Ayahuasca Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Sam Believ
Podcast Overview
<p><b>Ayahuasca Podcast with Sam Believ</b></p> <p><b>The #1 resource for Ayahuasca, Psychedelics, and Mental Health.</b></p> <p>Explore the transformative world of plant medicine and psychedelic therapy with <b>Sam Believ</b>, founder of <b>LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat</b>. This podcast dives deep into the healing power of Ayahuasca, offering expert clinical insights, indigenous wisdom, and raw success stories of trauma recovery and spiritual awakening.</p> <p><b>What you’ll learn:</b></p> <ul> <li> <p><b>Expert Interviews:</b> Conversations with world-renowned scientists, doctors, and shamans.</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Healing Stories:</b> Real-life accounts of overcoming PTSD, depression, and addiction through Ayahuasca.</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Integration & Safety:</b> Practical advice on Ayahuasca integration, preparation, and psychedelic-assisted therapy.</p> </li> <li> <p><b>The Frontiers of Science:</b> Latest research on Ayahuasca, Ketamine, Psilocybin, and the intersection of science and spirituality.</p> </li> </ul> <p>Whether you are a curious beginner or an experienced practitioner, join us as we bridge Western medicine with ancient Amazonian traditions to help you heal and transform your life.</p> <p><b>Visit our home:</b> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ayahuascapodcast.com" class="ng-star-inserted" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.ayahuascapodcast.com</a> <b>Retreat with us:</b> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.lawayra.com" class="ng-star-inserted" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.lawayra.com</a></p> <p><b>Top Featured Guests</b></p> <p>International Public Figures</p> <ol start="1"> <li> <p><b>Gabor Maté</b> (World-renowned expert on trauma and addiction)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Dennis McKenna</b> (Legendary ethnobotanist and psychedelic pioneer)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Wade Davis</b> (National Geographic Explorer, world-famous anthropologist)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Paul Austin</b> (Founder of The Third Wave, major figure in microdosing)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Ian McCall</b> (Former UFC fighter and psychedelic advocate)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Bill Richards</b> (Psilocybin research pioneer at Johns Hopkins)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Troy Casey</b> (The "Certified Health Nut," major social media presence)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Hamilton Souther</b> (Well-known shaman and founder of Blue Morpho)</p> </li> </ol> <p>Influential Thought Leaders & Authors</p> <ul> <li> <p><b>Dave Rabin</b> (Neuroscientist/Psychiatrist, Apollo Neuro founder)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Lauren Taus</b> (Leading psychedelic-assisted therapist)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Bia Labate</b> (Executive Director of Chacruna Institute)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Norman Ohler</b> (Author of the NYT bestseller Blitzed)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Spring Washam</b> (Prominent meditation teacher and author)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Joe Tafur</b> (Author of The Fellowship of the River)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Alex Beiner</b> (Author and executive director of Rebel Wisdom)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Jesse Harless</b> (Expert on recovery and heart-centered leadership)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Tracey Tee</b> (Founder of Moms on Mushrooms)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Kyle Buller</b> (Co-founder of Psychedelics Today)</p> </li> </ul> <p>Industry Experts & Specialized Practitioners</p> <ul> <li> <p><b>Marc Aixala</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Rick Barnett</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Steve Thayer</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Rotem Petranker</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Salimeh Tabrizi</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Ayla Schafer</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Lex Pelger</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Daniel Shankin</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Natasia Pelgrom</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Nick Courtright</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Matt Zemon</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Shawn Wells</b></p> </li> </ul>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
9/29/2023
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Recent Episodes
June 17, 2026
The art of healing with Carlos Tanner. Neurobiology, Shipibo tradition, Dietas and Ayahuasca science.
In this episode of the Ayahuasca Podcast, the host connects with Carlos Tanner. Carlos is the founder and director of the Ayahuasca Foundation, an organization he established in 2009 after moving to the Peruvian Amazon in 2004. Transitioning from his own personal healing journey to becoming a dedicated apprentice of indigenous curanderos, Carlos now bridges ancestral wisdom with modern scientific research. He is also a founding member of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, dedicating his life to helping individuals navigate trauma, healing, and deep personal transformation. Carlos opens up about how his early life and philosophical studies uniquely prepared him for shamanism, how a severe opiate addiction catalyzed a life-saving leap of faith into the Amazon, and how his work bridging clinical science with the Shipibo tradition is sparking a global revival of ancestral plant relationships. Key Discussion Points 01:22 – Seeds of Shamanism & Overcoming Addiction: Carlos explains how playing with an Ewok shaman toy, experimenting with psychedelics in high school, and studying the philosophy of religion laid his spiritual groundwork. This foundation ultimately aligned with a life-saving synchronicity that brought him to Peru in 2003 to break free from a downward spiral of opiate addiction. 05:26 – Shifting Western Paradigms: Exploring the dramatic evolution of the ayahuasca space over the last two decades, moving away from a purely materialist, chemical-to-biology framework toward a deep respect for shamanic ritual, intention, and complex traditional practices like plant dietas. 09:23 – From Rugged Adventure to Modern Comfort: How the demographic of people seeking ayahuasca expanded exponentially as retreat environments evolved from rustic, off-grid jungle camps requiring multi-hour treks to fully accessible modern research and retreat centers powered by solar energy. 13:56 – Synchronistic Infrastructure & The Foundation's Birth: Carlos shares the wild logistical journey of committing to study under Shipibo healer Don Enrique Lopez, inheriting an unfinished community infrastructure project in the remote Mishana reserve, and using an inheritance from his late mother to launch the Ayahuasca Foundation in 2009. 21:34 – Bridging Science and Spirit: Highlighting the "field of dreams" creation of their dedicated research facility, partnering with Onaya Science to publish academic papers on personality changes, anxiety, and depression, and collaborating with the Heroic Hearts Project to study veterans suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD. 26:26 – Cellular Agency and the Earth's Agenda: A deep philosophical look at human willpower, proposing that humans operate much like individual cells within the grander physical body and consciousness of the Earth, carrying out a vital cellular role dictated by a higher planetary intelligence. 31:15 – Healing as an Art Form & Expanding Awareness: Breaking down the neurobiology of ayahuasca, explaining how it temporarily deactivates the brain's sensory gating filters to expand conscious awareness, and how true healing occurs when a person uses that heightened sensitivity to correct false beliefs and traumatic misinterpretations. 37:41 – The Challenge of Scientific Language: Discussing his role as a philosopher of healing and navigating the complex linguistic tightrope of translating deeply spiritual, non-material indigenous phenomena to a rigid Western scientific community without being seen as having "gone off the deep end". 45:59 – Noya Rao and Global Shamanic Revival: An exploration of Noya Rao, an enlightened tree consciousness central to their Shipibo lineage, and a profound story of a student who successfully utilized traditional Shipibo dieta protocols on the Blue Lotus plant to demonstrate how intact traditions can revive ancestral relationships with native flora globally. 55:24 – The Future of the Psychedelic Space: Delving into the conflict betw
June 10, 2026
Cain Velasquez - 2 times UFC champion talking about his Ayahuasca experience and how spirituality helped him survive the prison.
In this episode of the Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ connects with combat sports legend Cain Velasquez. Cain is a two-time NCAA All-American, a two-time UFC Heavyweight Champion, and the first Mexican-American heavyweight champion in UFC history. Known throughout his career for an unstoppable, relentless pace that broke the toughest fighters on earth, Cain has since transitioned that warrior spirit into a profound mission advocating for ancestral healing and the transformative potential of plant medicines. Cain opens up about how his early life in combat sports functioned as a raw mechanism for processing childhood trauma, how losing his mother and brother catalyzed a profound spiritual awakening, and how navigating legal trials and prison time became the ultimate training ground for his integration of ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT. Key Discussion Points 01:14 – Raising the Stakes: Cain discusses his transition from childhood wrestling—which he picked up at age 12 because it was free—to mixed martial arts, driven by an instinctual pull toward higher physical stakes and martial arts discipline. 02:42 – The Mexican Fighting Spirit: Discovering right away that getting hit didn’t phase or scare him, but instead unlocked a deep, instinctual resilience and strength that allowed him to retaliate and put fight combinations together quickly. 04:34 – Combat as the First Medicine: How the physical extremes of MMA served as Cain's initial form of therapy, allowing him to release stored emotional trauma, build unbreakable poker-face boundaries against pain, and completely lose himself in the sport. 08:45 – The Body Breaks Down: Navigating severe career injuries, back surgery, and an intentional daily relationship with THC and CBD to manage pain while completely changing his mental creative perspective on fighting. 11:07 – Unmapped Grief & The Medium: Processing the sudden, deeply traumatic losses of his mother and brother within a two-month span, and how a session with a medium helped shift his mental loop away from their final moments and toward a higher spiritual perspective. 14:54 – The First Ayahuasca Journey: Sitting in his first ceremony on the exact anniversary of his brother's passing, where he instantly felt he "knew the plant more than he knew himself," choosing to fully surrender his trust to the medicine. 17:58 – No Accidents: Cain shares his visionary download regarding the perfection of human life, realizing that his soul and higher self mapped out his exact earthly timeline with Source before incarnating to guarantee maximum spiritual growth. 24:32 – Dissolving in 5-MeO-DMT: Undergoing a shattering ego death during a high-dose Bufo experience, where his consciousness left his body, expanded into everything and nothing, and experienced an infinite existence of pure love and universal strength. 28:07 – The Reintegration Crisis: Facing a severe midlife integration crisis over a two-month period where his perception of life had fundamentally changed, leaving him without a guide to help anchor his massive energetic downloads back into reality. 29:41 – Prison as a Silent Meditation Retreat: How his subsequent time in jail and prison was divinely orchestrated by Source as a mandatory period of absolute solitude, teaching him to find total inner happiness and realize that the entire universe is stored within, regardless of external walls. 31:42 – Synchronicities from a Cell Window: Learning radical gratitude for microscopic wins, including a profound moment where he manifested a wild hawk to fly six feet from his window seconds after mentally asking to see one close up. 36:16 – The Prison Sweat Lodge: Hanging around the Native American circle in prison to connect with his own Yaqui ancestry, and learning the ultimate test of surrendering to the heat inside a traditional Lakota-style four-round Inipi sweat lodge. Connect with Cain Velasquez: Instagram: @officialcainvelasquez Experience Saf
June 2, 2026
Ecstasy as Medicine - Jonathan Robinson on two Years of Therapy in an Afternoon
In this episode of the Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ sits down with Jonathan Robinson, a psychotherapist, New York Times bestselling author of over 10 books, and a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Jonathan has spent decades exploring human connection, interviewing foundational spiritual figures like Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Ram Dass. His latest work, Ecstasy as Medicine, and its counterpart Ecstasy for Couples, centers on the immense therapeutic potential of MDMA. Jonathan shares his transition from growing up in a chaotic environment to studying chemical consciousness, explaining how MDMA acts as a biological "fast-track" for vulnerability, emotional rewiring, and healing relationships. Key Discussion Points 02:15 – A Dysfunctional Childhood as a Gift: Jonathan discusses how growing up around family volatility forced him inward at age 12, sparking an early mastery of self-hypnosis, meditation, and early psychedelic experimentation. 05:40 – The Early Days of Legal MDMA Research: Conducting a master’s thesis on MDMA for trauma in the early 1980s before it was criminalized in the US, and how modern data proves it is exponentially more effective for PTSD than standard antidepressants. 09:15 – "The Drug Never Took Effect": A hilarious story of Jonathan giving pure MDMA to his conservative parents, who spent the evening resolving 45 years of hidden marital tension and cuddling—completely unaware they were under the influence. 13:45 – The 5-Hour Therapy Session on Steroids: The mechanics of facilitating over 700 MDMA journeys, and why Jonathan chooses to run his intensive deep-dives and integration work virtually over Zoom for maximum domestic comfort. 18:20 – Blaming, Shaming, Complaining, and Explaining: Why standard relationship defense mechanisms fail 100% of the time, and the core communication framework required to shift a relationship dynamic immediately. 22:50 – The Illusion of "Dishes" (The Aunt Story): How an MDMA session saved Jonathan’s own marriage by revealing that his wife's displaced anger over refrigerator doors was actually unmapped grief regarding her late aunt. 27:15 – The "Sweet Killer" Dilemma: A 300,000-year evolutionary look at why male brains were naturally selected to prioritize protective aggression and goal achievement, and how modern environments require an intensive education in empathy. 33:10 – Collectivism of Spiritual Lifelines: Insights from living in Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian monasteries, culminating in Jonathan's ultimate personal religion: "Do what works." Connect with Jonathan Robinson: Websites: ecstasyformedicine.com | awarenessexplorers.com Featured Books: Ecstasy for Couples, Ecstasy as Medicine, and Communication Miracles for Couples. Experience Safe, Guided Consciousness Work: To explore heart-opening, traditional plant medicine retreats in a deeply restorative setting designed for integration and profound clarity, explore our programs at: ayahuascaincolombia.com
136 total episodes available
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- What is Ayahuasca Podcast?
<p><b>Ayahuasca Podcast with Sam Believ</b></p> <p><b>The #1 resource for Ayahuasca, Psychedelics, and Mental Health.</b></p> <p>Explore the transformative world of plant medicine and psychedelic therapy with <b>Sam Believ</b>, founder of <b>LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat</b>. This podcast dives deep into the healing power of Ayahuasca, offering expert clinical insights, indigenous wisdom, and raw success stories of trauma recovery and spiritual awakening.</p> <p><b>What you’ll learn:</b></p> <ul> <li> <p><b>Expert Interviews:</b> Conversations with world-renowned scientists, doctors, and shamans.</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Healing Stories:</b> Real-life accounts of overcoming PTSD, depression, and addiction through Ayahuasca.</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Integration & Safety:</b> Practical advice on Ayahuasca integration, preparation, and psychedelic-assisted therapy.</p> </li> <li> <p><b>The Frontiers of Science:</b> Latest research on Ayahuasca, Ketamine, Psilocybin, and the intersection of science and spirituality.</p> </li> </ul> <p>Whether you are a curious beginner or an experienced practitioner, join us as we bridge Western medicine with ancient Amazonian traditions to help you heal and transform your life.</p> <p><b>Visit our home:</b> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ayahuascapodcast.com" class="ng-star-inserted" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.ayahuascapodcast.com</a> <b>Retreat with us:</b> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.lawayra.com" class="ng-star-inserted" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.lawayra.com</a></p> <p><b>Top Featured Guests</b></p> <p>International Public Figures</p> <ol start="1"> <li> <p><b>Gabor Maté</b> (World-renowned expert on trauma and addiction)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Dennis McKenna</b> (Legendary ethnobotanist and psychedelic pioneer)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Wade Davis</b> (National Geographic Explorer, world-famous anthropologist)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Paul Austin</b> (Founder of The Third Wave, major figure in microdosing)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Ian McCall</b> (Former UFC fighter and psychedelic advocate)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Bill Richards</b> (Psilocybin research pioneer at Johns Hopkins)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Troy Casey</b> (The "Certified Health Nut," major social media presence)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Hamilton Souther</b> (Well-known shaman and founder of Blue Morpho)</p> </li> </ol> <p>Influential Thought Leaders & Authors</p> <ul> <li> <p><b>Dave Rabin</b> (Neuroscientist/Psychiatrist, Apollo Neuro founder)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Lauren Taus</b> (Leading psychedelic-assisted therapist)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Bia Labate</b> (Executive Director of Chacruna Institute)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Norman Ohler</b> (Author of the NYT bestseller Blitzed)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Spring Washam</b> (Prominent meditation teacher and author)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Joe Tafur</b> (Author of The Fellowship of the River)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Alex Beiner</b> (Author and executive director of Rebel Wisdom)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Jesse Harless</b> (Expert on recovery and heart-centered leadership)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Tracey Tee</b> (Founder of Moms on Mushrooms)</p> </li> <li> <p><b>Kyle Buller</b> (Co-founder of Psychedelics Today)</p> </li> </ul> <p>Industry Experts & Specialized Practitioners</p> <ul> <li> <p><b>Marc Aixala</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Rick Barnett</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Steve Thayer</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Rotem Petranker</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Salimeh Tabrizi</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Ayla Schafer</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Lex Pelger</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Daniel Shankin</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Natasia Pelgrom</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Nick Courtright</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Matt Zemon</b></p> </li> <li> <p><b>Shawn Wells</b></p> </li> </ul> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates bi-weekly.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 10 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.
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