# T
In 2022, I found myself lost within the life I had created.
I was confused, frustrated and unable to understand my purpose. I kept asking myself the same questions: Why is life treating me this way? Why am I trapped in circumstances I do not want? Is this truly the life I am meant to be living?
At the time, I could not see that much of my suffering came from resisting reality. I wanted my external world to change, but I had not yet developed the courage to look honestly at the world within me.
The immediate catalyst was a serious argument with my wife. It became so intense that I left our home and stayed with my parents for a while. I believed I needed distance from my marriage, but beneath that desire was a deeper longing: I wanted to rediscover who I was.
Away from home, I began asking myself whether I wanted to continue living the life I had built. I believed I was searching for an answer about my marriage. In truth, I was searching for myself.
Years earlier, while in Silicon Valley, I had heard about ayahuasca and read a book about it. That had been around eight years before, and although I found the subject interesting, I never imagined that I would one day drink the medicine myself.
Then, while staying at my parents’ house, ayahuasca suddenly returned to my awareness. I began searching for retreats and felt inexplicably drawn towards one in Spain. I knew very little about what I was entering, yet something within me seemed to recognise it.
“This is what I need,” I thought.
As I have often done in life, I jumped in headfirst.
I booked a week-long retreat consisting of four ayahuasca ceremonies, a Bufo ceremony and deep breathwork. I followed the recommended dieta for two or three weeks beforehand, removing salt and other restricted foods and trying to prepare myself as carefully as possible.
But no amount of dietary preparation could have shown me what I was really preparing for.
## The threshold
Before travelling to the retreat, I spent a day alone in Barcelona. Without a car or any particular obligations, I walked for fourteen or fifteen miles through the city.
There was something liberating about that day. I was alone and temporarily removed from my responsibilities, conflicts and familiar identity. For a few hours, I felt completely free. I walked without needing to explain myself to anyone.
The following day, we travelled by bus to the retreat venue. We were told what to expect and guided through the preparations for the first ceremony.
That evening, I sat with the others and received my first cup of ayahuasca.
I drank it and waited.
Nothing happened.
I continued waiting, watching for some sign that the experience had begun. Still, there was nothing. Eventually, tired from the previous day’s walking, I felt myself beginning to fall asleep.
Then, without warning, everything changed.
## The mirror
The first great lesson did not arrive as a voice or an abstract idea. It came through embodiment.
I found myself experiencing the body and consciousness of my wife. I was no longer merely thinking about how she might feel; I seemed to be inhabiting her emotional world. I felt her pain from within, as though the boundary separating her experience from mine had temporarily dissolved.
Through this, I was shown something deeply uncomfortable: although I was married to her, I had not truly treated her as my wife.
Until that moment, I had viewed our conflict primarily through the lens of what had been done to me. I had concentrated on my frustration, my disappointment and my sense of being misunderstood. The medicine turned the mirror around.
I was made to feel the effect of my own behaviour.
There was nowhere to hide and no argument with which I could defend myself. I could not explain away what I was experiencing. I could only feel it.
The recognition shocked me. I had arrived believing that my wife was largely responsible for the state of our relationship. Yet, from within her experience, I began to recognise the ways in which I had failed her. I saw that I carried far more responsibility than I had been willing to accept.
This was not condemnation. It felt more like truth delivered through compassion. I was being allowed to see myself through another person’s heart.
I took another cup.
A distinctly feminine energy began moving through me. I danced and moved in ways that were unfamiliar to me, surrendering to something gentler and more fluid than my ordinary self. The experience seemed to loosen the rigid identity I had carried into the room.
I was not being given the answer I had expected. I had come asking whether this was the life I wanted. Instead, I was being asked whether I had truly understood the people with whom I shared that life.
## The body remembers
Before the emotional visions fully unfolded, the experience began working through my body.
I had never practised yoga and knew almost nothing about its postures, yet I found myself moving instinctively into unfamiliar positions. My body stretched, twisted and released. My back cracked, and I entered postures that I had never consciously learnt.
Only later did I recognise that some of these movements resembled yoga, which has since become a regular part of my life.
It felt as though the medicine understood that my body needed to open before my mind could follow. It worked through the physical tension first, loosening something I had been carrying without realising it. My body seemed to hold a history that my conscious mind had forgotten.
Once the body had softened, the deeper emotional journey began.
## A lifetime unfolding
My life opened before me like a film running at one hundred times its normal speed.
I moved through different chapters of my past, but these were not simply memories. Every scene carried its original emotional weight. Feelings I had suppressed, avoided or stored within myself were suddenly alive again.
I cried.
I laughed.
I grieved.
At times, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of emotion passing through me. Yet the experience was also extraordinarily beautiful. Alongside the pain came images of kindness, tenderness and love. It was as though each buried emotion was being awakened, witnessed and finally allowed to move.
I was transported into worlds unlike anything I had previously known. Colours and forms appeared with an intensity that ordinary language cannot adequately describe. These places did not feel like fantasies. While I was within them, they seemed more real than everyday life—as though ordinary reality were only the surface of a far deeper ocean.
I cannot claim with certainty what those realms were. They may have emerged from the unexplored depths of my own mind, from the mysterious action of the medicine, or from something beyond my present understanding.
What I can say is that they changed the way I understood reality.
It felt as though I had spent my life standing beside an ocean without knowing it was there. During that first ceremony, I had not crossed or comprehended it. I had merely dipped my feet into its waters.
Even that was enough.
## The opening
Something began unlocking within my heart.
I did not understand it at the time, but a dormant part of me was beginning to awaken. Beneath the frustration, defensiveness and stories I had constructed about my life, there was a deeper capacity to feel.
The experience did not give me a simple answer or tell me that every perception I had was wrong. Instead, it showed me how incomplete my perspective had been. It revealed the distance between judging another person’s actions and truly feeling the world from within their heart.
After another cup, I danced. I felt lighter and freer than I had felt in years. The emotional weight I had carried seemed to loosen, and an immense sense of relief moved through me.
“This is the most beautiful thing,” I remember thinking. “This is the best thing I have ever experienced.”
Yet I did not then understand that this beauty was only the beginning. I believed I had discovered something wonderful, but I had not yet grasped what it was preparing me to confront. The first night had opened a door, and the ceremonies that followed would take me much further through it.
I entered the retreat wanting to escape a life I believed had treated me unfairly. During that first ceremony, I was shown that transformation could not begin with escape. It had to begin with seeing.
I had gone searching for freedom from my circumstances. Instead, I was offered freedom from the narrowness of my own perspective.
The first night was profound, mystical and indescribably beautiful. It carried me through colours, memories and realms that seemed more real than life itself. But its greatest revelation was not found in the visions.
It was found in the opening of my mind to another person’s pain—and in the opening of my soul to the possibility that healing begins when we stop asking only what life has done to us and become willing to ask what we have done within life.