The night the coyotes started howling
I drank ayahuasca for the first time in 2017, at a three-ceremony weekend in Northern Ontario. About thirty of us stayed at a house in the country. Nobody assigned rooms — you just found a space and claimed it — so I put my sleeping bag on the floor of the laundry room, because it had a door, a sink, and nobody else in it.
The first night, lying in the medicine tent, I drifted toward sleep and heard coyotes howling somewhere in the hills. The air was crisp, the howling felt close and celebratory, and I had the clear sense that I had stepped through into another space entirely — sacred land, running on different rules than the ones I had left outside.
What came through, and what I couldn’t hold
That first ceremony gave me more than I could take in. Insight after insight, faster than I could absorb them — answers to questions I had been carrying for years, arriving all at once and then slipping away, like sand through my fingers.
At one point I heard, clearly: let go. None of this matters. We are all going to die anyway.
It sounds bleak written down. It didn’t feel bleak. It felt like permission — a reminder that most of what I spend a day worrying over is minutiae, and that the actual instruction is simpler: be here now, because none of us gets to keep any of this.
Where I was that year
I had recently left a job I had been good at and productive in, but that had stopped being where I wanted to be. My life generally felt the same way — functional, not full.
What shifted afterward wasn’t dramatic. It was more that nature stopped being scenery and started being something I was in relationship with — a guide I had been walking past for years without noticing. I came home with the sense that there was more to life than I had been operating as though there was, and that most of it was more mysterious, not less, than I’d assumed.
What I’d tell a first-timer now
The people made that weekend what it was. There were elder women there — Mohawk women, in white — who spent the whole time quietly checking on anyone who needed help. One piece of advice from them has stayed with me since: you can ask for a gentle experience. It doesn’t have to be intense to be real.
The food was excellent, which mattered more than I expected. Being in the country mattered too — owls at night, coyotes in the distance, a swimming pool in the daytime heat.
If I’m honest about what I’d change, it comes down to space. No assigned beds meant improvising, and the woman next to me on ceremony night had a mattress so much bigger than mine that I spent part of the night convinced she was going to roll onto me. Close quarters, thirty people, one big tent — it taught me how resourceful I could be, but I’d have traded some of that lesson for more room to actually rest. It’s part of why Portals keeps groups small and gives every woman her own bed.
Forty ceremonies later
I stopped counting after forty. I’m the older woman in the room now, the one newer sitters come to with questions the way I once went to the Mohawk women.
The ceremony that changed my direction most was in December 2020, at Pamela and Yvonne’s, during COVID. A friend brought me. The group was smaller but the world represented in it wasn’t — women from Japan, Poland, Russia, several African countries, South America, all of us there for the same reason and speaking through it rather than around our different languages. I stepped outside at one point, under a full moon, into gentle rain, and it felt like the softest possible welcome.
Pamela’s way of holding a ceremony is distinct: musical, grounded, unhurried. She reads a room and asks the right question at the right moment, and she does it without ever making it about her. I learned as much from watching her work as I did from anything the medicine showed me directly.
How this became Portals
I met Debbie a few weeks later, in January 2021, through a mutual friend. Neither of us set out that week to start a retreat.
But I can say plainly that Portals would not exist without that first weekend in Northern Ontario, or without the December ceremony that led me to Pamela and Yvonne. Ayahuasca is what brought me to Mexico in the first place. Everything since traces back to a laundry-room floor and a night of coyotes: the retreats, the women who have come through them, this website.
Where to go next
If you’re weighing a first ceremony of your own, the safety and contraindications guide is the honest place to start — what actually rules someone out, and why. The program lays out what a week with us looks like day by day, and past participants have written about their own weeks in their own words.
Pamela’s approach to ceremony is part of what shapes every Portals retreat — you can read more about her and the rest of the team on the about page. And if you have a question this page didn’t answer, ask us directly. We reply within ten hours.
