Eight Days.
Five People.
One Vine.
Most people don’t come back changed. They come back impressed.
A yagé retreat held by the Kamentsá lineage in their own territory — with the preparation and integration that decides whether any of it holds.
30 January – 7 February 2027 · application only · applications close 15 September 2026
5 preparation & integration calls · Rosa present all 8 days · €1,440 deposit holds a place
Preparation and integration are included, not sold separately. There is no checkout button — nobody books a place without a conversation first.
Most people don't come back changed. They come back impressed.
You can have the most extraordinary night of your life in a maloka and be exactly the same person by March. This is not a failure of the medicine. It is a failure of everything arranged around it.
The retreat industry is exceptional at the six hours and negligent about the three weeks. You are flown in, held through the ceremonies, driven back to an airport, and returned to the environment that produced the pattern — carrying an experience nobody has prepared you to metabolise.
And the group is usually too large for anyone to notice how you're actually doing. Twenty-eight people, one facilitator, a schedule. What's offered as attunement is, structurally, crowd management.
The ceremony is not where it is decided. The Tuesday afterwards is where it is decided.
Their land. Their lineage. Their ceremony.
The retreat is held at Shanayoy Healing Center, an ancestral healing centre of the Kamentsá community in the Kamentsá Indigenous Reservation, in the Sibundoy Valley of Alto-Putumayo, Colombia. It is led by Taita Mayor Juan Bautista Agreda and his family.
In this region the medicine is called yagé. The Kamentsá tradition is its own — distinct from the Shipibo lineages most Westerners have read about, with its own songs, its own protocols, and its own relationship to the valley it comes from.
I am going as a guest. I do not hold the ceremonies, I do not speak for the Kamentsá, and I have no authority in that tradition. What I bring is five people who have been properly prepared, and the work that happens on either side of the ceremony.
Shanayoy also runs a botanical garden, community projects, a weaving school, and its own scholarship programme. Your fee goes directly to the community that hosts you. That is the difference between reciprocity and tourism, and it is not a marketing line — it is where the money goes.
The valley spends the year
preparing to forgive.
There is a reason this retreat sits where it sits in the calendar. Every year, on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, the Kamëntsá and Inga peoples of the Sibundoy Valley hold Bëtsknaté — the Great Day, known in Spanish as the Carnaval del Perdón, the Carnival of Forgiveness. It is the most important day in the valley's year, and it was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Nation by Colombia in 2012.
It is not a carnival in the sense you are picturing. It is a formal, communal act of repair. Debts are settled. Grievances are spoken and released. People go to the houses of those they have wronged, or who have wronged them, and the year is closed properly so the new one can begin unencumbered. There is music, there are masks, there is chicha and dancing and drums — but underneath the colour, the technology being practised is reconciliation, performed at the scale of an entire community rather than a single relationship.
I want you to notice how strange that is from where you are sitting. We treat forgiveness as a private, internal, largely invisible event — something you do in a therapy room, or alone at 3am, and then hope holds. Here it is a public, embodied, annual, collective obligation. A whole valley agreeing to put something down at the same time, in the open, in front of each other.
That is the season you are arriving into. The valley in the weeks before Bëtsknaté is a place actively organising itself around repair — and being on that land, taking yagé, in the middle of a community rehearsing its most serious act of letting go, is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is the atmosphere the work happens inside.
In Kamëntsá, "the Great Day." The Spanish name — Carnaval del Perdón — is the one you will find in most Colombian coverage, but the Kamëntsá name is the one the community uses, and it is worth learning before you arrive.
What this is not: a ticketed event, a scheduled excursion, or something included in your fee. Bëtsknaté belongs to the Kamëntsá and Inga peoples. It is not staged for visitors and it is not ours to sell you access to. If there is an invitation to be present, it comes from the community, on their terms, and it is received as a guest receives it — quietly, and with the understanding that you are at the edge of something that is not about you.
The Monday before Ash Wednesday, which falls on 10 February 2027.
Our retreat ends on Sunday 7 February — the day before. If you want to be in the valley for Bëtsknaté, you arrange one additional night independently, and I will help you think it through. I have not built it into the price or the itinerary, because I will not sell you a seat at someone else's sacred day.
Why five is a claim about biology, not a vibe.
In 2006, Coan, Schaefer and Davidson scanned people under threat of electric shock while they held a trusted partner's hand, a stranger's hand, or no hand. Threat-related activation dropped with the trusted hand, dropped less with the stranger's — and the size of the effect scaled with the quality of the relationship, not the fact of contact.
Coan and Sbarra later formalised this: the brain runs a cheaper calculation of risk and effort when reliable others are genuinely available. Take them away and the cost goes back up.
Which tells you what a person holding a room is actually doing. Not delivering content — functioning as a regulatory reference point, on one nervous system, with finite attention.
I can track five people. I can tell you on day four who didn't sleep, whose quiet means something, and whose quiet is just how they are. At twenty-eight, nobody can — and what replaces attunement is management. Management photographs beautifully. You find out it wasn't the other thing around week three of being home.
Five is the number at which what I am offering is actually possible.
Two people are responsible here. Here is exactly who does what.
Shanayoy provides
- Transport from Pasto (PSO) to the centre
- All lodging for the eight days
- All meals
- Private and group consultations
- Three medicine ceremonies
- Medical form and pre-retreat interview
Rosa provides
- Two 1:1 preparation calls before departure
- One group preparation call — you meet the others first
- Presence alongside you for all eight days
- One 1:1 integration call after you return
- One group integration call
- A separate fit-and-readiness conversation before you book
What is not included
Flights, travel insurance, visas, vaccinations, and personal expenses. You will fly into Pasto (PSO), usually via Bogotá.
What is not on offer
The ceremony, the medicine, and the outcome. None of those are mine to sell. I sell preparation, accompaniment and integration — and I hold the conditions in which something can change. Anyone promising you the change itself is selling you something they do not have.
Five calls, eight days, and the part everyone skips.
Mapping
What you're actually bringing, what your nervous system does under pressure, and what you're hoping this will fix — including the version you haven't said out loud.
Preparation
Practical and somatic. Dieta, expectations, fear, what to do when it becomes difficult, and how to stop trying to steer.
The others
You meet the four people you'll be doing this with. Familiarity before arrival is not a nicety — trust is the variable the whole container runs on.
Accompaniment
Taita Juan and his family and trusted medicine man hold the ceremonies. I am there to support you if you need help during the ceremony and especially for the time when there are no ceremonies occurring — which is where most of the real work happens, and where most retreats leave you alone with it.
Integration
Emotional memory becomes briefly re-writable when it is genuinely reactivated, and then it re-stabilises. What arrives in that window decides whether you integrated something or had an intense week. This is why the calls after are in the price and not an upsell.
Some people will get a no. That is the point.
This may be for you if
- You can describe your pattern fluently and still cannot move it
- You have done real work already and want the layer underneath
- You want preparation and integration, not just the ceremony
- You are willing to be met rather than managed
- You understand you are a guest in someone else's tradition
- You can leave spaciousness around the trip — not fly home into a launch
This is not for you if
- You are in acute crisis or at risk of harming yourself
- You have a personal or family history of psychosis, schizophrenia or bipolar I
- You have significant cardiac conditions or uncontrolled hypertension
- You are pregnant
- You take contraindicated medication and cannot resolve that safely with a prescriber
- You want an experience to collect, or a guaranteed breakthrough
On medication — read this properly
Ayahuasca contains MAO-inhibiting β-carbolines. Combining MAO inhibitors with SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, lithium, tramadol and a number of other drugs carries a risk of serotonin syndrome, which can be fatal.
If you take any of these, this needs a conversation with your prescribing doctor. Tapering must never be improvised — stopping abruptly carries its own serious risks, and no retreat, including this one, is a reason to do it unsupervised.
Shanayoy runs a medical form and interview. I have a separate fit conversation with you. Between us, some people will be told no. If that is you, it is not a verdict — it means your system deserves the right level of care rather than a beautiful container with the wrong capacity.
The whole number, and the whole truth about it.
A €1,440 deposit secures your place. Balance due mid-December 2026. Flights, insurance and personal expenses are arranged by you.
If your life changes
Retreats are the one thing I cannot hold flexibly, because your place is bought from Shanayoy the moment you book and the group is built around five specific people. So here is exactly where you stand, in plain terms, before you pay anything.
Your deposit. The €1,440 deposit is non-refundable. It is not a fee I keep — the larger part is committed to Shanayoy on your behalf immediately, and it is what reserves one of the five places against everyone else who wanted it.
But it does not disappear. If you cannot travel, you have two options, and I would rather you use one than lose the money:
- Pass your place on. Name someone else and they take your place at no extra cost — subject to a short fit conversation with me, because the group composition is part of what you are all buying. Possible up to 30 days before departure.
- Roll it forward. My portion of the deposit (€885) rolls in full to my next retreat, valid for 18 months from the original departure date. The Shanayoy portion is subject to their terms, and I will advocate for you with them directly — but I cannot promise on their behalf, and I will not pretend otherwise.
The balance. Due mid-December 2026. If you withdraw after paying in full, the balance beyond the deposit is refunded minus any costs already committed on your behalf — in practice most of it, and I will show you the arithmetic rather than assert a number.
If I cancel. If I cannot run the retreat for any reason, you receive a full refund of everything you have paid me, including my portion of the deposit — or you may roll the entire sum to the next date, your choice, not mine. Where Shanayoy holds funds, I recover them on your behalf and pass them back to you in full. I carry that risk rather than you, because I am the one asking you to commit ten months in advance.
If I decline you after screening. If the fit or safety conversation ends in a no from me, you are refunded in full, deposit included. A screening process that costs you money is not a screening process — it is a sales filter with a medical costume on. Which is precisely why the conversation happens before you pay.
Travel insurance covering cancellation is strongly recommended and is your responsibility. Tell me as early as you can if something shifts — the earlier it is, the more room there is to find the version that works.
The things people actually ask.
Where exactly is the retreat held?
At Shanayoy Healing Center, in the Kamentsá Indigenous Reservation in the Sibundoy Valley, Alto-Putumayo, Colombia. It is led by Taita Mayor Juan Bautista Agreda and his family. You fly into Pasto (PSO), usually via Bogotá, and Shanayoy provides transport from the airport to the centre.
Who holds the ceremonies?
Taita Juan Bautista Agreda and his family. The ceremonies, the medicine, and the lineage belong to them. Rosa does not facilitate the ceremonies and does not claim any authority over that tradition. Her role is preparation, accompaniment and integration.
What is included in the €2,700?
From Shanayoy: transport from Pasto airport, all lodging and meals for the eight days, private and group consultations, and three medicine ceremonies. From Rosa: two 1:1 calls and one group call before departure, her presence alongside you for the full eight days, and one 1:1 call and one group call after you return. Flights, travel insurance, visas and personal expenses are not included and are arranged by you.
Why only five people?
Because co-regulation does not scale. Research on social regulation of threat shows the effect depends on the quality of the relationship rather than mere proximity — which means the person holding a room is functioning as a regulatory reference point, running on one nervous system with finite attention. Five is the number at which genuine attunement is possible. Beyond that, facilitation becomes management.
Is this suitable if I take antidepressants or other medication?
This requires a conversation with your prescriber, and it is not negotiable. Ayahuasca contains MAO-inhibiting compounds, and combining MAO inhibitors with SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, lithium, tramadol and several other medications carries a risk of serotonin syndrome, which can be fatal. Tapering must never be improvised — stopping abruptly carries its own serious risks. Shanayoy runs a medical form and interview, and Rosa has a separate fit conversation with you. Some people will receive a no.
Who is this not for?
People in acute crisis; anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, schizophrenia or bipolar I; those with significant cardiovascular conditions or uncontrolled hypertension; anyone pregnant; and anyone taking contraindicated medication who cannot safely resolve that with a prescriber. A no is not a verdict on you — it means your system deserves the right level of care rather than a beautiful container with the wrong capacity.
What happens if I book and then cannot travel?
Your deposit is non-refundable, because your place is bought from Shanayoy the moment you book. But it does not disappear. You can pass your place to another person at no extra cost up to 30 days before departure, subject to a short fit conversation so the group stays right. Or you can roll it forward: Rosa's portion of the deposit (€885) rolls in full to her next retreat and is valid for 18 months from the original departure date, and she will advocate directly with Shanayoy for their portion. If you have already paid the balance and then withdraw, everything beyond the deposit is refunded minus costs already committed on your behalf.
What happens if Rosa cancels, or if she declines me after screening?
If Rosa cancels the retreat for any reason, you receive a full refund of everything you have paid her, including her portion of the deposit — or you may roll the entire sum to the next date. That is your choice, not hers. Where Shanayoy holds funds, she recovers them on your behalf. And if the fit or safety conversation ends in a no from her, you are refunded in full, deposit included. A screening process that costs you money is not a screening process. This is also why the conversation happens before you pay anything.
What is Bëtsknaté, the Carnival of Forgiveness — and will I be there for it?
Bëtsknaté, the Great Day, is the most important annual celebration of the Kamëntsá and Inga peoples of the Sibundoy Valley, known in Spanish as the Carnaval del Perdón. It is a formal communal act of repair: debts settled, grievances spoken and released, the year closed properly so the next can begin unencumbered. Colombia declared it Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Nation in 2012. It falls on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, which in 2027 is Monday 8 February. This retreat runs 30 January to 7 February, so it sits in the weeks of preparation leading up to it and ends the day before. If you wish to be in the valley for Bëtsknaté itself, you arrange one additional night independently and Rosa will help you think it through. It is deliberately not built into the price or the itinerary: Bëtsknaté belongs to the Kamëntsá and Inga peoples, it is not staged for visitors, and access to it is not Rosa's to sell.
Why does the integration work matter so much?
Because the ceremony is not where change is decided. Emotional memory becomes briefly re-writable when it is genuinely reactivated, and then it re-stabilises. What arrives during that window determines whether something integrated or whether you simply had an intense week. The two calls after you return are built into the price for exactly this reason.
Do I need previous experience with plant medicine?
No. What is needed is preparation, honesty in the screening conversation, and a willingness to be met rather than managed. Both first-timers and experienced participants are considered on the same basis: fit, readiness and safety.
How do I apply?
Through the form on this page. There is no checkout button — nobody buys a place without a conversation first. Rosa reads every application personally and responds within three business days. Applications close on 15 September 2026.
There is no checkout button. There is a conversation.
Nobody buys a place here without talking to me first. I read every application personally and reply within three business days. Applications close 15 September 2026.
Thank you — it's with me.
I read every application myself, and I'll reply within three business days from info@rosafbrissos.com. If you don't see it, check your spam folder before assuming silence.
If anything urgent comes up before then, write to me directly.
The retreat sits inside a longer body of work.
Whether or not Colombia is yours, the preparation and integration work stands on its own — and for most people it is the right first step.
Ayahuasca — the full guide
Origins, pharmacology, neuroimaging, clinical evidence and the ethics of engagement. Read this before you decide anything.
Psychedelic Preparation
For a ceremony you are attending elsewhere. What you carry in shapes what is available to you.
Psychedelic Integration
For an experience you have already had — recent or years ago, and still unmetabolised.
Breakthrough Session
Ninety minutes, one to one. The fastest way to find out whether this kind of work is yours.
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Five places. 30 January – 7 February 2027. Applications close 15 September 2026.