From location to style, additional plant medicines and fellow retreat participants, it will all impact your ayahuasca experience. What is an Ayahuasca retreat? Choosing the right Ayahuasca retreat for you The effects of Ayahuasca Choosing a location for your Ayahuasca experience The top Ayahuasca retreats in the world.
Traveler-focused ayahuasca retreat centers have opened all around the world and are equipped with lodging that can range from basic tambos, to luxury accommodation with the amenities of a five star hotel.
Retreat centers vary widely in their offerings, but you can expect to share meals and often a room with other retreat participants and have the ceremonial space on site. The structure of each retreat will also vary significantly depending on the intention, duration, and the lineage held, more on that later. In general, the retreat is intended to be in a safe, well-held space for attendees to meet the sacred ayahuasca vine in service of healing. Some retreats last only a couple of days, and others are a full month or even longer.
Some centers may choose to work only with Ayahuasca, and other retreats include additional "companion" plant medicines such as Bobinsana or Noya Rao the Tree of Light or with other hallucinogenics such as San Pedro Huachuma, a type of mescaline from a prolific cactus or Kambo medicine milked from a jungle frog. Again, it all depends on your intention for how you choose to work with the master plants and other natural medicines.
Everyone comes to the Ayahuasca experience with their own unique intention. Whether you trek into the Amazon rainforest of South America to work with a Shipibo shaman, travel to the Peruvian urban center of Cusco, or find an underground retreat in the United States, you can choose from a wide array of styles for each ceremony. In traditional Peruvian ceremonies, for example, the singing of Icaros, sacred traditional songs, plays a central role in the ceremony. For longer more restrictive retreats, called a dieta, the types of food permitted often depend on the companion plants.
Bland food with little or no spices, not even salt, and water are the only thing on the menu in some cases, to prepare the body to work with the medicine.
Attendees are usually given chairs or mattresses and stay seated or prone for the duration of the all-night ceremony. The Ayahuasca brew does its work and the shamans and facilitators are there to support your healing. In some South American centers where the Ayahuasca vine is legal, medicinal plant retreats are paired with complementary practices like yoga, meditation, breathwork, or other personal growth practices to help guide the experience.
The effects of Ayahuasca can heighten the feeling of connection with the heart and to the earth, so pairing these experiences can create a more expansive healing journey by helping integrate introspection with outward activity. Save Pin FB More. Credit: Getty Images. All rights reserved.
Others might be very nice, full of meaning and vital satisfaction. As much as you should prepare for the eventual difficult moments, you should enjoy the beautiful moments that you might experience with ayahuasca. States with deep meaning that can be revealing and sometimes accompanied by ineffable beauty.
In case you want to adjust your relationship with family, partner or friends, or deal with issues involving other people, you should open dialogue with these people if possible during the period of preparation, explaining your serious intentions to solve the issues you have with them.
Establishing a relationship of trust and support is beneficial for all parties. On this website you can find information for family or friends about how they can support a loved one who is going through a therapeutic process with ayahuasca. In traditional cultures, especially in Peru, you can find a whole lot of knowledge on complex diets in shamanic practice. For days, weeks or even months the individual eats unripe baked banana with white rice, no salt, no sugar, and no oil.
For each day on the diet, a specific plant decoction is taken. There is sexual abstinence and one lives in complete isolation in a cabin in the forest. The diet often starts with the ingestion of an emetic plant such as tobacco or yawarpanga Aristolochia didyma , among others. The intention is to cleanse and sensitize the body and psyche to the effects of the plants taken so that they can produce more benefit.
Originally these diets are a way of healing and are part of the training of the healers. How far you want to go with diets, fasting, isolation from everyday environment, sports or meditation before taking ayahuasca in occidental environments depends on you. There are people who maintain their normal diet, others ingest less salt and sugar for a few days or weeks, others fast the days before, etc. In general, one can say that healthy and light meals and maintaining a good physical condition can facilitate the ayahuasca experience and perhaps make it safer.
Such diets can also be a way to connect with the body and blockages you feel, help you gain self-awareness and prepare you for the session. It is often advised to take plenty of vegetables and fruit the days before the session, have a light breakfast and carbohydrate-rich meal, and make sure that the last meal is about hours before the session.
If you take medications that are contraindicated with ayahuasca, such as antidepressants, it is advisable to stop using it two weeks before the session. This is a very delicate process that has to be done under strict supervision of a specialist, as interrupting the use of a psychiatric medication can cause serious problems. Herbal preparations containing St. Avoid alcohol, stimulants, opiates and other drugs during the days or weeks before the session.
Keep your body hydrated and well rested before the ceremony. After ingesting the ayahuasca, the effect comes up, depending on the person, in about ten minutes to one hour, and lasts up to two to four hours. There are many types of ayahuasca depending on its preparation, as every shaman can use a variety of plants to modulate the effect, e.
Each plant has its own effect that adds to the overall experience. So the duration and the intensity of the ayahuasca experience can vary greatly from one session to another depending on the content of the preparation.
There are centers and groups that use very powerful ayahuascas and others where several cups of a softer decoction is taken. Many facilitators do not give high doses to people taking for the first time, making them first familiar with the effects before giving higher doses. The ayahuasca experience produces changes in the way we perceive reality. The texture of reality can become brighter, more colorful and composed of patterns of luminous energetic vibration.
The beginning of the experience is usually when one notices with both eyes open and closed that the textures of reality change. Also the appearance of a buzzing in the ears can announce that the psychological effects are approaching. While having the eyes closed, the experience is much more intense than with eyes open, although with open eyes the change in the texture of reality is always noticed.
A common strategy, in fact, when the content of the experience is too intense with eyes closed, is simply to open the eyes, which dampens the effects.
During the course of the experience, visions usually appear with abstract motifs but also clearly identifiable sharp images. Emotions are perceived more profoundly and one can access forgotten memories. There are people who experience paranormal phenomena as telepathy or precognition.
Regardless of whether these effects are really paranormal, the truth is that subjectively these are common elements of the experience. Also fears or difficult emotions can appear that may be accompanied by blockages in the body pains, tension, etc. The best thing to do in tough times is to breathe slowly and deeply, go with the music and have confidence in the process induced by the ayahuasca and the facilitator.
It is normal, especially in the case of beginners, not to have visionary effects in the first sessions, but this is not always the case. It seems that in some cases, it is as if the ayahuasca visions need some kind of visual and cognitive learning process before they can be fully experienced.
Ayahuasca also modifies the habitual way of thinking. It may simply be that you have no visions but that your thinking process is altered. It is better to spend some time being bored than end up in an accident because you wanted to leave abruptly before the end of the session, or taking the risk that the psychological effects manifest intensely after having left the room while being alone.
Ayahuasca is a powerful plant; take it with respect even if you think you are not having any effect. For some people, it takes time for the effects to be noticed. Be cautious; there is time enough to go home. Many consider ayahuasca as a mirror of the inner self, where, in the same way that internal conflicts may surface, so may surface your wonderful sides.
When this happens, the experience can be of indescribable beauty. It can sometimes happen that you have feelings of paranoia during the course of experience. The ayahuasca experience is not linear; rather, it goes through different phases, some more pleasant and others more difficult.
As in any journey that is undertaken in life, there are moments of laughter, moments of sadness, moments of euphoria, moments of sudden insights and revealed truths, and moments of boredom and disappointment. These effects are normal during the time of the experience and are transient. The appearance of these effects is proof that these are experiences that happen to all of us at some moment in our lives for whatever circumstance, and although they can be uncomfortable, you should deal with them.
Learning to deal with whatever comes up is always the best attitude for an ayahuasca session. And most importantly, do not hesitate to ask for help from your facilitator when you consider that you need it. It may also happen that one is being immersed in perinatal states, as described by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. Sadly, relapse of drug addiction does occur, and this is the nature of the illness. It does not necessarily mean that what you have tried has wholly failed.
This does not always mean that you need a new treatment experience. It is also illegal in most countries, except for Peru. In the U. This is because there are so many unknown uncertainties , from what occurs and the possible long-term effects. If you suffer from addiction or another mental health illness and are considering undergoing Ayahuasca treatment, we urge you to contact Rehab Guide.
The drug rehab treatment methods we offer are evidence-based and thoroughly researched, and delivered by a team of fully qualified medical and therapeutic experts.
Trained in addictionology in the Johnson Model, and specializing in substance abuse for individual and couple counselling. John's personal experience has given him a wealth of insights, which he integrates into practice. His extensive training has allowed him to gain expertise in individual and group counselling, concurrent disorders, case management, executing treatment plans and relapse prevention.
He started this free helpline as a result of a life change and to help others get sober and live a life free from drugs and alcohol. John covers a variety of topics relating to addiction and recovery in his articles. You can contact us by completing our form below and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly. Please leave this field empty. Read about hallucinogens. What is LSD? What is Ketamine? What Is DMT?
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