The bus stalled halfway up the mountain. Hail was hammering the roof of the green VW, and the driver — who spoke maybe fifteen words of English — turned around and gestured that we were walking the rest of the way. My duffel bag weighed about as much as a small child. The path ahead had turned to something between mud and soup. Somewhere up that hill was a Vipassana center where I'd agreed to sit in silence for ten days, and honestly, standing in that rain, I couldn't remember why that had sounded like a good idea.

I've been thinking about that afternoon a lot lately. Not because the retreat itself was some revelation — it was mostly just hard — but because so many of the people I talk to now, people weighing whether to book an ayahuasca retreat or a psilocybin ceremony or an ibogaine program, are standing in a version of that same rain. They've made a decision they can't fully justify. They're heading somewhere they can't quite picture. And the smart voice in their head is asking, politely, whether they've completely lost the plot.

So this piece is for them. It's about how a meditation practice sneaks up on you, why sitting in silence and drinking plant medicine have more in common than people admit, and what a decade of teaching this stuff has taught me about the honest work of healing.

How a Regular Person Ends Up Meditating

Nobody in my family meditated. I come from repressed Irish Catholics from western Massachusetts — the kind of people who wear pressed slacks to a cookout and consider a golf shirt a bold summer choice. Meditation was something other people did. Californians. Yogis. My grandfather would've been baffled.

Then, in my mid-twenties, the anxiety showed up. Not the ordinary kind — the kind that made mornings feel like walking uphill in wet sand. I'd never really struggled with mood before, so when it landed, I had no framework for it. I tried the usual things. Nothing moved. One morning I downloaded an app, sat on my bedroom floor for ten minutes before work, and figured I'd give it a week.

The strange part is that I could feel it working almost immediately. Not dramatically — I wasn't floating three inches off the cushion — but there was a small daily quieting, like someone turning down a radio I hadn't realized was on. What I remember most clearly is telling my dad on the phone, a few days in, "I'm going to try this meditation thing, but I don't want it to change who I am." Two years later, he drove me to JFK for a flight to Nepal.

Why Meditators End Up Curious About Plant Medicine

Here's something you notice if you spend enough time in this world: the Venn diagram of serious meditators and people who've explored ayahuasca, psilocybin, or other master plants has a big fat overlap in the middle. It's not universal. Plenty of lifelong Vipassana practitioners have never touched a psychedelic and never plan to. Plenty of ceremony veterans think sitting still for ten days sounds like torture. But the traffic between the two camps is heavy, and it's worth understanding why.

Both practices are, at their core, about paying attention to what's actually happening inside you without flinching. Meditation trains that capacity slowly, over years, with the volume turned down. Ayahuasca and other plant medicines turn the volume up — sometimes way up — and hand you a similar kind of encounter in a single long night. The material is often the same: old grief, buried resentments, the parts of yourself you've been outsourcing to other people to hold. The difference is the pace and the intensity.

This is why so many people arrive at a psychedelic retreat with some meditation background, and why so many walk out of one and immediately look for a Vipassana course or a mindfulness teacher. The plant shows you something. Meditation gives you the muscle to keep looking at it after you've come home.

What Sitting Practice Actually Prepares You For

If you're weighing an ayahuasca or psilocybin retreat, and you've never meditated, I wouldn't tell you that you have to. Plenty of first-timers show up cold and get exactly what they came for. But a modest daily practice — even ten or fifteen minutes a day for a month or two before you go — will change your experience. Here's what it actually gives you:

• Familiarity with sitting still in your own body when it's uncomfortable. Ceremonies are long. Your legs will hurt. Your mind will beg for distraction.
• The habit of watching a thought without immediately obeying it. This is maybe the single most useful skill inside a ceremony.
• Some baseline experience of the mind going quiet, so when it happens under the medicine, you're not startled by it.
• A way to keep working with what surfaces after you get home, when there's no shaman and no icaros and no group container.

The Vipassana Ten-Day: What It Really Feels Like

Let me tell you about Nepal, because I think people romanticize silent retreats, and they shouldn't. Vipassana in the tradition of S.N. Goenka is ten days of noble silence, ten hours of meditation a day, vegetarian food, no phones, no books, no writing, no eye contact. You wake up at 4 a.m. You go to bed at 9. In between, you sit.

The customs officer at Kathmandu airport laughed when I told him where I was going. “All your sins will be revealed,” he said. Warm welcome. Two days later I was slogging up that muddy hill with a New Zealander named Ryan who joked we were being initiated into a really friendly cult. By day five, Ryan's cushion had quietly disappeared from the meditation hall. He wasn't the last. People drop out. It's brutal in a way that's hard to explain until you've done it.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: I didn't have a breakthrough. I didn't see colors. I didn't dissolve into the cosmic whatever. Mostly, I sat with an aching back and a chattering mind and a growing suspicion that I'd made a terrible mistake. And still — somehow — I came home different. Quieter. Less reactive. More willing to let things be what they were. The retreat didn't hand me an experience. It handed me a set of tools I'm still using years later.

The same is true, honestly, of a lot of ayahuasca retreats. The people I know who got the most from ceremony aren't the ones who had the most cinematic visions. They're the ones who did the boring, unglamorous integration work in the six months after.

Choosing Between a Meditation Retreat and a Plant Medicine Retreat

People ask me this all the time, and my honest answer is: it depends on what you're carrying and how much time you have. Both can be genuinely useful. Both can be a waste of money if you pick the wrong container. A few things worth thinking about before you book anything:

1. What are you actually trying to work with? Grief and trauma often respond well to plant medicine because the material moves fast and the emotional charge comes to the surface. Chronic anxiety, rumination, and general life-stuckness often respond beautifully to a sustained meditation practice, sometimes better than to a single ceremony.
2. How stable is your mental health right now? If you're in acute crisis — actively suicidal, unmedicated psychosis, severe untreated bipolar — neither a ten-day silent retreat nor an ayahuasca ceremony is your first move. Both can crack things open in ways that require a stable base to metabolize.
3. What's your integration plan? This is the question that gets skipped most often. A retreat is an event. Integration is the actual work. If you don't have a therapist, a practice, a community, or at minimum some quiet weeks blocked off afterward, you're leaving most of the value on the table.
4. What can you afford — not just in money, but in time and life bandwidth? A reputable ayahuasca retreat in Peru runs anywhere from about $1,500 to $4,000 for a week or so, not counting flights. A Vipassana course is technically donation-based. Neither is free once you factor in the runway you need on either side.

On Being Bad at This, and Doing It Anyway

I started teaching meditation in a boarding school where I was pretty sure the seventeen-year-olds would side-eye me into the sun. They mostly didn't. One kid came in one morning and told me a Dunkin' Donuts worker had spilled his iced coffee down his shirt on his way to school, and instead of losing it, he'd just taken a breath and gone home to change. “I knew meditation was working,” he said. That's not enlightenment. That's just being slightly less of a jerk to a stranger on a Tuesday. Which, honestly, might be the whole thing.

The reason I bring this up is that people considering a plant medicine retreat sometimes want it to be a bigger, more transcendent thing than it actually is. They want the fireworks. And sure, the fireworks do happen. But the deeper healing, the kind that sticks, tends to look a lot like that kid at the drive-through. Slightly less reactive. Slightly kinder. Slightly more willing to let a bad moment be a bad moment without turning it into a bad month.

Whether you get there through years of sitting or a week of ceremony or — most likely — some combination of both, the destination is weirdly modest. You become a little more yourself. You stop outsourcing your peace to other people's behavior. You forgive some things you thought you couldn't.

If You're Still on the Fence

Most people who reach out to me about plant medicine have already made the decision internally. They're just waiting for permission, or for someone to talk them out of it. I'm not going to do either. What I'll say is this: if the pull toward ayahuasca or psilocybin or another plant medicine has been quietly with you for months or years, it's probably worth listening to. Not necessarily obeying immediately — but listening. Read honestly. Talk to people who've done it. Ask hard questions of any retreat center you're considering, especially about facilitator training, medical screening, and integration support. Red flags are usually visible if you're willing to see them.

And start sitting, even for ten minutes a day, right now. Not because you need to earn the ceremony, but because the practice will change what you're able to receive from it. If, after all that, you decide the moment is right, a wide range of ayahuasca and plant medicine retreats can be explored on our marketplace here. Take your time with the choice. The path, in my experience, takes you where it takes you — but it helps to walk it with your eyes open.