What I Asked For, and What I Was Shown
Before both of my Peru retreats, I wrote about what I hoped to explore and what I wanted to heal. I hadn’t really thought about comparing the two years until recently, but when I went back and read what I wrote before my first retreat in 2025 and then what I wrote before going back this year, it was kind of amazing to me how directly both experiences met what I was asking for, and also how much the questions themselves changed in a year.
What I Was Asking for in 2025
In 2025, my intentions were huge and pretty wide open. I wanted to know who I was when I wasn’t organizing myself around who I thought I was supposed to be. I wanted to feel more peace, joy and energy. I wanted to feel supported by the universe and the people in my life. I wanted to feel loved. I wanted to treat myself as sacred and tend to myself gently and lovingly. I wanted to understand the mission of my soul and what I was here to do, and I remember specifically writing that I wanted to live after the healing, to step into doing and creating and offering and actually living my life instead of always feeling like I was still trying to fix myself before my life could begin.
I also wanted to explore my powerful, wise, sexual and sensual self. I wanted to heal the parts of me that felt ugly, unworthy, small or insignificant. I wanted to stop abandoning myself for crumbs of love or approval and stop pushing love away before I could be hurt. I wanted to become someone who was “impeccably safe for myself,” who could speak my desires and boundaries and be loved and supported without depletion. Reading all of that now, there is almost something sweet about how much I was asking for at once.
And then I got to Peru. Even before the retreat started, so much of what I was asking for was already happening. I was traveling alone in a country I had never been to, navigating airports and taxis and hotels and train stations and cities where I didn’t speak the language very well. I was getting overwhelmed and scared and exhausted and then figuring out the next thing anyway.
In Cusco, I remember being intimidated about even leaving my room at first because I wasn’t sure if I could walk around without getting lost. Then I did it. I found a restaurant and came back and even remembered the route without looking at my phone the whole time. The next day I somehow walked more than 12,000 steps at almost 12,000 feet of elevation and ended up at Sacsayhuamán completely exhausted, lying on the earth because I didn’t think I could keep going. I remember praying, Help me, and staying there until I felt like I could move again.
The message I wrote down there said, among other things, “There is literally no rush. Go slow, breathe deep and long, your whole body was made for this.” That became one of the repeating messages of the whole trip: go slow, breathe, receive help, there is no rush.
Being Shown That Love Was Already There
Then I got to Munay Sonqo and had my first ayahuasca ceremony. The first thing that happened was that my grandmother Helen came to me and, without saying anything, started pouring an enormous amount of love into me. Down my throat, into my body, filling me with it. I understood that this was the moment where I was supposed to stop resisting and receive all of that love. I remember understanding so clearly that it was mine. I didn’t have to earn it or convince anyone to give it to me. I couldn’t lose it.
There was also a woman near me who was whimpering for much of the ceremony, and at some point I understood that she was me. I was that whimpering child. Instead of being embarrassed by her or wanting her to stop, I spent time loving her, telling her she was my precious baby. There was this whole experience of mother and grandmother and daughter and ancestor, and understanding that I could mother and grandmother myself.
At another point the medicine was so intense that I felt physically pinned down to the floor, and I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make it easier. The answer kept being the same: breathe in and breathe out. That was my job. Take care of my body. Breathe in. Breathe out. Let the medicine do its work. There was something so simple about it, and obviously something I am still learning.
I also remember going outside and seeing the mountains and the stars and having this feeling that the stars saw me and I saw them, the mountain saw me and I saw the mountain, and the connection and love and attention and validation I wanted were everywhere around me. That experience went even deeper the next day during San Pedro.
My heart felt incredibly open and expansive. Maestro Hamilton talked about everything being a being rather than an object, about seeing a flower and saying hello instead of standing apart from it and evaluating its beauty, and one of the things he said that has stayed with me ever since was, “There will never be a single reason in the entire cosmos to close my heart.”
Later that night I woke up and went outside because I had heard there would be a meteor shower. I lay by the pool looking at the southern sky and saw four shooting stars. The message I wrote down from the stars said, “We are relatives. We are always here. When you see us and when you do not. We are still here.” Looking at that now, I can see how similar it is to the message from my grandmother. The love is here even when I don’t feel it. The stars are here even when I can’t see them. The relationship doesn’t disappear because I am not receiving constant evidence of it. I don’t think I understood then how important that was going to become.
The Lessons Were Already Beginning
There were other things happening at the same time that are interesting to me now. I was very aware of Maestro Hamilton. I had known about his work for close to twenty years, and I was interested in him and wanted him to like me and be interested in me. I noticed his awareness of me. I noticed when he called me “soul sister.” I noticed when there was warmth and when there was awkwardness. But I was also noticing myself noticing.
I wrote that I felt a healthy hesitation and a desire to stay grounded in myself. I remember thinking, I’m here to experience the medicine. I’m here to have my own experience. That seems important now because I think I was already beginning to practice something that became a much more explicit intention this year.
In my second ayahuasca ceremony in 2025, there was a woman in front of me having a very difficult experience. She kept crying out and asking if she was alive and asking to leave. Part of me wanted to get up and help her, but I knew that wasn’t my job. So I stayed on my mat. I sent her love and reassurance from where I was, but I didn’t make myself responsible for her experience.
That is almost comically on the nose when I compare it to one of the intentions I brought into Peru this year, which was to heal the part of me that experiences caring as responsibility, especially with my parents. I wrote before this year’s retreat that I wanted to learn how to be present, loving and useful without making myself responsible for things no human being can control: aging, illness, loss, other people’s choices and time. Apparently ayahuasca started teaching me that one the year before.
There was another moment in 2025 after San Pedro when I tried to get my laptop and do some work. I had just spent all day in this beautiful expanded state, feeling my heart open, and almost immediately I started thinking about clients and productivity and getting things done. Then I caught myself and realized that working was almost a way of shutting the experience down and returning to my normal self, the part of me that believes I always need to be accomplishing something.
Again, I look at what I wrote before going back this year: “I want to understand where I’m still operating from the belief that I have to figure everything out, hold everything together, anticipate everything, fix everything or do everything myself.” I was already seeing it. But I was not done with any of it.
After my second ceremony in 2025, I wrote down a long list of things I wanted help healing and things I desired. I asked for help healing my feeling of being alone in the world, my self-consciousness, my insecurity, my body, my sleep, and my attraction to unavailable men. Then, in the same list, I asked for a partner by my side who would love me, support me, hold me, understand me, listen to me, treat me like a queen and co-create a beautiful life with me.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with that desire. I still think it sounds pretty nice. But I find it fascinating to read now, because a year later, my question was no longer primarily, How do I get the loving partnership I want? It had become something different.
The Question Changed in 2026
In 2026, I wrote: “I want to explore what it actually means to live from the understanding that love is already available to me.” The word actually feels very important. The year before, I had been shown that love was available to me in this enormous, unmistakable, psychedelic way. My grandmother poured it into me. The stars told me they were always there. The mountains saw me. My heart opened under San Pedro until I felt connected to everything.
Then I went home, and I discovered all the places where I still didn’t live as though any of that were true. I still organized myself around being chosen. I still confused another person’s availability with my worth. I still had places where I abandoned myself when I was afraid of losing someone. I still became attached to stories about what particular connections meant. I could know spiritually that love was everywhere and still become dysregulated when one particular person stopped attending to me in the way I wanted.
So this year I went back with much more specific questions. What happens if I stop organizing myself around being chosen? What happens if I can experience love, attraction, longing, intimacy and attachment without immediately needing those feelings to become a particular kind of relationship? What happens if I let relationships reveal themselves to me instead of trying to make them become something? How do I love people deeply while continuing to belong to myself?
This year felt much less like being shown some enormous new truth and much more like being put directly into situations where I had to practice what I already claimed to know.
Before I even got to Blue Morpho, I went to this enormous ceiba tree outside Iquitos, and the message I received from it was: “You are this strong, this tall, this grounded. Your branches go this high and your roots go this deep, your lungs are this expansive, your bones this solid. Be this magnificent and immovable in your love and your intention for your life.”
That word immovable has stayed with me. Not immovable as in stubborn or closed. Immovable in my belonging to myself.
Watching My Mind Around Love
Then I went into the retreat and, again, one of the strongest threads was love. There were moments when I experienced enormous love in connection with Maestro Hamilton and his presence. There were moments where my mind did what it has always done around love and intimacy and started watching for meaning. But this time, I was also watching my mind.
At one point Shiri came into the ceremony space, and Maestro Hamilton greeted her affectionately. Of course I noticed. I notice everything. But what became interesting wasn’t really their relationship. It was my mind around their relationship and around my own experience of love.
I had specifically asked before the retreat what it would be like to experience love without immediately needing that love to become a particular kind of relationship. Then there I was, experiencing love, watching love, watching my own thoughts about love, and slowly beginning to understand that maybe love can simply be love. Maybe something can be intimate and profound and emotionally significant and life-changing without it needing to turn into romance or partnership or exclusivity or a future. Maybe I don’t have to use love as evidence.
That understanding has continued unfolding since I came home, especially in the way I’ve been thinking about Micah. I have had experiences with him over the last several years that have felt incredibly intimate and loving and profound. For a long time, I think part of me tried to understand those experiences by putting them into a romantic framework because romance was the category I had for that kind of intensity. I am beginning to understand that I don’t necessarily have to do that. Something can be love and not need to become a relationship. Something can be real without needing to become permanent. Something can matter enormously without having to mean what I once thought it meant. That is a very different place for me.
Staying With What I Feel
I also asked this year to heal my relationship with sadness, disappointment and uncertainty. I wrote that I had sometimes treated difficult feelings as evidence that something had gone terribly wrong, and that if loving someone hurt, I wanted to get rid of the relationship or the person or the feeling.
Then I had my second ceremony. It was loud. Men were laughing and talking. I was irritated and judgmental. I went outside. I came back inside. My body started doing its own strange thing and I ended up in cat-cow over my bucket. I felt this huge jaguar or puma strength in me. And by the end of the ceremony I was also heartbroken.
It wasn’t neat, and it wasn’t the kind of beautiful mystical experience I might have chosen. But nothing actually went wrong. I was angry and overwhelmed and powerful and heartbroken, and I stayed with myself. I didn’t have to turn those feelings into a conclusion. That feels important.
I Don’t Have to Try to Be Sexy
Before the retreat I also wrote that I wanted to heal the belief that being loved required me to become someone lovable. I wrote about all of the ways I had tried to be beautiful enough, easy enough, desirable enough, generous enough, accommodating enough, interesting enough, sexually appealing enough and emotionally undemanding enough. The beautiful dinner, the clean house, the fresh sheets, the perfectly cared-for body, all of it looking effortless while underneath I was paddling furiously.
Somewhere through all of this, this little sentence became incredibly meaningful to me: I don’t have to try to be sexy.
There is so much freedom in that. I can be sensual because I am sensual. I can be sexual because I am sexual. I can enjoy being desired. I can want touch and intimacy. But I don’t have to construct a version of myself designed to produce love.
In 2025, one of my intentions was to explore my powerful, wise, sexual and sensual self. In 2026, the question became whether I could inhabit that self without using her to secure attachment. Those feel like two stages of the same lesson.
The same is true of love. In 2025, I asked to feel loved and supported. This year I asked what happens when I stop requiring someone else’s behavior to prove that love exists. In 2025, I learned that I could receive help. This year I asked what it means to stop taking responsibility for everything. In 2025, I asked to become someone who was impeccably safe for myself. This year I started asking what becomes possible once I trust that I am.
It’s Safe for Me to Love
A few days after I got home from Peru this year, during Mystery School, I had this realization during a guided meditation: It’s safe for me to love.
That surprised me, because I think for a very long time I have tried to make love safe by controlling what happens after I feel it. If I love someone, do they love me? How much? What does it mean? Am I special? Am I chosen? Where is this going? Is this going to disappear?
Maybe that isn’t where the safety comes from. Maybe the safety is me. Maybe it’s safe for me to love because I can love someone and still belong to myself, because I can open my heart and not abandon myself and experience something beautiful without immediately trying to secure its continuation. I can let another person be exactly who they are. I can let a relationship be exactly what it is. I can be disappointed. I can long for something. I can receive love when it is there. I can notice when it is not being offered in the form that I want. And I can remain me.
What I Think I Was Really Asking
When I look back at the two years, I don’t feel like I asked for things and then ayahuasca handed me the answers. It feels more like I asked questions and then life kept putting me inside them.
In 2025, I was shown love in these huge, beautiful ways. My grandmother poured it into me. I loved the whimpering child. The mountains and stars saw me. San Pedro opened my heart. I began learning to receive help, to breathe, to go slowly, to stay on my own mat and not make somebody else’s experience my responsibility. Then I went home and spent a year finding all the places where I still didn’t quite believe what I had been shown.
So I came back in 2026 asking something harder: What does it actually look like to live as though this is true?
I don’t think I’m done answering that. I hope I’m never completely done answering it. But I think I understand the question much better now.
