From Personal Healing to Reciprocity: Alison Eakin on Ayahuasca, Indigenous Leadership, and Prayer
On this episode of Cura Medicina, Alison Eakin joins Derek Dodds to reflect on her path with ayahuasca, the importance of learning within a lineage, and why honoring the medicine means listening to the Indigenous communities who have safeguarded it.
Alison Eakin’s relationship with ayahuasca began in the Ecuadorian jungle in 2000. During a break from college, she traveled through South America when curiosity led her to a small village, then to a traditional healer’s home in the forest. What began as an experiment became a profound encounter with healing, prayer, and a way of seeing the world she had not grown up with.
The experience changed her life, but Alison says it also left her feeling overwhelmed. Back home, she struggled to find people who could understand or validate what had happened. She was grateful for the healing she experienced, yet unsure where she could safely return to the medicine. It would be more than a decade before she drank ayahuasca again.
In this conversation, Alison and Derek speak candidly about those long pauses in a spiritual path: the time it can take to integrate an experience, the life events that may call someone back, and the humility required to approach powerful traditions with care.
A path shaped by healing and hardship
Alison describes her visual impairment as one of her greatest teachers. She does not present it as something that simply needs to be overcome. Instead, she reflects on how it has shaped her studies, spiritual practice, and commitment to service.
“I personally am a big believer in everything having a purpose and a meaning,” she tells Derek. “For me, my path with this visual impairment has been an amazing teacher.”
Her story is not offered as a promise of a particular medical outcome. Rather, it shows how a difficult experience can become part of a person’s search for meaning and connection. Alison’s journey has included ayahuasca, yoga, breathwork, and years of learning from elders and different ceremonial lineages.
She also speaks about the importance of discernment. After her first experience, she wanted to return for more healing but did not feel ready. Finding a safe, trustworthy setting mattered. She eventually returned after years of life and study, and after someone close to her encouraged her to consider ceremony again.
Learning with humility and within relationship
Alison has spent years supporting an intertribal community in California, including its sweat lodge and prayer practices. She is careful to name her position: she is of Celtic descent, is not Lakota, and does not claim authority over traditions that are not hers.
Her reflections on vision quest and ceremony are shared from her own experience and relationships. She describes a path of learning through community, service, and guidance from elders—not simply collecting powerful experiences. Over time, she says, it becomes important to deepen one’s relationship with a tradition and the people who carry it.
That perspective runs through the episode. Alison encourages listeners to approach Indigenous practices with respect, to learn from the people who hold those traditions, and to understand that practices differ across communities. There is no single Indigenous viewpoint, and no one conversation can speak for every nation or lineage.
An Indigenous-centered gathering in Spain
Much of the conversation turns to the 2026 ayahuasca forum in Spain, which Alison had recently attended. She describes the gathering as a significant moment because Indigenous people helped shape and organize the event, rather than being invited only to offer a brief contribution to a program designed by others.
According to Alison, around 1,700 people attended, including more than 100 Indigenous participants representing 35 tribes. The forum brought Indigenous leaders, researchers, scientists, and people working in psychedelic care into conversation. Sessions were live-translated into English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
One of the forum’s central questions was how traditional knowledge is recognized. Alison recounts Indigenous speakers asking why decades of observation, practice, and healing in their communities are not treated as knowledge simply because they do not follow Western research methods. The discussion also raised concerns about efforts to isolate ayahuasca’s components or develop pharmaceutical products without fully acknowledging the ceremony, relationships, songs, and cultural knowledge surrounding the medicine.
For Alison, listening is essential. Indigenous communities are asking for an equal voice in conversations about the medicine’s future: to be consulted, to share their perspectives, and to have their knowledge and rights respected as interest in ayahuasca grows.
Ceremony, responsibility, and the Amazon
The forum also addressed safety. Alison describes Indigenous speakers emphasizing the role of the person holding a ceremony: their training, experience, and ability to care for the people gathered. She points listeners to preparation and integration resources discussed at the event, while stressing the importance of direct guidance from the people responsible for a ceremony.
The conversation then widens beyond the ceremony space. Alison speaks about the pressures facing Indigenous communities and the Amazon, including deforestation and extractive industries. She believes people who seek healing through the medicine should also consider how to support the communities and places connected to it.
“If we’re going to be using the medicine,” she says, “I personally believe it’s our responsibility and our duty to get involved in some type of social activism, some type of reciprocity.”
For Alison, reciprocity can begin with attention: learning whose land and knowledge a practice comes from, listening to Indigenous voices, and supporting work that helps communities live with dignity and protect their homelands.
She shares a moving example from a visit to a Nomanawa community, where a boat collision injured people. Rather than withdrawing into grief, the community gathered for ceremony and prayed for their relatives. The story became a lesson in collective care: meeting hardship together, with love and prayer directed toward those who need support.
From “What can I receive?” to “How can I serve?”
Derek reflects on how his own relationship with ayahuasca has changed over the years. At first, he says, his focus was on what healing he might receive. With time, his prayers have increasingly turned toward others, humanity, and the spiritual forces he feels connected to.
Alison echoes that movement from the personal toward the collective. She describes trying to carry a prayer of service into everyday life: “How can I use my gifts in service?”
The episode is a wide-ranging conversation about ayahuasca, Indigenous traditions, personal transformation, and the responsibilities that can accompany spiritual practice. At its heart is an invitation to listen more deeply—to elders, to community, and to the people whose knowledge has carried these medicines across generations.
Listen to Alison Eakin on Cura Medicina for the full conversation with Derek Dodds.
