A doctor describes drinking ayahuasca after her internship and realizing Western medicine couldn't treat chronic disease or mental illness. She left clinical work after six years to study tantra, permaculture, and acupuncture, now teaching consciousness work and advocating psychedelics as healers.
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I'd love to know more about your story. How did you become a renegade doctor?
Well, I think I was quite a renegade individual from a very young age. Even at school I was always misbehaving and being rusticated, as we call suspended in old school England. So I think I always had an issue with protocols and being told how things should be done.
But yeah, it definitely was catalyzed when I drank ayahuasca in the year after I finished my internship. So it was essentially I'd done my two years post medical school and then I went and drank ayahuasca and it was just like, this isn't how it's meant to be done. Like, yes, there are benefits and Western medicine is amazing at trauma and the more biomechanical aspects of things, but it's like what happens with the rest of it, the chronic disease, the mental health and those were the areas I'd seen massive failings in my own experience of Western healthcare. So then I very slowly, over the course of four or five years started part timing as a doctor in the ER and taking time off to really just explore what brought me excitement, which was things like tantra, permaculture, living in community, all just everything and all my own healing and health related topics. So acupuncture and did courses on everything really and finally made the step last year to, to leave medicine permanently after six years as a doctor, which felt a bit strange, but I'm still very pleased I made that decision.
Wow, so you're not going to go back to being a doctor. You burn your bridges with it.
A lot of people ask me that question and I'm just like, you know what? No, I'd rather just like move back home with my mum and paint pictures or something.
Wow.
I just can't imagine myself doing it.
Yeah, well, my mum's always a little bit concerned the fact that I went six years at university and now, you know, I'm not doing anything with that degree. But I always tell her that I'm still a pharmacist, I'm still a pharmacist, I'm still doing the work of a pharmacist. I'm just doing it in my style, my way. So I suppose that's the same thing for you.
Yeah, I mean, doctor means teacher and so now I've moved into a more educational role of ushering in a new paradigm of thought consciousness and you know, I think psychedelics just so such amazing healers in their own way. And there's just so many people who I Think it's not our fault. You know, we've been brought up in this reductionist paradigm where it's like, do this, do that, being taught kind of not how to think outside of the box. And I think it's up to us to re educate people how to think outside of that box again and become empowered individuals and.
Really provide for ourselves. What certain states aren't providing for people to see despite taking large amounts of taxes. I just love uniting people with their passion and like, what's true. That's what Ayahuasca taught me. It was like, okay, so you went to be a doctor because your father died when you were young and he was a doctor and you wanted to be connected to him. There was ego in it. You wanted to prove to all the teachers that didn't like you because you got suspended all the time that you could, you know, do something like that. You wanted security and money and you were. It actually came from fear of not knowing what to do. I mean, of course there's a very altruistic part of me that wants to help people out and everything, but when I looked at the core reasons why I'd become a doctor, I was like, wow, that's not. It wasn't my highest excitement. So now what I do is I help people understand their values, understand their mission, what they want to create in terms of their legacy. And then through that, we kind of tease out where we focus their energy so that they can be in much more in alignment with their heart, with. With their gut, with their intuition. And then naturally, life starts to flow in a way where you find you're actually doing the thing you thought you wanted to do.
