For a long stretch of my twenties, I lived like a person waiting for bad news. Not dramatically. Just quietly, in the background, the way you leave a browser tab open you never actually check. Every meal, every train ride, every ordinary Tuesday came pre-tensed. My chest would tighten before anything had actually gone wrong.

That's the thing anxiety does that nobody warns you about — it teaches you to flinch preemptively. And the more you flinch, the smaller your world becomes.

I want to tell you about a tree that changed that for me. And why, all these years later, I still think about it whenever I'm sitting with someone considering an ayahuasca retreat or another form of plant medicine work for anxiety, addiction, or the low-grade dread that never quite lifts.

The Season Everything Cracked Open

I was twenty-two. Fresh out of college, halfway through a master's program in Philadelphia, working days and studying nights in a city I hadn't quite figured out yet. On paper, everything was fine. In my body, nothing was.

The panic attacks started without a proper introduction. One second I'd be reading a case study, the next I'd feel like an electrical current had been switched on inside my ribcage. Chest tight. Breath thin. That awful conviction that something is deeply wrong and you have no way to name it.

They got worse. I walked out of a movie theater one night convinced I was suffocating. I tried a few therapy sessions, but nothing clicked in time. After the first semester, I packed the car and drove back to Florida, sure I'd failed at adulthood before it had properly begun.

The panic came home with me. Of course it did. Geography doesn't cure anything.

How I Ended Up in a Tree

To burn off the buzzing feeling, I started walking laps around a small park near my parents' place. There was a pond and, next to it, a banyan — one of those sprawling, cathedral-shaped trees that drops aerial roots from its own branches until the roots become new trunks. It looked less like a plant and more like a village.

One afternoon I climbed into the crook where three limbs met and just sat there. And for the first time in months, my nervous system stopped screaming. Not because the anxiety was gone. Because something older and steadier was holding me for a minute.

Then I noticed the nails.

Someone — probably several someones, over years — had hammered nails into the trunk. Some rusted, some fresh. It looked like small, thoughtless violence done to something patient. Without really planning to, I started prying them out. One at a time. Working the rusted ones back and forth until they gave.

What the Nails Were Actually Teaching Me

Here's what I didn't understand at the time: while I was working on the nails, I wasn't monitoring my chest. I wasn't cataloguing my heartbeat. I wasn't running the anxious internal dashboard that had become my full-time job. My attention had gone outward, and my body had gotten a break from being watched.

Anxiety, if you've lived with it, has a specific gravity. It pulls everything inward. Every twinge becomes evidence. Every thought becomes another problem to fix. You spend so much energy watching yourself that you forget there's a world out there that isn't demanding anything of you.

Over weeks of visits — pulling nails, watching turtles slip into the pond, feeling breeze move through leaves the size of dinner plates — the panic attacks thinned out. Not because I'd solved them. Because I'd stopped orbiting them so tightly.

The question in my head shifted. Instead of how do I make this feeling stop, it became what actually needs my attention right now. Sometimes the answer was a rusty nail. Sometimes it was the light on the water. The question itself, more than any specific answer, was the medicine.

Why This Matters If You're Considering a Retreat

I write and talk with a lot of people who are researching ayahuasca ceremonies, psilocybin retreats, and other plant medicine work. Most of them are showing up for one of a few reasons: anxiety that won't quit, depression that's outlasted the therapies they've tried, addiction they're tired of losing to, or trauma that keeps rerouting their lives.

What surprises people about a well-run retreat isn't the visions. It's how much of the healing happens in the quiet, ordinary hours — the walk between the maloca and the dining hut, the afternoon sitting by a river, the evening spent listening to someone else's story instead of rehearsing your own.

Plant medicine, done seriously, does something structurally similar to what the banyan tree did for me. It interrupts the loop. It insists you look outward — at your surroundings, at the people sharing the ceremony, at something older and larger than the anxious little office of your own mind. Then it hands you back to yourself, slightly changed.

A few things I'd say to anyone weighing this decision:

• Don't expect the substance to do all the work. The container matters more than the compound. The land, the facilitators, the group, the aftercare — those are what turn a big experience into a durable change.
• Be honest about what you're bringing in. If you're on SSRIs, if you have a history of psychosis in your family, if you're using alcohol daily — a good retreat will want to know all of it. If they don't ask, that's your answer about them.
• Plan the landing. The two weeks after a ceremony can be more important than the ceremony itself. Integration circles, a therapist who understands psychedelics, time in nature, sleep, and boring routines all count.
• Ask about the lineage. Who trained the facilitators? What tradition are they working from? Vague answers are a red flag. Specific ones — even if they name a teacher you've never heard of — are a good sign.

The Outward Turn

Years later I got married, had kids, and one of the first places I took them was that park. My daughter named the tree Nelly. She and her brother climb into the same crook of branches that once held me on my worst afternoons, and it feels like a completed circuit — a thing that healed me is now just a good tree to a couple of kids.

I don't think Nelly cured my anxiety. I still have to pay attention to my inner weather. Therapy has mattered. Sleep matters. Community matters. But the banyan gave me something I didn't have language for at the time: the understanding that healing has two directions, and the outward one is easy to skip.

We need self-reflection. Obviously. But we also need moments where we're so absorbed in caring for something beyond ourselves — a friend who's hurting, a garden, a stranger, a tree with rusty nails in it — that our anxious grip loosens without us even noticing. Master plants, when they work, seem to know this instinctively. They pull your attention out of the closed loop and place it, gently and sometimes not so gently, in the wider world.

If any of this resonates and you're quietly considering whether a plant medicine retreat might be part of your own outward turn, a curated selection of ayahuasca and psychedelic retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Take your time with the decision. The tree isn't going anywhere, and neither is the work.