It was a few hours into his first ayahuasca treatment that Kerry Rhodes vomited a foetus into a bucket and found truth. The former New York Jets and Arizona Cardinals star began the treatment, a ceremony that goes overnight and typically lasts seven to eight hours, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. “I didn’t really knowing what I was doing,” he says on the phone from his home in LA. Within minutes the hallucinations had begun. “Once it kicks in there are prisms and shapes and stuff like that, I could see visually stunning stuff. I literally had to tell myself, ‘You’re OK, you’re good, this is what you signed up for.’” The first “purge” – vomit – into a bucket brought a particularly bizarre vision: Rhodes, at his playing peak one of the NFL’s pre-eminent safeties, was brought face to face with a foetus. At the conclusion of the eight-hour ceremony, Rhodes’s shaman assured him the vision had been a “good thing” and that he needed to connect with the foetus during the next treatment the following night.
The next night, Rhodes began vomiting again – “you’re pretty coherent, you go in and out of it” – and the emetic foetus reappeared. Describing what happened next, he says: “I go in and I connect with it. Cut to: I wake up and I’m a baby in the crib, and I’m looking out, and I’m crying, and in that moment nobody picked me up. And I had a moment, half in the hallucination, half in the treatment room, where I was like, ‘Oh shit, I don’t need anyone to pick me up,’ and I put my thumb in my mouth, and I stopped crying. I realized that I didn’t need anyone. The thumb grew and it killed that moment – it killed that need.”
This was, Rhodes says, an especially important realization to come to. “Neediness” was the word that punctuated his nine-year career in the NFL. Pro Football Focus named him the fourth-best safety in the league at the conclusion of the 2012 season, but Rhodes refused a new deal from the Cardinals (“It was a pay cut so I said no”) and trialed, unsuccessfully, with the Cincinnati Bengals and the New York Giants. He never played professional football again, and the words of a former coach followed him into retirement. “He wouldn’t work, and he was a Hollywood type, flashy and needing attention,” former Jets coach Rex Ryan wrote of his former charge in the 2011 memoir Play Like You Mean It.
Rhodes does not necessarily agree that neediness was the proximate cause of the slightly abrupt end to his NFL career (“It was a difficult market for safeties at that time, and once you get to a certain age your value dips pretty suddenly,” he offers by way of an alternative explanation), but he does concede that it’s held him back in other parts of his life. Ayahuasca allowed him to see that. “My idea of love was [other people] picking me up, showing up, telling me I’m great,” he says. “All those things showed themselves in one ceremony. I realized I was dependent on others when I didn’t need to be.”
Rhodes’s experiences with ayahuasca are the subject of The Medicine, a new documentary which documents his journey to Costa Rica for a two-day treatment program under the guidance of Colombian shaman Taita Juanito Guillermo Chindoy Chindoy. Disappointingly the documentary doesn’t show Rhodes purging his imaginary baby into the bucket – the vision cuts out just as his treatment begins, in accordance with the shaman’s instructions – but it does give viewers a glimpse into the preparatory rituals: in one memorable scene the shaman blows tobacco into Rhodes’s nostrils and we see the 200lbs former defensive back with tears streaming down his face, utterly vulnerable. (The main ceremony, Rhodes says, was “much more difficult.”) Ayahuasca, often mislabeled as a drug, is an entheogenic plant tea made with the stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and other ingredients. The ayahuasca plant itself is not illegal in the US but its psychoactive component, DMT, is. Rhodes has been back to Costa Rica, where ayahuasca treatments are legal, once since his introduction to the brew, and maintains regular contact with Taita Juanito.
Rhodes has kept busy in the years since his playing days came to an end: he plays the role of police office Rick Connor on the O Network’s ongoing soap opera If Loving You Is Wrong, he produced and acted in the 2017 comedy horror film Tragedy Girls, and he’s working on the script for his next film. But as for many former athletes, filling the void left after a young adulthood of full commitment to professional sporting competition has not always been easy. He’s battled depression, forgetfulness and mood swings, and is naturally concerned about the potential trauma done to his brain from a decade of pro football. “I’ve always been a control freak in every aspect of my life,” he says. “The success I had in sport was all about control.” Once he retired, “I knew that I couldn’t control things about how my body would react to years on the field. I’m aware of the symptoms of CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy] so I monitor for those – I do a lot of puzzles and mind games to keep my mind sharp, I do baseline tests with the doctor to monitor my cognitive health.”
Ayahuasca, Rhodes says, offered another way to reinvigorate his mind and insure against the onset of CTE. The real power of ayahuasca, some believe is in its effect on hippocampal neurogenesis: recent research led by Dr Jordi Riba, a Barcelona-based pharmacologist, suggests that certain compounds present in the psychedelic brew actually stimulate the birth of new neurons, potentially offering a treatment that can help replace damaged or dead brain cells. This aspect of ayahuasca remains relatively unexplored, however, and approved pharmaceutical applications are not yet available.
Even after a handful of exposures, Rhodes says he has seen a marked improvement in his health: he now suffers far fewer mood swings than previously and feels generally “way more alert, way more open, way more present” (it should also be noted that, like all hallucinogens, ayahuasca has associated risks and should be treated with caution). But the larger benefit has been in the realm of emotion and self-understanding to which, Rhodes says, ayahuasca has given him access: “You have all these answers that are revealed to you. During the treatment, you’re peeled away and you have no choice but to confront the truth. And once it’s over, you get this knowledge, this access to this space that you’d forgotten about.” For an athlete who was, in his own words, “taught to hide my emotions, to bury my feelings about everything deep inside,” the cognitive opening engineered by ayahuasca has been “incredibly powerful.”
Rhodes concedes that “things were always a little weird for me with the NFL: it’s such a macho league, it’s such a toxic masculine environment.” But he hopes his example, quite apart from providing an advertisement for the neurological benefits of ayahuasca, will also help players – both current and former – unlock all the non-footballing parts of their potential and creativity that years at the line of scrimmage may have suppressed. “Once your career is done, it’s done – and for many of us it can be a real struggle to come to terms with that,” he says. “But there are other things we can do, we have other talents we can contribute to the world. We are not robots.”