Ayahuasca, Healing Culture, and the Crisis of Meaning
Conversation with Adam Aronovich, plus Black Friday sale!
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Ayahuasca, Healing Culture, and the Crisis of Meaning
I hope you get a chance to check out this conversation with Adam Aronovich, a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Communications and a researcher at the Medical Anthropology Research Centre at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain. Adam spent five years living and conducting fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, facilitating plant-medicine retreats while gathering ethnographic data. He is also the creator of Healing from Healing, an absurdly hilarious Instagram that massively takes the piss out of postmodern spiritual trends.
We discuss Iquitos in Peru, the world’s largest city unreachable by road and a center of the international ayahuasca scene. Western visitors often romanticize this isolation, seeing it as a precious respite from corporate homogeneity. Yet, as Adam points out, the locals do not necessarily share this idealism. For decades, the primary political promise in Iquitos has been to build a road connecting the city to the rest of Peru—to finally “bring progress.”
This dynamic reveals a tension inherent in globalization. While Westerners flock to the jungle seeking the pre-modern, locals are often desperate to plug into the mainstream hyper-Capitalist artery. Adam shared a story of a friend in a small riverine village who, despite living in a wooden shack with almost no material assets, invested in a massive satellite antenna solely to watch European football. For him, progress wasn’t a better roof; it was watching Messi play at the same time as the rest of the world.
Adam’s research focuses on how participants in ayahuasca retreats interpret their experiences with ayahuasca. He initially expected them to speak the language of “healing culture”—a contemporary mix of Western esotericism, pop psychology, and trauma discourse. Indeed, most people arrived with a clear narrative: they came to heal trauma or pursue personal growth. They viewed the experience through the lens of the “hero’s journey”—a solitary, internal quest to fix a broken self.
However, after conducting over a hundred interviews immediately following ceremonies, Adam discovered a surprising discrepancy. While participants tend to use the buzzwords of healing and growth, when they reflect on what is actually meaningful to them, they rarely speak of abstract inner breakthroughs. Instead, they speak of relationships.
Participants describe visions involving family members, ex-partners, or old friends—moments of “relational healing” that mended internal rifts. Even more significantly, they consistently identify the connection with their fellow retreat-goers as the most transformative element. They reflect on communitas—that intense sense of belonging and mutual care that emerges when people undergo a liminal experience together. They discover that what alleviated their depression or anxiety wasn’t just the molecular effect of the brew, but the simple act of laughing with others, sharing meals, and feeling a sense of belonging they hadn’t felt in decades.
This challenges the hyper-individualistic model that dominates psychedelic discourse. We have grown accustomed to viewing mental health as a private affair, something happening inside our brains that requires a private solution. But Adam’s research suggests that wellbeing is inherently a collective journey. Participants often left the jungle understanding that their anxiety wasn’t just a chemical imbalance, but a reaction to isolated work, lack of community, precarity, and ecological instability. They realized that being healthy is impossible in a vacuum; it requires healthy communities and environments.
