Ayahuasca in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia

By Jan Rostlinka, founder of Feather Crown. A personal account of the Amazonian traditions I have encountered since moving to Ecuador in 2008.

When someone asks me whether it is better to travel to Peru, Ecuador, Brazil or Colombia for ayahuasca, I cannot answer in a single sentence.

The longer I spend among Indigenous healers, the less sense it makes to me to divide ayahuasca according to national borders. The plant remains the same plant, and certain foundations are shared across the Amazon, but the ways different peoples work with it can differ profoundly. A Kichwa yachak in the Ecuadorian Amazon understands it differently from a Shipibo onanya in Peru. A ceremony with a Yawanawá or Huni Kuin pajé in Brazil, or the work of a Colombian taita, may take another form again.

Over the years in Ecuador, I have met healers from several Indigenous cultures, including the Kichwa, Shuar and Secoya. Later, I also had the opportunity to learn about the Shipibo tradition and the Brazilian traditions of the Yawanawá and Huni Kuin.

These encounters helped me realize that when we say “ayahuasca,” we often imagine a single tradition that has never actually existed. The Amazon is vast. Each people has its own language, landscape, stories, way of learning and understanding of what a healer does during a ceremony. If you would first like an introduction to the medicine itself, start with our guide to ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca in Ecuador: The Yachak, the Landscape and the Spirits of Places

From the beginning, one aspect of the Kichwa tradition fascinated me: the healers’ strong relationship with particular places in nature. A yachak does not simply learn about plants or acquire a set of healing techniques. Gradually, they come to know the world around them as a living landscape. Water, trees, birds, animals, rocks, caves, mountains, volcanoes and places considered especially powerful within the local tradition all matter.

Many yachaks I have met have one or several such places to which they return throughout their lives. It might be a waterfall, a large boulder, a mountain lagoon, a cave or an Andean summit. In their understanding, these are places where they form relationships with the spirits of nature and gain allies whom they later invite into their healing work. When a yachak cleanses someone, they do not understand it as their own power alone. They become an intermediary through whom the strength of the places and beings they have come to know during their training can work.

Water, Mountains and “Living Stones”

Water is particularly important. Rivers, waterfalls, lagoons and even the sea hold a special place in Amazonian cosmology. Again and again, water appears as one of its most powerful healing elements. Some Amazonian healers travel all the way to the coast to get to know the sea and, according to their tradition, establish a relationship with its spiritual beings.

Alongside water, they may also work with the spirits of wind, mountains, volcanoes, stones or animals. In the traditional understanding, a good yachak should know more than powerful plants. They should gradually come to know the whole world in which they live.

For me, this is where one of Ecuador’s most interesting characteristics begins. Here, the Andes meet the Amazon directly. Powerful rivers descend from the high mountains, creating waterfalls, rocky gorges, lagoons and places filled with enormous boulders. Stones themselves have a particular significance in some local traditions. Some healers speak of “living stones,” working with their power or understanding them as a way of making contact with other dimensions of the world. Within a relatively small area, a person can move between rainforest, high mountains, volcanoes and the ocean. This diversity of landscape is naturally reflected in local shamanism.

Different Paths of Learning: Kichwa, Shipibo and Yawanawá

Structured Dietas Among the Shipibo and Yawanawá

When you encounter the Shipibo or Yawanawá traditions, you find a somewhat different approach to learning. It is not that they do not work with the spirits of places or with nature, but the structure of plant dietas and different periods of initiation is much more visible. Among the Shipibo, someone may enter a dieta with a particular plant for a defined period, following quite precise rules.

Similarly, some Yawanawá dietas have a clearly defined duration and traditional procedure. There, I encountered samakei dietas involving mamá—a cassava drink into which the shaman prays before passing it on to be drunk ritually—and nane, a seed providing a dark blue pigment used for body painting. I also encountered the very long and demanding muká dieta, which lasts more than a year.

This may be one reason these traditions can be relatively easier for an outsider to grasp. There is a structure, a set of rules, a particular plant or a defined period, making it possible to follow the process step by step.

Kichwa: Learning Through a Long-Term Relationship

Among the Kichwa, my experience has usually been different. Dietas (sasina), fasting and restrictions certainly exist here too, particularly around salt, spicy food and sexual activity. Yet the learning process has always felt to me less like a clearly organized system and more like gradually growing into a way of life. You spend time with a particular yachak, walk with them in the forest, get to know their family, listen to their stories and slowly begin to understand the relationships between plants, places and spiritual forces.

For someone seeking to learn from a particular place of power, reading about it or knowing the correct procedure is not enough. In this traditional path, they must spend a great deal of time there, drinking ayahuasca, datura or tobacco and learning to perceive the place. According to the traditional understanding, the person’s character and discipline also matter, as does whether the spirits of that place accept them. Local healers describe some abilities as developing slowly, sometimes over many years. This is why the Kichwa path may seem less structured to an outsider while remaining deeply connected to a particular landscape.

Ayahuasca Ceremonies in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Colombia

These differences become visible as soon as you attend a ceremony. Among the Siekopai (Secoya), I have experienced ceremonies where people rest in hammocks and drink the medicine repeatedly throughout the night. The timing of the healing work is distinctive too: drinking may continue for practically the whole night, while the more pronounced cleansings take place in the morning, in daylight.

Kichwa participants, by contrast, often sit on chairs, and the yachak’s role is clearly distinguished from everyone else’s. Among the Shipibo, sitting on the ground is traditionally common. In a Yawanawá or Huni Kuin ceremony, a person may sit, lie in a hammock, sing and later even dance.

In a traditional Kichwa ceremony, the yachak is the person doing the work. Others may also drink ayahuasca, learn or observe, but the patient primarily receives the healer’s cleansing and energetic work. It is not usually customary for the ceremony to become a shared singing session involving everyone present. Even two healers, such as a father and son, often maintain their own separate space while working.

Among the Yawanawá or Huni Kuin, collective singing may play a much more important role. Some ceremonies are distinctly communal, full of music and movement. Alongside deep, intimate work, there are also large gatherings, such as festivals, that bring together much of the community.

Colombian Yagé and Group Ceremonies

Colombia also has group yagé ceremonies. Several harmonicas may be played, and the songs sound different from those of the Kichwa or Shipibo. A bundle of leaves is used here too, and the Colombian yagé I have encountered has often been markedly purgative.

Songs in Ayahuasca Ceremonies: Kichwa, Shipibo and Yawanawá

The differences are expressed beautifully in the songs. During a Kichwa ceremony, the yachak often has a distinctive personal style of singing that returns to a recurring melodic and narrative foundation. They sing about the places they visited during their training, the beings they met there, what those worlds look like and how those beings come to help the person receiving the healing.

Beautiful clothing, crowns, animals, water, mountains and spiritual gifts may all appear in the song. It is more than musical accompaniment. It is also a description of the world through which the healer moves during their work.

Among the Shipibo, I have experienced something different. Their song is often very organic, arising directly from what the healer perceives in the person at that moment. They may sing about cleansing, opening, straightening or bringing light to something, and sometimes about negative energies they perceive and work with during the process.

Among the Yawanawá, great importance is placed on singing particular inherited songs and prayers precisely as they have been passed down. These have different melodies, words and purposes. In Colombia, I encountered another musical character again, including the use of harmonicas. All these traditions use the voice, rhythm or music, but the cultural meaning of these tools can be very different.

Cleansing and Work with the Body in the Kichwa Tradition

Another difference visitors quickly notice is the healer’s physical proximity. Kichwa cleansing often involves direct contact. The yachak uses a surupanga, a bundle of leaves known in other regions as a chacapa. They brush the person directly with these leaves, touching the body. They place their hands on the person, blow onto the head, hands or feet, and work from very close by.

Another characteristic is the sound the healer makes, as though drawing out and coughing up something they have removed from the patient, followed by blowing. Some yachaks also use a traditional sucking technique. Elders regard this as a demanding discipline that should not be practised by someone without extensive experience.

Shipibo work often involves less physical contact. The healer may sit a short distance away, with song as the main means of reaching the person. The connection is made less through hands or leaves and more through the voice and what, within their tradition, the song carries.

Among the Yawanawá, I have often seen rapé and the smoke of resins such as copal used during prayer or cleansing. By contrast, I have hardly seen them smoke mapacho in the way I know from the Kichwa or Shipibo.

The Kichwa use tobacco in various ways: it may be smoked, prepared as an infusion, applied to the body or traditionally administered through the nose or in other ways. Among the Shipibo, smoking mapacho and blowing tobacco smoke onto the patient, the medicine or the ceremonial space are well-known practices.

How Ayahuasca Is Prepared: Each Tradition’s Rules and Taboos

The differences begin long before anyone enters the maloca or starts singing. Each people has its own customs for gathering and cooking the medicine. The recipe may differ, but the rules and taboos surrounding preparation are equally important.

In some Brazilian traditions, I encountered a rule that the person preparing the medicine also drinks it during the preparation.

Among the Siekopai, I encountered a different custom: once someone enters the place where the medicine is being prepared, they should not leave during the process, remaining there until the ceremony. Even the weather can matter. According to some of their rules, the medicine is not cooked and ceremonies are not held during heavy rain.

From the outside, these rules may seem like minor details. For people raised within a tradition, however, they carry deep meaning. Preparation is not simply a chemical recipe in which certain plants are boiled in water. It is itself part of the ritual, the relationship with the plants and the way the medicine is approached.

Here it is helpful to remember that, despite their differences, these traditions remain part of one great Amazonian family. Fundamental principles recur, but each people expresses them in its own language.

Ayahuasca, Chacruna and Chalipanga: Which Plants Are Used?

Despite all these differences, ayahuasca is still ayahuasca. The foundation of the brew is the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, with other plants added according to the region and tradition.

Chacruna, Psychotria viridis, is widely known in Peru and Brazil. In Ecuador’s mountainous Amazon region, one very often encounters chalipanga (Diplopterys cabrerana), which grows particularly well here.

In Ecuador, I have also encountered a practice I have hardly seen elsewhere: drinking a brew made only from the vine, without the usual accompanying leaves. This kind of ayahuasca may feel heavier, sleepier and less visual. A person may feel unsteady, and the experience may not have such a clearly visual character.

Across different cultures, there are also stronger and weaker varieties of the vine, as well as preparations used for different purposes. Among the Kichwa, for example, the name muku huasca may refer to a particular type of knotted vine.

The medicine itself has different names too: depending on the culture, it may be called ayawaska, yagé, natem, uni, nixi pae or something else. These are not simply different labels attached to the same thing. Each language carries its own way of understanding the plant and its world.

Peru, Ecuador, Brazil or Colombia?

The more of these traditions you come to know, the less inclined you become to decide which is “best.” The Shipibo have developed a beautifully elaborate system of work with plants, dietas and the organic melodies of icaros. The Kichwa have an exceptionally strong relationship with the landscape, water and the spirits of particular places. The Yawanawá and Huni Kuin have preserved an extraordinarily vibrant culture of songs, prayers, shared rituals and community life around ayahuasca. Colombian yagé traditions have their own musical, cleansing and ceremonial character.

Personally, I find it much more interesting to ask not which country is best, but what world you are entering and whom you are learning from. When you spend enough time with a good yachak, you gradually understand that behind their songs are more than beautiful words. There are the places they visited, the people they learned from, the rivers in which they cleansed themselves, the stones on which they sat, the plants they came to know and the relationships they built throughout their lives.

For me, this is something easily overlooked in today’s fast-moving travel for ayahuasca. A ceremony is more than a night in which the medicine is drunk. It is a small window into a much larger culture and the lifelong path of the person leading it. To see how this approach takes shape at our center in the Ecuadorian Amazon, explore our ayahuasca retreat in Ecuador or read more about how our ayahuasca ceremonies unfold.

Frequently Asked Questions: Ayahuasca in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia