I have worked with ayahuasca and plant medicines for over two decades, and with psychedelics and entheogens for thirty years. I hold deep reverence for grandmother ayahuasca and genuine gratitude for everything she has shown me. I am currently on a deliberate break from the medicine, focusing entirely on integration. Many of my clients come to me asking about ayahuasca, seeking my guidance on whether it is right for them and what to expect. This article is my honest answer. Not a warning designed to discourage, and not an endorsement. An honest account from someone who was willing to do the work for a very long time before she understood what the work actually was, and who loves this medicine enough to speak about it clearly.
The understanding did not arrive in a single ceremony. It arrived through contrast.
Over the years I took repeated breaks from the medicine for integration work, and each time I returned, something became harder to ignore. The contrast sharpened. I began seeing the same people returning to ceremony again and again, sometimes getting visibly worse. I began seeing facilitators who severely lacked integrity or self-awareness, parading spirituality like a costume while bypassing exactly the shadow work necessary to see oneself clearly. I watched communities organized around healing become containers for projection, dependency, and unacknowledged harm held together by shared mythology rather than genuine accountability.
And then I had to look at myself honestly and acknowledge that I had done versions of these things too, before I fully understood what I was doing. I had outsourced my healing. I had returned to the medicine hoping it would do work I did not understand how to to do myself. I had confused the intensity of a vision with the substance of change.
That honest reckoning changed everything. I am genuinely grateful for all of it, including the years I spent lost inside the pattern, because that is what eventually led me to understand what real integration requires.
Insight and transformation are not the same thing. This is the most important thing I have come to know about plant medicine, and it took me thirty years to be willing to say it plainly.
What Tantra Actually Says About This
When people hear the word tantra in the context of plant medicine, they often assume these are two separate worlds. Historically, they are not.
Tantra did not emerge from a culture of sober abstraction. The earliest Shaiva and Shakta tantric traditions of South Asia developed within rich ritual cultures that understood consciousness as something to be transformed through direct engagement with experience: through the body, through sensation, through breath, through mantra, through ethical relationship, and in some lineages, through carefully held contact with psychoactive substances including cannabis preparations used in specific ritual contexts.¹ These were not recreational practices. They were disciplined technologies held inside coherent initiatory lineages with clear ethical structures and teachers who had done their own work across decades.
This matters because the relationship between tantra and entheogens is real and historically grounded. It is not new age invention. But what that relationship looked like inside a living lineage bears almost no resemblance to what we are seeing in the current global psychedelic wave.
That wave operates largely outside coherent tradition. It operates at enormous commercial scale, often without genuine lineage, frequently without adequate screening, and within a broader market that rewards charisma, intensity, and compelling personal mythology far more reliably than it rewards ethics, accountability, and the quiet unglamorous work of nervous system regulation. The vine itself is being harvested faster than it can regenerate in some regions of the Amazon, and the cultures that have stewarded these medicines for generations are watching sacred practices absorbed into a wellness industry that often has no framework for what genuine integration actually requires.²
Ayahuasca is also not a medicine for everyone, nor is it meant to be returned to indefinitely as though repeated ceremony will eventually produce the transformation that daily life has not. The vine is a limited resource. More importantly, it is a catalyst, not a cure. The actual work of change happens deep in the nervous system through repeated exposure to safety, through staying with your own truth when it is uncomfortable, through the small decisions made every single day that either honor or abandon the self. No plant can do that work. No facilitator can do that work. Only you can.
Tantra, as I practice and understand it, holds this same position clearly. The measure of spiritual depth is not what a person can access in an expanded state. It is what they can remain conscious with inside ordinary life: inside the body, inside intimacy, inside conflict, inside grief, inside power, inside the repetition of daily choice. Liberation, in a tantric framework, is not escape from form. It is deeper participation in it.³
What Ayahuasca Actually Is
Before I speak about what can go wrong inside medicine culture, I want to say something about what ayahuasca actually is, because most people walking toward their first ceremony do not understand the intelligence of what they are about to work with.
Ayahuasca is one of the most sophisticated plant medicines on the planet. From a physiological perspective, the brew can be understood as an adaptogen: a compound that helps the body adapt to stress and restore balance, or homeostasis. This distinction matters enormously. Most pharmaceutical and even herbal interventions are linear. They stimulate certain pathways and suppress others. They do one thing in one direction. Adaptogens are categorically different. They modulate systems, including the nervous system, hormonal pathways, and immune response, helping the body recalibrate rather than override. They do not force a single effect. They respond to what your individual system actually needs.
Consider what this means in practice. Some people arrive at ceremony depleted: low cortisol, low metabolic drive, diminished resilience. Others arrive overstimulated: running on excess cortisol and adrenaline, locked in a chronic stress response they have come to mistake for their baseline. An adaptogenic compound does not treat these two people the same way. It reads the system and supports what is deficient while calming what is excessive. The same is true at the nervous system level. Some people need activation, more energy, forward movement, motivation. Others need the opposite: the capacity to slow down, access quiet clarity, and stop running from stillness. Rather than forcing stimulation or sedation, an adaptogenic compound supports the appropriate response for that individual system.
This is what makes ayahuasca genuinely different from most interventions people seek out for healing. It works across multiple systems simultaneously and helps the body recalibrate in ways that are often difficult to achieve through more linear approaches.
But this is also precisely why context is everything. The outcome is never just the medicine. It is the medicine in combination with the environment, the preparation, the quality of the container, and the depth of the integration work that follows. Strip away any one of those elements and even the most intelligent plant medicine will fall short of what it is capable of offering. The vine is extraordinary. What surrounds it has to be worthy of it.
If you are a client considering whether ayahuasca is right for you, I am genuinely happy to explore that question together. It is a conversation I welcome as part of my Somatic Tantra Immersion work, where we can look honestly at your nervous system, your history, your readiness, and what preparation and integration would actually need to look like for the experience to serve you well.
The Seduction No One Names
After thirty years of working with medicines and watching others do the same, I have come to believe there is a seduction at the center of psychedelic culture that rarely gets named directly.
People do not keep returning to ceremony only because they want healing. That is the innocent answer, and it is often true. But underneath it, there is frequently something else: the desire to feel chosen through suffering. The desire to have contact with the sacred without the humiliation of daily practice. The desire to receive a vision that finally explains everything, so that living differently becomes not a choice requiring courage but a destiny that was revealed.
The medicine can become another way the unintegrated ego avoids genuine transformation while maintaining the story of seeking it.
I say this with full compassion, because I lived this pattern myself. I kept returning to ceremony long past the point where the medicine was showing me anything new. I already knew the patterns. I already understood the wounds. What I needed was not another vision. What I needed was to stop abandoning myself in the places where abandonment had become habitual, and that required not ceremony but the slow, steady work of staying present inside ordinary life.
The scholar Alexis Sanderson, writing on the development of Shaiva tantric initiation, describes it not as a peak experience but as entry into ongoing disciplined practice oriented toward genuine ethical and psychological transformation.⁴ The experience was a door. The lineage was what you walked through it into. Modern ceremony culture often provides the door and very little of what comes after.
What Medicine Spaces Can Become
I want to be precise here, because precision matters and because I am not writing from a place of disillusionment with the medicine herself. Grandmother ayahuasca has given me some of the most profound openings of my life. My critique is not of her. It is of the human containers that have formed around her, and the ways those containers can fail the people inside them.
I have sat in circles held with genuine integrity, where facilitators had done serious personal work and where the container was built around real safety, consent, and care. Those experiences contributed something genuine to my life.
But I have also witnessed, repeatedly, something else entirely. I have seen facilitators who lacked the self-awareness to recognize their own unresolved wounds being acted out inside the container. I have watched people who could speak about consciousness with real beauty demonstrate no capacity for ethical accountability in their relationships or their behavior. I have seen spiritual language used to dress up dynamics that were, underneath the ceremony aesthetics, simply harmful.
Altered states increase vulnerability in ways that are psychologically significant and physiologically measurable. During ceremony, participants can become emotionally open, psychologically regressed, suggestible, and deeply impressionable.⁵ Powerful transference toward facilitators is common. Dysregulation gets reinterpreted as activation. Boundary violations get reframed as spiritual lessons. Emotional chaos gets called shadow work. The nervous system keeps score while the mythology insists everything is medicine.
What rarely gets discussed is how profoundly this dynamic is compounded for people with CPTSD or neurodivergence. Healing containers in medicine culture tend to reward visible, intense emotional reactions as evidence of breakthrough or catharsis. But for a nervous system already living in chronic dysregulation, what looks like opening is often flooding. Being blown open inside a chaotic environment without grounding, without nervous system support, without a practitioner who understands the difference between activation and overwhelm, is not transformation. It is retraumatization with spiritual branding. The absence of screaming and or crying is not evidence of safety, and the presence of it is not evidence of healing.
This is not a fringe problem. It is a structural risk in any space where the facilitator’s ego goes unexamined and the community’s shared story is protected above everything else.
People considering medicine work deserve to ask honest questions before entering any container: Is this facilitator emotionally regulated outside ceremony? Can they tolerate accountability without spiritualizing it into something else? Do they encourage autonomy or dependency? Is integration given genuine weight alongside the experience? Can concerns be voiced openly? These are not cynical questions. They are a form of intelligence. Discernment is not the opposite of spiritual openness. It is inseparable from it.
You Do Not Need Ayahuasca to Heal
I want to say this directly to anyone reading this who is trying to decide whether they need to do a ceremony.
You do not need ayahuasca to heal your trauma or expand your consciousness. If you believe you do, you have already begun giving your power away.
Expansion and healing are not things a substance gives you. They are capacities you build the conditions to hold. What most people describe as expansion inside a ceremony is frequently the nervous system being overwhelmed, blown open by a powerful plant medicine in an unfamiliar environment with people they have just met. Being cracked open is not transformation. It is a temporary dissolution of the defenses the nervous system built to keep you functional. Capacity is not the same thing as the absence of defenses. Real capacity is the ability to access depth, truth, and genuine healing completely sober, and to actually hold what comes up because your nervous system has been slowly, deliberately prepared to do so.
There is something else that rarely gets discussed openly. Ceremonies do not only open your consciousness to what you think you are signing up for. They open you to everything present in the energetic field. Most people walking into these spaces do not have the somatic awareness or the developed inner authority to discern what they are actually interacting with, and this is where things can go very wrong in ways that have nothing to do with the facilitator’s intentions.
And then the ceremony ends. Nobody talks honestly enough about what happens after: the inability to process what came up, the material that remains unresolved and churning just below the surface, and what people sometimes carry home that was never theirs to begin with. This is a significant reason why people keep returning. Not because the medicine is calling them back. Because they left unresolved, and the unresolved material keeps pulling. I did this for a long time without understanding what I was doing.
You do not need to be cracked open to change your life. Transformation happens through building the authority to lead yourself and through breaking the patterns of self-abandonment that have organized your nervous system since long before you ever heard of plant medicine. That is slower work. It is less dramatic. And it is the only work that actually holds.
As a somatic practitioner working with clients across many years, I have become far more interested in what actually produces lasting transformation than in what produces intensity.
They are not the same thing.
Sustainable change, in my observation, tends to emerge from slower and less glamorous processes: learning to recognize self-abandonment in real time, building nervous system regulation as a daily practice, repairing attachment wounds through honest relationship, developing the capacity to remain present in the body during discomfort rather than dissociating from it. These practices do not produce visions. They do not generate the identity of someone always on the edge of breakthrough. They produce something quieter and more enduring: a person who no longer leaves herself when things become difficult.
Real change is done deep in the nervous system. It happens through repeated exposure to safety. It happens through staying with your actual truth, again and again, in the small moments where it would be easier to look away. This is precisely why somatic work is not a complement to integration: it is the vehicle for it. The nervous system does not reorganize through insight alone. It reorganizes through body-based experience, through felt safety, through the slow repetition of new patterns held inside a regulated container. A ceremony may reveal the wound. Life, and the somatic work done within it, is where the integration occurs.
From a tantric perspective, this is not a consolation prize for people who cannot access dramatic experiences. This is the practice itself. The body is not an obstacle to awakening. It is the field where awakening is tested, refined, and made real. Grief, desire, shame, fear, tenderness, power: these are not energies to transcend. They are energies to metabolize consciously, inside relationship, inside the body, inside the ordinary hours of an ordinary life.
That is a fundamentally different project than seeking another peak experience, and it requires a fundamentally different kind of courage.
A Note on Safety and Ecology
There are practical realities that deserve honest acknowledgment alongside everything else.
Ayahuasca is not appropriate for everyone. The brew contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors that interact dangerously with a significant range of medications, including many commonly prescribed antidepressants, stimulants, and cardiac medications. Contraindications are real, they can be life-threatening, and they require genuine medical screening.⁶ People with certain cardiac conditions, personal or family histories of psychosis, or active destabilized trauma deserve particular caution and honest guidance, not a brief intake form that serves the facilitator’s business model more than the participant’s safety.
The ecological reality matters too. Banisteriopsis caapi takes years to mature and is under significant harvesting pressure as global demand has accelerated dramatically. The Amazonian communities who have held these medicines across generations are watching a sacred plant become a commodity.⁷ Choosing to work with this medicine carries responsibilities that extend beyond the personal and deserve to be held with the same seriousness as the ceremony itself.
What I Came Back To
There came a point in my own life where my body stopped feeling called to ceremony, and I stopped questioning that.
My body was not seeking revelation anymore. It was seeking congruence. It was asking me to stop knowing the patterns and start living differently inside them. And the most profound shift I have experienced in my life did not come through a vision. It came through finally, consistently, stubbornly refusing to abandon myself: in relationships, in work, in the places where I had learned to make myself smaller in order to belong.
That is what no ceremony ever gave me. And it is what daily practice, honest relationship, somatic work, and genuine therapy eventually did. I am so grateful for the medicine work I have done across these decades. It led me here. It showed me what I needed to see. And what it showed me, ultimately, was that the next step was mine alone to take, inside my body, inside my choices, inside the ordinary texture of my life.
The Work I Built Because It Was Missing
Integration is spoken about constantly in medicine culture. It is rarely structured into something a person can actually move through with rigor and real support over time. That gap is what I felt most acutely across decades of personal medicine work and years of working with clients who arrived carrying experiences they did not know how to land. I have immense respect and love for grandmother ayahuasca and what she has taught me. I never felt called to serve the medicine itself. What I felt deeply called to do was help with what comes after.
That calling is where my integration program was born.
This program is offered as a deeper optional pathway for clients who come to me for Somatic Tantra Immersion work and want to go further. The somatic work itself is the foundation: the nervous system cannot integrate what the body has not yet been given the conditions to process. The integration program builds on that foundation with structure, specificity, and sustained support over time.
The program runs four and a half to six months and moves through nine modules at a pace of one every two weeks. It sits alongside the Somatic Tantra Immersion sessions I offer, and for clients who want to go deeper, it is where the most significant and lasting shifts tend to occur. The modules are built around the specific capacities I have found most consistently absent in people who have done substantial ceremony work without corresponding somatic and relational development: reclaiming self-trust through pattern recognition, advanced discernment, emotional literacy, standards for access, and nervous system discernment.
Understanding your pain in elaborate detail is not the same thing as interrupting the pattern that creates it. This work is not designed to help you become more articulate about your suffering while your life stays exactly the same. It is designed to make you more effective inside your own life.
By the end of this program, you will be able to name what is happening while it is happening, not only in retrospect. You will recognize the difference between chemistry and safety, and between familiarity and alignment. You will distinguish longing from truth, and the fantasy bond from actual connection. You will identify self-abandonment in real time and interrupt it before it compounds. You will build and hold standards for who gets proximity to your interior life. You will evaluate repair honestly and stop restoring access based on apology alone.
If you do not interrupt the pattern consciously, you will live it again. If you do this work with honesty and repetition, you do not have to.
If this resonates, I welcome a one-on-one conversation. You can reach me through my profile at Sensaura Sanctuary.
I still respect the mystery of consciousness. I still believe altered states can open doors. I still honor the traditions from which these medicines come, and I hold deep, genuine love for grandmother ayahuasca and everything she has carried me through. All of those years of medicine work, all of those ceremonies, all of that grief and expansion and destabilization and return: I am grateful for every single one. They led me here. They taught me what I needed to learn so I could build the work I now offer. And the most important thing they taught me is this: the real work is not done in ceremony. It is done in the life you return to when the ceremony ends, in every honest choice, in every moment you stay rather than abandon yourself.
The medicine may open the door. Only embodiment walks through it.
If you have been curious about what this kind of work might open for you, I would be honored to hold that space.
I am currently welcoming new clients for Somatic Tantra Immersion™ sessions in the Marina del Rey and Los Angeles area.
If you would like to read more about what to expect in a session with me, I wrote about that here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/what-to-expect-in-a-session-with-me-crystal-clear/
If you’re ready to explore this work with a practitioner, you can view our healer team here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/healers/
If you’re curious about session options, visit our offerings page here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/offerings/
If you’re new and want clarity on how sessions work, our FAQ is here: https://sensaurasanctuary.com/faq/
With gratitude and grace,
Creator of Somatic Tantra Immersion
Extended, guided experiences for discerning clients
Notes
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- Alexis Sanderson, “The Shaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Shaivism during the Early Medieval Period,” in Genesis and Development of Tantrism, ed. Shingo Einoo (Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2009). See also Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
- Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar, eds., Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For ecological concerns and the commercialization of Amazonian plant medicines, see also Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Henrik Jungaberle, eds., The Internationalization of Ayahuasca (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011).
- For the tantric understanding of liberation as immanent rather than transcendent, see David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in Its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy (Boston: Shambhala, 1998).
- Alexis Sanderson, “Shaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” in The World’s Religions, ed. Stewart Sutherland et al. (London: Routledge, 1988), 660-704.
- Jordi Riba et al., “Human Pharmacology of Ayahuasca: Subjective and Cardiovascular Effects, Monoamine Oxidase Inhibition, and Pharmacokinetics,” Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 306, no. 1 (2003): 73-83. For psychological vulnerability and suggestibility in altered states, see also Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- Jose Carlos Bouso et al., “Pharmacology of Ayahuasca Administered in Two Different Doses,” Psychopharmacology 231 (2014): 3531-3541. For contraindications and drug interactions, see also Jordi Riba and Manel J. Barbanoj, “A Pharmacological Update on Ayahuasca,” Psychopharmacology 187, no. 3 (2006): 259-260.
- Glenn H. Shepard Jr. and Henri Ramirez, “Made in Brazil: Human Dispersal of the Domesticated Ayahuasca Vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) in Western Amazonia,” Economic Botany 65, no. 3 (2011): 209-220.
