Where do we go when we die? Looking for answers in psychedelics

Feb 27, 2026

Lynette Wallworth, artist and award-winning filmmaker who explores near-death experiences and immersive work. She recounts her childhood near-death memory and how art became a language for the ineffable. She describes visits to Indigenous communities, Amazon plant traditions, and palliative trials using psilocybin. The conversation traces comparisons between NDEs, ayahuasca visions and approaches to dying with acceptance.

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ANECDOTE

Yawanawa Origin Story Links Ayahuasca To The Dead

The Yawanawa origin story Lynette shares links ayahuasca to the first death: a chief's buried body grows the vine used to make the brew.
The community initially used the drink in grief, trying to die, but instead they met the deceased in visions and recovered connection.

ANECDOTE

Filming A Terminal Patient Who Found Death Easier

Lynette filmed a Melbourne psilocybin trial patient, Flavia, a 35-year-old with terminal breast cancer who wanted help easing fear about leaving her loved ones.
After her first experience Flavia told Lynette death felt easier, but she died before her second planned session.

ANECDOTE

Christian Patient Found Psilocybin Aligned With Faith

Roz, an older Christian patient, experienced an out‑of‑body vision during psilocybin where she saw her children okay and met her deceased husband who kissed her.
The vision gave Roz relief and reaffirmed her spiritual beliefs about continuity after death.

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Filmmaker Lynette Wallworth on how nearly dying as a little girl set her on a lifelong path to interrogate out-of-body experiences, spirituality and what really happens to us when we die.

When Lynette was a little girl, she had a near death experience on her grandparents' property.

Her father brought her back from the brink and what she saw and experienced there, on the edge of death, came back with her.

For years, Lynette struggled to talk about what happened so she made paintings and artworks trying to make sense of this experience.

But when she started visiting remote Indigenous communities here in Australia and abroad, in the Amazon, that she finally found some sort of language for describing the scientifically unprovable.

There, in cultures where out of body experiences are accepted as either spiritual or possible through the use of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and ayahuasca, Lynette stopped feeling weird.

Her latest film investigates how doctors in Melbourne are turning to psychedelic drugs to help ease their terminally ill patients towards death, and in the process learn that "we weren't put on earth to run around in fear".

Edge of Life will be available to stream on Binge from 28 March.

Currently, you can watch it via Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Fetch and YouTubel; or organise your own cinema screening via Fan Force.

You can find more information about Lynette and her films at her website.

This episode of Conversations was produced by Meggie Morris. Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison.

It explores death, dying, grief, medical trials, shamans, hallucinogens, science, psychology, psychiatry, acceptance, palliative care, caring for the dying, nursing, art, filmmaking, philosophy, shrooms, magic mushrooms, the immortality key, religion, spiritualty, quacks, health and wellness industry, tripping, epiphanies, film.

To binge even more great episodes of the Conversations podcast with Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski go the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. There you’ll find hundreds of the best thought-provoking interviews with authors, writers, artists, politicians, psychologists, musicians, and celebrities.