Ayahuasca Retreats

An ayahuasca retreat is a multi-day experience centred around one or more nighttime ceremonies, with preparation beforehand and integration afterwards. The ceremony is what most people imagine, but the days surrounding it often determine whether the experience has any lasting impact.

Not all retreats are alike, and the differences matter far more than the marketing might suggest. A three-night retreat with two ceremonies in Colombia has little in common with a ten-day dieta in the Peruvian jungle beyond the plant itself. The intensity is different, the cost is different, and each format suits a different kind of person.

We’ve been running retreats near Medellín for more than five years, so this guide comes from inside the work—not from a directory. We’ll look at the different formats, what they cost, where they are legally recognised, and where to go next.

What a Retreat Is

A retreat is a container, and the ceremony is one night inside it. The word gets used for everything from a single evening in a rented room to two weeks of isolation in the jungle, which is why people arrive with wildly different expectations.

A serious one has four parts. There is screening before you arrive, covering medical history, medication and mental health, and a retreat that skips this is telling you something. There is preparation: a diet, usually a week or two, and some work on what you are actually coming for. There are the ceremonies themselves, at night, with facilitators awake and sober. And there is integration, which is the weeks afterwards when the thing either becomes a change or becomes a story you tell at parties.

People underweight the fourth part almost universally. It can be that you have a shattering night and nothing changes, because you went home and did no homework. It can also be that you have a quiet, apparently uneventful ceremony and things reorganise slowly afterwards because you kept on working with it. And by doing that work, the night becomes useful. The ceremony on its own is not the thing you are buying.

Retreat Formats

Short retreats: three to four days, one or two ceremonies

The most common entry point. Long enough to prepare, drink, and land before you fly. Suits somebody whose life is basically intact, who wants to see something more clearly, and who cannot disappear for two weeks. This is the format we run most.

Week-long retreats: seven days, three or four ceremonies

Each ceremony builds on the one before, and the middle of the week is usually where the real thing surfaces. Suits people carrying something older, whether that is trauma, a long depression or an addiction pattern, where one night is not going to be enough to get underneath it.

Dietas: ten days to a month, in the jungle

The traditional Shipibo-style format: isolation, a restricted diet, work with individual master plants alongside the brew. Demanding, and not a beginner format. Suits people who are already deep in this and know why they want it.

Private and one-to-one ceremonies

More facilitator attention, no group field. Useful where somebody genuinely cannot be in a group, for instance certain trauma histories, and less useful than people expect otherwise, because the group is doing more of the work than it looks like. See private ayahuasca retreats.

What It Costs

A serious multi-day retreat generally runs between roughly 450 and 3,000 US dollars. Colombia and Peru sit at the bottom of that range, Costa Rica higher, and anything in North America or Europe higher still, because it is pricing in legal risk.

The bottom of that range is a Colombian and Peruvian cost base rather than a warning sign, and our own retreats sit there. What a price cannot tell you is whether the medical intake is real, how many sober people stay awake through the night, and what happens if it goes badly. Ask those separately, at any price. The full breakdown by country is on how much an ayahuasca retreat costs.

Where Retreats Are Legal

Traditional use is recognised in law in Peru, Brazil and Colombia, and the brew is illegal in the United States, the United Kingdom and most of Europe. That is the single biggest structural fact about this field. Ecuador gets listed alongside the first group and should not be. It has general constitutional recognition of ancestral medicine and no specific instrument, which leaves it a tolerated grey zone.

Where use is recognised, a retreat can be insured, medically staffed and held publicly accountable, and it can call an ambulance without anybody committing an offence. Where it is illegal none of that is available, and quality varies enormously with no way for you to check from outside. Recognition is not a licence, though: there is no ayahuasca licensing regime in Colombia or Peru, so you still have to look at the specific place. We cover this properly on is ayahuasca legal and, for Americans specifically, ayahuasca and US law.

How to Choose One

Choosing a retreat comes down to screening, facilitator experience, group size, medical cover, where the medicine comes from, and what happens after you leave. Those six things decide whether a container can actually hold you.

The long version, with the five non-negotiable safety standards, the twelve questions to ask before booking, and what different price bands signal, is on how to choose a safe ayahuasca retreat. If you read one page before booking anything anywhere, read that one.

Where We Run Retreats

We run our retreats in the mountains outside Medellín, Colombia, about fifty-five minutes from the city. Yagé is not a scheduled substance in Colombia and traditional practice is constitutionally recognised, which is why serious operations here can work in the open.

These pages cover the regions and the cities people ask about most:

• Ayahuasca in Medellín, our own region, with the practical detail on getting here
• Bogotá, Cali and Pereira, the other Colombian centres
• Panama, the Dominican Republic, Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire
• Miami and Florida, California, Texas and New York, where most of our American guests fly from

For a comparison of the better-known centres, we keep one at best ayahuasca retreats, and head-to-head pages under alternatives.

Who Retreats Are For

Some people should not do this, and the list is not a formality. Pregnancy and breastfeeding are a hard no. A personal or family history of psychosis, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is a hard no, and so are serious heart conditions, epilepsy or a seizure disorder, and significant liver disease. The medication list is longer than people expect: SSRIs, SNRIs, MAOIs, lithium, tramadol and other serotonergic opioids, stimulants and ADHD medication, triptans, dextromethorphan in ordinary cough medicine, St John’s Wort, 5-HTP. That list is also not exhaustive, which is the part that catches people out. Any taper is planned with your doctor over weeks.

Then there is the softer no, which is timing. Somebody in acute crisis, somebody in the first weeks of a bereavement, somebody hoping the ceremony will do the work instead of them. That is a not-yet rather than a never. Turning people away is one of the more useful things a retreat does, and one that never does it is not screening at all. See who should not do ayahuasca and is ayahuasca right for me.

We also run pages for the specific reasons people come : PTSD, addiction, grief, burnout. And for the groups who ask us different questions, including women, veterans and couples.

What to Read Next

If you are early and still working out what this even is, start with what ayahuasca is. If you are closer to booking, read how to choose a safe retreat and what to expect in a ceremony. If you have a date already, preparation and the diet are the practical ones.

And whichever way you go: this is a conversation you have with yourself in an extraordinary state. Afterwards, the actions are yours. All the strength on your path.

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