Integration: Where the Real Work Begins

 I went into this thinking I’d get one transformational week. What I got instead was a starting point.

Ayahuasca doesn’t stop working when the ceremony ends. It keeps going. Most of my healing didn’t happen in the maloca. It happened after.

It really does feel like drinking from a fire hose. Insights come fast—during ceremonies, in your own head, in classes. Months down the road.

Integration was a consistent routine. I started journaling, constantly. I filled three notebooks. If I couldn’t write, I recorded. But more importantly, I made space for it. Every morning for over a month, I practiced yoga with a journal next to the mat, writing whatever came up. Insights, answers, emotions came pouring out. It was difficult to write fast enough.

More insights would pop up throughout the day, and I made notes in my phone.

Every night, I’d sit down and process everything. Put it all together. Then more yoga and breathwork to help me move through the emotions that kept surfacing, let it go so I could sleep.

It has been overwhelming. In a good way, but still overwhelming. Below are some of the bits of myself I unraveled over the past few months. Just the highlights. (For reference, the unedited version was three times longer.)

The Pattern: It Always Goes Back to Childhood

 At the retreat, I noticed a pattern. Someone would share something from ceremony, and the instructor would ask: “When was the first time you felt that way?” And almost every time, it led straight back to childhood. One memory → another → another. A chain reaction. That’s what this work does. It makes you unravel your creation myth—the story you built to survive.

For me, that story was built on one thing: Be the strong one. 

I grew up carrying other people’s emotions. Fear. Anxiety. Instability. I became hypervigilant, anxious, emotionally shut down. I learned not to feel what I felt. Because how dare I, when someone else is suffering? So I became strong—for them.

That identity shaped everything: my relationships, my decisions, my career. It’s probably why I became a nurse. I had to be the one who could handle it. The fixer.

But here’s the problem with being “the strong one”: You don’t know where it ends.

I didn’t know the difference between being afraid of something and something simply not being right for me. I overrode myself. Constantly. I wasn’t just choosing a path—I was trying to prove something: that I was stronger than my past; that I wasn’t like my family; that I could handle anything.

That mindset got me a long way. Thankfully it got me away from home. But it also ran me straight into the ground.

It led to a lot of guilt. Guilt I placed on myself, and guilt put on me by my mother. Guilt for leaving home. Guilt for building a life. Guilt for being okay when other people weren’t. Guilt for not being enough.

Before ayahuasca, for years, I had recurring dreams about being in a hallway with a lot of rooms, but for one reason or another, I couldn’t enter the rooms. Something always physically stopped me from entering. I usually dreamt that I was pinned down by gunfire or rockets, but I needed to get down this hall. My brother Ryan blocked me from going down the hall. I couldn’t get by him. I’ve had these dreams for years, but in the time leading up to my ayahuasca journey, when I began focusing on what I want to resolve, the dreams became more frequent. I was having them every couple of nights. My brother was always there. I thought he was trying to protect me. Ayahuasca showed me that he was blocking me from dealing with whatever was down the hall, behind those doors. I had to deal with my emotions surrounding his suicide before I could deal with anything else. All of that was holding me back. That’s why he was the first thing I dealt with in ceremony.

And I had to go all the way back to childhood to figure out why I felt so guilty about not being able to help him. Yes, I’m the oldest it’s natural to feel responsible. But I felt that responsibility like an adult even when I was a child. I always felt responsible for both of us. I felt his death like a parent. I left him. I left him there to fend for himself. I didn’t stay and protect him.  I failed him. I was selfish for leaving. For getting out and leaving him behind.

I know he made his own choices. Nobody helped me get out. No one but the recruiter. But it was still impossible to let it go all those years.

Between his death and my feelings about Afghanistan, I was buried in guilt. I didn’t feel like I had the right to feel anything at all. Not joy. Not peace. Nothing but guilt, and anger. So much anger.

The Hard Truth About Healing

Here’s something I had to learn the hard way: You can change. You can grow. You can do the work. But the people around you are still where they are.

I came home expecting some kind of breakthrough with my mother. But she was still the same person. The one who didn’t go to therapy or deal with her trauma. But this didn’t mean my vision was incorrect. It just meant that I had to be patient. To meet her where she’s at. And set boundaries with her instead of carrying her anxiety and emotions. Our relationship has actually improved over the past six months.

What I’m learning now is balance. I can love people and still set boundaries. I can show up without carrying everything. I spent my life acting like it was my job to hold everything together—for everyone.

It’s not. People can carry their own weight. And I’m allowed to expect that.

Spirituality

During the ayahuasca ceremony, I felt love with the medicine, not fear. I felt connection, not scolding or power wielded from a force that was bigger than me or above me. It felt like a part of me.

Fortunately for me, one of the few things I figured out early in life is that my spiritual path is just that, my path. Mine alone to discover and walk. Not something that can be dictated to me, especially from a place of fear and control.

I’m healing from religious trauma. Yes trauma. It’s traumatic for a five-year-old to be told constantly they’ll burn in hell. That the devil is coming for them. That kind of messaging doesn’t just bounce off a kid. It sticks. It shows up in nightmares. In sleepless nights. The way it showed up for me until my dad moved out.

Religion was another thing I built a wall against and shut out completely. I grew up with the competing ideologies of my parents. They had the same focus: guilt, unquestionable rules, and sin. And both came with the same consequence—hell. I rejected all of it. Quietly. Became agnostic in my own mind, even if I couldn’t say it out loud.

For a while, I leaned toward Buddhism. It made more sense to me. But over time, I got jaded. Too much hypocrisy in the world. Too much intolerance. I never fully stopped believing in something bigger—but I couldn’t feel it. I had no real anchor.

And honestly, my biggest issue with Christianity, at least the version I was raised in, was this: Jesus didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would want people doing the right thing out of fear. I’d say that out loud, and people would agree… then immediately go right back to talking about hell. Same breath. Never made sense to me. But asking too many questions just got me labeled as “full of sass.”  There was never an actual answer. At least not in my family. Pretty sure I’m right though, based on my Jesus vision in the maloca. I still don’t subscribe to any one religion, but I made my peace with Jesus that night.

The beginning of the end. Finally, Afghanistan

Even though my visions in the maloca didn’t directly take me back to Afghanistan, they went straight to the guilt and anger I’d been carrying for years—about everything. My family. My past. My choices.

One thing I learned in Costa Rica is that letting go of anger doesn’t mean you condone what happened. I can let go of the anger from deployment without agreeing with the outcome. I needed to hear that. But even though I'd figured out why I was stuck, I still hadn't dealt with Afghanistan directly.

After a few weeks of actively focusing on integration, the insights started to taper off. I caught myself thinking, maybe that’s it. Maybe I’d cleared out most of the past. Maybe it was time to go back—do another round and go straight at the PTSD this time. Straight to Afghanistan. At the retreat in Costa Rica, the Colombian ayahuasca was direct. It started showing me Afghanistan very graphically. I was just too tired to follow it through. Maybe I should go to Colombia…

Again, ayahuasca said, “Yeah, we’ll get to that.”

That night, I had a dream.

I was in a house I wasn’t supposed to be in. That was the feeling, like I was trespassing in this house. Then a friend from Kansas, someone I haven’t spoken to in several years, came in and she said, “I wonder what’s behind this wall.”

Then I woke up for a minute, and  I remembered what they told us at the plant medicine center—go toward the scary thing. So I tried. Show me what’s behind the wall. I started getting visuals—kaleidoscopic, dim, unfocused. No. Not that. Show me behind the wall.

Nothing. I fell back asleep without an answer.

The next morning on my yoga mat, I suddenly realized what it meant, what was behind the wall. My dream was taking me back to Kansas, back to college, where I decided to become a nurse and rejoin the military. Back to the reason I became a nurse. Where I defined my purpose. 

I’d bounced through majors in college, nothing sticking. Nothing felt good enough. And if I chose the wrong path, I wouldn’t be good enough. And then there was the guilt. Seeing the wounded veterans at my school, amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasized the guilt I already felt at getting out of the military the first time, during the Iraq war. Like I’d abdicated my duty.

My purpose was to help these people. I’d paid my dues, made it through nursing school, perioperative training, and orientation. I finally got to deploy. And with the way the war ended, ultimately, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. That’s what eats me up. Not just the war. Not just the loss. The futility. The belief that I failed the one thing I set out to do. Another angle for the anger.

I realized that my amputee patient in Kandahar was more than one patient. I remembered him because I locked eyes with him, a brief moment of connection. But he stuck with me in part because he was a representation of everything I was pissed about. He represented all my anger. All the waste of war. And in this case, the pointlessness of it. I hate that it was pointless. It burns inside of me. That’s why I broke that day on GTMO, watching the withdrawal.

I know it doesn’t make sense, but on some level, I feel like I failed him. I feel guilt. Like I caused the damned war. I didn’t feel that way before the withdrawal. I dreamed about him before. But all the anger came later. He was on my mind a lot after the withdrawal.  The guilt was more subtle than the anger. I wrote a letter to him in my journal, to say that I was sorry. I didn’t actually recognize that I felt guilty until I wrote the letter.

So, to summarize, I became a nurse because my childhood made me want to save people, and I failed at the purpose I had set for myself because of global geopolitics. That’s why I couldn’t get over it. It’s all one big cluster – trauma, guilt, anger.

All that came from one dream. Months after I drank the medicine.

The Shift

Six months later, I’ve stopped reacting to everything like it is a threat. I give myself permission to feel things without holding on. I can get angry or have a twinge of guilt, feel it, think about it, let it go. Without spiraling.

My recurring nightmares have stopped.

And maybe most importantly: I’ve stopped confusing suffering with loyalty. Living my life, fully, is not a betrayal of the people I’ve lost or people lost to war. Not living would be.

Ayahuasca isn’t a magic fix, and integration isn’t a moment. It’s a process. The ceremony opens the door. But you still have to walk through it. You have to choose the new path every single day.