A meeting at the World Ayahuasca Forum
Long before the retreat brochures and the airport integrations. Before the week-long jungle experience and the one-thousand dollar discounted journey, people whose curiosity led them to investigate, to delve deeper, were already writing about the vine. A Victorian botanist, with a notebook. A tape recorder and a Colombian anthropologist. A chemist came in searching for answers in molecules. Inspired worldwide, ayahuasca brew. She has come out of paper. She is alive. Yet what she has not done is to let thee written word overpass her capacity into worldly wisdom.
This week, that is what is happening in Girona. On September 11,the people who hold her will lead a world gathering on ayahuasca for the first time. This event, titled “a space for equitable dialogue”, was co-organized by ICEERS and the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute of the Ashaninka leader Benki Piyãko and spoke of a plant that left the Amazonian forest to assume a new sphere. It comes after the three World Ayahuasca Conferences. Ibiza in 2014, Rio Branco in 2016, Girona in 2019 and five Indigenous Ayahuasca Congresses. Indigenous leaders are here to talk. Some say, they will come to listen as well.
Synergetic Press will be there as a community and media partner, part of the conversation not just to listen to the new stories we have to tell, but to share the words of those who have been protecting Indigenous peoples and plant medicine reciprocity since the movement began.
The Archive of Wisdom
Synergetic Press and its authors have been in the business of bringing the knowledge of the plants to your door for over forty years. To translate into something recognisable, citable and buildable the conversation of ecological development and consciousness. We are in the midst of documenting the process, of keeping the records, of letting voices reach us about the contemporary happenings of our generation. The myths, the icaros, the field notes, the chemistry. The same binding that holds all the wonder of discovery.
A book can take knowledge out of the Amazon Rainforest much more easily than going into the depths of it. That’s the importance in simple terms. That is also why these voices matter in the bigger story of connectivity and advocacy. This conference will have many voices, but these four visionaries, collaborators and authors at Synergetic Press bring a valuable perspective having spent their lifetimes at the seam. It is their records that render intelligible the case of the plants where they cannot speak for themselves.
A Series of Connectors
The one who listened first
Our first contributor is the man who defined the movement in its inception. Born in Florencia, in the Colombian Amazon, in 1947, Luis Eduardo Luna had his knowledge of the vine in his essence before we had the vine on the market. He began his journey in the early 1980s sitting with ayahuasqueros in Iquitos and Pucallpa and did the one thing the West cannot do. He listened to the words of the wisdom goalkeepers. The concept of plants as teachers among four mestizo shamans of Iquitos. Two years later Vegetalismo came out and shook our world view with its first detailed account of the shamanic system that everyone now travels to experience. He founded the school of painting USKO-AYAR in Pucallpa with Pablo Amaringo, so as to find a medium for the visions other than memory.
He and Steven F. White have gone beyond the study and created a collective voice. The Ayahuasca Reader, first published by Synergetic Press in 2000, expanded in 2016, is a collection of texts from a dozen languages, sheltering the many complexities of the medicine. Richard Spruce’s notebook from the nineteenth century sits next to a Tukano origin myth, Santo Daime hymn next to Wade Davis, Reichel-Dolmatoff next to Dennis Mckenna. The second edition of The Ayahuasca Reader featured Jeremy Narby, Graham Hancock, Alex Grey, Susana Bustos, and the painters. A hymn of discovery that wore the edges of our modern understanding. of exploration that cut the edges of our contemporary understanding. Jeremny Narby, who is also participating in Girona this week, blurbed it as undoubtedly the best collection on the subject.³
"The reader who expects a utopian depiction of pristine rainforests will be surprised to discover that Varela, an environmentally-conscious writer, is well aware of the ecological destruction inflicted by humanity on her Amazonian community. In Varela's poem, it is not the human individual who seeks the healing powers of the plants for herself, but rather the planet itself that is sick and in need of urgent help from the spirit of ayahuasca" (The Ayahuasca Reader, page 108)
That’s why Luna joins us on the stage. The forum will be in a room, on paper, The Ayahuasca Reader. Many voices in chorus, one vine, and the humility to weave all forms of life and knowledge into one cause.
The one who came back beyond chemistry
All scientists have origin myths and Dennis Mckenna’s is a book that followed him through the ropes of destiny. In 1967, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health hosted a symposium in San Francisco, with a title the modern government could get behind: Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. Finally, a teen in Colorado finds the conference proceedings and says it changed his life. Finally, there was a comprehension of the ancient wisdom of psychedelics and their nuanced relationship with the Earth beyond what the media had been showing. He became an ethnopharmacologist, running field courses in Peru and Ecuador, and working extensively in the upper Amazon, and serving on the founding board of the Heffter Research Institute. Fifty years of taking chemistry seriously. Fifty years of saying chemistry was never why it works.
This was Dennis Mckenna, this teenager.
This teenager was Dennis Mckenna.
Then he did what no scientist does with his origin story: he went back and finished the tale, bringing the rest of his inspiration to life. ESPD50 was released in 2017 as a two-volume box set at Tyringham Hall. Last year we released ESPD55 which took place at St. Giles House in Dorset in 2022. Over thirty papers, including Wade Davis and Paul Stamets and Merlin Sheldrake and Monica Gagliano. Not by discipline but by sphere. Ethnosphere. Phytosphere. Mycosphere. Faunasphere. Archeosphere. Sonosphere. A taxonomy that takes sound as a sphere. We also continue to publish his memoir, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, and the foreword to the tenth anniversary edition is by Luis Eduardo Luna because this world is small and its friendships are ancient.
"Discoveries stemming from this work may yield compounds capable of treating a variety of psychological and neurological disorders. And, in an era when species, indigenous knowledge, and habitats are disappearing, the mission is more important and more urgent than ever"⁶ (Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs Vol.3, page 48)
The forum has called him a "Founding Voice in Psychedelic Science." What that means in a room full of healers from Original Communities is that Western science went into the rainforest and came back with the data to complement that corroborates the importance of our mission to help preserve the sanctity of our natural heritage: the intelligence of plants.
The one who listened back
The phrase the planet is a teacher has long spoken to two audiences, those who nodded and those who smiled. What happens when a scientist starts to listen to their wisdom: Monica Gagliano.
She is an evolutionary ecologist. She invented the field of plant bioacoustica, and experimentally showed that plants emit sound and react to sound, in the way that organisms do. A Mimosa, she demonstrated, will stop flinching if it learns a fall doesn’t hurt, and she argued to her peers that if an animal stopped flinching when it learned that falling didn’t hurt, they would call it learning so they should use the same term for plants.⁸ She saw plea plants forming Pavlovian associations, and found water in sound.¹⁰ Perception, memory, learning, and cognition in a brainless creature. And she has not been shy in her memoir about dreams and ceremonial encounters that have led to these experiments.
Together with John C. Ryan and Patricia Vieria, she co-edited the book The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (2021), which she presented as a keynote address at ESPD55. She is also part of the ESPD55 proceedings. The forum names her a "Pioneering Researcher in Plant Cognition," not because we are ignoring what the maloka has been telling us all along, but because her language can communicate it in a way our laboratories cannot ignore.
When a Maestro in Pucallpa says the plant is teaching, and a laboratory in Australia says the plant is learning, and neither of them uses metaphor, the translation ends and the conversation begins. This is why Gagliano's voice is essential in this discussion.
The one you can count on
Here is a part of the story we seem to constantly be missing: the morning after our hearts and minds are purged open and we need to talk about Integration.
Marc Aixalà is a psychologist in Barcelona, a Holotropic Breathwork facilitator, a therapist of psilocybin and MDMA trials, and the man who ran the emergency psychological care at Boom Festival within Kosmicare.¹² But mostly, he was the one people could count on. People who drank in Iquitos or Ibizia or in their living room in Utrecht and came back with something they could not stop thinking about began to ask questions Marc wanted to answer. He has admitted that during those first years he was "working in the dark", without the guide maps to what he was hearing. But the maps appeared later.
The map became a book, Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness published by Synergetic Press in 2022, translated by Adam Aronovich. This book is the first serious attempt to give integration a theory by showcasing metaphors of what it is, seven dimensions of it, and the clinical detachment to admit that a good ceremony needs a different kind of care than a bad one. Beneath the much needed emerging framework was a conviction present without the need of qualifications; that psychedelics can bring to mental health "a renewed and much-needed compassion and respect towards those who suffer".
Integration and safety are on the forum's own agenda. Aixalà's voice is a much needed addition to the reality of what happens in the “after”. The one who has heard, in a thousand different forms, that we must let the vine do her work but we must learn what it means to open her doors.
The ones who paved the way
ICEERS was founded in 2009 in Barcelona bu its executive director, Benjamin De Loenen, and has consultative status with they United Nations Economic and Social Council. It has spent seventeen years on the unglamorous work of this field. It has been doing the dirty work of this field for seventeen years. ICEERS has built a network of advocacy that has significant roots, from being the free support queue to having presence in the courtroom and building on the mathematics. Their research found that some 4.2 million people in the Americas, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have taken ayahuasca at some point in their lives. In 2019 alone, some five and a half million servings of it were drunk by roughly 820,000 people. Preliminary results of further research still underway suggest only some 10% of those people belong to the INdigenous nations from which the vine is part. Nine out of 10 have arrived because of globalisation. The figures above are qualified by ICEERS as a rough estimate and it must be remembered that the above figures pre-date the spiritual boom of the last five years. The count has not been repeated again since the exponential growth of the new spiritual landscape. What we are seeing on the ground suggests the actual number today could be considerably higher.
The legal work began when the Ayahuasca Defence Fund, a concept planted at the first World Ayahuasca Conference in Ibiza in 2014, began its work defending people in the criminal justice system for what a grandmother in Putumayo would describe as a casual Tuesday. This was formalised as a separate ICEERS program two years later, based on the defence work the organization had been doing since 2010. 448 cases in 49 countries supported by more than ten years of work. And the pattern it has emerged is the topic of the forum itself. It is the ones invited abroad by the organisers who are being detained on arrival, the organisers taking no risk.
The organisation that has hosted every past World Ayahuasca Conference decided not to host it alone this year. Inviting indigenous people as panel speakers is important, co-organizing it with an Ashaninka institute is a partnership.
The Other End of the Vine
This week's forum is being held in a Catalan congress centre. But the thing we are all meeting about has an address that is not European.
This is what the data has shown. A common caseOfA common case for ICEERS, which has supported 448 legal cases in 49 countries over a decade, is that Indigenous healers are invited to come abroad and detained on arrival. Prosecuted or deported for taking their own medicine, while the organiser who invited them took none of the risk. In 2025 alone, the program received 59 new cases from 21 countries, nine of which involved members of Indigenous communities. Criminalisation is not falling. It is diversifying.
We are also seeing an outstanding breakout of overconsumption of the medicine, unethical practices, the misuse of psychoactive plants not only by the western public but the reality of indigenous communities commodifying their own culture for the sake of spiritual tourism. The landscape has gotten increasingly complex since 2019.
This is the reason why this reunion feels significantly poignant. The delegations arriving in Girona are here to make note of the important topics plaguing the landscape today. Noting that globalisation without paying attention can lead to extraction. That reciprocity without benefit-sharing divides us. Everyone in these halls is here to let the world know we are building alliances with the combined mission to hold a more sustainable Earth.
Two Ways of Keeping the Sacred
Books are the West’s way of keeping what we know. Lineage and Ceremony is how the Amazon keeps our ancient wisdom. For a hundred years we have been carving ways to co-create psychedelic exploration into unknown territory. The great key that we have is interconnectivity through research, books and sharing knowledge. We as publishers understand the importance of record keeping. And we see possibility for our best kept wisdom to stand the test of time.
What we expect from Girona is a tighter network of people that are passionate about working together for a common future. We are here to bridge the gap between the two ways of keeping. To give the voices who got us here center stage in a movement, made. Let this be a week of remembering, from the Indigenous communities themselves and from the allies who have been working behind the scenes to make their mission a reality.
Thanks ICEERS for providing the safe spaces we needed. We are looking forward to seeing you all there.
Book of the Month: The Ayahuasca Reader. Take it home with ESPD55 and we will surprise you with a little gift, a celebration of Girona in a bundle. Come find us!
Sources
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ICEERS, "Indigenous Peoples Speak Out on the Future of Ayahuasca."
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Luis Eduardo Luna, "The concept of plants as teachers among four mestizo shamans of Iquitos, northeastern Peru" (1984); Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon (1986).
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Jeremy Narby, cover endorsement, Ayahuasca Reader, 1st ed. (Synergetic Press, 2000). Narby supplied a different endorsement for the second edition.
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Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White, eds., Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine, 2nd ed. (Synergetic Press, 2016), 108.
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Biographical note, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
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Dennis McKenna, ed., ESPD55: Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (Synergetic Press), 48.
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World Ayahuasca Forum, Featured Voices, Girona, September 11–13, 2026.
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Monica Gagliano, Michael Renton, Martial Depczynski and Stefano Mancuso, "Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters," Oecologia 175, no. 1 (2014): 63–72, doi:10.1007/s00442-013-2873-7.
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Monica Gagliano et al., "Learning by Association in Plants," Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 38427, doi:10.1038/srep38427. A 2020 replication attempt did not reproduce the result (doi:10.7554/eLife.57614); Gagliano and colleagues responded that the replication protocol was unsuitable for testing associative learning.
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Monica Gagliano, Mavra Grimonprez, Martial Depczynski and Michael Renton, "Tuned in: plant roots use sound to locate water," Oecologia 184, no. 1 (2017): 151–160, doi:10.1007/s00442-017-3862-z.
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Author biography, Psychedelic Integration (Synergetic Press, 2022).
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Marc Aixalà, quoted in Sarah Russo, "Psychedelic Integration: New Book by Marc Aixalà," ICEERS, August 23, 2022.
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ICEERS, "Four million people have taken ayahuasca worldwide"; ICEERS, "Benjamin De Loenen."
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Jesús Alonso Olamendi, "Ten Years of Legal Support for Traditional Plant Practices," ICEERS, March 10, 2026.
