How grief, silence, and curiosity prepared me for my first ceremony.
A Birthday Like No Other
It was my birthday, and I chose to spend it surrounded by strangers, hugging buckets together.
But the journey had begun months earlier.
The Funeral That Changed My Questions
In November 2023, I stood in a funeral room in the Czech Republic, looking at the body of my grandmother.
The trees had already lost their leaves when we gathered outside the funeral home. When the doors opened and we were invited inside, my stomach tightened. This would be the last time I would ever see my granny’s face. I heard my mum and my aunt break into tears before I reached the coffin. My uncle hesitated at the doorway, holding himself together.
I stepped inside and looked carefully at her face.
I couldn’t recognise her.
Her body was there, but she wasn’t.
I had walked into that room hoping to see my granny one more time.
Later, during the ceremony, they projected a photograph I had taken of her during her visit to Portugal. Without thinking, I smiled back at her.
There she was.
Her favourite songs were playing, and suddenly I was sitting at the kitchen table with her again. I hear her telling me how beautiful the voices of Il Divo are.I see us playing cards while Modern Talking’s Cherry, Cherry Lady plays in the background. I hear her talking, she laughs at the simplest things, and looking at me with those kind eyes that always made me feel loved.
I regretted not being with her in her final moments.
As I sat there, I could almost hear her telling me what she had always told me—to follow my dreams. She hadn’t been able to follow all of hers.
I wanted to make her proud.
For the first time, I wondered who would one day stand at my own funeral, and what they would remember about me.
After my grandmother’s passing, a question stayed with me: What is life really about? And how do I want to use the time I have?
The question wasn’t entirely new. It had been quietly accompanying me for years.
As a teenager, I struggled to accept a life that seemed to revolve around surviving from one paycheck to the next.
In my twenties, I sat in a marketing office asking myself if I wanted the lives of the people around me to become my own.
Later, in Scotland, I earned more money than I had ever had before, only to realise I had no time left to truly live.
The questions kept returning. Is this really all there is?
Learning to Sit With Grief
When I returned to Portugal, I agreed to meet a friend for dinner.
I sat across from him like a wall. I could talk. I could answer questions. But somehow the sadness hadn’t reached me yet. I was holding everything together.
Until he said:
“If I may suggest something to you. Don’t run away from your pain. Sit with it.”
Something inside me cracked.
I barely made it to the bathroom before the tears came.
His words stayed with me. I realised I had been trying to move through grief by staying busy, by continuing as if everything was normal.
So I stopped.
I took unpaid leave from work and spent almost four weeks alone in a beach house…
When Something Shifted
One evening, after weeks alone in the beach house, I was sitting in silence when something I had recently read surfaced in my mind.
Until then, it had only been an idea.
Suddenly, it wasn’t.
It was as if someone had switched on a light in a dark room.
I watched my thoughts passing through my mind, and for the first time they didn’t feel like me.
I sat there in disbelief.
Only moments earlier I had felt empty. Now I felt an excitement I couldn’t explain.
The first thing I wanted to do was share it with someone.
I reached for my phone and messaged my friend.
Then I messaged my boss.
“Can I work tomorrow?”
The next morning I was back in the water, teaching surf again.
Nothing outside of me had changed.
But everything inside had.
I became increasingly open to exploring different ways of understanding myself. I found myself saying yes to experiences I might once have dismissed—singing circles, Kundalini yoga, an aura reading, a one-day psilocybin retreat. I wasn’t searching for an experience. I was searching for understanding.
Following My Curiosity
I became curious about exploring consciousness more deeply. I started meeting people who had worked with plant medicines and listening to their stories.
The first time I heard about ayahuasca, I didn’t even know how to spell it. I only knew that something in me became curious.
I listened for hours as my friend shared his experiences. I also heard stories from people who felt the medicine had changed the direction of their lives.
I didn’t rush into it. I wanted to feel trust in the people holding the space and the way the ceremony was organised. When I felt ready, I asked my friend—someone whose judgement I trusted—for a recommendation.
The first opportunity had already been full.
Then another date appeared.
28 June.
My birthday.
I laughed.
“Okay,” I thought. “Maybe this is the moment.”
Seven months later, on 28 June 2024, I chose to celebrate my 31st birthday surrounded by strangers, hugging buckets together.
This Was Only the Beginning
When I sat down to write this, I thought I was going to tell the story of my first ayahuasca ceremony.
Instead, I found myself writing about everything that quietly led me there.
It turns out the ceremony didn’t begin on my birthday. It began months earlier—with grief, silence, difficult questions, and a growing curiosity about life itself.
I’ll share what happened during that birthday weekend, and what unfolded afterwards, in the next part of this journey.
Until then, I’d love to hear from you.
Have you ever had a moment that changed the direction of your life—not all at once, but by quietly changing the questions you were asking?
Feel free to share in the comments. I’d genuinely love to read your story.