A group of 12 combat sports athletes recently came together in the Colombian Andes for an unusual experiment: four ayahuasca ceremonies combined with scientific observation, brain mapping, and a shared focus on trauma and traumatic brain injury.

The group included MMA fighters, UFC veterans, bare-knuckle boxers, wrestlers, and jiu-jitsu competitors, many with championship-level careers. The retreat was organized with Athlete’s Journey Home, an organization working with combat sports athletes affected by the physical and psychological consequences of fighting.

From Fighters to a Vulnerable Community

One of the biggest surprises was the group dynamic. Bringing highly competitive fighters together might suggest an environment dominated by ego and aggression. Instead, participants described something very different.

Titles and achievements largely disappeared from the conversation. Fighters cried, shared painful experiences, supported one another, and openly admitted that they needed help. Several participants described the group as unusually cohesive because everyone understood what years of fighting can do to the body and mind.

That shared background became part of the retreat itself. Rather than competing against one another, the fighters were confronting injuries, addiction, PTSD, childhood trauma, relationship problems, and the difficult question of what comes after a life built around combat.

The Hidden Cost of Combat Sports

Former MMA champion Ian McCall and bare-knuckle champion Mark Irwin spoke about repeated concussions and the long-term consequences faced by fighters. McCall described experiencing hundreds of concussions over his lifetime, while Irwin said repeated head trauma ultimately pushed him toward research into psychedelic therapies.

Other participants shared similarly difficult histories. Bare-knuckle fighter Matthew Martin discussed childhood abuse and years of heroin and crack addiction before becoming sober. Clinton Faucher described a traumatic brain injury that once caused severe memory problems, including becoming disoriented while driving his daughter to school and needing reminders around his home.

Faith, a military veteran, firefighter, and fighter, described cumulative trauma and PTSD symptoms including panic attacks, hypervigilance, and anger. She said ayahuasca had not eliminated those symptoms but had made them more manageable.

What the Fighters Reported

The experiences varied considerably. Irwin, drinking ayahuasca for the first time, described feeling greater empathy and connection. McCall, who already had extensive psychedelic experience, found the Colombian ceremonies less focused on dramatic visions and more introspective, emotional, and physically purgative.

Other fighters reported feeling calmer, clearer, less reactive, or more capable of looking at painful experiences. These were personal reports rather than clinical conclusions, but a recurring theme was that the ceremonies created space to examine problems that had previously been hidden behind toughness, competition, or survival.

Measuring the Brain Before and After Ayahuasca

The retreat also included QEEG brain mapping before and after the ceremonies. Neuroscience researcher Luke Jensen discussed preliminary observations from the fighters as well as a larger collection of pre- and post-ayahuasca brain maps gathered at LaWayra.

Jensen described QEEG as a way of examining patterns of brainwave activity and identifying areas of dysregulation. In one fighter with significant head trauma, he reported that a pattern interpreted by the team as inflammation was substantially reduced after the week.

However, Jensen also emphasized that the broader dataset still needs to be properly analyzed. The observations are therefore preliminary and should not be treated as proof that ayahuasca can heal traumatic brain injury, PTSD, or other neurological conditions.

A Different Meaning of Strength

Perhaps the most striking part of the retreat had little to do with brain scans. Combat sports reward toughness, pain tolerance, aggression, and the ability to keep moving forward. Those same qualities can make it difficult for fighters to admit when they are struggling.

At the retreat, strength took a different form. World champions and experienced fighters openly discussed fear, addiction, grief, trauma, family problems, and uncertainty about the future. Participants repeatedly described the absence of ego as one of the most powerful aspects of the experience.

For athletes whose lives have been defined by fighting, the week suggested another possibility: sometimes the hardest fight is not against another person. It is learning how to face what remains after the crowd disappears, the career ends, and the fighter finally has space to look inward.

Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2esZp7zMLv7n2OFlB5xZIq?si=efbefe1638ce4520

Tim Morrison’s path into healing work began with a sudden physical collapse. Once an elite Muay Thai fighter and strength coach, he suffered serious neck injuries that ended his fighting career and left him with chronic nerve pain. The loss of identity was even harder, and Morrison entered a period of depression and uncertainty.

Eventually, that crisis led him to the Amazon, where he began working with ayahuasca. What followed was not instant healing, but a long process involving altered states, somatic work, breathwork, and more than a year of integration.

When Healing Opens Too Much at Once

After his first extended ayahuasca experience, Morrison returned home feeling deeply connected and transformed. Soon afterward, however, he entered what he describes as a shamanic awakening. He experienced powerful energy moving through his body, vivid dreams, altered states, voices, spiritual imagery, and periods where he questioned whether he was losing his mind.

Morrison emphasizes how destabilizing it was. He says it took around 18 months to integrate what had happened, with support from his mother helping him remain grounded.

His story highlights that transformation is not always comfortable and may require significant support afterward.

How Ayahuasca Led to Breathwork

During a later period in the jungle, Morrison entered a traditional plant dieta and asked how he could bring some of the benefits of the medicine back to people who might never drink ayahuasca.

During ceremony, he experienced a strong message to focus on the breath. He began experimenting with conscious connected breathing while still in the jungle, then continued practicing when he returned home. Over time, those experiments developed into the trauma-informed approach he now calls Spiritus Breathwork.

His method combines rhythmic breathing with somatic awareness, emotional processing, movement, sound, and nervous-system regulation. The goal is not simply to create an intense altered state, but to work within what a person can safely process.

Breathwork and Altered States

Morrison sees similarities between breathwork and psychedelic experiences without claiming they are identical. Conscious connected breathing can produce tingling, emotional release, unusual sensations, vivid imagery, or altered states.

But intensity is not automatically healing. Someone who constantly chases altered states may actually be avoiding their body or using spiritual experiences as another form of escape.

That is why Morrison emphasizes regulation and pacing. Breathwork can deepen an experience, but it can also help settle the nervous system.

Why the Body Matters in Trauma Healing

A central part of Morrison’s work is helping people increase their capacity to feel sensations without immediately becoming overwhelmed, dissociating, or falling into old survival reactions.

He describes this through the idea of a window of tolerance. When people remain within that window, they can experience difficult emotions while staying present. Outside it, they may move into anxiety, panic, shutdown, numbness, or defensive behavior.

Somatic work gradually expands that capacity. Rather than forcing catharsis, Morrison prefers helping people stay connected to the body as sensations arise. Forced emotional release can be harder to integrate afterward.

Healing Should Change Daily Life

One of the strongest themes in the conversation is that healing work should eventually produce changes outside the retreat, ceremony, or breathwork session.

Morrison became skeptical after seeing people repeatedly attend transformational workshops, release the same emotions, and return without changing their daily patterns. A person can become attached to the identity of always healing.

At some point, the focus has to shift from asking what else needs to be fixed to asking what kind of life should be created. That may involve relationships, work, health, creativity, boundaries, or simply responding differently when familiar triggers appear.

Integration Is Where Transformation Becomes Real

Both ayahuasca and breathwork can create moments where people feel open, connected, and completely different from their usual selves. The challenge begins when they return home to the same relationships, habits, environments, and stresses.

Integration means noticing when an old reaction begins and choosing something different. It also means allowing enough time between intense experiences for the nervous system to absorb what has happened.

Morrison’s journey from fighter to facilitator ultimately points to a simple idea: the experience itself is only part of healing. Whether the tool is ayahuasca, breathwork, meditation, or another practice, transformation becomes meaningful when insights are translated into the way a person actually lives.

Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1oL50OTL80DqoRATXbJ3Tj?si=1a8db3dd349d4077

Filmmaker and musician Metta Beshay approaches psychoactive plants from a citizen scientist perspective, with a strong interest in ethnobotany, history, culture, and how people actually use these plants.

After spending time with Shipibo communities in the Peruvian Amazon, Beshay joined Sam Believ on the Ayahuasca Podcast to discuss ayahuasca tourism, indigenous culture, icaros, jungle life, and the modern presentation of ancient traditions.

From YouTube Experiments to Ethnobotany

Beshay’s path into ethnobotany began through videos about unusual substances. After one video about legal highs attracted millions of views, he faced a choice: become known primarily for drug content or move toward the cultural and historical questions that had always interested him.

He chose ethnobotany. Inspired by explorers and researchers such as Richard Evans Schultes, he became fascinated by the relationships between plants and the cultures that have used them for generations. That interest eventually brought him to the Amazon.

Looking Beyond the “Gringo Experience”

One of Beshay’s strongest impressions was the difference between the image of indigenous Amazonian life presented to tourists and ordinary daily reality. He encountered people who might wear traditional clothing for visitors while also using smartphones and participating fully in the modern world.

Rather than seeing this as a contradiction, he became interested in how indigenous identity is packaged for tourism. He wanted to understand people as they actually lived rather than receive a staged version designed around foreign expectations.

He was equally fascinated by relationships between neighboring tribes. Different communities have their own stereotypes, rivalries, histories, and traditions. From the outside, Amazonian cultures can easily be treated as one category, but his experience revealed a far more complicated social landscape.

What Icaros Really Mean

As a musician, Beshay was particularly interested in icaros, the ceremonial songs associated with Shipibo ayahuasca traditions. At first, he assumed an icaro was simply a traditional song that could be learned like any other piece of music.

Over time, he came to understand it differently. In the tradition he encountered, an icaro could emerge in response to a particular person, ceremony, or experience. Different curanderos also had distinct musical approaches rather than following one universal scale or structure.

He was told that icaros can function as tools within the ceremonial worldview, helping guide someone away from difficult states or assisting with spiritual cleansing. Sam contrasted this with Colombian traditions, where icaros may appear at specific points in ceremony while guitars, flutes, and more structured medicine songs are used at other times.

Peruvian and Colombian Ayahuasca Traditions

The conversation also highlighted how misleading it can be to speak about a single “traditional ayahuasca ceremony.” Practices vary considerably between regions and indigenous groups.

In the Shipibo environment Beshay visited, plant diets and icaros were important elements. Sam described Colombian traditions as placing greater emphasis on purges, with different plants used for different purposes. The plants combined with the ayahuasca vine can also differ between Peru and Colombia.

Even the role of ayahuasca in everyday life may vary. Beshay described a family ceremony held before a young man traveled abroad for the first time. It was not presented as an intensive healing retreat, but as a meaningful family experience connected to an important life event.

The Jungle Without the Romantic Filter

The Amazon itself also challenged Beshay’s expectations. Popular culture often presents the jungle as a beautiful world of adventure and biodiversity. He found that description accurate—but incomplete.

Extreme rain, intense heat, insects, and especially mosquitoes can make daily life physically exhausting for someone who is not accustomed to the environment. Despite describing the jungle as uncomfortable and difficult, he remained fascinated by it and planned to return.

That contradiction captures much of his approach: appreciating the Amazon without romanticizing it.

Culture Cannot Be Learned in a Weekend

Perhaps the broader lesson from Beshay’s journey concerns cultural context. A visitor can learn plant names, participate in ceremonies, and study traditional practices, but that does not mean they fully understand the worldview surrounding them.

He compared it to moving into someone else’s hometown. Even after years, an outsider may understand only a fraction of the relationships, stories, assumptions, and cultural references that locals absorbed while growing up.

This becomes particularly important when outsiders quickly begin presenting themselves as shamans or authorities on Amazonian traditions. Both Beshay and Sam emphasized the depth of knowledge carried by people raised around these practices.

Ayahuasca tourism can create meaningful cultural exchange and bring economic opportunities to indigenous communities, but it can also encourage simplified or commercialized versions of traditions. Looking beyond the spectacle requires curiosity, humility, and a willingness to accept that the Amazon is far more complex than the experience packaged for visitors.

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Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5g1Ps0xzviAiqr0TMs4ca9?si=a22d6d1759b24ff8