I was in a village hall in a secret location deep in the English countryside, about to take the Amazonian medicine ayahuasca. I had never done psychedelics before. I’m a 33-year-old dentist from London. Apart from smoking my fair share of weed as a teenager and doing coke a handful of times in my late 20s, I’m not a very experienced drug user.

Before deciding to do this I spoke to three people I knew who had done ayahuasca, and I was slightly baffled by the fact that even though they were all intelligent, articulate women, none of them were able to explain what the experience of taking this drug was like. I only got replies like “Ayahuasca’s intense,” “It shows you ‘you,’” or “It’s like ten years of therapy, but you have to be ready to do the work.” In hindsight, I now understand how the effects of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca’s active compound, are impossible to explain.

I didn’t do this to get high; I was doing it largely out of curiosity. I wasn’t hoping for anything specific. I’m very interested in spirituality, our purpose as humans, our connections with others. So I was quite fascinated when friends told me they had experienced some profound spiritual insights on ayahuasca. I felt as though it had come into my life for a reason, so I went with it.

There were about 20 of us, people of all ages, ethnic, and social backgrounds. We set up our duvets and pillows around the edge of the hall, a place usually used for old people’s tea parties or cake baking competitions. The curtains were shut and the doors were locked by Shaun (some names have been changed to protect people’s identities), a psychotherapist who has used ayahuasca and is interested in exploring how he can use it in his clinical practice. Ayahuasca is illegal because it contains DMT, and the organizers couldn’t have local villagers finding out that this “meditation retreat” was something rather more than that.

We changed from our normal, villager-friendly clothes into all white and sat around to share our intentions for the evening. My intention was to surrender to the experience and allow it to show me what I needed to see.