How Many Ceremonies Do You Actually Need?
Updated: Oct 14
People ask this expecting a number, and the number they are hoping for is one.
I understand why. One ceremony is affordable, containable, and can be scheduled around a life. It is also, for most people, not quite how the medicine works — and the reason is more practical than mystical.
What usually happens in a first ceremony
The first night is largely spent meeting the experience itself.
You are dealing with the taste, the onset, the nausea, the disorientation, the noise of other people in the room, and the entirely reasonable question of whether you have made a terrible mistake. Most first-timers spend a significant part of the night managing their own reaction rather than working.
There is also a physical layer to move through. If you arrive after years of processed food, alcohol, caffeine and stress, the body has a queue to clear before anything else gets attention. That is what people mean when they say the first ceremony is "cleaning."
Some people do have a profound first night. It happens. But the more common pattern is that the first ceremony teaches you how to be in a ceremony, and the second is where you actually arrive.
What changes on the second night
Almost everything, and mostly because your nervous system has stopped bracing.
You know the taste. You know what onset feels like and that it passes. You know the purge will not kill you. You know the facilitator will come if you raise a hand. The enormous amount of energy that first-night attention spends on threat assessment is freed up, and it goes into the work.
The second ceremony is also where people tend to stop steering. First nights are full of agendas — questions people brought, answers they wanted. By the second, most people have discovered that the medicine does not take requests, and the surrender that follows is where the depth is.
What the third is for
The third night is where integration begins inside the retreat rather than after it.
By then something has usually surfaced — a memory, a pattern, a relationship, a piece of grief you had filed away. The third ceremony is where that material gets worked rather than merely discovered. In my experience it is the night people most often describe afterwards as the one that mattered, and it is the reason our retreats are built around up to three.
One ceremony shows you the door. Two gets you through it. Three is where you look around.
The honest counter-argument
More is not automatically better, and I want to be clear about where the ceiling is.
There is a saturation point. Four, five, six nights in a row is genuinely demanding — physically, because you are eating little and sleeping less, and psychologically, because material surfaces faster than anyone can process it. Long retreats have their place in traditional contexts with the surrounding structure to match. In a European weekend they mostly produce exhaustion.
Frequency matters more than volume. Someone who sits three times a year and does the work in between will go further than someone who sits fifteen times a year and does not. The medicine opens material. Your ordinary life is where it gets metabolised. Sitting again before you have integrated the last one is a way of avoiding the integration, and it is common.
Some people should sit once and stop. If a ceremony gives you something clear and you spend the following year actually acting on it, that is a complete outcome. The pull to go back is not always the work calling. Sometimes it is the intensity calling.
How long between retreats
The honest answer is: until the last one has finished with you.
As a working guide, I suggest at least three months, and more often six. That is not a rule about the medicine; it is a rule about you. Integration is slow. The insight arrives in a night and the behaviour change takes a season.
A useful test before booking again: can you name one concrete thing that is different in your life since the last retreat? A conversation you had, a habit you changed, something you ended or began. If you cannot, another ceremony is unlikely to help — the material from the last one is still sitting there waiting.
What to do between
This is where the real work happens, and it does not require ceremony.
Integration sessions — structured, with someone who knows this territory. Ours run as group calls plus individual follow-up.
Therapy. Particularly for trauma material, which frequently surfaces and rarely resolves on its own.
A daily practice. Meditation, breathwork, journalling — anything that keeps you in contact with your interior between peaks.
Microdosing, for some people, as a way to keep the thread live without another full ceremony.
So, the number
For a first retreat: two or three ceremonies, held close together, with real preparation before and real integration after. That is the shape that produces lasting change most reliably.
After that, it is not a number. It is a rhythm, and it should be slower than you want it to be.
You can see how our retreats are structured around up to three ceremonies, or look at what preparation and integration involves between them.
Ritshi Zenati, Speaker & Life Coach
Founder at Holistika Center.
Holistika Center holds plant medicine retreats across Barcelona, Málaga, Mallorca, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Colombia and Mexico.
Also, different programs like Microdosing, Life and Spiritual Guidance, etc.
Visit Holistika Center to explore upcoming programs.
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