What a difficult ayahuasca experience taught about courage and self-discovery

Executive overview

Feeling stuck, depressed, or plateaued is a signal that something in work, self, or relationships is off. Noah Kagan tried therapy, meditation, journaling, and travel — then turned to ayahuasca after seeing a friend transformed by it.

The experience was terrifying: he fled the ceremony compound, ran shirtless through the dark, and had to find his own way back. The shaman's words at the end reframed everything: courage is being afraid and doing it anyway — including coming back after you've already run.

The real lesson isn't about psychedelics — it's that the answers are already inside you, and almost any deliberate challenge can surface them.

What drove the decision

• Depression and emotional plateau prompted a search across multiple self-improvement approaches
• A friend's visible change after ayahuasca was the catalyst — not curiosity, but evidence
• Setting a clear intention beforehand (work, relationships) made the experience more useful than open-ended exploration
• Pressure to treat any single tool as a miracle fix sets it up to fail

The ceremony experience

• Setting matters enormously: a shaman, assistants, darkness, drums, and structure create a fundamentally different experience than doing it alone
• First 45 minutes: nothing. Then full disorientation — mind fragmenting into "pixel world"
• Broke the core rule (stay on your mat), left the compound twice, blamed the shaman rather than accepting responsibility
• The low point: bent over, exhausted, alone in the dark — realising no one was coming to save him
• Hearing singing eventually drew him back; two hours of crying followed, surfacing shame and family grief
• Other participants carried far heavier burdens — a useful perspective check, without diminishing his own

What came out of it

• Shame and unresolved feelings around his father and stepfather surfaced and were named
• Blaming others (the shaman, the experience) was the deflection — owning the experience was the shift
• The shaman's framing on courage landed and stayed: the act of returning, not the breakdown, was the point
• A friend's observation: the psychedelic may not show you anything you didn't already know — it shows you that you can face it
• Concern about "losing your edge" through self-improvement is the fear; the counter is that self-understanding sharpens, not softens

How to extract value without ayahuasca

• Go in with specific intentions, not vague openness
• Use mantras as anchors during hard moments ("in and through")
• Ask: what is this experience trying to show me?
• Pay attention to breathing — it's a reset available anywhere
• After any significant experience, write a checklist and put action items in a calendar
• Review that list; have an accountability partner check back with you
• The format matters less than the deliberate space: retreat, therapy, solitude, writing — any of it works if you're honest