Let me start with something obvious that nobody says clearly enough: sex is one of the most powerful forces in human behavior. It is everywhere, always, quietly pressuring everything. Put it inside an ayahuasca ceremony, where the heart cracks open, where defenses dissolve, where a person experiences, for the first time in years or perhaps decades, what it feels like to love without armor, and you have a situation that is, in a sense, almost structurally designed to produce confusion.

I have seen it many times. Someone arrives at the center carrying the usual Western cargo: the busy mind, the defended heart, the carefully managed distance from their own feelings. And more often than not, it is a woman. 

I hear it in the talking circles, spoken with the quiet certainty of someone who has made peace with a difficult truth: my heart is behind a wall. Not said as a complaint, but as a statement of fact, almost with pride, the pride of someone who built something solid after learning, the hard way, that the world can hurt you or use you, and that staying open is a form of recklessness they can no longer afford. 

The wall was not built in a single moment. It went up brick by brick, each one laid after a betrayal, a disappointment, a love that turned out to be something other than love. And after enough time, the wall stopped feeling like a defense and began to feel like a self. They forgot there was ever anything on the other side of it. Then the medicine does what the medicine does. The heart opens. And this is real, not a hallucination, not a symbolic event, but something physiologically and psychologically genuine. 

The problem is that most people in the modern world have never felt an open heart, or have not felt one since childhood, and so they have no internal reference for what they are experiencing. They cannot recognize it as themselves. They need to attach it somewhere. And the nearest available surface is the shaman. He becomes, in that moment, not who he actually is but what the experience requires him to be: the one who sees, the one who opened you, the teacher you were always looking for, the beloved. 

This misattribution is not stupidity or weakness. It is a perfectly predictable consequence of encountering an unfamiliar inner state without vocabulary for it. The person is not falling in love with the shaman. They are falling in love with the experience of their own open hearts, and they have no way of knowing the difference. Layer on top of this the ancient erotic charge of wanting to be the chosen disciple, the elected one, the student the master notices above all others, a hunger that appears in every monastery, every guru community, every charismatic circle in human history, and then add the raw pressure of sexual drive, which needs no altered state and no excuse to operate, and the situation stops being mysterious. It becomes almost inevitable.

This is the psychological engine underneath everything else that this article will explore. Before cultural codes and cosmological systems, before market dynamics and ethics, there is this: an open heart that doesn’t yet know what it’s feeling, reaching toward the nearest warm body.

Sex, Ceremony, and the Question Nobody Asks Clearly

In the world of ayahuasca retreats, few subjects generate as much discomfort as sex. Not the erotic imagery that sometimes appears in visions, not the symbolic sexuality of dream and myth, but the concrete, recurring fact that sexual encounters occasionally arise between healers and the people they serve. The subject circulates in whispers. When it surfaces publicly, it tends to collapse immediately into one of two reactions: scandal, which frames every such encounter as predation and abuse, or cultural relativism, which frames Western discomfort as prudishness projected onto traditions where sexuality is supposedly more natural, more honest, less neurotic. Both reactions are emotionally satisfying. Both miss the point.

I have lived for years inside Amazonian communities and facilitated hundreds of ceremonies. I have seen these situations arise from many directions, from manipulation, yes, but also from misunderstanding, from transference, from genuine mutual attraction that developed outside the ceremonial context, and from the simple force of two people spending intense time in extreme psychological proximity. To treat all of these as identical is not ethical clarity. It is intellectual laziness dressed as moral seriousness.

What interests me is the deeper question: why does this pattern appear so consistently across traditions, cultures, and centuries? The same constellation keeps returning: spiritual authority, altered states, vulnerability, gratitude, desire, confusion, in monasteries and yoga ashrams, in therapy rooms and guru communities, in Catholic priesthoods and Sufi orders. This is not a peculiarity of Amazonian shamanism. 

It is a feature of any situation in which one person holds concentrated, unsupervised power over another person who is in a state of psychological openness. The medicine is different each time. The structure is always the same.

Two Cultures, Two Sexual Languages

Before going further, it is necessary to say something that tends to get lost in these discussions: there is no single indigenous sexuality, and the diversity of Amazonian cultures on this subject is enormous. I have spent time with communities in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, and the sexual systems I encountered varied as widely as their languages. Some had strict marital regulations. Others had diffuse concepts of paternity, in which children belonged to the whole clan rather than to a biological father. Jealousy, in some contexts, was culturally minimized to near nonexistence. Nudity, bathing, and bodily proximity were ordinary social acts rather than charged erotic signals.

Having lived inside these worlds, I know from personal experience how much of what a Westerner reads as sexual is, in those contexts, simply social. And I know how much of what a Westerner performs unconsciously as seduction is, there, not symbolic but literal. This creates a structural problem that I would call semiotic rather than moral. Western sexuality is a theatre of coded gestures, desire communicated through suggestion, ambiguity, controlled exposure, and deniability maintained at every step. In many indigenous contexts, sexuality is more direct and less theatrical: what is offered is offered plainly, what is refused is refused without drama, and the line between gesture and invitation is considerably thinner.

When a Western woman bathes naked in the river, moves freely in her body, displays physical ease and openness, she is expressing freedom. She means nothing beyond that. But inside a cultural grammar where nudity is ordinary and seduction is not ritualized, the same gesture can read as an invitation. The confusion operates in the other direction too: touching, physical warmth, and bodily attention that are simply affectionate in indigenous communication are often read by foreigners as erotic signals when no such intention exists. I have seen both kinds of misreading produce situations that neither party intended and that both afterward struggled to explain.

Cultural distance explains confusion. What it cannot explain is why these situations cluster so specifically around ceremonial contexts and spiritual authority. Misunderstanding is noise. It does not produce structure. For structure, we have to go elsewhere.

The Shaman’s Fear

Here, I need to complicate the dominant narrative. The assumption in most Western commentary is that sexual situations in ceremonial contexts are driven primarily by shamans and facilitated by coercion. My experience suggests something considerably more complicated. In a significant number of cases, it is the guest who initiates, not because she has been manipulated into it, but because of the transference mechanism I described at the beginning of this article, operating with a force that surprises everyone, including the person experiencing it. 

Gratitude becomes love. Being seen becomes desire. The experience of dissolution and reconnection produces an erotic charge that has almost nothing to do with the actual person of the healer and everything to do with what that person represents inside the altered state.

A shaman I know told me once, with characteristic directness, that after ceremonies, it happened many times that Western women entered his room naked and explicitly offered sex. He always refused. Not because he believed it was wrong, in his cultural world, the possibility of sleeping with a Western woman was considered interesting, even somewhat prestigious. He refused because he was afraid. Afraid the ayahuasca spirit would become hungry. Afraid it would withdraw its protection. Afraid of losing his power, his health, maybe his life. 

Among traditional healers, I have heard more than once of shamans who died suddenly and inexplicably after sleeping with a client during a dieta, deaths interpreted not as a coincidence but as punishment for someone who had violated the agreement.

This is a completely different ethical architecture than anything in Western professional ethics. The boundary is not social, not legal, not based on principles of consent or harm. It is cosmological. The enforcement mechanism is not a licensing board but an invisible, implacable presence that punishes betrayal with illness or death. When that belief is genuine and inhabited, it constrains behavior with an effectiveness that no external regulation can match. 

The shaman does not reason his way to the ethical decision. He feels the danger in his body. When that cosmological structure is intact and believed from the inside, it works. When tourism erodes it, through money, through admiration, through spending years surrounded by people who do not share the ontology, what disappears is not sexuality but the fear that once kept it in its place.

When the Spirits Leave, and the Market Arrives

This is where the analysis becomes uncomfortable, because it requires acknowledging that the contemporary ayahuasca world contains at least three quite different kinds of practitioners, and that the risk of exploitation is distributed very unevenly among them. There is the healer embedded in a living cosmological tradition, inheriting a dense web of prohibitions, community accountability, and metaphysical consequence. 

The healer navigates a hybrid space between tradition and modernity, partially believing, partially performing. And there is the one who has adopted ceremonial techniques without inheriting the ontological structure that once made them governable, operating primarily within a market logic in which charisma is the currency and admiration the feedback loop.

In traditional contexts, the shaman is not the protagonist. He is the conduit. The medicine does not belong to him; he serves it. Power is not his identity; it is his responsibility. Becoming a healer in these traditions is rarely described as self-actualization. It is described as a burden, sometimes as an affliction; one is chosen reluctantly, and one serves. When that understanding shifts, when the healer begins to speak primarily of his power, his special gifts, his unique destiny, something structural has already changed. The axis has tilted. Authority has fused with ego. And where ego holds authority without accountability, without community oversight, without institutional regulation, without cosmological fear, the history of human behavior gives us very clear predictions about what happens next: predation.

The market accelerates everything. Money replaces reciprocity. Prestige replaces lineage. Spiritual authority becomes personal branding, and the feedback loop is closed by the admiration of precisely the people over whom the authority is exercised. I have watched this dynamic produce, in otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people, a slow inflation of self that they themselves do not perceive. The forest used to correct this. Community corrected this. The spirits, when genuinely believed in, corrected this. Tourism does not correct it. Tourism rewards it.

Toward Something We Don’t Have Yet

Neither indigenous morality nor Western professional ethics is sufficient to regulate sexuality in contemporary ceremonial contexts. This is not a criticism of either; it is a recognition that both were built for entirely different worlds. Indigenous systems presupposed small communities in which everyone knew everyone, where kinship, reputation, and genuine cosmological belief created constraints that did not need to be articulated because they were lived from the inside. Western clinical ethics presupposed hospitals, licensing boards, legal accountability, and secular institutions. 

Ayahuasca tourism belongs to neither. It is a genuinely new human situation: profound psychological vulnerability, ancient medicines, foreign strangers, concentrated individual authority, money, and a cosmological framework that may or may not be believed by the person administering it.

To appeal to tradition here is insufficient because the tradition is already being practiced outside the conditions that made it function. Appealing to Western law is insufficient because the practices occur in jurisdictions where that law is thin and lacks an interpretive framework for what is actually happening. What the situation calls for is something more honest and more difficult: the conscious construction of a new ethics, not imported from anywhere, but grown from a clear-eyed recognition of the specific vulnerabilities this context creates.

That ethics would need to begin with the acknowledgment I made at the start of this essay, that when someone drinks a medicine that opens the heart, dissolves psychological defenses, amplifies attachment, and produces states that are routinely misattributed to the nearest present person, the healer acquires a form of responsibility that no traditional system fully anticipated. 

The guest reaching toward the shaman in the night is not crazy, is not morally compromised, is not even necessarily wrong about what she is feeling. She has an open heart. She has never had one before. She doesn’t know whose it is. The healer who understands this mechanism, and any serious practitioner will recognize it from experience, is obligated by that understanding regardless of what his cosmology permits, regardless of what she is offering.

This does not require pretending desire doesn’t exist. It does not require asceticism or the moralization of sexuality. It requires one recognition, applied consistently: that power reshapes freedom quietly, without announcement, even when no coercion is intended, and no harm is consciously inflicted. The most common damage in these situations does not come from monsters. It comes from ordinary human desire, operating inside an architecture of authority and vulnerability that nobody designed and nobody yet knows how to govern.

We built something new. Now we have to figure out the rules.