Beyond Sight: A Blind Person’s Ayahuasca Experience with Ashley Townsend

When most people imagine a plant-medicine journey, they picture intense visuals — fractals, shifting colors, symbolic landscapes. But what happens when someone without sight sits with a visionary medicine like ayahuasca? Can the experience still be vivid, healing, and transformative?

In this conversation, guest Ashley Townsend, a blind psychotherapist, shares her ten-day retreat experience and the powerful truth that “vision” is not limited to eyesight — it can arise internally through emotion, sensation, memory, intuition, and energetic perception.

A Journey That Didn’t Begin With Vision

Ashley lost her vision progressively and has only light perception today. Because of this, she entered ceremony without expectations about seeing geometric patterns or vivid scenes. Instead, her experience began through feeling and connection.

Her first ceremony was marked by emotional release rather than visual imagery. She describes hours of crying — a purge not of the stomach, but of the heart. The medicine didn’t present itself through colors or shapes at first, but through presence. It felt like a dialogue, like something familiar finally making space for something long avoided.

Meeting the Ancestors in a New Way

One of Ashley’s most striking experiences was the sense of connecting with family members who had passed away. These were not frightening encounters, but deeply relational ones. Instead of a visual scene unfolding externally, the ceremony felt like a meeting of consciousness — the medicine speaking through emotional memory and familial resonance.

At one point, she felt surrounded by relatives she had loved and lost. There was no horror in it — only reunion. Another time, her grandfather appeared internally as a dragon of radiant energy and white light. The form wasn’t literal — it was symbolic and energetic, carrying the emotional signature of his strength and guidance, expressed in a non-optical way she could still “see” internally.

When the Medicine Speaks Through Sound and Light Sensation

Ashley explains that blind people often experience psychedelics differently depending on their history of sight. For her, visual memory still existed, so the medicine eventually expressed itself through light perception tied to music.

During later ceremonies, she could feel waves of color, movement, and light around the songs. The sound carried texture. The rhythm carried shape. The icaros carried color. The visuals were not geometric overlays — they were emotional landscapes rendered through light sensation, energetic vibration, and auditory-color synesthesia. The colors weren’t “seen” the way a sighted person might see them, but experienced in a surrounding field of sensation.

She describes moments where the medicine felt like burning, dissolving, reshaping — a kind of internal transformation that didn’t need a visual component to feel overwhelming. The experience was physical, emotional, sensory — full-body, full-spirit.

Trauma Meets the Field — and Finally Moves

As a therapist, Ashley had spent years holding space for others’ trauma. But in her own life, she carried unprocessed attachment wounds and fear around male energy due to personal history. One of her deepest breakthroughs was realizing that she wasn’t just confronting trauma around men — she was being healed by them in the ceremony field.

During the retreat, she sat in a space co-facilitated by masculine energy she had once feared. Instead of being overwhelmed, she felt protected. Held. Supported. The vulnerability she witnessed in the men around her became part of her own healing. The medicine did not isolate her in a vision — it dissolved isolation by making her feel seen within a group context, especially by energies she once associated with fear.

That realization unlocked something huge: healing didn’t come from fighting the past — it came from being held differently in the present.

Integration Begins in the Jungle, Not After It

Ashley emphasizes that her retreat was not just ceremonies stacked together, but an initiation into presence. Being disconnected from sight had never disconnected her from inner vision — and the medicine met her there.

The retreat environment allowed integration to start before she even returned home:

• Stillness without distraction

• No noise to fill the silence

• Feeling without escaping feeling

• Listening without intellectualizing

• Meeting vulnerability without defending against it

The medicine didn’t require her to perform integration — it gave her a felt reason to integrate.

Vision Is Bigger Than Eyes

One of the core reflections of her story is that psychedelics don’t deliver “optical visuals” — they deliver inner vision. Vision through memory. Through sensation. Through emotion. Through energy. Through relationship.

Her experience challenges a narrow Western assumption: that healing must look like a dramatic, visual, mystical spectacle. Instead, it was deeply human: grief moving through the body, connection replacing disconnection, ancestors speaking through symbolic presence, and the nervous system finally softening enough to let trauma move instead of loop.

A Message of Courage and Inclusion

Ashley’s journey reminds us that the medicine doesn’t discriminate by sensory ability — it meets the psyche where it lives. Blind people don’t experience “less” under psychedelics — they experience differently. The brew speaks through body, emotion, memory, intuition, sensation, and subtle light perception.

Her story is not one of “ayahuasca cured depression overnight.” It is one of “ayahuasca showed me the truth behind my suffering, allowed me to finally feel again, and gave me a new orientation toward presence and self-worth.”

And sometimes, that shift — from denial and numbness into presence and connection — is the most radical healing a human being can experience.

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Based on the Ayahuasca Podcast episode “Blind Person’s Ayahuasca experience” with Sam Believ and Ashley Townsend.