Most professional athletes use the offseason to heal, train, work on their craft, and look back on the season to plan for next year.
But Aaron Rodgers? He's not like the average athlete. Instead, he spent the 2020 offseason in South America using Ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic used by tribes since ancient times.
The Green Bay Packers star credited his back-to-back MVP seasons to the enlightening journey he embarked himself in with that experience:
"I don't think it's a coincidence," Rodgers said on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast. "I really don't. I don't really believe in coincidences at this point. It's the universe bringing things to happen when they're supposed to happen."
Rodgers says that people shouldn't focus on the negative effects of Ayahuasca – nausea, vomiting, diarrhea – and open up their minds instead:
"There's signs and synchronicities all around us at all times if we're awake enough to see them and to take them in and to listen to our intuition when it's speaking to us or pounding us in the head saying, 'Hey dummy, this is what you're supposed to be doing,'" Rodgers added.
Rodgers claims that experience changed his life forever. It gave him a deeper understanding of his surroundings and the universe, and he got to experience 'pure love':
"For me, I didn't do that and think 'oh, I'm never playing football again,'" Rodgers said. "No, it gave me a deep and meaningful appreciation for life. My intention the first night going in was 'I want to feel what pure love feels like.' That was my intention. And I did. I really did. I had a magical experience with the sensation of feeling a hundred different hands on my body imparting a blessing of love and forgiveness for myself and gratitude for this life from what seemed to be my ancestors."
The future Hall of Famer believes Ayahuasca helped him get a different perspective on things, which eventually helped him have a historically great season:
"Set me on my course to be able to go back in to my job and have a different perspective on things. To be way more free at work, as a leader, as a teammate, as a friend, as a lover. I really feel like that experience paved the way for me to have the best season of my career (in 2020)," Rodgers concluded.
Well, whatever works.
