Aaron Rodgers’ Ayahuasca Interview with Aubrey Marcus

Aaron Rodgers‘ Ayahuasca interview with Aubrey Marcus continues to be a powerful talking point in the world of sports, personal development, and psychedelic plant medicine. In that interview, Aaron shares how he was able to attain freedom from narratives around himself and negative self-talk in order to feel unconditional self-love. And to better model unconditional love, he sat with the sacred psychedelic tea, Ayahuasca, which contains the hallucinogenic drug DMT.

Aaron, Aubrey, and Vylana

When people in the public eye, like Aaron, step up to share their life-changing experiences with sacred plant medicine, they are helping to remove major stigmas. These myths and naive narratives are seriously unjust to powerful medicines like Ayahuasca. We applaud the superstar quarterback from the Green Bay Packers for stepping forward and sharing his message.

Mental health challenges and the struggle to find self-love are far too prevalent in our modern society. In our own work bringing high-performing leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators on 1heart Journeys, we have found that self-love, stress, and depression are especially present even in those perceived as “successful.” Self-love and personal peace are not found through achievements; rather, chasing achievements often is at the expense of these core tenants for basic goodness.

Below is our brief summary of Aaron’s beautiful self-love and medicine journey that allowed him to show up in life and on the field as someone who can love and care unconditionally. As the Superbowl-winning quarterback shares, his experience with Ayahuasca was before his back-to-back MVP seasons.

“I came back and knew that I was never going to be the same. It gave me a deep and meaningful appreciation for life. My intention for going in was that I wanted to see what pure love feels like. And I did. I had a magical experience with the sensation of feeling 100 different hands on my body and imparting a blessing of love and forgiveness for myself and gratitude for this life from what seemed to be my ancestors… I really felt like that set me on my course to be able to go back into my job and have a different perspective on things, and to be a lot more free at work as a leader, as a teammate, as a friend, as a lover. And I really feel like that experience paved the way to have the best season of my career.” – Aaron Rodgers

Aaron’s Background

Aaron Charles Rodgers is among the best American football players in NFL history. He’s the Green Bay Packers quarterback, league MVP, and an NFL record holder in multiple categories. From passing yardage to single-season franchise records to earned NFC offensive player awards or even four straight games to a playoff game or a regular season game, Aaron has been one of the very best for consecutive seasons and definitely in franchise history.

Aaron receiving his 4th NFL MVP Award

Born in California on December 2, 1983, Rodgers is second on the NFL’s all-time regular-season career passer rating list. At 38 years old, he´s considered by many sportscasters and players to be one of the greatest and most talented quarterbacks of all time. He´s been a Super Bowl champion, a Super Bowl MVP, and has been a four-time NFL Most Valuable Player (2011, 2014, 2020, 2021).

And most recently, he’s been in the news for dating one of Aubrey Marcus’ past podcast guests, Blu. Aaron Rodgers’ new girlfriend came after his split with Shailene Woodley. Blu, podcast host of Deja Blu, is referred to as a pristine reservoir of consciousness from which people yearning for purity, relief, and love can take a sip.

Coming into Self-Love & Modeling Unconditional Love

In his interview with Aubrey, Aaron reflects on how, despite all his personal achievements and successful career, he still struggled with self-criticism, doubt, feelings of not being enough, and not being worthy of being loved. These feelings crumbled after three Ayahuasca ceremonies in South America, and deep self-love, gratitude, and compassion were born in their place.

Below details more of his process from self-doubt into complete self-love, but to really fully understand what he went through, we highly recommend listening to the interview here:

Aaron’s Ayahuasca Journey

Aaron describes entering his first Ayahuasca ceremony (the first of three ceremonies during a 1-week retreat) with so many intentions and expectations. Instead, the plant medicine took him down a completely different path, which was about ego death. All of his self-criticism was brought to light, and the medicine helped him realize that he couldn’t accomplish his other intentions until he realized these feelings of unworthiness he had buried deep inside and began to love himself unconditionally.

The Packers quarterback had a very challenging night in which he had to sit with these feelings and the worst self-talk, which culminated in a realization that people still loved him during his lowest (including his interviewer Aubrey who was sitting in ceremony with him at that moment), and how if these people could still love him, he SHOULD be able to love himself. He had a profound feeling of acceptance and love during that night.

And as Aaron shares, he went into his second ceremony completely ready to surrender, without intentions or expectations, and just let whatever needed to come through happen. This night, he received many revelations about his past, present, and future lives, and many questions were answered. He enjoyed the highest bliss possible that he could have imagined.

“To be alive is to feel all the emotion, not just the highs and joys, but also sadness, frustration… and the depth of all these emotions is to be alive” – Aaron Rodgers

The third night was again accompanied by a greater challenge, similar to the first night. He describes how he sat in his process of grieving his past life (as he knew it) and going through a rebirth into a new trajectory. He sat with that for hours and finally enjoyed a Costa Rican sunrise as a metaphor for the rise of his new self.

Aubrey and Aaron share very intimate moments of breakthroughs during their Ayahuasca ceremony but also in their everyday lives. They grasp the challenges men go through with upbringings that show them to repress emotions and how they have been able to deal with these shadows and transform them in a way that they now can live in reverence for the feminine aspects and qualities of life as well.

Aaron in South America with his tattoo artist

Aaron Rodgers Talks Ayahuasca On The Pat Macafee Show

Aubrey wasn’t the only one lucky enough to dive into Aaron’s Ayahuasca journey. On the Pat Macafee Show, Aaron went on a short tangent after Pat used the word ‘drug’ to frame Ayahuasca. He said, “Putting the tag drug on them is a manipulative word that creates a bias against those specific things, and it happens all over society. Think about the word fat and sugar. Fat brings an image of unhealthiness and maybe obesity, but sugar is sweet, kind, loving. We have these two words that couldn’t be more opposite. High-fat foods are usually pretty good for you. High sugar is terrible for you.”

Then the Packers’ quarterback added: “Drugs – you start labeling marijuana a drug, which is a plant. You label ayahuasca a drug, which is a plant. Then you think about medicine. ‘I’m going to take my daily aspirin’; that’s a drug. ‘I’m gonna take my cough medicine; that’s a drug’. Those are drugs. Ayahuasca is not a drug. It has properties in it that have hallucinogenic abilities, but it’s not a drug. We’re talking about plants here. This is how words are used to create a bias in our society. Those biases create fears and those fears prevent people from doing their own research or having their own idea and truth in a situation.”

"Ayahuasca isn't a drug it's a plant & I think that's a very important point to make" ~@AaronRodgers12 #PMSLive #ART pic.twitter.com/xJyCiiP3Kn

— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) September 20, 2022

The Greatest Gift Felt Mid-Game?

However, the Pat Macafee Show wasn’t the only place the Green Bay Packers quarterback spoke about his use of Ayahuasca. Aaron wanted to ensure the wrong message wasn’t being sent after the Bears game and the Ayahuasca-themed touchdown led by Allen Lazard. He went on to say, “You’re not standing up drinking, having this Jesus revival, slaying in the spirit. It’s not like that. You don’t have some immediate pass out into oblivion.” He did say that after taking Ayahuasca, “you have some incredible reactions,” and later joked that on the field, maybe “the medicine just started spinning up inside me” again after the celebration.

He also shared that should he feel called again, he’d sit with the medicine. The Packers’ four-time MVP quarterback later said, “it’s more of an intuitive feeling” that someone knows when it’s time to “sit with the medicine again.” “Once you sat with the medicine one time you kind of know what that feeling is that more lessons to be learned. … Some people sit 100 straight days and still feel called years and years down the road to keep on doing it. I had such a beautiful experience I’m pretty certain it won’t be my last.”

Best celebration of season. Thank you Twitter for pointing out it’s Ayahuasca pic.twitter.com/KPna2bMLoM

— Andrew Perloff (@andrewperloff) September 19, 2022

Takeaways

It is incredibly refreshing to listen to two successful leaders open their hearts, share their vulnerability, and show their appreciation for each other. One of the most interesting points that arose is a common theme at 1heart: how we approach our careers and lives after taking these sacred medicines. Many often fear that they will leave their work and the life they’ve built. What is beautiful about both Aaron and Aubrey is how the medicine supported them in taking their careers to the next level.

Aaron won two back-to-back MVPs in 2020 and 2021 directly following his experience. Aubrey saw in his ceremonies many years ago where he would take his business Onnit and has since seen that plan and success realized. When we’re aligned in mind, body, heart, and soul Ayahuasca reinforces that path we’re on. Whereas if we’re misaligned, not feeding our souls, deeply confused, or psychologically heavy about what we’re doing, this medicine will show us that, as Aubrey shared.

This podcast episode portrays how even the most successful men struggle with feelings of self-doubt and how his three plant medicine ceremonies helped remind Aaron that he can and should unconditionally love himself. What resulted from this was a person who was able to show up with vulnerability in life, professionally and personally, allowing others to do the same. And by doing so, we invite each other to be better team players, friends, and partners.

And as Aaron shared about his Ayahuasca journey later, he’s waiting to feel the call to sit with this life-changing sacred psychedelic medicine again. By standing up against biases around the word drugs, inviting people to learn on their own, rather than through manipulative media, sharing his Ayahuasca experiences, and listening to his intuition, he’s serving the medicine with power and grace.