Much is written about Ayahuasca centers, facilitators, and shamans. Retreat spaces are reviewed, ranked, and compared almost perpetually. Ceremonial lineages are debated. Shamans are celebrated or questioned.
Very little is said about the traveler.
This post is about you, your preparation, your honesty, your intentions, and your responsibility to yourself and to the people you will share this experience with (us). We write this not to discourage, but to invite you into the seriousness that this work deserves. The more clearly you understand what you are stepping into and what your role in that process looks like, the more meaningful and safe your experience will be.
What We Are — and What We Are Not
One of the most important things to understand before attending any Ayahuasca retreat is the scope of what facilitators actually do. There is a great deal of mythology around this role, and that mythology can create unrealistic expectations that lead to disappointment or, in some cases, harm.
Our guides are not doctors. We do not diagnose, treat, or claim to cure diseases. We do not offer clinical follow-up, medical interventions, or psychological assessments — unless something is explicitly discussed and agreed upon in advance. Our primary function is to accompany: to hold a safe, intentional space before, during, and after the ceremony so that your own process can unfold as it needs to.
This distinction matters enormously. Ayahuasca can surface deeply buried material. Grief, fear, trauma, unresolved relationships, and aspects of yourself you have long avoided. That is part of its power. But surfacing that material is not the same as treating it. A skilled facilitator can help you feel safe while that material arises. They are not equipped to provide the kind of sustained therapeutic support that processing it deeply may require.
For that reason, we are not the right people to work with individuals who are seeking direct treatment for deep trauma rooted in sexual abuse, physical violence, or severe psychological harm. These are situations that require qualified mental health professionals — trauma-specialized therapists, psychiatrists, or psychologists outside of a psychedelic experience. Bringing those needs into a ceremony without proper clinical support is not brave; it is risky. Sharing sensitive trauma material with the wrong person, even a well-meaning one, can lead to re-traumatization, revictimization, acute psychological crisis, or, in rare cases, temporary psychosis.
We describe ourselves as trauma-informed, which means we understand the basic principles of trauma-sensitive care: we do not push, we do not force, we create safety, and we follow your lead. But we do not treat trauma. That line is important, and we hold it out of respect for the seriousness of what trauma healing actually requires. We also do not take cases involving certain types of drug addiction, severe PTSD, or alcoholism (unless already treated and in detox with professional help) because these cases also require a space and skills that we do not possess. Our years of experience have made us well aware of that.
We also want to be transparent about another clinical boundary: we are not equipped to work safely with individuals who have been diagnosed with Cluster B personality disorders, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, or narcissistic personality disorder. This is not a judgment. These are complex presentations that require specialized support, and Ayahuasca in those contexts can produce outcomes that a standard facilitation team is not trained to manage, not even a shaman. There are retreat centers staffed with medical professionals and clinical psychologists that are better suited for those cases, and we are happy to point you in that direction.
The Selection Process Is an Act of Care
Every retreat we offer begins long before the ceremony — it begins with the selection of participants.
Our intake process exists for one reason: to make sure that the people who sit together in ceremony are genuinely ready, genuinely safe, and genuinely aligned with the nature of this work. This protects you, the other participants, and the integrity of the experience as a whole. Ayahuasca is not a service you consume. It is a shared container, and everyone inside that container affects everyone else. Filling out the application is basic, but you will be surprised by the number of people who don´t like to fill it out or do it to get it out of the way. The answers are short; nothing is in-depth; they try not to reveal much, which creates a lack of trust in the applicant. The more you write in your application, the better.
If your application is not approved, we ask you to receive that information with openness rather than resistance. A declined application is not a personal rejection. It is an honest assessment, based on our experience with hundreds of participants, that your profile, your current mental or emotional state, or your stated intentions are not the right fit for our retreat at this time. It may also be an indication that this is simply not the right moment in your life for this work. Both of those things are worth knowing.
You are always free to apply to other centers. What we ask is that you do not block us, insist repeatedly, or interpret our decision as something to overcome. We share our assessment with care and respect, and we expect the same in return.
We also want to be direct about something more serious: providing false or incomplete information during the intake process is not a minor omission. If you tell us the diet is going well and you have been drinking alcohol, if you forget to mention that you had open-heart surgery several years ago, or if you choose not to share that you regularly hear voices, you are not just bending a rule. You are putting yourself and others at genuine risk. Facilitators in these situations may have no option other than to take legal action. We say this not to intimidate, but because we take this work seriously, and we need you to take it seriously too.
Come for Yourself, or Don't Come
This may be the most important thing we write in this post.
Do not attend a retreat because your friend is going. Do not come to keep your partner company, or because someone you love convinced you it would be good for you. There is nothing wrong with sharing this path with people you care about, but your reasons for being there must be your own. Genuine, personal, internal reasons.
Ayahuasca is a master plant teacher with an extraordinary ability to surface what is true. If your intention is unclear, if your motivation is external, if you are there out of social obligation or quiet reluctance, the medicine will find that. It often externalizes it in ways that are difficult to manage: confusion, resistance, fear, or what people commonly call a "bad trip." Most difficult experiences in the ceremony are not random. They are the medicine reflecting something.
We have seen this pattern many times. We have also seen something else that we find equally telling: when one person in a group is declined, sometimes no one in that group comes. They cancel together. On the surface, this looks like loyalty. But Ayahuasca is not a group activity in the way a dinner or a trip is. As the facilitator and Ayahuaquero Chris Isner says, inside the maloka, in the dark of night, it does not matter who is sitting beside you or which shaman is present. In that moment, only you and the master plants exist. Your friends, your family, your partner, nobody can help you. The guide walks closely with you, but the journey is yours alone.
Arriving with full, personal intention is not a small thing. It may be the most important preparation you do, even if it’s not fully clear and logical, you have an intuition about it.
The Diet Is Not a Suggestion
Many people do not grasp how delicate the days leading up to a ceremony actually are until they are in the ceremony and something feels off. Most of what we write here comes from direct experience: from situations we have witnessed, from moments that could have been avoided, from conversations we have had to have after the fact.
The traditional Ayahuasca diet — avoiding alcohol, pork, fermented foods, recreational drugs, certain medications, sexual activity, and large social gatherings — is not an arbitrary set of restrictions invented to test your willpower. It is a preparation of the body, the nervous system, and the energetic field. In Amazonian tradition, the diet is understood as a way of quieting the noise of ordinary life so that the medicine can communicate clearly. From a physiological standpoint, many of these restrictions exist to reduce the risk of dangerous interactions with the MAOIs present in the Ayahuasca brew. From a more subtle perspective, they exist to bring you into a state of receptivity, to begin the work before the ceremony begins.
When people arrive and casually mention that they could not stop drinking coffee, or that they had sex the morning of the ceremony, or that they attended a concert with 35,000 people the night before — and they say it the way you might mention stopping for groceries — it tells us something important. Not about their character, but about their readiness.
We want to ask: if you cannot set aside a cup of coffee or a concert for three days, how do you expect to make the bigger changes that this medicine may ask of you? Ayahuasca often shows people with great clarity what needs to shift in their lives, patterns, relationships, habits, and beliefs. But it can only show you the door. You are the one who has to walk through it. And the diet is the first step of that walk.
One recent couple attended a major concert the night before their ceremony — tens of thousands of people, loud music, late hours, high energy stimulation. They arrived at their session visibly depleted, with diminished capacity to connect or surrender. Were they also, perhaps unconsciously, using the concert as a way to delay the confrontation they knew was coming? It is worth asking that question honestly. Avoidance takes many forms, and sometimes the most sophisticated avoidance looks like enthusiasm.
By the time we notice these things on the day of the ceremony, our options are limited. Canceling a retreat at the last minute is logistically complex and emotionally charged. So we ask you to carry this responsibility before you arrive, not for us, but for yourself.
A Note on What Happens When You Respect the Process
We have written this post in a direct voice because this work asks for directness. But we want to close with something equally true: when people arrive prepared, honest, and genuinely willing, the results are extraordinary.
We have sat with travelers who arrived carrying grief they had never spoken aloud, and watched them leave lighter. We have seen people confront patterns they had spent decades building walls around, and choose, in the space of one night, to put those patterns down. We have witnessed reconciliations with parents, with the past, with the self that years of conventional therapy had not been able to reach.
This is what Ayahuasca makes possible when the conditions are right. And you are a large part of those conditions.
The retreat space, the ceremony, the guides, the medicine, we hold our part of this as carefully as we know how. We ask you to hold yours with the same care. Come rested. Come honest. Come for yourself. Follow the diet not as a rule but as the first act of devotion to your own healing. Arrive with curiosity rather than expectation, with openness rather than agenda.
The medicine does not need you to be perfect. It needs you to be present. And when you are truly present, when you arrive with a clean body, a clear intention, and a willingness to meet whatever arises, what becomes possible is beyond what any of us can promise or predict.
We look forward to walking alongside you. -Andrés
Want to understand more about what the experience itself may hold? Read our post on whether Ayahuasca visions are real.