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Ricki talks with Ernesto Londoño, NYT national correspondent and writer of the book Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics, about his reporting on Ayahuasca retreats in Brazil and some of the dangers posed by the unregulated drug market. They also dig into Ernesto’s personal experience taking the drug, and the mental health journey that he says unfolded as a result of his first trip.

Show Resources:

• Check out Ernesto’s book, Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Ernesto Londono, Ricki Lake, Silvia

Ricki Lake  00:02

This is The High Life With me, Ricki Lake, where we find out how my guests crack the code to living a full and vibrant life so you can too. I’m so excited to bring onto the show Ernesto Londono. He’s a journalist and national correspondent for The New York Times, and the author of the fantastic new book Trippy: The peril and promise of medicinal psychedelics. In the book, he dives into the promise and the dangers of drugs like ayahuasca and all through his own personal history of mental health and ancestral trauma. Ernesto, I am so excited to talk with you today.

 

Ernesto Londono  00:35

Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here. I watched your show growing up in Colombia, and it was one of my first glimpses of what Americans were like. And I was very disappointed when I actually moved here and realized, not everybody is as wild and outrageous as the Americans on your show.

 

Ricki Lake  00:53

I know well, I thank you, and I’m sorry, Ernesto, I always like to start the show with this question, where are you getting your highs from right now? Like, where are you getting your joy? It could be big. It could be small.

 

Ernesto Londono  01:08

Dancing. Yeah, I’ll try to dance in the morning, you know, especially if I had, you know, not great sleep. I’ll play a song I like, and I’ll just feel my body move.

 

Ricki Lake  01:23

What kind of music are you listening and dancing to?

 

Ernesto Londono  01:26

So lately, I’ve been really hooked on these albums by members of the Yawanawa tribe, which is an indigenous tribe in my book, that use ayahuasca and have become, you know, kind of very significant players in this renaissance of ayahuasca, and their music is really playful and joyous and mesmerizing.

 

Ricki Lake  01:50

And the Icarus, what do you say? How do you describe it?

 

Ernesto Londono  01:53

Yeah, in this, in this particular tribe, they describe their music as a means to elevate the collective vibrations of people in the ceremony space. And it’s very different from the music from the Peruvian indigenous Shipibo, which tends to be a little darker and, you know, almost a little sinister sounding. You know, the Yawanawas music is just kind of a wild party and a celebration of being alive. And that’s what I like about it.

 

Ricki Lake  02:23

Amazing, well, I have to tell you, when I was doing my show and you were growing up in Bogota, right? I was, like, super judgmental about all drugs. I call myself, like, back then, I was a disciple of Nancy Reagan, like, just say no, you know, I was really fear filled and very judgy and closed minded to all of these medicines. And I don’t know if you know this, but I have had many experiences sitting with Mama Ayahuasca. I mean, I was cracked open, is what I consider it. I mean, it really, really was life changing. That is not hyperbole. I mean, multiple things happened in my life because of the experiences I had. How did you hear about ayahuasca in the first place? And please, can you share like what it is to people that don’t know?

 

Ernesto Londono  03:13

Yeah, so just for starters, Ayahuasca is a brew that has been used by indigenous people in the Amazon for centuries, it’s made by combining a vine with the leaves of an ordinary shrub, one of 1000s of shrubs in the rainforest. And when cooked in a particular way and consumed, it contains DMT and it induces really strong physical, emotional and mental reactions. You know, it’s, it’s really hard to put this into words for people who have not experienced it, but some of the things you might experience on Ayahuasca are, you know, visions, kind of geometrical patterns or, you know, sort of different colors that are really mesmerizing and interesting. I oftentimes experienced memory retrieval. I feel like I was being guided almost by an external force to sort of zoom into interesting or formative moments of my childhood or my life and really kind of anchor myself in them, and re examine them, and kind of revisit the emotional texture of those memories. And then some of what happens is just kind of impossible to put into words. You just feel kind of energetic ripples through your body. Oftentimes people vomit, oftentimes there’s diarrhea or yawning or other forms of so called purging. And you know these experiences, you know, for the most part, I wouldn’t describe as fun, they can be cathartic, but I think when you’re really in.

 

Ricki Lake  04:57

I call it, hell yeah.

 

Ernesto Londono  04:59

When you’re really in, in in the middle of a journey, it’s really intense. There’s a lot of turbulence and turmoil that you need to sort of wrestle with, until you get to the other side, and, you know, hopefully feel some level of clarity or catharsis. I had first heard about ayahuasca when I was about to move to Brazil to take a new job as the bureau chief at the New York Times back in 2017 and interestingly enough, I heard it from a psychiatrist at Yale. I was at an engagement party for my sister, who, at the time, was a resident at Yale. She too was a shrink, and one of her peers just told me that he had recently been on the Amazon, that he was really interested in this field, and that he’d been researching these retreats in Latin America. And I think one thing he mentioned was that many American veterans were starting to go on these retreats to treat PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance use problems because they felt that they weren’t getting the help they needed in the conventional mental health care system. So that, you know, kind of I bookmarked that as a potential story idea that I would pursue. But then, you know, months later, when I’m in the grip of what feels like an intractable depression and something that just keeps getting worse and worse. You know, this thing that began as kind of a journalistic interest, all of a sudden shifted to a personal quest, and I find myself one night googling Ayahuasca retreats Brazil at like four in the morning, you know, during during kind of an awful sleepless night, and I stumble into this loopy video recorded by this Argentine psychotherapist who’s been hosting retreats in Brazil for about 15 years.

 

Silvia  06:59

I am Silvia Poliboy, and we are in Bahia, in the south of Bahia, in 39 acres in the jungle. We are five minutes driving from the west beach.

 

Ernesto Londono  07:14

And there was something really kind of mesmerizing about her voice and the clarity she projected. She just looked so calm and confident. And it was such a contrast, you know, with what I was feeling inside. And it feels very irrational now that that felt like the help that I needed, but it was there was something almost intuitive. They told me.

 

Ricki Lake  07:40

Like a calling, I would say, wouldn’t you say like you were called to the medicine?

 

Ernesto Londono  07:45

Yeah. I mean, I describe it as a little bit of a gravitational pull where you’re like, Huh? You know, this doesn’t entirely make sense, but I’m gonna follow my gut.

 

Ricki Lake  07:55

Yeah, I have to say, I learned about ayahuasca through my partner at the time, who was suffering. He’d been suffering from chronic pain and migraines and all this physical back pain from a car accident. And so we were in Ibiza on vacation, and we met this man who shared about he cured his back pain by drinking Ayahuasca. And he’s like, what’s that? And then next thing, you know, we found some spot in Topanga that was doing a nut, you know. And I basically did it the first time I did it because I didn’t want him doing it without me, which is not the reason to do it. I’ll just tell you that was like the biggest nightmare. I drank the medicine. It tasted so awful, and I was in a fetal position praying to die and for it to be over the entire night, you know. And went on to do it after and had much better outcomes. But that was my intro into, into doing it. Tell us what is involved. I know you do a dieta, like a specific diet, right? To clean out your system. You know, you set a real container with these, these shaman, you know, leaders, correct?

 

Ernesto Londono  08:58

Yeah, I mean, there’s a range of offerings. But you know what I would describe as kind of like the mainstream retreat experience in Latin America, in countries like Brazil or Peru, where this is legally permissible, you know, typically you sign up for a retreat, and if the retreat operators are responsible, they will do a little bit of due diligence to kind of get a sense of, you know, what’s happening with you, what medications you’re on. Generally, if somebody is on antidepressants, they will not be deemed a good candidate for an Ayahuasca retreat.

 

Ricki Lake  09:35

Because the SSRI counteracts with the medicine, correct?

 

Ernesto Londono  09:39

Yeah, there’s, there’s a belief that it may do something called serotonin syndrome, it may sort of overwhelm some receptors in the brain and potentially leave somebody more destabilized than healed, or there’s really little research on this. There’s the medical literature is thin on what this does to the mind and the body, and also what. Um, what kind of people may be bad candidates for these therapies. So I think, unfortunately, we’re still kind of at the infancy of understanding, from a scientific standpoint, how to think about these compounds. But you know, the one, the first one I went to, there were some pretty interesting instructions you had to abstain from eating meat for a few days before, you had to give up alcohol, which for me, felt like a big sacrifice, because I used to really like my my Scotch at night. There’s also this belief that people should be sexually abstinent a few days before, during and after an Ayahuasca retreat, so we got guidance to refrain from even masturbating a year, sorry, a week before showing up at the retreat.

 

Ricki Lake  10:50

That would be quite the sacrifice.

 

Ernesto Londono  10:54

And then there was also an intriguing rule that that was advised at this at my first retreat, which was to refrain from watching the news, because we were advised that the news can be upsetting emotionally for people. Somebody who gathers and produces news for a living, that was a tall order.

 

Ricki Lake  11:16

What were the accommodations like? I sort of imagine that you’re like among like, all the wildlife and the bugs. And was it? Was it fancy? Would you describe it as, like, a luxurious experience?

 

Ernesto Londono  11:27

Yeah, this first retreat was very bougie. You know, what’s really magical about these experiences in the rainforest is the sounds the rainforests are really mesmerizing. You know, just ordinarily. But when you’re under the influence of ayahuasca, and you listen to the sounds of the animals and the rain, you know, I described it in the book as like listening to the pulse of the planet. You feel really, really connected to nature, and you sort of understand your place within kind of this teeming ecosystem of wondrous and miraculous life and and that, in and of itself, just kind of that sense of of being so awed by, you know, the majesty of nature and plants and the beauty that you see in the rainforest was kind of a big, a big part of, sort of, you know, shifting gears from the state of sort of obsessive thinking that I think is kind of the backbone of depression and and kind of shifting into the state of awe and emotional and mental expansion of sort of Being open to new feelings and ideas.

 

Ricki Lake  12:41

Absolutely and so how many people were in this very first journey with you? I would

 

Ernesto Londono  12:47

say there were like 15 to 18 people in this initial one. It was a small group,

 

Ricki Lake  12:52

and you get super close with all these people, correct? Like, it’s like incredibly bothering one.

 

Ernesto Londono  12:57

One of the crazy and fabulous things about these retreats is it feels a little bit like, like being part of a reality show, because you kind of walk in on day one, and there’s usually, like a circle of introductions, and you kind of give people kind of a broad sense of what you’re doing there. And, you know, people tend to be somewhat guarded on day one, and kind of show only a tiny bit of their story. And then as you become more unburdened and uninhibited, and as things kind of surface during ceremony, people start revealing extraordinarily private and personal things. So like, you know, terrible parents, or sort of, you know, parenting moments that were really traumatic, and a lot of people talk about sexual abuse, a lot of people have experiences with violence. You know, I ran into a lot of veterans that, you know, years after really difficult moments kind of had to face the music of what was really at the heart of their suffering. And and you start seeing people in a whole new light, you know, people that on day one you kind of made assumptions about or, you know, kind of judged because of the way they were speaking or acting, you know, to a person toward the end, you feel such deep compassion for each person and and a sense that we’re all a little broken and all sort of stumbling our ways through life. And there’s a real sense of community and and a bond that happens toward the end that is very magical.

 

Ricki Lake  14:43

Don’t go anywhere. We’re going to take a short break, and we’ll be right back with Ernesto Londono.

 

Ricki Lake  14:56

You write in your book, and I quote as though it was. Like your emotional hard drive had been restored to factory settings and your senses had been recalibrated. Can you tell me more about that?

 

Ernesto Londono  15:09

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that happened toward the end when I walked out of that retreat after nine days, is I realized just how depressed and cognitively impaired I had become after months of feeling terribly sad and anxious and sleep deprived and being stuck in these obsessive ruts of fear inducing thinking and sort of obsessive thinking, and when all of a sudden, you kind of get a burst of oxygen, and you’re able to start thinking clearly and strategically about the future. But also you sort of gain the ability to see the anatomy of your depression, to start understanding how it came about, and you start sort of making sense of the different chapters in your life that you shoved way down and never really made time to process or think critically about all of a sudden. Like it makes perfect sense that I’d been so depressed, but also I think like I walked away with the ability to think about things I could do, you know, specifically, to be more resilient and to kind of, you know, if not overcome depression, at least have healthier defense mechanisms to guard myself from periods that became so intense and destabilizing.

 

Ricki Lake  16:40

How did you like figure out what was causing these feelings, the depression in the first place?

 

Ernesto Londono  16:46

Yeah, so a number of things, I think the biggest and kind of simplest one is understanding that I hadn’t shown myself compassion, and that seems really kind of simple and almost like maybe belongs in a Hallmark card. But as I was drawn to revisit memories from childhood and from adolescence and from my 20s, you know, it was almost like I was visiting an earlier version of myself and and could comfort and show love to to that person. It’s almost like I was out of my buddy and was able to kind of go back and and be with these earlier iterations of myself. And that act of sort of showing, you know, a 16 year old in Colombia struggling with his sexual orientation, or, you know, Ernesto in his, you know, late teens and early 20s, trying to make his way in this new country where everything seems so confusing and hard, there was something really magical about just kind of dousing those early versions of myself with compassion and love, just understanding that I hadn’t really had the ability to show myself that self compassion in real time.

 

Ricki Lake  18:11

Yeah, I was going to ask, how long does that last? Would you say that that feeling of relief?

 

Ernesto Londono  18:16

In my experience, you had a few weeks of what scientists call neuroplasticity, which is kind of a period when your brain function is altered in a way that allows different parts of the brain to communicate more seamlessly with each other. And what this does, I think, practically speaking, is it allows you to think in different ways and to reach different conclusions about things that have seemed problematic or intractable or just really challenging, but then the question is, well, what do I do about it? You know, all of this takes a tremendous amount of work and discipline.

 

Ricki Lake  18:59

Not like a quick fix.

 

Ernesto Londono  19:00

It’s not the psychedelics doing this for you. I think the psychedelics can give you, you know, a period of, you know, thinking differently and just having a clear sense of where you’re headed or where you should be headed. But then it’s up to you to actually put in the work and take a few risks.

 

Ricki Lake  19:18

So did you make specific changes from your experiences?

 

Ernesto Londono  19:21

Yeah, you know, much to my surprise, I never wanted to touch alcohol again. I had this very clear insight that my relationship with alcohol had been problematic, and that alcohol affected my body and my mind in ways that were detrimental. And it wasn’t kind of a judgy thing, it was just kind of a clear understanding that I was going to feel better and, you know, feel healthier without alcohol, and it was like a switch was flipped.

 

Ricki Lake  19:48

Wow. So you’d stop drinking after that first ceremony?

 

Ernesto Londono  19:51

Cold turkey, was effortless. And if you had told me, I think, like if you had told me on the way to the airport, on the way to the retreat, like you’re going to come out of this and you’ll. You’re never going to want alcohol again. I think I would have run in the opposite direction, because I’ve been scared of that version of myself.

 

Ricki Lake  20:07

And you know, they see, you know what they say. They say you do 10 years of therapy, of drinking, one night of ayahuasca. Would you say that’s true? Did you feel like that to you?

 

Ernesto Londono  20:18

Um, I mean, I hear that a ton. I feel that I feel a little uneasy when I hear people make such bold and hyperbolic claims about these retreats, because, you know, I think this can unclog a lot of stuff and kind of give you clarity about things. But the reality is, it’s not going to be a one and done. These experiences are not a silver bullet, and I feel that, because oftentimes the loudest voices in the psychedelics world are people who you know, speak in these, you know, grandiose terms about you know, what you can expect after these experiences. I think people may be coming in with unrealistic expectations as I’ve come to understand these experiences. You know, it can give you a window of opportunity in which you can think more clearly and more strategically about what the hell went wrong. You know, what led you astray. And then I think you need to then come up with a plan of, you know, if I now have insights, if I now have very helpful insights about, you know, how I became depressed or anxious, or, you know, my love life turned into, you know, kind of a shit show. I hope I can somewhat curse on your show.

 

Ricki Lake  21:44

Yes, you may.

 

Ernesto Londono  21:46

You know, then the question is like, well, what can I do about it? You know, and, and in my experience, in the aftermath of DMT ceremonies, ceremonies with Ayahuasca, there’s a period when a you’re not depressed, you’re actually feeling, you know, if not euphoric, you’re feeling really calm and steady.

 

Ricki Lake  22:03

Yeah, it’s almost, I see it like, like seeing life instead in 5d instead of 3d you know.

 

Ernesto Londono  22:09

Exactly, you know, I think one of the very early and consistent downloads that I was getting from the universe was that I had created a really lonely life for myself. You know, from the outside looking in, I looked really successful. I was a foreign correspondent at the New York Times with a generous expense account, traveling through, you know, really kind of interesting and exciting region, but I was profoundly lonely. And when I kind of looked at the arc of my career. And, you know, the past couple of decades of my life, I’d been living this nomadic life where I was, you know, pursuing one exciting professional opportunity after another, and my love life had always been messy, and my relationships tended to be short lived, and I tended to be emotionally unavailable, and I always kind of assumed that it was the other people’s fault. It was It couldn’t be me. So I think, you know, I reached a point where it was very clear to me that it was that it was, if I was going to try to get one thing right in my life, it was going to be my ability to love better and more deeply and to form bonds that would feel nourishing and grounding. And it took me a while, but I set that intention out into the universe. I was very sort of clear and deliberate about understanding that that is what I wanted to do, and that is what I wanted to prioritize. And when I met somebody special a few years later, and I kind of had a clear visceral sense that this was somebody that was going to change my life, and I was going to fill a void in his life, then I was very bold, and I was very courageous in pursuing that and taking a number of calculated risks in the pursuit of having somebody to come home to.

 

Ricki Lake  24:12

Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, I have to say, every experience I’ve had on this medicine has been hugely healing. Incredibly hard, terrifying, and I’m terrifying, like every time that medicine just starts kicking in, you know, I have tremendous fear, but I also surrender, you know, it’s a total exercise, and just trusting that Mama is going to give you what you need, not what you want, you know, and, yeah, it’s, I’m, I’m incredibly grateful for these experiences. Can we talk about the pitfalls? Because there, there are a lot of places that have sprung up, both, you know, illegally in the US and in down, down in South America, that aren’t necessarily safe for everyone.

 

Ernesto Londono  24:58

Yeah. I mean, I think, well. Where we find ourselves now is by virtue of prohibition, and you know, the very complicated history of the war on drugs, the people who have stepped in to sort of be the pioneers of this emerging field tend to be, you know, big risk takers, because they’re sort of legal risks you’re taking, there’s moral risks you’re taking considering you’re catering to a population of people who you know are, by and large struggling with complicated problems and very vulnerable. So so the reality is that where we find ourselves now is very often the people who are most vulnerable end up in the care of the practitioners who have the fewest safeguards, but also, at times, people who are outright predators. You know, there’s a couple of chapters in the book that point to two of the problems that I think you know we need to start thinking about and and zeroing in on one is the issue of sexual abuse and these kind of boundary transgressions. You know, I think for a long time, given the altered states that these compounds induce, it’s been very easy for practitioners or guides or therapists to either rape, you know, people who put themselves in their care, or engage in relationships that are unhealthy, because there’s a big power different. You know difference. So there’s a chapter in the book that takes readers into this hellish retreat run by a guy named Victor Escobar who had once been arrested for raping tourists years ago, and then he sort of carved, you know, a role for himself as somebody who taught people how to administer combo. This is a purgative that is oftentimes administered in conjunction with Ayahuasca ceremonies. And it’s, it’s derived from the secretions of a of a frog from the Amazon, and it induces projectile vomiting.

 

Ricki Lake  27:15

So purgative means vomiting.

 

Ernesto Londono  27:17

Yes.

 

Ricki Lake  27:18

okay.

 

Ernesto Londono  27:20

And so what happened in this case is, you know, a handful of women signed up to this retreat. It was all female participants. It’s in a very, very remote area near Iquitos, a city in the Peruvian Amazon, and during the ceremonies, the first few nights, he starts inappropriately touching a couple of the female participants initially saying he was massaging their feet. And then he starts kind of going up the leg. And then one of the participants, I think, on the second night, he actually raped. And what happens is, halfway through the retreat, the women kind of confide in each other about what they had been experiencing. You know, he kind of is gaslighting them and, you know, pretending like everything that has happened has been consensual or not inappropriate. And then these women, who, you know, realize they put themselves in a really precarious situation, end up confronting him and barricading themselves in these little huts in the jungle with kitchen knives, because they were afraid of what this guy would do.

 

Ricki Lake  28:22

What happened to this guy? Because that’s, it’s horrifying that this happened to these women. What happened to that guy was he held accountable? Was he?

 

Ernesto Londono  28:30

No, the women, you know, got in touch with the US Embassy there and the US Embassy, I think, advised them that they could retain the lawyer to try to, you know, press charges against him, but they didn’t have enough money to do it. He initially sort of acknowledged that this had been a mistake, and expressed remorse and said he was going to get out of the retreat business. But by the time I was almost done writing the book, you know, on social media, it was clear that he and his spouse were hosting new retreats in the area, and had sort of laid low for a while, and then they were back in business.

 

Ricki Lake  29:12

That is terrifying.

 

Ernesto Londono  29:14

Yeah, so what became clear to me is there’s been a long pattern of these abuses in this space, but I think people oftentimes don’t want to speak up, because, on the one hand, there’s still a lot of stigma attached to any drug use. So you know, there’s stigma attached to sexual abuse, drug abuse, and then when the two are intertwined, it makes it all the more difficult to really talk about, but I think also a lot of people are conflicted, because if they have found healing in this, you know, World of psychedelics and alternative medicine, and they have come to see the war on drugs as being misguided or problematic, they were afraid of giving the whole thing a bad name, you know, by kind of lifting the veil. On these problematic practices.

 

Ricki Lake  30:01

Yeah, if there’s someone listening, and I would imagine people are going to be really intrigued by by your experience, your book, how do you navigate? What’s a safe place to start this, this journey?

 

Ernesto Londono  30:16

It’s really hard, because none of this is really kind of licensed or regulated. You know, this is all sort of as, for now, largely a self policed space, with the exception of what’s happening in sort of the clinical settings, you know, where, which is in its kind of infancy. So, you know. But I think there are a number of things you can do. On the one hand, you know, if you can try to go to a place where you know somebody who’s been there and who can tell you, you know, can answer a lot of the questions you might have about what it’s like. And so you know, referrals from people you trust whose judgment you think is sound, I think goes a long way. Initially, I would be really wary of marketing that makes these retreats or experiences too good to be true. There’s a place in Costa Rica that I write about in the book called rythmia, which has Mia, which has this, you know, kind of over the top marketing promising people, that 97% of people who go there walk away experiencing a miracle. And you know, it’s a costly miracle, because it’ll cost you, it’ll set you back, like $6,000 to spend a week there. But so if it sounds too good to be true, and if you feel like the algorithms are really shoving these products and these experiences down your throat, I would, you know, take that with a grain of salt and see that as a little bit of a red flag. And also, I think one thing to watch for is, you know, do these retreat operators screen participants carefully? You know, does it feel like they are taking the time on the front end before committing to host you to understand who you are, what your medical history is, what you’re struggling with, and whether you have sort of a baseline of being sort of functional in order to navigate what’s going to be a really challenging experience. So I think those would be the things to watch out for, you know, I think for women, particularly since sex abuse has been such a problem in this field, if you can go there with somebody who can, you know, kind of just let you have a little bit of a buddy system, I think that would be prudent. But at the end of the day, you know, given where we find ourselves, and given the reality of, you know, the risk takers pioneering this field for years to come, I think there’s still going to be a margin of error that unfortunately will mean that some people end up getting hurt.

 

Ricki Lake  32:55

Gosh, yeah, all of that I agree with you. Don’t go anywhere. We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back.

 

Ricki Lake  33:16

This is clearly an indigenous practice for many, many centuries. How? How are we careful to have, like, the reverence for this work?

 

Ernesto Londono  33:26

Yeah, that was something I was really interested in as I reported the book, because we have seen a sequence of people being invited into these rituals and sort of reimagining and then commodifying them later on, um, you know, I think it’s important in this era in which we’re sort of reimagining our relationship with some of these mind altering compounds, to really listen to indigenous voices and their wisdom and their understanding of both The benefits but also some of the downsides or perils of these compounds. I think by and large, indigenous people see these compounds, ayahuasca and some of these other tools, as something that keeps them anchored in the natural world, but also gives them access to a realm of spirits. So I think for them, it’s, you know, first and foremost, a spiritual portal, you know, a way to sort of keep connected and keep a foothold in a realm that is beyond our ability to sort of discern and understand with our everyday thinking mind. And there’s a lot of depth to their understanding of these compounds and these experiences, and they’re very different to the way we now are starting to think about them in our language of medicine and mental health. So I would encourage everybody who’s interested in this field to a find indigenous people and sources to understand. The roots of these traditions, and to have a spirit of humility and curiosity in understanding it from their lens and understanding their healing potential through the eyes of indigenous people. And I worry that in this era, oftentimes those voices are getting drowned out.

 

Ricki Lake  35:22

Beautifully said, so you’ve done, you’ve had this experience. How many times? I mean, I know I’ve done it like 15 times.

 

Ernesto Londono  35:28

I have now done dozens of ceremonies. I lost count. But if I had to guess, I would say it probably is kind of in this 65 range?

 

Ricki Lake  35:39

Varsity.

 

Ernesto Londono  35:43

You’d be surprised.

 

Ricki Lake  35:44

What would you say are the biggest revelations from it that has stayed with you?

 

Ernesto Londono  35:51

I mean, I think one key takeaway for me was that the mind and our thinking brain is a lot more malleable than I think we sometimes assume it is. I think sometimes when our mind works in ways that are problematic, it’s easy to kind of assume that you’re just stuck with the brain you were born with, and that these thoughts are, you know, just what you were dealt with in this life. So one thing that I did early on in this journey after my first retreat, was I started a meditation practice, and I kind of felt that meditation might be a more sustainable and healthy way to continue, kind of examining my thinking mind and finding ways to, you know, live with my thoughts in a way that was more harmonious, and that has been a really good investment of my time and effort, and have that to lean on, especially during, you know, periods where I’m feeling sad or untethered, you know. I also think it reoriented my priorities, you know, I still care deeply about journalism and about my job and my career, but I am no longer as dogged and obsessive as I once was. You know, to me, I think work was kind of like, you know, it always came first, and I would just kind of work myself into these periods of burnout, and it was just kind of a cycle of of that. I also think on some level, I became really interested in faith and spirituality in ways that were surprising. I think there’s all these, you know, really difficult questions that we all, to some extent, either wrestle with or ignore, like what happens after death, and like what happens to our ancestors who are no longer, you know, walking on this earth. And what the hell is consciousness, you know? And are we alone in this little planet you know, sort of tumbling through this void. And, you know, I think it led me to be really, really interested in studying how people of faith, people who have had the ability to really latch on to a series of beliefs and practices that are helpful for them to navigate life and adversity. It gave me an appreciation and a taste of that, and how that kind of gives you an armor, and, you know, an ability to move through the world with greater confidence that you’re not alone. And there was real strength in that. So I think I’ve been kind of in this, in this evolving and ever shifting tango with, you know, my own spiritual path.

 

Ricki Lake  38:44

And also you were able to connect with your sort of ancestors, right in this journey space?

 

Ernesto Londono  38:49

Yeah. I mean, two of my grandparents experienced severe forms of mental illness. I had one grandfather who was manic depressive and died at a psychiatric hospital after the family essentially gave up on him because he had become so volatile. And then on the other side of my family tree, I had a grandmother who had very, very serious depression and also was hospitalized and tried electroshock therapy back in an era where this was kind of an experimental therapy, and I think it was really useful for me in the process of writing this book to see myself rooted in sort of a lineage of unstable minds, because I think one of the things that I experienced early on was, you know, the sense that depression was a personal failure, that it was something that I had done wrong and that it was something shameful and it was something I needed to sort of keep from others. And I think once I placed my own depression and my own experiences and history in the context of what came before me, it became a lot. Lot easier to be at peace with it. It didn’t, you know, entirely lift the depression, but I sort of understood myself to be part of sort of a a broader and more intricate web of suffering. And that was really soothing for, you know, for for reasons that may be somewhat mysterious.

 

Ricki Lake  40:19

Yeah, are there things that you think the mainstream medical community could borrow or learn from your experience with Ayahuasca?

 

Ernesto Londono  40:27

Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, I think of two things mainly, I think the retreat setting, where you bring people who are, you know, kind of united in the pursuit of introspection or feeling better, or sort of looking into their darkness is a really fascinating model. Because right now, when we go to the doctor or the therapist for mental health reasons, usually it’s a very solitary experience. It’s just sort of you and the professional.

 

Ricki Lake  40:56

It’s usually 10 minutes and yeah, you’re out the door.

 

Ernesto Londono  40:59

Yeah. So the extent to which we can somehow incorporate this sort of group setting and group healing dynamic from the psychedelic retreat world into the mental health system, whether or not it involves ritual and mind altering drugs, I think there’s something really powerful about those bonds and being in community and healing as part of community, especially when you bring in sort of people with similar backgrounds and experience.

 

Ricki Lake  41:25

So what is next for you, like, like, what’s what’s the next book? What’s that? What’s happening next with you?

 

Ernesto Londono  41:31

I’ve been feeling a lot better. You know, I’m in a very happy marriage. I moved to Minnesota with my now husband, who so handsome veterinarian. And so life has been, life has been pretty good, and I haven’t really felt the need or the urge to go back into retreat or ceremony, which is not to say I won’t do it again, but I do think, you know, in my experience, there was kind of a, you know, there were diminishing returns. I think sometimes when you get a lot of answers, a lot of questions answered, you either act on them or you keep asking the same questions and ignoring the answer. So I think, you know, I think I sort of put myself through enough of these journeys to have enough clarity to reorient my life and to live a healthier life and a more meaningful life, and I’m kind of enjoying that right now. So I may write another book one day. I think it’s been I’m still sort of exhausted by the process at the end of it. So I may need, I may need a beat or two to find a new passion project. But I’m not sure if you know this will become something that I continue to do habitually.

 

Ricki Lake  42:53

Ernesto, I cannot. Thank you enough. This, this conversation in your book, is so interesting, so thought provoking, and so important to me, so thank you.

 

Ernesto Londono  43:02

Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be on the show and such a pleasure to be in conversation with you.

 

CREDITS  43:16

Oh man, that was such an amazing conversation. I just love talking with Ernesto. I keep thinking about how he described hearing the pulse of the planet. Well, I had a similar experience years ago when I did Ayahuasca in the redwoods, and I literally saw and felt the Earth’s pulse pulsating in my hands on the ground. It was It was unbelievable. And to this day, being in nature, walking, hiking outside every morning is just a practice that I think I will never give up. It has done so much for my physical and mental health. It’s been amazing. Well, Ernesto’s book is called Trippy, the peril and promise of medicinal psychedelics. Thank you so much for listening today. There is so much more of The High Life with Lemonada premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, like extra rapid fire questions with me and my guests subscribe now on Apple podcasts. The High Life is a production of Lemonada Media. Isabella Kulkarni and Katherine Barnes produce our show. Our mix is by James Barber. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Additional Lemonada support from Rachel Niel and Steve Nelson. You can find me @Rickylake on Instagram. Follow The High Life with Ricki Lake, wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad free on Amazon. Music with your Prime membership.