40 Days in Peru: Ayahuasca, Chronic Illness, and Turmoil (Part I)
The Long Descent into Illness and the Unraveling of Self
In 2016, I attended an ayahuasca retreat in Peru for 40 days, consisting of 18 ayahuasca ceremonies. I deliberately chose a retreat center with minimal Western influence, allowing me the option to stay for an extended experience. The driving force behind such a prolonged retreat was one I had yet to fully recognize, pushing me to eradicate my wounds and my needs—one of my attempts at self-erasure masked as spiritual curiosity and self-growth. I came back blissed, calm, and serene, yet profoundly disconnected and disembodied.
During this period of my life, I had built a dedicated meditation practice, meditating at least two hours a day, increasing to three or four hours toward the end of my committed practice. This helped sustain the afterglow from the ayahuasca retreat for some time. Despite the decade of experiences I’ve accumulated with classic tryptamines and research chemicals, this was the first time I had undergone such a concentrated series of mind-altering experiences in such a short period of time.
I remember a moment with my partner, whom I began dating during this prolonged afterglow state. As we lay cuddled in bed, she asked me what my needs were in a relationship. Warmly and sincerely, I responded, “I have no needs”, accompanied by a smile that reflected genuine contentment with my response. I had found what felt like a solution to the immutable discomfort, dread, and futility I had long tried to ward off with countless strategies and coping mechanisms since adolescence. If enough of myself was absent, so too would be my pain, my history, and my need for real human relationships. Then I would never have to depend on another person, never have to feel my own needs or the unacknowledged pain of my past. I equated my lack of relational needs with stability—a version of “stability” I believed would keep me from ever being hurt in a relationship again.
But the “stability” I believed I had found was delicate, more like a temporary suspension away from my fragility. About a year into this newfound “stability,” I became ill from a combination of food poisoning and altitude sickness during a backpacking trip in India, shortly after ending my romantic relationship. From that moment on, my body and immune system became frail, and over the following months a cascade of symptoms emerged—gradually worsening until they took over my life for the next few years. My digestion broke down, leaving me with severe and persistent bloating, indigestion, dehydration, and nausea. My nervous system became erratic, cycling through vertigo, nerve pain, temperature swings, and muscle aches. And mentally, I spiraled into cognitive decline, fatigue, panic attacks, depression, and a steady undercurrent of suicidal ideation. I felt trapped in my body, sleeping an average of 12 hours a day, as I struggled to keep my weight on.
I sought out over ten medical professionals in search of relief. I experimented with various diets, supplements, detoxes, Eastern medicine, and Western medications and medical evaluations. Each attempt felt like reaching for a lifeline, but every intervention seemed to tighten the grip of the illness instead of loosening it. I had access to little emotional life beyond moments of panic and the relentless weight of hopelessness, isolation, and confusion—all of it arose without any accompanying memories to explain why, which made the experience even more disorienting. Although I was familiar with trauma and the symptoms of it, I remained estranged from my own history and never saw myself as someone who had grown up in anything resembling a traumatic environment.
For years, I had immersed myself in psychedelic experiences, meditation retreats, and extended backpacking trips, chasing mystical experiences and striving to transcend the self. The illness brought all of that momentum to a halt, rooting me in a life I had spent years floating above. I was suddenly stuck at home, trapped in a body I had long been detached from.
I had spent countless hours developing a spiritual identity—consuming lectures, books, and practices, doing everything I could to be compassionate and self-less. As the chronic illness persisted, that identity began to collapse, replaced by the emerging identity of someone ill—a struggle familiar to many living with chronic conditions. This ushered in a period of deep nihilism and quiet rage at the world for betraying an implicit social contract I subconsciously made: I would sacrifice the self in service of others, as long as I was cared for in return. This pattern—rooted in my early relationship with my caregiver—was now replaying itself with the cosmos, a safer proxy for the original wound, because my fragile system could not bear to confront the reality of it directly. The collapse of my spiritual persona felt like losing the scaffolding that had kept me upright, even if that scaffolding had been built on avoidance.
A few particular moments stand out during this period of my life. There was a peculiar psychological pain in the predictability and stability of my physical suffering leading me to find relief when the pain intensified, because at least there was movement, a sense of change, breaking the psychological inertia that had drained all feeling of aliveness. Before falling ill, I ate simply for sustenance, as part of my spiritual practice—not for pleasure. But when I became sick, that choice was taken from me. For a long period, all I could eat was porridge; even music sounded flat and uninviting. I had spent years prioritizing self growth and spiritual pursuits over actively nurturing my long-term friendships and enjoying the simple pleasure of life, and suddenly, the things I had once deprioritized—relationships, food, music, movement—were painfully, vividly important, illuminated by the limits imposed on me by my illness. It was the first time I remember feeling the need to lean onto others as my pain was becoming unbearable to carry alone, although not able to express or receive it in any meaningful way outside of letting others know of my symptoms.
At a moment of fragility, the food poisoning and altitude sickness unspooled layers of unresolved pain my body had long carried, initially manifesting as physical symptoms, autonomic nervous system dysregulation, and immune system dysfunction over the first 2 years after my health incident in India. In an attempt to find relief from these persistent physical symptoms, I returned to solo psychedelic work I had practiced previously. While this offered fleeting access to the emotions beneath the surface, one session in particular triggered a chronic state of destabilization1 and decompensation2, spanning the next couple of years: torrents of tears and uncontainable emotion, terror, convulsions, eruptive rage, IARs3, fragmented memories, and an unending loop of fear with no apparent solution. This psychological unraveling felt like the emotional counterpart to the physical collapse that had preceded it, both rooted in wounds I had never truly touched. This marked the beginning of a prolonged period of profound emotional and psychological turmoil that I will detail in a future piece, as buried traumatic material began surfacing alongside the gradual abatement of my chronic illness.
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1 Destabilization: A temporary disruption in a person’s psychological, emotional, or physiological equilibrium, often triggered by stress, trauma, or intense experiences.
2 Decompensation: The failure of previously effective coping mechanisms, resulting in a significant decline in mental, emotional, or physical functioning.
3 IAR (Involuntary Autonomic Response): a spontaneous, physical movement directed by the nervous system that enacts an incomplete defense or trauma-related response—movements the body was unable to fully carry out at the time of the original experience, or reenactments of unresolved trauma expressed physically.
