The Profile:
Name: Marissa
Nationality: American
Lives in: California, USA
Age when taken psychedelics: 35
Job: Naturopathic Doctor
Psychedelic of choice: Ayahuasca
Place of ceremony: Peru & USA
What was your intention?
Just radical healing. I knew I needed to do something like that.
Once in Peru, before every ceremony, we were encouraged to set an intention and I think the healing and clarity was always my main thing: to bring clarity to the confusion and the chaos I was feeling inside and to become a better healer having overcome my own wounds.
I mainly wanted to heal my romantic relationships – that was always an area I struggled with, feeling insecure. It went back to childhood, to not having my emotional needs met and feeling abandoned – that was always present in all my relationships.
Why did you take it?
I’ve always been interested in psychedelics. As a child I remember being able to push on my eyelids and seeing psychedelics and I loved doing that and journeying in my head. So, maybe this was something I was innately drawn to from a very young age.
My first experience was when I was 15 years’ old (I know, it’s young!) when I took a dose of LSD. That same summer I read the book Be Here Now by Ram Daas, I connected with a community of people on beach in Pensacola, Florida and had my mind expanded and blown wide open. That was the beginning of my transformation.
Through college, I was studying business but also spending a lot of times in dance clubs and at raves, connecting with people and further exploring different drugs.
When I became a mother, a lot of that was put on hold.
My experience with Ayahuasca began in 2012 – it was my first year of medical school in Seattle. I found myself in a very unexpected situation: my husband wanted a divorce. I was very focused on my studies and was probably neglecting him in some ways and he didn’t have the strength to express that. With the busyness of raising a child, my studies and him being at work, we found everything crumbling in May 2012 and that dropped me into the dark night of the soul. It brought me to my knees. I was in a really bad place.
I was raised a middle child, deeply empathic, sensitive – I cried all the time, my mother didn’t know what to do with me. It was somewhat of an abusive household to grow up in so I internalised all of that pain, including all of my parents’ one. All of that was what needed to be healed.
Beyond all of that trauma, we are raised (especially as women) to believe in this fairy tale existence, this Disneyland, playing with barbie dolls, the white picket fence, the knight in shiny armour making us believe that a man is going to come and save us and we are just going to have our babies and everything is going to be amazing. And that’s not how life turns out at all and we are at a great disadvantage growing up in that kind of environment leaving us unprepared for life’s turbulence.
The story of 2012 brings me to the year 2014 – by that year, I managed to stay in medical school and stick with my studies. It was very hard and painful – I found myself all alone, a single mother in a city where I knew no-one. It was a horrible experience. Luckily, I had some friends who were able to support me.
By 2014 it was as if my soul had totally disconnected from my body and from this earthly experience. It just went “Nope. I don’t want to do this.” That was also my own sentiment – if life is going to be this difficult, if this is the human experience, then I don’t want to be here. Deep inside, I just wanted to fly away – my son was the only thing keeping me tethered to this earth.
I wasn’t outright suicidal as in I didn’t have a plan or all these ideations, there was just this deep sinking feeling “Is this all that there is”? A couple of friends of mine had made a trip to Peru several years before and were just beaming when they got back. By 2014, I set the intention and planted the seed. I said “Spirit / universe, if this is right, let it unfold!” – mind you, I was living on a student budget, a single mother with loans, stretched very thin and lo and behold the money showed up and so did the timing (my son went to a 4-week summer camp, which coincided with the exact retreat dates that I chose). You know those times in life when you make a decision and the doors just open? That was one of them. I didn’t have to work for this, I didn’t have to do anything. It was meant to be in every sense of the word.
I told my family I was going on a yoga retreat. I knew they would not accept me going to the jungle to Peru by myself. My dad already thought I was going to be kidnapped but he finally accepted it.
I did 6 ceremonies in total: 4 in Peru, 1 outside of Oregon and 1 in Hawaii.
What were you most afraid of?
I felt so brave and courageous, I felt I had nothing to lose. There was a sense of adventure, which I loved too.
I arrived in Lima late at night and took a taxi to my Airbnb. My host didn’t speak any English. I woke up the next morning terrified thinking “What have I done? I’m in this foreign country, I don’t speak much Spanish, I’m by myself” and there is this moment when I say to myself “Girl, put your shoes on, get your map out, you got this!” – this was my pep talk. I ended up connecting with people in Lima before I took the plane to the retreat centre and had the most amazing time.
This made me think that in life, we are always on the search for who we are, always coming back to ourselves, so we can show up authentically to the world. That experience let me do that.
What did you most look forward to?
I loved when the icaros were being sung and there was a male and a female voice – I loved the balance of it.
The experience can take any form – you can go with an intention and that will help guide things but sometimes you don’t know what’s going to come up and that’s part of the surrender. I just looked forward to being able to overcome my blockages.
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
Acquainting yourself with Ayahuasca and its spirit can be terrifying. Before I went to Peru, my friend was teasing me saying “You are going to lose your mind, Marissa” and I actually did want to lose my mind…
During the 1st ceremony, exactly that happened – I lost the sense of who I was as Marissa, as a mother, as a student – it was this stripping away of all these identities and getting to the core of my being, which is that I’m a spirit, a soul.
It was terrifying – all I could do was to focus on my breath. That was all I had. The medicine felt like these scrubbing bubbles, or like a computer defragmentation – I could feel it moving through every cell in my body and when it got to my heart, holy molly, I thought I was going to die. There was so much pain there including physical trauma from going through an eating disorder when I was a teenager – I must have caused my heart some physical damage… I remember being conscious that I might not be able to make it through Ayahuasca working on my heart.
The other thing that added to my discomfort was the intensity of the geometric patterns and shapes. I don’t remember a lot of the visuals, just the feeling. I was blasted out into the outer space, losing earth, time and space, what I was. I remember touching my elbow and not even remembering or thinking that was my elbow.
And then you surrender to it and this is it! Once I did it, I felt like I pushed through the blocks.
During my 3rd ceremony, I didn’t get a good feeling from the shaman and I was sitting right next to him. That night I forgot to put on any of my jewellery – I work with crystals, I feel like they are my allies, so not having them felt really vulnerable.
Things got really dark. Throughout the ceremony, I found myself signing with him, as if I stepped up to be the female shaman. I learned his songs and sang with him and I’m not the kind of person who would normally do it but there was something inside that said to me that I needed to open my mouth and sign my own song.
About half way through the ceremony, things got pretty dark. I saw some things: what I would call black magic. In my mind’s eye I saw this very powerful sorcerer and I remember his hand holding the staff with this ball on it and I remember thinking “There’s some dark energy here right now, this is black magic” but the interesting thing was that this felt familiar to me, as if I had used it before but then as I was journeying and processing through what I was sensing, there was this knowing that maybe I had used that type of power in another incarnation but in this life, I was with the light.
Shortly after that, the medicine spoke to me and said “Get out!” and I didn’t want to leave. I said “We are supposed to stay in the space” – “Get out!!!” it yelled at me. So, I got out and sat on the bench outside and was just looking up at the stars and by that time, probably 4 or 5 of the participants had come outside as they felt uncomfortable with the dark energy in the space too. The shaman cut the ceremony short by 6 hours – by midnight, he just said he was done and he left while people were still journeying and needed guidance. We literally had 4-6 hours left…
I later found out that that shaman was possessed or had an attachment. A shaman should hold the container – that was really concerning and upsetting but I was able to work through it although later I wondered if I ended up having the attachment as a result of it too. It was difficult to make sense of it.
That was a very scary and challenging experience but I was proud of myself for listening to my inner guidance.
What was the best bit about the experience?
The 4th and the final ceremony, I made sure I felt good and I went there with my crystals. Some of the facilitators said “We are going to assist you in healing. Let’s make this a beautiful experience” – I feel like just having that intention helped because it was the complete opposite of the previous experiences.
I remember one visual where I was walking down a hallway and there were elders, wrapped in Native American blankets. They were lining this hallway to infinity and I felt the love and support from all of them. During that same experience, I was seeing crystal castles, unicorns, iridescent soft purple and pink light and it was like heaven. I remember closing my eyes and thinking “Thank you Ayahuasca, what an incredible show you are putting on”. In my mind’s eye I was watching this beautiful celestial cirque du soleil performance. I just remember being in awe and so nourished. When the shamans came around, just feeling the love from them and them honouring the love they saw in me – there was this beautiful exchange of energies.
It was a beautiful end to those experiences and I can always tap back into that feeling of the most incredible love for myself, for human kind and all the plants, minerals, animals on the earth and for the cosmos and the universe. One of my favourite quotes is that “The temple doors are made of eyelids” – we close our eyes and we can tap into that field of love and drop into it anytime.
What did you get from it?
The deepest and most profound healing of my entire life. When I look at my life, it’s pre and post Ayahuasca – it was that profound for me and I’m so grateful.
Breaking all the social conditioning. Just questioning what does life have to look like for me? Do I need to go down the path of getting married and having a white picket fence or do I blaze my own path, which is what I’m doing now. I feel like I’m a trailblazer in my profession and the plant medicine has helped me get to that place of owning who I am.
I came back a completely different person than when I left Seattle. I remember walking back into the classroom and all of my friends turned around and looked at me and went “Is that Marissa?” I was just glowing. They had been with me, supporting me the best they could through the end of the marriage. They saw me at my worst. So, to see me walk in with that crystal clarity, people actually asked me “What did you do? What happened to you?”
So, the medicine brought me clarity and healing. I was able to forgive my husband and to this day we are wonderful friends.
I also healed a lot of ancestral wounds, generational karma on both of my parents’ side, most of it tied to religion, my mum being Catholic and my dad Southern Baptist they each had their own stuff attached to it that had gone through generations. I felt I was the one where the buck stopped – I didn’t want to be passing on all those wounds.
The way that played out during the ceremony was that I remember feeling the energy of Ayahuasca in my ovaries. It was spinning bilaterally and almost backwards through time. Those were my eggs, my femininity – that’s how I was healing past generations of women – I could feel the energy healing it all.
That experience was the catalyst for deeper healing afterwards, e.g. going into a vipassana meditation after I got back. I experienced a similar amount of healing void of any substance there. Those 2 things go very well together – it allowed for even further integration.
Then, I did the Landmark forum, I was going to Tony Robbins events. I just launched into more growth and self-exploration, more discovering who I am and also the stripping away. I realised it’s not about becoming and being something better and different but stripping away all that you are not and just getting to the essence.
How did it impact your life?
My ex husband and I ended up moving in together to raise our son while I finished medical school a couple of months after I got back from Peru. If I had not experienced that deep healing, I would not have been able to live with my him after all that he did. I just came from this place of radical acceptance and forgiveness for him.
In a tangible way, that experience allowed me to become a better healer, to be able to go to these depths and to really discover all of the attachments and trauma and the things we carry with us. I can help connect the dots for other people – that’s what I do in my practice. In a very gentle way, I ask about childhood trauma, whether that’s an accident or a verbally abusive parent or something else that happened, I open it for people and make them realise that the symptoms they experience today are typically related to something that happened in childhood. I feel I gave myself a deep understanding of the human experience of wounding and trauma and also the knowledge that this can be healed.
What did you struggle with after?
Coming back from Peru, I remember I flew into Houston and went into this gigantic grocery store and I must have spent an hour in the produce section – I just couldn’t speak to people, I needed to be around fruits and vegetables! I think being deep in the jungle, having that profound experience with nature, plants and the earth and then going back into the airport and the society and for me also back into school and so much structure when I had been so free with the Amazon jungle being so feminine and so wild. It was all about the energy for me. All that was challenging.
I found that with my family, I had experienced such a radical shift, I was no longer the person they expected me to be and that caused a lot of tension. They wanted me to stay the same, as many of our families do. They struggled to understand it, so there was a lot of friction on that front.
What improved?
When I got back from Peru, I got together with a man who became increasingly frustrated with me. He said to me “Marissa, why do you always have to be transforming? Why can’t you just be happy where you are and with who you are?” – I couldn’t really answer that question apart from knowing this is my path. I want the cocoon to rip open and I want to fly away as a butterfly. I was able to stick to what was important to me and be true to myself in the end.
Also, Ayahuasca helped me heal my relationship with my father. It was very challenging in my young adult life and Ayahuasca kickstarted that healing. It allowed me to see how difficult the human experience is and that it’s difficult for all of us – we are all struggling. I also understood that we are both a victim and a perpetrator. That was one of the big lessons for me that allowed me to see my father as someone who was hurting and that’s why he acted the way he did. I’m so happy to say that he and I have a beautiful relationship today and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.
What do you need to work on?
This idea of living close to the land – that rally spoke to me. I loved the sense of communal living – that’s one of my goals in life now: to buy a piece of land and grow food and have a community. I don’t think we are supposed to live such insular lives and so far away from one another. So, my goal is to come back to nature and to myself.
I’m really interested in the explosion of research and people waking up to plant medicines too. I think they are a way to fast track the healing of humanity and I want to be a part of that.
Otherwise, to help integrate all these lessons I have received, I meditate, I practice and receive reiki on a regular basis.
I also really like Qi gong, utilising that energy, moving it and being able to receive it from the environment – I think it is really important.
On top of that, I got into mindset – the work of Dr Joe Dispensa. I went on a cruise last summer that he hosted and it was incredible. It’s so important to be able to look at the stories we tell ourselves and understand what that voice in your head actually says.
So, I really take mind, body, and spirit approach now.
What would be your advice if you were to do it again?
Be international but have no expectations. Go in there with an open heart and an intention for healing.
I would also tell myself: don’t be afraid of what you find. Know these are normal human experiences and emotions.
I feel like I went into the experience with so much courage and bravery. I was ready for a change, I was hungry for it and when I look back at myself, I’m kind of in awe of that person who was so brave to get on that plane, fly solo to Peru and do the hard work – it was really difficult work to do. The moment you drink that medicine, there is no coming back and I did it.
Marissa has touched on the big lie most of us are fed when we grow up: that you can be happy if you can demonstrate all the commonly accepted signs of success, namely: a spouse, a perfect house, babies, and other similar items. While those trophies are not necessarily good or bad, they may not be the right route for everyone at the exact same time on their journey. Yet, we make our children run after them, forcing them to forget who they are, forgo their passions and take on the persona that can fit in instead of belong. Is it so surprising that sooner or later so many of us hit a wall then?
We call it mid-life crisis and we laugh it off, as if the person in question was just having a moment. I now see it as an often once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to crack through the layers of bullsh*t, if we will, so we can start the stripping away and finally get to ourselves because essentially, we got it all wrong: it's not about becoming anything, it's about UNbecoming, so we can get to our essence and eventually start to live...
What makes each of us happy are different things - may we accept that difference. It makes us do incredible things in the world. Let's celebrate that, shall we?
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