Personal Story: My Journey With Ayahuasca

In regards to my journey with ayahuasca, I’d like to say I’m breaking myself down to build myself back up… I can only hope that more people will soon realize that psychedelic medicine is one of our only hopes in changing the direction we are going as a society — on the emotional, spiritual, and physical levels. I have battled serious anxiety, depression, and some OCD since I was in my early teens. At one point, the doctor had me on three different anti-depressants, and I was close to really harming myself and others around me. I didn’t know what was wrong, the side effects were doing more harm to me than anything. I drank a lot, dabbled in some hard drugs, and was going down a really bad road. It got to the point where I had had enough with the suicidal thoughts, the severe anxiousness, the dark thoughts, the endless worry… I was trying to play collegiate baseball through all of this too, which was really hard to do.

It was a couple years ago when I was in a dark place that I heard about ayahausca. I heard about it from a massage therapist who was rehabbing me after I blew my back out lifting weights in preparation for my season. That year turned out to be hell as my father had a quintuple bypass, my mother’s alcoholism took a turn for the worse, and I tried playing injured, which turned out to be a disaster — that summer the doctor put me on a very high dose of Effexor XR and I was extremely close to killing myself.

It was after that year that I made it my goal to do everything in my power to stop drinking, get off all my medications, turn my life around, and start working with the plant medicine. Last summer, I fought like hell through the withdrawals to get off my medication. It was very painful and scary — unwanted thoughts, crazy emotions, and overall discomfort… I had to use small doses of Prozac to get off Effexor because the Effexor is so powerful that it will not allow one to wean off a high dose without severe nausea, insomnia, suicidal thoughts, tremors etc. It wasn’t fun.

Now, in 2014, I am four ayahuasca ceremonies down, I am medication free, I am sober, training jujutsu, eating organic, and on my way to breaking down the barriers that have held me back for over a decade. Next year, I am heading back to school to begin an acupuncture and Chinese medicine program in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Soon, I will also be learning Shiatsu meridian therapy under the second ranked Japanese KoKoDo Jujutsu fighter in the world who trains Brazilian jujutsu with us (Joe Rogan would appreciate this). In 3 weeks’ time, I am heading down to South America to see a friend in Brazil, and am then flying into the Amazon to take part in my first ayahuasca tour in Peru. I am going to be doing ceremonies at a well-respected retreat that my shaman from up here did his apprenticing at.

My anxiety and depression are a lot better, but there is still work to do, I am on my way to becoming a healer, and I want to spread the word like you are.