- Writing, daily, without editing it into a narrative.
- Time outdoors and physical movement that is not performance.
- One or two people you can talk to honestly, rather than an audience.
- Continuing to eat and sleep the way you did at the retreat, for longer than feels necessary.
- Working with a therapist or integration practitioner if difficult material surfaced.
Integration
What you do next decides what it was worth.
An initiation opens something. Integration is the unglamorous work of not closing it again within a fortnight of getting home.
The Integration Days
Five days to rebuild what comes next.
For those who stay ten nights, the second five are integration, held entirely in English at a second site. It is an intensive period: the work of reconstructing your future while you are still clear from the iboga's cleansing, before ordinary life has a chance to fill the space back in.
Afterwards the support continues. The WhatsApp group from your retreat stays open, and we hold two integration calls in the weeks after you go home.
It does not end there either. You are initiated in community, which means you belong to it. Initiates can return for future retreats at a reduced cost.
The Quiet Window
The first days are the most fragile and the most useful.
For roughly a week after the ceremonies, most people are unusually permeable. Sleep is long and vivid. Emotion arrives without much warning. Ordinary things — traffic, notifications, a crowded room, a bright screen — land far harder than they normally would.
This is not a problem to fix. It is the window in which change actually sets. The instruction from the tradition is simple and worth taking literally: prioritise introspection, silence, good food, and rest, and avoid highly stimulating environments, bright lights, loud noise, and large numbers of people.
The single most common mistake is flying home the day after departure and being back at a desk on Monday. People who protect the first week keep far more of what they went for.
Re-entry
A rough map of the first months.
Everyone's timeline differs. This is the shape it takes often enough to be worth planning around.
Week One
Protect it
Low stimulation, simple food, a great deal of sleep. No major decisions, no big conversations, no announcing your revelations to everyone you know. Write things down instead — you will not remember as much as you think.
Weeks Two to Four
Notice what changed by itself
Some things fall away without effort in this period — a habit, a tolerance for something you had been putting up with for years. Notice these rather than trying to manufacture them. Reintroduce work gradually and deliberately.
Months Two and Three
Build the structure
This is when insight either becomes practice or becomes a story. What holds it is usually mundane: a routine, a boundary you actually enforce, a relationship you repair, something you finally stop doing.
Later
The long return
People report pieces of the ceremony continuing to make sense months and sometimes years afterwards. An initiation is a marker in a life, not a treatment with a completion date.
In Practice
What helps, and what reliably does not.
Integration is less about technique than about refusing to rush.
- Booking the next ceremony immediately. The work of this one is not finished.
- Making irreversible decisions about work or relationships in the first fortnight.
- Explaining the experience repeatedly until it becomes an anecdote.
- Returning straight to alcohol, heavy stimulants, or the schedule that sent you there.
- Judging the retreat by how you feel on day three.
Continuing Support
You are not handed back at the airport.
Contact continues after you leave. There is a point of contact for questions as they surface, and for the ones that only surface weeks later, which is usually when the more useful questions arrive.
Where it is helpful, we can point toward integration practitioners and therapists who understand ceremonial work and will not treat what happened to you as a symptom.
If something difficult comes up, say so early. That is not a failure of the retreat or of you — it is the ordinary shape of this work, and it is far easier to meet at week two than at month six.
Upon leaving, prioritise introspection, silence, good nutrition, and rest. Avoid highly stimulating environments, bright lights, loud noise, and contact with large numbers of people. The Instruction Given to Every Guest
Private Consultation
Plan the return before you book the flight.
We will ask what your first week home looks like before we discuss dates. It is a better predictor of outcome than almost anything else we could ask about.