Several years ago I was hit with some pretty severe tinnitus, which resulted from an overly loud musical performance at a bar. I had worn my trusty musician’s earplugs, yet the music was so loud (and perhaps my ears already were sensitive from earlier exposure) that I ended up with a persistent ringing at a high frequency: it sounded like an extremely high-pitched, loud, endless scream inside my head. I was quite distressed, which including waking up with suicidal ideation one night (“life’s not worth living if I have to experience this”), but over the next few months I learned to accommodate; the sound also diminished very slightly.

Having had experience with ayahuasca and going on long retreats in Peru, I wondered whether this medicinal modality could help me out. I booked a three-month retreat / healing plant diet at the center where I had spent time before (Nihue Rao Spiritual Center). This itself was an adventure of a lifetime, over the course of 32 ceremonies. I dieted with the master plant ayahuma. With respect to my tinnitus:

(1) Immediately on moving into my hut (tambo) at the edge of the forest, the myriad insect sounds were so loud that they effectively masked my tinnitus with this comforting, natural “green noise”. I resisted the periodic impulse to plug my ears and check whether my tinnitus was even still present, and enjoyed the ambiguity. Venturing out of the forest into the center grounds I could again hear it, but felt something healing about sleeping within the masking natural soundscape.

(2) I received guidance from the plant spirits in dreams (this sounds pretty mystical, but that’s just how it is) on how to address the tinnitus, which effectively amounted to repairing the relationship between myself and the traumatized parts of my body (perhaps as seen through some self-referential imaginal capacity we all have) by apologizing, taking responsibility, asking forgiveness for not having been more careful, and so on. I perceived (via dream symbolism, and in ayahuasca visions) that this part of my body was angry at “me” and so I started making peace through acknowledgement: “you have every right to be angry, you can be angry for as long as you want, etc.” Over time, the anger of this “part” of me dissipated, and I was able to repair the relationship.

(3) One ceremony at a time, I sensed that other small changes were taking place. Often, during the peak of the ayahuasca effect, the tinnitus sound would be tremendously amplified. I took this to be a symptom of slow rewiring. Without checking too often (I didn’t want to be preoccupied at all with it), I sensed a slow diminishment in volume of the tinnitus.

End result: After three months in the rainforest, I returned home to the US. I remember explicitly checking in on my tinnitus, which had faded in volume by perhaps about half: I noticed that although I could hear the sound, it held no interest/emotional charge to my psyche. In other words, those continuous negative thoughts, the futile attempts to push the sound away, in fact any sense of distress: this was all gone. The sound was there, yet just uninteresting to my brain, and therefore didn’t bother me or catch my attention.

As I write this, over two years after that healing journey, although I can still hear my tinnitus (obviously, in a quiet room; even in a busy coffee shop, although barely), it’s now a fully integrated part of my sonic landscape, meaning that I just don’t pay attention to it. So my conclusion is that yes, ayahuasca (over time) can help heal tinnitus. Part of the ayahuasca experience is that before a ceremony, it is hard to imagine how one will feel afterwards: energy shifts so much. In the same way, it’s hard to imagine the feeling of pain while not feeling it. So there may be a feeling of distress that you have now because of your tinnitus, which is hard to imagine, in a present-feeling way, not being there. For me, relationship repair (between parts of myself), facilitated by ayahuasca, was the pathway which healed the intense distress trapped by association within the tinnitus signal, while time and holistic healing in a natural setting reduced the sound’s volume. I ultimately made further meaning of the experience through major gratitude for being “called back” to the rainforest and the magical/growth experience which unfolded there.