Ayahuasca Told Me
Did the medicine show you the universal truth, or did it show you yourself, dressed so well you mistook it for truth?
The bird at the top of this page is not decoration. By the end, you will know its secret.
In the dark, something arrives.
It does not feel like a thought. It feels like a fact about the universe. You see it, you understand it, and it carries the weight of revelation. For that moment you are more certain of it than of anything in your waking life.
The candle gets lit, the night ends, the morning comes. The certainty stays. And the question stays with it.
Almost no one teaches you to ask this one. Did Ayahuasca show you the truth, or did she show you your own mind, and make it so convincing you could not tell the two apart?
Ayahuasca has many traps, and you lay them yourself
Years ago, going through the ICEERS integration training, I hit a module called Ayahuasca Told Me.
I sat with it for a while. It said the thing I had watched go missing in retreat after retreat, the thing everyone steps around. The traps in the Ayahuasca world are real, and you build most of them yourself.
In 2023 I met an American, a therapist, who told me what his teacher had taught him. He talked about his own healing, and how carefully it had to be done, and the karmic mess that comes when it is done wrong. Then he said something that stuck.
The Ayahuasca world is dreamy, and it does not run in straight lines. No one should travel it without protection and an experienced guide. And the one who pours the medicine must first pass every test the spirit sets, before the spirit grants them the right to pour it.
A vision is not an instruction
Off the waterfront in Iquitos, a wooden pyramid once floated on the river.
An Englishman named Julian Haynes built it after a vision told him he had a mission. It was going to be a center for world peace. And a hotel. And a magnet that would pull seekers from everywhere. For a while it was the most famous thing in the city. Today it is scattered across the Rio Itaya as driftwood, some salvaged into shacks, some dried and burned for cooking fires. Chris Kilham wrote the whole story years ago, and it is worth reading.
A good friend of mine booked a flight to Egypt right out of a ceremony. He was certain an activation was waiting for him there. Did he find it? It did not look that way to me. But I could be wrong.
Or maybe the medicine was not handing him a destiny in the desert. Maybe it was showing him how much he loves the old world, how many documentaries he has watched, how a symbol can hold an emotional truth without being a plane ticket.
It is not always Egypt. Some people come out of a few ceremonies certain they are meant to become shamans.
Sometimes it is real. The calling is true, they do the work, they earn it. More power to them. Often it is not, and the honest question is what it actually is.
Usually the pull is just hunger. To learn more, to stay curious, to keep going. Someone with maturity takes it that way. Someone without it becomes the next shaman, the next messiah, off to save humanity, and in the worst case builds a cult out of the people who, in their own ceremonies, saw him as their savior.
Ask whether you are a clean vessel
Channeling needs a clean vessel. So does anything that claims to carry a message through you from somewhere outside yourself.
Most of us are not clean. The ones who are still practice discernment, because no one is without shadow. Leave perfect to God.
So ask yourself something plain. In ordinary life, off the medicine, do you ever misread a person or a moment? Have you ever held something as true about yourself, or about someone else, and watched it turn out to be wrong?
If the answer is yes, then the vision does not get a pass.
Some doubt is healthy. So is a circle of people honest enough to tell you when you are wrong. You do not make meaning alone.
We have all heard about the man who climbed the mountain and came back holding a tablet from God. Good for him. I would rather sit with the thing, take it to people I trust, and let it be tested before I call it real.
The plants test you
Most people miss this part. Some of them pour the medicine for a living. The plants test you.
They have a shadow side too, and it knows exactly where yours is. It hooks into you and plays. It wants to see what you reach for, the medicine or the poison. It wants to know who really sat down in front of it, and what you came to find.
Most of what the medicine shows me is me
We live in an age with more gurus than disciples.
Everywhere someone has decided they need no guide, because they are divine, because they are the source. I do not argue with the divine. I have felt the inherence, in myself and in others. But I would like to poke at it, and find out how well I actually know it.
I am not talking about cynicism. Cynicism is its own sickness, and it fixes nothing. What I am describing is the old, quiet lesson almost everyone who walks this path ends up learning. I do not know everything. And I could be wrong.
Feelings matter. Sometimes they matter more than the image they come wrapped in, because they point to a truth underneath it.
A man feels he must lead the pack. He throws his head back and howls. This does not mean he is destined to become some half-wild vigilante. More likely he has buried his own strength, or his own voice, and the medicine found it.
Ayahuasca has shown me the faults of other people more times than I can count. I do not walk up to them the next morning and tell them what they need to change. I sit with it. I ask what it means for me. Ninety percent of the time, it was about me, shown to me through someone else.
None of this makes the medicine small.
Ayahuasca can open memory the mind has sealed away. She reaches trauma that years of talk never touched, and gives back things you did not know you had lost. She teaches the deep material, the recipes and the songs, the places most people never see.
All of it is real. The traps are just as real. Telling them apart is the whole work.
The maze has one key
Navigating the Ayahuasca journey is not easy. It never was.
The maze has one key, and it is the plainest word there is. Humility.
As I write this, a bird flew into my apartment.
That bird is the one at the top of this page.
Is it a message from the spirit? I do not know.
You tell me.
Feel deeply.
Show up fully.
About the Author
Yasha Shah is the founder of MahaDevi Ayahuasca, a retreat center in Colombia. He has been working with ayahuasca since 2017, with experience across hundreds of ceremonies as both a participant and retreat organizer. Trained within the Shipibo and Camsá traditions, his work bridges indigenous wisdom, harm-reduction principles, and practical integration for modern seekers. Yasha writes about ayahuasca, plant medicine, and psychedelics, covering integration, preparation, and harm reduction to help readers make informed and responsible decisions.