Ayahuasca is a medicinal plant at the heart of traditional healing systems of indigenous tribes in the amazon basin. Rapidly expanding in the academic world over the last three decades, ayahuasca is studied for its powerful therapeutic potential and is currently pushing the boundaries of Western psychiatry, the science of consciousness, as well as entheogenic and inter-cultural practises. This dissertation is a Constructivist Grounded Theory analysis of the literature published in the last decade that seeks to elucidate how ayahuasca is perceived by participants, facilitators and researchers to impart therapeutic benefits. Drawing on the available peer-reviewed literature and the author’s personal experiences with ayahuasca, eleven themes emerge that describe these perceptions. The author’s personal experiences are made explicit and critically examined in order to show the nature of this joint construction of meaning, and demonstrate the author’s attempt to ground the theory in the data. These eleven themes form a continuous and integrated image of how ayahuasca is viewed to heal. Future research into the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca will require well-designed research methods that account for the complex ethics surrounding potentially illegal activities and a nuanced mixed-methodology that simultaneously accounts for the rich personal experiences of ayahuasca alongside statistically-based clinical results of its use.