I Don’t Recognize The Woman I Was Two Years Ago

A story of plant medicine, healing, and persistence

I celebrated my birthday the other day, a point in the year that invites reflection since I will likely remember what exactly I did that day in the prior years. Two years ago, I was on a solo trip in Asia, and after spending some time in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal I settled in Bali for a few weeks. I met wonderful people and had a beautiful little birthday soiree. It was lovely, but I also remember feeling insecure, and I was having my fair share of “birthday drinks” to distract me from that reality.

I had also just relapsed in my eating disorder for the gazillionth time. After a 10-day meditation retreat with many epiphanies and insights (and complete abstinence from my bulimia), it only took a few days back in real life for it to return. I enjoyed Bali but also wrestled with the painful reality of binge and purge episodes sprinkled throughout the trip. I did yoga, met inspiring people, danced, laughed. But I also binged and purged. I couldn’t help it.

After many years of “recovery”, I still felt completely powerless over my urges. They would randomly strike and completely disrupt my day. No matter how much work I had done on myself.

Years of therapy hadn’t helped. My health was deteriorating and a hormonal disorder called PMDD (Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder) made eating disorder recovery extra challenging. It also gifted me with periodic stretches of severe depression, which — like clockwork — appeared two weeks before my cycle. Relapses after phases of seemingly complete recovery frustrated me, and I began to wonder if I would ever overcome this beast.

I had worked with multiple Eating Disorder coaches, gotten into yoga and meditation, even went to holistic nutrition school to learn how to intuitively nourish my body without restricting, and openly spoke to people about my struggles to alleviate shame.

But it just wouldn’t let me live.

It always came back.

After five years of deep introspection and self-development work, I felt like a peacock that was conscious of the inner beauty I so deeply wanted to experience myself, and share with the world, but I wasn’t able to. I wasn’t able to lift my feathers and show my full self, something kept pulling me back down into darkness. Year after year.

My First Ayahuasca Ceremonies Gave Me A Glimpse Into The Power Of Plant Medicine

On my quest to find healing, I eventually stumbled upon psychedelics. After a year of educating myself, I began experimenting. Initially, I did so in social settings: I first took LSD in the Brazilian jungle with a group of friends and then again a few months later at Burning Man (very overwhelming, not sure if I’d recommend it).

My quality of life dramatically increased as soon as I became a psychonaut — I enjoyed increased self-awareness, more capacity to experience joy in my day-to-day life, and a feeling of deep connection to nature and everything around me (including humans). But I was still numbing myself with food, drinks, shopping, and the occasional drug-infused all-night bender — a lifestyle that didn’t seem radical living in Manhattan.

My psychedelic experiences had been powerful and started changing how I viewed the world around me, but I was craving more. I wanted the full healing experience.

And then one day I woke up and I realized it was time to drink Ayahuasca.

They say when you’re meant to do it, you’ll “hear the call”.

I always shook my head at sentences like that. Yes, I was a yogi and had dipped my toe into spirituality after realizing (through psychedelics) that reality may not exclusively be what we’re able to perceive. But I was also a recovering atheist native in skepticism.

But that day, boy did I hear “the call”. It was loud and clear.

Just three weeks later I found myself at Rythmia in Costa Rica, a high-end retreat with medical facilities that legally serve Ayahuasca. (You can read this viral article about my detailed experience).

My first experience with Ayahuasca, arguably one of the most potent plant medicines, was nothing like I imagined. No visuals of snakes, or god-like entities and angels. Instead, I got a purely emotional experience. I re-lived childhood trauma that had planted a single belief at an early age that would proceed to guide my entire life, both in destructive and constructive ways: the belief that I was not enough.

In constructive ways, because I became a driven and perfectionist overachiever and raced through elite institutions to land a prestigious high-paying job in the corporate world.

In destructive ways, because I also became a bulimic after obsessively dieting and ignoring my body's warning signs (which make most people stop dieting — but not perfectionists). I was disassociated from my emotional world, which created a void that I attempted to fill with all the things: money, food, drugs, shopping, fancy travels, validation, male attention, and so on. (Spoiler alert, none of it worked very well of course).

In Michael Pollan’s new book, “This Is Your Mind On Plants”, he cites medicine man Don Victor describing precisely the condition I found myself in:

“When any part of your body has been affected by destructive energies or trauma, the heart will close down to protect itself. A closed heart will not heal. It will not express its feelings. The mind becomes more active because the heart’s not feeling anymore.”

That was me. I had completely overintellectualized my life but I was emotionally bankrupt.

I had lost access to my feelings, and through almost a decade of addiction, they’d become more and more out of reach. Even when I would get better, it was always my inability to identify, label, and sit with feelings that kept my addiction alive.

When I came back from my first Ayahuasca experience something in me shifted. Over the following year, I took apart the narrative of my life and began to see how I needed to change things in order to be more in alignment with who I was without all my trauma. I needed more nature, deep and intimate connections, slowness, vulnerability, and less distraction, stimulants, overworking, and shame.

I quit all drugs other than psychedelics (including alcohol), (finally) quit smoking, moved from New York to LA into a little green sanctuary, pulled back at work and reduced my hours, and found ways to deeply connect — through breathwork and somatic practices, dancing, more yoga and meditation, and other community practices like circling.

I was finally on my journey from the mind to the heart.

More Intense Healing Work With Ayahuasca And San Pedro Helped Me Complete The Puzzle

Despite being a lot better, I also still wasn’t completely healthy. I was still bulimic. And while my depression was substantially reduced, it still periodically appeared.

So after over a year of exploring different healing modalities, I returned to the one that undeniably had the biggest impact on my health: plant medicine.

I adopted the mindset that I would drink Ayahuasca as many times as I had to in order to finally get over my bulimia. However many ceremonies it would require. My drive to get to the bottom of my persisting misery overshadowed the voice in my head that was ready to give up, to throw in the towel. It also overshadowed the voice that was afraid that I’d become “too hippie” or too dissociated from real life.

It’s one thing to not feel like your mental health is improving over many years, but it’s another thing to feel this way when you’ve been focusing virtually all your energy on getting well. It’s fucking frustrating.

Over the course of a few weeks, I participated in eight ceremonies, four with Ayahuasca and four with Wachuma (San Pedro). By the end of my little plant medicine spree, everything tied together neatly.

For the long version, go here and here. But to keep it short: I uncovered that I had sexual trauma which my mind had conveniently entirely repressed (pretty much right after it happened). Unfortunately, trauma attracts more trauma — so when I entered the workforce as an insecure overachiever, I was convenient prey for a charming but narcissistic colleague of mine that took advantage of me on my very first project. I went to work the next day and never told a soul, and then I “forgot”.

If you’re now thinking, what if it was just the psychedelics that planted this reality in my mind? How would I know what actually happened?

Memory is a fuzzy thing. But it wasn’t actually on any substance that I began having flashbacks, it was during a silent 10-day meditation retreat at a Vipassana center.

But it was Ayahuasca that helped me heal the experience in the most gentle and loving way. It was easy to forgive my abuser, but it was harder to forgive myself for all the abuse that I had put myself through over the years.

One of the Wachuma ceremonies opened the flood gates and I started releasing grief. I cried uncontrollably for the majority of the day, and then I cried many more times once I returned home over the course of a few weeks.

It now made sense that for most of my 20s, I barely had had any romantic relationships and remained largely celibate other than a few alcohol-induced hookups during business school. When I would meet an actual nice guy that cared about me and treated me well, I would pretty quickly shut it down.

Despite the obvious lack of evidence, I also came to believe that my disassociative trauma was what manifested physically through my hormonal struggle with PMDD, which nearly disappeared after I processed the trauma.

I felt like I finally had an answer.

But my work wasn’t finished.

I went back to the medicine again for what would turn out to be a weekend of completion. I went through excruciating pain, I felt something die inside of me over the course of an entire night. I was put into a death loop during which I went from drowning, to suffocating, to melting, to exploding.

It felt like the universe was throwing up and I was at the center of that throw-up. I don’t know how to put this feeling into words, but every fiber of my being was in extreme physical discomfort. I didn’t know one could feel that bad. It was the worst night of my life and it went on for several hours without a break or a resolve. I didn’t end the night being “reborn”.

I was held by helpers throughout the evening but I was obsessively trying to control my experience, reaching for that one epiphany that would shift my journey into a beautiful and healing one. But it didn’t come, because I wasn’t surrendering to the experience, I was trying to make sense of it, which made it neverending and so much worse.

Part of me wondered whether it was the feeling of wanting to crawl out of my own skin that I parted with that night. A feeling I’d been all too familiar with. A feeling that made me doubt my willingness to live many times.

The next day, I received experienced guidance from those around me to go into the following night with only the intent to trust, which I did. Halfway into the journey, the physical discomfort came back. I immediately asked for help from a facilitator who came and sat next to me to hold me.

And as soon as I let myself be held, things started to shift.

I ended up meeting my inner child, the little girl I’d never encountered because I didn’t have any memories of my childhood before the age of 12. And she was scared, extremely scared, and fragile, but an innocent and tender heart. And I was with her all night, felt her presence, and felt the immense comfort of being in the helper’s arms throughout the entire night. He was crucial because I believe without his presence, it would not have felt safe enough for her to come out.

I had to be held.

I’ve Received Many Gifts From Ayahuasca, But The Biggest One Is The Access To My Emotional World

Since this last set of ceremonies and the reconciliation with my inner child, I’ve observed the biggest shift to date in my well-being.

It’s been weeks, and I’ve experienced an immense amount of joy, have thrown myself into my community, for the first time in years felt re-energized about my career, and I can sense that I’m opening up towards intimacy and partnership.

And I’ve cried.

Many, many times.

I’m a cancer sign after all. It’s in my nature. Turns out I’m as emotional as one can be. Something I denied myself for most of my life.

This recent retreat has brought me the biggest gift that I didn’t even know I could have asked for: The ability to feel.

Once my inner child felt safe, she appeared and brought her full range of emotions. And she hasn’t left me since. Over the last few weeks, I’ve miraculously been able to do something that I so desperately tried to teach myself for many, many years: I let my emotions arise, I’m able to identify and label them, I allow myself to feel them and, if necessary, create the space for a proper release, and then I watch them disperse.

Joy, sorrow, grief, frustration, loneliness, sadness, hope, excitement.

The full range.

Like a peacock that spreads its feathers and reveals its intricately beautiful skirt, I’m discovering the beauty of emotional abundance. For over a month, there hasn’t been a single eating disorder urge, because it is no longer needed.

It is safe for her to feel now.

She’s finally come home, and I know my life will never be the same.

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