A step-by-step plan for first-time ayahuasca guests to prepare before ceremony
and make the change last after

What happens to a lot of people after their first retreat

You've circled a date on the calendar. Maybe a friend came back from Peru glowing and talking about the tree she met. Maybe you watched a documentary at two in the morning and haven't stopped thinking about it.

And now the questions arrive, usually at night.

"What if I fly all that way and nothing happens?"

"What if something does happen, and three weeks later I'm back at the same desk, with the same phone and the same arguments, wondering if any of it was real?"

"Is the no-salt thing a real rule, or did someone make it up for Instagram?"

"How do I even know the person pouring the cup knows what they're doing?"

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone, and you're not being paranoid. These are the right questions. Almost nobody answers them for you, because every retreat is selling the night. The night is the dramatic part. It gets the photographs, the testimonials, the long posts afterward.

The part that decides whether anything lasts happens in your kitchen, weeks before you leave, and in your living room, weeks after you get back.

Why the ceremony isn't what decides whether the change lasts

The common belief goes like this: the medicine does the work, so your job is to show up and drink.

It's easy to see why people believe it. The ceremony really is powerful. People purge, weep, see things they can't describe, and come home lighter. If one night can do that, it seems reasonable to assume the night is the whole story.

Here's what that leaves out. You come home from ceremony with more room inside you than you've had in years. Then you walk back into the same apartment, the same food, the same Friday nights, the same schedule built around the old habit. An empty space fills with whatever is nearest. Usually the nearest thing is the old pattern.

That's why some people come back changed and stay changed, while others are writing to book the next retreat within a month. Same medicine. Same maestro, sometimes. The difference was what they cleaned out beforehand and what they deliberately put in the space afterward.

Why booking another ceremony doesn't fix a change that faded

When the glow wears off, the obvious move is to go back for more. Another retreat, another purge.

The trouble is that every new ceremony empties into the same uncleaned life. The body arrives full of last month's coffee and salt, so the night spends itself on the surface. Then you fly home to the same unplanned weeks, and the room refills the same way it did last time.

I've watched this from the inside of a ceremony community for three years. There's a line in Aya Dieta I come back to often: twenty ceremonies and the same temper. Ceremony count was never the measure. You can sit in a lot of circles and still snap at the people you love.

Reading more trip reports online doesn't solve it either. You can know everything about the pharmacology and still have no plan for the Monday after you land.

Why I wrote this book

In the fall of 2022 I was staying in a small mountain village in northern Italy, recovering from a business failure I couldn't stop replaying. What went wrong. How to fix it. Every pass through the loop, my stomach dropped and my chest tightened.

One morning a stray thought brought it all back, and I felt something like an arc of lightning cross my head, back left to front right. Standing there, I understood it as a groove worn in by months of the same thinking. If repetition could wire one path, maybe another could be built around it.

I took a fourteen-hour overnight bus to Maastricht, where psychedelic truffles were legal. The first time was a light show. The second, back at the cabin in Italy, gave me about an inch of space inside my own head. An inch sounds small until your mind has left you nowhere to stand. For the first time in years, I thought things might be workable.

In my late teens and early twenties I'd been through a series of hard experiences that left me with gaps in my memory and a personality I barely recognised. Therapy helped me understand parts of the story. It didn't reach what I could feel lodged underneath.

In 2023 I came home to Vancouver Island. One morning my neighbour Mark was on the lawn talking loudly about ayahuasca. He gave me a name, Dinara. I booked the next retreat that night. It fell on my birthday, seven years after I'd lost my way.

On the first night, I purged something I can only describe as a thick black shadow falling off me like an oversized winter coat. By midday the next morning I knew the structure of the problem had changed. Conversations flowed more easily. Details from my past came back.

Dinara and Erik became my teachers. Over the next three years I sat in roughly fifty ceremonies, opened and closed multiple dietas, and watched hundreds of people come through our community. Two gaps kept showing up. People arrived without enough context to understand what they were walking into. Then they went home, sometimes deeply changed, and tried to fit that change back into the life they'd left.

That's the realisation underneath this whole book. The empty space always gets filled with something. You either choose what goes there, or the old pattern chooses for you.

Aya Dieta is the guide I wish I'd had before my first ceremony.

Why clearing out before ceremony and filling the space after works better than one big night

When you clean before ceremony and plan what fills the space after, the purge goes deeper and the result has something to hold it in place.

Think of a garden. You rake first, clearing years of deadfall so you can see the ground. Then you pull the blackberry out by the root, which is the hard, bloody part. Then you plant something on purpose, because bare soil never stays bare. Leave it and something grows within weeks. The only question is whether you chose it.

Most people go straight to pulling. They skip the raking, so the medicine spends the night on the surface. Then they skip the planting, so the hole fills with weeds. Get the order right and one night can hold. Get it wrong and ten nights leak.

A codified process of cleaning, emptying and filling, built from the practices the Shipibo-Konibo tradition has always used: food dieta, ceremony under a maestro, and master plant dieta. The first time through, it runs as a sequence. After that, it becomes a cycle, each pass going a little deeper.

Walk in prepared, come home with a plan

Think about three weeks from now. Your body is quiet from a plain plate and early nights. Your doctor has given you an answer in writing. You know which questions to ask the centre, what to do if the first night turns hard, and exactly what your first month home looks like, down to who you'll call.

That's what Aya Dieta gives you. The visions belong to one night. The fruit belongs to the life that follows.