I have to be honest, I never thought I'd do ayahuasca. 

I'm chronically ill and autistic, so my body often doesn't react like healthy ones when it comes to substances. I've been in various plant medicine ceremonies before, and psychedelic wellness spaces can be intimidating because they aren't usually accommodating or thoughtful of disabled bodies or minds. Wellness is often reserved for the already healthy.

But then my partner, who's also chronically ill, had a transformative experience with a practitioner in LA. He came out life altered. He spoke of the medicine knowing exactly what kind of experience he needed, that it felt like it wouldn't push you farther than you could handle. It made me a little less afraid.

Still, when I agreed to my first ceremony in September 2024, I had my doubts and anxieties. I was afraid of what the ayahuasca might show me, yes, but I was even more afraid of how it might physically affect my body. 

My practitioner didn't seem at all worried about that part, which ramped up my concern. Even though she inquired about medications, because I wasn't on any that she'd personally deemed as interacting with ayahuasca, she didn't really dig further. She didn't ask me to explain my diagnoses or how my autism might affect sensory overload. She didn't ask if I'd need any accommodations or how previous plant medicine had affected my body.

I think this is a common experience in psychedelic ceremony circles. Most practitioners I've known skew more towards the spiritual than being rooted in science. And this makes sense. The experiences we have on plant medicines are deeply spiritual.

But they're also scientific. So why aren't there more practitioners that lead in a more balanced way?

I'd describe my experience with ayahuasca like this: It felt like I was able to suddenly detect my own energetic field, like I was vibrating. And so the work to me felt a lot like moving stagnant energy out of myself.

I think this is where the purging comes in, which can look many ways, not necessarily just vomiting. For me, it manifested as movement. I writhed and undulated and shook my body. I hummed and moaned. I did yogic cat-cow, pushing the energy out in breath and sound. 

It felt like the energy moved in waves. There were moments of stillness where I could rest in between. Almost like a spiritual birthing, contractions followed by peace, cyclically.

There's also an element of opening your heart that can linger after a ceremony. Sometimes it isn't even about having one big experience on the medicine. I found that even up to two months afterward, I had moments of realization and release in this lingering sensitive state.

Entering such a tender newborn state can be even more frightening when you're in a disabled body or mind. Many psychedelic communities value things like surrender, openness, letting go, or dissolving boundaries. But for disabled or neurodivergent people, we've often survived through predictability and control over our environments. 

While most of the other participants in my ceremony milled about and socialized at various points, my body didn't feel safe to do so. I was grateful to find a separate room, somewhere I could curl up in a bed in the dark under the covers to simplify my input while everything felt like so much inside of me.

The morning after, I felt like I had been hit by a truck. There was sickening nausea and a pounding headache, as well as heavy throbbing and burning tension in my joints and muscles. Honestly, the first thing I felt was regret for having done the medicine at all. I wasn't sure this pain and fear for whether my body was ok was worth it. In my journal, I wrote: "I woke up fearing regrets. When the pain is blinding me, I don't want to be in my body. I don't want to love my body. I spent most of my life not loving my body. The pain was every day. The pain was normal. No one told me otherwise. No one protected me. So I didn't learn how to protect myself."

My practitioner came to speak with me one-on-one when she found out I wasn't feeling well. I told her how my body felt, and she was quick to explain it away as positive, tinged with cosmic meaning. I felt dismissed in that moment. The physical reality of my body was being interpreted only through a spiritual lens, and there was no room for the possibility that both things could be true.

The thing is that a physical sickness can have meaning and require medical consideration. A disabled body is not a barrier to spiritual experience, but a spiritual experience does not make a disabled body stop being disabled.

I had a transformative experience and my body suffered. It took me weeks to get back to baseline health. My fatigue was more pronounced. My nervous system was much more sensitive to light and sound and motion. My body hurt all the time. The pain was overwhelming at times, and it was frightening wondering if I would return to the baseline I had been at pre-ceremony.

Once I recovered enough to start researching, I wasn't looking for someone to blame. I was trying to understand what happened to my body. What surprised me wasn't that ayahuasca places significant physiological demands on the body. That's well documented. It was that no one helped me understand what those demands might mean for someone with my medical history.

One of my conditions is POTS, a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that affects my body's ability to regulate heart rate and blood pressure. Ayahuasca temporarily alters autonomic nervous system activity, while vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, prolonged muscle activation, and intense sensory and emotional processing can place significant demands on the body. Looking back, it became easier to understand why the ceremony had demanded so much from my body.¹ 

Yet people with chronic illnesses and neurodevelopmental conditions have largely been excluded from clinical trials, leaving remarkably little evidence to guide either patients or practitioners. We know a great deal about how ayahuasca affects healthy participants. We know far less about how it interacts with bodies that are already physiologically complex.²

This gap matters not only because there’s a gap in understanding how these medicines interact with complex bodies, but because many disabled people arrive at these experiences after years of medical trauma, uncertainty, grief, and disconnection from their bodies. The cumulative experience of symptoms, medical interventions, changes in identity, and difficult encounters with healthcare systems can itself become traumatic.³

For decades, my nervous system had one job: protect me. It learned that pain was normal and that my body was something to endure rather than inhabit.

Ayahuasca didn't erase those pathways, but it created moments where my brain could experience something outside of them. Suddenly, I felt like I could say, "I want to be in my body even when it's hurting. I love my body exactly as it is." And even more exciting, this belief started to stick a few months after the ceremony. I still feel this way today, two years later.

Researchers have proposed that psychedelics may temporarily increase psychological flexibility, creating a window of time where new perspectives and behaviors become easier to practice. This doesn't mean the medicine creates healing on its own. Integration, the process of building new relationships with ourselves afterward, is where change becomes lasting.⁴

As an autistic person, surrender wasn't simply a spiritual exercise. It first required convincing my nervous system that it was safe. Research specifically on psychedelics and autistic adults is extremely limited.⁵ What we do know is that autistic people often process sensory information differently, meaning an experience designed around surrender and openness may require a very different kind of preparation.⁶

If psychedelic spaces are going to make room for disabled people, they have to expand their understanding of safety.⁷ Modern psychedelic researchers increasingly emphasize "set and setting," the mindset someone brings into an experience and the environment surrounding them, as major determinants of safety.

For disabled people, accessibility should be considered part of the setting.

In preparation, there needs to be conscious planning around quiet spaces where someone can lie down, control sensory input, walk through emergency planning, and slower pacing. Any participant should be allowed to visit their ceremony location prior to the experience. As well as medication review that takes into account the science and not just the spiritual.

During the ceremony there needs to be accessibility, not just sensory-wise, but also with communication, emotional processing, and the permission to participate differently. In psychedelic culture, people can often assume everyone wants connection. But some bodies need solitude to process. If a practitioner doesn't know to suggest this as an option for a disabled person, then they may not get the space required to feel safe.

It's tough to say if I had known the science before doing the ceremony whether I would have proceeded. And the spiritual part of me says, maybe that's why you weren't given that information. Because I am grateful for the things the medicine taught me. I'm glad I took that leap of faith. But it was a huge leap of faith, and if I'd at least had the information I could have perhaps prepared my body better.

I can't say with certainty that ayahuasca caused every aspect of my prolonged flare. Chronic illnesses fluctuate and bodies are complicated. But the absence of research doesn't erase the possibility of risk. It simply means disabled people are often left making these decisions without evidence tailored to us.

In my daily journalling afterwards, chronicling the realizations I'd come to, I did eventually come to not have any regret over my experience. As a whole, it was incredibly positive and life changing. I began to treat myself more like a friend, noticing and tending to my body's signals sooner. I began witnessing my own emotions and finding self compassion for them. I began to approach pain with curiosity instead of shame and fear. I experienced more moments of safety inside myself.

Psychedelics gave me access to emotional and bodily experiences that my nervous system had spent decades protecting me from, but healing cannot happen if we ignore the body that is doing the healing. 

Modern psychedelic research often measures whether depression improved or anxiety lessened. But disabled people sometimes have another question entirely: What if my mind heals while my body struggles? Those two realities aren't mutually exclusive.

Even in healing spaces, disabled bodies can become inconvenient when they complicate the narrative. The person who says, "my body had a different response," is treated as disrupting the magic.

But the thing is, the magic becomes more complete when we make room for the whole body.

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