Ayahuasca or psilocybin: what is the difference?

Anyone who reads about psychedelics comes across ayahuasca sooner or later: the brew from the Amazon that so many stories are told about. It is natural to assume a truffle ceremony is more or less the same thing. It is not. Both are a journey inward, but the way that journey unfolds is fundamentally different.

Kelly Schuller, one of our ceremony facilitators, explains the difference with an image:

An ayahuasca journey builds up like a mountain. It goes in one line towards the peak. A psilocybin journey comes much more in waves.

That shape determines a great deal of how you experience it. On a long climb to a single peak there is little room to catch your breath along the way. With waves there is.

Because it comes in waves, you keep getting a moment to breathe, a little space to recover before the next wave arrives.

In those quieter moments you can let something settle, have a drink, or check in with a facilitator. Then it carries on.

In an ayahuasca ceremony, vomiting is often a regular part of it; in the tradition it comes from, it is even seen as part of the process. According to Kelly, that also makes the experience much more intense.

A truffle ceremony is different. Nausea can occur, especially at the start, but vomiting is not part of the day.

That is why people often experience an ayahuasca journey as much more intense than a psilocybin journey. Melanie de Jong, a hypnotherapist with us, recently put the difference to someone like this:

With psilocybin you peel off a layer each time, towards your core. Walls, patterns you have built up, you break them down. That way you get closer and closer to the person you really are. With ayahuasca you really smash a hole through it.

Kelly therefore calls psilocybin a kinder way to make a journey inward. That is an observation from practice, not a measurement. And kinder does not mean light: with truffles too, grief, fear or something confronting can come up. How we handle that is set out in Will I have a bad trip from a truffle ceremony?

Legally the difference is large as well. Ayahuasca contains DMT, and DMT is a controlled substance under Dutch law. Ayahuasca ceremonies have repeatedly ended up in Dutch courts for that reason. Psilocybin truffles fall outside that ban and are legally available. We work exclusively with truffles. More on that under the legal status of psilocybin truffles.

We only offer psilocybin, so this is not a neutral comparison guide. What we can say is this: if you are curious about a journey inward, but the idea of one long, overwhelming peak puts you off, the wave-like course of psilocybin is a more accessible start for many people.

A ceremony is not a medical treatment and does not replace regular care. If you are unsure, or you have done ayahuasca before and want to know how it compares, raise it in the intake call. That conversation carries no obligation. How to prepare further is set out under preparing for a psilocybin ceremony.