If Ayahuasca Is So Profoundly Helpful, How Could I Still Have Anything Left to Work On?
This is one of the most common and honest questions I receive: If you’ve been sitting with Ayahuasca for decades, how could you still have work to do? Shouldn’t the medicine have already “finished” you?
It’s a beautiful question because beneath it is both curiosity and hope—that there could be a point where all struggle falls away, where every wound is healed once and for all. I understand that longing. I’ve felt it myself. But here is the truth I’ve come to know: healing is not about reaching a finish line. It is about entering into relationship.
Medicine As Relationship, Not Cure
Ayahuasca is not a magic pill. It does not erase the human condition or extract us from the cycles of growth, change, and challenge. It is a living medicine, and like all living relationships, it continues to unfold. Just as you wouldn’t ask why a marriage or a friendship still requires care after decades, the same is true here. The work does not end, because the relationship is alive.
Layers Upon Layers
What Ayahuasca has consistently shown me is that healing is layered. We release one weight, and underneath is another truth waiting to be seen. We resolve an old wound, and it opens the capacity to address an even deeper one. The work spirals, not in circles that return us to the same place, but in a helix that carries us higher, wider, deeper each time.
Life Doesn’t Stop Testing Us
No matter how profound the ceremony, life keeps happening. Loved ones die. Our bodies age. Relationships shift. The world breaks our hearts again and again. New griefs, new joys, new crossroads arrive. Healing is not a bubble that shields us from life. It is the capacity to meet life fully—to sit with its beauty and its heartbreak without losing ourselves.
The Myth Of Being “Finished”
There is a subtle danger in imagining that the point of Ayahuasca (or any path) is to become “done.” That vision itself is rooted in fear—the fear of being broken, the fear of being unworthy until we arrive at some imagined perfect version of ourselves. But what the medicine teaches, over and over, is that wholeness does not mean perfection. Wholeness means presence. It means being with what is, as it is, in love and humility.
“Healing is the capacity to meet life fully—to sit with its beauty and its heartbreak without losing ourselves.”
A Different Kind Of Progress
After decades, I don’t measure my path in terms of what is “fixed.” I measure it in terms of how quickly I can return to center after I’ve been knocked off balance. How open my heart remains in the midst of pain. How deeply I can listen, even when it’s uncomfortable. How much more willing I am to surrender instead of control.
This is the progress ayahuasca offers—not an escape from humanity, but a fuller inhabiting of it.
The Work Is The Gift
So yes, after decades, I still have work to do. I always will. But instead of seeing that as failure, I see it as grace. Because the presence of the work means I am alive, still learning, still capable of being surprised, humbled, and softened.
The medicine has not erased my humanity. It has taught me to embrace it, to walk with it, to love it. And that, more than any imagined finish line, is the true gift.
In other words: Ayahuasca is not about making us done. It is about making us real.