My second plant medicine journey asked something different of me — something deeper, more intimate, more terrifying in its honesty. I knew going in that I would be asking Grandmother Ayahuasca for guidance… but I did not yet know the price of that prayer.

I asked her to show me how to navigate my heart.
I asked her to help me open my second chakra.
I asked her to soften me.

And I also knew:
I wasn’t looking forward to meeting her again in the way I had two nights before.
It had been a lot.

But today, somehow, I felt new again.
Calmer.
More steady in my heart.
The urge to flee — which had been so loud the day before — lifted. There was a sense of manageability, a quiet inner yes that wasn’t there before.

Yet still, I made a choice:
Tonight, only one cup — not two.
One doorway, not two.

Preparing the Heart

Before walking to the maloka, I pulled three cards, asking what archetypes were here to guide me:

The Shaman — trust in higher forces.
Winter — tend to your needs.
The Seer — see beyond the current situation.

The trifecta felt like a map: devotion, self-tending, and sight.

At 8 p.m., I made my way toward the maloka, found my place on the mat, and received the medicine. I took barely half a cup. It was so bitter I could hardly get it down. I remember hoping — bargaining, in truth — that this would be a gentler night.

It wasn’t.

The Descent

Within the first 20 minutes, I knew I was in for it.
As soon as the visuals began, I felt the force of it: Oh… this is going to be another initiation.

Seconds later — not minutes — I called for help. And I am proud of myself for that. The intensity of what I felt in my body told me I needed someone to sit with me.
The part of me that always tries to “handle it alone” surrendered immediately. I knew I needed support to ride whatever this was going to be.

I tried to reject the medicine.
I tried to escape the ego.
I simply didn’t want it to be so hard.

But Grandmother had other plans.

This ceremony was brutal — precise in its breakdown, unrelenting in its intensity. It became the longest, terrifying experience. My body would not purge. I begged for release, but nothing came.

It was as if the medicine said:

You will not escape the shadow of your ego.
You will feel this.
You came here for a deeper awakening —
And you came here to bring the teachings of this medicine home.

Hours passed like eternity, even though I had no concept of time.
I stayed present as best I could, even as I felt myself unravel in ways I could not stop.

Ego Death

I faced the shadow architecture of my ego — not the concept, not the metaphor — but the living creature of it. I witnessed the ways it clings, resists, protects, distorts, denies, and judges. The experience was real and not real at the same time… but my body couldn’t tell the difference.

At one point, I thought I might die.

It felt like my heart might stop.
It felt like I wasn’t breathing.
I checked my tongue to make sure I wasn’t swallowing it.
I asked the support woman beside me to remind me to breathe because I had no concept of my breathing.
She said, “Okay,” but she knew my breathing wouldn’t stop.

But inside the journey, the sensation was unmistakable:
I am dying.

And in many ways… I was.

Not physically —
But a dimension of my ego that I had never met so directly was dissolving.
And I do not use this phrase lightly: it was a true ego death.

I was brought outside the maloka so as not to disturb the others. Someone held my hand, spoke gently, stayed with me until 2 a.m. — a steady, grounded presence helping me ride the storm.

When I finally returned inside, after having to be convinced, a bit of an opening had occurred.

The Moment My Voice Found Me

The room was pitch black, the medicine still moving through all of us, each person in their own private universe. And then one of the women nearby began to sing.

Her voice rose like a thread of light in the dark, soft at first, then strong, guiding, intentional. And as she sang, Grandmother arrived again — but this time, not as storm, not as dismantler, but as gentle teacher.

She placed the image of a wolf before me.
A single, unmistakable message accompanied it:

“Release through the howl.”

But she added something more:

“Do not howl like a wolf.
Howl from your own voice.
Let the sound come from the place in you that has never been named.”

At first, I hesitated.
My body was still tender, still uncertain, still full of remnants of everything I had endured. But the medicine was clear. The wolf was clear. The teaching was clear.

So I let out a small sound — not a howl, not yet — but the beginning of one.
A tremble of voice.
A crack in the armor.

The woman beside me heard it.
Without breaking her song, she raised her voice — louder, fuller — as if to say, I hear you. Keep going.

Her rising lifted mine.

And suddenly, I wasn’t whispering a sound anymore.
I was howling — not like the wolf she showed me, but like myself.
From a place so ancient, so buried, so original that I didn’t even know it lived in me.

Each howl ruptured the density inside me.
Each sound loosened the grip of fear.
Each vibration cleared the residue of the long night I had survived.

I wasn’t just releasing —
I was remembering.

The howl was my medicine.
The howl was my purge.
The howl was my liberation.

My entire body vibrated with the force of it — not wild, not chaotic, but true.
It felt like something deep in my second chakra unlocked, unwound, and spilled into sound.
It felt like my heart cracked open in resonance rather than shattering in silence.

And as I lay there, howling my way back into myself, I knew:

This was the initiation of my voice.
Not the speaking voice I use in daily life, but the medicine voice —
the voice that sings during ceremony,
the voice that calls the spirits,
the voice that carries healing,
the voice that opens portals.

This was the moment my Icaro was born.

Not an Amazonian song taught by a maestro —
but the original sound that lives inside me,
the one I had never given permission to speak.

That night sealed something:
A new pathway in my body.
A new expression of my medicine.
A new relationship with sound as healing, as release, as transformation.

It was the end of that ceremony —
but the beginning of an entirely new chapter of who I am as a healer.

And Grandmother Ayahuasca whispered,
soft now, like wind through the bones of the world:

“This is the voice you will carry home.”

The Answer to My Intention

I had asked:
Show me how to open my heart.
Show me how to open my second chakra.

What I was shown was every place I have been keeping them closed.

Every contraction.
Every defense.
Every fear.
Every barrier I built and forgot I built.

It was excruciating to witness — and liberating.

The medicine didn’t soften me.
She showed me what stands in the way of softening.

She showed me the truth:
I cannot open what I am still protecting.
I cannot soften what I refuse to feel.
I cannot receive what my body does not trust.

This ceremony broke me open in ways I didn’t know were possible.
It changed me.
It rearranged me.

And in the end, I understood:

The brutality was not punishment.
It was an initiation.
It was precision.
It was grace in its fiercest form.

I came to Peru to awaken.
I came to shed.
I came to remember.
And on this night, through the hardest medicine I have ever received, something in me returned home.

Aho. For all my relations.