On the use of Ayahuasca and psychedelics in recovery
An old take on an exploding topic
Dear reader —
This was something I wrote in 2017 — six years ago and four years into my recovery.
Reading it today (August 7, 2023) is both inspiring and humbling. Inspiring because the me back then was so certain of some things (she would never relapse, she would never change her mind about psychedelics, she would always feel this strongly, she felt deeply responsible to her readers and community, she felt like her sobriety was what kept other people sober).
Humbling because wow, how certain we can be about things we later feel entirely different about.
I’m leaving it mostly in tact. I clean up some old essays where necessary for readability, remove potentially harmful language/language I wouldn’t use now (so many fucks).
I would refer to more recent writings on psychedelics (mostly in my roundups, or partially reflected in this guest opinion piece); I’d also refer to Alex Olshonsky’s work, specifically this piece on Addiction and Ayahuasca.
I have since used psychedelics — a few times. I plan to write about it and I’ll link to it here when I do.
Let me start from the beginning.
Have you heard of ayahuasca? I hadn't, not until after sobriety at least. Surprisingly (or possibly not), I heard about it in Kundalini training. A friend from training, M, had done it nearly 20 times. He came to my home one day in 2014 after a weekend ceremony. I'd just had sex with [redacted] and they'd passed each other on the elevator, one coming in, one going out. M was so lit from the ceremony and I was so lit from the sex it was as if we were stealing each other's experiences. We were porous. I could feel his drugs. I guessed he could feel my sex. We went to a café and sat in the San Francisco sun, and we ran into people we knew, and I remember thinking so clearly They must think I’m high.
This did not make me want to try ayahuasca. In fact, this made me not want to try it. My highs (from yoga and breath work and meditation and the life-ruining sex I was having with [redacted]) were safer and more expansive than whatever it was I picked up on that day.
The second time I heard about Ayahuasca was again in a Kundalini training. A different training, a different man. This guy, B, like M, had tried it nearly 20 times, and was “training” to become a “Shaman”. I noticed he had the same ease and kindness and lightness as my other friend, M, which I wondered about. I asked B what his experiences with ayahuasca had done for him one night after class as we thumbed through racks of second-hand clothing on Haight, and he told me it had saved his life. Depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, all of them had been practically erased from these experiences he'd had drinking tea.
This conversation happened in January 2015, and I was depressed. I couldn't write. I couldn't get out of bed most days. Smiling made my face hurt and being around people just made me feel collapsed, hollow. Most days I woke up asking God to split me open down the back and let that part of me that was just using this body fly out; just dissolve the pain and free it and free me. I had done everything I knew to do to move depression. I meditated and done yoga for hours on end, I had a therapist, I had past life regressions and energy clearings and Reiki and acupuncture, I took Epsom salt baths most nights, I regularly got massages, I read good books, I'd finished two yoga trainings, I’d journaled and danced and run and built community and developed friendships and made recovery my number one job.
Still: The darkness in the pit of my stomach remained, and persisted. Desperate and willing to try anything, I asked B if he could help me find a ceremony. The second he said yes I wanted to take it back. Over the next week, B texted me a few times. Has she called you yet? She being the woman who, for $500, would give me drugs and hold the space through an evening where I would (supposedly, hopefully, so I’d heard) vomit the black knot in the center of me out into a ceremonial bucket. But my phone hadn't rung. I told him so. She will, he’d said. And she did, eventually, a day before the ceremony, but I had already written it off. By the time we connected everything inside me was saying no, and so I said no.
What I think I meant, though, was not yet.
That was two years ago and I didn’t think about it again until I went to Hawaii last year and did a 10-day silent meditation retreat. There was something so transcendent in that experience — it was brutal, difficult, and painful, and yet I’d remained with myself in that kind of distress and gone beyond it, touched the edge of something I so rarely had access to, found a new level of courage and space and inquiry and peace, and I wanted to keep going. I was tapped into that part of me that will do anything to self-transcend, and it was in this experience that ayahuasca announced itself again as a potential.
Then, in the winter of this year, I finally read a book I'd been trying to read for some time, High Society by Mike Jay, a book that traces the role of mind-altering drugs in history, science, and culture through the last two thousand years. Which, thinking back, just watered the seed that had been planted in Hawaii at the meditation retreat, and before I knew it, somehow without even weighing it my mind was made up. I was ready to do this thing. And not on some living room floor in the middle of Napa. I was going to do it legitimately, in Peru, with a friend. We decided we'd go in April, between my sobriety schools, and also maybe hike Machu Pichu while we were there.
Shortly thereafter: Laura, my podcast co-host, found a guy on the internet, sober, singer-songwriter, who she found fascinating. She wanted him to come on the show and I wanted her to be happy and so we agreed and booked him. And because I'm a stubborn judgmental asshole who forms strong opinions before meeting people based on my sometimes wrong/sometimes right Jedi sense, I might have refused to research this guy. I didn’t like anything about his vibe.
On the day of the podcast, we started to record, and I hadn't read any of his work and had only listened to one of his songs. But I had gone through his Instagram account, and there it was, the one thing I definitely wanted to discuss: He was sober and still did mushrooms. This was all I wrote down, on a sticky note: Mushrooms.
Because I had mentally carved ayahuasca into my sobriety, for the healing, and because then I was thinking, ‘Maybe I can carve in all the hallucinogens’ this is all I wanted to talk to this guy about.
The conversation went great, in that it fed the part of me that had stepped back into drug culture. I was enthralled, hanging on his words!, as we talked about psychedelics for twenty minutes. I ignored Laura when she said the conversation was making her feel sick.
A few weeks later I was excited to release the episode. Laura was nervous. There were wonderful discussion points throughout the entire podcast which she was supportive of, which I thought were a distraction to all I remembered of the conversation, which was the part where he says You can't get addicted to hallucinogens, and I willfully, greedily, agreed.
The day we aired it, I texted a good friend of mine, a sober friend, about it, who said something along the lines of Let's do mushrooms! And this was where everything started to feel wrong. (There’s a special kind of horror, for me at least, when I imagine doing drugs (any kind of drugs) with my sober friends.)
After some of our community1 listened to the podcast, a thread appeared on Facebook, and women I had been preaching to for years that we don't need anything outside of us to find what is already inside start saying things like, I had been on the fence about this molly but after hearing you talk so passionately about drugs…I’m thinking yes.
We let the show ride anyway. And then an hour later, I got this letter from another sober woman who is part of the community:
I am not concerned about his use of hallucinogens, or your interest in Ayahuasca. I guess I just don't understand why a podcast that focuses on recovery would spend over 20 minutes talking about the positive effects of using hallucinogens. You are very grounded in your recovery and I assume you would use Ayahuasca for a sort of spiritual awakening as opposed to getting 'high'. I get that. But a lot of people who read or hear this conversation are not necessarily on that plane of awareness and may see this conversation as essentially condoning the use of hallucinogens because it's not alcohol - and sobriety is related to 'alcohol only'. I think that may mess with people's heads. It messed with mine for like five seconds and I am a woman who is totally clear and grounded in my own recovery. I had a spark of 'ohhhh, huh, maybe 'shrooms someday.' Then i snapped the fuck back to my heart and knew that taking any sort of mind altering substance would take me far away from my authentic self I have finally found and fallen in love with, and put me right back in the mind-fuck of wanting to escape. So, obviously, I will not be doing 'shrooms anytime soon - or ever.
Not everyone is secure in their recovery, though, and not everyone can come back easily from a thought. You know you don't have to believe every thought you have? Well a lot of people haven't gotten to that place, yet. Especially people new to sobriety/recovery. They may take it as a green light. Especially if they respect your work and look up to you. I HOPE people are more secure than that, but I have come across a lot of people who still look for those 'outs' or 'green lights' or anything to justify a temporary escape.
I realize that you and Laura present a variety of topics which can, at times, be controversial, but this topic didn't go in a neutral direction of 'all sides of the coin.' It was basically alluding to the idea that it's ok to use hallucinogens in sobriety. There was no person who said, 'actually, using hallucinogens in recovery may NOT be good for x, y, and z reasons'. It's fine if people choose that for themselves, but I don't think that is really the audience that tunes into your podcast. We are people who are trying the heal and learn and feel part of a sober/recovery community. A sober-from-everything community, not a sober-from-alcohol-but-hallucinogens-are-ok community. Maybe I am totally wrong and people loved hearing about using hallucinogens in sobriety. The whole thing just made me feel off.
I have, over time, developed a pretty big fuck-it mentality when it comes to criticism of my work because it comes so often. I don't aim to please everyone, and I don't aim to be perfect, and 99.9% of the time I stand fully behind what I put out there. But this got me. I knew this woman, I respected this woman, and this woman respected me. But of course, ayahuasca was different, right? I tried that angle. I sat for an hour and I typed out responses to her, responses that justified my choice, made her wrong, made this different, made me different, made me right. Clearly, she just missed the point. But every word I put down felt like a lie, because it was. I wasn't right. I was wrong and deluded. She was right.
I ran a sobriety program, and I had just spent 20 minutes on a podcast that reaches 40,000 people a month — a podcast dedicated to recovery — basically giving a biased opinion of psychedelic use without having done any sort of research on the topic, or questioning my own motives.
Do you know what this moment was like? Can you imagine what this moment was like? Everything I have worked for, stood for, cried for, yelled for, sacrificed for — sitting in the corner like a piece of discarded shit. Here is my mantle, dismantled.
I sat in the exact spot I sit right now typing this to you, the same place I have penned post after post on sobriety and recovery, covered in a film of shame, fear, doubt, and disbelief. I wanted nothing more than to cover it up. This cannot get out. They cannot know about this. They will never trust you again.
I thought through the many ways I could bury it, lie my way out of it, pretend it didn't happen, make it go away. But not long after that, in the span of mere minutes, it occurred to me that I had to do the opposite of that. Because I know from past experience that the burying is always worse than the original transgression. The burying is the disintegration of integrity, the burying is the part that erodes the most, does the most damage, and owns you more than you own it.
I knew that if I wasn't allowed to make mistakes, and that if I presented an exterior that was decidedly different than the interior, this would eat me alive, and just lead to bigger lies and more damage.
And so, I owned it.
We pulled the episode, and in the thread on Facebook where there had been the talk of maybe us sober folk snorting all the drugs, I posted the following.
I got an email from a reader a few hours ago who said there was a five-second detour in her mind listening to the pod where she said “maybe 'shrooms someday’”. She looks up to Laura and me and she said this felt like a permission slip. We run a recovery podcast, our listeners are some of the most vulnerable people on the earth, and here we are talking about drugs in a way that starts to cut in exceptions. Mushrooms are okay. DMT is okay. Ayahuasca is okay. "Because you can't get addicted to it."
I started to respond to her and realized I had no good answer. And realized that part of my draw to talking about it with [redacted] is because I've been looking for the answers to the hallucinogen question ever since I started thinking about Ayahuasca at a meditation retreat last year. I've said things like "Gabor Mate does it!" and looked [for other confirmation] to understand if Ayahuasca is okay and at some point decided to do it.
When I started to respond to her, and actually had to sit with the truth of what that would mean, what I was actually saying, I realized that I have been looking for some expert to tell me what is okay and isn't okay for me. Instead of coming up with it on my own, and understanding what is in line with my truth.
And my truth is that for me - personally - drugs are out. All drugs are out.
I am happy. For once in my life, I'm happy. And I am happy because I am free, and I got free crawling on my hands and knees, and I didn't fight this hard to get to a point where I start making exceptions to my truth. I personally don't care if Ayahuasca will get me further or whatever it may or may not do. Because what it will for sure do is steal the one thing that I already have, which is my integrity - meaning, the alignment I have between my words, thoughts, actions, beliefs. It would disintegrate me to start saying this one is okay because x,y,z, and that one isn't. It would be a trap door.
Laura and I work so hard to make sure everyone understands that their sobriety is only defined by them. We never want to be in a position where we start down the path of saying this means you’re sober, and this doesn't. That's bullshit and it's harmful. I claimed sobriety while I was still doing drugs because I wasn't drinking and that was MINE and no one could tell me otherwise. There's only one person that matters when it comes to deciding what you are. But we also work really hard to lead by example. And our example is based on a principal of using our own perfect chemistry, to stay with ourselves, to stop escaping. We don't get sometimes the responsibility and the burden this carries. And today, releasing this episode was one of those times where I think we fucked up and let you guys down. I'm learning, we are both still learning. And I will always be learning. Thanks for sticking through this with us.
Parting thoughts on Ayahuasca
The truth is, when I was deeply suffering from depression in 2015, ayahuasca was on the table for one reason and one reason only: I was in pain, in a rut, in a darkness I couldn't escape, no matter how hard I tried. It had therapeutic value.
For that and that alone, it was an option and one that I would probably still consider if I was there. And back in 2012, when I was cycling down the path of self-destruction, binging and purging close to $1,000 of food a week, drinking bottles of wine a night, smoking as much tobacco and pot as my lungs would allow…this was possibly another great time for a psychedelic intervention. The studies are clear…things like psilocybin are showing in study after study that when medically dosed along with a therapeutic element (read, not taken when you're bored on a Friday night — set and setting matter, intention matters), people are able to release themselves from some of the underlying conditions of addiction and depression. In one study done by Johns Hopkins, the efficacy rate of using psilocybin for smoking cessation was 80%. Gabor Mate famously uses Ayahuasca when treating his patients at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver's Skid Row, and has used it himself.
I would be remiss if I didn't tell you the truth, which is that part of me just wanted to get fucked up.
But here’s another fact that can't be overlooked — I didn't use these interventions. And I'm sober, and I struggle with minimal depression, at least compared to the level with which I used to. I actually, through a ton of work, made it to where I am without using them. Which is not to say it would have been wrong had I used them — we each have our own path to follow and each of us start in different places. To say that I made it to where I am without using therapeutic MDMA, psilocybin, or shipping off to Peru for an Ayahuasca ceremony is basically, in my mind, the same thing as saying I didn't use anti-anxiety meds, sleeping aids, MAT, or anti-depressants in recovery. Which to me just is another way of saying I had different needs, or even that I was luckier than some. Some people need — or just want — medical or pharmacological intervention. Some people die without it. No one gets a medal for doing it one specific way and with or without medicinal support, and we know for a fact how harmful it is (and what a death sentence it can be) when we start qualifying ‘sober’. It’s a moral trap, and it’s useless and dangerous.
And also, let's be clear — my trip to Peru was planned for next month, and my justification for doing it was to transcend and touch god and have an experience and do some field research so I could report back on it. But I'm okay, I'm sober, I'm happy, I'm finding god on a meditation pillow and on Roman streets and when I read your letters, and I don't need extreme measures to feel that anymore. Which basically just means that I would be remiss if I didn't tell you the truth, which is that part of me just wanted to get fucked up.
Finally, I must report that to date, I have received too many letters from readers who unintentionally found relief from addiction through ayahuasca ceremonies. They most always go the same way: I didn't mean to want to stop drinking/smoking/using drugs/killing myself slowly with this thing or that/etc., but I did. Can you please tell your readers this? Can you please let them know about ayahuasca?
Some thoughts in closing:
1. I am capable of making grand mistakes and, as painful as it is to admit, a part of me wanted to get fucked up
It's a beautiful thing to admit to. It's a beautiful thing to own. Life is fucking hard, and while sobriety has offered me endless gifts, I will never pretend that being awake for my life is a some straight line that moves up and to the right. It is a plot graph, and it swings as low as you can imagine so that it can also swing high or just sometimes vibrate in the never-ending middle. That’s the deal. I'm proud of how stupid I can be. And I'm even more proud that at my stupidest moments, integrity is actually worth something now.
2. At points along this journey, I have had some thoughts I would consider in integrity (with my definition of my own sobriety) about ayahuasca, and considered it at times when it made sense
But the thoughts I had about it, especially on the recording of that podcast, were not coming from that place. They were coming from the part in me that wants to get closer to God, for sure. (But as one of my friends so aptly pointed out, she thought wine brought her closer to God). And they were also, undeniably, coming from that same place in me that once compelled me to ransack my apartment night after night, shaking out carpets, emptying vacuum bags, scouring for the last morsel of pot, the overlooked nugget, so I could escape; the same place in me that compelled me to learn the schedules of every liquor store worker within the radius of my apartment so that I could buy multiple bottles of shitty red wine in a day without being detected.
3. My truth, my ultimate truth, is that I don't want to use drugs to escape
I did that for over half my life, 20 years of that! And it did not work for me. It smothered me and buried me and strangled me and choked me, it took up all the room where my life was supposed to be, the part of me that now runs through fields and prays in graveyards and dances in ruins and cries in the moonlight is only alive because I killed that fucking thing and I killed it all. And fuck you, drugs, you will never have a home here again. Where you once were, there is now me.
4. Only you get to decide what your sobriety means
And when we start saying things like this or that means you aren't sober — like psych meds and MAT and coffee and sugar and sex and smartphones, to name just a few — that all we are doing is laying judgment on a soul that needs no more of that nonsense, that needs no additional shame or separation or sin in their world. Only one opinion of you matters, and that is your own. And only one person knows what you actually need and has to live with the choices you make. And so only you get to decide what you are. End of story.
5. Psychedelics have been shown to provide some great efficacy for breaking addiction when used in specific, intentional ways (i.e., not on a Friday night with your roommate)
With the guidance of experienced professionals or traditional healers. Exactly the same as conventional Western meds have shown efficacy. Exactly as meditation, therapy, Somatic Experiencing, being in nature, finding purpose, and a ton of other things have shown. All paths should be considered because we need everything we have, and none should be seen as morally superior.
6. "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." - Sartre
With that power to decide your own story comes the great responsibility of being honest with yourself. It's a bitch of a liberty, and one I will never stop cherishing. I am condemned to choice, condemned to freedom., condemned to responsibility. Only I get to decide, only I know if I'm bullshitting myself, only I wear this burden. Only you get to decide, only you are the expert, only you know the true cost of your decisions, only you live this life.
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I’m talking about the Home podcast I hosted with Laura McKowen from 2015 to 2018. We started a private Facebook group for listeners to find one another that numbered in the few hundreds, I believe.