You’re Not in Charge: What Ayahuasca Teaches High Achievers
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 491 • Yasha Shah
There is a particular kind of emptiness that only successful people understand. You built the business. You hit the revenue targets. You solved the problems everyone said could not be solved. And yet, somewhere underneath all of that momentum, there is a quiet, persistent signal that something is not quite right. Not broken, exactly. Just… missing.
What if the very thing that made you successful is the thing standing between you and what you are actually searching for?
That is the question at the heart of this Richer Soul conversation with Yasha Shah, founder and lead facilitator of Mahadevi Ayahuasca Retreat in Colombia. Yasha has spent years guiding entrepreneurs, tech professionals, and high performers through plant medicine ceremonies, and what he has observed is both simple and deeply uncomfortable for driven people to hear: you cannot control your way to wholeness. At some point, you have to learn to receive.
Why Entrepreneurs Are Showing Up in the Amazon
Yasha noticed a shift. When he first started working with ayahuasca in 2017, the people showing up for ceremony were a mixed group. Today, a significant and growing portion are entrepreneurs, tech founders, and former employees of companies like Google and Meta. These are people who have optimized everything in their external lives and are now looking inward for something that spreadsheets and strategy cannot deliver.
“They’re result driven people,” Yasha explained. “They don’t want just to have the same old. I think a lot of them also have tried those paths. They’ve seen that just simply talking about a therapy or this or that or medications is not going to help me. And they’re looking for alternatives.”
This is not a trend driven by recklessness. It is driven by a genuine search for personal development and life fulfillment that conventional paths have not provided. Podcasts, shifting cultural attitudes, and a growing body of research on psychedelic therapy have all contributed. But underneath the cultural momentum is something more personal: people who are winning by every external measure and still feeling disconnected from themselves.
The Hardest Lesson: You Are Not in Charge
For someone who has spent a lifetime building, leading, and controlling outcomes, the ayahuasca ceremony presents a direct challenge to identity. Yasha describes it plainly: “They live up here most of the time and they’re always trying to plan and scheme and they’re trying to control an outcome. And they come with that tendency for many, many, many years to an ayahuasca ceremony. And in that process, you’re not in charge. You’re supposed to be led. You’re supposed to be shown. You have to receive.”
That word, receive, is the one that tends to land hardest. High achievers are trained to drive, to push, to make things happen. The idea of sitting in an experience and letting it come to you rather than going out and getting it runs against every instinct they have developed. Yasha sees people fight this in ceremony. They resist. They try to manage the experience. And the breakthrough, when it comes, often arrives at the exact moment they stop trying.
This is not just a lesson about plant medicine. It is a lesson about life. How many of us have been so busy steering that we have forgotten what it feels like to be carried? The wealth mindset most people carry is one of accumulation and control. What Yasha describes is a different kind of richness, one that comes from releasing the grip.
Healing Is Not a Destination
One of the most important reframes in this conversation is Yasha’s perspective on what healing actually looks like. The entrepreneurial mind wants a clear outcome: I go in broken, I come out fixed, I move on to the next thing. Ayahuasca does not work that way. Nothing real does.
“The most fulfilling part of that experience is not that we get to the healed part,” Yasha said, “but how much more freedom and joy we get to cultivate, how much wisdom we get to cultivate as we go through that. So rather than waiting for one final moment, we’re going to have a lot of moments of celebration throughout that process.”
This reframe matters far beyond the context of plant medicine. It applies to therapy, to personal growth, to building a purpose driven life. The high achiever’s instinct is to check the box and move on. But the richest growth happens in the middle of the process, not at some imagined finish line. There are layers. You peel one back, another appears. And each layer brings its own clarity, its own freedom, its own small celebration.
At Mahadevi, Yasha and his team developed five archetypes of integration to support people after ceremony. Explorers need openness and room to wander toward their answers. Initiates, new to healing and spirituality, need grounding and connection. Rationalists need things to make logical sense before they can absorb them. Each person’s post-ceremony work looks different, and that is the point. There is no single template for becoming whole.
The Trap of Looking Outward
One of the subtler but most important ideas Yasha shared is the trap of projection during ceremony. “Sometimes people in this retreat and with other people, but in a ceremony, they think, oh, this other person needs to learn about this. Or I think it’s this person’s things.” The facilitator’s job, he explained, is to help the person turn that projection inward. Why do I feel that way? What is this showing me about myself?
This is not unique to ayahuasca. It is one of the most common ways human beings avoid their own work. It is easier to see what your partner needs to change, what your business partner is doing wrong, what your employees are missing, than it is to sit with what you yourself have been avoiding. The leadership lesson here is quiet but powerful: the most important work you will ever do is the work you do on yourself, and it starts the moment you stop pointing outward.
The Disconnection Underneath It All
When Rocky asked Yasha what he sees happening in Western society that creates so much of this pain, Yasha’s answer went deeper than expected. He described a gradual, centuries-long disconnection from the body and from the earth, driven by survival instincts that pushed human beings to live almost entirely in their minds. “That feeling over centuries and centuries and centuries pushed human beings to be more attached to their thoughts and to their mind, rather than to the body and to the earth. It created this disconnection.”
Technology accelerated it. Productivity culture reinforced it. And now, people are searching for a way back. Yasha described it as people looking to return to their “original factory setting.” Not to become less intelligent or less driven, but to reconnect with the parts of themselves they abandoned in the race to survive and succeed. Spiritual growth, in this framing, is not about adding something new. It is about recovering something that was always there.
Rocky’s Perspective
What struck me most in this conversation was how clearly Yasha articulated something I see in so many of the people I talk to. They are not broken. They are not failing. They are disconnected. And the tools that built their success, the planning, the control, the relentless drive, are the very things keeping them from the depth they are craving.
I do not think everyone needs to fly to the Amazon. But I do think everyone needs to ask themselves the question this episode raises: what would happen if I stopped being in charge for a moment? Not forever. Just long enough to hear what has been trying to reach me underneath all the noise.
One Question to Sit With
If you have spent your whole life being the one in charge, what might happen if you let yourself be led?
Bringing It Full Circle
The path to a richer life is not always about adding more. Sometimes it is about releasing what you have been gripping so tightly that your hands forgot they could open. Yasha Shah’s work with entrepreneurs in the Amazon is one doorway, but the deeper invitation is universal: stop controlling long enough to receive what is already trying to reach you.
About Yasha Sha
He’s not your typical plant medicine guy. He doesn’t do new age BS, and he sure as hell doesn’t do spiritual bypassing. He had crippling anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies. He was a stock trader who made and lost millions, and his life was a mess. He went to the Amazon in 2017 desperate for answers after therapy, medication, and everything else failed. Ayahuasca helped, but it wasn’t some magic cure like people want to believe. He got sick again, so he spent a year in Nepal and India searching, and what he found was fake gurus, charlatans, and desperate people projecting their needs onto anyone exotic enough. In 2023, he went back to the jungle, and that’s when everything changed. He got initiated by the Shipibo in Peru and Kamsa in Colombia, and learned that real transformation requires discernment, integration, and being grounded in reality, not fantasy. He founded Mahadevi Ayahuasca Retreat because he’s against the idea of everyone becoming a shaman. He works with indigenous healers who’ve spent years mastering this medicine. Here’s the thing: he’s bilingual in a sense. He can understand the spiritual realm and language without losing his sanity, and he can bring it into the real world. That’s why entrepreneurs and go-getter types like working with him the most. Good business isn’t less spiritual than ceremony, it shows you’re integrated and wise. With his partner Ania, they created the Ayahuasca Framework where anyone can learn the truth about ayahuasca and know if this is the right choice for them. Your audience will hear the real story about plant medicine, the traps he’s seen, and how to approach this work without the bullshit.
Links
Website: https://mahadeviayahuasca.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasha-shah-28b1bb264/
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
Richer Soul Life Beyond Money. You got rich, now what? Let’s talk about your journey to purposeful, intentional, amazing life. Where are you going to go and how are you going to get there? Let’s figure that out together. At the core is the financial well being to be able to do what you want, when you want, how you want. It’s about personal freedom!
Thanks for listening!
Show Sponsor: http://profitcomesfirst.com/
Schedule your free no obligation call: https://bookme.name/rockyl/lite/intro appointment 15 minutes
If you like the show please leave a review on iTunes: http://bit.do/richersoul
https://www.facebook.com/richersoul
Some music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast
Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
0 Comments