Who Is Ayahuasca For?
Ayahuasca Is For Those Seeking Profound Transformation to Deeper Love, Freedom, and Inner Peace
If you already know an Ayahuasca psychedelic experience is something you wish to participate in, please click here for our calendar of upcoming Ayahuasca Retreats at our beautiful retreat centre in the Netherlands.
If you still have some questions you can send us an email or read on for more information.
Do You know Feel Called to Ayahuasca?
When deciding to go on a retreat, people sometimes say they “feel the call”. This often describes repeatedly hearing about ayahuasca or coming across it time and time again. Some people also dream about experiencing Ayahuasca.
Feeling called to ayahuasca is another way to describe a curiosity, general pull, or an intuitive excitement to experience this wonderful sacred medicine.
When Do You Decide to Attend an Ayahuasca Retreat?
Most people decide to attend an Ayahuasca retreat to get a deeper sense of who they really are, understand the world around them, and to heal various energy blockages or traumas. Many wish to understand the nature of consciousness, the cosmos, and how they fit into the grand scheme of existence. These understands ultimately lead to leading a more aligned life closer to expressing their highest potential.
An Ayahuasca ceremony can be very effective to shift ‘stuck’ energy or a sense of inertia by addressing traumas or personal issues that are deeply rooted. Gaining insights into the roots of these issues can help to realign your system and bring you closer to living authentically.
For those who are ready to take a giant step forward in their personal development and the expansion of their consciousness, Ayahuasca can be the perfect tool. However, it is not something to throw yourself into lightly. Ayahuasca is a serious medicine and should be treated as such. Preparation and respect for this sacred plant is absolutely necessary for you to surrender to this sometimes challenging process of healing.
Freedom From Our Cultural Schemas
Our Western culture prioritises certain values and implants certain schemas that are often not in line with our truest selves. These systems can be stifling and destructive, such as career focuses and maintaining image standards, and keep us in behavioural pattern loops that repeat year after year and become habitually ingrained. Ingrained patterns can seem impossible to step out of and once they are seem a process of breaking free begins to occur.
Unfortunately, in the West, there are not many avenues to exploration into the nature of our being. With a lack of holistic philosophical approaches to learning the full-spectrum of our existence, including mind, body, spirit, and energy systems, we find ourselves starting a learning process later in life to discover who we are, our purpose, and how to follow our intuitions.
Ayahuasca can open our awareness, reconnecting us to those lost aspects of our being and creative expression.
Ayahuasca Confronts Us with Our Shadow-Self, Setting Free Trapped Energy Not Aligned with the Rest of Our Being
What Outcomes Can I Expect?
Naturally, when booking an experience with Ayahuasca certain expectations will arise, not only about the experience itself, but the outcomes or changes when returning to daily life.
From our extensive experience with these processes, we advice people to not go into a ceremony with too many expectations. It is important to understand that no one can predict how your experience will be or what exact outcomes will manifest. Outcomes generally depend on various personal and situational factors, however, there are some outcomes that are often reported which are listed in the table below.
| PSYCHOLOGICAL |
|---|
| Insights in/Conscious of behavioral (addictive) patterns |
| Increased clarity of thought |
| Greater understanding of and patience with oneself and others. Stressful thoughts disappear |
| New, positive thoughts replace old, negative ones |
| Improved self-reflection |
| Experiences of expanded consciousness |
| Experiences of oneness/connectedness |
| Feeling “awakened” and “understanding” |
| PHYSICAL |
|---|
| Having quitted addictions |
| More energy |
| A sense of detoxification and purification |
| Better stability |
| Relaxation |
| Improved sleep |
| Different choices of nutrition (e.g. less meat/more plant-based diet) |
| Less hinder (or even full resolution) from (chronic) illness symptoms |
| EMOTIONAL |
|---|
| Reduced “have-to” pressure, less stress |
| Increasing empathy |
| Greater self-confidence |
| Greater self-acceptance and a more honest image of oneself |
| The ability to enjoy things more often |
| More lightness in life |
| An improved ability to deal with emotions |
| More serenity and peace |
| Dissolving of anxieties |
Ayahuasca is a powerful tool that can aid the path of personal growth and change. However, this plant medicine is not a magic pill. To extract the most out of your experience it is very advantageous to already have an intention towards real transformation and growth.
A psychedelic experience at Acsauhaya is not designed to be a substitute for any medications, including anti-depressants. This is why we require all our guests, with the supervision of their doctors, to have stopped any medication that may contraindicate with our ayahuacsa medicine.
Our Retreat Offer Extensive Support Programmes to Help You Navigate the Path of Ayahuasca
How to Navigate the Path of ayahuasca?
Ayahuasca is a unique sacred medicine and, throughout our extensive experience we have discovered that many can arrive without proper preparation and unrealistic expectations. Active participation with this wonderful medicine is required and it asks that you work with the medicine as it will not do the work for you. With dedication, surrender, and effort a ceremony with Ayahuasca can be miraculous.
As we want you to gain the most out of our experience and to assist your journey of spiritual development, our retreats offer an extensive support programme in addition to the ceremonies. These focus on helping you to prepare and explore intentions and supports you in the after process of integrating the insights received during your ceremony.
Who is Ayahuasca NOT for?
Our ayahuasca retreats are not for everybody. As such, we have a very thorough application process where we explore, together, the degree to which you are ready for an experience such as this. Below you will find a list of possible reasons why a psychedelic retreat may not be appropriate for you at this time. However, this list is highly context dependant and does not always mean an automatic refusal so please contact us if you have any questions.
Ayahuasca might NOT be for you, if:
- You have (had) psychiatric problems or mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or psychoses.
- You are using drugs or medications that can cause contra-indications with the MAO inhibitors in the brew, such as antidepressants (serotonin reuptake inhibitors – SRIs) or tranquillizers (e.g. oxazepam, diazepam or alprazolam).
- You have a severe kidney disease, severe neurological disorders, epilepsy, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, blood dyscrasia (abnormal blood cells) or you’ve had hemorrhagic bleeding and/or stroke, or an actual or expected pheochromocytoma (an adrenal lump).
- You are looking for a quick-fix or a magic pill (“brew” in this case). Even though there are examples of people that do describe their ayahuasca experience as some sort of drastic turning point in their life, you shouldn’t expect ayahuasca to just “fix” you. What we mean by that is that ayahuasca is a tool for conscious evolution and healing, a teacher, a spirit. However, you are the one using the tool. You ultimately decide how deeply the tool will be able to help you.
- You are solely interested in having a fun psychedelic experience. Or you just want to give it a try, because it seems to be working for others.
If you are still not sure if ayahuasca can be a good next step in your process or you have any specific doubts or questions concerning your (mental) health situation, please do not hesitate to contact us.
FAQ
- get a deeper understanding of yourself;
- expand your consciousness (further);
- find meaning, reason and/or purpose;
- reconnect to your truth and/or your heart;
- are looking for insights with regard to (the roots of) specific personal problems;
- have a clear intention of walking a path of spiritual development.
- have (had) psychiatric problems or mental disorders;
- are using drugs or medications that can cause contra-indications with the MAO inhibitors;
- have a certain physical illness or disease that is a contra-indication (as listed above);
- are looking for a magic pill/brew;
- are solely looking for a fun trip.
We do not allow pregnant women into our retreats.
There are heated discussions on the participation of pregnant women (and children) in ayahuasca ceremonies, mainly between the traditional users of ayahuasca, the Santo Daime religious community and opponents that claim that it can provoke neurological alterations in the fetus (and for the same reason should not be consumed by children). Even though the ayahuasca religions enjoy a relative degree of social legitimacy and even formal legal recognition in Brazil, the participation of pregnant women and children continues to dominate public debate and is frequently used to question the validity of the use of ayahuasca in general (Labate, 2005). Opinions on this topic differ, as is often the case with ayahuasca, but because of the lack of scientific research in this area, we choose not to take any risk and do not allow pregnant women into our retreats.
Even though the research on this topic is limited, if you want to read more, you might be interested in the following article.
People frequently ask if ayahuasca can cure or help with their illness or ailment, such as depression, addiction, anxiety, PTSD, cancer, OCD, or mental health disorders such as bipolarity or schizophrenia. Although there are plenty of examples of miraculous recovery stories that can be found online and we have also personally witnessed some astonishing healing experiences, little is known about the therapeutic potentials of ayahuasca. We believe one could never say that ayahuasca can cure these illnesses. Due to the legal restrictions around this sacred brew in many countries, it has been studied very little. For example, there are hardly any scientific articles that have ever been published linking ayahuasca with cancer remission.
No predictions or promises can be made with regards to the healing effects of ayahuasca, because to understand the complete healing effects, we must look beyond the potential biochemical impacts ayahuasca has. The outcome of ayahuasca ceremonies depends on so many personal and situational factors that no two cases can ever be the same. We believe that the process of healing in general is more holistic, which makes it extremely hard to isolate certain factors for scientific research.
If you want to read more, you might be interested in the following article.