How Kyle Kingsbury used ayahuasca to become a happier person and a worse fighter

From outside the cage, it looked like a pretty awful night for Kyle Kingsbury.

The 32-year-old light heavyweight had returned to action after almost two full years away in order to face Patrick Cummins at UFC on FOX 12 in his hometown of San Jose, and the result was one of those fights where the nicest thing you can say about Kingsbury (11-6 MMA, 4-5 UFC) is that he managed to endure the beating for three full rounds.

He got taken down over and over again. He got mauled by punches and elbows. Several times he seemed right on the brink of being stopped, only to somehow limp onward in the service of an increasingly hopeless cause. It was the fourth consecutive loss for Kingsbury, the last of his career, according to him, and it wasn’t even close.

It was also a fight he took in part because of experiences he’d had while under the influence of the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, and it was everything he wanted it to be, whether anyone outside the cage realized it or not.

“This was for me,” Kingsbury told MMAjunkie. “This fight was for me. I wanted to see if I could go in there with a clear head and perform. In terms of what I was shooting for from a mental standpoint and an emotional standpoint, I definitely got what I was looking for, and on the biggest stage.”

There’s really no good way to explain to people that you want to fight because of things that happened to you while you were tripping off a brew made of some Amazonian vine. You start throwing around terms like “apex teacher plant” and “dream state,” and it’s bound to get you some funny looks.

It’s also not exactly the kind of thing your employers want you telling people in advance of a fight on live network TV, so Kingsbury was reminded several times to keep it to himself, he said.

But now, after this unanimous decision loss to Cummins, he’s officially retired. Now he can tell people exactly how he really feels, which is that ayahuasca was maybe the best thing that ever happened to him.

“It’s extremely introspective,” Kingsbury said. “People call it a psychedelic, but it’s not like you just sit there and see trails or s–t like that. You have profound visions that are very meaningful and very personal. I’ve had the opportunity to do it five times, and each one of those peels another layer of the onion, and I’ve learned more about myself and life in general. Doing that, I’ve come to terms with a lot of things about my life. I’m a happier person all around.”

But here’s the question: Does a happier person necessarily make for a better fighter? Particularly if the kind of happiness we’re talking about is the kind that comes from contentment and satisfaction, does that mean it’s also the kind that is unhelpful in a career that involves hurting people for money?

Think about the things you hear fighters say. Think about the language they use, how it’s always about being hungry and savage, how they’re always embracing the grind and imposing their wills. Do these sound like people who are content or satisfied? Do they sound like people whose happiness is derived from a knowledge of self and a willingness to accept life as one harmonious puzzle?

This is a question Kingsbury has considered, and his answer – as well as the string of recent losses and the physical damage suffered in the process – had a lot to do with his decision to call it quits after the loss to Cummins.

“There were times in this camp where, because of the things I’ve learned, if I had a bad day, it didn’t get me down,” Kingsbury said. “I’d just say, ‘Hey, I had a bad day of sparring, but I put in good rounds and I’m getting better.’ On that level, I was correct. I wasn’t lying to myself. But on a different level, there wasn’t that ‘Holy s–t’ factor where I’d feel like I’ve got to change up and get going now.

“There was an itch inside me when I first started fighting,” he added. “I really wanted to hurt people and I didn’t give a s–t about anything else. I just wanted to punch someone in the face as hard as I could. By the end of my career, that was gone completely. I wanted to win and compete, and more than anything to push myself to be my best, for emotional, physical, and mental wellness. But to go in there and be successful, I think you do have to have that chip on your shoulder. You have to have that angst, that small spark. You don’t have to fight angry, but you do have to have some anger inside you in order to really throw punches with aggression and really want to hurt someone else. I don’t have that anymore.”

For Kingsbury the person, that’s a good thing, even if it means the end of Kingsbury the pro fighter. For a lot of his career, he said, and even for a good portion of his life, he was angry. That drove him to fight, but it didn’t necessarily make him happy. The first time he tried ayahuasca, he said, anger was the first emotion to boil to the surface.

“I thought, why the hell do people do this if it makes you feel this way?” Kingsbury said. “I kept getting more and more angry, getting annoyed at the people I was with, and I remember just being filled with anger.”

Soon after that, he started vomiting. La purga, they call it. The purge.

To ayahuasca enthusiasts, it’s a physical release of unwanted emotional baggage. And for Kingsbury, the anger he’d carried around for years was the first thing to go. As he puked into a bucket, he said, he could feel the anger leaving him. Perhaps even more surprising, it didn’t come back once the ayahuasca trip was over.

“When you come out of it, you’re changed,” he said. “There’s no hangover. There’s no sense that you’ve got to go back and do more. But you do feel completely content with your life and everything around you. You have a new outlook, and it affects the way you view yourself, your friendships, your relationship with your family, everything. That’s permanent.”

But if Kingsbury found so much peace outside the cage, why then did he return just to get beat up for 15 more minutes? To hear him tell it, he wanted to see for himself, via one of the most stressful and emotionally challenging processes he knew of, whether he’d really changed.

“I wanted to know, can I be calm in that type of stress?” Kingsbury said. “Can I be calm in front of that many people and fight with a level head? I really wasn’t able to do that in any of my other fights. I always fought inside my own head so much. At the weigh-ins, I used to have almost like a panic attack. I had to remind myself to breathe. I’d get so nervous just looking at my opponent. This time, I didn’t even have to try to remain calm. It was almost like an out-of-body experience. I was at peace the entire time. Even in the fight, I was at peace, so much so that I probably needed a little kick in the ass or a sense of urgency.”

Instead what he got was a beating so one-sided it resulted in scores of 30-27, 30-25, and 30-24 from the judges at cageside. He lost about as badly as you can lose and still last the distance, and he’s not about to pretend that he’s especially happy with that result.

At the same time, a lot of Kingsbury’s focus these past two years has been on “shedding the ego,” as he put it. Losing a fight in front of thousands of people in your hometown is about as humbling as it gets, and how you respond to that might tell you a lot about the current state of your own self-image.

“I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t care about winning and losing,” Kingsbury said. “You always want to perform and have people say, ‘Man, you looked great out there.’ I know I didn’t go out that way. I know that wasn’t the kind of performance where fans would think I looked awesome and left it all out there. I think a lot of people were disappointed in the way I looked. I wouldn’t argue with that. I was disappointed, from a technical standpoint. But like I said, that fight was for me. It wasn’t for anyone else.”

Kingsbury isn’t done with martial arts, he insists. He intends to do jiu-jitsu for the rest of his life, even if he could probably do without getting hit in the head quite so regularly from now on. He’s been working toward becoming a firefighter, and he hopes that will be his new career now that this one’s finished.

Mostly, he said, he wants to be able to be happy and content, to be satisfied with his life and his place in the world. That’s tough to do in professional fighting, where everyone is either clawing their way up the ranks or fending off those trying to take what they’ve got. It seems very possible that the cage is no place for happy people who have worked through their anger issues.

And that’s fine, Kingsbury said. He doesn’t regret his time in the sport, and he even credits it with helping him work through those issues, both in victory and defeat.

“I loved every second of it, but I’m happy to move on,” he said. “I don’t want to be that guy who’s 40 years old and that’s all he’s got. There’s more to life than fighting, at least for me.”