Back in September, we wrote about saying yes to a plant medicine retreat before we knew where it would lead. This week, months after that retreat actually happened, we finally sat down with our friend and collaborator Elba to debrief the whole week — the preparation, the ceremonies, and the mountain that had plans of its own. It's a longer conversation than usual, and a harder one to compress into takeaways, but here's what stuck with us.
Keeping Two Worlds Separate, Until You Don't
Elba has spent her career as a product manager in tech, the kind of "3D life" most of us know well, while quietly building a second life helping facilitate sacred plant medicine retreats in Peru. She told us she almost didn't invite us in the first place, not because she didn't want us there, but because you never know how people will take it when you let your spiritual life bump up against your professional one. Will they get it, or will they decide you're "the weird one"? That hesitation is familiar to anyone who's ever kept their meditation practice off their LinkedIn. The retreat only happened because, eventually, someone was willing to let the two worlds touch.
The Chain of Trust
None of us vetted the retreat leaders ourselves. We trusted Elba, Elba trusted the person running it, and he trusted the traditional guides who'd been doing this work in the Sacred Valley for years. That's not a shortcut — it's actually the point. Choosing who guides an experience like this matters enormously: whether the people holding the ceremony are from the culture and lineage they're drawing on, how long they've trained, whether they take the preparation and the ritual as seriously as the ceremony itself. Respect for the medicine and respect for the culture turned out to be inseparable. When you can't personally verify every detail, the question becomes who you trust enough to vouch for it — and whether that chain holds.
A Circle Before Anything Else
The retreat didn't open with ceremony. It opened with a group meditation designed to sync everyone's energy and create a sense of collective protection before anything more intense began — a way of turning a room of strangers from different places into something closer to one group holding space for each other. It sounds like a simple icebreaker until you're in it: more than one person in the circle reported seeing the same colors, the same images, at the same moments. You don't need to explain that to believe something real happened in that room. The intentionality behind even the "chill" parts of the week was the throughline for everything that came after.
When the Mountain Had Other Plans
The next day's hike was supposed to be an easy forty minutes before an afternoon ceremony. It had been dry season, with wildfires in the region, and the group set out underdressed for anything but heat. Within an hour, at well over 4,000 meters, it was raining. Then it was snowing — hard enough that guides who'd been leading groups there for a decade said they'd never seen weather turn that fast. Everyone was carrying a log meant to hold their written intentions, trying to keep it dry under borrowed umbrellas and ponchos bought on the walk over. When the group finally found partial shelter, the task became building a fire out of wet wood on wet ground, which should not have worked and somehow did. It's the kind of detail that sounds like an inconvenience in the retelling and felt, in the moment, like proof that something larger was paying attention.
Preparation Is Part of the Medicine
Long before anyone set foot in Peru, the group had been sent a written guide explaining how to prepare: what to eat less of, how to think about the weeks leading up to the ceremony, what the medicine is actually meant to do. That groundwork matters as much as the week itself. The goal was never the most dramatic experience possible — it was integration, and integration requires showing up as clean a channel as you can manage and placing your own intention into the process rather than just receiving whatever happens to you. Ceremony without preparation is a different, lesser thing.
What You Can Take From This
You don't need a retreat booked in Peru to use any of this. Notice where you're relying on a chain of trust in your own life — a doctor, a mentor, a friend who vouched for someone — and ask honestly whether that chain is solid all the way down. Before you walk into something that matters to you, ask what "preparation" would actually look like, beyond logistics. And when conditions change on you without warning, which they will, the group that built a fire in the snow is a decent reminder that "it should work" and "it worked" are closer together than they look from the outside.
We're still integrating pieces of this trip months later, and we suspect we will be for a while longer. Thank you, as always, for listening in on the process with us — and to Elba, for trusting us enough to finally say yes to this conversation.
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