Addiction is one of the most challenging and misunderstood experiences in human life. It’s more than habit or craving — it’s a pattern of coping, escape, avoidance, and unconscious avoidance of pain. In a heartfelt and candid conversation, host Sam Believ speaks with Danielle Nova, a woman whose life was once shaped by addiction, and who found unexpected healing through an ayahuasca retreat. Her experience doesn’t depict a miracle cure — but an honest process of confrontation, integration, and transformation.
The Weight of Addiction: Not Just a Behavior
Danielle opens by describing the often lonely world of addiction — the cycle of desire, relief, guilt, shame and repetition. For her, addiction wasn’t just about substances; it was about escape and self-medication. Alcohol, drugs, distractions — these weren’t just physical habits, they were responses to emotional pain and unresolved internal life. The pattern felt familiar but suffocating. She knew intellectually that the cycle was hurting her, but logically knowing wasn’t enough to shift the pattern.
Many people in addiction recovery can relate: you know what you don’t want, but dismantling the pattern is a completely different challenge.
Why Ayahuasca? Not Curiosity — Need
Danielle didn’t arrive at the retreat out of recreational curiosity. She arrived out of a sense that her old avenues of healing — therapy, support groups, medications — had helped, but hadn’t freed her. She wanted depth, honesty, and confrontation with her inner world. She wanted to stop running — but she didn’t know how.
That desire wasn’t light. It was a deep internal ache: the sense that routine coping mechanisms weren’t truly solving anything, just delaying the pain. In that space of openness, she decided to sit with the medicine — not for escape, but for clarity.
Ceremony as Mirror: Seeing What Hides
Under ayahuasca, Danielle didn’t find fantasy or colorful visions at first. She found truth — emotional, relational, psychological truth that previously had lived in shadow. The medicine didn’t “fix” anything for her in a single night, but it revealed the internal structures that had been driving her addiction: fear, self-judgment, pain, old relational wounds, and unconscious patterns she had never fully examined.
In her first ceremonies, she felt an emotional peeling: layers of avoidance, layers of defensive numbness, layers of old trauma. It was not easy or gentle — it was confrontation. But it was honest.
For many seekers, this is a turning point: the medicine acts not as anesthetic, but as spotlight. You don’t just feel high or expanded — you feel your life, as it really is. And for someone wrestling with addiction, that’s both terrifying and liberating.
From Relief to Release
Danielle describes the shift not as immediate freedom, but as a process of release. The medicine didn’t instantly stop her cravings, but it softened the emotional charge behind them. She began to see how much of her addiction was tied to wanting relief from herself: from sadness, from memory, from fear. When those internal drivers were finally seen, the compulsion began to lose its power.
She makes an important distinction: ayahuasca didn’t take away her discomfort — it helped her feel it, without needing an external substance to soften it. Once she could sit with her feelings, the old pattern of self-medication began to break.
Integration: Doing the Inner Work
After the ceremonies ended, Danielle didn’t emerge into a perfect life. What she got was awareness — ongoing work. Integration became the real challenge and opportunity. She began journaling, reflecting, strengthening her emotional vocabulary, engaging therapy with new clarity, and building healthier routines. Instead of suppressing pain, she learned to acknowledge it and then choose consciously how to move through it.
For someone with addiction history, that skill — conscious choice — is profound. It’s the difference between reactive behavior and responsive life.
She also developed practices like meditation, community support, and somatic awareness, helping her stay embodied instead of dissociated. The medicine gave her access — the integration gave her agency.
Relationship Healing: Self, Others, and Forgiveness
Danielle also highlights how healing from addiction isn’t just about stopping substance use. It’s about repairing relationships — with self, with others, and with life’s emotional complexity. In ceremonies, unresolved guilt, self-hatred, and unprocessed relational pain often surface. For her, this was a humbling and essential part of the journey.
She began facing old relational traumas that had fueled her drinking and avoidance. She learned — slowly, imperfectly — to treat herself with compassion instead of judgment. This emotional reorientation didn’t happen overnight, but the medicine cracked the door open.
The Role of Community and Support
Danielle stresses that healing isn’t done alone. Ayahuasca can ignite insight, but insight without support can feel isolating. She leaned into communities, therapy, trusted friendships, and supportive environments that would help hold her transformation rather than swallow it back into the old pattern.
It’s one thing to have a profound experience in a controlled ceremonial space. It’s another to bring that experience into daily life — work, relationships, responsibilities, and emotional demands. Integration happens in relationship more than in isolation.
A Balanced Perspective on Healing
Danielle is careful not to present her story as a universal prescription. She doesn’t claim ayahuasca “cured” her addiction in a single night. Rather, she frames the medicine as a powerful tool — one that helped her see beneath the surface, confront inner patterns, and choose a different way of living.
She acknowledges that not everyone’s path will look like hers. Psychedelic work can be destabilizing without support, preparation, and integration. It is not a replacement for therapy, community, or self-work. But for her, it was a catalyst — a doorway into deeper honesty.
From Survival to Presence
Her story shifts the narrative from addiction as failure to addiction as adaptive survival strategy turned outdated. That distinction matters. When addiction is understood as a response to pain — and then that pain is finally seen, felt, and integrated — the trajectory of recovery changes.
Rather than clinging to external relief, Danielle learned how to stay in her body and her life — even when it hurts. In doing so, her cravings softened, not because they were erased, but because the internal driver behind them was no longer hidden.
Final Reflection: Healing as a Continuous Path
Danielle’s experience with ayahuasca isn’t a single dramatic turnaround — it’s a chapter in a longer story of healing. It’s about courageous self-interrogation, emotional release, community support, integration, and ongoing growth. The medicine sparked awareness; the work of living with that awareness deepened her recovery.
For anyone grappling with addiction — or patterns that feel beyond conscious change — her journey suggests that healing isn’t about suppression, avoidance, or magical fixes. It’s about seeing, feeling, and choosing — and sometimes, it requires tools that help us access parts of ourselves we’ve long buried.
Her story isn’t just about addiction recovery. It’s about reclaiming presence, one honest moment at a time — a lifelong practice of choosing life over escape.
Based on the Ayahuasca Podcast episode “Addiction Recovery and Ayahuasca” with Sam Believ and Danielle Nova.
Sam Believ is the founder and CEO of LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat, the best-rated Ayahuasca retreat in South America, with over 520 five-star Google reviews and an overall rating of 5 stars. After his life was transformed by Ayahuasca, he dedicated himself to spreading awareness about this ancestral medicine to help address the mental health crisis. Sam is committed to making Ayahuasca retreats affordable, accessible, and authentic, with a focus on care, integration, and the involvement of indigenous shamans. He is also the host of the Ayahuasca Podcast.
