Running an ayahuasca retreat is unlike operating an ordinary hospitality business. It combines accommodation, food service, transportation, ceremony management, emotional support, and land maintenance while serving guests who may arrive carrying depression, trauma, addiction, or disconnection.

In a conversation on The Innsiders podcast, LaWayra founder Sam Believ explained how an ayahuasca retreat functions behind the scenes, why group dynamics matter so much, and how his engineering background unexpectedly prepared him to build a healing center in rural Colombia.

A Hotel, Restaurant, Farm, and Healing Center

Sam describes the retreat as a hotel, restaurant, spiritual center, and mental health environment operating at the same time. The property also includes wellness facilities, gardens, and extensive grounds.

The team reflects that complexity. Kitchen staff prepare specialized meals, cleaning staff manage shared rooms and cabins, facilitators support ceremonies, musicians help guide the atmosphere, and an indigenous shaman oversees the medicine work. Volunteers, builders, and transportation providers add further layers.

Comfort matters, but conventional luxury is not the main goal. Guests are there primarily for healing, and every operational decision must support that purpose.

What a One-Week Retreat Looks Like

A typical week begins with transportation from Medellín to the retreat center. Participants spend their first day settling into the environment, meeting the team, and getting to know the group.

Before drinking ayahuasca, they attend workshops and sharing circles designed to reduce fear and explain how to navigate the experience. Participants need to trust the people and surroundings completely.

The week usually includes three nighttime ceremonies, a rest day, and a final daytime ceremony. Night ceremonies encourage inward focus, while the daytime experience allows participants to connect with the surrounding mountains, plants, and natural landscape.

Why the Group Becomes Part of the Medicine

Many guests initially worry about sleeping in shared rooms or attending ceremonies with strangers. Yet Sam repeatedly sees those same people leave saying the group was one of the most valuable parts of the retreat.

Participants share personal stories, hear others describe similar struggles, and begin recognizing themselves in one another. A group of strangers can become unusually close within a week because the environment encourages honesty and vulnerability.

Shared accommodation can strengthen this community. Conversations continue after workshops, around the fire, and before sleep.

The Challenge of Affordable Hospitality

LaWayra was intentionally designed to remain affordable. Shared dormitories make the experience accessible, while private cabins are available for guests wanting additional comfort.

Keeping prices low is difficult because a retreat still requires staff, food, transportation, maintenance, and ceremony support. The challenge is to remain sustainable without turning healing into a luxury.

The retreat must offer enough comfort for people to feel safe while avoiding costs that would push prices beyond reach.

Special Food and Preparation Requirements

Food service is particularly complicated because participants follow preparation guidelines before and during the retreat. Meals may need to avoid alcohol, excessive salt, dairy products, spicy ingredients, fermented foods, and certain other items.

Some medications and substances are far more serious concerns. Antidepressants and other psychoactive medications may interact dangerously with ayahuasca, while alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, and other drugs can interfere with the process or create health risks.

Guests must be honest about what they are taking and follow preparation instructions. Staff cannot ignore private choices when they may affect ceremony safety.

Addiction and the Pain Beneath It

Many participants come specifically for addiction, while others discover that addictive behaviors weaken after addressing unrelated emotional pain.

Sam views addiction less as the original problem and more as a coping mechanism. People may use alcohol, drugs, work, food, or endless scrolling to escape difficult feelings.

During ceremony, those underlying emotions may become visible. When the pressure beneath the behavior is released, some participants find that they no longer crave the substance or distraction in the same way.

Hospitality Built Around Transformation

The emotional demands are significant. One group may leave feeling joyful and transformed, while another arrives carrying fear and exhaustion. The team must rebuild trust with each new group.

Despite the workload, Sam finds the project more fulfilling than his engineering career. The retreat provides local jobs and allows him to witness people change in a matter of days.

Ultimately, an ayahuasca retreat is not simply a hotel that serves plant medicine. It is a carefully managed environment where hospitality becomes part of the healing process. The meals, rooms, fire, music, staff, group, and natural setting all contribute to whether participants feel safe enough to confront what they have been carrying.

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Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0mGzWXL37FdaQpk5tDCch3

Ayahuasca has moved from an obscure Amazonian tradition into mainstream conversations about healing, spirituality, and personal transformation. As interest grows, so does the number of retreat centers and self-described shamans offering ceremonies around the world. This also makes it harder for newcomers to recognize what is authentic, safe, and responsibly facilitated.

In a conversation on the Ignite the Spark Within podcast, LaWayra founder Sam Believ discussed the differences between ayahuasca traditions, the warning signs people should notice when choosing a retreat, and how his own search for healing unexpectedly led him to build a retreat center in Colombia.

Ayahuasca and Yagé: Related Traditions

One common misunderstanding is that ayahuasca and Colombian yagé are completely different medicines. Both preparations use the ayahuasca vine together with a DMT-containing plant. The main botanical difference is usually the source of DMT. Peruvian traditions commonly use chacruna, while Colombian traditions often use chagropanga or chaliponga.

The ceremonies can also feel different because each indigenous lineage has its own music, rituals, and preparation methods. Colombian ceremonies often include a continuously burning fire, while some Peruvian traditions work in complete darkness. Neither approach is automatically superior. They are different expressions of traditions that developed across the Amazon before modern borders existed.

The Strongest Sign of Authenticity

For Sam, one of the clearest signs of authenticity is a direct connection between the ceremonial leader and the medicine being served. Ideally, the shaman or their family should grow, harvest, prepare, and serve their own ayahuasca.

When medicine passes through several unknown hands, participants may not know what it contains or how it was prepared. In established lineages, cultivation, cooking, ceremony, and healing are not separate businesses. They are parts of the same lifelong practice.

Why Experience and Lineage Matter

Another warning sign is a facilitator who claims ceremonial authority after only a short period of training. Sam compares a genuine healer to a surgeon for the soul. Even if outsiders do not fully understand the work, it requires years of observation, discipline, and responsibility.

Traditional healers may train for a decade or longer under parents, grandparents, or community elders. A short certificate cannot replace that depth of experience.

This does not mean every indigenous healer is automatically trustworthy or that no outsider can learn responsibly. It means participants should investigate how long the leader has trained, who taught them, and whether they are accountable to tradition.

Facilitation Is More Than Serving Medicine

A safe retreat also needs enough trained facilitators to support the group. Participants can become physically and emotionally vulnerable during ceremony, so the team must be able to notice distress, provide grounding, and prevent someone from being abandoned during an overwhelming process.

Preparation and integration are equally important. A responsible retreat should explain medication restrictions, dietary guidance, what may happen during ceremony, and how to navigate difficult moments. Afterward, participants need time to reflect, share, journal, and turn insights into practical changes.

A retreat that simply serves the medicine and sends people home is leaving out much of the work.

Pure Medicine and Realistic Expectations

Sam also warns against brews containing unnecessary psychoactive additives. Some providers add other plants because visitors expect dramatic visions and may judge the medicine as weak without an immediate spectacle.

Stronger is not always better. Overwhelming visions are not the same as healing, and added ingredients can introduce serious physical or psychological risks. Traditional ayahuasca prepared from the core plants is already powerful.

Participants should also question anyone promising guaranteed enlightenment, instant healing, or a completely pleasant experience. Ayahuasca can be beautiful, but it can also involve fear, purging, grief, difficult memories, and emotional confrontation.

From Directionlessness to Purpose

Sam’s own path began during a period of depression and uncertainty. After leaving a well-paid engineering career, traveling, and settling in Colombia, he found himself with freedom but no clear purpose. Ayahuasca initially offered relief, then gradually helped him recognize that his lack of direction was central to his unhappiness.

The retreat did not begin as a formal business plan. Unexpected opportunities brought ceremonies to the countryside property where he lived. After an early partnership failed, he realized he already had the equipment, relationships, and motivation needed to continue. What began as one ceremony per month gradually grew into LaWayra.

Respect Without Romanticizing

The central lesson is not that there is only one correct ayahuasca tradition. The Amazon contains many tribes, recipes, ceremonial styles, and ways of understanding the medicine.

What matters is respect, experience, transparency, and responsibility. An authentic retreat should know where its medicine comes from, work with properly trained ceremonial leaders, provide strong participant support, and treat integration as part of the healing process.

Ayahuasca may open a door, but the quality of the people holding that door matters enormously.

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Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/30vHR6MGLAoEa0ZbHcxHb6

Ayahuasca has become one of the most talked-about plant medicines in the world. Once practiced almost exclusively by indigenous communities in the Amazon, it is now attracting people from all walks of life who are searching for healing, clarity, and personal growth. Despite its growing popularity, many questions remain. How does ayahuasca work? Is it safe? Is there scientific evidence behind it, or is it purely a spiritual experience?

In an interview on the Witness the World Podcast, Sam Believ, founder of LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat in Colombia, shared his personal journey from engineer to retreat founder while offering an honest perspective on both the scientific and spiritual aspects of ayahuasca.

From Engineering to Healing

Before discovering ayahuasca, Sam worked for nearly a decade as a marine engineer in the offshore oil and gas industry. The career provided financial security, but little fulfillment. Although he was earning an excellent income, he felt disconnected from his work and increasingly unhappy.

Eventually, he left both his career and long-term relationship to travel through South America. After settling in Colombia, the distractions of constant travel disappeared, and he found himself facing depression more intensely than ever before.

Remembering a positive ayahuasca experience he had during his travels, he decided to return to the medicine with a clear intention: healing.

Over the following year and a half, he says ayahuasca helped him gradually overcome his depression while also revealing a new sense of purpose. That journey eventually led him and his wife to establish LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat, where they now help hundreds of participants every year.

What Does Science Actually Know?

Although ayahuasca has gained increasing attention from researchers, Sam believes there is still much that science cannot fully explain.

The brew contains numerous active compounds, including DMT and naturally occurring MAO inhibitors, but reducing ayahuasca to a single molecule oversimplifies its complexity. While researchers continue studying how these compounds affect the brain, many of the long-term psychological changes reported by participants remain difficult to explain through current scientific understanding.

People often experience profound improvements that continue long after the active compounds have left the body.

Rather than claiming to have definitive answers, Sam believes it is more honest to acknowledge that ayahuasca remains only partially understood.

The Role of the Ego

One explanation that resonates with Sam involves the temporary dissolution of the ego.

He compares the process to stopping a heart during open-heart surgery.

The ego normally protects us by filtering our experiences and helping us navigate daily life. However, trauma, anxiety, and negative experiences can cause those protective mechanisms to become overactive.

During an ayahuasca ceremony, that protective layer temporarily softens.

This creates an opportunity to revisit old emotional patterns from a new perspective, allowing participants to rebuild healthier ways of relating to themselves and the world around them.

Whether this process is entirely neurological, spiritual, or a combination of both remains an open question.

Is Ayahuasca Safe?

Safety is one of the most important topics surrounding ayahuasca.

According to Sam, three factors determine whether an experience is likely to be safe.

First, the ceremony should be led by an experienced indigenous shaman or someone with extensive traditional training and lineage.

Second, the medicine itself should be pure.

Traditional ayahuasca consists of the ayahuasca vine and a DMT-containing plant. Some retreat centers add additional psychoactive ingredients to create stronger visual experiences, but Sam believes these mixtures can increase unnecessary risks while moving away from the traditional purpose of healing.

Third, participants should be supported by experienced facilitators who can provide physical and emotional assistance throughout the ceremony.

Equally important is medical screening. People taking antidepressants, those with certain psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or psychosis, and individuals with specific medical conditions may not be suitable candidates.

Every Ceremony Is Different

One lesson Sam has learned after many ceremonies is that no two experiences are ever the same.

Some ceremonies involve emotional healing.

Others focus on physical release through purging.

Some participants experience vivid visions, while others receive subtle emotional insights without dramatic visuals.

His own recent ceremony began with physical sensations and purging before transitioning into a peaceful state where he felt reassured about the direction of his life and the future of his retreat.

For him, the most valuable part of the experience was not the visions themselves but the lasting sense of clarity and confidence they created.

Physical Healing Beyond Mental Health

Although many people initially seek ayahuasca for depression, anxiety, or trauma, Sam has witnessed numerous participants report unexpected physical improvements as well.

Digestive disorders, chronic pain, autoimmune symptoms, psoriasis, and other long-standing conditions have reportedly improved following retreats.

He is careful not to present ayahuasca as a miracle cure.

Instead, he believes many physical symptoms are connected to unresolved emotional trauma or chronic stress. When those underlying issues begin healing, physical improvements sometimes follow naturally.

His own digestive problems disappeared after working with ayahuasca, despite never intending to address them directly.

Integration Is Where Healing Continues

Perhaps the most important message Sam shares is that ayahuasca is not a quick fix.

The ceremony opens a door, but lasting transformation depends on what happens afterward.

Participants are encouraged to reflect on the insights they receive, make meaningful lifestyle changes, and continue working on themselves through practices such as journaling, therapy, meditation, or coaching.

Ignoring those lessons often leads people back into the same patterns they hoped to escape.

Integration turns temporary insight into lasting change.

Choosing the Right Retreat

As ayahuasca grows in popularity, choosing the right retreat becomes increasingly important.

Sam encourages people to look beyond luxury accommodations or dramatic marketing.

Instead, they should focus on the quality of the facilitators, the experience of the shaman, the purity of the medicine, comprehensive preparation, post-retreat integration support, and genuine participant reviews.

Most importantly, he believes people should trust their intuition.

The retreat should feel like a place where they can safely surrender, heal, and grow.

More Than a Psychedelic Experience

Ayahuasca is often described as a psychedelic experience, but Sam believes that description misses the bigger picture.

For him, the medicine is ultimately about healing.

It helps people reconnect with themselves, process emotional wounds, discover purpose, and approach life with greater clarity.

Science continues to explore how ayahuasca works, while indigenous traditions have trusted it for generations.

Although many questions remain unanswered, Sam believes one thing is clear from the thousands of people he has met over the years: when approached responsibly, with proper preparation and guidance, ayahuasca has the potential to become a powerful catalyst for lasting personal transformation.

Listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4dee815rsnfwam23ArFNEh