Reading · Your Trauma Therapist

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I haven’t posted here in two weeks and I want to tell you where I’ve been, because it’s a big part of why.

I spent the week at Rythmia in Costa Rica going through four ayahuasca ceremonies, and if you follow me on Instagram you probably caught pieces of it already, the video before I left, one from day one, one right after I got home. Those were all like three minutes long though, and honestly this isn’t something I can say in three minutes.

Before I left I told my Instagram followers I wanted to actually focus on myself this week instead of turning it into research for my clients or content for my platform, and I did that. I unplugged, wrote everything by hand, made video journals just for me instead of for anyone watching. And what came out of all of it is a lot more than I know how to squeeze into a caption, which is kind of the whole reason I’m writing this here instead.

So here’s the plan. For the next few weeks I want this to be the place where I actually process this out loud, in a way that doesn’t really fit on a platform built for quick scrolling. Substack lets me slow down and get into the parts of this that deserve more room than an Instagram caption ever could.

I want to write honestly about Rythmia itself, what made me trust the place enough to actually go through with this, and the things about how they run the program that felt like real green flags to me as a clinician.

Cost is getting its own post because it deserves more than a paragraph tucked into something else. There’s more nuance to it than people expect, including some scholarship and shared room options that can bring things down if you’re going solo, so I want to give that its own space rather than rush through it here.

I want to write about the ceremonies themselves too, what I can share of my own experience, what came up for me, the parts that were really hard and the parts I’m still sitting with weeks later. I won’t speak for anyone else who was there, but my own experience is mine to tell and I want to tell it honestly.

And I want to do some actual education around ayahuasca itself, what it is, what it’s physiologically doing, where the myths stop and the facts actually start. There’s a long history here too, ceremonial use in South American traditions that goes back centuries, and I think that context matters a lot more than how this usually gets talked about online.

One thing I want to say clearly before I go further. I have an affiliate partnership with Rythmia and I’ll be linking to them in these posts, and I want you to know that upfront because it matters to me that you know it. I also want to be honest that Rythmia isn’t the only option out there. There are other centers, other facilitators, other ways into this work, and I’d rather you make an informed choice than assume this is the only door available to you. I’m sharing my experience because it’s the one I had and because I genuinely trust the place I went, not because I think it’s the only path worth taking.

I also want to be upfront that ayahuasca itself isn’t the only route to the kind of healing I experienced. So much of what made this week work for me, the nervous system release, getting access to stuck material, the integration afterward, overlaps with modalities I already use and believe in as a clinician. Breathwork, EMDR, Internal Family Systems work, somatic work, even a sustained meditation practice can get you into some of that same territory, just on a slower timeline and through a different door. I’ll probably end up writing a whole post just on that overlap, because I think it might actually be one of the more useful things I can offer here given that I’m trained in both worlds.

None of this is locked in though. If there’s something else you’re curious about, something you’ve been wondering about this whole space or about my experience specifically, just tell me. I’d rather write toward what you actually want to know than guess at it from over here.

So consider this my open invitation. Drop a comment with whatever you want me to get into over the next few weeks, whether that’s about the retreat, the medicine itself, what shifted for me personally, or whether something like this is even worth considering for you. I’ll do my best to answer as much of it as I can right here.

I still don’t really know how to describe this week. I’m too inside of it still. But I wanted you to know where I’ve been, and that I’m not disappearing again, I’m just bringing this conversation somewhere it can actually breathe.

More soon.

I Did Ayahuasca, And I’m Completely Changed

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