Ironically, Ayahuasca in itself is a huge cause of anxiety for many people. The journey with these powerful plants can seem daunting and foreboding.

Like going on a scary roller coaster, you’re often afraid beforehand but feel exhilarated and a sense of accomplishment afterwards.

Ayahuasca is a healer of trauma and illuminates the path to closing our trauma loops. It heals the mind and reorganises the neurological pathways allowing for more healthy connections. Sometimes reshuffling and reorganising our thoughts altogether.

Ayahuasca works to diagnose issues on an extraordinary level. When the medicine is consumed, it enters your body at a cellular level. Reading your DNA, your memories, your ancestry. It finds the energetic patterns that are out of balance within your system and helps to purge them from the body. It cleanses memories and assists in closing trauma loops living in the nervous system. 

Grounding Part 2

Grounding is an essential part of integration process post any modality of energetic work. Our bodies and minds benefit from feeling the repetition of the mundane - the movement and sensations in our bodies, the physical contact with others. If we always want to escape and live in the ether, we are running away from the work of what it is to live the life of a well balanced human.

Here we share some very practical tips on what this could look like.

Grounding Part 1

Our minds play an important role in discerning what is delusional and what is actually guidance when working with plant medicines. It is a fine line between taming our egos only to gain a spiritual ego, as we experience the vastness that these plants offer our consciousness. Grounding back into this reality is fundamental to any energetically opening work.

The sacred mirror that Ayahuasca shows us is often the thing that most scares us about working with this medicine. There is an innate resistance/protection in us all to fully see our true selves and not just the persona we believe ourselves to be. 

Mama Aya helps us to meet those parts, with love and grace, for when we have greater understanding and compassion for ourselves we can embrace it all and show up in the world in all our flawed yet beautiful completeness. 

I really wish this had never even happened but it has. The world of spiritual practice has merged with social media and the results are confusing at best but if we’re being honest it’s mostly a hellish cringe fest.

I spoke about this a year ago, asking that ceremony be kept sacred and not filmed or photographed to be used for social media.

My point being that ceremony is carried by our intention, and if you are filming it, the intention changes to attention automatically.

Neil Kirwan, co-founder of Sowa Soma speaks about the afterglow of the experience having gone as we get into the mundane flow of life again. Months 1-3 (and beyond) are where those lessons learnt are put to the test. This usually comes with some mistakes and failings, but try not to be too hard on yourself. This is all part of bringing more awareness into our lives, choosing not to repeat old patterns and behaviours. 

As more and more people come to Ayahuasca, an estimated 4m people (ICEERS study) around the world have experienced the potent Amazonian brew, so too has plant medicine interest piqued.

Neil Kirwan, Ayahuascero and co-founder of Sowa Soma talks about what happens 1-2 weeks following any energetic work, including Ayahuasca ceremonies or retreats.

Screening participants before and ayahuasca ceremony is an essential part of our practice.

What happens during an ayahuasca ceremony? Knowing the general structure of how a ceremony works goes a long way to creating a sense safety for your first ayahuasca ceremony.