This article is adapted from the book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024) by anthropologist Alex K. Gearin.
When I began researching ayahuasca in Australia fourteen years ago for my PhD at the University of Queensland, mainstream society had little appetite for the bitter brew. Ayahuasca—an Indigenous Amazonian psychoactive tea—was associated with illicit drugs like cocaine, MDMA, and LSD, burdened with charges of deviance, irony, and even moral panic.
As an anthropologist, this totally fascinated me, but it also surprised me. Among the hundreds of individuals I interviewed, surveyed, or chatted with in Australia, most drank the plant brew for healing and personal transformation, not to party or escape reality.
Ayahuasca was often referred to as “the medicine.” Attendees would follow healthy diets and spiritual preparations in the days before a retreat and some would refer to each other as “medicine brothers and sisters”. Even the most spiritual and neo-shamanic enthusiasts had some stories of personal healing with ayahuasca medicine. The brew was not a “drug” but a “plant medicine” and “plant spirit.”
The spiritual life people attributed to ayahuasca sets the brew at moral odds with public perceptions of alcohol and illicit drug use. Looking at Indigenous views that compared ayahuasca to alcohol in the Peruvian Amazon, the anthropologist Peter Gow (2012) commented how alcohol was perceived to produce a hangover in the morning after drinking it whereas ayahuasca resulted in feelings of elation, a desire to work, and good fortune in the days following.
Similarly, members of the Native American Church said that drinking peyote—a psychedelic cactus—causes the hangover to come first or during the ceremony and then positivity and health benefits come after. For the Australians I studied, ayahuasca medicine was not an intoxicating escape from the shadow self but provided illuminating encounters with it, the goal often being to purge and heal the wounds of a troubled world.
Telling stories was an integral part of ayahuasca drinking, during my research in Australia, which was from 2011 to 2015. The morning after a ceremony usually included a group “integration circle,” which gave attendees space and time to share and decompress together. During these circles, participants articulated narratives of visionary insights and cathartic purging. They shared stories of spiritual rejuvenation, gaining moral fortitude, and more.
Yet, these healing retreats were occurring in the shadows of a society that held deeply negative views of ayahuasca. Medical professionals described the brew as a “recreational drug” that can cause brain damage.
In August 2012, a five-minute story began on the country’s most popular free-to-air television news program, Channel 7 News. “Sydney medical experts are warning of possible brain damage from hallucinogenic plants apparently used by South American medicine men,” the program began. “Ayahuasca,” it continued, “is being used in secretive ceremonies across Australia.”
The New South Wales attorney-general Greg Smith warned, “We are concerned with stamping them out as much as possible, restricting their use, and further growth.”
Despite emerging scientific evidence at the time demonstrating the safety and genuine benefits of ayahuasca, the emergency medicine physician Dr. Gordian Fulde of St. Vincent Hospital claimed that with “hallucinogens you’ve surrendered control of your brain and may also be leading to permanent brain damage.”
The experiences of drinking ayahuasca are somewhat revealed during the narratives participants shared at the “integration circles” at retreats. These narratives covered a wide range of hopes, fears, and desires. People’s life stories became entangled with the spirit of ayahuasca, or with the experiences the brew inspired within them.
They described visionary encounters with plant spirits, angels, deceased loved ones, aliens, monsters, other worlds, and much more. But whenever the person interpreted these otherworldly experiences psychologically, it was typically in relation to their interpersonal life, moral dilemmas, and traumas they linked to themselves and their pasts.
Among those in Australia, the quest to integrate sometimes involved confronting ethical crises and developing new moral convictions. For Judith, a white thirty-five-year-old social worker, the healing she received from ayahuasca inspired her to divorce her husband. She described having postnatal depression for years while living under his violent and abusive rule. Her battle with depression included suicidal thoughts, but she felt determined to live to care for her child.
“Facilitators and attendees held space for individuals like Judith to heal, reassess their lives, and attune their bodies and senses to a sacred moral fortitude.”
During an ayahuasca ceremony in hills outside of a major Australian city, she purged intensely for thirty minutes while experiencing a dizzying array of haunting imagery. This was followed by a newfound peace, which formed an empowered view that emerged some weeks after her retreat:
“Prior to taking aya, I had no idea who I was, what my morals and values in life were, what I wanted to do or be, and I was thirty-four-years old and married with two toddlers. After taking aya I left my husband, went back to school, moved out, endured being dragged through the legal system by my ex and have never looked back. Why? Because I have that knowing inside that aya gives.”
She understood the unraveling of her escape from her husband among a wider healing and awakening process facilitated by ayahuasca.
“The voices in my head were so loud and constant, twenty-four-seven, for months. I was so scattered and hopeless then. About four hours after [drinking] aya the voices stopped, and all I can say is that I felt like I was liberated, but I couldn’t work out what I was liberated from.
It was about three weeks later that I realized I was liberated from all the negative beliefs I had about myself. Liberated from my parents and the false beliefs and fears they instilled in me, and liberated from my ex-husband.
I was no longer responsible for anyone but myself and my children and whilst I used to know this intellectually, I didn’t know it with certainty, with every cell in my body. I have always looked to others for answers. I no longer always do that as I now have access to a knowing that I didn’t have before, as no one had taught me.
I also have more compassion for people who are angry and fearful and dominating as I can now see how they are just in pain and don’t love or accept themselves.”
Judith found a source of moral strength in the spirit of ayahuasca and the natural world. As it did for others in Australia, ceremony provided her with insight and healing from the transcendental brew. Facilitators and attendees held space for individuals like Judith to heal, reassess their lives, and attune their bodies and senses to a sacred moral fortitude.
“Ayahuasca has been used across Indigenous Amazonia for many different purposes, including sometimes to foster and instill virtues in drinkers.”
Considering the cultural plasticity of psychedelics, the anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz observed how the substances can shapeshift to different moral projects and value systems. Psychedelics have attracted environmentalists, liberals, libertarians, anarchists, nationalists, right-wing groups and others. In this sense, the brew does not appear to discriminate. The ethicist Brian Earp suggested that psychedelics may play an enhancement role in moral learning, which provides an angle for thinking beyond, or in addition to, healing and spirituality.
Ayahuasca has been used across Indigenous Amazonia for many different purposes, including sometimes to foster and instill virtues in drinkers. Anthropologist Barbiber Freedman noted that “Throughout western Amazonia … [ayahuasca usage] entails preoccupation with ‘keeping right’, being constantly ‘put right’ with the help of one’s guides.” Those who master the plants may conflate therapeutic and normative goals, guiding ayahuasca drinkers through song and performance.
In the Australian context, however, ayahuasca knowledge and experience were often redefined in more individualistic ways. Unlike the varied social types of ayahuasca usage across Indigenous Amazonia, Australian ayahuasca drinkers tended to navigate their journeys independently, focusing on personal healing and self-directed insights.
The stories of moral courage and crisis I encountered among drinkers in Australia usually had a healing component— and, healing was probably the widest genre of ayahuasca experience narratives I witnessed and gathered there.
As described during the integration circles, people were seeking healing from many issues, including gender-based violence, meaning crises, trauma from war, racial injustices, psychiatric medication side-effects, and more. Yet, across the wide range of motivations and reasons to drink ayahuasca, people’s visionary experiences sometimes shared resonant themes.
Judith’s first ayahuasca experience, which she described as “weird but the most important experience in my life,” entailed a kind of spiritual union that would be familiar to others in Australia. “I watched myself and Mother Aya make love (not sexual) through our chests, both our souls weaving upwards like the plant itself . . . whilst I was watching this happen, I was actually feeling it.” In the days and weeks afterwards, this feeling of unification sometimes hovered in her mind and acted as an emotional resource to “integrate” when faced with challenges. “When I am feeling sad,” she explained, “I always think of that experience and try to get that feeling back.”
Handling the insights that ayahuasca can bestow is a challenge encountered very differently for different people, and also potentially for the same person at different times. Kate, a regular Australian drinker, explained to me, “The teachings are countless and endless. They happen all the time, including when you least expect it. You might be walking down the street thinking about something else and a [visionary] journey from six months ago drops into your head.” Another person shared: “I can’t contain my [ayahuasca] journeys as they are like a book unfolding in front of me.”
Ceremony facilitators often cautioned if someone is not doing integration, they will most likely not receive lasting healing from the brew. Some warned that Mother Ayahuasca can recognize when the drinker is not making an effort to integrate the insights, and she will respond by only providing superficial experiences to the drinker. Darpan, the country’s most prolific ceremony facilitator, explained to me:
“Unless you are integrating it into your daily life it is as worthless as a dream. But if you take what you have learned from the medicine and start to apply it daily into your life, whatever it is, it could be a simple thing like learn how to manage your own anger, and stay on the program with that.
The mother [ayahuasca] notices, she knows, because you are dealing with a divine intelligence, and she will give you more and more beautiful energy to work with. But if you’re not [integrating] all you will get is some fractals and nice colors and nice feelings. And she will say “pffft, come back when you are serious” . . . it’s about anchoring visions. I just see the [ayahuasca drinking] sessions as a microcosm for life. It’s school. You go there to get the insights then the real work starts after the session when you are doing daily life. People forget that, they think, “Oh we are going into session to do the work and now I am just going back to my ordinary job.” No, it’s the other way around. That’s the school, this is the real job, to integrate it into life.”
Ayahuasca drinkers tended to view the several days after a ceremony as a particularly good time to be integrating. It may be more challenging precisely because the temporal gap between the visionary and ordinary lifeworlds is smaller, the embodied mind more open, the emotions polished, the realms porous.
Yet, integration was largely a private goal for many of those I spoke with. This privacy was attributed to different reasons. Some were hesitant to discuss their ayahuasca experiences with outsiders, fearing ridicule, legal repercussions, and stigmatization. The prevailing discourses on “hallucinogens” in Australia at the time fostered a smoggy disenchantment that alienated ayahuasca practices, situating them outside the bounds of the country’s moral imagination.
In this hidden world, the ayahuasca groups operated not simply as victims of the social system but they also enjoyed a counter-cultural independence from the system that capitalism and mainstream medicine promise and threaten to bring to the table. At the same time, criminalizing the brew has tarnished how many people encounter ayahuasca and, more importantly, has locked-up healers, therapists, and shamans alike in prisons across the globe, sometimes for many years, just for serving their psychedelic medicines to willing recipients.
Society’s failure to understand and integrate such psychoactive substances properly is complex and difficult to understand or change in an instant.
Without proper context and safeguards, ayahuasca drinking may encourage dangerous or even traumatizing experiences. Yet, its risks have often been exaggerated in many ways— not least the examples given here about “brain damage”—while remaining not very well understood in some important ways. This includes legitimate concerns over vulnerable patient groups consuming psychedelics, like those with a family history of psychosis or bipolar.
This article explored how the moral and therapeutic aspects of ayahuasca are sometimes deeply intertwined. In the Australian context, the ceremonies provided a space where individuals like Judith could access healing and inner strength.
By empowering people to confront their life circumstances with visionary insight and courage, ceremony offered them more than healing—it challenged reality and presented alternative pathways to well-being.
Recognizing ayahuasca’s capacity to nurture moral strength could lead to more mature discussions of its place in society.
This article is adapted from the book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024) by anthropologist Alex K. Gearin. Buy in Australia at The Book Merchant Jenkins or for US, Europe, and elsewhere on the Amazon website.
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