Therapists spend their careers guiding others through the inner terrain of pain, attachment, trauma and transformation. But what happens when a psychotherapist turns the lens inward, choosing not the couch but a plant-medicine ceremony? In a candid episode of the Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ sits down with psychotherapist Simon Tennant to explore how his own ayahuasca retreat changed the way he views therapy, healing, and the deep relationship between body, mind and experience.
A Therapist’s Curiosity — And Humble Hesitation
Simon didn’t come into this with romantic expectations. As a trained clinician, he had navigated psychological theory, therapeutic frameworks, and emotional healing for years. He was curious about plant medicines, but cautious — aware that his clinical experience might collide with something ineffable, unsystematic and raw.
That tension — between professional psychological training and embodied human experience — became a central theme in his journey. He wanted insight, not escape; clarity, not distraction. He wanted to meet himself, not be entertained by visions.
The Experience: Beyond Words
Like many retreats, Simon’s ceremonies weren’t about flashing visuals or colorful hallucinations. Instead, they were about felt sense — bodily emotion, memory, and relational truth surfacing in ways talk therapy alone often cannot access.
In his sessions, he encountered buried grief, relational imprinting from childhood, and recurring patterns he had intellectually known but not deeply felt. The medicine, he says, didn’t construct illusions — it exposed reality from the inside out.
One night, he felt a release of emotions that had been locked behind years of clinical detachment. Rather than diagnosing or conceptualizing pain, he experienced it. That experience shifted him — not just emotionally, but epistemologically: it changed how he understands what healing feels like.
The Body as Archive
A major realization for Simon was how much the body stores: tension, history, defensive patterns, relational memory. In office work, a therapist can talk through patterns, reframe narratives, and help clients recontextualize their behavior. But the body — a vast archive of sensations and memories — sometimes keeps returning to the same unresolved knot.
Under ayahuasca, Simon felt old tensions unwind — not in language, but in somatic release: trembling, heat, tears, sighs. These weren’t chaotic symptoms; they were old-held stories finally allowed to speak. He learned firsthand that sometimes the psyche’s deepest narratives are felt before they can be thought.
This deepened his appreciation for therapeutic work that honors the body, not just the mind.
Beyond Technique: The Shift in Perspective
After his retreat, Simon didn’t walk away with grand certainties. Instead, he returned with a shift in orientation. He began to see psychological symptoms not as isolated problems but as embodied messages. Depression isn’t just a chemical imbalance. Fear isn’t just a cognitive loop. Trauma isn’t just a memory. These are living processes the psyche is still trying to complete.
For a therapist, that’s a profound shift. Instead of seeing symptoms as obstacles to manage, he now views them as invitations: internal signals pointing to unresolved edges of self — edges that want attention, empathy, recognition and care.
In his clinical practice since the retreat, he notices himself listening not just for words, but for somatic cues — the spaces between words where the body is still speaking.
Integration: Learning From the Medicine, Not Clinging to It
Simon is clear that ayahuasca doesn’t give answers — it reveals questions. It doesn’t heal by itself — it reveals where the work is needed. Ceremony can open a door, but integration is where the real transformation occurs.
He emphasizes that returning home after a retreat is not the end, but the beginning of deeper work. What the medicine reveals must be lived. Body, emotion, relationships, habits, routines — these are the places where true transformation takes hold.
For him, integration isn’t just journaling. It’s lifestyle change. It’s relationship repair. It’s emotional honesty. It’s learning to live the experience rather than memorize it.
The Therapist in the Room — And Out of It
Another layer Simon reflects on is how his own therapy training interacts with plant medicine experiences. In a clinical setting, the therapist is trained to observe, contain, question, reflect. But in a ceremony, that professional lens dissolves. What remains is pure presence.
He notes that in his retreat he wasn’t “the therapist” — he was open, vulnerable, receptive. That state of simply being allowed material to surface without defense, without intervention, without analysis. And in doing so, he came to appreciate why people seek these experiences: not to bypass psychology, but to complement it with embodied awareness.
Since then, he says his interventions feel more grounded — less like cognitive instruction and more like relational presence. He often finds himself reminding clients that healing is not a thought experiment; it is a lived process.
Not for Everyone — But Useful for Many
Simon is cautious, not evangelical. He doesn’t suggest that everyone should drink ayahuasca, nor that psychedelics are a shortcut to healing. He acknowledges risks, emotional intensity, integration challenges, and the necessity of proper support. Psychedelic experiences can be destabilizing if approached without care, preparation, and integration support.
Yet he also recognizes that for many clients — especially those stuck in cognitive loops, emotional avoidance, or embodied tension — plant medicines can act as helpers by illuminating blind spots. Not cures — but mirrors.
A New Lens on Healing
In the end, Simon’s story is less about spectacular visions and more about expanded embodiment, emotional access, and psychological humility. The medicine didn’t give him answers in words, but it gave him access to felt truth. It reminded him that humans are not only thinkers, but feelers — and that lasting healing often begins in the body, not the intellect.
For a psychotherapist, that realization is as profound as any mystical experience. It reorients how he sees clients, how he listens, how he holds space. It acknowledges that healing is not just a narrative arc, but a somatic journey.
And perhaps most importantly: that healing starts not just with insight into why we suffer, but with presence to what we feel.
Based on the Ayahuasca Podcast episode “Psychotherapist’s Ayahuasca experience” with Sam Believ and Simon Tennant.
Sam Believ is the founder and CEO of LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat, the best-rated Ayahuasca retreat in South America, with over 520 five-star Google reviews and an overall rating of 5 stars. After his life was transformed by Ayahuasca, he dedicated himself to spreading awareness about this ancestral medicine to help address the mental health crisis. Sam is committed to making Ayahuasca retreats affordable, accessible, and authentic, with a focus on care, integration, and the involvement of indigenous shamans. He is also the host of the Ayahuasca Podcast.
