It’s pitch dark, about 2 hours into the ceremony. The ayahuasca is in full effect, and I’m in deep. After a period of silence, the ceremony leader begins to sing another icaro. Someone starts to cry. It deepens into wrenching, anguished sobbing. Soon, the room is pulsing with sound: others are weeping, crying out, someone else is vomiting. The icaro is increasing in intensity. I am listening especially to the first crier, in gratitude, my heart also gushing tears. We are each in our own experience and yet it feels to me that the group is expressing grief as a collective. The next morning in the sharing circle, a co-participant says thank you to the person whose crying got the ball rolling, and how helpful it was for them to touch into their own sorrow. Another participant remarks, “It sounded like God’s orchestra of healing last night.”

Grief is not seeking solutions or fixes—she craves the profound act of being heard and seen. ~ Alexandra Ahlay Blakely, Wails

_{Master plant Chiric Sanango (Photograph by Gary Saucedo/Archivo Centro Takiwasi)}

Ayahuasca invites us to grieve across the personal and collective realms

Ayahuasca ceremonies can be a container for communal grief work, although perhaps they are not always explicitly framed as such. In almost every ayahuasca ceremony I’ve attended, someone is grieving to their fullest expression.

For myself, I’ve lost count of the number of times ayahuasca has invited me, nudged me, pinned me down into feeling the deepest, ripping, rasping grief. It feels terrible, it feels beautiful. It’s a relief. I’m grateful that it has almost always felt witnessed and held in some way by the plants, practitioners, helpers, or the group as a whole.

With each feeling-through, there’s an energetic release, a lighter feeling in my body, and many new understandings. And somehow, both the grief itself and the thing I was grieving are woven back into my nervous system to rest there more peacefully, the grief sometimes softening into sadness. All allowed to exist and be felt rather than pressed down into the shadows.

Grieving the dismantling of persona

One of ayahuasca’s gifts is its ability to slip past our most dependable self-protections and free up grief stored in the body, some of it buried so deep we didn’t even know it was there.

Throughout my own ayahuasca odyssey, ayahuasca has cast light into the dark corners of my nervous system, illuminating and unraveling childhood and ancestral traumas. As a child, my nervous system cleverly shielded me from these unwanted, overwhelming (and sometimes unknown, or ancestrally transmitted) thoughts, feelings, and experiences, weaving layers of adaptation into a reasonably durable self-narrative that helped me navigate the world. 

But as an adult, these self-protections were not working very well for me. Ayahuasca brought these into sharp focus also, some of them having been exiled so completely that it was shocking to have them surface into conscious awareness. 

Softening each protective layer, exploring the parts of me tucked away in the dark, and releasing the underlying stories and unfelt emotions evoked profound mourning. An ocean of grief in there, let me tell you, for the adversities themselves and for the ways in which I’d guarded myself against them. 

Yet, at the ocean’s floor lay precious gifts: a growing authenticity and a deepening connection to others, community, and the natural world.

Mourning as a pathway to Core Self

One way to think about emotions is simply as patterns of energy in the body. When we allow ourselves to feel grief fully, its energy moves through us in a wave, as it was always meant to.

Feeling each wave of grief through to completion brings release and relief. It can evoke other essential emotions – joy, anger, fear, surprise, disgust – and open more space into which compassion, love, forgiveness, and gratitude can flow. 

As one Western ayahuasca ceremony leader shared in our research: 

There are specific experiences that I wish for people to have… [One of them is] I want them to be able to grieve. And, afterwards, I want them to experience a celebratory joy and love (Leader 8).

Ayahuasca tends to amplify this process, taking us deep into our emotional world to kindle psychological transformation. Our Core Self – connected to our authentic needs and attachment strivings – can become more accessible to us, along with greater resilience, vitality, and meaningful connection. 

A Shipibo onaya¹ approach to grief

Ayahuasca originated in Indigenous communities of the Global South, where the most established ayahuasca knowledges and practices continue to thrive. 

As recounted in the book Ayahuasca Healing and Science, a Shipibo-Conibo ayahuasca origin story from Perú describes ayahuasca as a grief-specific technology gifted by the chaikoni (wise ancestors, guardians of the forest and its people) to help survivors of colonialism process trauma and bereavement resulting from the horrors they endured. 

Interviews with four Shipibo ayahuasca practitioners (onayas) – Elena, Sara, Soi, and Segundo – revealed their approach to grief in relation to losing a loved one, which they viewed as a psychological or spiritual trauma that can sicken the mind and body.

Collaborating with the plant spirits, these practitioners used healing songs (icaros) to free up the deep sadness (tristeza) lodged in the body, spirit, and soul, which blocks the heart and mind. This was achieved through “sing[ing] that sadness out.” They cleared energetic and spiritual blockages caused by the trauma of the loss, helping people to feel and release their anguish, and restore their capacity to feel joy and other positive emotions.

Western science, ayahuasca, and grief

Scientific inquiry brings another lens to ayahuasca and grief. It’s helpful to recognize that both Indigenous and scientific perspectives are knowledge systems in their own right, without using one to validate the other. Perhaps in their parallel streams, there can be places of complementarity and synergy regarding ayahuasca. 

Research on ayahuasca and grief has so far centered on how ayahuasca helps people navigate grief (including complicated grief²) following the loss of a significant other. Ayahuasca is thought to facilitate this through “emotional confrontation” which can include:

• Expressing grief openly
• Honoring the deceased
• Gaining perspective on one’s daily pain by observing it as a spectator
• Recognizing unhelpful self-protective patterns that suppress pain
• Finding new meanings in traumatic events
• Maintaining bonds with deceased loved ones
• Exploring existential themes arising from new spiritual insights
• Transforming the internal representation of the deceased
• Sustaining a connection with the deceased in new ways
• Allowing the relationship with a loved one to evolve despite their physical absence.

Although located in a different conceptual universe, this emerging research seems to correspond in part to Shipibo insights, in that processing grief necessitates feeling it through within safe, dedicated spaces.

A portal to remembering interrelationship

The medicine of grief extends beyond personal healing, inviting us to recall our inter-beingness – our connection to family, friends, community, non-human animals, the biosphere, and beyond, in service of collective wellbeing. In fact, “[r]ight now, as you read this, trillions of neutrinos originating at the core of the Sun are going through your body—every second. An invisible bridge of neutrinos links us to the heart of the Sun” (Gleiser, 2023, p. 48).

We are creatures inter-being with everything else, and ayahuasca can accelerate and amplify these remembrances.

To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone: you have to inter-be with every other thing. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Under the influence of ayahuasca, I’ve grieved profoundly for my disconnection from nature, the loss of our plant and animal relations and their habitats, humanity’s seemingly endless capacity for violence, oppression, and cruelty, and for the big, sad gap between what humans could be and what we are. While this may sound depressing,

The Five Gates of Grief

A dear friend and colleague recently introduced me to Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief, which beautifully mirrors the various grief experiences I’ve had with ayahuasca. I love this framework’s expansiveness and inclusiveness.

The “gates” are metaphorical doorways, revealing grief as multifaceted, each gate leading to the “communal hall of grief.” They’re not stages but portals, welcoming us in to explore heartache in ways that are both individual and collectively shared.

Gate 1: Everything we love, we will lose

• Grief from losing loved ones or cherished things; teaching impermanence and heart opening
• Medicine/theme: Vulnerability and love

Gate 2: The places in me that have not known love

• Grief from neglected, shamed parts due to trauma; bringing compassion
• Medicine/theme: Compassion, including self-compassion

Gate 3: The sorrows of the world

• Grief for global and ecological losses; feeling the world’s pain, reconnecting with nature.
• Medicine/theme: Entanglement (interconnectedness)

Gate 4: What we expected and did not receive

• Grief from lack of community, belonging, and purpose in modern culture; longing for connection
• Medicine/theme: Belonging

Gate 5: Ancestral grief

• Grief from ancestral sorrows and lost connections, including cultural and transgenerational trauma; honouring and healing ancestral wounds
• Medicine/Theme: Wisdom

Ayahuasca has a profound ability to walk us up to and through these gates. When grief is allowed to surface, this opens us up to vulnerability, love, compassion, interconnectedness, belonging, and wisdom. 

In summary

Ayahuasca can be a catalyst for fully-felt grieving through the exploration of personal, ancestral, and collective sorrows. From a Shipibo understanding in which deep grief is sung out of the body, to Western science’s observations of emotional confrontation, ayahuasca’s ability to help us welcome grieving as medicine offers possibilities for sharing pain communally, as well as for increased authenticity, interconnectedness, vulnerability, compassion, and wisdom, in service of both personal and collective wellbeing.

There’s no need to “fix” one another or the Grief; it’s about collectively embracing it to cultivate greater internal spaciousness, agility and resilience as we navigate the undulation of Grief in our everyday lives. ~ Alexandra Ahlay Blakely, Wails

Sources

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition, text revision (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association.

Aronovich, A. A., & Labate, B. C. (2021). Healing at the intersections between tradition and innovation: An interview with Shipibo Onaya Jorge Ochavano Vasquez. In B. C. Labate & C. Cavnar (Eds.), pp. 227–242. Ayahuasca healing and science. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55688-4_13

Blakely, A. A. (2024). Wails (Songs for Grief). Digital album and digital book. Retrieved August 2025 from https://payhip.com/WAILS

Cacciatore, J., & Frances, A. (2022). DSM-5-TR turns normal grief into a mental disorder. The Lancet Psychiatry, 9(7), e32. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00150-X 

Fosha, D. (2021). How AEDP works. In D. Fosha (Ed.), Undoing aloneness and the transformation of suffering into flourishing (pp. 27–52). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000232-000

Gleiser, M. (2023). The dawn of a mindful universe: A manifesto for humanity’s future. Harper Collins. https://www.amazon.ca/Dawn-Mindful-Universe-Manifesto-Humanitys/dp/0063056879

González, D., Aixalà, M. B., Neimeyer, R. A., Cantillo, J., Nicolson, D., & Farré, M. (2022). Restorative retelling for processing psychedelic experiences: Rationale and case study of complicated grief. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 832879. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.832879

González, D., Aronovich, A. A., & Carvalho, M. (2021). The therapeutic use of ayahuasca in grief. In B. C. Labate & C. Cavnar (Eds.), pp. 209–226. Ayahuasca healing and science. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55688-4_12

González, D., Cantillo, J., Pérez, I., Farré, M., Feilding, A., Obiols, J. E., & Bouso, J. C. (2020). Therapeutic potential of ayahuasca in grief: A prospective, observational study. Psychopharmacology, 237(4), 1171–1182. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-019-05446-2

Grieving at the Roots (2025). https://www.healingattheroots.com/aboutartist

Hanh, T. H. (2017). The other shore: A new translation of the Heart Sutra with commentaries. Palm Leaves Press. https://www.amazon.ca/Other-Shore-Translation-Heart-Commentaries/dp/1941529143

Prigerson, H. G., Shear, M. K., & Reynolds, C. F. (2022). Prolonged grief disorder diagnostic criteria—Helping those with maladaptive grief responses. JAMA psychiatry, 79(4), 277–278. https//doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.4201

Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books.

1. Onaya (which I’ve also seen spelled onanya) is the Shipibo-Conibo word for ayahuasca practitioner (“one who knows”: a healer who works with oni, the Shipibo word for ayahuasca). Shipibo communities are not a monolith, so there is a plurality of cosmologies and practices. The views presented here are from these particular healers and their communities, as reported to the interviewers. ↩︎
2. Complicated grief, also termed prolonged grief disorder in the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2022), refers to intense, persistent grief that disrupts daily life beyond typical mourning periods. Some researchers have welcomed its inclusion in the DSM, recognizing that grief can sometimes become derailed (e.g., Prigerson et al., 2022). Others have been more critical, citing weak evidence and the pathologizing of normal grief, noting there’s “no uniform expiration date” for mourning (Cacciatore & Frances, 2024, p. e32). ↩︎