After years of trauma, and the failure of Western medicine, I booked my solo trip to Iquitos in hopes that ayahuasca would save my life. It did and more!
How did I get to a point of deciding whether I should live or die? It took years of both personal defects, poor decisions and tragedy. I will shorten it because I could write a book on the subject, but will include most of the pertinent facts in my journey from ruin to rebirth.
In May of 2012, I had lost my job, wife, family, mother, brother, house and all sense of the world. I became an alcoholic. I lived at my sister’s. Whole days passed drunk. All hope was lost. As Christmas and the New Year approached, I spent days, when I did not have my kids, drunk.
Then on New Year’s Day 2012 I really had a choice to make. Either kill myself slowly with alcohol or to find a way to heal myself and my broken heart. I started going to AA and stayed sober for two months. I relapsed a little when I had to switch AA meetings. The real hope came when I started investigating ayahuasca and its ability to heal people from trauma.
I had tried virtually everything Western medicine had to offer — drugs, therapy, religion, AA, psychotherapy, alcohol, Outward Bound — and none of them healed my pain. I needed to go way outside of the box. I felt I needed to experience ancient healing methods and medicines. I needed to go where I feared to go. I needed to reboot my brain.
Listen, Western medicine and practices are not designed to heal you. They are looking for on going consumers of medicines that are addictive. They want you addicted so they can profit from you. They don’t want you to heal because then they lose their customers.
They classify “drugs” Schedule 1 because they truly have the ability to heal your mind and soul. Pot, mushrooms, MDMA, ayahuasca, San Pedro, DMT, and a host of other psychedelics are banned not because they are more dangerous physically, but because they heal and they also show you the farce of culture and especially our culture. Hell, legal drugs like alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, processed sugars, processed fats, processed foods, are far more dangerous than the aforementioned “drugs.”
They show you a consciousness that transcends this world and shows you another world. These tools and medicines have been used in some cases for thousands of years in cultures all over the world. They are tools to explore your deepest inner realms as well as realms that are hidden from your consciousness in this world. Whole cultures have been built around these practices and states of mind. The Egyptians, Greeks, Inca, and others all have at their heart the use of mind altering medicines and tools. All we get are drugs that addict us and numb us to our true spiritual selves. That is why I think people are so unhappy today.
We have more physical comfort and more physical pleasures than almost any culture in history, and yet we yearn for the spiritual experience. We yearn for a connection to something greater than ourselves that cannot be found in modern culture or religion. We yearn for the experience of the divine. We yearn to heal our hearts and our souls from the toxic environment that we live in.
Anyways, the hope of traveling to Peru to take ayahuasca and San Pedro gave me hope that I could heal myself — for myself, my sons and my family and friends. I needed to stay on this earth for them. I needed to learn a lesson. I felt compelled to take this journey by myself so that I could experience that other world and come to terms with my past.
I feel that if I knew what I know now, I could have saved my brother Ken. I could have saved my marriage. I could have saved my career. I could have saved my life from ruin. Thus, I want to provide people with an alternative to Western medicine and therapy to heal them. I can’t save my life as it was, that is over, but I can help people that have not lost everything have a chance to heal and grow before it’s too late. That really is the point of offering this trip. It is potentially a way for people to really reboot there lives and save themselves as I couldn’t.
My trip saved my life. I really think if I had not taken it and been aware that it was an option, then I think I would have just muddled along and maybe fallen back into alcoholism and maybe death. I do not contend that this trip totally made me whole, [but] I have continued to work and heal. I continue to work with alternative medicines and methods of healing.
Thank you for sharing you’re story, your willpower and strength is truly admirable 🙂
Thanks for sharing your story. If you feel up to it, can you write a bit more about the actual experience, how it made you feel, what you saw and what changes in your patterns of thinking took place post-experience?