to make most of this extraordinary experience, an integration framework is needed that is closer to our understanding, for example psychology. Using the psychological framework and western understanding of the subconscious, we are able to give meaning to these powerful experiences and thus integrate the teachings into our life.

If you have been contemplating on taking a deep dive with this wonderful medicine, somewhere in a supervised ceremonial setting, look no further. At  Vine of the Soul Retreats, the best of two worlds collide: proven ancient medicine with todays knowledge. Check it out and stay healthy!