Ayahuasca Blog · Casa de la Luz
What happens when a sacred medicine meets a world run by money, and how to find a place that still honors it.
In a world driven almost entirely by money, ayahuasca was never going to escape. Retreats with hundreds of people, price tags of thousands of dollars, inexperienced staff, and adulterated or poor-quality medicine are now served up in many places around the world. Running a ceremony center can be very profitable, and if the place is luxurious, it quickly becomes a multimillion-dollar business. A well-sized center with every comfort, daytime activities, and room for many guests can literally generate millions of dollars a month.
Just as we have wanted to conquer other things in other eras, we are now extracting this medicine from the Amazon and, in our own way, conquering new territory. I have seen with my own eyes that ayahuasca can be used as a drug in many ways. Just as a person can abuse the substance, the medicine itself can be abused by an industry that wants to standardize it.
The difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose, and that is exactly where the use of ayahuasca lies.
Why Group Size Matters
Ayahuasca is group work. I have experienced this firsthand over the past year: whether the group is small or just two people, the work is always shared. That is exactly why groups need a limit. In my opinion, once a ceremony goes beyond 25 to 30 people, too many things are put at risk: individual attention, control of the session itself, and the basic care of each participant.
Even so, in Costa Rica and in many other places, ceremonies of 80 to 100 people take place. You have to be brave to run a ceremony like that. The first one I ever heard about was held in Limón, Costa Rica, in a ranch in the middle of the jungle that took many hours to reach on foot. It sounds like a special place for a ritual: cut off from everything and connected to nature. Literally drinking with the jaguars. People drank on the bare floor, with no mats or comfortable mattresses. I was told the atmosphere became very intense, but that everyone helped lift the energy together.
There are also famous centers where the setting is more urban and everything happens in luxury locations. I do not judge how they are set up, and I am sure they do good work up to a point. But today's mentality is to do many things at once, and paying attention to too many things can distract from the meaning of the medicine. I prefer retreats that offer minimal yoga or simply meditation and focus on the ayahuasca itself, rather than the most advanced holistic technique or a colon cleanse.
The House in the Mountains
The first time I went to a retreat, I imagined an older woman's home in the mountains, and that is exactly what it was. There was a large room in the back where the ceremonies took place, and about eight of us fit inside. It was strangely pleasant to be visiting someone's home instead of a hotel-style retreat center, and it is something I have wanted to carry forward through the years.
Some of the famous centers have even started bringing in well-known writers, celebrities, and "VIP healers." Their model, however, has never been fully accepted by the ayahuasca community, mainly because ceremonies of that size often have only one shaman and a limited number of helpers, and because of the way they exploit the medicine.
Drinking on a Schedule
I once innocently reached out to a world-famous author I admire very much, hoping to meet him during a lecture he came to give in Costa Rica. I was politely turned down, with the explanation that I would have to pay for the full retreat, since he would only be present for the talks included in the week-long package. I still wonder why you would bring someone so well known to a country and then keep him out of reach of the people who live there. I also wonder whether drinking ayahuasca alongside a celebrity is a good reason to choose a retreat. It might be a motivation to attend, but it is not necessarily the right moment for a person to go. No one should influence whether another person drinks ayahuasca. It has to be one's own decision.
Nowadays people drink ayahuasca on a schedule. They set dates around their jobs and obligations, and most do not get the chance to give themselves time to prepare beforehand. They take a flight and drink the medicine only a few hours after landing, or they have to fly home right after the retreat, without realizing that this strongly reduces the long-term effects of the medicine.
Respecting Costa Rica and Its Culture
In Costa Rica, the culture and its limits must be respected. We should avoid businesses that benefit only a minority and not all of us: narcissistic ventures run by greedy people, with events that locals are not invited to, first because of the price and second because they are not held in our language. Some people set up these businesses without ever having tried the medicines themselves, among many other problems.
No matter the hierarchy, the person who works directly with ayahuasca must be experienced and must keep a balance between the business side and the healing side, and many people do not understand this. Do not come to a country to share medicine if you do not even have a work permit or legal status there. Some organizers even bring shamans from Brazil or Peru for events who obviously have no work permits and entered as tourists. All of this can lead to serious legal problems, such as human trafficking, employing undocumented workers, tax evasion, and including minors in ceremonies.
In Costa Rica, the purchase and use of ayahuasca itself cannot be taxed. That is why some centers charge a separate fee for the medicine, in cash. But everything else around a retreat can be taxed: the work of the shamans and assistants, supplies, food, lodging, and therapies. Our country allows this, and people should take advantage of it. Instead, illegal retreats are set up constantly, and they deeply affect local businesses like ours that operate openly and do things the right way.
The luxury retreats I am describing could never be attended by the average Costa Rican, because they require a stay of at least a week at the resort. This erases the origins of ayahuasca culture in Costa Rica, where it has always been possible to attend for a single night, something I think is a good way to begin and to build an initial connection with the plant. Foreign visitors, meanwhile, end up in a retreat that feels like being in their own country, with no challenges and nothing interesting to discover about Costa Rican culture. That is a pity.
It is interesting that most of the people who come to our ceremonies are first-timers. In the talks before the ceremonies, I tell participants this and add that it is probably my role to give the medicine to people for the first time, because of how well I adapt to them and because I can hold ceremonies in English, which makes the experience less stressful for foreigners since they can understand everything. It is also common to meet guides or shamans who present themselves as ayahuasca experts and do not even speak Spanish. I wonder how they learned from an experienced shaman or guide. With Google Translate?
What to Look For in a Good Place
Starting from the top: the big centers have psychologists, doctors, nurses, nutritionists, and even famous personalities on staff. When you manage that many people, you certainly need that entire team. But the most appropriate approach is to keep the group to the number of people who fit in a small house in the middle of the mountains or on the beach, as was done traditionally.
I have always worked with groups of up to 13 people, and for me that is the limit. Everyone who works with the medicine knows their own capacity and how much of a ceremony they can truly control. This should not be decided by profit, but by honesty and responsibility. I do not think that putting 80 people into an altered state is something we can safely handle outside the place where the medicine comes from. If it were done, there should be at least eight shamans, each with two helpers. To me this is experimenting with something that has not been used this way for very long. It could even be dangerous. I have also been told that some people never feel the medicine at all, perhaps because of the crowd, or because they are given very mild preparations as a way of testing the waters.
This is where the eye of a deep critic of ayahuasca comes in. Ayahuasca needs to find a balance with the world of money, and it should be shared as widely as possible. A center full of professionals like the big ones is ideal, but it would be hard to sustain in a small one. That is why I insist that holding such large ceremonies is purely about money.
It would have a male and a female shaman, along with helpers of different genders who have drunk the medicine with those same shamans. Ceremonies would be capped at about 20 people, with the shamans taking turns through the night, and the helpers as well. It would have staff for psychological assessment and psychotherapy in case anything happens, ideally a nurse for safety and pre-ceremony health checks, and service staff. A model like this is not very large, and it could not serve a great number of visitors. And if a center insists on ceremonies of 80, it could at least split people into separate temples and build a true complex designed for this, with dedicated staff for each temple and no more than 30 people in each, instead of people packed five centimeters apart in a single space.
Mixing Medicines Turns a Ritual into a Drug Party
I have already discussed this with experienced ayahuasca brothers. After sharing ceremonies, we talked about building three different temples where ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, and peyote would be held simultaneously. Things like this are very close to happening. There are already places that give San Pedro the day after ayahuasca and then put participants into the temazcal (sweat lodge) at the same time. We must avoid making the ritual look like a drug party.
I once asked a temazcal shaman I deeply respect about drinking ayahuasca and then entering the temazcal. He told me it would be too extreme, and that this is not how it is done. I agreed with him. I was only asking on behalf of my friends in the back seat who had just drunk a mushroom tea and were about to enter the sweat lodge. They probably hated me for the question. I did not drink the tea, of course.
This is a symptom of the "drug scene" mentality, where ayahuasca, kambo, peyote, rapé, and other things are all mixed together in one retreat. Legality must also be handled carefully. In Costa Rica, small event organizers with only a few years of experience have also offered magic mushroom ceremonies, without considering that mushrooms are an illegal substance pursued by the police, which is very different from ayahuasca.
Legal Risks and the Question of Death
Another important point in the ayahuasca business involves socio-religious or ethnic beliefs within a shaman's worldview that can come into conflict with a country's laws or morals. Many people have been detained at airports carrying ayahuasca, and some have even been jailed. But transporting the medicine is not the most serious concern. The most serious concern is death.
People tend to focus on the few deaths that have actually occurred because of ayahuasca, and most of those cases involve the use of another substance alongside it. Some medicines can even help a person die. The most recent case happened in Peru, where a man was doing a purge with drunk tobacco before his ayahuasca experience. Drunk or liquid tobacco requires great care, because it is very strong on the body, which is where its cleansing power comes from. In this case, the man died in the middle of the application. When interviewed, the shaman said it was the man's destiny to die, which is not far from the shamanic worldview I am describing.
Some shamans help people die. They detect the illness and systematically explain to the sick person the natural course it will take, up to the moment of death. If the person is convinced they will die, there is nothing the shaman can do to cure them, and within two to three weeks of the visit the person normally passes away. By explaining the grave illness to the patient, the shaman in some way speeds up the process. This is not similar to assisted suicide. It is more like an indigenous farewell. There are also cases where a person dies during the visit itself.
Meanwhile, thousands of people die every year from opioids or antidepressants, yet no doctor who prescribes those medicines has ever gone to jail.
What Makes a Good Guide or Shaman
In this adaptation of ayahuasca, which you can call industrial or whatever you like, the people who help and guide ceremonies are also evolving. It is extremely hard to find a good guide or shaman who works with love, which is the most important thing. As I have said in other posts, if the person facilitating ayahuasca is not Indigenous, I consider it very important that they have gone to therapy or are actively going. You can feel it. If the person working with the medicine does not love what they do, they will not give good ceremonies. The same goes for the helpers: if they are there just to fill a space, you will not feel them in the ceremony.
How can you tell a good guide or shaman apart? First, not every guide or shaman is fully equipped to work with every kind of person, profile, or symptom, so there are some important points to look for, and even red flags. It can also simply be that some people are not compatible with certain guides or ways of working. I find that completely normal; sometimes there is just no "click." It can happen that you attend a ceremony led by people who have never encountered someone with your particular pain or spiritual suffering. It would be something new for them. The cases that come up with ayahuasca are always unique, and new situations arise all the time. Even today, the great shamans are still learning.
In a ceremony, difficult moments can include births, the reliving of sexual assault or trauma, accidents, time in prison, the deaths of friends or relatives, and even time in the mother's womb, among many other things. A good guide or shaman will know how to identify what is happening with a given person, and will apply the right techniques to ask the participant questions, help them feel comfortable, or pass along messages. This is done through visions, ideas picked up from the person's energy, or sensations. It can also come from something the participant said in a conversation before the ceremony, which is why a good connection matters so much.
This specialized person should have at least five years of drinking ayahuasca for themselves before venturing to guide a ceremony alongside someone experienced. When we picture someone who guides ceremonies, we may imagine a person very different from everyone else and exemplary in every way, but that is not the case. Their specialty lies in their knowledge of shamanism and plants, and in their ability to transmit, redirect, manage, or transform the energy of the ceremonies. We should not fixate on a teacher's mistakes and become disillusioned. We should learn to recognize what the teacher knows and learn from it, in our own way.
Ayahuasca guides and shamans also have toxic relationships, family problems, money problems, and sometimes serious illnesses. Their strength is built on this: on being able to control or heal their own illnesses as best they can, and manage their own inner situations so that they can pass that strength on to others. I remember that after I began holding ceremonies for others, I became seriously ill within a few months. I felt lost, very lonely, and blocked for several weeks. After some time I became stronger, and I learned that illnesses caused by or absorbed from ceremonies are only healed by drinking more medicine and going deeper. By surrendering more. The grandmother told me I had to be more myself than ever if I wanted to work in harmony with her and with myself. I could not pretend to be someone I was not.
At a retreat in Costa Rica, a participant felt a strong pain in her abdomen. Perhaps without remembering anything about it, she sank into the pain, and she was helped with blowing and agua florida. The shaman reminded her that she had had an abortion and that the baby was still with her. She was left in shock and the pain continued. She literally went through a birth during the ceremony, which she needed in order to spiritually release what she was carrying of the baby. The next day, when she went to the bathroom, something dark left her body, and she understood it as part of the cleansing.
Balancing Money, Responsibility, and Love
Many different personalities are involved in this adaptation, or reconquest, of ayahuasca in the West. There are those who do not charge for their services or prefer to barter, and there are those who earn large salaries without ever having taken the medicine themselves. On one side there are injustices, and on the other there is excess mixed with greed. Very rarely does the money end up in the hands of the shaman or guide. Most of it goes to large investors and the people who commercialize the medicine. The work of helpers and guides can be complicated when they deal with businesspeople who do not understand what ayahuasca is, or with individuals who are seeking personal gain.
The medicine itself demands that everyone who works with it must drink it or have tried it. She says this herself, like a commandment. For example, guides and shamans all face the challenge of keeping their emotions calm when they meet a participant who stirs desire in them or attracts them in some way. If a guide uses their position to gain advantage and form a romantic or sexual relationship with a participant, whether a man or a woman, the main purpose of a retreat is lost.
This is quite a big challenge, because the medicine naturally produces a lot of love among all participants, and that can easily be mistaken for falling in love. Romantic love is different from the love that the medicine produces. At a serious retreat this should not even be a topic of conversation, because it is a place of personal healing, not ego conquests. If something blossoms after the retreat, that is perfectly fine. But all energy of that kind must be kept under strict control by participants, guides, and helpers, both during and before retreats of this type.
Final Thoughts
Ayahuasca does not need to be industrialized to be shared. It needs small groups, honest guides, enough time to prepare, respect for the country and culture that hosts it, and a real balance between money and healing.
If you are looking for a place to drink, look for the people before you look for the amenities, and trust your intuition about whether the medicine is being treated as a sacred work or as a product.
With gratitude, Andrés · Casa de la Luz