The first time I drank ayahuasca, I was a vehement atheist and I left the ceremony a spiritual being. That's not hyperbole — it's just what happened. I went from empathic misanthrope to feeling genuine love for all as one, from workaholic to someone who protected her mornings fiercely, from someone who believed scarcity was just the nature of things to someone who had seen, viscerally, that it was an illusion. The world cracked open and I walked through.

But the thing that changed my life most wasn't the visions, it was the community. After a lifetime of isolation, of a few close friends scattered across the country, of work-based friendships that were real but always had the job as their underlying tie, suddenly there were people who spoke the same language I'd always spoken internally but never said out loud. That community was everything to me.

When the founder of Zenhuasca died, I couldn't let it fall apart. A synchronicity led me to Peru for training, and when I came back I began leading ceremonies. Those were halcyon days — holding space for people week after week, watching the medicine do what only the medicine can do, feeling genuinely useful in a way I never had before.

And then Covid hit and the slow unraveling began. I held on — Taurean stubbornness is real — keeping the physical space alive as the original facilitators gradually moved on and new ones came through, until by early 2022 I had no peers left. I had people I was training, integral people, but no one who could share the weight of it equally.

But the horrible dichotomy of healing work eventually came into full view: we were offering low-cost ceremonies, rent needed to be paid, and somewhere along the way my own self-care quietly disappeared. I was keeping my own business alive, keeping the community alive, keeping everything spinning, and there was nothing left over.

The medicine kept pointing at it. Iboga showed me the earth bound in chains and told me I needed to unchain myself to be part of something larger. San Pedro told me plainly that to get where I was going I would have to let go of literally everything that came before.

I heard it. I just couldn't do it yet. It's one of the hardest patterns there is — seeing the illusion of scarcity clearly while still being unable to release the thing that's keeping you financially safe, even when that thing is keeping you from your actual purpose. The pattern was so deeply ingrained that when it came up as a contract in my Past Life Regression training, I consciously chose not to break it.

The universe, it turns out, is patient but persistent. In my first Future Life Progression session I was shown myself on a picnic blanket with an infant boy. That was August 2022. By March 2023 I was leading my final Zenhuasca ceremony, having discovered I was pregnant right before that night began. The second night I didn't drink, and then that was it — no more ceremonies, no one ready to take over, the space closed, the house sold, everything released in the span of six months.

The adjustment was genuinely hard. Patterns I thought had been resolved turned out to depend on the structure that phase of life had provided — the routine, the community, the sense of service. Strip that away and what was underneath became visible: external solutions that had been managing root issues, not resolving them.

But something had been quietly growing through all of it. Toward the end of my time with Zenhuasca I had begun offering Past Life Regression sessions to the community, and what I was witnessing was amazing. People were getting to the root of issues in a single session that ayahuasca had been circling for months, sometimes years. They were calling back parts of themselves that ceremony had illuminated but couldn't retrieve. They were breaking patterns that had been clearing and returning, finally for good.

I still miss leading ceremony. I miss using my voice to channel the plants, the singing, the energy of the room, the work that's there to do. But keeping all those plates spinning was keeping me from being able to offer the deeper work — the kind that doesn't just show you what needs to change, but actually completes the change at the root.

That's what I'm here to do now.

Explore the work at spiritawakening.us or find me on Instagram @spiritawakeningus

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