A few years back, when Aaron Rodgers casually mentioned on a podcast that he'd done ayahuasca twice in Peru and considered it one of the most meaningful experiences of his life, the sports internet did what the sports internet does. It made memes. It clutched pearls. It treated the whole thing as another item in the quarterback's growing catalogue of weird wellness choices, somewhere between the hyperbaric chamber and the dolphin-sex-sounds rumour.

But if you're someone actually considering a plant medicine retreat — and if you've landed here, there's a decent chance you are — Rodgers' very public arc through ayahuasca, psychedelics, and master plants is worth a closer look. Not because a Super Bowl ring makes him an authority on consciousness. It doesn't. But because his story illustrates something the broader conversation around psychedelic healing keeps bumping into: high-profile people are using these medicines, they're talking about the results, and a lot of regular folks are quietly wondering whether they should too.

So let's sort the signal from the noise. What did Rodgers actually do? What does the research say about ayahuasca and psychedelics for the kinds of issues he described — anxiety, identity questions, addiction-adjacent patterns? And if any of this resonates with where you are right now, what would a thoughtful path forward actually look like?

What Rodgers Actually Said About His Ayahuasca Experience

In interviews with Aubrey Marcus and others, Rodgers described two ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru that he framed as the source of his back-to-back MVP seasons — though he was careful to say the medicine wasn't a performance enhancer in any direct sense. What it did, in his telling, was help him love himself more fully, soften the inner critic, and reconnect with what he called "unconditional love."

That language gets eye-rolls from people who haven't sat with the medicine. Which is fair. It sounds like the kind of soft-focus retreat brochure copy that any reasonable adult would mock. But here's the thing: it's also a pretty accurate, if compressed, description of what a lot of people report after a well-held ayahuasca ceremony. The vocabulary is limited. The experience isn't.

Rodgers also talked about the difficulty of the ceremonies themselves — purging, confronting fear, sitting with old material from childhood and earlier relationships. He didn't paint it as a vacation. He painted it as work. And that, more than anything, is the part of his account worth trusting.

So What Is Ayahuasca, Really?

Ayahuasca is a brew traditionally prepared in the western Amazon — Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil — by combining the Banisteriopsis caapi vine with the leaves of Psychotria viridis (or a similar DMT-containing plant). The vine contains MAO inhibitors that allow the DMT in the leaves to become orally active. Drink it on its own and your body breaks the DMT down before it does anything. Drink them together and you get a four-to-six-hour experience that participants often describe as the most psychologically intense thing they've ever done.

Indigenous groups have used the brew for centuries — possibly much longer — for healing, divination, and what's often translated as "soul retrieval." In the lineages that take it seriously, ayahuasca is considered a master plant: a teacher, not a drug. That framing matters. It's not a recreational substance and it's not designed to feel good. It's designed to show you what you've been avoiding.

Modern research is still early but increasingly serious. Studies out of Brazil, Spain, and the U.S. have looked at ayahuasca's effects on depression, PTSD, and substance use disorders. The results aren't a cure-all, but they're consistent enough that organizations from Johns Hopkins to Imperial College London are watching the space closely.

Can Psychedelics Actually Help With Addiction and Stuck Patterns?

This is where Rodgers' story gets more interesting, and where the science is moving fastest. The quarterback hasn't publicly described an addiction in the clinical sense, but he's been open about cycles of self-criticism, family estrangement, and the kind of psychological loops that anyone in recovery would recognise.

The research on psychedelics for addiction is some of the most promising work in mental health right now. A few highlights worth knowing about:

• Psilocybin-assisted therapy has shown meaningful results in trials for tobacco and alcohol use disorder.
• Ibogaine, derived from the African iboga shrub, has decades of underground use for opioid dependence and is being studied formally for the same purpose.
• Ayahuasca has been studied for problematic alcohol and cocaine use, with participants describing reduced cravings and shifts in self-image lasting months after a single ceremony.

The mechanism isn't fully understood, but the working theory goes something like this: addictions are often rigid patterns of avoidance — ways of not feeling something. A high-dose psychedelic experience temporarily dissolves the defensive structures that keep those patterns in place, and a few hours of honest contact with what's underneath can reset something that years of talk therapy couldn't budge.

That's the optimistic version. The honest caveat: psychedelics don't do the work for you. They open a door. You still have to walk through it, and you still have to live differently when the ceremony ends. The people who get lasting benefit are almost always the ones who took integration seriously — meaning therapy, community, lifestyle changes, sometimes for years after.

What a Real Ayahuasca Retreat Looks Like (And What to Watch For)

If Rodgers' account has made you curious enough to look into a retreat yourself, a few practical things to know before you start clicking through websites.

A reputable ayahuasca retreat is not a wellness vacation. It's typically four to ten days, often in a remote part of Peru, Costa Rica, or Brazil, with two to five ceremonies held overnight. The days between ceremonies involve a strict diet (no salt, sugar, pork, alcohol, sex — the famous dieta), conversations with facilitators, and a lot of unstructured time for reflection. You will probably be uncomfortable. You will almost certainly purge. You may not enjoy yourself in the conventional sense.

Things to look for when evaluating a retreat:

1. Lineage and facilitator training. Who is pouring the medicine? Where did they learn? A shipibo maestro with thirty years of practice is a different thing than a Westerner who did a six-week apprenticeship.
2. Medical screening. Ayahuasca interacts dangerously with SSRIs, lithium, and several other medications. Any retreat that doesn't ask detailed health questions before accepting you is one to skip.
3. Group size. Twelve participants is intimate. Forty is a factory.
4. Integration support. What happens after you fly home? A serious retreat offers follow-up calls, integration circles, or therapist referrals. A weak one waves goodbye at the airport.
5. Honest marketing. If the website promises healing, transformation, and life-changing breakthroughs in glossy language, be skeptical. The real work is messier than that.

Master Plants Beyond Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca gets the headlines, but it's one tradition among several. Rodgers has hinted at curiosity about other plant medicines, and the broader field is rich:

San Pedro (huachuma) is a cactus from the Andes containing mescaline. The experience is longer than ayahuasca — often twelve hours — and many people describe it as gentler, more heart-centred, less confrontational. It's often used for grief, relationship work, and reconnecting to the natural world.

Psilocybin mushrooms are increasingly available in legal retreat settings in Jamaica, the Netherlands, and Oregon. They tend to be more visually rich and somewhat more predictable in dose than ayahuasca, which makes them appealing for first-time journeyers.

Ibogaine is the heavyweight for opioid addiction specifically. It's also the most medically risky of the major plant medicines — it can affect heart rhythm — and should only be approached in clinics with cardiac monitoring.

None of these are interchangeable. Choosing one over another isn't a matter of preference so much as fit — what you're working with, what your medical history allows, and what tradition speaks to you.

The Honest Bottom Line

Aaron Rodgers will believe what he believes about wellness, and a chunk of his catalogue — the dolphin sounds, the ivermectin, the diluted virus story — falls somewhere between unproven and actively concerning. But ayahuasca isn't in that pile. The plant has a centuries-deep lineage, a growing body of clinical research, and a generation of regular people quietly reporting that it helped them with things nothing else touched.

If you're sitting with depression, addiction, trauma, or the specific kind of stuck-ness that no amount of journaling seems to crack — psychedelic healing is worth knowing about. Not as a silver bullet. As one tool, used carefully, in the right setting, with the right people, followed by months of real integration work.

For readers who want to take this further without wading through a hundred sketchy websites, a curated range of ayahuasca and plant medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Whatever you choose, choose slowly. The medicine isn't going anywhere, and the decision deserves the same seriousness as the experience itself.