The Ayahuasca Love Retreat

Sex After Seventy - Episode Five

Well, darlings, I’m back. And before you start composing strongly-worded letters about my absence, checking obituaries, or God help you, calling my son-in-law to ask if I’ve been “placed somewhere,” let me just say: I have been on a journey.

Not a cruise this time. Not a singles mixer. Not even one of those sad wine-and-paint nights where you end up crying into a canvas and calling it “abstract.”

No. I went to South America. To the Amazon. To drink ancient plant medicine with a shaman named Don Alejandro in a thatched-roof hut with no plumbing, no Wi-Fi, and a composting toilet that I am still not emotionally prepared to discuss.

That’s right. Mavis Brennan did ayahuasca.

For six weeks.

Let me explain.

How It Started

It began, as most of my worst decisions do, with a magazine in a waiting room. I was at the podiatrist, bunion check, nothing glamorous, flipping through one of those wellness publications where everyone looks dewy and enlightened and probably hasn’t eaten bread since 2014.

There was an article about a retreat center in Peru called Luz del Corazón — “Light of the Heart.” It promised “profound healing, spiritual awakening, and reconnection with your deepest self.” It also had photos of a jungle lodge that looked like a very expensive tree house. I was intrigued.

Then I read the testimonials. “I found a love I didn’t know existed.” “My heart cracked wide open.” “I experienced a union with the universe that made every relationship I’d ever had feel like a warm-up.”

Well. Hell. Who wouldn’t want a union that made their previous relationships feel like warm-ups? Harold had certainly felt like a warm-up. Mostly because he never finished anything he started, including our marriage.

I called the number. A very calm woman named Solana answered and asked what I was seeking. I told her: romance, a functioning libido, and to stop waking up at 3 a.m. thinking about death.

She said, “The medicine will show you what you need.”

I said, “Could it also show me where I put my reading glasses? Because at my age, that would qualify as a religious experience.”

She said the medicine works on its own timeline.

So does my memory, apparently.

The Journey Down

Getting to the retreat required three flights, a van ride through roads that can only be described as “suggestions,” and a boat trip up a river the color of chocolate milk. By the time I arrived, I’d sweated through two outfits, lost a sandal to the mud, and been personally welcomed by approximately forty thousand mosquitoes.

The lodge was beautiful, I’ll give them that. Wooden platforms with thatched roofs, hammocks everywhere, flowers I’d never seen before growing out of every surface like the jungle was showing off. My “cabin” was a platform with a mattress, a mosquito net, and a view of the river. No door. No walls, really. Just me and nature, which apparently included a family of frogs who’d already claimed the shower.

I was told to settle in before the orientation. I sat on my mattress, listened to the jungle scream at itself. Do you know how loud nature is? And thought: Mavis, what in the name of sweet Christ have you done?

The Fellow Seekers

There were eighteen of us. I was the oldest by a solid two decades, which, at this point in my life, barely registers. The group included:

— A tech executive from San Francisco named “Skye” (born Steven) who’d sold his startup for “enough to never have to pretend to enjoy meetings again” and was now “seeking his authentic self.” His authentic self wore a lot of linen.

— A couple from Berlin, Katya and Dieter, who were there to “save their marriage through shared ego dissolution.” Katya and Dieter did not appear to like each other. I gave the marriage another six months, tops.

— A retired military man named Frank from Tulsa who said he was “tired of being angry.” Frank did not look tired of being angry. Frank looked like he was one drum circle away from invading something.

— And a gorgeous Argentinian man named Marcelo, mid-sixties, silver-templed, with the posture of a tango dancer and a voice like aged whiskey poured over gravel. He was there because his late wife had come to this same retreat years ago and he wanted to “feel close to her again.”

Now, when a man tells you he’s recently widowed and seeking spiritual connection, the proper thing to do is offer your condolences and your friendship. I immediately decided I would offer both. Grief is heavy to carry alone, and I have always been a generous woman. I would help him feel close to his late wife by being very, very nearby.

The Preparation (a.k.a. The Diet from Hell)

Before you can drink the medicine, you have to do what they call la dieta. This is a cleansing period where you eliminate caffeine, sugar, salt, red meat, dairy, alcohol, and—I am not making this up—sexual activity.

In other words: everything worth living for.

For two weeks before the ceremonies, we ate boiled plantains, steamed fish, and rice so plain it made hospital food look like a Michelin tasting menu. No seasoning. Not even pepper. I asked if I could have hot sauce and the facilitator, a very earnest young woman named Paloma, looked at me like I’d suggested snorting cocaine off the altar.

“The body must be pure,” she said. “The medicine needs a clean vessel.”

“Honey,” I said, “this vessel has been through two marriages, three decades of cocktail waitressing, and a brief but passionate affair with frozen margaritas in the ’90s. It hasn’t been clean since Carter was president.”

She suggested I “trust the process.” People kept saying that. “Trust the process.” As if the process hadn’t just taken away my morning coffee and replaced it with lukewarm jungle water that tasted like a swamp’s armpit.

But I did it. I ate the bland food. I drank the swamp water. I did not strangle anyone, though Frank came close when he started doing burpees at 5 a.m. outside my cabin. I don’t know what they teach men in the military, but it isn’t how to read a clock.

Ceremony One: The Purge

They don’t tell you enough about the vomiting.

The brochure says “purging.” Purging sounds almost elegant, doesn’t it? Like a cleanse. Like something Gwyneth Paltrow would do on a Saturday.

Let me be clear: this was not elegant. This was every bad shrimp, every regrettable tequila shot, every flu I’ve ever had, condensed into one explosive, full-body reckoning. I was on all fours in a ceremonial hut, lit only by candles, while a shaman sang ancient songs and I produced sounds from both ends that could only be described as industrial.

The facilitators call this “releasing stored trauma.” I would have called it food poisoning, except I hadn’t eaten anything worth poisoning me in two weeks.

Don Alejandro, the head shaman, a small man with a gentle face and approximately nine hundred years of wisdom behind his eyes, came to me during the worst of it. He placed his hand on my back and began singing directly to me. A personal song, they said. An icaro. Specific to my energy.

It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. Like being held by music. Like someone was singing to the parts of me I’d given up on.

Then I vomited on his shoes.

He didn’t flinch. He just kept singing. That man has seen some things.

Ceremony Two: The Visitors

The second ceremony is where it got weird.

After the medicine took hold—about forty minutes of lying there thinking “maybe this batch is defective” followed by the sudden realization that the ceiling was breathing — I started seeing things.

First: colors. Colors that don’t exist. Colors that hadn’t been invented yet. Imagine if a sunset and a peacock had a baby and that baby was also somehow a symphony. That’s the closest I can get.

Then: Harold showed up.

Not real Harold. Vision Harold. He was sitting in our old kitchen, the one on Maple Street, and he was younger. The version of him before he got mean, before the drinking got worse, before the dental hygienist. He was just sitting there, looking at me with those eyes he used to have back when they still had kindness in them.

And I cried. Not pretty crying. Not graceful single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek crying. I’m talking heaving, snot-filled, from-the-bottom-of-my-soul crying. The kind of crying that would get you escorted out of a restaurant.

I cried for the marriage I thought I’d have. I cried for the woman who stayed too long. I cried for my mother, who never talked about feelings because her generation thought emotions were a personal failing. I cried for my body, which has carried me through seventy-plus years and deserves better than being called “a vessel past its prime” by a man who left me for a woman, younger, who flosses teeth for a living.

Then Gerald appeared. My second husband. Gerald was doing what Gerald always did best: absolutely nothing. He was sitting in a La-Z-Boy in a cosmic void, watching television that didn’t exist, and he waved at me like I’d just come back from the grocery store.

I laughed so hard I choked.

Then a giant snake appeared, which the facilitators later told me was “the spirit of the medicine.” She, and yes, she was definitely a she, wrapped herself around me, and instead of being terrified, I felt like I was being hugged by the universe’s most aggressive grandmother. She looked me dead in the eyes, and I swear on everything holy, she said: “You are not too old. You are not too much. You have always been enough.”

Then she told me to drink more water and stop eating cheese before bed. Even cosmic serpents have practical advice, apparently.

Around the Lodge

Other things were happening in the meantime.

Frank broke during ceremony four. I won’t tell you what came out of him because some things are sacred, but by morning he was sitting cross-legged in the dining hut, telling anyone who would listen that he was going to adopt a dog and “finally learn to be soft.” Skye gave him a knowing nod. Skye gave a lot of knowing nods.

Katya and Dieter announced their divorce on integration day six and threw a small party to celebrate it. There was cake. Well, banana bread. And Katya read a poem in German that Dieter translated as “a tribute to all the years we tried.” They left the retreat holding hands for the first time anyone could remember. The medicine doesn’t always do what you ordered. Sometimes it does something better.

The Frog Incident

On integration day five, I was journaling in my hammock when a scream tore through the lodge. Not a small scream. A full, operatic, this-is-the-end scream. I grabbed my flashlight, certain someone was being eaten by something with too many teeth.

I found Marcelo standing on his mattress in the middle of his cabin, pressed against the mosquito netting, pointing at the floor with the gravity of a man identifying a body.

“Mavis,” he said, mustering all the dignity a man can have while standing on a bed in his pajamas. “There is a frog.”

There was. A small one. Brown. Roughly the size of a walnut. It blinked at us with the indifference of a creature who’d witnessed this reaction before.

“It is staring at me,” Marcelo said.

I escorted the frog outside on a postcard from the gift shop. Marcelo thanked me with the gratitude of a man pulled from a burning building. He had survived losing his wife, raising two children, and three Argentine economic collapses, but apparently amphibians were where he drew the line.

“I will tell no one,” I promised.

“I will name my next child after you,” he said.

I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, especially since at our age the children would have to be metaphorical, and metaphorical Mavises rarely turned out well.

He laughed. A real laugh. Not the polite chuckle men give when they’re humoring you. The kind that makes the birds go quiet because they want to listen too.

From that moment on, we were something. I didn’t know what yet. But it was something.

The Marcelo Situation

Over the next three weeks, we became… close. We walked. We talked. He told me about his wife, Elena, how she’d danced flamenco in their living room every Sunday, how she’d died three years ago and he still set two places at the table. I told him about Harold and Gerald and the string of well-intentioned disasters in between.

One night, after a particularly intense ceremony where I’d spent four hours communing with what appeared to be a celestial jaguar who showed me every person I’d ever been unkind to (it was a long list, and the jaguar was very judgmental), Marcelo found me in my hammock, wrapped in a blanket, shivering despite the heat.

“Mavis,” he said softly. “You are shaking.”

“A cosmic jaguar just showed me every mistake I’ve ever made. It was like a highlight reel of poor judgment. Of course I’m shaking.”

He climbed into the hammock beside me. And before you get excited. Or concerned about the structural integrity of a jungle hammock holding two seniors. He just held me. He smelled like wood smoke and that terrible herbal soap they gave us and something underneath that was just… him. Warm. Present. Human.

We lay there in that hammock, listening to the jungle lose its mind all around us. The closest I’d been to another person in years, and nothing improper was happening. I had not known that was possible. Honestly, I thought all that was over for me — the holding part, I mean. Apparently a man can just hold you. And that can be a whole thing on its own.

He whispered, “Sometimes the best love is just being still together.”

I wanted to say something clever. Something Mavis. But for once in my life, I just shut up and let it be enough.

The Final Ceremony

The last ceremony was the big one. Six weeks of bland food, spiritual excavation, and emotional exorcism, all building to this.

I won’t tell you everything I saw. Some of it is too private. Some of it is too strange. And some of it I genuinely can’t describe because the English language doesn’t have words for “becoming temporarily one with a river and understanding what fish feel.”

But I will tell you this: at the peak of the ceremony, when the medicine was doing its absolute most, I saw myself. Not current Mavis. Not young Mavis. Just… Mavis. The whole of me. Every age at once. The little girl who used to dance in the kitchen. The teenager who kissed boys behind the bleachers. The young wife who thought love was supposed to hurt. The older woman who learned it wasn’t.

And she — I — me — was luminous. Not pretty. Not young. Just alive. Every wrinkle earned. Every laugh line proof I’d chosen joy when joy wasn’t the easy option.

Don Alejandro came to me one last time. He sang his icaro, and this time I didn’t vomit. I just listened. And when he finished, he said, through the translator, because my Spanish is limited to ordering drinks and telling cab drivers to slow down; “You came looking for a lover. The medicine gave you yourself.”

I said, “That’s lovely. But myself can’t kill the spiders in the bathtub.”

He smiled. Shamans have excellent senses of humor. You’d have to, if your job involved watching people vomit and cry for a living.

Coming Home

Marcelo and I said goodbye at the airport in Lima. He was going back to Buenos Aires. I was going back to my kitchen table and my dog and my electric blanket and every comfort I’d ever taken for granted.

He held my hands and said, “Mavis. You are the most extraordinary lemon I have ever—”

“If you call me a citrus fruit, I swear to God—”

He kissed me. Right there, in the middle of Jorge Chávez International Airport, between a currency exchange and a duty-free shop selling alpaca sweaters. It was soft and warm and tasted like airplane coffee and goodbye.

“Come to Buenos Aires sometime,” he said.

“Only if they have indoor plumbing. And no frogs.”

He laughed. I laughed. Then we walked in different directions, which is what people do.

Velcrow nearly knocked me flat when I got home. He’d been staying with my neighbor Doris, who reported that he’d eaten one throw pillow, two TV remotes, and “something that looked expensive from your nightstand drawer.”

Some things never change.

So that’s where I’ve been. Not dead. Not institutionalized. Just squatting over a bucket in the Amazon, crying about my first marriage while a shaman sang to my soul and a sixty-five-year-old Argentine held me in a hammock.

Did I find love? I found something. I’m still figuring out what to call it.

Did I find myself? According to the giant snake, yes.

Did I lose nine pounds from the purging alone? Also yes. The Ayahuasca Diet: coming soon to a wellness blog near you.

Pro Tip: Never trust a wellness magazine in a podiatrist’s waiting room. They will send you to the jungle, take away your coffee, and have you vomiting on a holy man before you’ve even unpacked your moisturizer. And just when you think you’ve hit bottom, a giant snake will appear to judge your eating habits. The snake, by the way, was right. About the cheese.

Next time: I’m integrating. That’s what they call it when you come back from the jungle and try to explain to your book club why you’re suddenly weeping during The Thursday Murder Club and telling everyone their aura looks “congested.” Also: Marcelo texted. Just a photo of two coffee cups. I haven’t responded yet because I’m seventy-plus years old and I still don’t know what that means.

Everything, darling. It means absolutely everything.

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Jungle Bride Banana Bread

The One I Hallucinated Into Existence

During one of my visions, I swear I tasted the most perfect banana bread ever created. When I came back to reality, I spent three days trying to recreate it. This is as close as I’ve gotten without psilocybin or a spirit animal’s assistance.

Ingredients

For the bread (the journey)

• 3 very ripe bananas (the more beaten-up, the better — like us)

• ⅓ cup melted butter

• ¾ cup sugar

• 1 egg, beaten

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• Pinch of salt

• 1½ cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon (the spice of spiritual awakening, or so I’m told)

• ½ cup walnuts, chopped (optional, like most of my life decisions)

For the glaze (the integration)

• 1 cup powdered sugar

• 2 tablespoons dark rum

• 1 tablespoon lime juice

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x5 loaf pan. Set intentions.

• Mash bananas in a bowl. Really get in there. Pretend they’re your unresolved feelings.

• Mix in melted butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla. Stir with purpose, like a woman who’s seen a cosmic serpent.

• Add baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and flour. Fold gently. Don’t overwork it — this isn’t therapy.

• Add walnuts if you’re feeling brave. I always feel brave now. The snake told me to.

• Pour into pan. Bake 55–60 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean, or close enough.

• Cool for 10 minutes. Whisk glaze ingredients together and drizzle over the top like you’re anointing something sacred.

• Serve warm with black coffee and the quiet satisfaction of a woman who survived six weeks without Wi-Fi.

Mavis’s Notes:

• This bread is best eaten in a hammock, but a couch will do.

• The rum is not optional. I’ve been sober enough for one lifetime.

• Pairs well with nostalgia, a good cry, and texts from Argentinian men.

• If a serpent deity appears while baking, reduce oven temperature and call your therapist.

Serves 8, or 1 woman still processing her visions while the dog destroys another chew toy.

Remember: the secret ingredient is always surrender. That, and very ripe bananas.

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➡ Catch up on more of Mavis and her adventures.

©2026 Gael MacLean