Where Did Aaron Rodgers Do Ayahuasca?

More people ask search engines about Aaron Rodgers and ayahuasca than about almost any other person connected to the medicine. The question clusters pile up: where did he do it, was it legal, did the NFL punish him. I get versions of it from guests too, usually half-joking, usually followed by a serious question about their own trip.

So here is the public record, straight, with sources. And then the more useful part: what a four-time MVP's story actually tells you if you are a regular person pricing out a retreat in Peru.

Where did Aaron Rodgers actually do ayahuasca?

Peru first, Costa Rica later. The Peru retreat happened in 2020, before the season that started his back-to-back MVP run, and he described it publicly for the first time on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast in August 2022, as Milwaukee's CBS 58 reported. Reporting around the podcast, including CelebStoner's detailed account, places the trip in early March 2020, just before the pandemic closed borders, and says he traveled with his then girlfriend, race-car driver Danica Patrick.

The later ceremonies happened in Costa Rica. Per the same CelebStoner reporting, after the 2022 season Rodgers attended a five-night, three-ceremony retreat at Soltara Healing Center in Playa Blanca on the Pacific coast, a center whose retreats were priced between roughly $3,125 and $6,000 at the time.

Notice the asymmetry. The Costa Rica center got named in the press. The Peru one, the retreat the whole story started with, never was. That gap is the honest core of this article.

What has he said about the Peru retreat?

A lot about the inside, almost nothing about the outside. On the podcast he said his intention going in was "to feel what pure love feels like," and that he did. He described meeting the medicine as a grandmother spirit, called the week "the most beautiful experience I could possibly imagine," and said he "came back and knew I was never going to be the same." The reporting describes three ceremonies over the retreat.

The Peru trip was not his first step into this world, either. The CelebStoner account places a psilocybin mushroom experience before it, with ayahuasca as the deeper second chapter, a progression that mirrors how a lot of travelers actually arrive at the vine: something smaller opened a door, and Peru was where they walked through it.

Then came the two MVP seasons, 2020 and 2021, and Rodgers himself drew the line between the medicine and the football, crediting the self-acceptance work for the best stretch of his career. Whatever you make of that causal claim, and plenty of commentators made plenty of it, the sporting timeline is simply true: retreat in March 2020, MVP awards for the two seasons that followed.

What he described, the intention set beforehand, several ceremonies across a week, the integration afterward, maps exactly onto how a structured retreat runs. If you want the mechanics of that structure without the celebrity wrapper, our guide to what happens at an ayahuasca retreat walks through it night by night.

Did he ever name the retreat center in Peru?

No. In every interview and every piece of reporting we could find, the Peru retreat is described but never located beyond the country itself. No center name, no region, not even Amazon versus Andes. Several retreat websites imply an association with him; none that we found provides evidence, and given how thoroughly his Costa Rica visit was reported, the silence around the Peru location reads as deliberate privacy.

So treat any "the retreat where Aaron Rodgers drank ayahuasca" marketing with suspicion. We track roughly 34 researched centers on this site and none of them has a documented claim to that visit. A center borrowing celebrity shine it cannot prove is failing the same honesty test we apply to every other claim, and our guide on how to spot a fake shaman explains why that test matters more here than in most industries.

If a center you are researching makes a celebrity claim you cannot verify, send it to us and we will check the record for you, free. That is the fastest use of the form we offer.

Was it legal, and did the NFL care?

Legal in Peru, and no. Ayahuasca's traditional use is protected in Peru as national cultural heritage under a 2008 resolution, which makes Peru one of the few countries where the ceremony operates in the clear; the full picture, including the unlicensed-retreat nuance, is in our guide to whether ayahuasca is legal in Peru.

On the league side, the NFL confirmed that ayahuasca did not violate either its substance-abuse or performance-enhancing policies, since the substance was not on the banned lists, as FOX Sports reported when the story broke. That mattered more than it sounds. When the podcast aired, half the sports press assumed a suspension was coming, and the league's shrug quietly set a precedent: an athlete drinking ayahuasca in a country where it is legal had broken no rule at all. The distinction that mattered for Rodgers matters for you too, in mirror image: where you drink determines your legal exposure. Peru protects the tradition; plenty of other countries do not, and bringing the brew home is prohibited everywhere that controls DMT. Drink it where it is legal, leave it there.

What happened after Peru?

He kept going, and he got louder about it. The Costa Rica retreat at Soltara came after the 2022 season. Then in June 2023, days before Jets training camp, Rodgers appeared as a headline speaker at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, on stage with Aubrey Marcus again, and called his experiences "radically life-changing," per CBS Colorado's coverage.

Two details from that appearance stuck with me. He said he had been able "to sit in ceremony with teammates" in recent years, meaning the solo spiritual experiment had become something he shared with the people he worked with. And he claimed "hundreds" of players had reached out to ask him about the medicine. Whatever you think of Rodgers, that number describes a real shift: the question moved from whether ayahuasca ends a career to how to do it carefully.

Step back and the trajectory tells its own story. Peru came first, privately, when almost nobody in his world talked about the medicine. Costa Rica came later, publicly, with teammates, at a named center with resort pricing. The origin trip was the anonymous, inexpensive-by-comparison one in the country where the tradition actually lives. That order says something about where you go when the experience itself is the point.

What does his story mean if you are not an NFL quarterback?

Strip out the fame and his path is a template of doing it roughly right, with one big exception you should not copy. The right parts: he went to countries where the ceremony is legal, he went with a clear intention, he did multiple ceremonies across a structured retreat rather than a one-night stunt, and he returned more than once instead of treating it as a bucket-list item. That pattern matches what experienced drinkers on r/Ayahuasca consistently recommend, and it is why the number of ceremonies question matters more than first-timers expect.

The exception: you cannot vet a center the way a celebrity's circle can, so you need the public record instead. Rodgers arrived with private referrals and, by the Costa Rica trip, a personal relationship with the retreat world. You arrive with Google, a subreddit, and whatever a center's website chooses to tell you. That gap is closable, it just takes method: named healers, checkable lineage, a real medical questionnaire, independent reviews spanning years. Screening is the piece that separates a serious center from a pour-for-cash operation, and it is the first thing we check in our comparison of every researched center.

And the money is better news than the Rodgers story suggests. His reported Costa Rica retreat ran $3,125 to $6,000 for five nights. In Peru, the researched range runs from about $750 for a short budget program to $4,440 at the famous end, with solid small centers in between; the full breakdown is in our cost guide. For a first-timer who wants small groups and real screening without celebrity pricing, a family-run center like the one in our AyaSelva review runs a 7-day, 4-ceremony program at $1,200 all-inclusive, a quarter of what the reported celebrity retreats cost.

You do not need an MVP's money to do this the careful way. You need a legal country, a screened center, enough days, and a plan for coming home. Peru has the first three covered; if you want help with the choosing, ask us your question and a real person will answer it.