Ayahuasca in the Amazon: Releasing Lifelong Anger and Bipolar Depression

In 2016, Jen and I spent two weeks deep in the Peruvian Amazon at the Temple of the Way of Light. We took part in eight Ayahuasca ceremonies guided by five Shipibo shamans. I had never done anything like it before. Twenty years earlier, in the middle of my anxiety and OCD, I would never have considered it. My left-brain needed proof, data and certainty before it would allow me to try anything new. By 2016 I had learned enough to be sceptical yet still take action and see what happened.

Ayahuasca is a plant medicine used by indigenous cultures in South America. It is legal in Peru. The brew contains DMT and places you in a deep trance state where the usual left-brain commentary goes offline and deeper material can surface. I am not recommending anyone take it. I am simply sharing what happened to me and what shifted as a result.

For most of my life I had carried two persistent problems that never fully resolved through ordinary therapy and self-work. One was sudden eruptions of anger that had been present since early childhood. The other was a low-level depression that started around the age of thirteen. I had learned to manage both reasonably well, but every few months the anger would still spill out, especially around people I loved, and the depression would hover, waiting for an excuse to return. I could never give a clear reason for either. Something simply got triggered and took over.

During the ceremonies the medicine repeatedly took me back into forgotten or rewritten memories. In one of the early sessions I found myself as a four-year-old standing outside a locked bathroom. My grandmother was inside with my baby brother. In the original story I had carried for decades, she had rejected me. In the memory that surfaced, the truth was the opposite: I had been in a violent rage, throwing toys at them, and she had locked the door to protect them from me. The realisation hit hard. All the trapped energy connected to that event and the false story I had built around it came up and out in a long purge. The shamans worked with me while it happened.

Similar releases occurred across the following ceremonies — school memories, relationship rejections my ego had rewritten as amicable endings, moments of deceit and loss I had completely blanked. Each time the conscious story changed and the held energy moved. After six ceremonies I felt lighter. The unprovoked anger episodes stopped completely. There was simply nothing left to be triggered.

On the penultimate night I took a larger dose and fully surrendered. What followed was the most intense release of the whole retreat. Waves of dense energy left my body for what felt like an hour while the shamans worked. At the end of it something fundamental shifted. I said out loud, “It’s gone.” From that moment the depression that had been with me for nearly forty years was simply no longer there. Not managed. Not minimised. Absent.

The final ceremony was different. Instead of trauma, I experienced an overwhelming sense of connection with nature and then an expansion of awareness that went far beyond anything my ordinary mind could map. I came back from that night with a quiet certainty that there is more going on than left-brain logic can measure, and a deeper trust in both myself and the wider intelligence of life.

I am not claiming this is the only way, or even the best way, for everyone. My own course is built around finding and releasing the same kinds of hidden stories and trapped energy without plant medicines. What the experience showed me clearly is that many of the beliefs we carry about ourselves are based on incomplete or rewritten information. The ego hides pain to protect us, then leaves us trying to make sense of life with only half the data. Calmness often arrives not by solving the old “why” but by releasing what has been held, changing the story, and stepping forward as the person we actually want to be now.

You will probably never get a complete rational explanation for every pattern you carry. That is fine. Process the charge, update the story, and focus on the life you want to live from here.

The full video is inside the course.