The One When I Said No in Medellín, Colombia

This story starts at the beginning of the year 2020. I was well over one year into my nomadic journey, working remotely during a time when remote work wasn’t the norm. I’d spent 2019 working from Bali, Nepal, Jordan, Dubai, Greece, Turkey, Thailand, and on the sandy shores of Australia’s Byron Bay. It was a year full of adventure, but I craved stability. I craved a community. I craved a home. And so, in order to satisfy that craving, I felt it was time to make a decision to stay in one place long enough to make friends, long enough to frequent a coffee shop enough times that the staff knew my order by the scan of my face, and long enough to fully unpack my rucksack; perhaps even buy a decoration or two and hang it on a wall inside a premises that felt like a home.

“Come to Medellín,” said my friend, Tarek, when I shared my deepest truths one evening, behind the screen of a Zoom call. “There is a thriving nomad community here. I think you will enjoy it.”

I’d always thought it inevitable that I would one day make my way to South America, a fascinating continent with rich cultural diversity and eons of history. The closest I ever got was in 2015 when my high school bestie and I took an Intrepid tour across Mexico, starting in Mexico City and finishing in Playa Del Carmen. I left that journey smelling like tacos and mezcal, with beautiful memories added to my prized collection.

Medellín it was, I thought to myself as I mapped out the best route from Nepal. It fell nicely in time with the family reunion we had planned in my auntie’s home on the outskirts of Washington D.C. I would finish my Vipassana meditation retreat in Pokhara, allow some weeks for my integration back into society and be on my way to the States via Japan. I had it all figured out… until I didn’t…

I think you know how this story ends. Suffice it to say, 2020 had other plans for me. It had other plans for all of us. On March 13 2020, I sat at a table in one of my favourite international restaurants in Pokhara, OR2K, overlooking the vast lake and pouring my emotions into a four-thousand-word blog post that was a recollection of my attempt at a ten-day silent meditation retreat. My computer made a sound that it only made when I received a Google Chat message. And I only ever received Google Chat messages from one person. I couldn’t see my face at that moment but I felt the blood drain from it the way it would if I had seen a ghost.

“Hey, I just wanted to check if you're OK.”

Dean and I hadn’t spoken in a long while but even the glimpse of his four-letter name shook me to my core. You can try with all your might to erase someone from your memory. You can move across oceans, climb the highest mountains, cross deserts of time, but some people will remain a piece of you for all eternity.

“I’m OK. Why do you ask?” I replied, utterly oblivious to what was going on outside of the shores of the Phewa Lake.

“Have you seen the news?” he replied.

It was in those moments I opened a Google Chrome tab to see the news headlines about a global pandemic. My time in the meditation retreat closed me off from the rest of the world, for good reasons, but those minutes in the cafe were definitely the epitome of a “back-to-reality” hit. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“Oh, I haven’t been online,” I replied.

“Not to scare you,” he answered, “but I’d look at the next flights out if you can.”

We continued on with some small talk until I mentioned it best we do not keep in contact. It was an involuntary impulse to protect my heart from pain. Our story had been so complex, so much so that years later I would pour that love story into the evergreen pages of my first memoir.

“Thank you for replying anyway,” he said. “I just wanted to know you were OK.”

The next week was a blur. I managed to get on one of the last flights back to Sydney after contemplating whether I should stick it out in Nepal, rush to the USA or go somewhere else. With hindsight, if someone had asked me the question ‘Where do you feel like spending a two-year global lockdown,’ I may have thought otherwise, but destiny had other plans.

And that brings us back here, to 2023, over three years since that afternoon in the cafe. I often wonder if I subconsciously decided to journey to Medellín because this city and I had some unfinished business. Perhaps, I wanted to honour the original plan I made all those years ago. Or perhaps honour the dream I made with Dean back in the spring of 2014, a few months after we met. The romantic, Chianti-induced scene plays out in my book. That evening we shared ten things we want to achieve in the next ten years. Backpacking through South America was on that list. Writing a book was also on that list. Both of those would eventually manifest into reality, among others. Can we ever truly underestimate the power of manifestation?

It was once again Tarek’s words that guided me to Colombia. Had it been a few decades ago, Medellín was no safe place for a girl like me or anyone, in fact. In the nineties, Medellín was the murder capital of the world. Drug and guerilla-related warfare fuelled violence across the city. If you’ve watched Netflix’s Narcos, you’ll know what I mean (although, my walking-tour guide shared that the show is only 50% accurate). But like most things in life, Medellín transformed. Firstly, through significant investment in infrastructure and community spaces, and then through tourism and globalisation. Nowadays, Medellín is popular amongst remote workers and ex-pats.

My first impressions of the city were surprising. I always thought my first glimpse of the lands of South America would offer more than identical highrise buildings and a Starbucks. But what else was to be expected of a globalised (or should I say, ‘Americanised’), city? At least it was green. I loved the smell of the trees, especially after the rain. I loved how they engulfed the concrete buildings, manoeuvring their branches around the man-made structures. And the weather was balmy. It was the perfect blend of warmth and breeze. I quickly learned why some call Medellín ‘the city of eternal spring.’

I had booked an overpriced AirBnB for the month, reluctantly becoming an addition to the statistics of digital nomads blamed for the mass inflation in housing prices. Most apartments in Medellín rent for prices so inflated that locals can't afford to live here anymore. Of course, this is not the sole blame of remote workers. I feel that gentrification began long before Medellín became a nomad hub. But the remnants of gentrification were blatant, right in front of my eyes - McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dominos, Wendys, Subway, Papa Johns, you name it. It was all here.

My apartment had a beautiful view though. There was a lot of natural light and I could see the rolling green hills in the distance. It was a grounding feeling to know I didn’t have to pack my bag for four whole weeks. That might not seem like a long time but it was rare I’d stay in one accommodation for that long. However, I was starting to see the benefits of slower travel. There is even a phrase for this - “slow-mad.” My friend Jarka is an expert at slow-mad-ing, preferring to spend months in a destination before moving on. I see the appeal.

So, I unpacked my bags, hung up my Nepalese prayer flags, put my books on the shelf, made a little alter for my meditations and began to feel into what I wanted to ask the next month to offer me. I was here on some unfinished business, but I was no longer the woman I was back in 2019. I had grown, and so I felt like asking something deeper from this land. I had met the sacred plant medicine, Ayahuasca, on two separate occasions in the previous years and now I was in the land of her birthplace, I thought I might meet her again.

The last year has seen me strengthen my relationship with plant medicine. I have been participating in regular group and personal psilocybin and cacao ceremonies and have gone deeper in my meditation practices. Creating space to connect with plant medicine has opened a deeper connection to my inner world and I find myself remembering the profound powers of intuition. I’ve also remembered my place in the oneness of this vast world. It’s as though the veil between me and the natural world has thinned and I no longer see myself as separate from it. The human-centred rhetoric brainwashed into me as a young adult is wearing off. It's the smoggy aftermath of a sedative pill. I feel like I’m waking up to a new reality, but it’s not new - it’s existed long before the white man came in with their flags and poles and oppressive, systematic ways of thinking. You see, connection to Earth, Source, God… whatever you feel to call it, does not come from the mind. It is to be felt. It is a language written in the stars.

For those new to the world of plant medicines, you may have heard other terms for them: psychedelics, ethnobotanicals, traditional medicines, psychoactive substances, or my least favourite - drugs (I find the use of the word ‘drugs’ quite insolent in this context, as it devalues ancient wisdom.) For thousands of years, cultures around the world have worked with plants for healing. Modern medicine, or scientific medicine, has been around a mere blip in time compared to plant medicine. In fact, a lot of synthetic modern medicines are derived from plants. For example, aspirin is derived from the bark of willow trees, and morphine and codeine are derived from the opium poppy.

Ayahuasca is also a medicine. It is a psychedelic brew traditionally prepared by indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest and made up of two primary plants: yagé (pronounced "yah-HEY") and Chacruna (pronounced "cha-KROO-na"). Due to the plant’s immense psychoactive compounds, it is illegal throughout the Western world. However, Ayahuasca has a rich and ancient history, deeply rooted in indigenous cultures. The indigenous tribes, such as the Shipibo, Quechua, Yawanawá, Huni Kuin and many others, have long considered Ayahuasca a key component of their spiritual and healing practices. However, with the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese colonisers to South America in the 16th century, Christian missionaries sought to suppress these indigenous spiritual practices, including the use of Ayahuasca. This suppression still exists today, although in the form of governing bodies.

In recent years, the scientific community has once again jumped on the bandwagon of ancient indigenous knowledge and begun to study the potential therapeutic effects of Ayahuasca. Research has explored its potential in treating conditions like depression, PTSD, addiction, and anxiety. There has also been an increase in people travelling to seek the healing of this medicine. Around the world you will now find retreat centres (both above-ground, aka legal, and under-ground, aka illegal), run by shamans and facilitators, attracting people seeking spiritual growth, healing, and insight. Am I one of those people? In some ways, yes.

Let’s timewarp again, shall we? It’s 2018 and I am on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand. This was around the time I began my spiritual journey, or let’s call it ‘the journey within.’ I experienced my first spiritual awakening in Nepal in 2017 and was now deepening my practice with meditation and studying energy movement through the practice of Reiki.

Koh Phangan is an island painted in duality. One side hosts the infamous full moon party attracting travellers who intend to drink as much alcohol as possible and dance until the sun comes up. And the other side attracts spiritual pilgrims. It’s the scene in Alice in Wonderland where she eats the mushroom (no pun intended). One side of the island will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter. Which one is which will depend on your perspective of the world.

I was, as I say in my book, a young padawan at that time. The spiritual journey lay before me but there were many paths to choose from. Each path would represent a modality - which modality do I partake in to get me to where I ought to be going? And here we have another Alice in Wonderland reference. Alice says to the Cheshire Cat, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” To which the cat replies, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” That’s how the spiritual path (or any human path) works. We take the steps that lead us to where we want to be, if we know what that is, and then come the greater forces that guide us along that journey.

I sat in Srithanu’s Karma Kafe, a vegan cafe frequented by modern hippies in crocheted crop tops and elephant-print harem pants. Practising veganism seemed to come part and parcel with the spiritual community. Although, I was one of the carnivorous outcasts, adhering to the diet of the ancients.

I sat at a table adjacent to a young woman. She looked of Indian descent with long dark hair that draped over her coloured halter top. We both had our laptops out in front of us, our mugs of tea beside them. It was a scene that would become more frequent in years to come, but not so much in December of 2018.

I can’t recall who greeted whom first, but that day in the cafe, two wandering pilgrims met one another in synchronous timing and talked for hours. We talked of our paths to the island of Koh Phangan, our spiritual awakenings, our learnings, and our curiosities. We had similar journeys, both leaving our Western home countries around 2015/2016 and spending our lives as vagabonds ever since. Her name was Kamya. She was a young woman born in the UK of Indian descent. Her personality was vibrant, just as her eyes were. They were the eyes of a soul who’d been here many times, eyes with the depth of a hundred oceans. Over the years, she had developed quite an Instagram following of people attracted to her free-spiritedness and authentic expression of life through her lens. It was Kamya who first told me about the wisdom of the Ayahuasca medicine. I’ll always remember her words… “It is a wisdom not to seek. Rather, when you are ready, she will seek you…”

Although one of my intentions of being in Medellín was to deepen my relationship with plant medicine, Kamya’s words still lived within me. And so, I fell into a daily routine and trusted that all would unfold as it was meant to.

During the month in my apartment in El Poblado, I would begin my days with meditation and, more often than not, a brew of ceremonial cacao with soya milk. The timezone difference was beneficial in the sense that I did not have to wake up and immediately be online for work. I could start my mornings slowly, ease into my day and then log on for work at around 3 p.m. I’d forgotten the beauty of slow mornings. When I was working from Europe, my workday started early and would absorb the energy of my mind, not leaving much for the afternoon ahead. Having my mornings back was a gift I never knew I needed.

In my spare time, I would scour multiple WhatsApp community groups to see what events were on and how I could mingle with the local community. WhatsApp had become the equivalent of new-age business cards and seemed to be replacing Facebook Groups as hubs for community events. There was a WhatsApp group for almost everything in Medellín - spiritual events, language exchange, hiking, yoga, acro yoga, museum crawls, dancing, women’s groups, men’s groups, and, to my surprise, plant medicine ceremonies.

At first glance, the thought of seeing Ayahuasca so casually advertised in a WhatsApp group seemed unusual to me. I’d only ever found out about these kinds of ceremonies through underground connections; a friend-who-knows-a-friend kind of situation. To me, the experience was too sacred to be advertised like some flash-sale retail spread in a magazine. Something felt off about the way it was so candidly exposed, but perhaps this was how it worked in South America, I thought to myself. After all, there aren’t illegalities to consider. In many South American nations, the use of the medicine is legalised. But that’s to honour the indigenous practices, not so much to encourage Westerners to turn the sacred ritual into a business and capitalise off the profits.

During that week, I did some more research about ceremonies in the region. Some felt more legitimate than others and so I decided to use my intuition and discernment to guide me to the right one. After spending a week in Medellín, I was no longer surprised that there were people commodifying anything they could make a buck on. The city reeked of exploitation.

One evening, I came across a one-day ceremony and reached out to the facilitator. He was of Bulgarian descent but had lived in Colombia for six years and was working with the medicine for five years. He told me how he had built a close relationship with a local shaman and a group of supporters who guided people through ceremonies. We had a call to discuss the logistics of the ceremony and it seemed aligned. They had a website that seemed to present themselves as professionals. What appealed to me was the pre and post-integration circles they offered. I remembered my past experiences and felt I could have benefited from someone to talk to before and after the ceremonies. They are so profound; deep journeys into the depths of your subconsciousness and beyond. I felt that some kind of assisted integration back into “normal” society was a good idea. So I agreed to join.

However, on the evening of the pre-integration circle, my intuition spoke to me clearly. Something felt off about the situation. I was invited to the circle in one of the participant's apartments. I entered the red brick building and took the elevator to the seventeenth floor. It was a modern apartment overlooking the city. The view was beautiful but the noise from the street was distracting. There were nine of us in the apartment, all sitting around a modern white coffee table in the middle. I could sense nervousness in the air. Most of the people in the room had never sat with Ayahuasca before. It was their first time. I expected us to do a round of introductions and learn more about why we were here and what we were to expect, but before we had a chance to introduce ourselves, I noticed some of the people in the room sniffling. The sacred medicine, Rapé (pronounced “ha-peh”) had already been administered without any acknowledgment or explanation. “Do you want some Rapé?” a woman asked me. I was shocked. I had only ever used Rapé in sacred ceremony, administered by an indigenous shaman. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I felt like I was at a frat party, surrounded by people snorting cocaine. Trying to hide my discomfort and shock, I kindly declined the offer. The woman next to me, who had never sat with any plant medicine before, agreed to take the Rapé. I couldn’t help but feel her agreement was influenced by peer pressure. All the other people in the room, oblivious to their naivety, agreed to receive the Rapé. I sat in discomfort. I was no longer safe amongst these so-called facilitators. I was witnessing the misuse of sacred plant medicines right before my eyes. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more disrespectful, they started passing around Mambe (Ypadu), a fine powder made from toasted coca leaves that is used in sacred rituals to share life experiences through speech.

That evening was one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my time in Medellín. It represented, to me, all the unease I had about that city and the sharks that swam in its waters. The next day, when I expressed to the facilitator my discomfort and my desire to pull out of the ceremony that week, they retaliated by attempting to defend their integrity. They did not acknowledge that I felt unsafe in their presence and refused to offer me a refund of the money I had paid.

I started to understand why I felt an unease about the energy of Medellín - the ‘Americanisation,’ the gentrification, the exploitation, the history of manipulation. It still lived here and was now manifesting in the misuse of sacred indigenous plant medicines. While this cannot be said for all the experiences in this city, I could not deny that a disregard of ancient roots existed in Medellín, for those who were willing to notice it.

I spent the next weeks navigating these shark-infested waters. While I did have some incredible experiences, I kept my eyes peeled for wolves disguised in sheep’s clothing. There are more examples I will share in my next book, but for now, I see my time in Medellín as a time of honouring my intuition and respecting the land I walked upon.

While I am an advocate for the use of plant medicine for healing, I worry about the risk of exploitation. I fear the greedy nature of certain human beings haunts this movement. This is why I will now only advocate for the use of Ayahuasca in sacred ceremonies facilitated by the keepers of this wisdom, on their terms.

I learned from this experience to trust in my intuition. As soon as I got to that apartment, I knew something was not right. That is the gut feeling. That is the deep knowing that we all carry inside us. I thought of Kamya’s words. My decision to decline to meet the medicine was more powerful than my decision to partake… “when you are ready, she will seek you…”

…And she did, but that’s another story. 💖