A DIY Blueprint for an At-Home Psychedelic Retreat 🧘♂️
The what, why, and how of designing a week-long transformational retreat..
📍 Coordinates: The Temple Room, The Nest 🪺 – Argentina.
🎧 Music Pairing: How Long – Geometrae.
📖 Reading Time: ~4 minutes.
🧉 Housekeeping: (1) A huge bear hug to all who have joined recently! Welcome. Shoutouts to Kyle from Sloww, Jordan Bates, & Jon Brooks for the legendary referrals. I’m excited to have you here. If you want to explore more of this digital dojo, I invite you to check out the Archives. (2) My next piece will explore the Cultural House we’re building, so you have more context into what I mean by my ‘Coordinates’. (3) Hot off the press! My good friend Ethan Nelson just dropped a podcast we did together. Listen here for a yarn on redesigning culture, personal transformation, and everything in between.
As the holidays approach…
... and with the New Year beckoning, almost all but the most addicted among us will be taking some time off of work.
Maybe to travel, perhaps to spend time with family, and possibly to spend some spare moments reflecting on the past year.
While ambiguous, this demarcation of a solar revolution we call the New Year is a powerful time to turn inward. To check in with yourself, re-assess your life and your values, and lay the foundation for the rest of your life.
Most people spend their lives avoiding themselves.
And society is all too ready to provide ample distractions in the form of decadence.
But there are those who want to use this time for reflection, contemplation, and cultivation. A brief opportunity, enabled by the collective work disconnection, to retreat. To return to yourself.
I’m excited to be attempting something new this year: a stay-at-home, do-it-yourself retreat.
Below you’ll find a few thoughts and my protocol for a multi-day DIY retreat. I’ll share a review of it once complete.
I have written about Experience Design before, the important considerations when attempting to DIY transformational alchemy for yourself or others.
My partner and I will be embarking on a 7-day retreat, at home, during the week leading up to Christmas.
Keep in mind that everything here can be altered.
If you don’t have a full week, you can do 3 days. If you don’t have a weekend, you can do a single day. Want to focus more on physical health? Great, gear your schedule towards that. Want it to be more social? You can design that in as well.
This is but one example from an infinite set.
Intentions & Ground Rules
We’re designing around a few core intentions: disconnection, detox, and forward clarity/power.
We’ve laid a few ground rules to follow each day:
🚭 No smoking (cannabis, nicotine)
🚱 No alcohol
🚫 No caffeine (coffee, maté, tea)
🍵 Meat & fruit & tea/water only
📴 30min screen check-ins morning/evening
📵 Offline screen use is allowed exclusively for reading/writing in designated blocks.
The rest of the world, family, and colleagues may not be fully offline by the time this starts, so we’re building in 30m phone check-ins. We have some reading/reflection activity blocks in the schedule, so screens aren’t entirely forbidden, just offline.
Daily Schedule
A sample day—with minimal variation for the week—looks like:
☀️ Wake/Screen Time
🤸 Yoga
🧘♂️ Meditate
🍄 Medicine Ceremony
🍎 Food
📝 Journal/Reflection
🗣️ Collective Shares/Discussion
📚 Reading / Study time
🚶♂️ Walk
🥩 Food
📲 Screen Check-In
🤸 Yoga
🧘♂️ Meditate
😴 Sleep
This setup uses core practices (yoga & meditation) as a scaffolding for deeper internal, psychological, and ceremonial work to unfold during the day.
This consistency and structure allows your body to adjust, relax into the experience, and surrender to the deeper work that is unfolding.
The Daily Pillars
Each day is centred around a ‘pillar experience’. In practice, this looks like:
Day 1: 🐸 Kambo Ceremony
Day 2: 🐸 Kambo Ceremony
Day 3: 🏛️ Breathwork & Structures
Day 4: 🍄 Psilocybin Ceremony
Day 5: 👨👩👧👦 Breathwork & Internal Family Systems
Day 6: 🌀 LSD Ceremony
Day 7: 💛 Breathwork & Integration
Revisiting the original intentions (disconnection, detox, and forward clarity) you can see how the schedule and ground rules grow out of these intentions.
Disconnection from tech is a ground rule, detoxes from the ground rules and kambo sessions, and forward clarity through the psycho-somatic sessions and psychedelic ceremonies.
On the days in-between medicine ceremonies, we opt for a longer breathwork session and some form of psycho-somatic work. ‘Structures’ and ‘Internal Family Systems’ are the choice this round, given our experience, interest, and proficiency with the modalities.
For better or for worse, we can’t feasibly incorporate fasting protocols into this, as you shouldn’t fast for ~3 days before or after kambo sessions. I’ll likely do some extended fasts in the week after Christmas.
There you have it! A DIY Blueprint for an at-home, self-led transformational retreat for yourself or with others. I’ll send a follow-up review of the protocol once we’ve finished!
If you’re interested in setting one up for yourself and have any questions at all, from dosing, integration, meditation tracks, breathwork links, etc., just reply to this and we’ll sort you out.
With love, EB. 💛
Love this idea Eric. All future "staycations" have now been upgraded to at-home retreats!