FAQs

Whether your Ayahuasca experience is full of extraordinary insights, or intense darkness that leaves you confused, you want to have prep and professional integration support to get the most value out of your experience.

Without an expert guide to prepare you in the weeks leading up to the retreat, you will likely suffer unnecessary fears, and not meet Ayahuasca with the right most effective intentions.

Without integration support, you could lose up to 60% or more of the potential.

Why?

Your mindset and the topics you intend to focus on going into the retreat have a huge impact on the Ayahuasca experience you have.  Like a genie offering you three wishes, you want to be sure you ask Ayahuasca for the right things.

When you return from your retreat, you return to your life as it was before your awakening. It’s very easy to slip back into your old habits, mindsets, and routines…and soon the breakthroughs you made with Ayahuasca’s help fade away as you slip back into your old behaviours.

Or worse, you end up feeling uncertain or strange about part of your experience, which lingers once you return home. Having an expert guide to help you find value in your intense emotions is key to moving forward powerfully.

My first Ayahuasca retreat was in Peru back in 2008. At the time I was operating as the VP of Marketing at the software company I founded. My Ayahuasca experience in Peru was extraordinarily profound. I had no negative challenges whatsoever. However, within a week of returning to work, many of the bad habits that I had let go of started creeping back in. The insights and progress I’d made began to fade away.

Knowing what I know now, if I had an Ayahuasca experienced coach, I would have been able to stay the course and prevent the bad habits from creeping back in. I believe lost about 60% of the potential value.

Imagine joining a group of 20-30 strangers, most of whom who don’t have professional reputations to protect and one of them makes a Facebook post that reveals your participation. As unlikely as this may sound, it is the reason many of our VIP clients choose to commission private ceremonies or join one of our carefully curated retreats.  It’s just not worth the risk.

Ayahuasqueros who do not have experience working with VIPs, or know the participants personally, rarely have the leverage to enforce the strictest privacy rules.

Properly trained Ayahuasca facilitators are called Ayahuasqueros. Even a good Ayahuasquero for most is likely the wrong Ayahuasquero for a high-functioning individual.

Our clients want to avoid the “New Age” song leaders, spiritual gurus, and laissez-faire facilitators.

The biggest mistake that you could inadvertently make is choosing a “lazy Ayahuasquero”- one who fails to screen every participant’s medical and mental health accurately. 

There is only one serious threat to your well-being in an Ayahuasca ceremony.  If the Ayahuasquero does not properly screen, and a person with a severe mental illness gets in, they could flip out in a way that creates a traumatising experience for everyone else.

A recent story from the summer of 2016 illustrates how bad it can get: Long story short, In the middle of the Ayahuasca ceremony, a guy seriously flips out. He became violent, and somebody called 911! Can you imagine being high on Ayahuasca and having the authorities arrive?

To be clear, it is very rare that Ayahuasca will not cause a mentally healthy individual to totally flip out. We have never seen it happen. This person had to have had a pre-existing mental illness that the Ayahuasquero did not properly screen for. All the Ayahuasquero we work thoroughly screen their participants, ensuring a secure session for all.

Here is one more way an Ayahuasquero can not live up to their commitment. The Ayahuasca itself can be too weak. In fact, contrary to popular belief, you are much more likely to have an underwhelming experience with no benefit than an overwhelming one. A clean, strong Ayahuasca brew made by a master botanist is an assurance you want up front, otherwise, all your efforts leading up to the retreat were for nothing.

Ayahuasca is an Amazonian herbal tea, a combination of at least two plants, one containing the hallucinogen DMT which catalyses the visionary and healing effects. The experience of being on Ayahuasca is hard to describe objectively because the experience is so unique to the individual. Typically it is like being in a very vivid, often beautiful, often intense dream state. One spends most of the 5-hour experience lying down, only getting up to go to the bathroom as needed.

The results are often life changing, which is why so many are willing to face the discomfort and unknown that comes with drinking Ayahuasca. Westerners are using ayahuasca to heal a long list of health conditions, like emotional aloofness, childhood trauma, and depression, that conventional medicine, and therapy struggles to cure.

More recently, totally healthy, high functioning individuals have been working with Ayahuasca as a performance development accelerator.

Western researchers have started to discover the positive effects that Ayahuasca has on the brain, as shown in this short video called The Science of Ayahuasca, – How Does it Work?