Ayahuasca, Hidden Stories and the Emotionally Energetic Release of What Was Never Fully Seen

For most of my adult life I approached recovery through careful observation, logical frameworks and deliberate practice. That work produced real progress. Anxiety lessened. Control loosened. Yet two patterns remained stubborn: occasional eruptions of anger that still startled those closest to me, and a low-grade depression that never fully left, only retreated when managed carefully. Something deeper still needed addressing, and no amount of left-brain analysis had reached it.

In 2016 my partner Jen inherited a small sum after her mother’s death. She chose to spend it on three weeks in Peru, two of them deep in the Amazon, participating in eight Ayahuasca ceremonies with Shipibo shamans. Her reasoning was simple and direct: the work I had done had taken me a long way, but something older and more hidden still needed to move. I agreed to go with an open yet sceptical mind. I was not looking for a miracle. I was willing to test whether nature itself might facilitate what deliberate psychological methods had not fully completed.

Ayahuasca is a plant brew containing DMT, used for generations by indigenous Amazonian cultures. In the West it is often framed as a powerful psychedelic. In the jungle it is treated as medicine — a substance that temporarily softens the ego’s grip so that material held outside ordinary awareness can surface. The experience is not entertainment. It is frequently uncomfortable, involves intense physical purging, and requires a willingness to meet whatever arises without the usual mental defences.

What emerged for me was not abstract insight. It was specific, previously inaccessible memory.

In one of the early ceremonies I found myself back as a four-year-old. My grandmother was holding my younger brother. I was in a full rage, throwing toys at them. She locked them in the bathroom for protection — not from some external threat, but from me. The story I had carried for decades was the opposite: that she had rejected me, that something was wrong with me, that I was unlovable. The ego had rewritten the event to protect a fragile sense of self. The original rage, the subsequent guilt, and the lifelong sense of separation had remained lodged in the body as unprocessed charge.

When the accurate memory surfaced, the energy that had been held for forty-six years moved. It came out as violent vomiting, shaking, and waves of heat. The shamans worked with it through song and presence. When it finished, something fundamental had shifted. The chronic, unexplained anger that had still occasionally erupted simply stopped. There was no longer anything left to be triggered in that particular way.

Later ceremonies brought other cover stories into the light. A relationship I had believed ended amicably revealed itself as a clear rejection; the pain of that rejection, and the subsequent crisis the other person experienced, had been edited out of conscious memory. A childhood event involving deceit left a physical imprint — a long-standing sinus restriction that released the moment the true memory returned. Each time the pattern was the same: the protective personality had hidden the original emotional impact and replaced it with a more manageable narrative. The body had continued to carry the charge.

The most striking release came in the penultimate ceremony. After descending through what felt like the floors of a building into an underground space, an intense stream of energy left me over a prolonged period. The shamans encouraged it fully. When it ended, the depression that had shadowed me since adolescence was simply gone. Not managed. Not minimised. Absent. I cannot prove what that energy was. My left brain has theories. What I know from direct experience is that something that had felt like an internal parasitic weight was no longer present, and it has not returned.

The final ceremony moved in the opposite direction. Instead of trauma, there was expansion. Awareness enlarged until the sense of separate self dissolved into a field of connection that included the jungle, the planet, and something far larger. Knowledge arrived that felt precise and ordered, though most of it could not be retained in ordinary language afterwards. What remained was a quieter, more reliable trust in the intelligence of the wider system — what I have come to call the Godliverse — and a reduced need for the left brain to demand proof before allowing experience.

None of this requires anyone else to take the same path. Ayahuasca is not a recommendation; it is one person’s account of what happened when the usual filters were temporarily lowered. The practical value lies in what the experience demonstrated about the mind’s protective mechanisms. The ego does not only generate anxious thoughts in the present. It also edits the past, hides painful material, and maintains cover stories that feel true because they have never been seriously examined. Those hidden charges continue to influence mood, reactivity and physical symptoms long after the original events.

The methods taught throughout this series — careful self-observation, trauma-release meditation, values clarification, exposure work, and the deliberate starving of dramatic mental loops — aim at the same territory without substances. They are slower. They require sustained attention. They work. The Amazon experience simply showed, in concentrated form, how much material can remain outside ordinary awareness and how thoroughly the body participates in holding it.

What changed most was not a set of beliefs about plants or shamans. It was the lived recognition that many of the stories I had treated as solid facts about myself and my history were incomplete or inverted. Once those stories loosened, the emotional and energetic load they carried had permission to leave. Anger no longer needed an outlet because the reservoir had emptied. Depression no longer needed management because its substrate was gone.

The wider implication is straightforward. Recovery is not only about changing present-moment thinking. It also involves a willingness to meet what the protective mind has hidden, whether that meeting happens through disciplined inner work, skilled therapy, or, for some, carefully held plant medicine. The goal is the same: to stop living inside partially true narratives, to discharge what no longer needs to be carried, and to step into a more accurate, less defended relationship with life as it actually is.

That is a right-brain movement as much as a left-brain one. It requires the courage to experience rather than merely analyse, and the humility to accept that some of what we have believed about ourselves may not be the full picture. When those conditions are met, the system often reorganises itself in ways that pure reasoning cannot predict.

I am not suggesting you take Ayahuasca – but I am pointing to how we do have trapped trauma in our bodies, and in video 58 of The Calmness in Mind Process, I discuss ways you can help yourself to vent it out from yourself.