People often ask me how they should interpret messages received in ceremony.

I find this complex because I believe the Mother Vine establishes a deeply personal and unique connection with every one of us, and through different ways of communication. While I don’t feel my insights are complete or the absolute truth, I try to guide people with what I’ve learned from years of working with the medicinal plants.

I’d like to share two anecdotes:

Fei is a very protective mother and worries continuously about her children during her retreat. Because she’s deep in the jungle, she can’t reach out to see how they’re doing, which adds to her anxiety. Her unhealthy ego makes it impossible for her to go inwards, creating a thought loop of fear and distress that she can’t stop.

In ceremony, Fei receives a vision of one of her children walking on the street, without supervision. The child is abducted. Fei is unable to surrender to the vision and starts to panic. She wants to leave the Maloca, but she is not allowed, so she remains in a state of fear and panic, unable to see the vision for what it is: a metaphor. The next morning, still in a frenzy, she demands to contact home to check if her child is still at home. She receives confirmation that the child is fine. What happened here?

Theo receives a message from Ayahuasca about the dream partner he would have in the near future. He is surprised because he had almost given up on meeting this person after so many disappointments in love. He allows himself to dream again and leaves the retreat full of hope and love in his heart, expecting to meet his dream partner not too long from now. The Mother Vine had told him this, after all! However, a year later, this dream partner still hasn’t shown up in his expected time frame. Not only is Theo utterly disappointed, but he also feels deceived by the Mother Vine. What happened here?

It is hard to provide a clear, one-size-fits-all answer…

Still, there are themes around how the Vine communicates with us. For Fei, the Vine showed a lot of fear held inside of her, that she projects onto her children. In ceremony, her deepest fears came to the surface as an opportunity for her to acknowledge them, feel them, and then release them. This is a common theme in Ayahuasca visions – the surfacing of deep-rooted fears, insecurities, and shadows. This can be incredibly unsettling, especially because the visions can feel very visceral, very real. It can feel as if this is actually happening now. Still, Ayahuasca’s motherly spirit never gives us what we cannot handle or what we are not ready for, but we have to be willing to surrender to her wisdom to receive what we need.

For Theo, sometimes Ayahuasca brings up our deepest desires, that we can then feel with our entire Being. When we become aware of our deepest desires, we can acknowledge the force that subconsciously drives our thoughts, emotions, and actions in our lives. We can then investigate them and make a conscious choice if we want our lives to be driven by this desire or not. Sometimes our desires do not serve our highest and greatest good, and can hold us prisoners in a loop we cannot escape. Ayahuasca gives us an opportunity to become aware of our desires. It then becomes our choice to release or hold onto our desires. In Theo’s case, the lesson may be to learn to reach inside for love, instead of depending on an outside source to be loved and nurtured. Ayahuasca opened up an awareness of a deep, deep desire to be loved, perhaps for companionship, perhaps for stability. It is now Theo’s choice how he’d like to act with this knowledge; does he want to seek partnership? Or does he want to seek love and stability within himself instead?

Visions in ceremony must be interpreted with caution, because they are often a reflection of our dreams and desires. Yet people have also seen their visions manifest. How do we make sense of this? In my opinion, Ayahuasca operates in a multidimensional realm where potentials for our future are presented to us. Sometimes these potentials will manifest, and sometimes they won’t. No one and no thing will ever be able to guarantee a particular outcome for the future. This is not just the case with the Mother Vine, but also with psychics, tarot readers, and soothsayers. We are given a prediction of the future based on the potentials that are present NOW. Since life is such a complex soup of potentials, and since our future usually involves others and their free will as well, there is no such thing as a fixed outcome.

So always use your intuition when interpreting your ceremonies. Use discernment when you look for outside confirmation. Allow room for several interpretations, and consider that the Mother Vine uncovers our deepest fears and desires to help us heal ourselves and step into our highest potentials.

I hope you find this blog helpful! I would love to hear about your insights on interpreting messages in ceremony.

In gratitude