Why Doing More Ceremonies Isn't Always the Answer

The guy who did over a hundred ceremonies

I came across a video from someone who had done ayahuasca more than a hundred times. A hundred. To be fair to him, he was not presenting it as some kind of trophy. He was honest about how brutal a lot of it was. He talked about the process not being sunshine and rainbows, about crying alone in the corner of a room, and about years of confusion between ceremonies when nothing made sense until much later.

I do not doubt that any of it was real for him. But when I sat with that video, what struck me was not the courage of it, which is genuinely there. It was the sheer inefficiency of it. A hundred ceremonies is not a small commitment. That is years of his life, a huge amount of money and, by his own account, a huge amount of suffering, all funnelled through essentially one tool used over and over again, hoping repetition alone would eventually finish the job.

The “psychological gravity” comment

Around the same time, I got into a conversation in the comments on a post from another creator who talks about psychedelic integration. He described a pattern he kept noticing in himself: a kind of pull back towards old habits and coping behaviours even after a genuinely powerful ceremony. He called it “psychological gravity.” Reaching for the phone. Slipping back into the same loops. That sense of doing real work and then quietly sliding backwards anyway.

I left a comment with a different way of looking at it. The ceremony may have opened one specific part of you, while a blockage remains somewhere else in the system—somewhere that particular medicine did not reach. I used the image of trying to unblock your kitchen sink by opening the garage door. Related house. Completely wrong part of it.

He came back with what I think is the sharper half of that exchange: the psychedelic integration world does talk about this and calls it “grounding,” but the advice can stay vague. Get outside. Touch grass. Spend less time on your phone. All genuinely fine advice, and none of it designed to explore something specific, such as a fear response with a real origin or an old wound that has been there since childhood.

Both examples point towards the same underlying thing, even though neither quite names it directly. And that is what got me thinking about bamboo.

How a chopstick gets made

Stick with me here, because I promise this is not as much of a stretch as it sounds.

The process of turning bamboo into a chopstick goes roughly like this. First, someone uses an axe or a saw to fell the bamboo. It is rough, powerful, decisive work. One or two big movements bring the raw material down to the ground, separated from the earth it grew out of.

Then the axe basically disappears from the process. A knife splits the pole into long, even strips along its natural grain. Boiling water pulls starch and sugar out of the fibres, because skipping that step can leave the finished chopstick vulnerable to mould and rot from within, no matter how good it looks outside. Planing and shaping create an even, consistent form. Sanding follows—not once, but progressively, moving through finer and finer grits until the surface no longer splinters in your hand. At the end, sometimes a little string or tape is wrapped around the tip, a final protective touch to help the finished piece last.

Every one of those tools is doing something real. But—and this is the whole point—you would never use the axe for sanding. You would never use boiling water to fell the bamboo. Each tool has a moment when it is exactly right, and a much longer stretch of the process when it is simply the wrong tool, no matter how powerful it is.

Psychedelics are the axe

This is how I see the conversation about doing more ceremonies.

Psychedelics—ayahuasca, psilocybin, whatever the substance—are the axe. They are gross in the literal sense of the word: not fine, subtle or precise. In my experience, they can be unbelievably powerful for the initial felling: taking something that has stood untouched for years, maybe your whole life, and bringing it down in one or two enormous movements.

But I do not think the axe is always what someone needs next. They may need the rest of the process:

• The knife: something like Reiki attunements, working more precisely along the grain of what is specifically there rather than bringing the whole thing down.
• The boiling water: structured journaling, the unglamorous step that lets you stay with the emotional charge around a memory instead of only naming it.
• The sanding: repeated Reiki sessions or mantra work, returning to the same surface in progressively finer passes—not because the first pass failed, but because that is how smoothing works.
• The final wrap: forgiveness work, a small finishing pass intended to support what has already been explored.

With that process in mind, go back to the hundred-ceremony example and the “psychological gravity” comment.

What happens when you only pick up the axe

Both examples show what can happen when someone tries to run the entire process—felling, splitting, purifying, smoothing and finishing—with nothing but the axe, because it is the only tool anyone handed them.

It is not that this does nothing. The ceremonies clearly meant something to the people describing them. It is that repeating one powerful tool may be an inefficient and unnecessarily painful way to continue. In theory, you could take a felled log and keep hitting it with an axe until something roughly stick-shaped emerged. But you would splinter places a knife could have split cleanly and leave rough patches that boiling and sanding were intended to address.

That is what a hundred ceremonies looks like to me from the outside. Not wasted, exactly—real change clearly happened along the way—but a hugely demanding path built almost entirely from continuing to swing the tool that may have been most useful at the beginning.

I think “psychological gravity” describes the same thing from a different angle. What feels like gravity may be a pattern sitting in a part of the system the axe was never built to reach, no matter how many times you swing it.

Why this happens

I do not think this is anyone's fault, and I do not think it is a conspiracy or laziness in the psychedelic community. I think it is simpler: many people in this space genuinely have one main tool.

Facilitators, shamans and integration coaches may know psychedelics extremely well, and that is real, valuable, hard-won expertise. But few also come from a background in Reiki, energy work or the kind of structured subconscious mapping that offers a different toolkit. When the axe has done its job and something still feels unresolved, the available advice can become “swing the axe again”—not because anyone is being careless, but because it is the tool in the room.

That is the gap as I see it. It is not that psychedelics do nothing. It is that the people offering them may not also offer the knife, the boiling water, the sanding and the final finishing pass. So people can keep swinging the tool they were given for far longer than it was meant to carry the whole process.

What I do differently

This is why I built what I built. I come from both sides of this. I have sat in ceremony myself with ayahuasca and psilocybin, somewhere in the range of a dozen heroic doses. I trained separately as a Reiki practitioner, and I have now worked with over fifty people through this kind of subconscious pattern mapping.

I am not telling you to put the axe down forever. I am sharing what I wish someone had told me: the axe can be for the beginning, while the rest of the process may need a completely different set of tools—many of which the psychedelic world was never trained in.

What I offer is a Four Planes Pattern Mapping Session: a structured, roughly two-hour conversation across four parts of your life—physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. Its purpose is to explore what may still be sitting there after the axe has done its work: the pattern, memory or blockage that is asking for attention, rather than automatically returning to another ceremony and hoping the same blunt tool reaches it.

From there, someone may choose structured journaling—the boiling-water step, staying with what has been found rather than only naming it—and further Reiki sessions, the sanding: not one dramatic pass, but progressively finer attention to the same real pattern.

The rest of the toolkit

If you have done real ceremony work—genuinely powerful, genuinely valuable—and something still feels unfinished, I do not think the answer is automatically another ceremony. It may simply mean nobody has handed you the rest of the toolkit yet.

If you would like a structured place to explore what is still present, you can learn more about the Four Planes Pattern Mapping Session or begin with the self-assessment. The safety and scope guidance explains the boundaries of this reflective work.