Rooted in Ceremony: How Women in Santo Daime Have Been Mapping Female Psychedelic Experience for Decades

Dr. Paulina Valamiel Lopes

Doctor of Sociology, UFMG, Brazil  |  Communications Associate, Chacruna Latinoamérica  |  Associate Researcher, NEIP  |  Co-founder, Hijas del Sur

Taken from an interview between Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley and Dr. Paulina Valamiel Lopes

Insights from a Conversation with Dr. Paulina Valamiel Lopes: A Sociologist Who Researched from the Inside Out

“When I started listening to women there I said, okay, let’s see what they have to say since they’re so oppressed. And wait, I’m part of that too. So I also have my opinions on that. But let’s see my elders speak.”

— Dr. Paulina Valamiel Lopes, PhD in Sociology, UFMG

What happens when a researcher studies something she has lived from the inside? When Dr. Paulina Valamiel Lopes sat down with Hystelica founder Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley to discuss her recently completed doctoral thesis, what emerged was not a detached academic account but something far more consequential: a body of knowledge that sits precisely at the intersection Hystelica was built to occupy. Over years of qualitative fieldwork, and across more than 30 in-depth interviews with women in Santo Daime communities spanning 14 countries, Paulina documented something that formal psychedelic science has not yet managed to capture – the sophisticated, cross-culturally consistent ways in which women adapt their relationship to ayahuasca around the realities of living in a female body.

Her findings challenge the field to ask a pointed question: if women in Japan, the UK, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Brazil, Israel, and Argentina have been arriving, independently, at the same conclusions about the menstrual cycle and plant medicine – without clinical literature to guide them – what does that tell us about what the clinical literature has missed?

A Methodology Built on Living the Research

Before examining what Paulina found, it is worth pausing on how she found it. Her doctoral research – completed at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2025 – was not conducted from the outside. Paulina is herself an ayahuasqueira, a practitioner who has been drinking the Daime at least two to four times per month for a decade. The medicine, she explains, was woven into the research process itself: she wrote her thesis with ayahuasca as part of her methodology, a choice she addresses directly in the PhD.

She also identifies openly as a lesbian woman, noting that attention to how women form relationships, build solidarity across borders, and navigate power structures, was foundational to her analytical lens. She is a co-founder of Hijas del Sur, a network of Latin American women working with plant medicines, and a Communications Associate at Chacruna Latinoamérica, where she has recently published an English-language article drawing on her doctoral findings. Her thesis has been written up in Portuguese, which is one reason this conversation matters: it makes her findings accessible to an English-speaking scientific and clinical audience.

This insider positioning is methodologically significant in ways that bear emphasising. Paulina was not arriving to decode a foreign practice. She was sitting with her peers and elders and asking them to speak – and listening carefully, rather than arriving with conclusions already formed. Much prior feminist criticism of Santo Daime, she notes, had labelled the religion’s structured gender roles as straightforwardly oppressive without doing precisely this.

What Women Know About Their Own Bodies: Cycle-Informed Medicine Use

One of the most compelling threads in Paulina’s research is the degree to which women, across cultures and without access to clinical research, have arrived at strikingly consistent practices around menstruation and ayahuasca use.

To understand this, it helps to understand the Amazonian intellectual background Paulina draws on. In many indigenous Amazonian traditions, menstruation is not understood through the dominant Western lens of secrecy and suppression. Anthropologist Luisa Elvira Belaúnde has described how, across Amazonian cultures, menstrual blood is understood as opening communication between everyday experience and other dimensions – operating both within and beyond the body. Among the Yawanawá, menstruation renders women visible to non-human entities (yuxin, or spirits) without being able to perceive those entities themselves, which is understood to create a condition of heightened vulnerability requiring care, retreat, and the avoidance of plant medicines. This is not a framing of impurity. In this cosmology, Belaúnde notes, menstrual blood is analogous to a form of female power – comparable to the male capacity to ensure fertility and the reproduction of game.

Santo Daime, founded in Brazil in the 1930s and now present across more than 40 countries, emerged from this Amazonian substrate. Its widely shared rule – that menstruating women should not participate in cleaning the chacruna leaves during the feitio (the ritual preparation of Daime) – is typically explained as something the founding figure, Mestre Irineu, received directly from the medicine. But when Paulina pressed the women she interviewed to elaborate, what she heard was far more nuanced than simple deference to tradition.

Women across the tradition described feeling “spiritually more open” during menstruation – more permeable to spiritual and emotional influences, more susceptible in the ceremonial space. And from this understanding, they had developed – independently, across countries, through embodied experience rather than formal instruction – a set of consistent practices. Many chose to drink less Daime during their menstrual period; others selected lighter preparations. When the stronger gel or honey Daime (a concentrated form developed during transnationalisation for ease of export) was available, most preferred the lighter “first degree” Daime – the first cooking, which contains more water and produces milder effects – during their bleed. The justification was both practical and spiritual: the body, already undergoing its own process of purification, was understood not to need additional stimuli.

Menopause, the Medicine, and the Return of the Blood

The majority of women Paulina interviewed for her doctoral research were over 40 and held leadership positions within the Santo Daime tradition – a generational pattern she found notable in itself: spiritual authority in the religion appears to accrue to women as they age rather than diminishing. But it was what these women described about the interaction between the Daime and the perimenopausal and postmenopausal transition that proved most clinically intriguing.

Several women in Paulina’s cohort described going months without menstruation – as is characteristic of late perimenopause and menopause – then entering a particularly intense ceremony and experiencing a significant and unexpected bleed. This is not an isolated account. Grace noted during their conversation that she has heard comparable reports across different plant medicines, including psilocybin, from women in late-stage menopausal transition: unexpected, significant bleeds during or after ceremonial work, often described by the women themselves as a kind of final release. The phenomenon has been reported frequently enough in the wider community to constitute a pattern – yet it has never been formally investigated.

Within the Santo Daime tradition, postmenopause carries a specific social and spiritual significance. Rather than experiencing the end of menstruation as a diminishment, many of the senior women Paulina spoke with described it as a transition into greater authority and protection. They chose to let their hair grey, to refrain from procedures that would conceal aging, and to embrace their position in the community. When Paulina asked why, the answers were not primarily ideological – not a conscious rejection of the beauty industry – but relational and strategic. These women felt less subject to men’s attention and desire, and therefore more able to hold positions of power without those positions being shared with or absorbed by a male partner.

The religion’s cosmology supports this: postmenopausal women, no longer menstruating, have traditionally been understood as approaching the archetype of the Virgin – simultaneously distant from and deeply connected to the sacred. But Paulina also observes an emerging counter-movement within the tradition, one that seeks to incorporate the figure of Mary Magdalene and to position menstruation, blood, and hormonal experience as sacred rather than peripheral. The female body, in all its phases, is beginning to be re-inscribed as a legitimate site of spiritual authority – not in spite of its biology but because of it.

Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Courage of Oral Knowledge

Paulina’s research also documents practices around pregnancy and childbirth that remain entirely absent from the formal psychedelic literature – not because they do not exist, but because they exist in communities and traditions that Western clinical science has not looked at.

In Brazil, ayahuasca use is legally protected – including for pregnant women and, under parental authorisation, for children. This legal framework has allowed a body of community knowledge to develop that would have no equivalent in clinical trial settings. The historical figure at the centre of this lineage is Madrina Cristina, a woman from the Amazon who presided over births in the Santo Daime community, administering the Daime during labour. By Paulina’s account, across the many births she attended, not a single mother or child was lost. Paulina hopes one day to write her biography.

Contemporary practice, as Paulina observed it, navigates the terrain between traditional ceremony and biomedical care. Women in the community bring their ritual materials – shrines, songs, drums, and the Daime itself – into hospital birth settings, with the support of medical staff operating within Brazil’s legal framework. Paulina was present at one such birth, describing a ceremony in which the entire family and attending community drank Daime together as the labour progressed, moving into specific ceremonial songs as delivery became imminent. When the child was born, before breastfeeding and before anything else, a drop of Daime was placed in the newborn’s mouth – the first substance, after breath, to mark the beginning of life in that community.

From her fieldwork in Australia, Paulina reports that community midwives attending women who had consumed ayahuasca during labour observed that the process appeared to progress significantly faster, and began arriving earlier to calls from this community as a result. This is observational and uncontrolled. Paulina does not overstate it. But its existence as practitioner knowledge – built by women attending women over time – represents exactly the kind of real-world evidence that psychedelic science has been poorly equipped to collect, and largely uninterested in seeking.

Abortion, Ceremony, and the Support the State Does Not Provide

One of the most quietly significant findings in Paulina’s research concerns a subject that remains largely unspoken within the Santo Daime tradition, and almost entirely absent from the psychedelic literature: the intersection of abortion and plant medicine use.

Brazil’s legal framework on abortion is highly restrictive. Termination is permitted only in cases of rape or when the foetus has a severe and fatal abnormality. In all other circumstances, women who seek abortions do so outside the law, whether at home, in clandestine clinical settings with inadequate infection control, or – in some documented cases – by presenting to hospital for completion of a medically incomplete process, only to find themselves reported to police. The women most exposed to these risks are, predictably, those with fewest resources: disproportionately poor, disproportionately Black.

Within this context, Paulina spoke with women for whom the Daime ceremony had played a role in their experience of termination – providing something the state actively withheld. One woman, now in her 60s and a long-standing practitioner, described her first ceremony at a moment when she had recently ended a pregnancy. She arrived carrying fear and the accumulated weight of social judgement. What she found was that the medicine – and what she understood as the religion’s presiding female divinity – did not condemn her. The divinity, as she experienced it, communicated that it was fine; that she had not had to go through something she had not chosen. That ceremony became, in her words, a turning point: she had been moving toward depression, and the experience of being met with acceptance rather than judgement changed the trajectory of her integration.

Paulina also described a second account – one she witnessed directly. A friend was in the process of a medical abortion, having taken medication earlier that day, and chose to attend a ceremony that evening. Not everyone present knew what was happening. She lay down and was supported by the women around her throughout. What she communicated to those holding her was that the ceremony was, for her, the right place to be. In a country where she had no legal right to the medical care she needed, the ceremony provided the relational and spiritual container that formal healthcare could not.

Paulina draws an important connection here to the progressive traditions within Afro-Brazilian religions such as Umbanda and Candomblé, whose women religious leaders have developed a practice of separating the question of women’s rights from religious belief – holding that women must be free to make that decision for themselves, and in doing so creating spaces where women who have undergone terminations can come and be received.

A Field That Still Has Everything to Learn

The women in Paulina’s cohort have – without clinical scaffolding, without funded trials, without the infrastructure of Western research institutions — developed sophisticated, cross-culturally replicated knowledge about navigating plant medicine use across the full arc of reproductive life. From the menstrual cycle to pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and the menopausal transition, they have built a body of understanding grounded in attention, experience, and the willingness to share knowledge with one another across borders.

Paulina’s thesis is written in Portuguese and has, until now, been largely inaccessible to English-speaking researchers and clinicians. She is currently developing a new research project focused on women from the Global South engaged with a range of plant medicines – ayahuasca, iboga, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms – with a view to building a hub for this accumulated knowledge. She envisions this as something that could be in dialogue with Hystelica, a collaboration rooted in a shared conviction that the bodies of women who have been paying attention are a research resource the field has barely begun to mine.

The psychedelic research community has begun – slowly, and not yet systematically – to ask questions about sex differences and hormonal variables in study design. What Paulina’s work demonstrates is that the answers have, in many cases, already been discovered. They live in the oral traditions, ceremonial practices, and collective memory of women who did not wait for a clinical trial to tell them what their bodies were already communicating.