The Mountain Didn’t Care That I Forgot My Toothbrush

I ran into an old acquaintance on a street corner in Minca, a small mountain town in northern Colombia where I’d been staying for a few weeks. We hadn’t seen each other in months. He mentioned he was leaving for the weekend to attend a traditional indigenous healing ceremony a few hours deeper into the Sierra Nevada mountains. Taitas were traveling from the Amazon to lead the ritual. It was a gathering mostly for locals, not the kind of thing advertised to tourists.

I listened. Something in me had already decided. Two days later, I sent him a message: I’m coming.

I showed up without warm clothes. Without a toothbrush. Without any real preparation beyond saying yes. On the back of a motortaxi winding up slick mountain roads in the dark, it occurred to me that this was either the most recklessly naive thing I’d ever done, or exactly where I was supposed to be. Probably both.

What Yagé Actually Is

Yagé is the Colombian name for a powerful, plant-based medicinal brew that most of the western world knows as Ayahuasca. It has been used for centuries by indigenous communities for deep emotional and physical healing. This wasn’t my first encounter with the medicine; I had sat with Ayahuasca five years prior and knew the profound mental and emotional impact it can have. In fact, clinical trials have demonstrated that the active compounds in the ayahuasca brew can rapidly reduce anxiety and treatment-resistant depression by temporarily rewiring the brain.

The physical purge, involving intense vomiting and shaking, is central to the experience; it is seen as a way of clearing out suppressed stress and emotional blockages. The ceremony is led by a Taita, a traditional indigenous elder who acts as a guide. He monitors the group through the dark night, steering the collective energy by singing icaros, which are sacred ceremonial songs, and playing traditional instruments.

None of this is recreational. It is a grueling, unpredictable experience that forces you to look directly at your flaws, fears, and the defense mechanisms you usually hide behind. And that raw process doesn’t particularly care whether you’ve brushed your teeth.

The Scanner

The community I stepped into that weekend was conscious in the way that word actually means something. Every facet of who I am, including the parts of me that move through the world as a gay man, existed there as a given. Just another human in the room. Which, if I’m honest, quietly dismantled one of my most reliable coping strategies.

The first cup did nothing. I fell asleep, woke up roughly an hour later, and lay there in the dark weighing whether to take a second. Then I watched someone else get up and go first. And that was it. Decision made. What I still can’t fully tell you is whether the choice was genuinely mine, or whether I just needed someone else to move first so I could follow without it feeling like a risk. Every time I glanced at the person next to me, my stomach cramped. This physical ‘no’ to my habit of comparing stayed with me all night, pointing back to that exact moment again and again.

As gay men, many of us spend years developing an almost uncanny ability to read a room: who’s safe, who’s not, what version of ourselves is most palatable here. It’s wiring built for protection. I’ve written about how this hyper-vigilant pattern embeds itself physically and neurologically in The Intimacy Gap. I carried that scanner into that temple in the mountains and ran it all night, reading faces I couldn’t even see clearly in the dark.

The medicine had one consistent note for me. Look inward. Every time I caught myself calibrating based on what someone else might think, something nudged me back. Not harshly. More like a patient hand on the shoulder. Here. Not there.

Somewhere along the line, the scanning never stopped. Even in rooms where nobody was attacking me. The environment no longer required it. The people around me held no judgment. And still, I kept running the program. What once kept me safe has become the thing that keeps me stuck. Maybe I’m overanalyzing all of this. I genuinely can’t tell sometimes.

Maybe I still don’t fully believe I’m safe, even when I am.

The other thing the medicine kept returning to was the space between wanting to let go and not being able to. Not symbolically. Physically. I spent significant portions of the night managing my dignity, making trips outside, gripping the edges of my own experience rather than falling into it. I thought I was being careful. What I was actually doing was staying in my head.

There’s a pattern I recognize in myself: the need to remain composed under observation. To not be caught out. To keep the mess internal and the surface clean. In the ceremony, this showed up as a literal, embodied refusal to lose control. The irony isn’t subtle. A medicine famous for confronting you with exactly the things you’re holding onto, and I spent parts of the night holding on.

This connects directly to the themes of longing and performance that I’ve been sitting with when silence becomes a physical arena, the way we manage how we’re perceived even when what we want most is to be fully seen. The ceremony didn’t resolve that tension. It just made it impossible to look away from.

What the Yagé reflected back wasn’t a flaw. It was information. The desire to surrender, to release the performance of having it together, is deep and real. And right next to it: the grip that won’t quite open.

Why the Temple Is Not the Work

And this is where the real work begins. Not in the temple. Not in the purge. But in what happens after. We chase the ceremony, the breakthrough, the January 1st declaration. This time I mean it. I’ve watched myself do this enough times to recognize the shape of it now. The resolution is real in the moment. The friction starts the week after, when life is just life again and the grand intention has no infrastructure to hold it up.

By February, the gym membership sits unused. The cigarettes are back in the jacket pocket. The spiritual awakening has become a good story at dinner. Wanting to change has honestly never been my problem. Actually living differently once the feeling fades… that’s the hard part. I recently explored this exact struggle with the ego and our desperate need for validation in I Thought I Trusted My Inner Compass.

Most change in my life has turned out to be much less dramatic than I imagined. It lives in the moments where I catch the internal scanner starting to run and, for the first time, choose to ignore its data. It’s the decision to stay present in a conversation without constantly checking if I’m still being acceptable or safe.

I’d like to say I’ve mastered this now, but the truth is that the habit of monitoring remains. The difference is that I can now see the grip for what it is. I think trust in yourself probably works the same way trust with other people works. You build it slowly, through repetition. Not the grand gesture. The micro-act. Every time there’s a gap between what I intend and what I actually do in the moment, that’s where the work is.

After coming down from the mountain, I found myself staring at a blank page. I realized I didn’t know how to track a feeling without immediately grading it or trying to fix it. I needed a way to see the raw data of my own anxiety without the filter.

I made a conscious choice to stay away from my laptop for this. There’s something about the physical act of writing by hand that hits differently. It forces a slower pace and allows the insights to settle deeper into the nervous system than a keyboard ever could. I started keeping a simple record of my days. Not to perform or to write a masterpiece, but just to document small, autonomous choices as they happen. For me, it became a way to keep the experience from dissolving the second normal life returned.

The Aging Thing

There was another thread running through that night, quieter but persistent. Thoughts about getting older. The shifting mirror. A question I’ve been circling for a while now. At what point does the value I assign to myself get rebuilt on something more durable than how I’m perceived?

I’m 48. For gay men specifically, there’s a particular texture to aging that doesn’t get discussed honestly enough, the way desire and relevance can feel like they’re on the same dial, the ageism baked into the community itself. I’ve been writing around this for months, but the ceremony stripped the abstraction away. What was left was one uncomfortable question. Am I building from the inside or still waiting for the outside to confirm I’m enough?

The medicine doesn’t answer that. But it showed me clearly which one I’d been doing.

What Came Down With Me

The toothbrush situation, for what it’s worth, forced some creativity. I ended up using my finger first and then the corner of a terry cloth towel to reach most spots. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked.

What didn’t resolve neatly is the part that matters: the recognition that the real ceremony starts at the bottom of the mountain. Not the insight at 3am in a temple in the Sierra Nevada, as real as that was. But the Tuesday afterward, when nobody is watching and there’s no medicine in my system, and I still choose the thing that’s actually mine.

The days after coming down the mountain can feel a bit lonely as everything goes back to normal. Bringing that intense temple experience into your daily routine is a challenge. It is about holding onto what you learned and making sure that feeling doesn’t just fade away when normal life takes over.

That’s the practice. Small, undramatic, cumulative. I don’t think I came down the mountain transformed. Just pointed slightly differently.

The medicine called. I showed up without the right equipment.

I’m starting to think that might have been the point.

Medical Disclaimer: This article discusses personal experience with Yagé (plant medicine), autonomy, sexuality, and self-worth. It is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. If you’re experiencing compulsive patterns, chronic loneliness, or navigating integration after a plant medicine experience, please consult a qualified healthcare provider or therapist.