By Carrie Brightwell
Your life looks good on paper. You’ve got the material things, the income, the relationships that function, and people see you as capable and wise. Yet inside you feel split. There’s that quiet sense of “this isn’t it”, and you’re yearning for something more. You’re under-expressed, quietly resentful, and carrying the fear that you might reach the end without ever becoming who you really are and what you’re truly capable of.
You chose this life. Maybe not consciously, but you chose it all the same, by following expectations, taking the path of least resistance, or letting others set the direction because you weren’t fully connected to your own true will. Not choosing is still a choice, and right now that choice is keeping you smaller than you’re meant to be.
Most people who feel this way already have awareness. You’ve done the coaching, the courses, the therapy, the retreats. You know there’s more, and yet you still settle. The pain of that gap is getting harder to ignore.
Your life is a direct result of the choices you’ve made, conscious or not. If it isn’t what you want, there’s only one real question: are you ready to choose differently?
So let’s talk about choice, and what it actually means.
What Does It Mean to Choose Your Own Life?
Peter teaches the 3 dimensions of choice.
- 1-dimensional choice identifies what you want. I want to be healthy.
- 2-dimensional choice identifies how. I’m going to eat well and rest.
- 3-dimensional choice is where the real power lives. It gives your choice depth, meaning, and a reason strong enough to keep you committed. I want to improve my mental and physical well-being so I can extend my lifespan and actually be present with my grandkids.
Without the third dimension, your choices are just intentions. Intentions without meaning don’t stick.
He also teaches that there is no wrong choice. The Goddess, in all her forms, including your Higher Self, doesn’t judge the choices you make.
So why talk about choosing differently? Because there’s a difference between right choice and willed choice.
Right choice responds to the human graces:
- Learn new skills
- Grow spiritually
- Have fun
- Expand your strengths
- Make new choices
Willed choice is the one aligned to your why, your 3rd-dimensional choice. It asks: why do I want this, and what choice actually moves me toward it?
Knowing yourself well enough to make a right or willed choice, rather than a reactive one, is what keeps you on your path. If something in your life needs to change, if you want a different experience, this is where it starts.
Understanding the dimensions of choice is one thing, using them is another. So why don’t we?
Why We Stay Stuck Even When We Know Better
It usually comes down to one of three things:
- You don’t believe they have a choice; life just happens to you
- You know they can choose differently, but you’re scared to
- You want to change, but you don’t know where to start
If you’re not making a conscious, 3rd-dimensional choice, your past is making it for you. Or you’re handing your power over to something external, your conditioning, your culture, your ancestral patterns. You end up living a life shaped by everything except your own true will. That’s where the disharmony lives.
Knowing which of those three applies to you is the starting point. But knowing isn’t enough on its own.
The Warrior Mindset: The Courage Real Change Requires
Making a choice takes courage.
It means lifting the veils, stripping back the identities, and facing who you actually are. Because once you see the truth, you can’t unknow it. You either act on it – or you settle, and betray yourself.
Once you’ve admitted what you want to yourself, you then have to admit it to others. Then to the systems, societies, and external forces, including ancestral and collective patterns, that have a stake in you staying exactly as you are.
Some of those forces won’t want you to change. And honestly? Neither will some parts of you.
This is where warrior energy comes in
The Warrior, in my definition, has nothing to do with aggression or force. It’s about truth. It’s the courage to face who you are, choose and claim what you want. The conviction to say no to anything that is trying to derail you. The resilience to keep going when everything feels impossible and the strength to face any challenge along the way. An unshakeable belief in your own path.
And equally, the courage to say yes. To receive what you’ve chosen and to let it change you.
Warrior energy is what carries you through. But first, you need to know what you’re choosing and why. That’s where my four pillars of choice and change come in.
The Four Pillars of Conscious Choice and Transformation
Peter tells us that choices made during moments of intense emotion, often years or decades ago, can still be running your life today. You made a conclusion in that moment, and part of you has been operating from it ever since. Most of those choices are limiting.
To override these, you need to make new choices at the same level of emotional intensity. The new choice will then supersede the old, if made with the same intensity.
Many of you know right now that you are capable of more. Deep down, you may even already know what you want to become or create. Staying where you are will soon (if not already) feel more painful than stepping into change. The question is, are you ready to choose it, and can you choose it at the right level?
So you don’t become the version of you that nearly did the thing, here are the four pillars that I believe are necessary to embody and receive your desired change:
- Clarity – cutting through the noise and conditioning to see what’s actually true for you, not what looks good or what you were told to want
- Choice – making right, willed choices aligned to your true will so you stop betraying yourself and start consciously creating your life
- Confidence – trusting your own inner authority instead of looking for external permission or validation
- Conviction – the discipline and follow-through to keep choosing differently when old patterns and life try to pull you back
The pillars give you the framework. But some of what’s stopping you runs deeper than mindset. Some of it is buried in places your conscious mind can’t easily reach.
Why Plant Medicine Unlocks the Choices You Can't Access Alone
Some choices were made in moments so painful that your mind sealed them off entirely. Peter calls this the Forbidden Zone, the part of the unconscious where suppressed trauma lives, out of sight but still quietly running the show.
To supersede a limiting choice with a better one, you have to revisit the memory where it was made. You have to feel it again so that you can discreate it. That’s not comfortable, but it’s the only way to be free of it.
This is where plant medicine comes in.
From my experience, it creates access to the parts of the unconscious you’ve locked away. It helps you reach what’s buried, move through the emotion that you suppressed, and release it. Once that weight is gone, you’re no longer choosing from a place of old identification. You’re actually free to choose.
It also shows you your potential and what is possible for you. But just because it is a potential, doesn’t mean you will experience it.
You still have to make a choice.
The medicine opens the door. But what you do once you’re through it is what determines everything. Again, here, you need your warrior if you want to choose yourself and a life that is genuinely yours.
How This Women's Plant Medicine Retreat Creates Lasting Change
Insight alone doesn’t create change. Neither does ceremony without integration, nor motivation without the emotional clearing to back it up. This retreat combines three elements deliberately, because each one does something the others can’t.
The three sacred plant ceremonies, led by hereditary Master Shaman Peter Aziz, go where talking can’t. They surface what’s hidden, clear what blocks you, and show you with brutal clarity what you’re ready to release and what you’re ready to claim.
But clearing isn’t enough on its own. As Peter teaches, we can’t just remove a choice; we have to replace it. And that replacement has to be rooted in the future, not the past.
Peter talks about Future Causality and that every experience is a double quantum wave between here and what’s coming, meaning the future is actively creating you as much as you are creating it. When we use the past as our cause, we project it forward and it repeats. The past is simply a backdrop; it gives us depth and context, but it is not part of the creation process. What drives real change is deciding what future you are building toward and choosing from that place.
This is why the Sacred Valley mountain treks come after the ceremonies. I will guide you through the mountains with intention, not just to walk, but to ground and integrate what the ceremonies have opened and begin feeling into the future that is now available to you. Nature strips the noise so that you can confidently choose. The landscape of Pachamama helps to anchor what’s shifting inside you.
The mindset workshops are where it all becomes actionable. You set powerful intentions, release remaining emotional blocks, clarify your vision, and build a real path forward. This is where Peter’s teaching on choice and future causality becomes personal, where you stop projecting the past forward and start consciously creating from what you actually want after having seen what’s possible.
The ceremonies clear your path. The mountains ground you. The workshops show you what to build.
Together, they don’t just create transformation; they make it stick.
I didn’t design this retreat from theory. I built it from my personal experiences.
I Was You
I spent years building a life that looked right and felt hollow. Multiple degrees, corporate career, good salary, nice car, ticking every box I’d been handed. I never once stopped to consider who I was. My life looked fine from the outside. Inside, I was miserable. I yearned for something different but couldn’t say what.
So I stopped. I left everything and everyone I’d ever known and rebuilt myself from the ground up.
Ten years later, I’m living in Thailand, can work and travel at the same time, fighting Muay Thai professionally at 45, studying shamanism under Peter Aziz and following my Dragon path. I now help women avoid the ache that I felt for so long. I help them choose themselves sooner, choose deliberately, and follow the path that was always theirs.
I’ve spent 20+ years coaching and facilitating transformation in others. I’ve sat with plant medicine, trained in yoga, moved through shamanic initiations, solo hiked mountains, jungles, and remote corners of the world, using nature as a stripping-back tool to go deeper, build strength, and expand what I thought was possible.
Everything I’ve been through, everything I’ve learned, lived and become, is what I bring to this retreat.
The Warrior's Choice: A Plant Medicine Retreat for Women in Peru
This is where you gain clarity, start to choose differently, and begin moving forward with confidence and conviction.
My experience, coupled with Peter’s shamanic mastery, will create a space that not only catalyses transformation, but helps it to ground, integrate and actualise in a safe, compassionate and assisted way.
You will get to see your potential and what choices you are not making. You will gain the ability to act on what you already know is yours.
Imagine waking each day knowing you are building a life aligned with your truth. Not the life others expect from you. But the life that is genuinely yours. You won’t just know what you want. You’ll be choosing it.
You’ve read this far because something in here is speaking to you.
You Already Know. Now Choose It.
Stop nearly doing the thing.
Everything is possible. You just have to choose it. Create your future vision from this choice and then let that future change you so that you can experience the life your Higher-Self has in mind for you.
Take a look at the full details on the retreat page. Feel into it. Then make your decision.
If this is your moment, book your spot.
Warriors Choice Retreat — 1 to 13 August 2026, Sacred Valley, Peru. Limited to 10 women.
Don’t end up the version of you who nearly did the thing.
Choose you.
Carrie x
