How to Integrate Your Experience After an Ayahuasca Retreat

People often talk mainly about what happens during an ayahuasca ceremony. Much less is said about what comes afterward. And the most difficult part often begins once the ceremonies are over.

What you experience and understand here during the retreat should then become part of your everyday life. Ayahuasca can show you many things, guide you and help you, but it will not change your life for you. What you do with everything after you return home is up to you.

If you truly want to change your life, it is not always easy. This is why integration after an ayahuasca retreat is so important.

Continue Following the Diet After the Retreat

After the ayahuasca retreat ends, it is very important to continue following the diet. All the details are included in the diet that we send to our guests, but I will briefly mention the most important points here.

Avoid chili for at least one week after the retreat and red meat, especially pork, for at least one month. One reason is that red meat is very heavy for the body, but it is also because of the conditions in which these animals are often kept. They experience stress and different negative emotions. When a person then eats their meat, according to our understanding, they also take some of this energy into their own body.

You should also avoid alcohol for at least one month after the retreat. Alcohol is generally bad for the body. Of course, good-quality wine is not as much of a problem as some other types of alcohol, but it is still not ideal after a retreat. After one month, it is up to you how you decide to continue.

The same applies to cigarettes. We recommend avoiding them completely for at least one month. If you do not want to give them up completely afterward, it is better to replace them with something more natural, such as natural tobacco that you roll yourself, rather than using regular cigarettes containing chemicals.

Sex is not recommended for at least one week after the retreat. The body is very sensitive during this time, sex uses a lot of energy and different energies are also transferred between people through sex.

In general, it is good to avoid all extremes. Do not eat very heavy, unhealthy, fried or highly processed foods. Give your body time, peace and simple food.

Write Down Everything You Experienced During the Ceremony

Ideally, the morning after the ceremony, write down everything you experienced and everything ayahuasca showed or gave you. This is very important because over time you may forget certain things.

Return to your notes regularly and read them again. During the following days, new memories or a deeper understanding of what happened during the ceremony may also begin to appear. Whenever you remember something else, write it down.

What You See as Your Future May Not Happen

Another important thing to understand is that if you see your future during a ceremony, it does not automatically mean that it will happen exactly that way.

It may be one possible future. Perhaps it will happen if you continue living your life in the same way. Or you may see a possibility that could become real if you choose it and begin taking the necessary steps toward it.

For this reason, it is not good to take every vision as something fixed. It may show you a direction or a possibility, but what happens still depends on what you do yourself.

Meditate Regularly

Shaman Luis always recommends meditating every Tuesday and Friday for at least thirty minutes. I have already mentioned meditation in previous articles because it is a very important part of integration.

It is important to practise it even when you do not feel like it. Your body may resist it, and it may not be easy to concentrate or have a completely empty mind during meditation. But the more often you practise, the easier it will gradually become.

Try to relax through your breathing. I also highly recommend listening to calm meditation music through headphones. Once you truly relax, different things that happened during the ceremony may begin to come back to you.

Luis recommends replaying and remembering what ayahuasca showed you during meditation. Then, of course, it is important to use this information in your life and keep reminding yourself of it until it becomes part of your reality.

I also recommend different guided meditations for calming the mind. They can help a lot and are an important part of the entire process if you want to take integration seriously.

Make Time for Peace and Breathing Exercises

Quiet moments and breathing exercises are also a very important part of integration. Try to include them regularly in your week and always make some time when you are away from your phone. You can simply breathe, relax, listen to calm music or think.

If you immediately return to your normal life, become overwhelmed by stress again and do not give yourself the peace you need, you may gradually forget everything you understood during the ceremony. All that information can fade and you may start functioning again as though nothing had happened.

Ayahuasca continues working for a long time after the ceremonies end. You may notice this in different situations when you suddenly begin reacting differently. You may start seeing things differently, thinking differently and gradually feeling that you yourself are changing, as long as you truly want that change.

Listen to Your Intuition

After an ayahuasca ceremony, people often have much stronger intuition. You may suddenly begin to feel differently around people you previously considered friends or people who had always seemed good to you.

You may suddenly feel that being around them is no longer the same as before. You may sense dishonesty or something that you did not notice previously. In that situation, it is important to trust your intuition, even if it is not easy.

Sometimes it is necessary to remove these people from your life. If you continue spending time with them, they may transfer negative energy to you that prevents you from growing.

Listen to yourself, your intuition and your heart. Your intuition may be significantly stronger after a ceremony, and it is good to follow it.

Protect Your Energy

For several days after the retreat, I recommend not shaking hands with anyone at all. Personally, I also recommend this as a long-term practice. We have a great amount of energy in the palms of our hands, and when people shake hands, this energy is transferred between them. There is a reason why people say that we can heal with our hands.

Of course, I understand that shaking hands with everyone is completely normal in many countries. I have learned to give people a fist bump instead. Sometimes they look at me a little strangely because of it, but I do not care. I am protecting myself and I know why I do it.

You can also protect your energy even if you do shake someone’s hand. There are different practices for this, so I recommend reading about how to protect your own energy.

One simple tip is to imagine a protective bubble around yourself. You can do this when you are standing next to someone whose energy feels bad or toxic, but also when you are hugging someone. Imagine that there is a bubble around you that their energy cannot pass through.

There are also different ways to cleanse yourself using a shower. You consciously create everything, so while showering you can say, for example: “Water, cleanse me of negative energy.”

During meditation, you can imagine yourself surrounded by a golden glow or golden light entering your body. Through these conscious practices, you can gradually cleanse yourself. This is a slightly different topic, so I am only mentioning it as a small tip.

Do Not Return to Drugs, Alcohol and Other Unhealthy Habits

If someone begins using drugs, drinking large amounts of alcohol or smoking cigarettes again after an ayahuasca ceremony, their previous state may gradually return. It may be as though they had never healed at all. Their original problems may return, sometimes even more strongly. Negative energies may return and they may begin attracting negative circumstances into their life again.

When someone decides to follow this path and genuinely wants to grow, they should consider whether they are ready to remove the things that hurt and destroy them.

Unfortunately, alcohol is considered completely normal by people in Europe, America and many other places. Almost everyone drinks it, so we often no longer even think about the fact that it is a toxic substance that damages us.

Ayahuasca Will Not Do Everything for You

One of the most important things to mention is that ayahuasca will not do everything for you. It can show you what is inside you and guide you, but what you do with it afterward is up to you.

For example, there was a period when I experienced many negative feelings. I constantly wanted more and more, I felt dissatisfied and nothing seemed good enough, even though in reality I had everything. I was aware of this about myself and I did not want to feel that way anymore.

During one ceremony, I therefore focused on this exact problem. In the end, I experienced all these feelings very intensely throughout the entire ceremony. Ayahuasca reflected them back to me, and I saw all the darkness I carried inside me—all my negative emotions.

Two days after the ceremony, I woke up and suddenly felt all those emotions again. My body had been used to feeling that way for some time. But I immediately remembered the ceremony and told myself, “I do not want to feel this way.” At that moment, the feelings disappeared and they never returned again.

A person can go through something very powerful during a ceremony and feel better after ayahuasca, especially if they follow the diet and all the other recommendations. But if they do not begin working on themselves, changing their life and changing the things that were hurting them, they can very easily return to their old patterns and no real change will happen.

The change is up to you. Ayahuasca can guide and help you, but you should take the individual steps yourself.

My Own Experience

When I was using drugs several years ago and came to ayahuasca for help, I was very afraid of what would happen afterward. I was scared that I would spend many months catching up on lost sleep, overeating and trying to give my body everything it had been missing.

I drank ayahuasca at that time, and it was not easy at all, but that is another story. I went through four ceremonies and afterward I felt completely fine. I did not need to spend several months only sleeping or eating to recover everything. I returned home and simply started again from the beginning, as though nothing had happened.

I want to use this example to show how ayahuasca can help and guide you. But after that, it is up to you how you decide to live and what you do with your life.

I could have returned to drugs and my life would not have changed. But I decided to do something to create that change. I began taking the necessary steps, I did not use drugs again and then everything slowly began to change. I started attracting completely different things into my life.

Work With Affirmations

If you want to keep your body healthy and feel well in general, I also recommend affirmations. It is good to read more about this subject and learn about sensing energy, cleansing energy and affirmations.

Affirmations are spoken in the present tense and always in a positive way. For example, you can repeat:

“My body is full of positive energy.”

“I am happy and grateful for everything I have.”

Repeat sentences like these every day for some time, until you truly begin to believe them and your mind gradually begins to follow them.

You can find many videos and different guided affirmations on YouTube and elsewhere online. I recommend learning more about them and choosing the ones that feel best for you.

Future Ceremonies

If you begin working on yourself after the retreat, make changes and move forward, I recommend attending another ceremony in the future. It does not have to be with us. I do not want this to sound as though I am trying to sell or offer you something.

I personally attend ceremonies every few months. When a person does some work between them, each new ceremony can move them a little further. With every ceremony, a person grows and also continues cleansing themselves.

New things that we need to resolve continue appearing throughout life. Sometimes ayahuasca may show you something you never even realised you carried inside or needed to pay attention to.

For me, it is a good way to continue cleansing yourself, stay in a good mental state and keep growing at the same time.

When It Feels as Though Everything Is Falling Apart

Sometimes people who attended ceremonies with us and wanted to change their lives write to me about everything that began happening after they returned home. Someone may return and realise that they are separating from their partner and now need to move. Someone else may suddenly feel that they no longer want to continue in a job that has been destroying them for a long time, and they decide to leave even though they do not have another job yet.

Sometimes it may feel as though everything is falling apart. But this can actually be a positive sign that your life is slowly changing and being rebuilt into something better. Sometimes you need to end things that served you for a long time so that new and better opportunities can appear.

Be prepared for the possibility that unpleasant situations may arise after you return home. When you are trying to change your life, different tests and lessons may begin appearing. It can feel as though the universe is testing whether you are truly ready for change, or whether the first difficult situation will pull you back into your old emotions and your previous way of living.

I am sharing this only as an interesting example. It is not something that commonly happens to everyone. But some people have genuinely written to me that they became stuck at an airport, or returned home to find that their partner had ended the relationship and wanted them to move out. Naturally, they felt devastated at that moment.

But this can be the beginning of a completely different path. First, you may need to go through something difficult, change your life and leave behind what no longer serves you. Afterward, a much better partner, a better job or an entirely different life may come.

If something unpleasant begins happening after the retreat, try not to see it only negatively. Be prepared for it and consider whether the situation may be showing you something that you needed to change a long time ago.

Integration Is Mainly Up to You

Ayahuasca can show you the path, but you should be the one to walk it. During a ceremony, you may understand something, feel enormous relief and clearly see what you need to change. But if you return to the same habits, the same people, drugs, alcohol, stress and the things that were hurting you, you may gradually return to the same inner state as well.

Integration is therefore not only about remembering the ceremony. It is about your daily decisions, moments of peace, meditation, working with your mind, protecting your energy and, most importantly, making real changes in your life.

Ayahuasca can help you and guide you in the right direction. But the most important part begins afterward.