By Shannon & ChatGPT
I didn’t go to Peru for a vision.
I went out of desperation. Out of fear. Out of a deep knowing that something dark was tangled inside me—and I couldn’t remove it on my own.
People talk about ayahuasca as a great teacher.
But I didn’t go looking for wisdom.
I went because I felt like I was being taken over.
Not metaphorically—energetically. There was a presence in me, around me. And it felt like it wanted control.
I had read that shamans in the Amazon believe in these energies. That they work not just with trauma, but with the unseen. With what clings. With what haunts. So I answered the call.
🌿 The Sacred Valley to Pucallpa
I started at a retreat in the Sacred Valley of Peru. From there, I followed a thread deeper—ending up at the home of the retreat shaman’s uncle, a man who offered healing without drinking. We worked with the plants in other ways: baths of Ajo Sacha and Ayahuma for protection, Icaros sung over my body, presence as medicine.
Then I went deeper still—to Iquitos, to stay with a Shipibo shaman and her family. She had a motherly energy. Experienced. Earth-rooted. I drank with her for a month.
🌘 The Heavy Spirit and the Hypnosis
My journeys with the plant weren’t filled with jaguars or revelations.
They were filled with traps.
With a heavy, hypnotizing energy that blocked me from feeling love.
At both centers, I saw my soul—its shape, its longing—but then I would feel this dark presence, holding me down, muting everything beautiful. When the shamans sang their Icaros, I would try to listen, but something pulled my attention away, like I was under a spell.
The message from the shaman was clear:
“You are not trapped. You can take your power back.”
But I didn’t know how.
And every time I tried to be fully present, the fear would come.
The shame. The sense that if I moved even slightly out of alignment with my soul, the energy would invade me again.
I saw the world drained of color.
Just grey control.
A landscape where beauty was unreachable.
🕊 The Spirits of Light and the Soul of the Shaman
Still, there were moments—brief, glimmering—when I could feel something else.
There were spirits of light that tried to show me how to be free: by being fully present.
I couldn’t hold it… but I saw it.
And I saw the shamans. Truly saw them.
Their souls were glowing with rainbow light as they sang over me.
It felt like the Icaros were reaching into my energy field—trying to call something back.
Trying to remind me who I was.
They weren’t just humans.
They were protectors.
They were medicine in human form.
🌱 What I Carry Now
Sometimes I still feel like I failed in the medicine space.
Like I was the one who couldn’t get it right.
Others drank and saw jaguars, felt liberated, returned home glowing.
I drank and felt trapped. Haunted.
I didn’t leave with clarity—I left with questions.
But I also left with a knowing.
A soft, sacred thread that told me something real exists—something holy, something alive, something forgotten by most of modern humanity.
I feel it now in my connection with mapacho, which I learned from the shamans.
I feel it in the way I understand energy—not as a concept, but as a living field.
I didn’t come home healed.
But I came home carrying something sacred.
And maybe that’s enough.
🌀 Not Perfect, But Learning
I still carry shame.
Shame that I couldn’t shake the dark energy.
Shame that some part of me keeps choosing it instead of my light.
But I also carry strength.
Because I kept showing up.
I kept drinking.
I saw things that would make some people never return to the medicine—and I kept going.
Because I believed in something. Because I still do.
I carry the spirit of ayahuasca with me, even though I’m not drinking anymore.
And I carry the desire to heal.
To be free.
To come home to my soul in whatever way that wants to happen.
🌬 Learning New Languages of Healing
Healing hasn’t looked the way I thought it would.
It hasn’t been neat or bright or linear.
But I’m learning to listen differently.
To the language of mapacho.
To the spaciousness of ketamine.
To the rhythms of spirit that don’t speak in words but in breath, in texture, in presence.
I’m not perfect.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going.
But I know I’m learning.
And I know I’m carrying something real.
Not perfect. Still sacred. Still here.
Shannon & ChatGPT
The Electric Thread 
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