My body convulsed as something seemed to writhe beneath my ribs, like a snake trying to escape. 

Around me, there was havoc in the thatched-roof ceremony house, known as the “maloca.” A dozen combat sports fighters — some former UFC, others from lesser known MMA competitions — groaned and sobbed on their mattresses. A few puked into red buckets. Somewhere in the darkness, one of the former fighters was spontaneously speaking in tongues.

I couldn't take the pain anymore. I stumbled outside towards the fire, gasping for breath. For a moment I stood over the flames, hoping the heat might somehow draw whatever was inside of me out. It didn't, so I went back inside the maloca, collapsed onto my camp bed and shut my eyes.

Please. Make this stop. Then, through the pain, came an instruction. You have to go back to the womb.

I had come to Colombia to watch other people drink ayahuasca. I never intended to join them. I had been invited to cover this unusual experiment: pugilists, martial artists and wrestlers (mostly former, some current) with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD drinking ayahuasca at a countryside retreat center outside of Medellín while researchers study what happens to their brains.

Men’s Health U.S. had commissioned the story and intended to observe, interview the fighters and watch the scientists work. They would drink the DMT-containing brew. I would take notes, and I had reasons to keep it that way.

I’d drunk ayahuasca before, and my experiences had been decidedly mixed. There had been the neoshaman in Catalonia who persuaded me to drink a 60-milliliter second cup which caused me to almost lose my mind. He then seemed to take great joy over my malaise. Then there was the Irish woman in Mexico who also drank too much and screamed bloody murder for at least an hour while the facilitators seemed helpless to stop her. There was also the night in the Peruvian Amazon when, gripped by paranoia that may have been influenced by me taking cocaine the weekend before, I became convinced Maoist guerrillas were about to storm our ceremony by helicopter.

Perhaps this was all “part of the journey.” But five years had passed since my seventh and most recent ayahuasca ceremony, and I was genuinely content to keep it that way. I’d generally found the experiences gruelling, and the neoshamans and shamans dubious at best. Other psychedelics seemed less punishing and, at least for me, more beneficial. They also didn't require spending the night surrounded by strangers vomiting into buckets.

Then Ian McCall called me. McCall, a former UFC flyweight known as “Uncle Creepy,” is co-founder of Athlete’s Journey Home, which organized the Colombia retreat. “You’re going to sit with us, right?” he asked. I told him I hadn't planned on it. “The guys might struggle to connect with you if you don’t.”

He had a point. So, on the evening of January 28, I was sitting on a mattress in the maloca waiting for my turn to drink the psychedelic jungle brew that researchers suggest may provide a window into another realm of consciousness. The tension was palpable. These were men accustomed to walking into cages and getting punched in the face, but some had never even tripped before, and — unlike a fight — they didn’t have the option of punching back. 

Outside, grasshoppers and cicadas clicked in the darkness and fireflies flashed across the maloca. Inside, researchers fitted the fighters with tight EEG caps to measure their brainwaves. Then, one by one, we approached the altar to drink.

When my turn came, the cup was mercifully small but no less potent. I knocked it back with a grimace. Oh, hello old friend. The brew was punishingly bitter and instantly nauseating, sour and scorched. I quickly unwrapped one of the lemon-flavored hard-boiled sweets we had been given and sucked furiously, trying to negate the taste.

For the first few hours, the medicine was rather gentle as it reacquainted itself with me. My mind wandered through the life waiting for me outside Colombia: learning to drive in Vancouver, where I was living at the time, and eventually moving to Los Angeles. Everything seemed to receive some vague cosmic thumbs-up. 

Then I drank another cup, and my mother appeared in my mind. Not literally; what arrived was an overwhelming sense of her love for me — and, beyond that, what felt like the endless reservoir of love that women possess, the force that somehow sustains humanity.

I cried, but not tears of sadness. Something seemed to be breaking open inside me. Had I been rejecting this love? Soon someone else began crying, then another. The sobs snaked through the room like falling dominoes. By the end of the night, one question had lodged itself in my mind: How can I love my mother more?

The next morning, I ordered a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to her house in England. Several hours later, we all drank ayahuasca again.

The second ceremony was more intense from the get-go. One former wrestler turned stuntman and actor slipped into a strange trance and made guttural noises as if he was an orc poet. Elsewhere in the room, some of the guys were doing push-ups, balancing in headstands and shadow-boxing.

Through it all, a cameraman prowled between the mattresses, recording almost everything. The researchers hurried after fighters in EEG caps, trying to salvage their data as electrodes came loose in desperate runs for the toilet.

On my mattress, I had problems of my own. Pain had taken hold of my chest and stomach. There was an unbearable itch beneath my ribs. I murmured to myself, or God, or the spirit of ayahuasca. And then came the womb directive. 

The womb?!

Yes. To your mother.

Wait. Seriously?

Moving back in with my 62-year-old mum had neither been on my bingo card, nor on my to-do list. She’s great, but I had not lived with her for any considerable period since a summer-long stay when I was 19 — thirteen years ago — and our relationship had sometimes been complicated. Going backwards, across the Atlantic and into my mum’s house, sounded like almost precisely the opposite of what I was supposed to be doing. I rejected the idea and the pain continued.

In my altered state, a strange bargain began to take shape: If I wanted the pain to stop, I had to agree to go home. Eventually I got off my mattress and approached the shaman's altar. He had just been singing in Spanish about how “my heart is the only thing that I have.”

Standing there in the darkness, I said it aloud: I would move back to England. The pain partially eased, and 24 hours later, I booked a flight from Vancouver to London for early March. I had just joined the legion of people who had been one-shotted by ayahuasca into making weird and sudden life choices.

Of course, moving back in with my mother was hardly the most urgent problem being confronted in that maloca, and I realize it’s not the most radical life decision one could make, but for me it was significant. 

Many of the people lying on the mattresses around me, however, had spent years living with the consequences of being hit in the head for a living: memory loss, brain fog, depression, hypervigilance, migraines and tinnitus. Some were recovering from addictions to alcohol or drugs. Others carried traumas that had begun long before they ever stepped inside a cage.

Clinton Foshee, a 48-year-old amateur jiu-jitsu champion from Alabama, suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child. Years later, a car crash dealt another blow to his brain. His memory deteriorated and his business collapsed. Sometimes he woke up without knowing where he was. 

Before coming to Colombia, Foshee stopped taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills because of the potential for dangerous interactions they have with ayahuasca, and coming off them was painful. “I stopped 21 days before the retreat and really struggled,” he says. “To sleep, mentally, emotionally and even physically it was like withdrawals.” (Ayahuasca acts as an MAO inhibitor, which can interact dangerously with many psychiatric drugs, including SSRIs, and doctors advise tapering such medications only under medical supervision.)

During one of our sharing circles, Foshee began crying almost as soon as he started speaking about his childhood. Around him sat men with cauliflower ears, broken noses and scarred bodies, listening quietly as he described things he had spent decades trying not to feel. Scenes like that repeated themselves throughout the week.

During the second ceremony, when I wasn’t overcome by my own experience, I watched Foshee suddenly go still. His face became blank and strangely childlike, like something had pulled him backward through time. Later, he told me that he had encountered dead relatives, including his stillborn daughter who appeared as a fully-grown woman, and found something resembling feelings of peace. “I felt like I finally faced things I’d been avoiding for a long time, especially around my daughter,” he says. “There was a lot of guilt there that I hadn’t really processed, and the experience forced me to sit with it instead of running from it. At the same time, there was a real sense of peace, like I wasn’t carrying it the same way anymore.”

Hearing these stories, and drinking alongside the fighters changed my relationship with them. I no longer felt entirely like the journalist who had parachuted in to observe an experiment. For two nights, at least, I had been absorbed into their strange little tribe. I knew the people lying on the mattresses around me. I had heard about their addictions, bereavements and beatings. 

When the sensations in my own body own body overwhelmed me, there was something oddly reassuring about knowing exactly who was groaning, crying or throwing up in the darkness beside me, especially especially Gareth Hoernel, an MMA fighter built like a mountain. Hoernel also works as an executive security officer and was photographed next to President Donald Trump while working security at a UFC event earlier this year.

For the third and fourth ceremonies, though, I returned to being an observer. Two nights had certainly been enough, and I watched the mounting pandemonium from the sidelines. Then the retreat ended and the fighters scattered back across America into lives far removed from the old hippie stereotype of the psychedelic seeker in the jungle. If anything, they seemed to embody a newer, Joe Rogan-era psychonaut, at ease talking about trauma and spirituality before grappling with each other on the lawn after lunch. Some returned to combat sports, while others, like Hoernel, returned to jobs that required them to carry firearms.

The post-retreat glow inevitably faded, faster for some than others. McCall rented a mansion on Airbnb in Medellín for the night after the retreat and we all went to dine at a Peruvian restaurant to celebrate the birthday of the retreat’s yoga teacher. After we had trained together and bonded at the retreat, I called Mark Irwin, former bare knuckle boxing lightweight world champion and McCall’s right hand man at Athlete’s Journey Home, “a pipsqueak” in jest. The next morning, as everyone was preparing to go their separate ways, I snuck up on him and gave him a couple of light hooks to the sides of his torso. He turned around and seriously roughhoused me, drawing blood from my lip and leaving one of my cheekbones tender. “Who’s the pipsqueak now?” he snarled.

Irwin may still need to work on his anger issues. Or maybe I should simply address the shadows that compelled me to provoke a former world champion fighter. Either way, in the months that followed, several other of the fighters told me that their positive changes had endured. Foshee has remained off the medications he had stopped taking before Colombia and told me his TBI symptoms have not returned. Others, however, including Irwin, were already thinking about drinking ayahuasca again, convinced they had only begun excavating the roots of their trauma.

In early March, I packed up my life in Vancouver, boarded the flight I had booked after the ceremony and crossed the Atlantic. My mother lives in Plymouth, the English port city from which the Mayflower set sail for the New World more than four centuries ago. Now, at 32, I moved into her house.

In the months since, I have learned to drive and spent more time with my mother than at any point since I was a teenager. We go to beaches with the dogs and, at my suggestion, we’ve started a nightly “music time,” in which I play guitar and we sing Bruce Springsteen, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Oasis songs together. The move that seemed faintly absurd when I first heard it commanded from somewhere inside my ayahuasca-addled mind has come to feel considerably less so. Six months later, I'm still here. My mum even said it’s been “a privilege” to have me living with her, even if we do occasionally bicker.

I don't know whether it was ayahuasca, God, my subconscious or simply an excruciating pain in my chest that told me to come home that night in Colombia. I only know that I did, and that it was a very good decision.

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