Inside the Psychedelic Religious Awakening

W
hen Wyatt went to Mexico in 2018, he was in search of a miracle. Thirty-five years old, married with two kids, he worked at his grandfather’s business in Pittsburgh selling heating equipment. But secretly, he was battling a gnarly, decades-long drug addiction — doing heroin, crack, and coke. “I was very scared, very desperate, hopeless, and had a full-volume suicide tape on repeat in my head that had me convinced my family would be better off without me.”

Wyatt checked himself into the Ambio Life Sciences treatment center in Baja California, Mexico, as a last resort, paying more than $10,000 for a weeklong program that promised metamorphosis. He had been to rehab countless times over the past two decades, but Ambio was different: They would use drugs to get him off drugs. Inside a white-walled room, a clinician administered ibogaine, a psychoactive compound derived from a sacred Central African bark.

A buzzing sound filled the room, like a massive swarm of bees. The sound became all-consuming, passing through his ears, his organs. He realized these bees were repairing his body.

Then he was somewhere else entirely: floating over his home back in Pittsburgh, watching himself stumble down the driveway alone, a gun in his hand. He knew his victim: himself. He witnessed the pain on his own face. Worse, following behind him was his wife, clutching their infant son, dragging along their young daughter. The version of himself put the gun in his mouth and fired. Watching his children watch him die, listening to their “hellacious cries,” Wyatt had the profound and life-changing realization of how much pain he was putting his family through. He understood in that moment not just that he needed to get sober, but that he was also in the presence of a higher power.

“I saw and felt firsthand what that would do to my family,” Wyatt says. “That started a reversal and a quieting of that awful tape being played for years.” He’s been sober, mostly, ever since. Psychedelics, he says, are “responsible for life-changing experiences that I don’t know how else to describe other than spiritual.”

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Wyatt grew up in a deeply Christian home — his mother is a Pentecostal minister — and he has attended church regularly. But he struggled with belief. That changed after the ibogaine. “God is real,” Wyatt tells me. “I couldn’t say that with the same conviction prior to working with these medicines. I still struggle to make sense of what exactly that means, but I’m in a much better place having that conviction.”

Ever since that first trip, Wyatt has repeatedly stepped away from his life in Pittsburgh, from his family, his work, and away from his evangelical church to quietly use a variety of psychedelics to reorient his life. Now fully sober, he’s still married, raising three kids. He spends his days doing sales at the family business, and his nights playing with his high school band, Garrison’s Basement. “I’ve felt the divine presence. It wasn’t like heroin,” Wyatt tells me. “I no longer have to doubt if the Holy Spirit is real. I’m closer to Christ now than I’ve ever been.”

At Least 700 Psychedelic Churches in America Today

Wyatt’s experience is part of a growing chorus. Over many months, I have interviewed dozens of people who have described transformation, revelation, epiphanies, and encounters with God, all through the use of psychedelic drugs. Wyatt’s life-changing encounter with the divine happened without a congregation or clergy. His experience of a higher power was evident to him alone.

I have read transcripts of a priest recounting a full-body, 90-minute spasm, somewhere between an orgasm and birth. I have been told of magical doorways opening into the cosmos. I have heard people describe the wild and celestial as if it were happening in real time — meeting one’s own soul, the tapping of an angel’s wings, ancestors releasing the burdens of the past. I have heard stories of Hasidic women in wigs sipping ayahuasca, of visions of celestial surgery, of snakes crawling over human skin, of demons dragging bodies to hell, of divine light healing the body, of fingers becoming roots, of the Earth breathing. I myself have sat in a ceremony, dumbstruck, my brain sizzling in plant medicine as I confronted the true nature of the universe, albeit with less-magical results.

‘To Be as Human as Possible’

Religious belief in the U.S. is shifting — it always is. But the number of Americans who make institutional religion part of their lives has declined over the decades. Today, less than a third attend church regularly, according to the Pew Research Center. But that doesn’t mean we have let go of our quest for meaning. Seven out of 10 Americans are more likely to call themselves spiritual rather than religious. From Silicon Valley to the Everglades to Brooklyn, in churches, in fields, on couches, and on the floor, people are looking to psychedelics not to escape but to find meaning — in search of the mystical experiences that organized religion once promised. Leaving behind religious authority, they are looking for their own direct relationship with the divine. There’s a name for that impulse that has been used throughout history: an awakening.

For more than two centuries there have been many religious revivals in this country. Historians often point to a pattern in American religion: the fringe becoming the center. From zealous Puritans becoming WASP powerbrokers to radical followers of a young man in upstate New York becoming the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the bizarre Holy Rollers becoming Pentecostals — and a quarter of the world’s Christians — one generation’s freaks become the spiritual leaders of future generations. At the exact moment artificial intelligence is making human consciousness feel mechanized and unstable, people are turning to psychedelics for revelation. Both market forces and an executive branch with unconventional ideas about health are moving to provide that to those who want it. Industry experts predict that President Donald Trump’s FDA will soon approve the use of psilocybin — the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms — for medical use.

“The approval of psilocybin by the FDA will be the most significant event in the history of psychedelics,” Mark Nicolson tells me on Zoom this summer. An executive coach who helps prepare clients for their psychedelic journeys in Silicon Valley, Nicolson says many of his tech-world clients come to him looking to change their perspective on reality and themselves. “I have people creating AI companies, people who are creating the foundations of it,” says Nicolson, who has an MBA from Stanford, a doctorate in clinical psychology, and teaches at the Esalen Institute, the Big Sur, California, retreat center. “They have these experiences and see how they hadn’t quite gotten it right. Instead, they see that love is the basis for everything. And that changes how they go about thinking about what this life can be. They’re coming because they can feel that there’s this moment, and they want to be as aware of what it is to be as human as possible.”

‘We Are Hoping for a Miracle’

Inside the barbed-wire fences of the vast yellow-stucco resort in Costa Rica, the sales pitch is simple: They are the “#1 transformation center for individuals committed to personal growth goals and seeking profound results.” The Rythmia Life Advancement Center touts more than 23,000 “satisfied souls” over the past decade with a “miracle rate” of more than 98 percent. Every week, visitors arrive at the barricaded compound in the Guanacaste Peninsula to participate in highly supervised ayahuasca ceremonies.

Paying a $5,000-a-week entry fee, the seekers looking for “soul satisfaction” are almost all American, mostly middle-aged, middle-class. All in search of transformation. As I walked through the property last summer, a smorgasbord of lifestyle and longevity enhancements were available. Past the yoga shala, past the spa, past the medical clinic, past the stem-cell injection center, past the vacation-home sales office, I heard a common refrain: “We are hoping for a miracle.”

The ceremonial room at the Rythmia Life Advancement Center.

Claire Hoffman

That miracle usually comes during one of four ayahuasca ceremonies attended during the week. In a large room with wall-to-wall carpeting, fans whir overhead as the cleaning staff works in the heat of the afternoon. Around the room, about a hundred twin-size mattresses line the perimeter, each with a pillow and neatly folded brown blanket on top. At the foot of each bed is a white plastic bucket, along with a roll of toilet paper. It’s a strange scene, somewhere between a Hilton conference room and a tropical orphanage.

Tonight, I’m told, about 80 guests will gather with a shaman and a series of assistants and drink ayahuasca. As the medicine takes hold, they will spend hours vomiting, shitting, laughing, crying, and, hopefully, encountering their divine truth. Just in case that gets rough, there’s an EMT in every ceremony, along with two security people, as well as three nurses and one doctor on site at all times.

I find most of that week’s guests a few buildings away in an air-conditioned conference room, preparing for that night’s ceremony. Seated in chairs, the group’s attire suggests a corporate off-site — athleisure, slacks, summer dresses — but the electricity in the air signals something different is afoot. Michael Beckwith, a minister from Los Angeles, steps to the front of the room and tells the crowd that they are on the precipice: “You are stepping into an awareness that you’re a dynamic cosmic being.”

“There’s a real Spiritual hunger that psychedelics are solving,” says Michael Pollan.

Beckwith is the founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center and a frequent guest on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday. He is on the board of Rythmia, part of an exceptionally eclectic group that includes surfer Kelly Slater, Martin Luther King III, and celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan. Today, Beckwith is leading the audience in a call-and-response as he lays out a worldview in which the ayahuasca will bring them into a new state of reality and awareness, one that is transcendent.

“I’m in love with the divine presence!” he shouts, and everyone shouts his words back. They call and respond with wild whoops and cries as the room thunders with affirmations and excitement. “I’m here to be transformed! I’m here to be transformed!”

Do most Rythmia attendees experience God? “Yes!” says Rythmia founder Gerry Powell. Powell has done more than 350 plant-medicine ceremonies and credits psychedelics with changing his life. He was in rehab at Passages when he decided to travel to Costa Rica to sit in his first ceremony. There, he says, the plants told him to open the Rythmia center. Still, he cautions that a spiritual experience without sustained structure can be dangerous. “What I notice,” he says, “is the gurus — the guys that have this experience, see the light, and make it their identity — they always end up in financial trouble. They always do. The exposure to God without rules or guardrails can wind up dangerous.… These religions with rules are really there for a reason. Without ethics, with just ecstasy, the lines get so blurry.”

When I ask the Rythmia attendees how they decided a major psychedelic weeklong retreat was the right choice on their spiritual journey, two names come up over and over again: Michael Pollan and Ram Dass. The long history of psychedelics and religion is filled with scientists, anthropologists, mystics, shamans, outlaws, and prophets, but these two men are, more than any others, the patron saints of our current psychedelic revival.

A dose of ayahuasca tea.

Courtesy of Rythmia

Published in 2018, Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind chronicled the journalist’s investigation into the history and science of psychedelics, including his own personal experimentation. The book was a bestseller, and suddenly it seemed psychedelics became positively bourgeois. Talk of journeys became commonplace at book clubs and preschool pickups. When I ask Pollan how it feels to be a modern-day apostle of psychedelics, he laughs and tells me he doesn’t see it that way. “I have launched a thousand trips,” he says, describing the many emails he’s received over the years. While not an apostle, he concedes that “the book has inspired a lot of people to do something they might not have done otherwise.”

One psychedelic guide told me there’s an industry term for them: Pollanators. Usually older and well-educated, Pollanators are looking for major change in the middle of their lives — hoping to drop their ego, have a breakthrough, and see their lives more clearly. “There’s a real hunger for spiritual development that people feel right now,” Pollan tells me. “These are very trying times. The future is looking pretty perilous, and so people turn to spiritual matters. There’s a real hunger that psychedelics are solving.”

‘Depth Beyond Depth’

The first uses of psychoactive plants in religious ceremonies date back thousands of years. There’s evidence that Zoroastrian, pre-Incan, and Vedic cultures all used psychoactive substances to connect to the divine. Just before the turn of the century, William James, the father of modern religious studies, experimented with nitrous oxide. “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler,” he later wrote. Still, for decades, the use of psychedelics in America was underground. Native Americans smoking peyote in ceremony, the CIA experimenting with LSD — tripping was seen as decidedly fringe.

Then, on a warm January day in 1967, Timothy Leary famously stood on a stage in Golden Gate Park and delivered what became the rallying call of a generation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” For many, the former Harvard professor was the face of the psychedelic revolution — brilliant but manic, addictive, paranoid, nihilistic, and antiestablishment.

Timothy Leary addresses a crowd at the “Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in 1967.

Bob Klein/AP

But there was a co-founder of that revolution, Leary’s colleague and less-famous co-conspirator, who took a very different path. Richard Alpert was a wealthy, handsome young professor teaching at both the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard, where he taught alongside Leary in the psychology department. Together they conducted the famous acid tests on themselves, students, and faculty that would help get them kicked out. But as Leary became an LSD-gobbling outlaw whom Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America,” Alpert grew weary of the endless parties and substances. Zach Leary, Timothy’s son, says that Alpert first went to India in 1967 to find an alternative to psychedelics. “His initial trip to India was born out of frustration,” says Leary. After countless acid trips, Alpert visited an Indian guru who practiced Bhakti yoga. On that trip, Alpert became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, and renamed himself Ram Dass. “He discovered a man who never came down,” Leary tells me. Alpert, now Ram Dass, returned from India in white robes and bare feet, preaching and writing about consciousness. His book Be Here Now, published in 1971, became a manual for a generation of spiritual seekers.

But Timothy Leary’s version became the dominant idea of psychedelics, and when President Reagan’s War on Drugs began, psychedelics were vilified as the gateway to ruin. Usage went back underground for decades. There were rumblings here and there, but in 2006, the first real crack appeared in the post-Reagan consensus around psychedelics. Johns Hopkins University published a landmark study titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” The lead author, Roland Griffiths, gave three dozen healthy adults with no history of drug use a large dose of psilocybin. The results were remarkable: More than 60 percent said they had mystical experiences, and a third said it was the single most spiritual experience of their life. More studies followed, including one conducted around a decade later at Johns Hopkins on religious leaders.

“The core of our religion is not faith. It’s direct experience. The goal is access to your soul.”

Around this time, psychedelics began reentering mainstream American life, although largely through the language of mental health. Research into psychedelics for depression, PTSD, end-of-life care, and anxiety has exploded, and overall recreational usage has risen sharply. While therapeutics and mental health are where the vast majority of clinical studies, policy change, and private investment is happening, psychedelics and spirituality are often part of that conversation. Major universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, Emory, and others have launched programs, conferences, studies, and institutes aimed at examining the interplay and growth of psychedelics and religion.

Before Ram Dass died in 2019, a handful of researchers, scientists, and academics made a pilgrimage to see him and ask for his blessing on what is being called the psychedelic revival. “He was 100 percent all for it,” Raghu Markus tells me. Markus is the executive director of Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation, which offers retreats for those who’ve had a psychedelic awakening and want to find a way to make it part of their daily spiritual practice. For Ram Dass, Markus says, the emphasis was on integration of these drugs into a daily practice and “the importance of being able to surface their true nature through a psychedelic experience.”

‘Psychedelics Are an Accelerant’

Everyone’s experience with psychedelics is singular, although common themes emerge. Denis De Souza is a high-profile hairdresser in Los Angeles whose clients have included Alessandra Ambrosio, Lily Collins, and Nicole Richie. He began doing ayahuasca ceremonies more than a decade ago, and his whole life and identity have changed as a result. He recounted his journeys to me as “the most divine experience” of his life. He now does “life-force activation,” which he says is “yoga for the soul.” A doctor I interviewed tried a variety of psychedelics, initially out of a professional interest. During her journeys, she encountered angels, witches, her soul, and the Earth. I spoke with a Grammy Award-nominated producer who believes that mushrooms were brought by an alien civilization to enlighten us (this is a common theme); raised Roman Catholic, he used his journeys to understand ancestral trauma.

All of these people and the others described mystical, life-changing, extraordinary experiences. And yet almost none of them would characterize themselves or their experiences as religious. For them, the word feels like something from the past — dusty, subservient, restrictive, and freighted with baggage. But from an academic point of view, every element of traditional religion is present in these journeys: rituals, sacraments, ceremonies, mystic experiences, and communities.

For seekers, they prefer the word “journey” rather than “trip,” which is viewed as a relic of the days of recreational and more-festive modes of drug use. For some, the journey is a concierge experience done with a psychedelic coach who works with clients, discussing their backgrounds, their intentions. Intake is followed by the journey — some combination of psychedelics given in carefully allotted amounts, usually alone with the coach, lasting from day into night. Private rooms, mattresses, candles, eye masks, and custom playlists. The journey is followed by further coaching — in person and over Zoom — as these guides help integrate the experience into everyday wisdom. The cost has a range, from a few hundred dollars to as much as $15,000.

Ram Dass meditates at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco in 1970.

Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

For some, psychedelics aren’t the gateway to religion but rather an enhancement. Hunt Priest is a former Episcopal priest who had his own parish in Washington state when he entered the Johns Hopkins religious-leader trials 10 years ago. Suffering from a sense of lost religious purpose, he found the effects of his two psilocybin journeys profoundly altered his sense of purpose. “Psychedelics are an accelerant … an accelerant to the connection,” says Priest. He began looking for ways to incorporate psychedelics into his work. He founded the nonprofit Ligare in 2021 with the mission of helping clergy members better understand and experience their faith through mystical experiences occasioned by mushrooms. “Religion is spirituality with rigor,” Priest says. “When people say they’re not religious, it often means they’re not Christian.” But in 2025, the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia conducted an investigation into Priest’s activities, and he was given an edict: Choose psychedelics or choose the Episcopal Church. He resigned his ordination. “I’m so committed to the work I’m doing, and I see it as a vocation, as a Christian vocation.”

Jeffrey Breau, who is the program lead for Harvard Divinity School’s Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, studies emerging novel psychedelic churches. Breau says he wasn’t surprised my interview subjects didn’t like it when I used the term “religion” — even when they said they were part of a church. It is often the leaders of these organizations, Breau says, who use the term “religion,” as they are cognizant of the legal protection the term allows in the United States. But at the same time, the community members will often disavow the term “religion” as too constrictive and dogmatic. This confusion of terms, says Breau, is in part because of the way American law looks at psychedelics and religion. “There’s no freedom of spirituality,” he tells me pointedly. “There is an embrace of the term ‘religion,’ and there’s an embrace of the term ‘church’ … because that will help them with religious freedom.”

Breau is referring to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993 by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. The law, often shortened to RFRA, says the government cannot substantially burden someone’s religious exercise unless it has a compelling reason and is using the least restrictive means possible. Decades later, psychedelic churches and spiritual groups have invoked RFRA, arguing that substances like ayahuasca and psilocybin are not recreational drugs but sacraments essential to their religious practice.

The Trump administration’s psychedelic appetite is somewhat kaleidoscopic; while conservatives have had a historical antipathy to psychedelics, there’s also longstanding judicial support for religious freedom. Adding to that is the emerging “psychedelic right,” a sector of MAHA that has been lobbying for research and regulatory reform for psychedelics. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry chairs Americans for Ibogaine and has become one of the drug’s most prominent advocates. And in April, Joe Rogan stood behind Trump in the Oval Office as the president issued an executive order calling for accelerated research into the use of psychedelics for treating mental illness. The logic is hallucinatory: The teetotaling Trump who has spent years calling for the death penalty for drug dealers is the one pushing for funding psychedelic therapy. “Can I have some, please?” he joked as he signed the order. “I’ll take some.”

‘We Have to Move From Counterculture to Culture’

Sean McAllister is a lawyer who works on religious freedom and psychedelics. Based in Denver, he has a long mullet and a body that is covered in spiritual tattoos. His bio photo shows him in prayer hands, but in conversation he speaks at a rapid-fire clip. He sends out a monthly newsletter from his law office, with headlines like “Modern Psychedelics Are a Mess (But Hope Remains).” McAllister tells me there’s progress in psychedelics and religion: Not long ago, there were two federally recognized churches, and today there are five. McAllister’s clients have included a number of psychedelic churches that sued the DEA for an RFRA exemption, including two successful settlements by the Church of the Eagle and Condor and the Church of the Celestial Heart, both ayahuasca churches that were granted exemptions over the past two years.

Despite his success in fighting for religious freedom for these groups, McAllister says they don’t always fit perfectly around the framework of religion. “To me, the term ‘spirituality’ is bigger than religion,” he says. “Religion is like, ‘I know what God said, and I’m gonna write it down, and we have a doctrine.’ This movement is spiritual, not religious. But, you know, in the U.S., we protect religion, so we’re kind of shoehorning spirituality down to the box of religion. We have to move from counterculture to culture.”

Within the Indigenous community there’s unease about the explosion of novel psychedelic churches and what impacts it will have on the sanctity of their own long-standing rituals and ceremonies. “We have concerns about the churches popping up,” says Mona Polacca, a member of the Native American Church and a leader in the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. “These churches really don’t have a long line of practice, discipline, things like ceremony or ritual.”

Beyond being troubled by the co-opting of their spiritual traditions, Polacca says there are more immediate questions about the overuse of the rare sacred plants taken in these ceremonies by a growing number of outsiders who don’t have a history of reverence for the medicine. “They’re treating it now as if it’s a commodity,” she says. “They create these commodities, and then they control the market. And then it’s no longer for us, it’s no longer accessible to these original people.”

The next frontier, everyone agrees, is what happens with the larger world of psychedelics and the novel religious organizations that are forming around their usage, and the law. “There are people itching for a fight about this and looking for the right case to take through the courts to test whether you could have an LSD church or a psilocybin church that wasn’t tied to some traditional culture or Indigenous people,” Pollan tells me. “The thinking is that this will be like an exploding cigar when Samuel Alito takes a puff on it.”

McAllister muses about what that argument might look like: “Some would say that Americans are the indigenous medicine keepers of LSD, since we’re the culture that birthed LSD. So, is there a unifying, spiritual, or religious principle behind every molecule of LSD? Is LSD really a religious thing?”

‘Humanity Has Done This for Eons’

For some, the drugs themselves become something close to worship, what Breau calls “the dispensary model” of churches. At the church of the Zide Door, the largest psychedelic church in America, congregants pay a fee to receive their “entheogenic sacraments” — psychedelic mushrooms. Founder Dave Hodges opened a medical-marijuana dispensary in California in 2009, before legalization. Years of court battles followed, and ultimately the city of San Jose passed a law shutting him down. He says that process gave him an education into drugs and the law. He didn’t consider himself religious, and his genesis to pastor is an unlikely one — more than a decade ago he started the Church of More Pot at Burning Man. “You know the magic of the playa,” he tells me with a stoner’s wink. “We had 13 commandments. I got my playa name: Preacher.”

Seven years ago, Hodges began to experiment with increasingly larger doses of mushrooms. Then, he says, he had a breakthrough experience. “I had three golden beings who sat down with me and told me everything that I had gone through in my life, the point of it, and what they needed me for. They said, ‘Hey, you’re somebody that can understand us. You’re somebody that can fight for us.’” During these experiences on mushrooms, Hodges came to believe that psilocybin was brought to Earth to awaken and change reality.

But life isn’t all golden beings for Hodges. Part of life at Zide Door is preparing for fights. The church — also called the Church of Ambrosia — was raided by the police in 2020. But Hodges has been adapting the way he works and growing his flock. Forbes estimated in 2024 that the church brings in about $5 million in revenue a year through the sales of its sacrament. Hodges says he knows to avoid having any money or holdings. He doesn’t pay himself a salary.

The Church of Ambrosia, the largest psychedelic church in the country.

Church of Ambrosia

When I ask Hodges what faith looks like at his church, he rebuffs the idea. “The core of what our religion is, it’s not faith. It’s direct experience, right? The goal is for us to give you access to your soul, and that means making sure that you have safe access to the sacraments that we provide.”

Alex Gearin, a medical anthropologist who has studied psychedelic-medicine usage, says that while there are the neo-shamanic questers who try to enact Indigenous practices in order to realize their spiritual goals, there are others who are using religious sacraments to achieve much more worldly purposes. “This is part of a wider trend, where spiritual practitioners try to justify their practice in secular terms,” says Gearin. He describes a group of Chinese businessmen he studied who used ayahuasca, in part, with the hope of optimizing success. Gearin says that leaders who run these retreats are aware of clients’ high premium on being able to see outside the box and gain the ability to look at their business problems from different angles. While this might seem like capitalist sacrilege, Gearin says there’s historical precedent for Indigenous peoples using plant medicine as a tool to navigate the practical demands of the world. “Given the wondrous edges that these states of mind can take people to, you can see how they become useful during a period of rapid social change when things start to break down. Shaking up your consciousness and moving into an altered state is a relatively common thing that humanity has done for eons.”

‘They Show Up Tripping Balls’

Alas, not all seekers are rewarded. Not all journeys are filled with angels and light. For all of the stories of healing and awakening, psychedelics also can engender another archive of spiritual life — terror, confusion, nihilism, and psychic collapse. And while many psychedelics are nonaddictive, there’s still real potential for abuse and psychological fallout.

Dr. Alejandro Gutierrez has been working for two decades in the popular yoga-surf town of Nosara, Costa Rica. He has a vibrant collection of stories of spiritual quests by American tourists gone wrong: “They come down here, and they’re looking for magic.” Gutierrez describes the past five years as particularly intense, as visitors have arrived in droves seeking some kind of neo-shamanic transformation, as seen on their Instagram stories. “They think they’re going to see God,” he says. “Some of them stopped their meds and came here to get enlightened.”

He estimates he treats about 20 bad trips a year, rescuing people from yoga spas, sedating them, giving them IVs, having them airlifted for more elaborate medical care. And not all of those are people who want to be on drugs. Gutierrez says he also treats a fair number of maids and hotel workers who innocently nibble on chocolate or candy left in hotel rooms — treats that are infused with psilocybin. “They show up at the clinic tripping balls.”

If you were waiting for the point in this piece where I decide I, too, will see God and take some mushrooms — well, sorry. The truth is I’ve experimented — infrequently — with psychedelics since I was a teenager. Most of that was recreational, but six years ago, I decided to have an intentional journey — one that made me never want to do psychedelics again. On a December night in 2019, I entered a wooden shack in the jungle of Costa Rica. I had friends who were part of the Santo Daime church, a Brazilian ayahuasca church that blends Indigenous customs with Catholicism. For years, I had been invited to come “sit in ceremony” with them. I demurred, despite the fact that I had more and more friends who said they’d taken ayahuasca and experienced a rebirth. But that was a strange moment in time — just a few months after my father died and just a few months before the world shut down from Covid. In my mind, I would go as an observer; I’d take a sip of the magic tea and watch. And yet, I don’t think I would’ve said yes if some part of me wasn’t longing for insight about my life or my father’s death.

Members arrived dressed in a version of church clothes — men in crisp button-downs and stringy black ties, women in long swishy cotton skirts. It had the feel of a sort of beatnik Sixties Jesus convention — or at least how I imagined one to be. I had weirdly chosen a full-length pink floral dress with a giant bow — in an effort to acknowledge the churchiness, but maybe not paying so much attention to how ayahuasca works.

As we walked in, people smiled at me and asked, “Are you ready for this?” followed quickly by a whispered: “Remember to breathe.” We sat on plastic green chairs in an open room with exposed bulbs and ceiling fans. Just beyond the dense thick of the jungle, we could hear waves crashing on the beach. The sun had set, and at the center of the room a low table had been set up, with tropical flowers and a wooden cross. Someone handed out small plastic-laminated hymn books. We began to sing. Men sat on one side, women on the other. There was a shaman, a muscular, compact Peruvian man with bleached hair, Buddy Holly glasses, and gigantic eyes.

He announced it was time to drink the tea, and women lined up on one side, men on the other. I was handed a small cup. “It’s my first time,” I said. The shaman laughed. “Well, you need to drink more.” He filled it to the top. It tasted terrible, poison-flavored. The music started again, men playing guitars. We sat flipping through the pages of the very long songbook, humming along to songs about Jesus, giving thanks, begging for forgiveness, for salvation, for the coming end.

After that, it’s hard to say how much time passed and what happened when. My Oura ring would later report that I took a series of long, intense naps, and an alert reported my heart rate plunging into the low forties. For me, the drowsy, hot churchiness became trancelike — until it wasn’t. Suddenly, everything became bright, fluorescent, and grim. People were clutching their stomachs, hurling vomit into buckets. I politely avoided looking at them, and instead gazed down at my hand which had become that of a very old, very wrinkled, very round child. I wanted out. I slipped out into the jungle. I felt sick and purged, and then lay down on a pile of gravel and wept looking at the stars. I stared up at the sky, sparkling, alive and utterly uncaring about me down below in the dirt. Instead of connecting with my father or a sublime being, I encountered a different startling truth: utter meaninglessness.

I finally returned to the ceremony, where people looked ghoulishly pale, except for a slapped-red to their cheeks. I sang along, meditated, and let my own sadness about death, my insignificance, and the absolute absurdity of caring about anything at all wash over me. Later, at a bonfire, I watched termites evacuate a burning log, a hermit crab wander into the fire and explode. I thought of my children at home, about my ambition. I vomited in the bushes. The night was endless. At some point there was a group dance, a side-shuffling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I sneaked away, making a 19-point-turn exit in my car. I wept myself to sleep.

Was this an experience of ultimate truth? I want to tell you that it wasn’t, that it was absurdly nihilistic and has nothing to do with reality. And yet if I’m being honest, that ayahuasca fever dream wherein I experienced my total insignificance in the universe has changed the way I think and live in subtle ways. Was I a closet nihilist, and did this Brazilian-plant drink just bring it to life in every cell of my being? Perhaps. Or maybe it was just a bad trip. “People do have bad trips that are nothing but deeply disturbing, if not traumatizing, and yield nothing,” says Dimitri Mugianis, a psychedelic facilitator who has been working with patients for more than two decades. He says he always advises people to avoid changing relationships, jobs, or getting neck tattoos for at least three months after a journey, given how volatile it can make people.

David Yaden, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins who studies psychedelic experiences and religious belief, has spent years examining these journeys. He is skeptical of the popular narrative of intense revelation wherein the atheist becomes a believer. Yaden tells me the data paints a less-dramatic picture. “A single experience will very rarely move [someone’s belief system] around,” he says. “We’re not seeing people shift from atheist to supernatural believer … we’re seeing quite small changes. Some people will lose their belief, some will gain it” — but, he adds, “both of those are on the far tails of the distribution.”

And yet the hunger for transformation, for awakening, for connection continues. People board planes, send Venmo payments, and drink tea and swallow pills with the hope of finding something bigger than themselves, whether it’s their own soul, their loved ones, or God and the universe. That seeking is older than this country. As are the substances.