Ayahuasca past lives are scenes in ceremony that feel like your own memories from another century or another body. Nobody can prove where they come from. What researchers can measure is how often people relive their own past. A 2023 study followed 339 retreat guests, and 42% of the non-veterans who’d lived through a hard event relived one during ceremony. So start with this life before you go looking for another.
I’ve run this center with our lead healer since 2017. He has 54 years of practice behind him, and I first came to ayahuasca as a grieving guest. People often drink hoping to see who they were before. What comes up is often closer to home, and what you do with it the next morning matters more than the vision.
Can ayahuasca show you past lives?
It can show you scenes that feel exactly like one. Whether any of them happened is a question no study has settled.
Ayahuasca past lives are visions during an ayahuasca ceremony that feel like memories of a life before this one, sometimes ending in a death you seem to remember. They can come as calm pictures or as fear in the body. The certainty you feel is part of the experience. It isn’t proof of where the scene came from.
I know of no published study that counts how often drinkers see a past life. The research that exists counts something nearby: how often people relive their own past in ceremony.
What ayahuasca past lives feel like on the mat
Some guests watch the scene like a film, from a safe distance. Others feel it land in the body, with fear, grief, a racing heart or the sense of dying.
In our ceremonies the healers start to sing at 9 PM, and the 3 hours after that are when visions run strongest. The maloca is fully dark by then. In that dark, a memory, a dream and an image you’ve never seen before can all feel equally real.
That’s worth knowing before you drink. The feeling that this happened to you comes with the medicine, whatever the scene turns out to be.
Where does the past in a vision come from? The 2026 evidence
The best data we have measures your own past, and it shows people meet it often.
In 2023, a team from Imperial College London and the University of Georgia published a study in Scientific Reports. It followed 339 guests at 3 retreat centers in South and Central America. Guests answered surveys before their retreat, about 5 days after it, and about 3 months later.
- Of the non-veterans who’d been through an adverse life event, 42% relived one during ceremony.
- Among veterans, 59% did.
- Among non-veterans, women relived one more often than men: 57% against 32%.
- About 3% said they relived a type of event they hadn’t listed before the retreat. The authors name 3 possible reasons: the guest forgot to list it, the memory was false, or it had been repressed.
The study had no control group, so it can’t say how much of that reliving the brew caused. And it never asked about past lives. That gap matters. The research has measured this life, and this life turns up in ceremony often. If what comes back is trauma, our safety page explains what resurfacing trauma does and doesn’t mean.
One of our guests, a retired firefighter, shows how that plays out. Our lead healer said whatever was locked inside him was “very old.” It turned out to be 31 years old: a house fire from his own career. His story is in our post on ayahuasca and the brain.
This life, your family, or another life: 3 ways to read what you saw
You don’t have to decide what a vision was to use it. Sort what you saw into 1 of 3 readings. Each points to a different next step.
| Reading | What it can look like | What the evidence says | What to bring to the morning circle |
|---|---|---|---|
| This life, in costume | A scene from another era that carries a feeling you know from your own life | In the 2023 study, 42% of non-veterans with an adverse event and 59% of veterans relived one from their own past | The feeling, and where it shows up in your life now |
| Your family line | A parent, a grandparent, or a stranger standing where they once stood | Patterns pass down through genes, shared homes and what parents teach. A trauma code in DNA isn’t proven in humans | What you were handed, and what you want to stop handing on |
| Another life | A whole life you don’t recognize, sometimes ending in a death | No one has a test for it, and imagining a scene makes it feel truer | The 1 change it asks of you |
A guest came to us early in her recovery from addiction. Her first night was 3 hours of purging, crying and rage. On her 4th night she lay still. The next morning she told our head facilitator: “I saw my mother for the first time. Not the mother who hurt me. The mother who was hurt before me. I understood the chain I was continuing did not start with me.” She was still clean 14 months later.
Her vision didn’t need a past life or a gene to make sense. It showed her who had handed her the chain.
Why a vision can feel true and still be built
Feeling sure doesn’t make a memory accurate, and memory research has shown it for decades.
In a 1996 study, 46 students rated how sure they were that a list of childhood events had happened to them. They imagined some of those events 2 weeks later, and 38 finished every stage. One of the events was breaking a window with their hand. Among students who first rated it unlikely, 24% of those who imagined it grew more confident it had happened, against 12% of those who didn’t. The researchers called the effect imagination inflation.
People who report past-life memories show a related pattern. A 2009 study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology compared them with a group who reported none. On a standard word-list memory test, the past-life group made more false recalls and false recognitions. Their correct recall and their intelligence matched the other group. They also scored higher on scales that measure magical thinking and absorption.
Hypnosis research points the same way. A psychologist who had tested past-life regression in the lab reviewed the evidence in 1994 with 2 co-authors. Writing in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, they concluded that these memories tend to appear when hypnosis and structured interviews push for them. Recall, they wrote, gets rebuilt to fit a person’s expectations and beliefs.
Even the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, best known for studying children who report past lives, says it has never used hypnotic regression in its cases. It calls nearly every past personality produced under hypnosis imaginary.
None of this proves your vision was invented. It means a vivid scene can’t answer the question either way.
Is trauma passed down in your DNA?
Not in any way science has proven in humans. A human geneticist reviewed the evidence in a 2018 comment in Nature Communications. He called inherited epigenetic change in mammals, and in humans above all, a matter of controversial debate. Human studies, he wrote, can exclude genetic effects but can’t rule out shared surroundings and culture. He ended the piece skeptical.
The family line still matters. The chain runs through things you can see: your genes, the home you grew up in, and what the adults around you taught and modeled. The last 2 are what make the DNA version so hard to prove, and they’re routes you can change.
Don’t research the life you saw
Don’t build the story out. An integration guide on past-life visions suggests looking up the era, reading novels set in it and daydreaming further into the scene. Each of those makes the vision feel more real without making it more accurate.
That’s imagination inflation, done on purpose. It also eats the weeks you need for something more useful.
Guests who integrate well tend to keep a daily practice and change at least 1 real thing in their life within 3 months. They stay in touch with people who understand what they went through, and they expect bad weeks. A past-life story pulls the other way. It’s interesting enough to research for months, and far enough away that nothing in your life has to change.
So the morning after, write down 2 things: the feeling, and the 1 change the scene seems to ask of you. Leave the dates and place names alone.
The point holds outside the lab too. An anthropologist has studied ayahuasca drinkers in Australia, Peru and China. In a 2024 essay adapted from his book Global Ayahuasca, he writes that commercial ceremonies pull visions toward the past and trauma. Indigenous Amazonian practice, he writes, has leaned toward the present and the future: a successful hunt, visitors on their way, a sick person’s prognosis. A Shipibo maestro he quotes, at another center, told visiting guests that healing means moving forward, not back.
Our healers work in a mestizo lineage from Loreto, and their consultations look forward too. In the first one, on day 3 or 4, a healer tells you what the medicine showed them about your condition and which plants could help next.
Ayahuasca and the dead
The name already points at the dead. In Quechua, aya means a dead person or corpse, and waska means rope or cord, so ayahuasca is usually translated as vine of the dead.
The first night I sat with our lead healer was in December 2013, years before this center existed. I hadn’t told anyone in Peru about my younger brother, who had died that February. He looked at me for a long time and said, through a translator: “You are carrying your brother. He is heavy. The vine can help you put him down.”
That night I felt my brother as a warmth, not as a ghost, and I said a goodbye I’d never been allowed to say. Our lead healer didn’t tell me who my brother had been in another life. He told me what I was carrying now.
If the person you meet in ceremony is someone you’ve lost, our grief guide covers what the only controlled trial found. If the death you meet is your own, that’s closer to ego dissolution, which for some guests feels like dying.
The morning after a past-life vision
Bring it to the 11 AM circle, and save your questions about what it was for your healer consultation. This is where a vision goes at our center, from the next morning to a year later.
| When | What happens | Who’s with you | What to bring |
|---|---|---|---|
| The next morning, 11 AM | The integration circle on the covered platform, 90 minutes to 2 hours. No one answers or advises while you talk | Our head facilitator, a clinical social worker licensed in California from 2013 to 2020. Some mornings our lead healer joins and says, through a translator, what he saw in the night | The feeling, and the 1 change the scene seems to ask of you |
| Days 3 to 4 and 8 to 9 | A one-to-one consultation of 20 to 40 minutes | A healer and a translator | Your questions about what the vision was |
| Weeks 1 and 3 at home | Follow-up calls, then check-ins to month 12 | Our integration staff | What has changed since you got home, and what hasn’t |
| Any time it won’t settle | Our emergency WhatsApp line, with a reply within 4 hours in waking hours, and a referral list of more than 25 therapists | Our integration staff, then a therapist who won’t treat the vision as a symptom | Whatever keeps coming back |
Hard weeks after ceremony are common. Published in 2022, the Global Ayahuasca Survey drew answers from 10,836 drinkers. Of the 7,839 whose mental health answers were analyzed, more than half described adverse effects during the following weeks and months. Most of those people, 87.6%, saw the effects as part of growing or integrating, and about 12% said they needed professional support.
Whichever center you choose, ask for its follow-up plan in writing. Our guide to vetting a retreat shows what a good answer looks like.
Who should avoid ayahuasca?
Don’t drink if you’ve had psychosis or bipolar I disorder. The same applies if a parent or sibling has schizophrenia or psychosis and you’ve never taken a psychedelic, or if you take lithium.
SSRIs and SNRIs need a taper supervised by your own doctor and our medical director: at least 6 weeks off the medication, or 8 for fluoxetine. Uncontrolled heart disease, uncontrolled blood pressure and pregnancy also rule you out.
Our screening rejects 13% of applicants, and a physician reads every medical form. The family question came from a night in 2022, when a guest who hadn’t mentioned his father’s schizophrenia developed acute psychosis in ceremony. Since then, every applicant has to tell us about psychiatric illness in their parents and siblings.
Ayahuasca past lives can make for the most vivid night of a retreat. What lasts is what you change at home. Our 10-day retreat leaves rest nights between its 4 ceremonies, and all our services are listed on 1 page. If a vision like this is on your mind and you’d like to talk before you apply, write to us.
FAQs
Are ayahuasca past lives real?
Nobody can check. A vivid scene can’t settle it: in a 1996 memory study, students who imagined breaking a window as a child were twice as likely to grow more confident it had happened, 24% against 12%. Treat a past-life vision as information about your life now.
Are ayahuasca past lives common?
I don’t know of a study that counts them. What researchers have counted is reliving your own past: a 2023 study that followed 339 retreat guests found that 42% of non-veterans who’d been through an adverse life event relived one in ceremony, and 59% of veterans did.
What should you do after a past-life vision on ayahuasca?
Write down the feeling and the 1 change it seems to ask of you, and leave the history books closed. Bring it to the morning circle and to your healer consultation. Guests who integrate well tend to change at least 1 real thing in their life within 3 months.
Is trauma stored in your DNA?
Not in any way that’s been proven in humans. A 2018 comment in Nature Communications says human studies can’t rule out shared surroundings and culture as the explanation, and its author remained skeptical. Families still pass patterns down through how they live, and you can change those.
Does ayahuasca release trauma?
It often brings trauma back up. A 2023 study that followed 339 retreat guests found that 42% of non-veterans and 59% of veterans with a past adverse event relived one. Those who relived an event showed a slightly larger drop in neuroticism afterward, though the study had no control group.
Is ayahuasca a near death experience?
It can feel like one. At the peak, you can lose track of where you end, and for some guests that feels like dying. It ends as the brew wears off, and a facilitator stays with anyone who’s frightened.
Who should avoid ayahuasca?
People with a history of psychosis or bipolar I, people whose parent or sibling has schizophrenia or psychosis and who have no psychedelic experience, and anyone on lithium. SSRIs and SNRIs need a supervised taper of at least 6 weeks first. Our screening rejects 13% of applicants.