Choosing to Survive: My Ayahuasca Journey through Eating Disorder Wounds

Martha Allitt of The Psychedelic Society team shares her recent personal experience with ayahuasca and the way it helped her reframe her relationship to her childhood eating disorder.

An Imposter Psychedelic Journalist

Having spent almost three years in the psychedelic field, writing and running events that advocate healing through altered states, I began to feel a sense of imposter syndrome.  

See, although I've had many positive experiences with psychedelics myself—frolicking around fields and making weird shapes on the dancefloor at psytrance parties—for the most part, these experiences haven't quite been in line with the visionary journeys of transformation I regularly write about.

With this in mind, in fulfilling my role as a psychedelic journalist, I decided it was about time I journeyed with the alleged "mother of all plant medicines" - ayahuasca.

During my consultation with the ceremony organiser, he asked about my intentions with the medicine. My initial response was "it just seemed like the right thing to do being in my current job role." Yet, remembering a study I came across early in my career investigating ayahuasca for eating disorders, my intention shifted.

What about the trauma of my own eating disorder history? One which I'd pretty much neglected for the past eight years.  

Addressing the Trauma of Anorexia Nervosa 

I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at age 13. I spent a month hospitalised as an inpatient and several years after that with the loud voice of control in my head.

By the books, around age sixteen, I'd "recovered," and all the child-support services I was undergoing stopped. I was so relieved to step back into a sense of normal everyday life and leave the eating disorder behind that I started disregarding it as ever being part of myself, viewing it like a distant memory. However, deep down, I knew the impact wasn't truly over. And now, I was ready to confront what remained.

In the lead-up to the ceremony, as if by virtue of making the intention, difficult, ruminating, and anxious thoughts around food began to appear. Narratives I hadn't encountered for years.

At the time, this was extremely challenging and confusing. But viewing in hindsight, it's like whatever remained of my eating disorder needed to surface, knowing it was finally time to really say goodbye.

The Ceremony

The ceremony itself was different from what you might expect from a traditional Ayahuasca ceremony. Rather than being led by one guide, or shaman, and adhering strictly to one tradition, the space was held by an eclectic mix of several facilitators, including doctors, energy healers and musicians and even an ordained priest of the Ancient Japanese martial art Shinto.

I pondered what it takes to hold space in psychedelic ceremonies, an ongoing discussion that I often encounter in my work. 

As the ceremony began and I observed the facilitators tend to the participants with such compassion, it occurred to me that things like lineage and training are all secondary considerations. What matters most is the pure and loving intention.

So as I snuggled in this warm blanket of compassion, and my physical blanket which I remained under for the best part of seven hours, I closed my eyes.

The effects hit, and I entered what I can only describe as ‘the ayahuasca space’. I was encapsulated in a realm of kaleidoscopic visual imagery. I felt synaesthetic waves of emotional, sensory pressure run through my being.

It was a place like no other. Yet, despite the profundity of such experience, my mind kept entering mundane thoughts about upcoming responsibilities. My body in cosmic space-time, but my head in to-do lists and work emails.

Annoyed at my thoughts for being distracted from the ayahuasca realm, I thought, "I need to reassemble my mind," and began trying to organise my thoughts like they were files and documents on a giant psychological Google Drive. 

Yet the longer I spent trying to file my brain, the more complicated and mentally exhausting this task became. 

Eventually, a voice came to me: "You don't need to do anything," and at that moment, it was like a flood of relief washed over me, and all the weights laid across my body just dissipated.

I repeated the mantra over and over "I don't need to do anything," while laughing at how clear and simple the solution was. All these duties I become overwhelmed by are fundamentally just choices. Whether or not I do them, the universe will continue to exist, and life will continue.

But then it occurred to me that if I want life to go on, I need to do at least one thing.

I need to Survive.

Recognising Survival as a Choice

It was at this moment my intention came to fruition.

This was it, the wound which I'd left unattended.

Finally, recognising how my eating disorder wasn't, in fact, a battle between me and difficult thoughts around food. Instead, it was a battle of survival.

By resisting the fuel necessary to exist as a human, it became clear how anorexia isn't just a psychological mishap but rather can be a long-drawn-out premature death sentence. Self-deprecation at its biological core. Battling the choice to not go on living.

"But I choose life," I spoke in my head as I wept with gratitude that I can continue to experience this marvel of existence every day through my choice to survive. Thanking my body for allowing me to witness this strange, beautiful intelligence that is Earth every day.

The appreciation was incredibly potent. I thought, "I get it now," fully understanding this immense healing capacity people talk of regarding ayahuasca. Not just for eating disorders, but in all circumstances where one's self-worth has depreciated to such a point existence is no longer a simple choice.

Listening to My Body

Delving into how my eating disorder history still affects me today, the original mantra came back to me, but this time modified:

"I don't need to do anything, but I choose to survive. And if I choose to survive, I need to listen to my body."

Since physical recovery, I have made a conscious effort every day to be embodied, wanting to fully appreciate what I nearly lost. I have a daily yoga practice. I climb, run, and cycle regularly.

However, at this moment I realised being in my body is only one-half of what embodiment truly means. Being is just as important as listening, the Yang and the Ying.

Recognising my lack of receptiveness, especially when it comes to rest, I vowed to my body I would better honour its calls to slow down.

The Experience Only As a Revealing

Other realisations about my thought and behaviour patterns continued to arise, like personal psychotherapy being carried out at ten times speed. As I untangled and connected threads within my mental landscape, the same simple yet so revolutionary answers returned each time: trust more, let go, be kind, listen.  

It all seemed so simple. However, I knew this whole experience had simply been revealing. The tip of an iceberg. Beneath would lie a dedication to practise if I really wanted to integrate these messages into my psyche.

It has been nearly two weeks since the ceremony, and I cannot say in any way, "ayahuasca has fixed my brain." In fact, I have found myself repeatedly stumbling on the same thoughts and actions which cause hindrances in my life. Nonetheless, with each stumble, I am noticing more awareness, softness, and a deep knowing that change is possible with practice.

The Future of Psychedelic Research and Eating Disorders 

Regardless of what's emerging for me now, what I feel is most important to share, is how much I believe this medicine could be hugely beneficial for people with eating disorders, not just anorexia. Whether addressing a scar of the past or an alive and prevalent condition.  

In the study I'd remembered in the lead-up to my ceremony, people living through various eating disorders had not only reported rapid reductions in their symptoms but also had increased self-love, better ability to process painful feelings, and healing of the perceived root of their illness.

"It showed me that I had greater choice, that I had the ability to choose to live differently in a way that I had never seen before, or thought of, or experienced before in any other form of therapy," quoted one participant.

Taking this research further, in 2020, a research team led by Dr Meg Spriggs launched a clinical trial investigating psilocybin as a therapy tool in anorexia treatment. A year later, the pharmaceutical company Tryp Therapeutics began its phase two research investigating psilocybin therapy for binge eating disorder.

Although the current evidence is limited, I am optimistic that this form of therapy can help people experiencing eating disorders. An area of research that is crucial, considering the disproportionately high relapse and mortality rates associated with eating disorders (anorexia has the highest number of deaths than any known psychiatric disorder).

I don't think by any means psychedelics can provide a cure, recognising how deeply ingrained eating disorder thoughts and behaviours are. But they could provide an opportunity for insight and base from which changes can then occur.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, is their capacity to remind us how truly unique and marvellous life is, and that each and everyone of us, no matter who we are, are worthy of our choice to experience it.

We are worthy of our choice to survive. 

Martha Allitt is an events coordinator for the Psychedelic Society, specialising in events related to psychedelic science and mental health, as well as a freelance writer who journals about ongoing scientific research relating to psychedelics, and other psychoactive drugs, and the cultural and political issues facing today’s psychedelic renaissance.

She is also a yoga teacher and co-facilitates regular laughter yoga workshops and our Bristol Psychedelic Socials. Having completed a degree in Neuroscience, she is passionate about finding the intersecting lines between spiritual practices and biomedical research.