The return To Peru — Closing Doors and Walking Deeper
I went back to Peru believing I was searching for something hidden in the mountains. The idea of El Dorado felt real at the time, something ancient waiting to be rediscovered. But the deeper I travelled — through villages, across mountain passes, and back into ceremony — the clearer it became that the journey wasn’t about a lost city at all. It was about instinct, endurance, and learning how to surrender without losing myself.
What Was Left Open
When I returned from my first trip to Peru, the ayahuasca experience stayed with me.
It wasn’t the visions that lingered most; it was the fear.
It took time to sit with that. Time to understand that something had been opened in me that I didn’t yet know how to close.
Eventually I went to see another shaman in Scotland. After listening carefully to my story, he said something that stayed with me: many shamans open people up with ayahuasca, but not all of them close them properly.
That resonated.
We worked with San Pedro instead, a much gentler plant teacher. We also smoked marijuana during the process. It wasn’t as deep or cosmic as the ayahuasca had been, but it allowed him to guide me differently — more contained, more deliberate.
Over a few days, we spoke about my paranoia and anxiety, about the doors that had opened in my mind and how to close what needed closing. The work wasn’t dramatic, but it steadied me.
During those conversations, something else surfaced — a strong inner knowing that I had worked in these realms before. Whether that was a past life, ancestral memory, or simply archetypal recognition, I don’t know. But I felt I had been a shaman before, perhaps in an Indigenous lifetime or somewhere further back in my lineage.
For the first time, I began exploring myself not just as Trevor, the man in this lifetime, but as consciousness evolving across lifetimes.
That shifted something.
The Call Back
After my time in Scotland, I returned home steadier. The paranoia had softened and the anxiety no longer gripped in the same way. Something had been closed that needed closing.
And yet, there was still something unfinished.
I remained in contact with Hugla, the shaman I had met in Peru. Eventually we agreed that I would return, this time to organise our own journey deeper into the jungle. The intention felt clear: we would search for what I then understood to be the Incan city often referred to as El Dorado — the Lost City of Gold.
I took a young woman with me. She was a friend, and it felt right that she would join the journey.
We flew into Lima and spent a couple of days there before travelling south to visit sacred sites. We made small offerings and carried out simple rituals — nothing elaborate, just preparation before heading north again.
After a few days in the south, we returned to Lima and arranged flights back up to Tarapoto. It was there that we organised what we needed for the expedition. We found another guide, hired packhorses, and bought supplies — rice, pasta, packets of soup and dried food that could be cooked easily over an open fire.
Then we began the trek.
Where Generosity Lives
The first day passed steadily as we followed dusty pathways into the hills. By evening we reached a small village and sat with locals around a fire, communicating as best we could. There was warmth there and a quiet acceptance.
The following day the weather shifted. Heavy rain fell steadily and the paths became slick. The four of us travelling on foot moved ahead of the horses, knowing we could make better progress without waiting.
By the time we reached a tiny village further along, the horses had not caught up and we had no food. The village teacher spoke to the locals on our behalf. After some discussion, they decided to give us their only chicken.
I remember thinking that chicken must have lived a very long life. It was tough beyond belief and served with dried plantains. It wasn’t about how it tasted; it was about what it represented. They had almost nothing, and they gave what they had. The teacher even gave up his bed — wooden planks resting on blocks — so we would have somewhere to sleep.
That night revealed something simple and profound about generosity.
When Instinct Takes Over
As we continued, the terrain became harsher. Mountains layered upon mountains, streams cut through rock, and mist reduced visibility so that sometimes we could barely see what lay ahead.
At one point our guide attempted to take one of the pack animals in a different direction. Something rose up inside me — deep and uncertain at first, but suddenly powerful. A voice came from somewhere beyond my usual thinking and I shouted for him to stop and turn back. It wasn’t planned or measured; it was instinct. He turned around instantly.
In that moment I realised how dependent we were on that animal carrying our supplies. Without it, the journey would have ended there.
On another climb, halfway up a steep mountain, my friend stopped and said she couldn’t go any further. Turning back would have been harder than continuing forward, so we kept moving, one step at a time.
We sheltered beneath rock outcrops when the cold became sharp and passed remote smallholdings where children stared at us, having never seen a foreigner that far into the region. Again and again, strangers offered us help — food, shelter, company. There was a consistent pattern of kindness in places where materially there was very little.
Surrender Without Collapse
Before returning to England, I chose to sit with ayahuasca once more.
This time it was one-to-one. Just me and a shaman by a fire in the jungle. There was no group, no shared container. It felt more direct.
As the medicine began to work, something very different surfaced. There wasn’t the same expansive cosmic energy as the first ceremony. Instead, something primal emerged.
During the mountain journey I had climbed to a summit and instinctively dropped onto all fours. I hadn’t physically changed, but energetically I felt feline — like a puma or panther. That same energy returned in the ceremony.
I curled onto all fours and scratched lightly at the earth as if preparing a place to lie down. The movement felt instinctive, not deliberate.
There was no purge this time.
Instead, I felt the fear of losing control completely. The fear of my identity dissolving.
At a certain point, resisting it became more exhausting than allowing it.
So I lay back and let go.
Gradually, the boundaries of who I thought I was began to soften. The sense of separation eased. I didn’t experience dramatic visions; what I felt was merging — a quiet dissolving into the forest around me.
It was both terrifying and peaceful.
Eventually the medicine wore off. I returned slowly to a more familiar sense of self. But something had shifted — not in a destabilising way this time, but in a quieter, more integrated way.
No Gold, But Something Shifted
After that, I returned to Lima and then back to England.
We had not found El Dorado. We had not uncovered a lost city. But I had travelled deeper into something internal — into instinct, endurance, fear, and surrender.
The paranoia that had followed my first ceremony had eased. The anxiety no longer dominated in the same way. There was still integration to do, but this time I returned home feeling less fractured.
The journey outward had not produced gold.
But something within me had been refined.
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