The Journey Back to Myself: A Plant Medicine Journey in Peru
I have never written a travel blog. I have never written anything about healing or plant medicine either. I am not here to sell you on any of it. I only want to educate. If you are curious, or scared, or standing somewhere near where I once stood, maybe this helps you understand what it actually looks like. That is the whole goal.
How I got here
I could give you the full list. The years of bad things. The patterns I kept repeating. The relationships I stayed in long past the point I should have walked out of them. But that is not really where this story starts.
When I was younger, I did the work. I meditated. My dad built me a meditation bench with his own hands, and I used it. I knew how to sit with myself back then.
Somewhere along the way, I lost that. I let myself go. I would not even say I kept bad company. It was more that I made a lot of bad choices, one after another, until I could not tell you how I had drifted so far from myself. I lost the love I once had for who I was. I still do not fully understand how that happens to a person. It just does, slowly, quietly, until one day you look up and it is gone.
A couple of years ago, at a point where I did not feel like my life was worth much of anything, I found breathwork. It came right when I needed it, and I have never been more thankful for anything in my life. It was the first solid ground under my feet in years. So when the trip to Peru was mentioned, plant healing deep in the jungle, I wanted nothing more than to go and find myself again. I did not overthink it. I said hell yes. I will do anything.
Setting intentions
None of this would have happened without Rachel, the woman who put the whole trip together. She is a breathwork facilitator and a licensed therapist, the one who first introduced me to breath back when I needed it most. She organized every piece of this journey to the spiritual center. The airfare. The endless logistics. The hundred nervous questions all of us had before we left. She handled all of it, and she held our hands through the parts that scared us. I owe her more than I know how to say.
It started on the phone, three weeks out. Rachel set up a call with all of us before anyone got on a plane. Not logistics this time. Intention. She wanted to make sure I knew why I was going, and that my intention was set properly before I ever sat down. An intention is not a demand. It is not a wish list. It is not you trying to control what happens. It is closer to a prayer. You get clear on what you are asking for, and then you let go of how it arrives.
The dieta
Weeks before you go, the dieta starts.
No salt. No sugar. No pork. No spice. No oil. No alcohol. No sex. The list is long. You strip your food down to almost nothing so there is less noise in your body when you arrive. It is not a punishment. It is not a cleanse challenge. It is preparation.
I ate pork by accident one day and spiraled about it for hours. That is the kind of person I am.
The strange part started before I ever left. The dreams. Vivid, loud, too real. People say the medicine comes to find you once you commit, and I do not know how to explain it except that something shifted early. One night my dog, who never cuddles me, pressed himself against my side and stayed there until morning. Make of that what you want. I stopped arguing with it.
The longest journey
I did not expect the trip itself to be so long.
One flight to Miami. One flight to Lima. One flight to Iquitos. And then an hour on a boat, down the river, into the Amazon. You cannot drive to where I was going. The jungle does not work that way. You go by air until you cannot, and then you go by water.
The travel fell apart on the way. My flight out of Miami was delayed and I was going to miss my connection, so I sat on a plane, in the air, and rebooked a whole new flight on a different airline just to make the last leg in time to meet my group. My luggage did not come with me. The person who eventually brought it to me was the retreat leader herself, the same breathwork facilitator who had told me about this trip in the first place. She was on a later flight, and she carried my bag through for me. She saved me on this trip in more ways than one.
Where we stayed
The rooms were not what people picture when they hear the word retreat. No mirrors anywhere, which does something to you after a few days, not being able to look at your own face. No high speed internet. Barely any internet at all. A mosquito net draped over every bed. And all night long, the sound of the jungle, and hundreds of monkeys climbing and calling in the dark all around us.
Meeting the shamans
When I arrived, we met with the shamans and a translator.
These meetings were private. When it was my turn, I walked in and it was just me, the translator, and the shamans. Nobody else in the room. I gave my four intentions. Who I was. Why I was there. What had brought me all the way to this jungle. I shared my struggles, and I cried. I felt like I could collapse right there on the floor.
I have always been the person who solves everyone else's problems. The one who helps other people through their chaos. And somewhere along the way my own chaos had gotten so loud I could not hear anything else. I knew I could push myself through hard things. I had always done that. But my self love was next to nothing. I sat there in front of them feeling unlovable. A burden. Broken.
And still, across a language barrier, with a translator between us, I felt like they saw me. Actually saw me, and understood.
The flower bath
Before the journeys, we did flower baths.
They would fill buckets with a concoction they made, and we would spread out across the land, each of us alone with our bucket. You sit with it. You sit with your thoughts and your intentions. And then you pour the whole thing over your body, and you do not rinse it off. You carry it with you.
Afterward, each day, we would talk about gratitude. For ourselves, or for someone else. That was its own message, every single day.
The first night
The first night in the maloca, before any ceremony had even started, they were still explaining how it would go. And I started purging already. Nothing had happened yet. Maybe it was just time. Maybe my body had been waiting years to let that shit go. I felt bad for everyone around me.
One thing stuck with me from that first night. They told us to focus on our breath. Our posture. Our intentions. The icaros, the sacred songs the shamans sing. And gratitude. I found it fascinating that the breath was so important, that the thing I had built my whole recovery on was sitting right there at the center of a tradition thousands of years older than me.
I ended up staying in the maloca for hours, alone, while they prepped for ceremony. Not scared. Surrendering. There is a difference, and I did not understand it until that night.
The plant medicine ceremony
When everyone gathered, I felt ready. Ready and very weak.
We each had our own mat, assigned, with our names on them. The ceremony began at nine at night.
The maloca itself is built for this. A large round jungle hut, often eight sided, with a high thatched roof that climbs to a point in the center. We sat in a circle along the walls. The shamans came in and took their places in specific spots around the space. I asked about this later. The lead shaman and the apprentices training under him position themselves around the circle on purpose, so the songs, the prayers, and the protection reach every corner of the room and every person in it. Nobody sits outside the circle of it. The details vary by lineage, but the idea is the same everywhere. The space is covered. You are held from all sides.
They prepared the medicine in the center, then called each of us up, one at a time, in a specific order, to drink. By the time it was my turn, I was so weak from purging that someone had to help me to my feet to walk up and receive it. But I knew I needed to do this. So I went.
Once the last person had gone, the candles were blown out. Every one of them. And we sat in the dark. Pitch black.
The icaros
We sat in silence for about thirty minutes. Nothing. Just breath and the dark and the waiting.
Then the shamans began to sing.
I cannot fully describe what the icaros did to that room. Their voices were beautiful. We could not understand a single word, and it did not matter, because it felt like the sound was reaching each of us individually, finding us one by one in the dark. It was like an orchestra had filled the maloca. The most amazing sounds I have ever heard in my life.
Later in the ceremony, a facilitator would come to you and walk you across the room to a specific shaman. He would sing you your own personal icaro, meant only for you. I would just lean into it and receive it. And this is the part I still cannot explain. Even with the language barrier, even not knowing the words, I understood every one of them.
In each of the four main ceremonies I received my own personal icaro. Every single time, it felt less like a song and more like instructions. Information for how to move forward with my life. How to love myself unconditionally, which happened to be the one thing I had never once known how to do.
The visions
It was not all visions. Some of it I saw. Some of it I simply knew. Visions and messages both. The white light I will share, and I will get to that in a minute, because it was the throughline of my whole journey. But the rest of it, the specific scenes and the messages meant only for me, I am going to keep.
Here is why. They were mine. Yours will be nothing like them. If I hand you my visions and messages, you will go looking for the same ones, and that is not how any of this works. Everyone who sits down meets something different. The worst thing I could do is set your expectations for a thing that was only ever meant for you.
Purging
Purging is part of it. I do not mean that as a warning. I mean it as the point. It felt like we were bringing up far more than the contents of our stomachs. We were vomiting pain. Loneliness. Years of held emotion. We each had our own bucket. I know how that sounds. But the facilitators moved through the dark the whole night, replacing buckets, appearing at your side the second you needed them.
We each had a small red flashlight we could shine on the wall if we felt overwhelmed, or too sick, or needed the restroom. They would come. They would sit with you as long as you needed, however long that was.
There was also mapacho, an organic jungle tobacco, offered to us. It is used to help ward off the darker energies and to settle the nausea. The smell of it moved through the room all night long.
The hardest part was hearing the others. When your neighbor is purging or crying in the dark right next to you, every instinct says get up, go help. But you cannot. You learn very fast that this is theirs. Their journey. Not yours to fix. For someone like me, whose whole identity was fixing other people, that was its own kind of medicine.
When the ceremony closed
The ceremonies would start around nine, and some nights they would not end until one or two in the morning, sometimes later. When it was finally closed, they would bring the candles back in, and there was light again. You could turn to the person next to you and share, quietly, what you had just been through. And they would bring in fruit, the most delicious fruit I have ever tasted after a night like that.
We were allowed to sleep in the maloca if we wanted to. The first couple of nights, I stayed. I slept and I recovered. Not from the medicine. From the letting go. From being more exhausted than I have ever been in my life, in the best possible way.
The mornings after
After each ceremony, we would meet in the maloca in the morning for group share.
This was hard for me. I am not a public speaker. I am definitely not someone who talks about my troubles out loud, to a room. But I shared as much as I could, and I cried every single time. And I think I became more whole by doing it. Every time I said something out loud, I set a little more of the burden down.
In those mornings, the shamans and facilitators would also ask each of us about our dose from the night before, and whether we wanted to adjust it. You could go lower. You could sit one out entirely. You could go higher. Or you could take the shaman's suggestion. It was always your choice.
Afterward, the group would drift to the pool. Some people went back to their rooms to journal. But a few of us would sit at the pool and just talk about what had happened to us in the dark. It felt like I had known these people for years. We had all come with the same goal. We all wanted to fix the thing we were carrying. I felt so much love from those people.
The support was unlike anything I have ever felt. The men and the women in our group were deep in their own hard work, carrying their own weight through their own dark. And still, after the sharing sessions, when I was raw from saying it all out loud, one of them would come and put a hand on my back. No words. Just a hand, so I knew I was not alone in it. I will never forget that as long as I live.
The other medicines
Besides the main medicine, we worked with two others along the way.
The first came before our third ceremony. I thought this one was going to be the gentle one, almost a break. It was not. It pulled even more out of me. This was where I first saw the white light, only partly, only in the corner of my eye, not the full thing I had been hoping for. And it was where the words came. Painful words. Bad words. Everything I had been holding onto for years came spewing out of my mouth on its own, before I could stop any of it.
The white light
We did four ceremonies with the main medicine in the maloca. Then, near the end, we left the jungle behind and moved to the Sacred Valley.
The final ceremony was different. A different medicine, out in an open air maloca, in the daytime, in full sun.
That was the finale. That was the one that broke me open. During the group share, when it finally came around to me, it felt like someone had cut off my head and my heart started speaking on its own. Over fifty years of things I had felt and never said came pouring out of me, uncontrollably. And the white light I had been chasing the whole trip, the one I had only ever caught in pieces, I finally saw it. All of it.
Before we left
The retreat did not just end and send us home. Before we left, we had integration meetings. What to eat and what to avoid. What to stay away from. How to handle the temptations when they came, because they would come. How to keep going with the breath.
We did group therapy too, where we learned how to actually speak to each other, and how to respond to one another with grace. There was one exercise where we sat and looked into another person's eyes for two full minutes. Just eye contact, nothing else. You would be surprised what happens in two minutes of that.
And then they gave us the eight Ps. A framework for carrying the work home, so it does not evaporate the second real life starts again.
Practice. Practice what you learned. Grounding, walking, breath. The healing is in the daily doing, not the ceremony.
Prune. Cut away what no longer serves you. Habits. Addictions. Patterns. People. Offer them the transformed version of you, and if that does not work, let them go.
Pilgrimage. Keep seeking places that feed your spirit. Temples, places of worship, time in nature. Keep a daily breath or meditation practice.
Pause. Throughout the day, check your inner state. Then respond and expand, instead of reacting on autopilot.
Patience. Be patient with yourself and your own process. Adjust slowly. Mistakes can be teachers.
Preach not. Do not preach about the plant. Educate when asked, and let your life be the example.
Plath. Play and laugh. This one matters. Learn from children. Healing is not only the heavy work.
Pursue. Pursue your gift with purpose.
The gift ceremony
Half the group had already left by the time we did the gift ceremony. The ones of us who stayed got the most magical experience of the whole trip.
We had each been told to bring something from home, something that meant something to us, or to buy something with intention. Everything went into a pile in the center of the maloca. It was not a white elephant. One person would be called up, choose a gift from the pile, and give it to someone in the room. Their choice. Their instinct.
I am still in awe of what happened. Every single gift landed in exactly the right person's hands. Every one. Including mine.
Mine came from one of the Arkana facilitators, someone I had spent a lot of this trip with. Three mapacho, the jungle tobacco, so I could build my own peaceful place at home, a corner to set my intentions and practice my breath. An embroidered heart, which undid me, because I had felt like I was missing one for so long. And a necklace, a beautiful stone with a small piece of the vine set into it.
More tears came. But not the sad kind. Not this time.
What I actually came home with
Here is the part I want you to keep.
The shamans are not the healers. They are vessels. They hold the space, they carry the songs, they keep you safe while you go under. But they do not do the work for you. The plant does not do it for you either.
You do it. You are the medicine.
I flew all that way waiting to be fixed by something outside of me, and I walked out with the opposite. Nothing out there healed me. I healed me. Everything else, the shamans, the songs, the plant, the jungle, only turned the lights on so I could finally see what was mine to do all along.
Flying home
The hardest part was not the jungle. It was leaving it.
For those days it was quiet. No phone lighting up. No alerts. No traffic. Just the sound of the jungle and my own breath. Then I flew home, and the world came roaring back. News alerts going off left and right. Traffic. Noise everywhere. And my old habits standing at the door, waiting to move back in like nothing had happened.
That is where the real work is. Not in the ceremony. Here, at home, in the noise, where it is actually hard.
Getting home has been a challenge. I will not pretend otherwise. So I am doing the work. More breathwork. I am clearing out my office, decluttering it down to something calm, so I have a peaceful place to breathe and to sit. The way I once sat on that bench my dad built me, all those years ago. The mapacho are there, waiting for the corner I am making for them.
I am not doing it alone, either. The same facilitator who carried my luggage through and first introduced me to breath sent us home with a huge manual to work through, and she scheduled four full weeks of integration calls with us. I have already been in the workbook. I have already been on my mat. And next Monday, I get to see all of those people again via zoom, the ones who sat in the dark next to me. I am nervous about it. Good nervous, but nervous.
I will be honest about why. I am a people pleaser at heart. I want to help everyone. I am agreeable to a fault. Right now I am trying to rewire that, to point some of that care back at myself for once, and it is taking every bit of patience I have. It has only been a week. That is the part nobody tells you. The breakthrough happens in the jungle, and then the actual work is a slow, unglamorous Tuesday at home, choosing yourself again and again until it starts to stick.
Breath is what I keep coming back to. It held me during the ceremonies, when everything was surfacing and I wanted to run. It grounded me after. And now, at home, when the old patterns try to creep back in, it is the thing that brings me back to who I decided to be down there in the dark.
Nobody breathes for you. That is the whole point. The work was always yours.
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