I want to share with you my recent ayahuasca experience at a healing retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon. It may help you decide whether or not you might consider going to a retreat center or doing a detox or reset type program, and also why a person might consider using psychedelic plant medicines, such as Ayahuasca, as a way to support your healing process.

This video is going to be helpful for you if you have tested positive for high-risk HPV virus and maybe abnormal cells on your cervix and potential risk of cervical cancer or vaginal cancer, or any other kind of cancer for that matter. 

This will also be helpful for those of you who are working to conceive a pregnancy and prevent a miscarriage, and those of you who are going through perimenopause and post-menopausal symptoms, weight gain, blood sugar issues, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, migraines, autoimmune conditions, and simply wanting to prevent other health issues like heart disease and dementia. So really, this information could be helpful for all of us humans to heal!

The recent trip to the Amazon is not my first time going to a healing center in Peru. This is the fourth time over the past five years that I have been to Peru to experience a healing retreat center as well as to take the psychedelic plant medicine called Ayahuasca. As a naturopathic doctor, women’s health expert, and herbalist, I’m really impressed with the healing potential of Ayahuasca, as well as the overall approach at the retreat center, and can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Understanding Psychedelic Therapy and Why I’m an Advocate

Some of you may already be familiar with psychedelic therapy or psychedelic-assisted therapy. There are several recent documentaries about it, such as “How to Change Your Mind” and “Fantastic Fungi.” These are great resources to give you a sense of what it’s like to go to a healing retreat center and to experience psychedelic medicines.

Over the past year, I completed a year-long training in psychedelic-assisted therapy through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. This is a one-of-a-kind training in the United States, and the first time it was offered for providers like me – medical doctors, including emergency room doctors, nurse practitioners, and naturopathic doctors. We have been in a classroom together learning about psychedelic medicines that can be used safely and effectively to help people with all different health issues.

It is anticipated that psychedelic medicines and therapy will become more and more accessible in the United States in the near future. Still, at this moment in time, most states have not legalized Ayahuasca, psilocybin, which is from magic mushrooms, or MDMA. Right now, one psychedelic substance that is available legally is ketamine. There are ketamine clinics opening in many cities across the country for the treatment of anxiety and depression. Psilocybin certification and legal access is available in Oregon and soon to be in Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa. 

After reviewing all the research on the clinical effectiveness of psychedelic substances to help with conditions that are not being helped by other approaches – including treatment resistant anxiety, depression, and PTSD – without causing side effects or addiction, I have become an advocate for increasing awareness and access. The training I completed will allow me to offer psychedelic assisted therapy where it is legal.

More than anything, I want for you to at least be aware of what is possible with the use of psychedelic substances to help us humans heal. As a researcher, always in search of medicines to help my patients, I went all the way to the Amazon in Peru to learn about how they’re using diet changes and herbs that have psychedelic properties. Ayahuasca is actually a mix of two different plants – a vine and a leaf from two different plants that together create a psychedelic experience.

The experience has been so healing for me that I look forward to sharing information with you about how to access psychedelic therapy safely so you can consider whether it may be an option for you.

The Mind-Body-Spirit Connection in Recovering from Stress and Trauma

There are a lot of misconceptions about psychedelics – more than I’ll be able to cover in this one video, so I’ll be covering more about psychedelics in upcoming videos because I want you all to be well-informed to be able to make decisions about your health. 

The most common misconception about psychedelics is thinking that they only impact our mind and our thoughts. Actually, psychedelic substances, including Ayahuasca, are affecting much more than our mind. In fact, it is more that they allow us to set aside our usual thought processes and patterns in order to heal on a much deeper level.

When considering whether you’d like to go on a healing retreat and/or to have a psychedelic experience, it is important to understand that it’s a mind-body-and-spirit healing experience. Ultimately, as humans, that’s what we are – we’re not just a body and we’re not just a mind. We are a mind, body, and spirit. 

No matter what health issue you’re dealing with – whether it’s mental like anxiety or depression, or in your body like joint pain or stomach aches – every health issue is related to and requires that we address your mind, body, and spirit. There is no separation of mind and body.

When you start to realize that the health issue you are dealing with may have an emotional component or is perhaps related to trauma you experienced – which I find is very often the case with high risk HPV and abnormal pap smears, for example – that’s when we need to look to use approaches that can help you heal from trauma. 

We like to think that we can avoid pain and suffering, and yet as humans, when we can acknowledge that we do experience pain and suffering, that’s when healing can happen. When we accept, embrace, process, forgive, and move through the suffering and allow ourselves to be with our emotions, that’s when we can actually heal from what we’ve been through and heal from what we experience as humans.

Many of you know that I specialize in stress and trauma. I research and write about how we as humans are exposed to stress and trauma starting from a young age, in childhood and even in utero. We also experience generational trauma that can affect us to this day. I then research what it is we as humans can do to recover from the trauma we are exposed to. 

I’ve written about this research in my books, including: “The Stress Remedy,” “The Stress Warrior”, and “Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health.”

Life at the Healing Retreat Center

What happens at the healing retreat in the Amazon? One thing is that it’s about being away. That’s one way to think about it – literally going away from home. At the retreat I attended, there were people from the United States, as well as from the U.K., Europe and New Zealand. People flew from halfway around the world to Peru and then rode in a van into the Andes mountains and the Amazon jungle.

We stayed in individual cabins with no Wi-Fi, and no EMFs, so we were away from all technology and stimulation. It was quite a contrast to come from Manhattan to the Amazon, away from all the lights and the chaos – to a simple small cabin in the jungle.

This time I was in a new healing retreat center, which meant that the cabins were brand new and beautiful. Sometimes in the past when I went to a healing retreat center, they did not have running water, so there was no sink, no shower, no toilet. This new healing retreat center has running water. It wasn’t hot water – it did have solar heat for the water so it wasn’t ice cold, but it was not hot water. It was cold water, which is very healing itself.

It was also a circadian rhythm reset because we did not have electricity and so light from the sun was our main exposure to light. The sun came up at about 6:00 AM and went down at about 6:00 PM – so we had 12 hours of daylight. When the sun went down, yes, we had candles, flashlights, and battery-powered light bulbs, but once it got dark, it was mainly dark because the cabins have mesh walls, open to the jungle.

It was interesting because two weeks before I left to go to Peru, in my home in New York, my hot water heater, air conditioner, and electric panel all stopped working, all at once. I thought to myself – how could that happen and what am I going to do? Then I went to Peru where I found myself in a cabin with no hot water, no electricity, and no air conditioner – and I was just fine. How ironic! 

The temperature at the location in the Amazon was actually perfect – not too hot and not too cold. I didn’t need an air conditioner, and I didn’t need a heater – it was amazing!

The Healing Diet and Fasting Protocol

At the healing retreat center in the Amazon we followed a traditional “dieta.” The diet includes only whole foods, no processed foods, and avoided all alcohol, caffeine, sugar, salt, dairy, gluten, as well as chocolate. 

We ate rice, quinoa, potatoes (there are lots of different kinds of potatoes in Peru), and avocado. We had the option to eat eggs and could have free-range chicken once per week. We also ate vegetables like broccoli, carrots, corn, beans, lentils, and occasionally oatmeal.

The diet is also calorie restricted. We were served two meals per day. I calculated the calories to be between 1,500 and 2,000 calories per day. It met the criteria of a fasting-mimicking diet in that a higher portion of calories came from carbs and a lower amount came from fat and protein. 

A fasting-mimicking diet is known to mimicking the effects of fasting in the body without fasting, which means that it can stimulate autophagy (cleaning out abnormal cells) and improve longevity (by preventing health issues).

The fasting-mimicking diet was doing a lot of healing work. At the same time, I never felt hungry. I usually split the two meals into four smaller meals. We also had longer periods of fasting – full fasting or intermittent fasting overnight, for example, from 6:00 or 7:00 PM until at least 9:00 AM the next morning, and sometimes it would even be fasting from 2:00 PM until 9:00 AM the next morning.

The Sacred Ayahuasca Ceremonies

Another key aspect of a healing center in Peru is the use of ritual and ceremony. We tend not to use ritual and ceremony in our daily lives, and yet they can be so healing. 

The Ayahuasca plant medicine is taken in a ceremony, not on your own. Everyone staying at the healing retreat center – about 25 or 30 of us –would gather in a big outdoor space called a Maloca. It’s a circular room with a hardwood floor and a cone-shaped roof. We sit side-by-side around the perimeter of the Maloca. 

The shaman leads the ceremony as we each go through our individual process. We come wearing clothes for ceremony – oftentimes they’re clothes that have been sewn by the Shipibo indigenous community. We begin by smudging each other with the smoke of Palo Santo, which is a wood that has a beautiful smell when burned. Palo Santo cleanses your energy.

The shaman opens the ceremony, calling in the spirit of Ayahuasca, as well as the spirit guides, and thanking mother earth for allowing us to receive the healing power of Ayahuasca. Then we go one by one to receive the plant medicine in a concentrated, dark-colored brew or liquid that you just drink in one swallow. You take it on an empty stomach, and then you sit and wait for it to activate. It takes about 30-45 minutes to begin to feel the effects, and the ceremony lasts at least six hours, sometimes eight hours.

During the ceremony the shaman and musicians play or sing medicine music or Icaros. They play drums, rattles, guitar, charango, flute, and more. The music is a support through the process and experience as Ayahuasca does it’s healing work.

The Ayahuasca Experience and Healing Process

The way I know Ayahuasca has started working is when I yawn, and I feel a vibration inside my body, and that is when visions usually begin. The visions can be patterns, colors, and/or animals. It is common with Ayahuasca, to see eyes – one eye or many eyes.

At the same time as you’re having visions, the medicine is working on the physical, emotional and spiritual level. It’s considered that Ayahuasca helps bring us into the spiritual realm, which means being able to access and experience things that we don’t experience in our normal daily life. 

In science, we call this a non-ordinary state of consciousness. An ordinary state of consciousness is how I’m talking to you right now, when we’re talking from our mind and our logic. A non-ordinary state of consciousness is when we are allowing our mind, body, and spirit to have an experience that’s outside of that usual state of logic.

What I noticed is that Ayahuasca is very healing to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is affected by stress. When we go through stress and trauma, it can really affect our vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body and connects our brain out to all the different areas of our body. It communicates with the glands that make our hormones, our digestion, our immune system, our nervous system. When trauma affects our vagus nerve, it can really affect our health. A medicine like Ayahuasca that can help heal the vagus nerve can be so healing even just on that level.

I believe that’s why sometimes Ayahuasca can cause you to vomit up the medicine. It’s not like food poisoning where you may be vomiting for hours. Instead, you may vomit up the ounce of herbal medicine that you just swallowed. It doesn’t always happen, and I see it as part of resetting the vagus nerve function.

Ayahuasca can help us process what has happened to us in the past. It allows for processing emotions that we likely didn’t even know we needed to feel. I often find that it reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in years and that hasn’t come up in therapy or by thinking about it or journaling. Ayahuasca allows us to set aside our thinking brain and to reveal what needs to processed.

For example, in one ceremony I was reminder how to feel anger. Then, oftentimes, Ayahuasca will show me how to feel gratitude and love. The feeling is so profound– it’s indescribable, really. Imagine feeling gratitude in the greatest degree possible. That’s what it’s like, with your heart exploding with gratitude.

At the recent retreat, I was processing a lot about my relationship with my father. My father died about 2½ years ago, and I’ve processed some of that over the years, but this healing retreat really gave me the opportunity to gain perspective I didn’t have before. It’s not something I intended to focus on, but once I took the medicine, that’s what revealed itself to me as needing to be processed.

My father was a pharmacist and ran a pharmacy chain his whole career. I, as his daughter, saw from a young age the value of pharmaceuticals but also the risks, and found that I tend to have a lot of sensitivities and reactions to pharmaceutical medications. I learned from my father that, yes, we can turn to pharmaceuticals when we need them, but we want to be able to help our bodies heal and prevent the need for pharmaceuticals whenever possible. We can do that through diet, nutrients and herbs, including plant medicines like Ayahuasca.

That’s what I connected with as my father’s daughter – how to avoid the need for pharmaceuticals. That’s what led me to become a naturopathic doctor, herbalist, midwife, clinical nutritionist, and I’ve been practicing for over 25 years helping patients in that way. 

So it’s perfectly fitting that I would find this plant medicine in the Amazon to help me with my health, and I’m so excited to tell patients about it. But I want you to know, like with anything, it’s very important to work with a provider, an Ayahuasquero, or a shaman who has experience and is being very careful with your case to make sure that there are no contraindications, so that you’re safe and supported.

The Spiritual and Transformational Aspects of Ayahausca

As humans, one of the things we fear most is death. In my life there were many times when instead of fearing death, I wished I could die. This is because of complex trauma I experienced (narcissistic abuse), and subsequent depression and anxiety.

With Ayahuasca, I had the beautiful opportunity to celebrate dying. In fact, one of the common spiritual experiences with Ayahuasca is to feel as if you’re dying, but you’re not dying. In fact, the spiritual experience of death and rebirth is well known in history and throughout time.

It was quite a beautiful experience – to feel as though it was the day I was dying, the celebration of it, and the beauty that can happen with the transition out of this human life. In fact, there is a lot of research that shows that psychedelic substances can be very helpful for end-of-life. They allow people to reconcile their life experience, understand what their purpose is, and be at peace with the end of their life.

During the 16-day healing retreat, there’s a lot of opportunity for spiritual transformation. There is an Ayahuasca ceremony every other day, so there are eight ceremonies in the 16-day retreat. At the same time, during the daytime, there are opportunities to spend time in nature – not only living in nature but also going for hikes in the healing retreat center. 

There are amazing waterfalls, like in paradise with green leaves and trees, butterflies, birds, and water coming straight out of a rock in the mountain, falling into the pool of water below. You can swim in the pool of water. We also participated in a special flower bath cleansing at the waterfall – a once in a lifetime experience.

How Ayahausca Helps with Recovery from Trauma 

I want to again emphasize what I see as the healing potential at a retreat center for those of you who might be feeling like you’ve tried everything. You might be feeling stuck, and maybe you know you’ve experienced trauma in your childhood – adverse childhood events – or maybe stress and trauma during your adulthood, whether that’s a stressful relationship, narcissistic abuse like what I experienced, or it could be from a death of a loved one or a loss of your home or crisis that you went through.

You might also be feeling that you are being guided into an experience of emotional awareness, expanding your perceptions, your views, and your experience. Maybe you’ve recently been through a divorce or separation in your life. Major life changes can sometimes stimulate the desire to look inside and say, “Why am I experiencing this in my life, and what are things I could do to change this going forward?”

You might also be drawn to what might be referred to as a spiritual emergence or expansion of your experience spiritually. When I was in the healing retreat center, I was reading a book as part of my training called “Spiritual Emergency,” which is all about different types of spiritual experiences that humans can have. These spiritual experiences really expand our sense of who we are, our purpose here, and what we value most and what we want to then offer as a service to others.

When in one of the Ayahausca ceremonies, I asked, “Why is it that I’m the one who’s here to help women to prevent cervical cancer and other health issues?” The answer was, “it is my experience healing from trauma myself that I will be able to share with others to help them heal as well.”

That’s a beautiful thing as humans – when we can heal ourselves and with that same wisdom and knowledge, we can help others heal. That is beautiful reciprocity and I believe that’s what we’re here to do as humans – to each identify our unique talent, our unique purpose, our uniqueness as a human being, and then to offer that to others in exchange.

I’m so grateful for all the healing I’ve experienced throughout my life, all of the wisdom from my childhood, from my training as a nutritionist, as a naturopathic doctor, as a midwife, all the women who I learned from, all of the patients I’ve worked with – thousands of patients for over 25 years – that has allowed me to help people to navigate stresses and traumas, such as recovering from 9/11 in Manhattan, from the COVID pandemic, and from high risk HPV.

I completely healed myself from migraines as well as from arthritis pain. When I take Ayahuasca, I have zero pain, when otherwise I almost always have some pain because of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and arthritis. The fact that I can use a substance to address pain that has no addictive qualities and no side effects – without needing to take it every day – is incredible.

It’s completely different from medications we are used to taking, which require that we take them every day. Ayahasca doesn’t cause suppression. It simply creates healing, and in that healing, the emotional pain goes away, the physical pain goes away, and at the same time, I have found greater clarity about my purpose and ability to support others to heal.

Conclusion and Next Steps for Healing

The key message I want to leave you with is that the human body can heal, and it’s possible to heal from trauma. We sometimes simply need to be able to release and let go and let our bodies and our spirit guide us to the healing that we need. 

Infections, imbalances, and symptoms are simply messages or signals showing us that trauma is affecting us on a physical level. It’s when we can heal from the trauma that these physical symptoms and health issues disappear. That the case with high-risk HPV and abnormal cells on the cervix. 

I’m in the process of planning a retreat in the Amazon for women who are working to protect themselves from HPV. If you are interested, please reach out to my office so we can put you on the list – office@doctordoni.com.  

At the same time, I want to emphasize that you don’t have to go all the way to Peru, and you don’t necessarily have to take a psychedelic substance if you don’t want to. There are many modalities we can use to support healing from trauma. We can use breathwork, time in nature, or a detoxification program from home. 

In fact, I developed a 14-day detox based on my experience at the healing retreat center. It includes a fasting-mimicking diet plan, protein shake, supplements, and videos from me to guide you every step of the way. Find my 14-Day Detox Program here.

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I include healing from trauma in the Say Goodbye to HPV online program, and in my one-on-one work with patients, which is available to women around the world.

If you would like to learn more and understand the next steps on your healing journey, you can comment below or you can reach out to my office and we can set up a time to meet, so I can get to know you, and we can think through the different options that make sense for you. It’s all about understanding where you’re starting from, and the next best step for your case. I will then guide you step by step in the direction of healing.

Please know that if you’re struggling and hoping there’s another option for healing, there is! I’m happy to help you create a plan to transform your health and your future.

Thanks again for joining me here at How Humans Heal. If you haven’t already, I welcome you to subscribe to my newsletter, podcast and join me for the next episode. 

I hope this gives you new hope and inspiration for your ability to heal. Don’t give up – believe me, I’ve been at the very bottom. I’ve experienced all the edges of human reality. I’ve been through pain and suffering. I understand. You’re not alone. Healing is possible. 

Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment,  natural HPV cure, or prevention of any disease.