Aaron Rodgers says taking ayahuasca helped improve mental health and spurred MVP seasons
Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers revealed on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast that he consumed ayahuasca prior to his back-to-back MVP seasons, crediting the plant-based psychedelic for helping produce two of the best seasons of his career thanks to a change in mindset and improvement of his mental health.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Rodgers said about winning his third and fourth MVPs in 2020 and 2021 following an ayahuasca experience in Peru. “I really don’t. I don’t really believe in coincidences at this point. It’s the universe bringing things to happen when they’re supposed to happen.
“There’s signs and synchronicities all around us at all times if we’re awake enough to see them and to take them in and to listen to our intuition when it’s speaking to us or pounding us in the head saying, ‘Hey dummy, this is what you’re supposed to be doing.'”
Rodgers said his decision to try ayahuasca was prompted by a prior experience he had with psychedelics – Marcus said Rodgers once told him that “one of the best days of my life” involved taking mushrooms on a beach where he subsequently “felt myself merge with the ocean” – as well as from listening to Marcus’ podcast.
Rodgers said people focus on the negatives of ayahuasca – nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and hallucinations among the many side effects – but not the “deep and meaningful and crazy mind-expanding possibilities and also deep self-love and healing that can happen on the other side” after taking the drug.
He said that following the trip and ayahuasca experience he “knew that I was never going to be the same.”
“For me, I didn’t do that and think ‘oh, I’m never playing football again,” Rodgers said. “No, it gave me a deep and meaningful appreciation for life. My intention the first night going in 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 with the sensation of feeling a hundred different hands on my body imparting a blessing of love and forgiveness for myself and gratitude for this life from what seemed to be my ancestors.”
The experience, Rodgers said, “set me on my course to be able to go back in to my job and have a different perspective on things. To be way more free at work, as a leader, as a teammate, as a friend, as a lover. I really feel like that experience paved the way for me to have the best season of my career (in 2020).”
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Rodgers got emotional talking about the importance of self-love, his ayahuasca experience and how he feels it helped him achieve self-love. He paused several times to fight back tears.
“You can’t do anything in this life until you really, truly unconditionally love yourself,” Rodgers said. “So that’s what I had to do. I had to surrender fully to the idea that everything I was telling myself was true. That’s when it finally broke. I laid there on that mat and I made peace with the possibility that all of these lies I was telling myself could possibly be true. In that reality of the worst self-talk you can possibly imagine, feeling like the lowest human on the planet and not worthy ever in this life of unconditional love…