What Reiki Revealed That Three Ayahuasca Ceremonies Couldn't

The thing about something being repressed

Here's the obvious problem with a repressed memory, and it's obvious enough that I feel a little silly spelling it out — except that I think it's the exact thing that gets missed in a lot of conversations about psychedelic healing. If something is repressed, you don't have conscious access to it. That's what the word means. You can't go looking for it, because you don't know it's there to look for.

So even sitting in ceremony, wide open, genuinely willing to see whatever needed to be seen, I couldn't have asked for help with something I didn't know existed. Nobody can ask the medicine to work with a wound they don't know they're carrying. That's not a failure of intention or commitment. It's just the nature of what “repressed” actually means.

Why the ceremony setting made this even harder to reach

I think there's a second piece to this that doesn't get talked about enough, and it has nothing to do with the plant itself. All three of my ceremonies were group settings — one shaman, a room full of people, each of us somewhere completely different in our own experience. And I don't say that as a criticism of the people running those ceremonies. I think most of them were doing genuinely good, careful work within a format that has real, structural limits.

Because even if something had surfaced briefly for me in one of those nights — even a flicker of it — there was no realistic way for one shaman, holding space for an entire room, to notice it, understand what it was, and help me explore it properly. At best, in that setting, something like that gets glimpsed. It doesn't get understood. It doesn't get worked with — not by me, in the middle of an altered state trying to make sense of my own experience, and not by anyone else in that room either, because nobody there had the bandwidth to give any one person that kind of focused attention.

I want to be fair here, because I think it's an important distinction: I don't think this is really a limitation of ayahuasca as a medicine. Used the right way — one practitioner, one person, real sustained individual attention across a session — I actually think ayahuasca could support this kind of exploration. I just don't think that's generally how it's practiced. The community around it, at least the parts of it I've experienced, is largely built around larger group ceremonies, and that structure, more than the medicine itself, is what limits how deeply any one person's specific history can actually be seen.

What changed when I started learning Reiki

When I started training in Reiki, the format itself was the first thing that struck me. One practitioner. One person. An entire session with nowhere else for that attention to go. And when I started doing this kind of work properly — being the only person in the room, so to speak — that repressed memory actually surfaced. Not just a flicker of it. Fully enough to be seen clearly, named, and explored.

That was the real revelation for me, and it's taken me a while to articulate it properly. It isn't that Reiki is simply “better” than ayahuasca, or that one modality beats the other. It's that they're built to do different things, and most people only ever get access to one of them. Ayahuasca, at least in how it's typically offered, tends to open something at a fairly broad level — insight, perspective, a kind of expansiveness that's real and valuable. Reiki gave me access to something much more specific: the ability to actually see what was sitting underneath, one person at a time, with nowhere else for the practitioner's attention to be divided.

A conversation that told me I wasn't the only one noticing this

A while back, I came across a post from someone in the psychedelic integration space — a creator whose work I respect — describing something he called “psychological gravity.” The sense of being pulled back into old habits and old coping behaviours, even after real, meaningful ceremony work. Reaching for the phone. Slipping back into old patterns almost on autopilot.

I left a comment offering a different way of looking at it. My sense was that this isn't really gravity pulling you down — it's that psychedelics tend to open one specific part of the system, and if there are still blockages elsewhere, in parts of the system that particular medicine doesn't reach, you're going to keep getting pulled back to them no matter how open the rest of you feels. I used an image that's stuck with me since: it's a bit like trying to unblock your kitchen sink by opening the garage door. Related house. Wrong part of it entirely.

He responded thoughtfully, and made a point of his own that I think is actually the sharper half of that exchange: the psychedelic integration community does talk about this. They call it “grounding.” But it's a fairly light, fairly vague version of the concept. Spend time in nature. Get off your phone. Genuinely good advice, as far as it goes — and not remotely equipped to deal with something specific: a fear pattern with a real origin, an old wound, a repressed memory like the kind I've just described. “Touch grass” isn't a tool for that. It's a nice suggestion sitting next to a much deeper problem.

Reading that exchange back, I think it captures the whole shape of what I'm trying to say here. The psychedelic community already knows something is missing at that lower, more foundational level. They even have a word for it. What's generally missing isn't awareness that the gap exists — it's the specific toolkit, and the specific individual attention, to actually do something about it.

Where this leaves me

I don't think any of this means ayahuasca doesn't work, and I don't think it means the people running these ceremonies are doing something wrong. I think it means the format most of us encounter it in — large groups, one facilitator, real medicine and real intention, but very little space for any one person's specific history — was never really built to reach something as quiet and as hidden as a repressed memory.

Reiki, for me, filled that specific gap. Not by being more powerful. By being more individual. One person, fully seen, for the whole length of a session — which turned out to be exactly what it took to find the thing three ceremonies, with everything else they gave me, couldn't quite reach.

If you've done real ceremony work yourself — genuine medicine, genuine intention — and some part of you still feels like there's something sitting there, just out of reach, I don't think that means anything failed. I think it might mean nobody in the room had the space to actually see it. That's the specific gap a Four Planes Pattern Mapping Session is built to work with: one person, one conversation, real individual attention to whatever's actually sitting underneath, rather than hoping it surfaces in a room of thirty people and one shaman.

If that feels like the right next step, you can book a Four Planes session, or start with the self-assessment for a more self-guided beginning. For more context on the scope of this work, read the safety and scope guidance.