Crossing Boundaries: Ayahuasca and Out-of-Body Experience

In a compelling conversation on the Ayahuasca Podcast, guest Ryan Nurse explores a deep and often misunderstood phenomenon: the out-of-body experience (OBE), and how this can surface under the influence of Ayahuasca. The episode delves into what it feels like when consciousness seems to detach from the physical body — and how such experiences, strange as they are, can carry meaning, healing, and transformation.

What Is an Out-of-Body Experience — and Why Ayahuasca?

An out-of-body experience is described as a state in which one perceives the world from a vantage point outside their physical body. Some people liken it to floating above oneself, seeing one’s body on the ground, or navigating spaces in a non-physical form. In psychedelic contexts, including ceremonies with ayahuasca, such dissociative or transcendental states can sometimes emerge: the brew alters perception, loosens ego boundaries, and may allow consciousness to roam beyond ordinary sensory constraints.

Ryan explains that for many participants, the OBE comes not as a whimsical “trip,” but as a disarming revelation — a detachment that surfaces suppressed trauma, emotional weight, or hidden aspects of self. Under the medicine, memories, sensations, and energies buried deep may surface. The out-of-body sensation becomes a mirror: forcing confrontation, allowing release, and revealing what was unseen.

Not Just Hallucination — A Psyche in Motion

During the interview, Ryan distinguishes between “hallucination” and “experience.” While ayahuasca often produces vivid visuals and altered perception, an OBE under the medicine tends to feel different: more subtle, more felt, more embodied. It isn’t always bright colors or dancing shapes — sometimes, it’s a quiet sense that “you are somewhere else,” or “you are not your body.”

It could manifest as dissociation (feeling detached from feelings or pain), out-of-body vision (seeing yourself lying still, watching your emotions or memories unfold), or a sense of weightlessness and freedom. For some, it’s brief; for others, it becomes a full journey — a passage through memory, trauma, grief, or previously unconscious material. In either case, the OBE serves as a kind of internal expedition: a chance to map inner territory, reclaim fragmented parts, and maybe integrate what was split.

The Shadow’s Reveal — Trauma, Release, Integration

One of the recurring themes Ryan highlights is that OBEs under ayahuasca often come when trauma is present — unresolved wounds, emotional burdens, suppressed experiences. The medicine doesn’t cause new wounds; rather, it opens a door for what’s already hidden to surface. The out-of-body phenomenon can thus reveal shadow content: grief, fear, shame, guilt, deep emotional pain.

While confronting such material can be disorienting or overwhelming, many describe a paradoxical relief. For the first time in years — sometimes decades — they feel separated from the old fear or pain enough to observe it. This distance allows for perspective, witnessing, and — ideally — release. The OBE becomes not an escape, but a container: a safe space for old imprints to emerge, get seen, and begin dissolving.

Why It Matters — Beyond the Experience

The importance of OBE experiences under ayahuasca lies less in novelty and more in potential healing. When consciousness steps outside the physical body, it can bypass the mind’s filters — that dense network of beliefs, fears, defenses that normally interpret, rationalize, suppress. In that threshold, raw sensations and emotions can move freely.

For people stuck in trauma loops, dissociation, chronic pain, depression or identity disconnection, that “free-floating” state may offer a new perspective. It may reveal patterns — behavioral, emotional, relational — that no amount of talk therapy, medication, or willpower had shifted. The body-mind system, when unlocked, begins to speak in a different language — one of energy, memory, sensation, subtlety.

The Risks, the Respect, and the Integration

But OBEs are not a guarantee, and not always easy. Ryan cautions that such experiences can be destabilizing if handled carelessly. Without proper guidance, safe setting, experienced facilitators, and — crucially — careful integration afterward — they can become disorienting or triggering.

He underscores that ayahuasca is powerful: it can catalyze deep release, but also surface deeply buried pain. Approaching it with respect, intention, and readiness is essential. Integration — whether through therapy, journaling, bodywork, community support, lifestyle alignment — is what transforms the experience into lasting healing. Without integration, insights may dissolve, or worse, become fragmented memories with no grounding.

A Path Between Worlds — Healing Beyond the Physical

For Ryan, and many others who’ve walked this path, the OBE under ayahuasca is less about mysticism and more about reconnecting with parts of self. It’s a detachment not from life — but from old pain, constraints, identity traps. It’s a movement toward wholeness.

The plant medicine doesn’t promise miracles. What it can offer is a door — one that opens the possibility of seeing oneself differently, feeling differently, moving differently. For those willing to walk through, the journey may lead not just out of the body, but deeper into the self — integration, healing, reclaiming agency, reconciling trauma, and continuing a lifelong path not toward escape, but toward embodiment.

In a world that often suppresses discomfort, numbness, and dissociation, perhaps this work of remembering — body, emotion, soul — becomes one of the most radical acts of healing.

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Based on the Ayahuasca Podcast episode “Ayahuasca and out of body experience” with Sam Believ and Ryan.