MotherLoad Podcast
MotherLoad Podcast
How Ayahuasca Changed Motherhood For Me
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Today I’m going to talk about something that completely changed my life.
This year, I went on an Ayahuasca mastermind retreat in the Peruvian Amazon, an intense 12-day experience with three Ayahuasca ceremonies. There were blessings, plant medicine, psychedelic experiences, and very real epiphanies about motherhood. It completely shook up my perspective of the past and future.
It’s a big moment for me to sit here and talk about it, and to be on this path with my business and podcast. Three months ago, I wouldn’t have thought ambitious, high-achieving women would be interested in talking about motherhood. They’d want to instead focus on business.
The thing is, you cannot not be a mother once you are one. At a scale that no one else understands, it changes who you are.
And it doesn’t mean you can’t continue to succeed – in fact, it means you can go on to do incredible things, because if you can become a mother, you’ve proved you can do anything. It’s the most radical shift there is.
Resources & Links
Learn more about Lindsay’s coaching and consulting services at https://www.lindsayroselle.com or follow along on Instagram at @lindsayroselle and @motherload.pod.
Welcome to Mother Load, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurial mothers who are navigating the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful when it comes to the relationship between their desire to succeed and their devotion to motherhood. I'm your host, Lindsay Roselle, a serial entrepreneur, growth and performance coach, and boy mama of two. Each week I'll bring you solo episodes, engaging interviews, and candid conversations that expand your capacity to do both things well, help you feel less alone, and hopefully bring a little levity to what can otherwise feel like a very heavy load. I'm so grateful you're here. Now let's jump into today's episode. Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm so happy that you're here for today's episode. So I'm gonna jump right in. I'm talking about today is something I've had a lot of questions on, and I know it could be a controversial topic, but it was something that changed my life and especially changed my view and my kind of belief system and my own experience with motherhood. So I think it's an important thing to talk about. And that is my experience with ayahuasca. I went on a trip to Peru a few months ago in May of 2022, or I guess it was late April 2022. And I want to kind of lay out today the story of how I even ended up there. I was very resistant to it at first, what the actual logistical process was to do something like that. Cause I've had a lot of questions of, you know, how do you find an ayahuasca retreat? Uh so I'll talk a little bit about the logistics, and then I will go into the experience that I had in our ceremony. So the group I was with, we did three nights in a row of ayahuasca ceremonies, and they were very coordinated and curated in terms of what the experience was like for those three nights. So I'll get into that too. So you'll definitely get a chance in this episode to hear about not only how to go about finding an ayahuasca experience based on you know what I know, but a lot more in depth around what I experienced as someone who's never really done any drugs of to speak of, and especially not an psychedelics and how I approached that, what I experienced and how it has impacted my belief system, experience of and stories of motherhood. Uh, it really was transformational for me. So jumping right in to kind of lay the groundwork for how I even ended up there. So back in, gosh, it must have been February of 2022, I was looking for mastermind to join this year, new coaches, like something to really shake me up after a couple years of really getting out of other businesses I had, taking a break from some of the online business stuff and working on myself. And I was like, you know, I really need a mentor this year or some coaches this year, an experience this year that are different than what I've done. And a friend of mine suggested I talk to the leaders of a mastermind called One Infinity, and they are Adam Roa and Gerard Adams, and both will be guests on the show. Uh, so you'll get to hear more about them. But I connected with Adam and Gerard and had a conversation about this mastermind One Infinity that I'm a part of. It's a year-long program, and it's for, you know, seven, pretty solidly seven-figure entrepreneurs, really approaching the experience, not from this idea of like, you're gonna join a mastermind and we're gonna help you grow your business and scale your business, which is a lot of what masterminds do and the value of masterminds. And I'm in those masterminds already, and I already have a lot of that type of support. This mastermind's whole intention was, hey, you're a really successful entrepreneur. You've already figured out how to do a lot of the business strategy and the scale and the things it takes to grow the business. How's your creativity? You know, how are you feeling as a human, an entrepreneur, a creator out there in the world? Now that you've reached this level of success, are you still able to create in the way that you want to be creating? And by and large, the answer to that question for me was no. You know, I really don't feel that creative. I feel pretty stuck in the grind of the business strategy. So one of the underpinnings of this One Infinity group is you have to commit to a creative project for the year that we spend together. And mine was this podcast. So I am well on my way to doing my creative project. But in talking with Adam and Gerard, the focus was on creativity. And they were really adamant and intentional and excited to bring plant medicine into the experience because of both of their experiences with plant medicine and how it has expanded their minds, but also because it's plant medicine is well known to help facilitate a deeper experience of yourself and the breaking down of some of the barriers within us that keep us from exploring and expressing our creativity. So I'm on the phone with them and I say, Yeah, guys, sounds great. I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. This was a couple months ago. I'm not ready to do plant medicine. You know, like I'm scared of this idea. I don't want to have a weird trip. And I just I'm not a hell yes on plant medicine. And they said, okay, you know, I think that's totally understandable. What is the resistance? What's the obstacle here? And I said, I'm scared. You know, I'm really like, I'm scared of what it'll be like. I've never done any kind of psychedelic. I don't know at all what it feels like. And the first experience that we were planning to have with a psychedelic in this mastermind was to fly to Peru, take a boat ride into the jungle, and spend three nights with Grandmother ayahuasca. So it wasn't like I was dabbling, I was jumping right into the very, very deep end. So I get off the phone with them, I sit down with RT and I say, you know, I'm very intrigued by this mastermind. And I do feel like these are expansive people that I otherwise probably wouldn't have found or wouldn't necessarily find a container like this from a creativity standpoint. But the plant medicine really freaks me out. But there's also something about it that I'm really drawn to. And I've been, you know, I had had some inkling about plant medicine for the few months before having this conversation, just seeing it on other people's Instagrams and thinking about, you know, I'm turning 40 this year, like I really want to have a big experience that kind of is a life-altering kind of deep dive into the deeper layers of myself that I haven't been able to get to with all the inner work I've been doing. So I take the weekend and RT and I chat about it a lot. And he's like, you know, I think you should do it. And I was like, really? And he's like, Yeah, you know, I know it's a lot of money. I know it's a big commitment, but I got the kids while you're gone. Don't worry about that. Which, as a side note, was one of my biggest hesitations was 12 days away from my kids is a huge time for me to be away, but it's also a big load on RT and our support system to make sure that they stay in their routines and everybody is, you know, happy and healthy and everything keeps running without mom. And that's part of my mental load is like, gosh, can I even leave for 12 days and have everything work? Or am I gonna, is there gonna be a bunch of resentment when I get home? And he really assured me that he got it, he's got it, and he really wanted me to have the experience. So I called them back on Sunday and I said, or I guess I WhatsApped them and I said, Hey guys, I'm in, let me know how to pay. And the first call was the next day. So this was in February. And so our experience in Peru was at the end of April into the first week of May. So we had about two months to do the all the preparation for our first experience, which was this trip to Peru. So we spend, you know, those two months really diving into all of the group. There's 10 of us in the group, what everyone's intention was from a creativity standpoint, and then what their intention is in the actual ceremony of going down there and what they're hoping to see, feel, experience, you know, get in touch with, have answered all of that. And, you know, it was one of those things where before we got down there, I didn't feel a whole lot other than a little bit of nervousness for how much time I'd be spending away. And then, of course, like this psychedelic experience that I had no context for, and I really resisted the urge to do research on because I didn't want to get scared of what it would be like. But I I thought, you know, surely, like, oh, my intention is like, oh, I want to deal with some of my money mindset stuff or like some of my blocks around creativity. I really didn't have a sense of what was going to come up for me in the ceremonies. So as we got closer to the trip, we started to prepare physically and emotionally, mentally. Part of doing an ayahuasca experience in the traditional sense is to go on what what the tradition calls a dieta, a diet, essentially, which is to remove as much toxic load from your body and your mind as you can before you embark on the ceremony. So this meant no caffeine, limited amounts of sugar, really looking at your diet, trying to make it really clean, avoiding as much news as possible, avoiding any kind of drama or people in your life that could load you up with negativity. Um, some people abstained from sex, like lots of stuff where you're really trying to be intentional about coming into the experience clean, physically clean, mentally clean, all of that. I was pretty good on my diet the giving up caffeine for a few weeks was a little tough, but I understand why we did that. And I do think that when I tell you more about what my actual physical and like my experience was with the ayahuasca, I think being pretty diligent about my diet really helped from a physical standpoint. So by about mid to late April, we are prepped as best as we can be. Speaking to the mental load of the mother who travels, I set up a very complex shared document with RT and all our childcare providers and my family and everybody who was like patching together childcare and support for RT for 12 days of me being gone. You know, and I did my best to just like get it off of my mind, mostly for myself. I, you know, RT's got it. He didn't necessarily need me to do that. But to write it all out and share it with him made me feel like, okay, he's got everything he needs. He knows where everybody's supposed to be every day that I'm gone. And so does our nanny, so does our babysitter, so does my family. Like if anything happens, this should be sufficient to at least keep everybody going. And then, you know, when they can reach me, they can reach me. So that helped a lot for me to prepare to leave, is just to lay out the schedule and all the things for him to remember so that I wasn't deep in the jungle being like, oh crap, it's Tuesday. I hope he remembers to put the trash out. So get all of that done. And right before we're starting, but right before we leave, I left on a Wednesday. I started to feel emotions start to well up in me about my kids and motherhood. And, you know, I attributed it at that time to feeling the apprehension of leaving and being away from them and doing something big like this for myself, and that that felt like this dissonance that I talk about a lot between this is a big deal for me and I want to go do this for myself, but also I hate to leave my kids for this long. And is everybody gonna be okay? And like maybe I should just not go because they're so young and this is a long time to be away from mom and they don't understand. But at the same time, you know, I'm so excited to go have this experience. What an incredible thing to do. And it's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip, and especially with these people. So feeling very torn those few days before I left. And then, of course, I leave because I committed to it and I was excited about it, and I felt very called to go. So I get down there and the first night, so by the time we actually are all reunited to kick everything off, it's now Thursday evening, and we're in Iquitos, Peru, which is in the north of Peru, uh, right near the headwaters of the Amazon. It's a jungle town, but it's also very feels very developing country. If you've been anywhere in Peru or into any developing countries, I've been to many as part of my previous work in my corporate job. The plane lands on this like cement runway, and there's one building at the airport, and there's just jungle all around. And I got picked up on a motorcycle tuck-tuck, driven to the hotel through a beautiful old Peruvian jungle city. So it was, and it was pouring rain. So just a very like grounding experience the second you land in a country where you're just immersed into the pace of the country. And that was one of my favorite things when I used to travel so much was just surrendering to the pace as soon as you landed. It wasn't like I've got to stay in my schedule. It's like, okay, now I'm in India, now I'm in Norway, now I'm in Australia, like now I'm in Tokyo. I've got to surrender to the pace that this goes at. So I land in Iquitos, Peru, and it was like, okay, get on the motorcycle tech tuck. We're gonna go fast through the rain, you know, uh, and it jars your system into presence to where you are in the world. So I loved that and felt super exhilarated. Get to the hotel that we're staying in that first night, meet up with everybody, uh, and we all prepare to go out to dinner. And we're at dinner that first night, and we start to go around the table. And Adam Roa, who you'll meet on the podcast in a few episodes ahead of this, is a poet and a master of words and just a deep soul, and has had many, many experiences with ayahuasca and other psychedelics, so other plant medicines. So he kind of led the this part of the group where we went around and shared what our intention was. And he had picked out a totem for each of us at the market and had written, chosen a word for each of us that had kind of encapsulates the experience for us from his, from what he knew of us by that time. So we each got an altar, a little crocheted altar, a bracelet, a beaded bracelet, and a word from Adam. So it gets to me, and my altar and my bracelet have a butterfly on them. And my word is dissolve. So as we go around the table, it is now my turn to state my intention, kind of tell a group why I'm there, and give a reaction to that word dissolve and what it means to me and how it frames the experience that you know I'm here in Peru to have. And so it's my turn to speak, and I just burst into tears. And I'm like, guys, I I don't know where this emotion is coming from, but it feels like motherhood. Like I'm I miss my kids and I feel very far away, and that like there's a level of exhilaration to that, but I'm also missing them and I feel guilty for being gone, you know. And also as I think about the word dissolve and this totem of the butterfly, I really do feel like I have been in a cocoon in this, you know, the last two years, just kind of keeping to myself and transforming and and shedding all these layers and really changing my life by myself, you know. I I mean, by myself in the sense of not sharing a lot of it publicly, not being the public figure that I had been in 2020 and before. And I do feel like motherhood kind of was the biggest catalyst to all of that, you know. Really, as my kids got out of the baby stage and into the toddler stage, it changed how I mothered and how motherhood factored into how I spend my time and especially how motherhood affects the fire burning in me as an entrepreneur and as an ambitious woman who wants to go do stuff in the world. Like I just I feel kind of lost right now. And I do feel like I've dissolved and and now I need to figure out how to put myself back together and like emerge as the butterfly. And I don't know how to do that, you know. I'm really stuck. And this was in late April of this year, so a few months ago at this point. So I I share all of that, you know, and I'm like, I I just feel this very strong energy around figuring something out about motherhood and like what is this question and and dissonance in my mind about motherhood. I love being a mom, I love my kids so much and I miss them so much, and also I miss the old me. Like I miss the ability to just work and go do what I want and feel free, you know, and I don't feel free to be fully me, and I don't feel free to do what I want because I have young kids and I carry, you know, what is ultimately the mother load. So I'm expressing this at dinner and I'm bawling and everybody's like, whoa, okay. And they were super compassionate and and very understanding. And, you know, I kind of became like the mom of the trip. Like I had packed so many snacks and things that other people didn't think about, you know, like band-aids and because I am also a mom, of course. And so, you know, it was such an anchoring moment that night to really let out the emotions without a filter and say, this is I'm here because of motherhood, and I don't really know what that means, but that's what's coming up. And it fit perfectly with the word that Adam had given me, this idea of dissolve. And it that really did help me go into the experience the following couple days because I could really stay focused on this idea of like, okay, I've already dissolved. Like I'm already this goo sitting in this cocoon waiting to become a butterfly. And I just need the definition and the clarity and the energetic jolt to shake me up, form me back together, and kind of spit me out as a butterfly. And boy, did that happen. So the next morning is Friday. So we wake up, we get on the boat, and I'll put some pictures in the show notes that are on my website so you can kind of see what everything looked like. It was not a luxurious boat, but it worked. So we we head on up the Amazon, and it's about two hours, maybe an hour and 45 minutes up the Amazon and against the current, you know, definitely takes longer. It was a power boat, so loud. And as we start heading up the Amazon, it it really sinks in like how far away you are and how just gigantic the Amazon is. And ironically, there's cell phone towers along the Amazon all the way up. So that was really unexpected to me to you know to see this crazy wilderness and the dense jungle and just the vibrancy and the life. Like it felt so alive and so fresh and like just palpable energy there. It like it literally sparkled, like it was so beautiful. And then occasionally there'd be this like you know, hundred-foot-tall cell phone tower in the jungle. Don't worry, civilization has reached the depths of the Amazon if you're ever wanting to go. So we we get up to where we're staying, this eco lodge, about an hour and a half, hour and 45 minutes up from Iquitos. And the water level was really high. It was the rainy season while we were there. So uh the water was actually all the way up to the lodge. Sometimes in other times of the year, you actually have to like park the boat down river a bit and walk in, but we were able to drive the boat right up to the dock. So we disembark, we get settled, and that evening is our first welcome ceremony. We didn't do the ayahuasca ceremonies started on Saturday night. So we did an ayahuasca ceremony Saturday night, Sunday night, and Monday night. So Friday night was kind of our anchoring introduction, getting grounded in the space, doing a lot of like intention setting and group work. So we meet the shamans that Friday afternoon. There's uh our experience was with the Shipibo Shapaibo tradition. So it's the very traditional like lineage of ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru. Our shaman, his name was Christian. I think he was in his mid-30s, but he was like, I want to say, uh don't quote me, but I want to say like 11th generation shaman. Like it had been passed down through the patriarchal lineage of his family, and he was like number 11 in a line of shamans. And his little three-year-old was there, little three-year-old boy with his wife. Christian's wife was there helping kind of with the kitchen and helping the girls during during the ayahuasca ceremonies. Christian's wife would take us to the bathroom and stuff like that. I'll get to that. But his little boy Liam was there observing and participating. You know, they really do start involving the future shamans that young. It was really, really cool to see. So we meet Christian, he does a blessing on all of us and explains what what to expect the next day. He also introduces his apprentice, whose name was Clay, and his uncle, whose name escapes me at this moment. I wrote it down, but I don't want to fumble with all my papers right now. But his uncle is also a shaman. And so the three of them co-facilitated our three nights. And that that was a very unique experience to have three shamans and to have them all be kind of in the same lineage. As I get into the experience of the ceremony, I'll give you some more information about how intense that made it. Like it made it really beautiful in some ways, but also to have that much energy and that much sound and that much chanting and all of that each night was very intense to have three people facilitating, but extremely unique and very, very cool, authentic experience that we had. Friday night we go, so we we finish the overview and the prep, and then we go out on a boat for a nighttime excursion into the Amazon. Which is a whole other story in and of itself. But suffice to say, it was like being on the planet where Yoda lives in Star Wars because it was pitch black, but we're on the the boat. And our guide, whose name was Wolf and is a total character, he would just like steer the boat into the bush of the jungle on the side of the river. And I'm like, are we just gonna like go for a walk? And turns out because of the high season with the river, the water was actually flooded a half mile or so into the jungle. So you could take the boat into the trees and kind of float through the trees, the tops of the trees. And so we did that. And you know, he was the only one with a headlamp. So he's like, he would like turn his head and be like, oh, look over there, there's a sloth. Like turn his head the other way. Oh, look over there. It's the Amazonian tree rat, you know, like, oh, look at there. It's the fish spider that's the size of your face that sits on the tree looking at the water. And if a fish swims by, it jumps in and grabs the fish and eats it. And you're like, what? I mean, it was just another world, you know, coming from the US to see a spider the size of your face that sits on trees at the waterline. And at one point, Wolf pulls up to this bush, reaches in, literally like crawls into this bush off the boat and comes back with this gigantic tree boa snake. He's like, Oh, look, here he is. Like, I've seen this one before. He lives in this bush, you know, like we know of him. It was crazy. Um, so you know, all of us were like, what is happening? Like last night we stayed in a Hilton in Iquitos, and tonight we're on a boat in the middle of the jungle, literally in the jungle, looking at boas that are being like hoisted into the boat and spiders the size of your face, and alligator eyes everywhere and sloths above you. It was such a cool experience and really brought it home that, like, you're very far away. You are in the Amazon. You know, this is not the normal environment, obviously. But at the same time, the intention of why we did it was so clear, like to get out into nature and to really make you feel radically present in this moment and in this place because the next three nights were gonna be so intense that you needed to know where you were. In some ways, I needed to know I was that far away. Like I really needed to surrender to what was gonna be happening and trying to like keep your mind anchored in what's happening in the US at home while you're sitting in a hut in the middle of the jungle drinking ayahuasca was just not gonna set us up for a good experience. So we go on that night cruise, we come back, go to bed, huge thunderstorm the first night. So that was a really cool experience, like an Amazonian thunderstorm. Very loud, uh very windy. Go to bed, wake up Saturday, and Saturday morning we went out and made our own ayahuasca, which was another really unique and unusual aspect of our experience. Because most people, when you do an ayahuasca ceremony, especially if you're not doing it in Peru, like where it's native, a lot of people go to like Costa Rica or Nicaragua or other places where you can have a really good ayahuasca, but it's the actual drink has been prepared in the jungle, you know, weeks ahead of time and sent to someone or brought there by a shaman. So it's not fresh. Ours was made the same day. Turns out that that makes it much more potent. So we go into, we know, we eat breakfast, we head out into the boat, we head up the river a little bit, like a mile or two up the river to this little village. We disembark, and our shamans take us on a little walk into the jungle, and there's a path. And into this little clearing, there's this gigantic vine at its base in the ground. It was, you know, the size of a normal tree, not huge, maybe you know, 12-inch diameter. But it grew up symbiotically into the trees around it. So this vine was like wrapped around all the trees around it. And there was also some just brush and other bushes and stuff around it in the jungle. If you're not familiar with ayahuasca, which I was not, it's actually the drink you ultimately drink is the combination of two different plants. So it's the vine, the ayahuasca vine, which we cut sections off of that were, you know, just pieces of the vine that were hanging down from the trees. We we chopped probably 10 feet of maybe one to two inch diameter chunks of the vine, and then chopped that into about 12-inch long pieces. And that's ultimately what we ended up pounding to pulverize it a little bit and then boiling. And then we mixed that with the leaves of the chakruna plant, which the leaves are it's this big bushy green plant. It was really tall, it was probably 12 feet tall, tons of leaves. The leaves are about the size of your hand. And Christian instructed us to each pick like a hundred leaves. We needed a ton of leaves from the plant. So, and I'm gonna give you a little bit of the science of this because I did not know how this all worked. So we harvested the vine and we took the leaves. We went to back into the village, and they had this huge pot, like big old iron pot over a fire. And each of us got to take a section of the vine and kind of pound it out so that it would break apart. And you have to imagine the vine kind of looking like a piece of wood. So as you're pounding it, it looks like bark that kind of falls apart. And the vine is all twisted up like DNA. And inside of the vine is like a thousand little vines, kind of we were all talking about like it kind of looked like twistlers, you know, the pull and peel twizzlers. That's what it seemed like. That's what it looked like. And then we pounded it out so it would release all of the chemicals more easily when it got boiled. And then we we stuffed all of that vine into the pot, and then we put the chakruna leaves on top of it. And then they added water to that, and that boiled for I think about eight hours that day. So, interestingly enough, the the psychedelic, like the psychoactive chemicals, are in both of those plants. The vine has the MAOI inhibitor in it, and the leaves have the DMT. So, DMT is a chemical that makes your brain have hallucinations and visions and gives you kind of the euphoria feeling. But DMT is really rapidly processed by your body if it's not combined with an MAOI inhibitor. I am not a doctor, I don't know exactly how this all works. I'm just reading what I read on the internet and what I was told. So, in combination, what you get is the DMT from the leaves of the Shakuruna plant, uh, which is psychoactive, and then the MAOI inhibitor and some other chemicals in the vine, which are also psychoactive, combined to create the psychedelic. And that's why they have to be put together and boiled together so that when you drink it, you get the psychedelic experience, you know, to happen from consuming it. All boiled. I'll get to the experience here in a little bit. It turns into this like thick brown liquid and tasted like forest, you know, like tobacco kind of. It was very earthy tasting. So this is Saturday morning. We helped them prep the cauldron of ayahuasca. We say some prayers and set some intentions as a group over it, and then we head back down to the eco-lodge to have lunch and to have our intention circle, like mastermind circle up, where we kind of had our last chance to express what we're feeling and ask any questions and go through what the logistics looked like and all of that. And then that afternoon, we were also going to each get to meet with the shamans one-on-one. So we're sitting in the intention circle before we do our one-on-ones and comes to me, and again, I just like burst into tears. And I'm like, it's this motherhood thing, guys. Like I journaled about it all morning. You know, I just I'm nervous because I've never done a psychedelic and I am, yes, legitimately nervous about what this is gonna feel like in my body. And I'm just overwhelmed by this question about why do I feel stuck? Like, why do I not feel the fire? Like, how do I turn myself back on? You know, and and it really was like using the dissolve word. It really was like, how do I transform from the goo inside of the cocoon into the butterfly? Like, I what in nature is that spark that makes the goo resolidify into a butterfly? Like, I need that same process to happen here. In this same circle was the first time also that someone mentioned that this might be dark and that the first ayahuasca experience that you have can be scary and can bring up darkness. And I was like, hold up. What? Like I going in, I had done no research because I just didn't want to be polluted with other people's negativity about it. Because, you know, we live in a culture where most people's reaction, a lot of people's reaction was, oh my God, I can't believe you're gonna do that. There was also a lot of people whose reaction was like, holy cow, this is so exciting! Like, I really want to know what it's like. But uh the people closer to me in my life, family members and such, were very concerned. So I just was like, you know what? I'm gonna go in blind. What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? I don't need to know that it's dark and can be scary. You know, I didn't really need to know that. So I didn't know that until I got there. And and here we are, 12 hours out from the experience on Saturday morning and having a conversation about what to expect and that it can be dark and frightening the first night, especially if you have no experience with psychedelics. And I was like, uh-oh, okay. And and I felt my anxiety start to rise, you know. I'm like, uh, what did I get myself into? Like, what is it? What does it mean that it could be scary? And they're like, well, you know, like we're doing three nights, three ceremonies in a row. And the whole idea of doing it that way, especially in the Shapaibo tradition, is that the first night is about clearing and cleansing. And so whatever needs to get cleared and cleaned is gonna come up this night. And for a lot of people, there's a lot of darkness and a lot of trauma, a lot of sadness, a lot of, you know, things that feel scary to relive and to feel again. That's what will likely come up tonight. The second night is about bringing the light back. And when I explained the second night, that will make more sense. But the second night is about bringing the light back and finding the light again. And then the third night is about integrating it all together and kind of figuring out where to go from here. And if you ask those questions and set the intention like that for this three night arc that we're experiencing, that's the intention of what we've set up. You know, this is Adam explaining it. And I was like, okay, uh, okay, I'm a little, I'm a little nervous, uh, a little more nervous. Didn't think a whole lot about it, like specifically what could come up that would be dark, but I definitely had that seed planted in me. And then that afternoon we we got to meet with the shamans. And so it was my turn to go meet with the shaman, Christian, and he doesn't speak very much English. So we had a translator. So I'm sitting there with uh Christian and our translator, Roger, and I sit down and I'm like, I'm Lindsay, and I burst into tears again. And I'm like, gosh, like this, I'm so sorry, but this keeps coming up. Like I feel so much emotion being here, and it's really intensified since I landed in Peru. And it it's something around motherhood. And you know, I have two little boys that I love and and I just want to like do the best I can for them and be the best mom I can and be the best me I can for them. I personally, Lindsay, have so many ambitions and so many things I want to do, and I I can't find the fire. Like, I don't, I don't know why I feel so disconnected from myself, other than I think it has something to do with motherhood and this question constantly in my mind of like, if I go do and and work as much and put all the effort into building the things I want to build in the world, I feel like it's gonna take away from being a good mom. And I don't know how to bring those two things back together. So I say this a version of that to Roger. He translates it for Christian. And Christian looks at me and he goes, he says it in Spanish, and I understood some of this in Spanish, you know, thank you, high school Spanish. I understood mostly what he was saying until, but then Roger translated it. And he said something to the effect of I get it, and you can do both things and you will do both things, there's just something in your mind that we need to clean out. Like you've got to clear your mind. There's something dark in there and it needs out. And tonight's gonna be really hard for you, but after tonight, you're gonna be free. And I burst into tears again, and this time because I was terrified and I was like, okay, um, now I'm like legitimately scared. But at this point, it's a full send, you know, like I'm in. I where what am I gonna do? Not do it, you know. I'm in the jungle, I'm 12 hours away from home, and yeah. So um like, okay, I feel a lot of fear and it's coming up, but I'm gonna trust that I've I'm well prepared and that I'm safe and that the people here have got me. You know, they've got my back. They're not gonna let me, you know, nothing bad is gonna happen. It's just gonna be an intense experience. And I've done intense experiences before, so I can do this. You know, this is late afternoon, and each of our ceremonies started at 9:30 p.m. and went until about 3 a.m. So we had the, you know, the time this first night between our meeting with the shamans until the ceremony started to journal, reflect, relax, like set the tone, really get our emotions grounded, our bodies grounded. And we're eating really light still. Like we're on the dieta the entire time until we finished the third ceremony. So, you know, they would serve us like chicken and rice and some light vegetables and mango or papaya or something like that. Like very little, uh, no spice, no added sugars, no sauces really. It was just very light eating. So we eat dinner and it's about time to start. So there was a generator at the Eco Lodge, so there was lights uh and power. And then at 9:30, they shut the generator off. So it just goes pitch black and gets really quiet. And that's like the sign to come into the ceremony room, which was this big round room, and it's totally screened in. So it's outside. I mean, there's a thatched roof on it and screens all the way around it, but there's no walls or anything, it's very open to the Amazon. So you can you get wind through there, you hear everything, and you can kind of see. I mean, even though it's pitch black, there's enough starlight down there, and and the Milky Way was like right above us and really bright. So you could see a lot actually just from the starlight. And it was a new moon while we were there, so no moonlight. But so we go into the ceremony room, there's mats all the way around the this edge of the circle. So on one side of the room, the shamans were all set up and they each had a chair and all of their ceremonial stuff, and then the other like half circle of the room had the mats all lined up, like just in an arc around the edge of the circle. So we picked our mats, and as you sit down and get comfortable, there's a bucket put next to you uh with a little bit of water in it. And our ayahuasca is well known to cause purging, vomiting, or diarrhea at the other end. It's in a medic, so it definitely clears you out physically as well as emotionally, spiritually, mentally. I, as a side note, did not end up purging at all. Like I didn't vomit at all. I had definitely had some other experiences uh of purging, but but I did not vomit during the ceremonies, which many of my co-people, my co-participants did, and many of us didn't. So if you're scared of that as part of the ayahuasca experience, it's 50-50 based on my experience. Anyway, we start the first night and it's very dark. They light a couple candles, and it's about an hour-long ceremony to initiate the process. So they burn Palo Santo, they walk around and they bless each one of us. We each have to come up to the front and get blessed. And then they bless the ayahuasca itself. It's in a jug up at the front. So they bless the ayahuasca and then they pour it into little cups that were, you know, like maybe like espresso cup size. And I think that there is probably about four ounces. I don't know, it wasn't the set measurement, but it seemed like about four ounces of liquid that we were each served. And so they pass it around and you just are supposed to just down it right down the hatch, give them back the cup as they come around, and then sit and wait. And even as I tell the story, I feel the anxiety rising. So that first night, I didn't know what to expect, of course. So I'm sitting there and it's dark, and they start as soon as everyone's drank the ayahuasca, they start the chanting and the sound and the prayers. And because there's three shamans and they all have different tonality in their voice, the initiation chants and the the chants of the first night in the Shaibo tradition are extremely intense. And if I can find the audio, I'll I'll put a clip of the audio on my website. But it's very intense chanting, and it's in Spanish and and in their tribal language. Uh, so you don't really understand what they're saying. It just sounds intense. And then they have these shakers made out of dried palm leaves. So it's like just over and over and over. It sounds like static. And there's three of them. So it's loud and dissonant, and it just sets this kind of what I would describe as like chaotic sound. Like it just, it was intentional. It's meant to kind of scramble your brain to set you into this psychedelic experience uh and clear, you shake everything up to get it all to come out. But I immediately felt like, wow, it's loud. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, huh, I wonder when it's gonna hit, you know, and it took about 30 minutes. I did look at my phone, didn't have signal, but you know, I was using it as a clock. So at 10:30 is when we drank the ayahuasca. I think about 30 minutes had gone by by the time it hit me. Not sure, but so I'm sitting there just sitting, meditating, and they had instructed us a couple things. One was to try to sit up for as long as possible. One was not to talk out loud. So you can make sounds, you can, some people were crying, roaring, yelling, like primal screaming, but they really didn't want you to speak like words because it's distracting to people around you. And then you were not supposed to get off your mat because of the influence of the psychedelic, you're wobbly, right? So they don't want you walking around because you're over the Amazon and it's the middle of the night. So those were the three instructions. And other than that, it was like, okay, you're safe. Good luck. We'll see you in the morning. And everyone in the room drank the ayahuasca, including the shamans. They did not have as much as us, but they were also under the influence of the psychedelic. And they, that's a big part of the tradition, is that they consume it with you so that they can be in touch with the spirits that are in the room, that the energy that the ayahuasca calls in from at each person. So that's the conduits, the connection point between them holding space for this uh for the experience and you being in the experience. As it hits me that first night, I feel the very first thing I remember feeling is like curtains closing, like on a stage, like and it just got really dark. And then immediately I'm in this like what I describe as a video game. Like it felt like an evil chaos video game. And it was like clowns and snakes and dragons and black and white squiggles and crazy numbers, like spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. I started there and then it started to settle into the year 1994. And I only know that because that number flashed across my mind a few times, and I was like, oh, that's weird. 1994. I was 12 in 1994, and that's the year my parents got divorced. And so it was a big year of like upheaval and you know, preteen hormones. My parents are getting divorced, like a big year in terms of core memories. And things were coming up in my visions while I'm in this part of the of the experience. Like I'm remembering what my dad wore and like the car he drove and the inside of my neighbor's house at that age, and just stuff I've not thought about since I was 12, right? Like it's just old, weird memories, but very potent tactile memories that really put me back into that space. Like I could smell my neighbor's house and I could hear the sound of my dad's old suburban that he drove. And you know, just really crazy memories that got unlocked that felt very real. But it also still felt like chaos. It's not like I was like back in age 12 and everything was smooth. It was like memory, memory, memory, jumping, jumping, jumping. So it felt still very disconnected. And that made it scary. I remember thinking, like, what's happening? Why am I just jumping all over the place? Like I can't get to one stream of thought right now. And the next stage of the visions for me and the psychedelic experience was that everything started to turn this like yellow putrid color. And I felt like I started to go down into this like swirl. And everything that I had been in my visions, like the car and my neighbor's house and school, and all these things from 1994, were like in the soup with me, and we were all spinning down this drain. This like putrid yellow drain. And everything that I could see as I like looked around was like Salvador Dali style, like melting into the drain. And at that point, as I'm like circling the drain in this yellow, putrid liquid, looking at everything I remember, kind of melting into it too. In that moment, I remember feeling the thread of Lindsay Roselle consciousness come through and being like, who am I? What are my kids' names? What do I look like? And I couldn't answer any of those questions. And that really scared me. It was weird because it's like I knew I was in the Amazon and I knew I was Lindsay Roselle. But the fact that my brain couldn't connect what I knew, I'm on all these different levels of consciousness, you know, and like the root consciousness knew it was me and knew I was in the Amazon. But then when I asked my inner voice, like, who are you? Where are we? What's your name? What are your kids' names? I couldn't recall those answers. And that lack of recall in that moment freaked me out. Apparently, that's when I started speaking out loud, unbeknownst to me. Like I thought I was speaking in my mind, but the people around me later on were like, Oh, yeah, you talked through pretty much the whole thing. And I was like, Oh shit, sorry. At that point, I remember saying, like, what is this? Where am I? What's happening? Who am I? What do I look like? Like I started asking those questions out loud. And it continued to intensify from there to the point where I ended up, I'm going down this drain and I, you know, I feel everything melt. And then I feel like I just kind of land, plop out, and I'm on this like moonscape with post-apocalyptic feel to it. Everything was like gray and burned. The sky was this weird, like yellow and maroon color. There's like rocks and burned trees, and that was it. And that's the first time in all of the visions that that evening that I felt like I my brain stopped moving and I was actually in one place. And I could look around and figure out, like kind of inquire about where I was and like what this was. I remember like this feeling of looking around this moonscape. I'll call it a hellscape because it turns out that's where I was. And I remember thinking like this is post-apocalypse, like this is the end of the world, this is what happens after we all die, you know? And it occurs to me that I'm in hell. And I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense. I'm in hell. Yeah, of course. Like I swirled the drain of this like putrid yellow, and my whole life melts away, and here I am down in hell. So I'm just kind of sitting there looking around, and I remember thinking, like, why am I in hell? You know, what's this supposed to be about? And immediately I become aware of like this consciousness around me, this other person. The best way to describe it is like I was like speaking to the Wizard of Oz. Like I wasn't actually speaking to this conscious, this person. I was speaking into the collective consciousness of like I was just speaking out into the void, and it was giving me answers back from this person's consciousness. And it took me a little bit to figure out who this person was. So I'm talking, initially talking to this, to the void, like to hell, to this collective consciousness around me. And I say, Who are you? Who is this? And and the only answer I got back was like, motherhood is evil. And I was like, wow, okay, like who are you? Where am I? What is this? Like, I don't want this. I want to go home, you know. And I'm I'm saying all these things in my mind, I'm saying them to like the universe, like to the energy around me in this place, trying to get an answer back. Apparently, I was saying them out loud. So sorry, guys. Um, but it was such an intense experience for me in that moment. And the fact that I remember it so clearly turns out that that's pretty unusual to have such a clear interaction and like such a like where I really was aware, even though I was very much deeply in the psychedelic experience, my Lindsay Roselle consciousness was there and understanding what was happening. So I'm kind of speaking to the void and asking these questions, and I'm getting these answers back that are like, you don't want to be a mother. You know, like motherhood's terrible. Motherhood is the worst thing. Like it takes away all these like negative feelings. And like these are all shadows in me, right? Like these are all beliefs that I've had at one point or another about motherhood, where it all is this culminates in this resentment of motherhood. And so I'm getting all these messages, and I still can't figure out who I'm interacting with, like whose consciousness this is that's giving me the answers back. And all of a sudden, I like I get this feeling. I'm trying to describe, like, think of the words how to describe this. It's like all of a sudden I felt like I could see the matrix, like, like I could see these connection points. And it almost looked like a family tree, like it arced up, and you had all these lines that connected different people. And in that moment, it hits me that this is my grandmother who I'm speaking with. Her and I are not directly conversing, it's like she's sending the message back through the void, but it's her. And this is my mom's mother. I have very little interaction with her in my whole life. She died when I was in college, very tragic death. And the little I know of her was that she had an incredibly traumatic childhood and as a result was a difficult woman to be around as an adult. Meaning, without going into great detail for the respect of my family, she terrorized my mother and her siblings to the point where they all retain some of that trauma to this day. You know, and I I know the stories anecdotally of what she did to them and how she treated them and what she said about motherhood to them. I never interacted with her more than maybe three or four times as a child. My mom protected us from her, turns out, necessarily. Anyway, I'm I'm down here in hell and I'm having this conversation. And it's really scary. I was terrified at that moment because it felt like I couldn't escape where I was. Like I felt like I was in hell and not leaving. And the only person there to interact with was my grandmother, who hated motherhood and thinks that it was the worst thing ever and resented it and has a lot of trauma around motherhood in her own experience. And I was in that moment felt very terrified that this was going to be how I left, you know, that I was going to be leaving with this feeling of like, I hate motherhood. I don't want to be a mother. Right as I have that kind of awakening or that feeling of fear, like figuring all of this stuff out and who I'm talking to and what the intention of me being there is. In that same moment, I all of a sudden become aware. It's like Lindsay's consciousness came through to save me. And I all of a sudden become aware of the sound of many people in the room purging. Right then, when I'm in the most intense part of this interaction with my grandmother's consciousness in hell, I open my eyes and look around because I'm hearing four or five different people purging. And that sound is so jarring. So I look around and it was like instantaneous presence and realization that, like, oh, oh my God, I'm okay. Like, I'm not in hell. I'm in the Amazon. I'm Lindsay Roselle. I'm in an ayahuasca ceremony. That's my friend over there. Like just that moment of kind of coming out of it and realizing that I was me and I'm okay and I'm having a psychedelic experience. Like, my Lindsay Roselle consciousness brought me back for a minute to kind of reassure me that I was okay after such a scary interaction there with my grandmother. And I'm so grateful for that because then it really helped me as I went back into the experience and like went back into to speak with her more. I started to figure out that I was in control. And I don't know the science of all this stuff in your mind. And I'm not an expert on that, and I need to keep going to finish the story. So this episode's not two hours long. But suffice it to say that the realization that I had some control over it really helped with the fear. So I was able to then go back into the experience. And even though I still felt scared of encountering her and the chaos in my mind of what I was feeling and seeing and all the sounds and the chanting and the purging sounds, you know, my nervous system was like, I want the hell out of here. Like this is too much. I want to be done. But my consciousness knew I was okay. So we pushed back in. And at that moment, when I opened my eyes, I looked at my phone just to see what time it was. Because of being brought back into presence, I was aware of the experience and like, oh yeah, let's see how long, how long it's been and like how much longer it's gonna be before the sun comes up and it ends and this isn't so scary anymore. So at that point it was 12:30. So about two hours had gone by since I had drank my cup of ayahuasca. So I had had that entire psychedelic, all those visuals of 1994 and the yellow putrid swirl and being in hell with my grandmother. All of that had happened in about two hours, which felt crazy to me because it seemed like it had been like 10 minutes. The ceremony went till about 3 a.m. So from 12:30 or so till about 3 a.m., I definitely came out of it. You know, I was on the upswing out of the intensity of the psychedelic activity in my body pretty rapidly once I opened my eyes that first time. So I was able to kind of cycle in and out and go back, drop back in, feel it more, come back up, anchor myself in the presence, drop back in, anchor up and down, up and down. As I started to wake up more, I mean, I say wake up in the sense that I was like less affected by the DMT and the psychedelic, the psychoactive chemicals and more in a meditative state. I'll do an episode on microdosing because it's so interesting. But as there's less and less of that chemical in your in your body and your brain, it just becomes like a sensory enhancer. And so I felt like maybe the last hour, hour and a half of that first night was a deep meditation. And that became, though I still felt very frightened and very fearful of what I had seen and what she had said to me about motherhood and what that meant and everything I was gonna have to unpack about all of that, as it wore off and it wasn't such an intense psychedelic experience, it felt more like a meditation, a really deep meditation. And I was able to start to integrate what that meant for me. And I did get a lot of like reassurance, like messages in from grandmother ayahuasca, the plant medicine itself, saying, You needed to know this. You needed to know that this is in your lineage. You needed to know that she hated motherhood and that she was not a great mother, and that she came from a long line of women who were mothers who were traumatized and victimized. And, you know, maybe someday I can share more about what I specifically know about my maternal lineage. It's not great. There's a lot of violence, a lot of trauma, a lot of darkness. And that really came to an end point in my grandmother. And then my own mother really served as the filter for that energy, that darkness, that evil in her lifetime. And my mother is still alive and she does still reflect, and at least, you know, in my judgment, she does represent someone who has acted as the filter in her life for good and evil. And she really did hold back a lot of darkness from her siblings and from me and my sister. And I think that shows, to be as candid as I can. So those answers started to come to me that first night where I was like, this explains a lot about my own mother, and this explains a lot about my grandmother that I didn't really know and I don't need to know the specifics of, but it but it's clear to me that my grandmother's consciousness resides in hell. And I'm not a religious person, so I don't assign any kind of like dogma to that. To me, it's that her consciousness, her soul ended up there because of the journey that it was on. And she didn't choose any of that, you know. But that in her lifetime, some of the things that she experienced created a soul, damaged a soul to the extent where its end point was her lifetime. And she, that soul now is in hell. It's not going to be reborn into someone else. And it really did end with her. And my mother, bless her soul, is the living embodiment of that transition, that transitory generation where one evil node ends, and then there's a generation of people born that hold that transition and are the filter for all of that in the lineage. And then there's me and the fact that I want to change all of this. And I'm here in Peru to have an experience and to learn things about myself so that I do not continue that lineage of trauma and I do not continue carrying through that resentment and that darkness. So all of these kind of realizations and the integration of all of it started that first night where I was starting to put all these pieces together. So it gets to be about 3 a.m. They conclude the ceremony, they light a candle or several candles. So there's a little bit of light that comes back, which was very reassuring and comforting after such an intensely dark and chaotic, like psychedelic experience that first night. You still felt the effects of it for several more hours until the sun came up. So we all just went to sleep, essentially, in that big room. The sun came up the next morning. A few people in the group did a combo ceremony. Combo is like frog venom and they burn your arm. They put a little dot of frog venom on your arm. You have basically an allergic reaction, which causes purging and this feeling of intense heat. I did not choose to do that because I was still so overwhelmed by what I had felt and experienced the first night. So I skipped that and uh I went back to sleep in our bunk rooms where there was an actual mattress and napped, got up, had lunch. So this was Sunday now after the first night. So Sunday afternoon, we each got to meet with the shamans again and kind of talk through what we had seen the first night and set the intention for the second night. So I, you know, I explained what I saw and I explained that I was terrified and that I didn't want to do the second night at all. You know, I was like, I don't need to see any more of that. That was terrifying. And I have a lot to integrate just from the first night. And the shaman said, you know what? You went deeper than most people go with their first experience with ayahuasca and the fact that you knew who you were, you knew what was happening. Like it wasn't this kind of esoteric energy. It was like a very clear experience with someone that you understand and know, and you know why you had that interaction with them, and they they gave you a message that you needed to hear, whether or not you wanted to hear it in that way or with those feelings. So you got what you came for. You got what I said you would get, which was the clearing. And it was dark and it was scary, but you closed the door, you know. And he used the word portal, or Roger did, you know, in translation. And I was like, that makes sense to me. Like I do feel like I left her presence in hell and I came back up. I had the interaction. I went down in there and I spoke with her, which was terrifying, but seems like that's what I needed to do. And here I am back up in the real world, quote unquote, you know, of this level of consciousness. And I get it. So the second night, you know, I will drink the ayahuasca again, but I don't want to go that deep. And he said, you don't have to drink as much. You choose your own experience. So if you want to have less, just drink less. So that second night, as we settle into the ceremony second night, it started at 9:30 again, lay back down on the same mat. I intentionally drink about a third as much as I did the first night. And I had cleared that with the shamans, so they knew I was not under the influence of as much of the psychedelic the second night as I was the first. And that was enough. You know, they poured me about a third as much, and that's what he said would give me enough to get into the experience without it being like deeply, deeply psychedelic. So I drank that. And as I'm sitting there waiting for it to hit, you know, I'm I'm scared. Like I literally was sweating and shaking, like scared that it was going to hit me like it hit me the first night. The interesting thing is the second night, the intention was to bring the light back. From the minute the ceremony started with the chanting and the singing, that second night was absolutely beautiful. Like it makes me emotional to think about it even now because the first night, the sounds were so chaotic. And it was like all three of them chanting all the time, just on and on and on, and loud and scary sounding, and the shaking and the static sounds, and like my nervous system was just like, fuck, this is so intense. The second night was beautiful. It was a totally different set of chants. They were all like melodic, and they sang of white flowers and white light and honey and sweetness and sugar and love, and like it was just such a different tone. Like it gives me full body goosebumps right now. And at one point during the second night, the uncle, the third shaman, who's the uncle of the main shaman, he had an acoustic guitar that none of us knew about. And he gets this acoustic guitar out and plays this acoustic song on his guitar and sings to it. And it, I mean, all of us were crying, even if those of us that were like heavily under the psychedelic experience, it brought everybody into this space of just like sweetness and love. And so the second night on my what I call a micro dose, a mini dose of ayahuasca, that night felt it hit me with this white cloud. It was like white smoke came into my mind. And the entire experience, the second night, I was much more aware of where I was. I was not deeply into the psychedelic the second night. It felt like a really intense meditation. And so I was able to play and interact with my mind and my consciousness and this white energy, the lightness that had come back in the ceremony of the second night. And I cried through most of the second night. It was such a relief that it was light and white and not scary. And it was so incredibly beautiful. The chanting and the singing was beautiful. And you really felt the connection to the earth and to the mother of ayahuasca, this mother energy of the Amazon and the earth and the oneness. Like everything that they talk about with ayahuasca and psychedelic experiences, that's what I felt the second night. This big connection to everyone, and that we are all truly connected, and that the earth is this alive being that pulses with energy to support life, you know? So that's the second night in a nutshell. Um, very beautiful, much different experience than the first night. Granted, I microdosed it, so I didn't have as much of the chemicals in my in my brain. So that was my choice to preserve my sanity and not spark so much anxiety so that I could have a beautiful experience the second night. And then the third night, I took a similar amount the third night. We did the same routine. So, you know, wake up in the morning, rest, eat, meet with the shamans again to prepare to integrate the second night and prepare for the third night. And I said to the shaman on that was Monday afternoon, I said, last night, the second night was so beautiful. And it really did help me connect some of the dots of like why what this like evil message about motherhood meant. And then this light and beauty and softness and sweetness and love, you know, and what that means. And when you bring these two things together, I really I do understand that we're talking about two sides of the same thing here, that motherhood for some in some ways and for some people is really dark and very full of trauma and not something that maybe is the best fit for them. But the other side of that is like this unconditional love for life and for your children and do no harm, like this feeling of just wanting the best for innocent children. And so I was in this place by the third night of trying to integrate this overall feeling of the lineage that's in me, where there's, I think, a lot of women in my lineage, from my grandmother back, who became mothers in really traumatic ways or had extremely traumatic experiences with motherhood once they became mothers. And we're talking grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother. So these are women who my family's from like the eastern plains of Kansas. These were women who lived on farms and had 11 or 12 children, and God knows what they went through. Yeah, I'm sure it was traumatic and terrible, and by today's definition, extremely hard and full of trauma, capital T trauma, right? And they didn't have the tools or the resources to heal themselves. They endured it. And that's what it feels like in my the energy of this, of that first night ended up really landing with me the third night in comparison to, you know, my experience with motherhood and my experience with my own self-awareness and feeling like, you know, there's a lineage in me, and it's probably in all of us, especially if you're a mother, where you've got to look back at the lineage of motherhood that you've come from and understand that it hasn't probably always been a great experience for every single one of those mothers, and that they didn't have the tools to understand it or integrate it. Or help themselves or get help when they needed it necessarily. They've probably endured, you know, we're humans. And this is right now in 2022 is the first time ever in history that we've had as much access to information and help and tools and medications and all the things. You know, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, when we start to look down the line, we're all carrying some of that ancestral trauma through. Because those women, when they were mothers, experienced things that would be unimaginable to us that wouldn't happen now because of modern medicine and modern psychiatry and all of that, right? So that's what came together for me on the third night was like, wow, to become aware of what's in me. And that it's not, you know, my perception of motherhood and my experience of motherhood is yes, my own, and I have agency over that, but I'm also carrying a story and this like ancestral trauma legacy in my DNA through eons of my maternal line. And some of those women have had great experiences with motherhood, and some of those women have had very negative experiences with motherhood. And all of that gets carried down in the subsequent mother. So my mother was taught how to be a mother by her mother, who wasn't such a great mother. And my grandmother was taught how to be a mother by her mother, who had a ton of trauma and died very young. So all of this is to say what ultimately came out of these experiences for me, especially during the third night and after the third night, was this understanding of the complexity of motherhood and that it's okay to feel some of these more like dark and negative feelings about it, as long as I'm also rooted in this ultimate feeling of love for my children and for myself as a mother. And I think the biggest takeaway I felt after the third night was the children are here as they're in having their own experience. Like the children are not what define me as a mother. Yes, having my children is what made me a mother, but my experience of motherhood is my own and is defined by how I navigate the world and by the trauma and the teachings of my own mother more than my children, right? Like my children are not responsible for teaching me about motherhood. They're children having a children experience. I've actually taken a lot more information and conditioning of how to be a mother from my own mother because that's the only experience of motherhood I know, you know, and she got it from her mom and back and back and back. So it was this full circle moment for me to say, like, okay, I think I need to focus on motherhood. Like, this is really my calling, and I feel extremely seen and heard by this plant medicine experience, because this answers the question of that I was having so much emotion about before. This really answers the question for me at a level that I couldn't have ever even imagined. Like, had you said to me, What do you think is going to come up in your ayahuasca journey? I never in a million years would have said my grandmother Ruth. Like I never would have even thought of her ever. And so for her to come up so potently that first night and really unlock this idea that there can be a lot of darkness around motherhood and that that has to be integrated and understood and spoken of and healed before motherhood becomes this thing that you just love. Right. And so for me to come out on the other side of three days of the three ceremonies feeling really lit up about helping other mothers and understanding my own journey with motherhood and being able to speak to this, what this podcast is ultimately about, right? About the mother load. It's this multifaceted, extremely complex, hard to describe, constant dialogue in your mind that goes back and forth between the darkness and the light, right? That it feels like there is always something about it that you don't love, and there's always something about it that's incredibly beautiful. And we live in that duality constantly. And I think ultimately the ayahuasca confirmed that for me and in the most potent way that it possibly could from my personal experience. And it sent me back out into the world after the third day saying, your mission on earth is to have these conversations, to have this conversation about motherhood and to normalize this. And you need to also go heal with your own mother, which is the a topic of another podcast, because you know, there's just a lot of this that she's wrapped up in, and that my experience of her as a mother shaped me in a certain way. And having this experience with ayahuasca and having a conversation with her mother, my grandmother, really sent me home with a lot of compassion for what my mother has endured in her life, uh, especially in her early childhood with the mother she had, and how that informed her ability to be a mother and what I felt, you know, as her child and her mothering, good and bad, you know, it left me with a lot of compassion for her in the same way of like, she probably has a lot of mixed feelings about motherhood, because we all do. Anyway, that's the full arc of the ayahuasca experience. I microdosed again. The third night really felt like it answered, it put a lot of this stuff together. When I woke up the third morning, so this was now Tuesday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Yeah, this was now Tuesday morning. I journaled for like two hours. I mean, it just poured out of me the idea for the podcast and you know, pivoting my business, my coaching business, my growth and performance coaching more into working with high-achieving mothers who people that are at this level that I've reached, where it's like I've found a lot of success in my business and I want to find more. I'm super ambitious and I have an identity that was established in me before I had kids. You know, I was almost 35 when I had my first child. So I had worked for many years to find myself and my career and my businesses before I had kids. And I missed that, you know? And so coming out of that third night, that next morning, I'm journaling, I'm like, I want to help women like me who either found some success prior to having kids and are now, you know, here they are with young kids going, what the heck? Like I do not feel like my old self and I can't, I miss that. And I want to work with women who have kids and are building a business and starting to find more success and are getting good growth and want to scale and are held back from scaling because they either literally or they believe that they can't because of their children. And I wrote this all out that Tuesday after having these three nights in a row, because I felt like this was the answer I didn't know I needed, but now I have, which is the best way to achieve what I went down there to achieve, which was like trying to figure out why I felt so torn between building my business and being a mom. The answer was like the meta answer of you've got to do it. That is the business. Like you've got to show people and help people do that. Because if you're struggling with it, so are many, many, many other women like you. So, all that is to say, Tuesday, I like wrote out everything that I'm now putting into action in my life. And I met with the shaman for the third meeting one-on-one after the third night. So that's Tuesday afternoon. We met with the shamans again. And I kind of explain all of this, and he's like, Lindsay, you got it. Like, good job. And I'm like, Yay, gold star, which I'm an Enneagram 3. So if you give me a gold star, you've basically, you're my favorite person. And and he said, No, seriously, like for you to have that complete of an arc, you know, where you really get an answer that was that deep and that connected to everything that you came in wanting to understand and that you're now gonna go put into action, like that's pretty rare. Like, good on you for opening yourself up to the experience and being willing to go as deep as you went that first night, so that you could understand all of this. And he said, it's gonna take you a couple months to integrate. So give yourself a couple months when you get back. You know, he was like, in July, you can start. And when you start, you will have success. Like, this is you, this is what you're meant to do. This is your dharma. I mean, he didn't use the word dharma because that's from a different tradition, different culture, but whatever that translates to in the Peruvian tradition that we experience, it's like your purpose in life is this, and you got that from this experience. So, how cool for you! And good job. And thank you for surrendering and good luck, you know. And I again I'm bawling, burst into tears because I'm just like so grateful after that third day that it had all come full circle back to this ability to sit here and and just be in awe of motherhood and how amazing it is, and also how hard it is and the darkness that does live in some of us and all of us, like the moments of darkness around motherhood. And that I ultimately like left that experience feeling like I had an answer to something that I had been grappling with for five years, you know, and and it was at a level of depth in my own self-awareness that I had not reached after a year and a half of daily inner work. So if you're someone who's questioning whether you are interested in or ready for an ayahuasca experience, I would say it's not for someone who's never done any inner work because I feel like if you went into that experience not knowing anything about what lives within you, you could have a pretty negative experience. If you've done some inner work and are ready to go deep and answer some of the questions that maybe are are still percolating in your inner work, that's a great opportunity to have one of these psychedelic plant medicine experiences to drop you in a little deeper. So after that third day, we pack up, we thank everyone. You know, I mean, it was like family by that point. Like you've you've lived on in this eco-lodge above the Amazon for five days and gone through this incredible experience with people. So it was sad to leave. You know, we were so grateful to the the group of Peruvian people there that were supporting us. So we had a dinner and a gift ceremony where we gave them all stuff. And we went to sleep and left early Wednesday morning. And from there, we we left the north part of Peru, Iquitos, that region, and we flew to Cusco to go have a few days of integration at a resort called Samadhi in Sacred Valley. Beautiful resort, very nice, like luxury, hot showers, all of that. And then we went to Machu Picchu on Saturday. So, you know, that was Wednesday morning we left. We had Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, and Friday at Sacred Valley at Samadhi to integrate. We got to do art class, we did ecstatic dance, we went on hikes, we went shopping. It was just a really nice few days of integration and relaxing as a group together before we went home. And then Saturday we took the train up to Machu Picchu, hiked up to the very, very top of Machu Picchu. And then I actually flew home that night. So, like Saturday morning, I was on a train at 5 a.m. to go to Machu Picchu. And by 8 p.m. that night, I was boarding a flight in Lima to fly home overnight to Houston and then on to Denver. So Saturday was a very long day of Machu Picchu, hike Machu Picchu, get back on the train, come back down to Cusco, fly to Lima, and then fly back to Houston and to Denver. So by the time I landed Sunday, Sunday, May 8th, which was Mother's Day in Denver, I'd been awake for like 24 hours. And I wrote an Instagram post, which you can go look at from that day, that talked about motherhood on Mother's Day and grandmother ayahuasca. And that really marks the first day of what I like makes me emotional. It was like a rebirth as a mother because I came back home on Mother's Day to see my kids, and I had a totally different feeling. And it's hard to describe, and it makes me emotional here on the podcast, but it was like I understood I just had this deep understanding of not only my experience as a mother, but my mother's experience and her mother's experience and all mother's experience. Like it really did bring me home connected to the mother. Since then, you know, I'm recording this on August 2nd. And so it's been almost three months, and I turned 40 actually in about a week. And so it's just a big moment for me here to sit with this conversation, to have integrated all of this and to be on the path now with this podcast and with my business that I, you know, three months ago wouldn't have even had in my mind. Like I would not have considered a focus on motherhood, especially for ambitious, like high-achieving women. You know, I would have thought that those kind of people wouldn't want to talk about motherhood. They'd want to focus on the business. And it turns out I'm wrong. I was wrong. And that this conversation is so important to how we succeed and how we scale and how we grow in our businesses, because, and in our work, if you're not an entrepreneur, because you absolutely cannot not be a mother once you are one. No matter what happens, it irreversibly and at a scale that no one else understands, it changes who you are. And it doesn't mean you can't continue to succeed. In fact, it means that you can go on to do incredible things because if you can become a mother, you prove that you can do anything. It's the most radical shift of identity. And it is the biggest load put on a human that I can figure. I mean, I can't think of another thing that is bigger than that in terms of what it demands of you in such a short amount of time from a capacity expansion standpoint and from an identity reintegration standpoint. And historically, until, like I said, the last probably two decades, there's been so little support for that process. It just is a wonder to me how mothers have made it through the eons with such little understanding of what's going on inside their head. I mean, it's remarkable and it's overwhelming and it's sad, but it's beautiful, like all the things, right? So this is a very long podcast, and I really appreciate that you're still here listening. And I wanted to make sure I took the time to do the experience justice without going too far into detail, you know, into depth, but I will cover a lot of this stuff in more detail, the the little insights I got and the things that it helped me understand about motherhood that I'm now putting into practice. I will obviously cover those things in in more detail in individual episodes going forward. So this won't be the last time. I'm sure you hear about me talking about ayahuasca. And, you know, I think the last thing I'll say about it, because I'm sure I'll get comments from people who are like, it's illegal. I can't believe you did that. Like, it's dangerous. Because I got a lot of those comments before I went. It is illegal in the United States. It is not illegal in Peru. So I did not break any laws in having that experience. Now, if I tried to have that experience in the US, then yes, that would be illegal. It's dangerous. No, it's not. It's plant medicine. When it's administered in the tradition that we had it administered in, and it was overseen as heavily as it was by a, in my experience with shamans who have done it for generations, and we had a doctor there with us too. It was very safe. We were all instructed on how to prepare for it. So our bodies were ready and we didn't have any interactions of other drugs or anything like that. And the setting that we were in, the way they held space for us, felt safe. So please don't assign that every person having a plant medicine experience is doing something unsafe. That's not true. And then the trepidation, you know, like my mom and other people were like, you know, this is it's a Schedule I drug. Like it's gonna change your brain. You're gonna come back a different person, you're gonna be addicted, like all these crazy things that I encourage you to do some research and understand the actual science of the chemicals. There's a great documentary out on Netflix right now called How to Change Your Mind. Uh, it's a book by Michael Pollen. It's excellent about plant medicines and psychedelics. You know, with anything, I always say back to people like, do your own research. Don't trust the media, don't trust what you see on social media. Like if someone is saying something negative about something based on their experience with it, that doesn't necessarily mean everyone's experience with it is like that. That's them. And uh especially with plant medicine, because it's not mainstream in America. If you've heard something negative about it, it might behoove you to go do some additional reading. And I'll put some resources in the show notes of this show that are, you know, books that were recommended to us, YouTube videos, documentaries, those kind of things that really go into the science of it and the tradition. So that if you are someone who's skeptical, you've got some resources to check out. You don't have to take my word for it. Um, I'm not a scientist, but this was a chronicle of my experience. And my experience with it was that I felt safe. I did feel scared, and I felt the word terror, like I felt terrified that first night while I was in hell having this conversation because I had never had a psychedelic experience and I didn't understand in the moment what was happening. But afterwards, and and having integrated it all now, I see that that was exactly what my brain needed to feel and needed to do under the influence of those chemicals to heal the wounds that I was carrying into that experience. And so to me, it's medicine. I had a wound that was open and raw that I brought into that experience. And the medicine knew what that wound was, and it went in there and it applied the medicine that I needed to heal. And I came out on the other side better for it. Thank you for sticking with me this long. And if you have any questions, especially about ayahuasca and where to find more information, please check out the show notes and my website. My personal experience, the retreat that I was with, you know, was curated specifically for my group. It's not something that you can sign up for online, but I can definitely answer questions and steer you in the right direction if you're someone who wants more information, especially about experiencing this stuff in Peru. So don't hesitate to reach out. The best way to have a conversation about this with me would be a DM on Instagram at motherlode.pod or at LindsayRoselle. You can also send an email in to me and my team, uh hello at lindseyroselle.com. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening. If you love this episode and know someone else that would benefit from today's conversation, it would mean so much to me if you share this episode with them or even share it to your social media and tag me so I can personally thank you. As always, I am so grateful you're on this journey with me. And until next time, remember that even when the love feels really heavy, you are never alone.