Few phrases carry as much promise — and as much risk — as this one: “Ayahuasca told me that…” Behind those words there may lie a genuine revelation, a life change that had been quietly taking shape for years, or a hasty interpretation with consequences that are hard to undo. Telling one from the other is rarely simple, and that difficulty is not accidental: it belongs to the very nature of the experience.
In April 2026, Jerónimo Mazarrasa — program director at ICEERS and a researcher of plant medicine facilitation for over two decades — hosted a free, open webinar dedicated to exploring precisely this territory. What follows draws on the central ideas from that conversation.
A feature, not a bug
The starting point matters: the fact that ayahuasca “speaks” is not a problem. Most people who approach ayahuasca do so precisely in order to listen. The experience has a remarkable capacity to surface material that, under ordinary circumstances, remains buried — desires, fears, intuitions, memories. And when that material rises, it tends to take the shape of messages, orders, revelations. The problem does not lie in the content of those messages, but in how they are interpreted and, above all, in the speed with which people act on them.
Over ten years of work at the ICEERS Support Center — where the team has accompanied more than 3,000 people through difficult experiences with psychoactive plants — recurring patterns have emerged: predictions, instant solutions, major life changes, recovered memories. And across all of them, the evidence points in both directions.
“We cannot say that everything ayahuasca tells you is true. We have evidence to the contrary. But we also cannot say it isn’t. We have examples of both.”
That ambiguity is not a flaw in the process — it is its fundamental condition. Learning to navigate it with discernment, without rushing to act or dismissing everything, is, according to Jerónimo, the art of drinking ayahuasca.
The rule of waiting
When ayahuasca conveys the feeling that one must leave a partner, change jobs, sell everything and open a center in the jungle, or that the person sitting across the room is a soulmate, the urgency that accompanies the message is often felt as confirmation of its truth. Jerónimo suggests inverting that logic.
If something is true, it will still be true three months from now. The plant has an amplifying capacity — “it works like a microscope,” Jerónimo said during the webinar — that can make something small appear enormous. The rule of waiting does not question the message; it simply gives it time to settle. To this he adds a distinction between orders and choices, learned from facilitators with decades of experience: “No message from the spiritual realm ever arrives as an order. It always arrives as a choice. If what you receive takes the form of ‘you must,’ treat it with more caution.”
Moreover, experienced facilitators add what they call the rule of three confirmations: first, that the message repeats across subsequent sessions; second, that it holds coherence with one’s own life trajectory and with the judgment of trusted people; third, that it is supported by someone whose wisdom one genuinely respects. The point is not to put the experience on trial, but to recover the common sense that any important decision deserves.
There is, however, a clear exception: if ayahuasca signals the need to exit something harmful — an addiction, an abusive relationship — waiting may not serve any purpose. Discernment does not produce rigid rules; it produces tools.
The responsibility of deciding
There is a linguistic shift that Jerónimo borrowed from his own therapist, and it captures much of the above. Saying “ayahuasca told me I should leave my job” moves responsibility outward. Saying “I drank ayahuasca and realized I want to leave my job” returns it to where it belongs.
The difference is not minor. In situations that affect other people — a separation, a distancing — arriving with the plant’s verdict as an argument not only shuts down dialogue; it also diminishes the decision itself. Ayahuasca can illuminate something that had been there for a long time. But the one who decides, always, is the person. Carl Jung noted something similar when reflecting on how unconscious material surfaces: it does not emerge as neutral information, but in the form of tasks and duties — a reminder that what feels like an external command may well be one’s own interior life speaking in an unfamiliar voice.
Learning to interpret the messages that emerge from the experience is not a process that can be completed in an afternoon. Jerónimo described it as the art of drinking ayahuasca — a practice that develops over time, with the right guidance, with the humility to acknowledge that one can also deceive oneself, and that the plant has a particular ability to amplify precisely what one most wants — or most fears — to see.
If you are interested in this topic and want to go deeper, AyaSafety is ICEERS Academy’s training program on safety in ayahuasca facilitation in non-native contexts: six months, 45 hours of content, and protocols developed alongside physicians, psychologists, lawyers, and harm reduction specialists. Registration is open until May 25.