Gratitude after ayahuasca: what science has noticed

When someone is about to receive the ayahuasca medicine for the first time, the question that comes up most is always the same: “Am I going to throw up?”

It is a real question, and many people do go through that. But there is another one that almost nobody asks, and it may be the most important: “Am I going to feel gratitude?”

Anyone who has had a deep experience knows what I mean. At some point a feeling arrives that is hard to explain, a love that asks for nothing in return and an enormous wish to give thanks, even for what hurt. With that in mind, I went looking: has science ever looked at gratitude in people who go through ayahuasca? It has. And what it found speaks very closely to what our house teaches.

What the researchers noticed

In 2024, researchers followed 54 people during a season of ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica (Aday and colleagues, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs). Each person took part in 2 to 7 ceremonies. Before the ceremonies, one week after and one month after, they answered a questionnaire that measures how much a person appreciates life: giving thanks for what they have, living in the present moment, feeling a sense of wonder.

The result: people’s gratitude was much higher after the ceremonies. And one month later, it had not dropped. It was still there.

What made the difference

The most interesting part comes now. Gratitude grew more in the people who had a deeper experience, the kind with a sense of something sacred and a great deal of wonder. The number of ceremonies, on the other hand, made no difference: those who took part in 2 and those who took part in 7 did not end up with more gratitude because of it.

The authors themselves sum it up this way: what matters is the quality of the experience, not the quantity.

Another, much larger study heard from 6,877 people who had taken ayahuasca, in more than 40 countries (Perkins and colleagues, Frontiers in Pharmacology). It found a link between the context of the ceremony (how it is guided, the support the person receives and the reason they went) and wellbeing and mental health outcomes. It is a questionnaire answered only once, so it shows a relationship and does not prove that one factor causes the other.

If quality matters, what surrounds the experience matters

A 2021 review on ayahuasca and other psychedelics (Eleftheriou and Thomas, Frontiers in Psychiatry) points out that preparation, guidance and integration shape the experience. Integration is what the person does after the ceremony to understand what they lived and carry it into their life. The same review notes that difficult reactions are usually attributed to a context without support.

This matches what we teach in our house: the medicine is sacred, but for the experience to be truly sacred, the setting, the guidance and the direction must be sacred too. That is why, before any ceremony, we carry out a screening to see whether the person has the health and the conditions to receive the medicine. Responsibility comes before everything.

What MahaGi teaches about gratitude

Now something that comes from the teaching and the methodology of Shaman MahaGi Wahbe, and not from a study. She often says:

Without gratitude, the richest are miserable. With gratitude, the poorest are rich.

In one of her guided meditations, the person closes their eyes and gives thanks to their own body, down to its smallest parts, approaching it with tenderness instead of demands: “My dear DNA, I have come to visit you, how I love you!”

The gratitude that ayahuasca awakens can be cultivated in the days that follow, as a process we keep practicing, day after day. That is what our house teaches: an invitation to practice, not a promise of results.

So we do not jump to conclusions

The gratitude study had no comparison group, followed people for only one month and took place at a ceremony center, where the setting itself may have helped. The studies show links, and they do not prove that ayahuasca “causes” all of this on its own. None of them measured any change in DNA. And none of this replaces medical or psychological care.

What can be said with confidence is this: gratitude appeared, it stayed, and it was greater in those who lived the experience more deeply. And if depth matters more than quantity, the care of whoever guides the ceremony and of the place where it happens is no longer a detail.

And you, what was the first thing you felt grateful for after your experience with ayahuasca?