NFL star Aaron Rodgers used ayahuasca two MVP seasons ago

NFL star quarterback Aaron Rodgers revealed this week that he traveled to South America to take ayahuasca before being named the league’s most valuable player two seasons in a row. Rodgers made the revelations about his experience with ayahuasca during an appearance on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, where he shared that the psychedelic drug has helped him find self-love and mental well-being.

The Green Bay Packers Superbowl champion’s quarterback said he made the trip to South America before winning the MVP award for third and fourth times in 2020 and 2021. After the ayahuasca experience, he said he “knew it [he] would never be the same.”

“For me, I didn’t do that and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m never going to play football again,'” Rodgers said, as quoted by USA Today. “No, it gave me a deep and meaningful appreciation for life. My intention on the first night was, ‘I want to feel what pure love feels like.’ That was my intention. And I did. I really did. I had a magical experience feeling like I could feel a hundred different hands on my body giving me a blessing of love and forgiveness for myself and gratitude for this life from my ancestors.”

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive concoction made from leaves and vines used for social and shamanic ceremonies by indigenous groups in the South American Amazon Basin. It contains the powerful psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which can induce intense vivid sensations and hallucinations. dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, led a study on ayahuasca published in 2019, which found that the brew caused an alteration in waking brainwaves compared to “waking dreaming.”

“DMT is a particularly intriguing psychedelic. The visual vividness and depth of immersion produced by high doses of the substance appears to be on a scale above what has been reported from more widely studied psychedelics such as psilocybin or “magic mushrooms,” Carhart-Harris explained. “It’s difficult to grasp and communicate what it’s like for people experiencing DMT, but it’s helpful to compare it to a waking dream or near-death experience. We believe that research with DMT can provide important insights into the relationship between brain activity and consciousness, and this small study is a first step in that direction.”

Ayahuasca led to the best season of Rodgers’ career

During the podcast interview with Marcus, Rodgers said that his experience with ayahuasca “put me on the path to getting back into my job and having a different perspective on things. To be much freer at work, as a leader, as a teammate, as a friend, as a lover. I really feel like this experience paved the way for the best season of my career (2020).”

He added that the psychedelic drug helped him redefine his way of thinking, which led to improvements in mental health that helped him have two of the best seasons of his career and his third and fourth MVP honors in 2020 and 2021. win prize.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Rodgers said of the ayahuasca experience in South America. “I really don’t. I don’t really believe in coincidences at the moment. It is the universe that makes things happen when they are meant to happen.”

“There are signs and synchronicities all around us when we’re awake enough to see them and take them in and listen to our intuition when it’s talking to us or pounding in our heads and saying, ‘Hey dummy, that’s something you should do’” he continued.

Rodgers said he was inspired to try ayahuasca after a previous experience with psychedelic drugs. Marcus added that the NFL star once told him that “one of the best days of my life” was taking psychedelic mushrooms on a beach that he “felt like”. [him]I merge with the ocean.”

The NFL star added that many people focus on the negative side effects of ayahuasca, which can include vomiting, diarrhea and uncomfortable hallucinations, rather than the “deep and meaningful and crazy mind-expanding possibilities and also deep self-love and healing, on the other hand, these can happen” that the drug can induce.

That self-love, Rodgers said, was a key benefit of his mental health journey.

“To me, that self-love is one of the cornerstones of your mental health,” Rodgers said. “That’s what Ayahuasca did for me, it helped me see how to love myself unconditionally. Only in this unconditional self-love am I really able to love others unconditionally. And what better way to work on my mental health than having an experience like this?”