How we teach a medicine that was never ours to give
A grounded, ethical approach to learning about Yagé, built on the cultures that carry it.
Explore the Ayahuasca Hub and Plant Medicine Hub for deeper reading.
A man in his forties flies into Bogotá having read everything he could find about ayahuasca. Three books, dozens of articles, a library's worth of podcasts, the full archive of the right subreddit. He can explain DMT, MAOI interactions, the pineal gland, the role of harmine and harmaline. He has opinions about paste versus fresh, crudo versus cooked, Peru versus Colombia.
On his second night in ceremony, he meets something his reading did not prepare him for.
What the story is about is not whether he did enough homework. It is what homework can and cannot do. Information about a thing is not knowledge of the thing. No amount of reading closes that gap.
This page is not another introduction to what ayahuasca is. Those pages exist. The Ayahuasca Hub and the Plant Medicine Hub handle that work in depth. This page is about how ayahuasca should be taught, and why most education on it fails the people it is meant to prepare.
Informed participation is not enough
Safety is necessary. It is not the foundation.
Most of what gets called ayahuasca education stops at three subjects: preparation, safety, and integration. We have written extensively about all three. You can read our guides on the ayahuasca dieta, on contraindications and drug interactions, and on integration practice.
Those pages matter. They describe the container. They do not describe the thing the container is meant to hold.
The foundation is older than pharmacology. It lives in the cultures the medicine came from. Any education that treats those cultures as background, flavour, or optional context has already lost the plot.
The medicine has a lineage. You are a guest inside it.
Yagé is not generic psychedelia with regional variations.
Yagé in Colombia is carried by four indigenous peoples: Camsá, Inga, Cofán, and Siona. Each lineage has its own Icaros, its own ceremonial grammar, its own cosmology. The medicine you drink at a ceremony is inseparable from the Taita who prepared it, the prayers sung over it, the land it was gathered from, and the centuries that taught people how to handle it.
Anthropologist Evgenia Fotiou has written that Western seekers tend to approach ayahuasca as a psychological tool, while indigenous use is built around modifying the body through precise ritual, preparation, and relationship with the plants. The separation of physical, emotional, and spiritual is a Western artifact. In the Amazon, it is one practice (Fotiou, 2020).
This matters for you. It changes what you are actually doing when you sit.
Science is a partner. It is not the authority.
Western evidence-making is useful. It is not the frame.
Scientific research into ayahuasca is real and growing. Studies on neural plasticity, on depression, trauma, and addiction are genuinely advancing. We follow them. We cite them. Our blog on ayahuasca safety leans on peer-reviewed pharmacology for a reason.
But scientific truth is one way of knowing. Ancestral cosmology is another. Philosopher Christine Hauskeller and her co-authors have described how the so-called psychedelic renaissance risks repeating old colonial dynamics: extracting indigenous knowledge without context, commodifying altered states, and applying a clinical gaze that standardises experience while delegitimising the traditions that created it (Hauskeller et al., 2023).
Replacing cosmology with chemistry is not progress. It is a narrower way of looking at something much bigger than our ability to measure it.
Ayahuasca is a relationship, not a substance
You do not take it. You meet it.
Animism is the word scholars use. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon use simpler language. The vine is alive. The river is alive. The forest is alive. The medicine has a spirit, and that spirit is a being with its own preferences, its own responses, and its own terms.
When you sit with Yagé, you are not consuming a compound. You are entering a relationship with a master plant teacher.
Writing from a different tradition but speaking to the same principle, Mazatec historian Dr. Osiris García Cerqueda describes sacred plants as messengers of the divine world, not chemical substances. Their ingestion is governed by strict spiritual norms, and ceremonies are treated as a last resort in a broader healing system, not a first reach (García Cerqueda, 2020).
Most false expectations come from treating ayahuasca as a wishing machine. A device that grants healing on demand. The people who arrive with that posture are the people who leave confused. The medicine does not fail them. The frame does.
What happens when culture is skipped: a cautionary story
Maria Sabina's name is everywhere in the psychedelic world. Most of the people who use it have no idea what happened to her.
In 1957, Robert Gordon Wasson published an article in Life magazine describing his participation in a Mazatec mushroom ceremony in Huautla de Jiménez, led by Maria Sabina. The article made her world-famous. It also made her world unlivable.
Her own community accused her of selling the sacred to foreigners. Her home was burned. She was nearly jailed. She died in poverty in 1985. Before her death, she said the mushrooms had lost their power because of the way outsiders used them.
The 1957 discovery was not an accident. Dr. García Cerqueda documents how it was the outcome of a long colonial process: Mazatec lands integrated into global trade, foreign scientists and missionaries building relationships of extraction, and the eventual exposure of a sacred ritual that had been protected for centuries (García Cerqueda, 2020).
This is what happens when a medicine is taken without its culture. Not for the tourists. For the people who carry it.
The Amazon is watching the same story unfold again, in slower motion. Yagé is moving. The question is how.
Ancestral medicine and psychedelic therapy are not the same thing
We are an ancestral medicine retreat. Not a clinical one.
The distinction matters. Psychedelic therapy, meaning clinical psilocybin, MDMA-assisted work, and ayahuasca in controlled protocols, has its place. People are being helped. Trials are producing real results. We do not dismiss any of it.
Ancestral medicine is older, slower, and built on a different architecture. Ceremonies led by indigenous healers on indigenous land. Fresh medicine prepared through traditional methods passed down through generations. A relational cosmology that holds the experience. It asks more of the participant. It returns something different.
At MahaDevi, every ceremony is led by Taita Miguel Mavisoy, a Camsá elder, on ancestral land in Putumayo. This is not an aesthetic choice. It is the thing.
The foundation no one talks about is what makes the rest work
Cultural understanding is not virtue signalling. It is set and setting.
Here is what most people miss. Approaching ayahuasca with foundational respect for the cultures that carry it is not about guilt, politeness, or fear of offending. It is about the experience itself.
Set and setting is one of the oldest principles in psychedelic science. When your internal set includes humility; when your setting includes ancestral land and ancestral medicine; when you arrive with a working understanding that you are a guest inside a living tradition, not a customer buying an experience; the ceremony changes quality. It becomes more coherent. More connected. Harder to dismiss. Harder to bypass.
The reverse is also true. People who arrive without this foundation often have experiences that feel fragmentary, abstract, or difficult to integrate afterward. The medicine did what it does. The container was too small for it.
There is a line in the decolonial literature that captures this well. The role of colonisation is to separate. The role of the medicine is to remember and reconnect. Bringing a colonised frame to an un-colonised medicine creates friction the medicine then has to work around.
The four pillars of a real ayahuasca education
Preparation, safety, integration, and the one most education leaves out.
Most ayahuasca education covers three pillars. We cover four.
Preparation
The dieta, the logistical and emotional preparation, the inner work before the plant is served.
Safety
Contraindications, medical screening, drug interactions, honest disclosure.
Integration
What to do with what you received, in the days, weeks, and months after ceremony.
Cultural foundation
Reading indigenous scholars like Dr. Osiris García Cerqueda, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Yuria Celidwen. Sitting with the history of what happened to Maria Sabina. Understanding that the Camsá carry Yagé differently than the Shipibo carry ayahuasca, and why. Learning the distinction between crudo and cooked. Recognising the difference between a Taita and a facilitator.
Informed participation that stops at pharmacology is still uninformed.
Where to start
Two public doors. One private door waiting for those who register.
The Ayahuasca Framework
Nine short lessons. Eighty minutes. Free. It covers the medicine itself, the Camsá lineage, the neuroscience, preparation, the dieta, the real risks, integration, and a readiness self-check. Built for someone actively researching before booking a retreat.
Start the free courseThe Cold Brew Aya newsletter
First Tuesday of every month. One ceremony story. One development in Amazonian ancestral wisdom. One new article. Early access to retreat dates and special offers. When you sign up, the first thing you receive is our complete article library, organised by topic.
Sign up for Cold Brew AyaThe private preparation & integration portal
For those who choose to come sit with us in ceremony, our education goes well beyond anything public. Registered retreat participants receive access to a private portal with guided video modules, protocols, one-on-one preparation and integration support, and ongoing communication with the MahaDevi team for ninety days after ceremony.
Preparation & integrationMahaDevi as ally
The medicine belongs to the people who carry it. Not to us. Not by birth.
We are not indigenous. The medicine does not belong to us in that sense. That is the first thing to be clear about, before anything else we say.
Yet there is a path. For non-indigenous people, the right to carry this work is never assumed, bought, or inherited. It is earned. Through apprenticeship. Through years of study under a lineage holder. Through demonstrated humility and a relationship with the medicine that does not end. Through explicit permission from the lineage itself to prepare, to offer, and to teach.
That is the path I have walked, and continue to walk. It is why every ceremony at MahaDevi is still led by Taita Miguel Mavisoy. Why our preparations follow Camsá tradition. Why our compensation to the lineage is direct, ongoing, and does not end at ceremony fees. Why we name the scholars and indigenous voices who inform us, and send people toward them rather than away.
The psychedelic renaissance is still being written. What kind of chapter it becomes depends on choices people like you make right now. Including the choice of where to sit.
The reading we stand on
You do not have to trust us. Read the sources.
Scholarly & Journalistic Sources
- Hauskeller, C., Artinian, T., Fiske, A., Schwarz Marin, E., González Romero, O. S., Luna, L. E., Crickmore, J., and Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2023). Decolonization is a Metaphor towards a Different Ethic. The Case from Psychedelic Studies. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48(5).
- Fotiou, E. (2020). The Role of Indigenous Knowledges in Psychedelic Science. Journal of Psychedelic Studies 4(1).
- Fotiou, E. (2020). Shamanic Tourism in the Peruvian Lowlands: Critical and Ethical Considerations. Journal of Psychedelic Studies.
- García Cerqueda, O. (2020). Magic Mushrooms, Memory and Resistance in the Sierra Mazateca. Chacruna Institute.
- Rodríguez Venegas, C. (2023). Mazatec Sacred Mushrooms vs. Western Psilocybin: Diverging Views. MAPS.
- George, J. R., Michaels, T. I., Sevelius, J., and Williams, M. T. (2020). The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Limitations of a White-Dominant Medical Framework. Journal of Psychedelic Studies 4(1).
- Luna, L. E. Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon.
- Byles, B. (Ngāti Hei, 2024). Postcolonial Multiplicities: Indigeneity in Flux.
Talks & Conversations
- Yuria Celidwen, Applying Indigenous Wisdom Traditions to Modern Challenges (Frontiers of Commoning, 2024).
- Adam Aronovich, A Critique of Healing Culture, Psychedelic Narcissism & Hyper-Individuality (Modern Psychedelics, 2023).
- Bernd Brabec de Mori and Sidney Castillo, Questioning the Silver Bullet: Critical Approaches for the Study of Ayahuasca (The Religious Studies Project, 2022).
- Chiara Baldini, Countercultural Festivals: Then and Now (Breaking Convention, 2024).
The medicine is wild. An education that domesticates it has already failed.
Ready to take the next step?
Start with the free course, or come sit with us in ceremony.
Medical Disclaimer: Ayahuasca is a powerful entheogenic medicine that requires thorough medical screening and qualified supervision. The information on this page is educational and does not constitute medical or legal advice. MahaDevi requires full medical screening of all participants prior to acceptance.