How kava works: Tony Robbins's story

2023-11-13 · 5 min read

By the kava.fyi editorial team · Last updated: 13 November 2023

Who is the author of this story

Tony Robbins is an American self-help author, speaker and entrepreneur, known among other things for his 1991 bestseller Awaken the Giant Within. In that book he describes an evening spent in a small village in Fiji, which began with a chance encounter on the road and ended with drinking kava together, singing and talking about what a happy life actually means. Fiji has held a special place in his life for years: it is there that he runs his own resort, where he regularly holds events for his participants, with a traditional kava ceremony often a fixture of them.

An evening in a Fijian village

Robbins describes how he and his wife ended up in a small seaside village, where he was invited into a hut for a kava ceremony, while his wife was invited separately to talk with the women, in keeping with the local custom of separating roles at such gatherings. Inside, several dozen people were waiting, the greeting was bula, bula, bula, the men soaked powdered root in water, and the drink was served to guests in half a coconut shell. Robbins writes that, despite the unfamiliar taste and the unusual situation, he felt a calm he had not known before, and the evening ended with singing together and a long farewell.

What bula really means

Bula is a Fijian greeting that literally refers to life and health, used both as a plain hello and as a wish along the lines of be well. Repeating it several times, as in Robbins's account, strengthens the warmth of the greeting rather than being a random linguistic flourish. The same word, in fact, also appears as a toast said just before drinking a portion of kava from the shell, so Robbins, without realising it, took part in a verbal ritual every bit as standardised as the ceremony itself.

Those trying kava for the first time usually also describe the characteristic mild numbing of the tongue and lips that appears after just the first few sips. This is the result of the local anaesthetic effect of kavalactones, documented in the scientific literature on the plant, not a subjective impression that Robbins alone happened to describe. In his case, this sensation coincided with the bitter, unfamiliar taste of the root, which he himself admits did not win him over from the first sip.

A ceremony with very specific rules

What Robbins experienced as a spontaneous encounter is in fact based on a very old and formalised ritual. In the traditional yaqona ceremony, as kava is called in Fiji, a strict protocol applies: who sits where, who drinks in what order, and who has the right to ask for another portion depends on social status and title. Historically the drink was prepared by chosen individuals, who pounded the root with stones, although under the influence of customs brought from Tonga the root was for a time chewed, with the chewed mass spat into a vessel of water, which was thought to help release the active constituents. The British colonial administration deemed this practice unhygienic, so over time people returned to pounding and grinding the dried root, and the liquid is strained today through cloth into a wooden bowl called a tanoa, exactly as has been done for generations. The coconut shell from which Robbins drank his kava is, incidentally, the standard vessel for serving it to guests, alongside the shared bowl from which further portions are drawn throughout the ceremony.

Did kava really build Pacific societies

It is worth adding context you will not find in a self-help book. For centuries the kava ceremony served not only community bonding but also communication with ancestors, welcoming guests and settling disputes, and taking part in it enhanced a person's standing. One might therefore assume that drinking kava itself drove the development of more complex, hierarchical societies in the Pacific, in the way alcohol is said to have done elsewhere in the world. A study published in 2026 in the journal PNAS, which analysed 83 Austronesian-language-speaking communities, did not confirm this hypothesis: the authors found no evidence that kava drinking co-occurred with growing centralisation of power or social stratification. Kava thus served a real communal function, but was not, as previously suspected, an engine driving the emergence of hierarchy. This is a significant correction to the popular, oversimplified narrative in which every psychoactive substance played the same role as a civilisational catalyst throughout human history: the Pacific data show that things could turn out differently, and kava's social function and its effect on power structures are two separate matters.

Why it still works

Whether or not kava shaped the political history of the Pacific, its everyday role remains the same: the shared ritual of drinking from one vessel, in a circle, in a set order, eases conversation and brings together people who might otherwise never exchange a word. This is exactly the mechanism Robbins describes as the strongest impression of that evening, even though his account is a personal memory rather than a scientific study. Today a similar, if more informal, role is played by kava bars outside the Pacific and by nakamals, the traditional meeting places where kava is still a pretext for conversation rather than an end in itself.

One caveat

The experience Robbins describes is subjective, and not everyone will feel what he did after drinking kava, especially on first contact with the unfamiliar taste and ritual. It is also worth remembering that the account in a bestselling self-help book was written to illustrate the author's thesis about the power of human bonds, not to describe kava exhaustively or with scientific rigour, so it should not be treated as a complete guide to how the plant works. Kava acts on the central nervous system, so combining it with alcohol or medications metabolised by the liver is not a good idea, as we discuss further in the article on kava and medications.

You can read about the step-by-step brewing of kava itself in the article how to prepare kava, and we describe the plant's history in more detail here. Another perspective on kava is offered by the article on Andrew Weil.