Aaron Rodgers says experience with psychedelics made him better player, lover

"I had a magical experience with the sensation of feeling a hundred different hands on my body..."

It was March 2020 when Aaron Rodgers says his life changed while on a trip to Peru, spending two psychedelic nights amongst ancient ruins for an Ayahuasca ceremony. 

"It was a magical first night of just surrendering to any of the lessons that needed to come through, through the grandmother's spirit of the vine," Rodgers said this week on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast. 

Whose vine? What? Ayahuasca is an ancient, powerful, hallucinogenic brew that is nicknamed "the grandmother of the vine," and Rodgers didn't audible when he was given the cup, going forward full steam ahead ... and the results were ... well, they were something. 

"It was a very deep and meaningful couple nights ceremony. I came back and knew that I was never going to be the same," Rodgers said. "It gave me a deep and meaningful appreciation for life."

His intention going into the ceremony was to "feel what pure love feels like."

"I did. I really did. I had a magical experience with the sensation of feeling a hundred different hands on my body importing a blessing of love and forgiveness for myself and gratitude for this life from what seemed to be my ancestors. And I came back and the pandemic hit, so I went from this incredible bliss in Peru to a pandemic back in the States," he said. 

"I really feel 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 way 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 for me to have the best season of my career."

Rodgers, who said he also loves dragons and is convinced he once saw a UFO, noted along with the host of the show, Aubrey Marcus, that Ayahuasco isn't for everyone and it can have some frightening effects. 

Marcus told a story about the first time he tried Ayahuasco, recalling that he tripped out and experienced "every possible way that I could die."

"Bugs crawling into my eyes, laying eggs and exploding out my eyeballs. Eating my eyes and exploding out my eyeballs and brain," he said. "And then there was eels, they did this thing, they had like a mouth with teeth and they burrowed into my sides, into my ribs and into my belly and started eating my organs from the inside out."

And then he recalled feeling like he was sliding down a palm tree while naked "and the spikes were just ripping up my genitals." Then something in the universe told him he had cancer. 

That's when a woman puked on his feet and repeated this line for 30 minutes: "I can't tell if I actually s*** my pants or imagined I s*** my pants."

Anyway, that's that.