Do We Really Need More Medicine?

My perspective on ayahuasca as a secret psychonaut (and why I am not stopping my ceremonial work in the "spiritual community" no matter what anybody’s content hook says)

“The burden of communicating the unspeakable is on the psychonaut. If the psychonaut wishes to be understood, she needs to find the means to communicate those experiences, and the means to overcome whatever obstacles are encountered, in relation to these dimensions of unspeakability.”

Diana Reed Slattery, Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness.

personal photo from the Amazon jungle at Spirit Quest Sanctuary, 2018

How do I even begin to speak to a topic that is so profoundly sacred in its indigenous belonging, so ineffably powerful in its mysteries, and also simultaneously now seems to sound so New Agey cliché as ayahuasca?

The more I observe public discourse around the subject - especially in the comment sections of social media posts - I often want to take the word ‘ayahuasca’ out of the mouths of people who don’t understand it through a sincere gnosis, without which it feels like a desecration.

Even with direct personal experience, we must tread lightly with the ego’s tendency to perceive itself as a master. It took me 15 ceremonies or so before the medicine of ayahuasca truly opened to reveal its greater power to me, shattering all of my previous stories of understanding. Since then, I have known better than to claim that I know it fully. I respect ayahuasca so much, I don’t often speak publicly about my intimate relationship with it. In fact, the more experience I have gained, the less I talk. The truth behind the name certainly feels too magnificent, and too holy, for words.

But I have to speak about it now because I do know its exquisite and unique power to clear the body and psyche of problematic ancestral patterns, to heal and rewrite core wounds in the emotional body, and to awaken divine creative light in consciousness and bring it into the vessel of the self by a more expanded capacity (to name only a few major benefits). I believe we need this sort of catalyst at this time, more than ever before, not less.

And I have to speak about it now because I am going back to Costa Rica next month and bringing a small group of brave travelers to the altar of the medicine to pray with me for humanity and for the salvation and regeneration of this magnificent world.

If I don’t speak about it, the people who are meant to accept the invitation might not even get to receive the chance. So I am going to attempt to talk about it today. At this point in my life, I must trust that I have enough experience to do the great spirit of this sacrament and its surrounding rituals at least some justice.

As it is, I see too many people lately that seem to have no personal direct experience with ayahuasca diminishing these ceremonies with judgements and assumptions.

If I had a strong enough conspiracy theorist in my psyche, I might believe by now that the trends I have seen recently to be some kind of spiritual psyop by dark forces attacking this pathway of direct access to the divine and interfering with a great opportunity for us to make the leap into our potential as a human collective before perishing altogether. That might even be true, as kooky as it sounds. I won’t pretend to know what forces influence our higher collective mind and all of its slipstreams of groupthink.

But don’t worry. I do not have a strong conspiracy-weaver in my psyche. The way I see it, we are human, after all. We are currently extremely divided. We are afraid of the unknown. And our paranoia and skepticism are heightened in these times of collective upheaval in an atmosphere of existential risk. We are clinging to the known to feel stable ground while everything is shaking.

Nevertheless, I will extend my hand and bring you into my journey with ayahuasca, if you are curious to hear about it from someone who has walked with the medicine for a long time, not always by seeking it out, and rarely by my own personal desire— But always by a calling from my own soul, in some form or another.

And always, ultimately, for my highest good.

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Anam Cara Healing Retreats, “Nature of the Heart” ceremony, 2023

After 13 years of stumbling exploration on what we would now call my spiritual journey, in more healing modalities than I will take the time right now to count, I know with full conviction that human beings do not “need” psychedelics or plant medicines for healing or self discovery.

But wow, do they help.

And when it comes to personal growth and liberation, or the quest for inner knowledge, we do need help, in some form. Whether it is the mirror of a relationship, the resources that come from a great book or course, a spiritual practice or teacher, a wisdom lineage, conventional psychotherapy, a supportive community, or the remembrance that comes with reconnecting to nature, we ultimately cannot do it all alone.

Even the powerful gifts that come from practices of isolation and introspection such as vipassana and darkness retreats, or periods of solitude, will eventually need to be integrated into the truth of our interrelatedness with all things.

Separation fosters suffering. Connection is the antidote to addiction, self-destruction, and all shame-bound behaviors and their distorted fields of perception.

I have been communing with my soul, with God in many forms, and with the spirits of plants through medicine ceremonies for long enough now to realize that one of the primary gifts of these sacred tools of plant medicine and psychedelic therapy is this medicine of connection.

Whether that is reconnecting with the self, others, life, the body, or otherworldly spiritual energies, reconnection is the ultimate panacea.

We can experience the healing of connection by bringing that pure intention into our mundane everyday lives, or in a slow drip from subtler tools like prayer and somatic embodiment practices, or in a higher-octane dose through modalities like ceremonial breathwork.

But there is nothing I have found quite as effective, immediate, and lasting as a psychedelic healing ceremony; especially with the earthly intelligence of a plant medicine.

I use the word “medicine” with a broad range of application beyond mainstream allopathic prescriptive medicines, and beyond less conventional psychedelic or plant medicines that are used in ceremonial therapeutic settings.

The way I see it, every substance, element, action, emotion, and life form has a distinctive energetic essence: a unique compound of qualities that are encoded with a signature frequency.

The word ‘heal’ etymologically means to become whole again. Medicine can be anything that contributes something that was lacking which is needed for this balanced sense of wholeness. So, in various doses, any essence can be medicine, when it is that which is needed.

Some medicine essences have very clear fundamental healing properties, depending on what a person or being’s given imbalance might be, such as alkalizing, anti-bacterial, anti-viral, probiotic properties, etc.

Some medicines induce healing affects, like purgatives, which help the body to expel waste and energy that is stagnant or blocking the holistic harmonious flow of life force energy and nutritive resources through its cells and systems.

Some “medicines” evoke an emotional or psychological experience that infuses the self or effuses the other with a state of experience that brings balance wherever in the system there is a lack of a necessary energy for a felt sense of wholeness.

A hug can be medicine. Gazing at an open flower can be medicine. Honey is a great example of a multidimensional medicine, evoking the sweetness of pleasure and joy while offering its antimicrobial benefits with ingestion.

Medicine can also be quite bitter or even painful, and still be beneficial. Take the old retributive saying, to give someone “a taste of their own medicine”, meaning for example, that if someone serves you anger, it might serve them well to receive anger in return. It might be uncomfortable in the moment, but experiencing a harsher emotional frequency could be what is needed to bring perspective and open the heart.

That saying has been poorly used to justify acts of petty revenge, but there is wisdom in it. It points to a truth that we as human beings, carry our own medicine, and we transfer that medicine (or its “poison” form) between one another through our frequency and essence.

Ayahuasca is a medicine in every sense of the word.

It is medicinal by nature, and good for the body. It is purgative, wringing us out from all directions. It facilitates the flow of our suppressed grief, and unshed tears of sorrow. It takes us into the territory of sweetness and wonder when we need it, and it brings us to the bitter altar of ownership and self-awareness when that is what we need.

It can be a bitch-slap, a luminous and sobering wake-up call, a permission slip for freedom from the chains of trauma and emotional fear, and a long warm hug in the arms of The Mother when we can no longer curl up in the lap of the woman who gave birth to us… all in one night.

And it is more than medicine. It is a sacrament.

A sacrament sits at the heart of a divine rite. It is temple medicine, imbued by animistic reverence with the spirit of Higher Power made manifest in a tangible, ingestible form.

To receive a sacrament is to commune with the Divine. Communion is the intimate experience of coming together between the self and an other. A sacrament of communion is a reunion of the self with the Divine. For that moment of remembrance in which we partake of the sacrament, we are made whole as an embodiment of divinity. We are healed in this way, through communion.

I recall taking Communion in the Catholic church as a young girl. It would take me years to understand that the Eucharist was Christ, through the consecration of the ceremony. Once the plain papery wafer was blessed in the ritual, there was no longer a distinction between it and Christ himself. Through ingestion, we took his sacred body into ours and became one in remembrance. I didn’t grok this well enough at that age to fully receive the invitation, but a seed was planted that would flower later in my life.

When I drink the medicine of Ayahuasca now, I enter a full-sensory communion experience with Divine Nature. There is a simultaneous sense of my ego and mortal body being so minuscule and insignificant in comparison to the vastness that encompasses it, and there is also an astounding realization that I AM that which I am suddenly perceiving, so much greater and more brilliant than I can ordinarily comprehend.

Every time, after the dizzying initial launch into that higher plane of consciousness, I eventually realize this medicine is not an “other” that I am making contact with. It is (to me) a benevolent powerful spirit that presents herself to me and then also guides me into communion with my own true nature…

Communion with my soul.

It is radical realization and healing remembrance.

And then, every time, I come back home and I forget.

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It is the nature of the human experience to forget.
And it is the gift of Divine Nature to remember.

Photo by Neils Nahm, Peru 2023

This is why it disheartens me to see people with little or no direct personal experience shaming others for having an ongoing relationship with these medicinal allies. It is of course very important to be discerning about who you will sit with in ceremony, and when. A big immersion in plant medicine or psychedelic therapy is certainly not for everyone, and not always needed.

I personally have never participated in an ayahuasca ceremony more than once in a calendar year. The medicine continues to unfold in subtle and nonlinear ways for months and sometimes even years after a full ceremonial experience (3-4 sessions).

But ayahuasca is not a one-and-done cure-all, that simply hits or misses. It has many facets and benefits, and layers of support that unfurl in unique ways… every. single. time. For this reason, I encourage anyone who does not have contraindicating medical conditions to stay open to continue to explore these medicines in reputable spaces with experienced facilitators and legitimate lineage carriers, when the timing is right. Bonus benefit if you can make the time to immerse yourself in the healing setting of wild nature.

One night of ceremony in a friend’s house, even with an expert shaman, done in a good way, barely scratches the surface of what is possible through an ongoing relationship.

If I had stopped after my first journey with ayahuasca in the Amazon in 2014, I never would have been able to experience the relationship I now have with this master medicine. At that time, I had no intention of coming back anytime soon, if ever.

That’s why I have scoffed at some of the recent narratives that paint ayahuasca ingestion as an addiction. I would argue this is rare. A ceremony of this magnitude is honestly not what I would call “fun”, particularly with the medicines that require great surrender. In all of my years in the “spiritual community” I have never personally observed someone develop an addiction to ayahuasca itself.

Altered states of consciousness for dissociation? Yes, I have seen addiction to that. Expanded states that re-associate you with your emotional body, inner child and hidden core wounds? Nope. I have not personally witnessed that, although any medicine has the potential to be abused into poison.

I have some highly experienced psychonauts for friends and not a single one of them is chomping at the bit to get back to that gritty cup of magical mud, no matter how long it has been since the last cup. There is ALWAYS a hint of respectful dread in the air as the group approaches the maloca in silence.

Oftentimes the more you drink it, actually, the more the body develops a physiological aversion to it. I cannot tell you how much strength it has taken for me to choose to go back to the altar of ayahuasca with each successive night.

With that said, I do greatly appreciate the general messaging from culture to steer away from the idea that we are broken things that need perpetual fixing.

I think this is the virtuous heart of the skepticism: we are tired of behaving like we are broken.

We are collectively remembering that this is a perspective of our emotional wounds. There is a parallel dimension where we sense that we have a diamond-like nature: indestructible, untarnishable, and perfectly imperfect. The time of obsessive self-healing is beginning to tire and expire. And it’s important to pause before working with anyone who sells you the story of your sickness without their cure.

But I do fiercely trust that these medicines want to be our allies, and offer powerful gates to accelerating the evolution of our awareness and helping us remember the bigger picture. Because we will forget again and again in this noisy world with its onslaught of dissociative distractions.

We owe it to our brothers and sisters in humanity not to fire cheap shots at the “spiritual community” in order to capitalize on algorithmic trends through clickbait headlines that mock the exploration of these profoundly healing medicines.

When we speak of ayahuasca, we are entering holy ground. We must tread humbly with respect to others’ subjective experiences with these sacred teachers. And it behooves us to nurture the spark of curiosity and connectivity (including discernment) for those in our audiences who might benefit from exploring them, or going deeper for greater benefit.

Here are a few of the other pathways of beneficial experience I have had in ayahuasca ceremony, aside from healing trauma and emotional wounds (which is, lets face it, a primary benefit- and an invaluable one at that):

Ayahuasca as integration.

This one might surprise you to read. It has been the newest revelation for me over the past couple of years. It used to be that life was the spacious playground for me to integrate the vast intensity of my ayahuasca ceremonies. Something has shifted in my consciousness with the advent of integrated AI in all arenas of our lives, and the immersive virtual reality that many of us spend most of our days living in now. Life feels noisy and overwhelming. The wheel of time spins furiously onward with exponential new developments and offerings and books and podcasts and access to so many lines of communications. It is a cognitively destabilizing assault on our attention, leaving less and less awareness for us to drop into our bodies and process the depth of emotion that is being shaken up in our day to day experiences.

The past few big medicine ceremonies I have sat in, have felt like, “Ahh.. Finally, space to integrate life.”

Ayahuasca can be an exceptional medicine at pulling us deeply into the emotional body and the soma to integrate what is hiding beneath the overstimulated mental body. Rather than approaching these ceremonies as yet another thing that must be integrated somehow during our busy lives when we get home, there is a new modern benefit. We can bring our busy lives into ceremony to integrate the deeper significance of our mundane experiences, with all of their tender roots and toxic residue, so we can return to life cleaner, more aware and reset in a natural rhythm.

In the ceremony, we finally have no distractions to keep us from facing what we have been avoiding. We finally experience that long lost essential human experience of reflection and contemplation. We get to explore our bodies and investigate the roots of pain and illness that we struggle to solve mentally, day after day. We get to make peace with the events we have been too overwhelmed to process.

When I first met the medicine, I never imagined that I would see it one day as a sort of vacation retreat for integration, but we are in a different world now, and I honestly do.

Ayahuasca as exploration.

I remember the exact moment when my relationship with psychedelics and plant medicine stopped being about fixing my seemingly endless wounds of brokenness, and expanded into something bigger.

I was in a psilocybin ceremony (with a shared intention, in a sacred container with on-hand support) in Sedona somewhere in the blur of 2020. I braced myself to face my demons and descend into my shadows and cry in front of my friends, as seemed to always be my role in the medicine space up to that point.

But that time, fascinating things began to happen. My hands began to move in language, and then my voice spoke fluently in a tongue I was never taught. I saw beings in my vision space that I had never conceived of, and archetypal deities danced through my waking dreamscape. I had heard others speak of such fantastical encounters but had been disappointed for years to pass through that hallmark veil of sacred geometry only to constantly re-encounter myself, in all the ways I yearned to transcend. I had all but given up on gaining access to those magical levels of experience I had heard about in other people’s trip reports. Until one day, the focus of my psyche just shifted, as if to bless me with the assurance that I had healed enough.

It was the start of a new chapter, where my body started to become an instrument for energy that I would gain incremental mastery in playing over the years to come. I was finally learning new things, instead of processing all of my old shit.

There is a place beyond the healing journey; it is the dimension of discovery. Some people gain fast access, and for some of us (like me), there are thick mental blocks and emotional or perceptual walls to dismantle before we can get there. I believe that all of the seemingly supernatural magic and higher states of consciousness that have ever been accessible to any single person in medicine experiences are available to any of us, in time. There is no guarantee where we will go and no concrete way to measure or compare experiences.

But once enough layers have been peeled back, and knots have been loosened in the body and mind, there truly is an infinite playground to explore. You will know when you arrive. And I promise, it is worth the work it might take to get there.

Ayahuasca for collective healing.

It’s not all about me!? Ah, the humbling wisdom that comes with a purge for the collective… I recall on my last trip to Peru, the remembrance I experienced as the medicine worked in me for hours with a massive haunting wound that was certainly beyond anything I had experienced in my personal lifetime. When the somatic expression of the tangled emotional web I had been trapped in for hours finally surfaced to move through me, it started as a low groan. The groan turned into a roar, and the roar expanded into a guttural scream. Words fall short again to describe what I felt and heard move through my body in that catharsis. I could audibly hear and viscerally sense the texture of multitudes of voices, wailing their sorrow and outrage through my body, as though I became an open node in the interconnected web of all lives ever lived, allowing for the unexpressed emotion to finally be discharged; heard and transmuted by the universe.

Without a word, every woman in the space - my spiritual sisters Vylana, Sigrid, Alana, and Huaira, surrounded me like guardians and wept quietly with me as the waves of sound flowed through my vocal cords. It was a catharsis that undoubtedly purified my body and healed my own personal wounds, but it was not mine. I had the gnosis that that scream was for generations of women. I was simultaneously amazed as I observed the many voices within the sound of my voice.

I actually wrote a short poem about it which you can read here: The Cry

The medicine did not let up all night. Grief for war, furies immeasurable, and impossible compassion shuddered through hot tears and unrelenting trips to the bathroom. It felt at times like more than I could bear. I even begged my Holy Guardian Angel, or my soul, or whatever guiding principle had agreed to the experience to please make it stop. I didn’t want to do that collective healing anymore. It felt like too much. The response was instantaneous: “But you will. Because you can.”

This is just one example of many instances now of mysterious healing processes I have experienced that felt beyond my own.

Even if we could ultimately “graduate” from our own personal healing journeys, we are still inextricably connected to, and never separate from, the collective transtemporal body of humankind. There are SO many human beings who do not have access to such levels of healing support, nor have the resources and guidance to be liberated through the catharsis that comes from this sort of emotional self-expression.

We can only hope that there will be a point when we are invited by the soul to use whatever means we have to help all beings heal and be free. One of my primary means is my feeling body. Whether it is in a circle in a ceremony for a person across the room that I just met, or in a movie theater feeling suddenly moved by a film about another culture, we are naturally empathic, and the web of collective experience flows through us to find harmony and release wherever it can.

Ayahuasca opens us through surrender to become conduits of this greater collective healing, that is bigger than our own story. We inevitably realize that it’s not all about ‘little ole me’, and that we are actually big enough to hold more than ourselves. It becomes an honor to contribute our ceremonial work to the well being of the greater body we are a small part of.

Ayahuasca for personal healing. (Yes, still!)

There is always more. And the path is a spiral where we may come back to familiar territory over and over again to re-experience similar feelings and circumstances in new ways. It can feel frustrating, because we live in a cultural game of graduation and achievement. The ego loves to feel like it has graduated, especially if we perceive personal healing as an indication of personal brokenness.

But what if it was exciting to continue healing, always?

What if healing meant a continual journey of reclaiming more and more of the truth of who and what we are, expanding infinitely into ever greater wholeness?

We are infinite beings when it comes to the psyche. The body is temporal and finite. The soul is a vast immeasurable mystery. It has been a long road to get here, but I now feel excited when I encounter a part of myself that was unwittingly fractured from my awareness, even if that reunion comes with pain and tears.

Healing is a brave exploration in itself and as long as we are blessed to live, there will always be more that we get to do.

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If you have read this far, you might be wondering at this point, am I trying to become a spokesperson for ayahuasca, or what?

Well, maybe yeah. Right now, kind of :)

In part because I want to open an invitation to the right people to join me in Costa Rica on Dec 12-19 with Anam Cara Retreats to receive the sacrament and participate in the collective healing and cosmic explorations, and that invitation deserves context.

If you feel that whisper, click HERE for more details on Communion With The Soul.

I also have recently recognized that as both a writer and a generally secretive psychonaut, I have a creative duty to come out of hiding and tell my stories from my medicine work. I want to set an honest foundation that states clearly where I stand for the trip reports I will be sharing in future entries here. And I am hoping to soften the taboo and find the others, like me, who struggle to find many spaces of open, resonant dialogue online around these fascinating mysteries.

And finally (but most importantly), I am doing my best to give back to a medicine that has given me maps of creation, poems I am proud to have written, and profound healing experiences that have helped me overcome addictive self-destruction patterns and build healthy relationships on a path of purpose and meaning. I know the magic that is possible for us with this plant, and I hope more people will lean into an interest to explore it, rather than feel shamed or scared off by the rhetoric of critics out there.

If nothing more, I hope this post has opened your mind and heart in a small way that might support your journey in ways that surprise and benefit you. Perhaps you will be able to open your heart to receive the “medicine” of your friend’s hug, or of a blossoming flower, or a spoonful of honey, just a little bit more in the future for having read it. And maybe one day it will help you navigate the invitation to explore a ceremonial space, with or without psychedelic medicines, that might bring you profound integration, exploration or healing.

I owe so much to the medicine carriers of these lineages and sacraments who have blessed me with the direct experiences I have had. I want to honor them by telling true stories of possibility in times of widespread discouragement.

As my first maestro Don Howard Lawler of Spirit Quest Sanctuary in Peru would say, “Para El Bien de Todos”, which means “For the Good of All.”

With Great Heart,
Caitlyn

PS. I would love your feedback! Share your perspectives and questions in the comments below, and if you have questions about working with me in these ways through the upcoming retreat or other offerings, reach out through my website, Instagram or email. My heart is always open.