Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Star QB, Opens Up About How Ayahuasca Elevated His Game & Accelerated His Personal Transformation

An epic interview between Aubrey Marcus and one of the greatest NFL players of all time, Aaron Rodgers, recently dropped and it was powerful. 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 psychoactive 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 doing a serious injustice 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 by 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.

He 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.

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

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. Aubrey shares that if we are doing what we are most aligned with and the work our souls are meant to do, the medicine will only reinforce and empower that further. Of course, if we feel heavy and misaligned with the work that we know does not feed our soul, we will likely be shown that as well.

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.