When Ayahuasca Reveals Past Lives

It’s said that ayahuasca has the power to clean various disorders and misalignments at the root, supporting healing from the bottom up. What constitutes a deeper root than our past lives? Indeed, it seems ayahuasca can help us face the karmic consequences of past actions, be these from a previous incarnation or an ancestral inheritance.

Let me unpack this a bit more here.

We modern folks are in the beginning stages of working with ayahuasca. We haven’t yet completely understood what it’s all about—but for some of us, it’s about going into the cellar of psyche and digging deeper, unearthing the personal, the familial, the ancestral and collective levels. Unlocking the gene codes, so to speak.

This work takes us through all sorts of human junk and clutter, down into primordial dungeons where we locked away parts of ourselves, where our ancestors locked away parts of themselves, because the trauma was too much to bear. The ancient rejected secrets of our species are packed away in the depths of our psyche, and all needs to come to the light.

It’s a humbling as well as a startling medicine experience to be catapulted into a different time and realm, and feel so directly involved. You witness other times and other beings, you feel rage, anguish, terror, love in your present body, you see images that have nothing to do with your current life, yet seem to apply to you anyway, personally and intimately. The impact of these experiences is such that it’s impossible to avoid the sense that you’re directly implicated in some way.

So, as I said: It seems ayahuasca has the ability to make us face the karmic consequences of past actions, be they past-life or ancestral inheritance. To be clear, it’s possible to tune into these realms without the assistance of medicine. Meditation, shamanic journeying, hypnosis, or uncanny dreams can equally bring us here. But various stories I’ve heard, along with my own personal experiences, lead me to believe that ayahuasca can reveal previously unseen karma. Which lends new meaning to the translation of its name as “Vine of the Dead.”

What Is Karma, Anyway?

“Karma, then, is the arrangement of our life so that we learn. It is not some impersonal mechanism that just lands on us. In this sense, we go through everything we go through because something very deep within us requires it, in order for us to become who we ultimately are and need to be. It is, always, the ultimate reality of the universe flowing through us, being us, and coming to its own fruition in and through us.”—Reggie Ray, in Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body

Karma is the cause and effect that shapes our experience—the way our past conditioning influences our present actions, which in turn shape our future state. Assuming past lives exist (and I, along with millions of humans, believe they do), it’s implicit that karma follows us from lifetime to lifetime—and it’s not surprising that ayahuasca, as a revealer of hidden information, can open our perception to see wider dimensions of our current incarnation.

Sometimes these apparent past-life recollections appear like images in a movie, where one receives the information in a relatively serene form. Sometimes it’s an utterly visceral (in the true sense of the word) experience, with thrashing and terror and pain. Reddit threads are full of stories of ayahuasca generating memories of past lives, and I have examples to share here as well:

• A woman who witnessed life as a Native American man several hundred years ago—just ordinary living, but the clarity of the experience struck her deeply.
• A friend who was shown multiple lifetimes that ended in suicide, ending with the message: “Right now is the oldest you’ve ever been in a human body.”
• A client who in ceremony vividly saw a life in which she was apprenticed to a shaman who cursed her to be under the influence of her own self-blame. And indeed, in this life, she was constantly questioning her decisions—a karmic chunk that this clear seeing helped to release.

Ancestors or Past Lives?

Admittedly a past-life memory can be a metaphor—sometimes psyche likes to dress things up to make a point. And as I explore in another post here, these kind of images and visions can also apply to our ancestral/genetic past. I’ve come to understand that our ancestral heritage of trauma is tattooed onto our genes, and that ayahuasca work can help release this, unlocking the codes of the ancient war-torture-rape-murder-horror programs that we all carry, so these old imprints can fly to the light.

If you’re currently in a fortunate incarnation, you might say, “Hey, my ancestors had it pretty easy,” but go back beyond your great-grandparents, back beyond the people you know of, to three centuries ago, where you have 2,000 ancestors, each of whom had their own unique life, not all of which were cushy. Or go back 1,000 years, at which point you have an unfathomable number of ancestors, many of whom surely suffered through lifetimes that were nasty, brutish and short.

Consequence and Responsibility

In my very first ceremony, I was shown repeated scenes of a particular transgression occurring across different places and times. I honestly didn’t know what to make of this, and I had no idea what it had to do with me.

At one point in that long strange trip, I was lying in the lap of an ageless, loving woman who I somehow knew was Ayahuasca, and I entered into wordless dialogue with her. I asked her a question, and the word “Consequence,” written in big letters, arose in my visual field for me to contemplate. Consequence: the result of an action. Karma.

I was told, silently, only that single word scrolling across the screen of my vision, that I needed to accept the results of certain past-life transgressions. The congenital hip dysplasia I was born with, and the ensuing surgeries I experienced as an infant and small child, were the calibrated and specific result of my actions in the past.

In that moment I knew that all that was required was my simple acceptance—not guilt, just acceptance. I needed to own this. And I did, humbly and fully. Once it was pointed out, there was really nothing else left to do. Owning it felt like a release.

Over time, with repeated journeying and many plant dietas, the story filled in further: lifetimes of transgression in my karma and in my DNA, as both perpetrator and victim, with this lifetime the one where, with the help of the plants, I get to see this fully, hold both of those lines in my hands, victim and perpetrator, and offer them up to Creator to be released.

Lying in the hammock on multiple dietas, I’ve had many hours to reflect on how ayahuasca and the plantas maestras call us to a more expanded level of soul work, at once refined and profound, one that works not just with us as individuals, but with the species, through the ancestral and collective dimensions of the DNA we carry.

Looking back over the past 12 years of my work with plant medicine, I am in awe of this possibility. I’ve learned and practice many different trauma-healing modalities, but none have shown me the multi-lifetime karmic/ancestral taproot to the extent the plants have. It’s a progressive refinement, maybe a graduate-level program in upgrading the human species.

Repairing Karmic Transgressions: A Brief Guide

So. What do you do if ayahuasca shows you past-life transgressions? To some extent, integration itself involves taking responsibility. How each of us does this is as unique as our particular karma, but here are some suggestions for what to do when faced with apparent past-life karma—practical actions to engender restoration. Mix and match according to your needs.

First of all, get curious about the time/place/culture that you saw. Explore this over time—in ceremony, yes, but also in daydreams, in meditation and reflection, in active research. In service to this I often find it useful to delve into the history of the specific period/place, using Wikipedia and Google, and to immerse myself in fiction set during that period (Druids, Romans, Celts).

• Open up your intuition and gather evidence. Don’t judge or discount at this point. Use active imagination to daydream further into these scenarios. What happened? Gather all the information possible.
• If you’re astrologically fluent, many insights can be gleaned by looking at the sign and house placements of the Lunar Nodes in your birth chart, and any tight aspects to these. The South Node in particular is considered a clear significator of past incarnations, as well as the circumstances of your early life (funny how these often intersect.)
• With this information, you can free-associate: what kind of past does your South Node indicate? What qualities might be entrenched here in a deep-seated way—both talents/skills, and karmic ruts you may be stuck in? Jan Spiller’s book Astrology for the Soul is particularly useful here. As well, I offer archetypal astrological readings that can potentially shed light on confusing or mysterious revelations that have arisen on your journeys.
• Then: discern. Unpack the story further. again perhaps relying on active imagination. Who was hurt, and how? What was the harm caused? What did I do? How many times, in how many lifetimes, has this pattern occurred? Explore—spiritually, energetically, intuitively—what you’ve been shown.
• Ask: What is my responsibility here?
• Own it. This means saying: Here and now, I take responsibility for my past actions. You might do a little ritual where you sit, breathe, light a candle, feel, and say: I own this fully. Cultivate the honesty of true regret. Avoid prolonged wallowing in guilt, which only paralyses and is really just another form of ego-clinging (I’m so bad. How could I have done that? How could anyone every forgive me?) Consequence and responsibility become intimately linked here.
• Determine: What are the amends to be made? Practically speaking, how can you set things right now? Sometimes the main work is symbolic or energetic (see below). Sometimes there are practical restorative actions you can take, perhaps not specific to the individual or group who was harmed, but another way to support people who have suffered similar transgressions.
• For example, you could make a commitment to donate or volunteer for a certain period of time to support an organisation that helps current victims (or their descendants) of the type of abuse you perpetuated. If you’re seeing colonization trauma, support indigenous people. If the karmic issue is slavery, support racial justice work. And so on. Sending a silent intention with the money helps too.
• If you harmed a particular individual in this lifetime, consider apologising to them—but first, be sure this will not add harm. If you reasonably believe that it could, perhaps write or speak a clean apology to their spirit instead.
• If the person you harmed is no longer alive, have a conversation with their spirit, express your regret, and make peace with their soul. This can be beneficial to them, but mainly It’s good for you—a way of aligning all your various selves and soul fragments, past, present and future, and bringing them into focus, clearing the decks so that your soul’s purpose can come into clearer alignment.
• Try active imagination: You can also use active imagination to play with different possibilities, alternative actions. You’ve seen what happened that you don’t want to support any longer. What do you wish you’d done instead? Visualise letting the girl go, or telling the shaman to stop, or putting down your weapons and walking home. Feel your way into what ensues.
• If this is right action, you can deepen your experience in the imaginal realm, and through this, repattern and realign both reality and your system. If the alternative you’ve come up with somehow doesn’t fit, don’t insist. Keep praying, keep expressing your sincere regret, keep realigning with the light.

Our entanglement with past transgressions is not just individual or karmic—it can also be ancestral or collective. Healing this can occur in many different ways; it doesn’t necessarily require ayahuasca’s help. If you’re interested in digging further into ancestral dimensions, you might explore Systemic Family Constellation Work with a good facilitator, and also the work of Thomas Hubl and Daniel Foor.

If you have insights or suggestions, please add in the comments below.