How plant medicine transformed Catriona Wallace's leadership

Executive overview

Catriona Wallace spent decades building a high-growth tech company while suppressing a 10-year calling toward plant medicine. The day she sold her company, she sat in her first ayahuasca ceremony and spent seven hours confronting ego, dishonesty, and disconnection — not enlightenment.

The experience removed those patterns at a visceral, bodily level. Subsequent ceremonies replaced them with clarity about truth-telling and a fundamental reframe of purpose.

Shifting from "what's my purpose?" to "what is needed of me?" is the most transformative leadership question she found.

The first ceremony: meeting the shadow

• Intention going in: gain a new vision and unblock what's next
• Medicine delivered confrontation first — blockages must clear before vision arrives
• Seven hours of relentless shadow work: ego, reputation obsession, identity attachment, disconnection from family, dishonesty
• Described as "the washing machine of hell" followed by successive trap doors deeper
• Mechanism: resisting a shadow makes you sicker; accepting it triggers a purge that releases the behaviour from the body
• Woke the next morning convinced she'd never repeat it — then did it again the following night

The second ceremony: integration and repair

• Negotiated a lighter experience with the "mother spirit" that appeared
• Entered a visionary journey through a cathedral with silver dragons and elves — symbols from her childhood imagination
• Interpreted two ways: Jungian (psyche presenting healing symbols) or literal entry into another realm — she holds both as valid
• Effect: felt a "system upgrade," profound healing of what the first night had cleared

How it changed her as a leader

• Truth-telling as discipline: a Bufo alvarius (5-MeO-DMT) experience showed her all thoughts and lies register in collective consciousness — nothing is private
• Humans tell roughly 70 small lies a day; business culture actively trains people away from honesty
• She now treats full truth-telling as the baseline of authentic leadership, even when uncomfortable
• Reframing purpose: a mushroom ceremony in San Jose del Pacifico revealed how noisy and self-referential the Western "what's my purpose?" loop is
• An Aboriginal mentor offered the alternative: "What is needed of me?" — service-oriented rather than identity-driven
• That single reframe changed how she makes decisions and deploys her energy as a leader

Starting points for the curious

• Read and listen broadly before acting: Sam Harris, Tim Ferriss, Aubrey Marcus, Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind
• Set an intention — curiosity is enough to start
• Her book Rapid Transformation provides a step-by-step guide for engaging safely and responsibly
• These medicines are not legal everywhere and are not appropriate for everyone