When Worlds Meet: Reflections from the World Ayahuasca Forum 2026

What happens when Indigenous knowledge keepers, Western researchers, therapists, lawyers, facilitators, advocates, and people who work directly with these medicines all enter the same room—not necessarily to agree, but to listen?

World Ayahuasca Forum 2026: Many Worlds, One Shared Conversation

By Sarah Lynn Thomas

Co-CEO – Behold Retreats

World Ayahuasca Forum 2026 | Girona, Spain | September 11–13
1,700 people. Many worlds. A shared conversation.

The World Ayahuasca Forum 2026 brought together Indigenous spiritual leaders alongside neuroscientists, anthropologists, physicians, lawyers, plant medicine facilitators and practitioners, artists, advocates, researchers, and others.

The official program moved across subjects including ancestral sciences, neuroscience, globalization, cultural memory, law, integration, ethics, and Indigenous rights.

Indigenous elders and spiritual leaders spoke about medicines their communities have worked with across generations. Neuroscientists presented data. Therapists discussed integration. Lawyers explored rights and regulation. Facilitators listened. Artists, advocates, researchers, and people whose lives have been changed by these medicines shared their perspectives.

What seemed to hold the gathering together was not complete agreement, but a recognition that something important is happening.

“When the world is suffering, the plants appear.” — Pilar Vergés

We see these medicines entering global awareness in many forms: in scientific laboratories and clinical research, in conversations about mental health and consciousness, in retreat and ceremonial settings, and increasingly in public conversations about law, religious freedom, Indigenous rights, and cultural protection.

Ayahuasca has moved far beyond the Amazon. The question is no longer simply whether that movement will continue.

The deeper question is how.

Across the World Ayahuasca Forum 2026, versions of the same questions surfaced again and again:

• How does medicine travel without becoming extraction?
• How can Indigenous knowledge remain alive and respected rather than becoming source material for another industry?
• What can Western science contribute—and what might it need to learn?
• What does meaningful reciprocity actually look like?
• How do we protect safety without stripping away ceremony?
• How do we make space for different ways of understanding healing, consciousness, nature, and the human being?
• And what responsibilities do organizations like Behold have when we participate in this ecosystem?

A message we heard from several Indigenous leaders during the opening circle was one of willingness to share. Their medicines and knowledge were not being presented as something that must remain hidden from the world.

But sharing was repeatedly accompanied by another message: respect the knowledge, the people, the territories, and the relationships that carry the medicine.

There wasn’t one answer being presented. There were questions being held together.

Learning Through Circle and Conversation

Some conversations took the familiar form of presentations and panels. Others happened in the “Warivi Maloca,” where chairs and bodies gathered in circles rather than rows.

The form itself changed the conversation.

It felt familiar to us—closer to the “Mambeaderos” (mambe circles) we hold within our community in Costa Rica, where the purpose is not simply to deliver information but to listen, exchange, and allow understanding to emerge together.

The name WARIVI, we learned, means “the house where everyone fits, while being different.”

That spirit extended beyond conversation. Music filled the gathering throughout the Forum, from an open stage during lunch to the songs of Yawanawá, Huni Kuin, Makairy Fulni-ô, and others who gathered in the Maloca as each day came toward its close.

For Danny [Danny Yepez, Co-CEO, Behold Retreats] and me, there was something deeply familiar in those moments.

After days of moving between Indigenous sciences, integration, neuroscience, law, rights, and reciprocity, we would find ourselves back in circle—listening to songs we knew alongside songs we had never heard, watching people dance, and remembering that not all knowledge is transmitted through words.

Perhaps that was one of the quiet lessons of the World Ayahuasca Forum 2026 itself: different ways of knowing do not always need to be translated into one another in order to sit together.

Why Behold Retreats Was There

We also ask ourselves some of the same questions:

Are we working in right relationship with the traditions from which these medicines come? Are we practicing reciprocity rather than extraction? Are we preserving ceremony rather than reducing medicine to an experience or compound? Are we listening to Indigenous communities rather than merely speaking about them?

We left Girona encouraged by many of the choices we have already made—and equally aware that right relationship is not something we can simply declare achieved.

It is something we have to keep practicing.

In many moments, we found ourselves quietly thinking, Yes. This is something we already deeply believe.

And almost immediately came the second thought:

And how can we go further?

So perhaps our answer is not simply “yes.”

It is “yes, and…”

Right Relationship

Our ceremonies are led by traditional healers and knowledge keepers who carry living traditions.

The Forum affirmed the importance of that choice—and expanded the circle of people from whom we can listen and learn.

Our responsibility is not only to remain in relationship with the medicine people we know and love, but to stay in conversation with the wider Indigenous and global community.

Reciprocity

We believe reciprocity must accompany the medicine.

That already shapes how we work with our medicine teams and how, through Sovereignty Alliance, we build relationships of mutual exchange with Indigenous communities in Costa Rica.

And the World Ayahuasca Forum 2026 pushed us to keep asking harder questions:

What does meaningful reciprocity look like as these medicines travel farther from their territories of origin? Who benefits? Who decides? What responsibilities travel with the medicine?

For years, one small way we have practiced reciprocity within medicine communities has been through art.

When we or members of our team travel to Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and elsewhere, we buy directly from Indigenous artists and communities, bring their work home, and offer it within our retreat community.

The money simply travels back into purchasing more.

I love knowing whose hands created the pieces that continue their journeys around the world.

At the Forum market, I selected pieces to bring home as gifts and to share with our guests.

Near the end of the gathering, when the market had finally quieted, I asked one of the women if she could tell me which communities had created several pieces I was holding.

Instead of giving me a quick answer, she stopped what she was doing and took me through them one by one—telling me about the people behind the work and pointing out artists who were there at the Forum themselves.

It was a small interaction, but it stayed with me.

Reciprocity can sound like a large and complicated idea.

Sometimes it begins much more simply: knowing whose hands created what we carry, knowing where it came from, and remaining in relationship with the people behind it.

Ceremony and Context

We do not understand ayahuasca simply as a compound or an isolated experience.

Our wisdom keepers and healers work within ceremony, while our facilitators also help guests—many of whom come from Western cultures—prepare for the experience and carry what they learn back into their lives.

The Forum reminded us that the bridge itself deserves attention:

How do we help people encounter another way of knowing without reducing it to the worldview they already understand?

Listening

Perhaps the simplest commitment is also the most important: keep listening.

Listen to the medicine people within our own community.

Listen beyond our community.

Build relationships rather than simply gather information.

And when we hear something that asks us to change, be willing to change.

Carrying the Conversation Home

We came to Girona representing several communities and organizations, including Behold Retreats, Sovereignty Alliance, and Resonance Community.

But perhaps the most important role we carried was that of students.

We listened to Indigenous knowledge keepers whose communities have carried these medicines across generations.

We listened to scientists trying to understand them through different tools and languages.

We listened to therapists and facilitators thinking deeply about ayahuasca preparation, and to lawyers and advocates working through difficult questions of access, rights, safety, and protection.

We did not leave Girona believing that these worlds need to become one.

Part of our responsibility is then to carry that listening home—to help our guests understand the larger traditions, relationships, and responsibilities surrounding the medicine, rather than encountering ayahuasca only through the lens of their own experience.

Perhaps the work is learning how they can stand beside one another—different, respected, and in relationship.

We left the World Ayahuasca Forum 2026 encouraged by what we are already doing, challenged to look more closely at where we can do better, and grateful to remain part of the conversation.

As these medicines continue to travel, our responsibility is not simply to help people access them.

It is to ask what must travel with them.