I'm struggling to interpret my most recent ayahuasca journey and I'm hoping someone here has experienced something similar.
For context, I started on this path about six years ago, beginning with mushroom journeys. I sat for my first ayahuasca ceremony four years ago, my second about a year ago, and my most recent just a few weeks back. All were two-night ceremonies. Each of my previous experiences moved me in a consistent direction—toward spirituality, an esoteric way of seeing the world, a genuine felt sense of oneness and connection to God/spirit, a belief in energy and magic. Those shifts were sometimes hard in their own ways, but they always felt like I was headed in the "right" direction.
My last ceremony was different.
On the first night, after the ceremony had officially ended, I felt myself moving into what I can only describe as another reality stream, like I was sliding into psychosis. And I had the clear understanding that if I let it happen, if I went there, I would never come back from it. I had to find ways to tether myself to this reality; I looked at photos of my family, my dog. I repeated the mantra "I choose this life" over and over. The anxiety and paranoia were extreme. Eventually after a few hours, I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up the anxiety had lifted. I felt calm and relaxed. If anything, I felt like that experience had shown me something real about the nature of anxiety itself, how thoughts can wrap around you and constrict, how it can feel inescapable.
The second night was mostly positive. I had some big emotional releases around family, understanding the circle of life, motherhood, and my own desire to have kids.
Since coming home, I've noticed changes that seem mostly positive. The food noise and cravings that I've struggled with for most of my life are almost completely gone. I'm less emotional, less reactive. Sometimes I almost feel "numb" compared to my prior emotional state.
That numbness extends beyond just emotions, it feels like something bigger has been blunted in me. It's not that I no longer believe in energy or spirituality or magic, I still do but it's different now. It's more intellectual, like I understand that's how the world is but I don't "see" it all around me the way I did before. The extra layer of meaning that had been painted over ordinary life for the last 6 years has suddenly lifted, and everything feels flat and normal now. If I'm being honest, I feel closer to who I was before any of this started and less like the person I'd been becoming.
What I keep coming back to is this: was what happened on that first night—what felt so clearly like psychosis—actually just my ego? And by listening to it, by choosing to grip this reality so hard, did I strengthen it at the expense of everything that had been opening up in me? Did I close a door I'd spent 6 years walking through?
Or is the medicine somehow guiding me back to "real life"? I feel so returned to normal that I'm even considering going back to the kind of corporate life I walked away from three years ago.
I'm trying to trust the medicine, I've always felt guided in ways I couldn't totally understand in the moment, but it's hard not to feel like this is some sort of reversion or like a test I failed by not surrendering. I'm wondering if anyone has been through something similar and what came of it??