The number of people who return to Spirit Vine year after year is the only review this place truly needs. Once you’ve experienced the container Silvia has created, you understand why people come back. This November marked my second retreat here, and returning felt less like a leap of faith and more like a homecoming.Ayahuasca is a powerful gift — but power without care is dangerous. What Silvia offers is restraint, intelligence, and a rare steadiness of hand. Every aspect of the retreat — safety, structure, food, rest, group work, integration — is considered. The result is a space where you can let go without falling apart, where surrender does not mean abandonment.Spirit Vine is genuinely LGBT+ friendly. Across both retreats I felt entirely seen and at ease. Coming to this work carrying trauma from a homophobic childhood and only coming out later in life, safety around identity was not a small concern. Here, acceptance was not performative or discussed — it was simply present. And that presence made deeper healing possible.Silvia brings a rare integration of deep psychological training and spiritual practice, giving the work both unusual depth and a strong sense of safety. I have heard many difficult stories from people who encountered ayahuasca in poorly held settings before eventually finding Spirit Vine. The contrast is stark. Silvia has the rare ability to truly see people — and then guide them, firmly and kindly, back toward themselves. She has a gift for empowering without imposing.The group work here deserves special mention. I underestimated its power before my first retreat. Watching people show up honestly, speak vulnerably, and be held within a carefully designed structure is a healing experience in its own right. This year there were four workshops — two new to me and two I had experienced before — and it was striking how much deeper the repeated work landed. Silvia’s workshops are intelligent, sometimes playful, and quietly profound. People speak without being interrupted. The room stays steady. Nothing needs to be fixed or explained away. In that steadiness, something long forgotten is allowed to surface. The tools offered here are priceless; they continue working quietly long after the retreat has ended.For years I understood — intellectually — that my hyper-vigilance, numbness, and inability to rest in my own body were the legacy of growing up with addiction and narcissism in my family. I could name it. Analyse it. Explain it clearly in a therapist’s room. But knowing is not the same as feeling. Talk therapy had given me insight, but my nervous system still behaved as if danger were imminent. Ayahuasca, when held well, works differently — it allows the body to experience fear, memory, and emotion without shutting down, and to discover in real time that it can survive them. In ceremony, fear released its grip. Safety registered not as an idea, but as a lived bodily truth — the nervous system releasing patterns it no longer needed to survive. This changed how my body understands the world.Some people build their lives through family. Some of us must build our lives after family. My nervous system was exhausted from decades of survival, numbing, and dissociation. Spirit Vine has played a fundamental role in changing that.What struck me on returning this year was how much deeper the work goes. Each retreat peels back another layer. If my first retreat was about re-entering my body after a lifetime of fear and dissociation, this second was about learning how to stay there — building capacity, resilience, and presence. The work compounds. It deepens. It waits for you to be ready.Most of our experience of life — and of ourselves — remains unconscious. Spirit Vine turns the lights on. It feels less like fixing something broken and more like entering a vast, previously sealed chamber: a cave of wonders you didn’t know you were carrying. Spirit Vine is a place where careful hands, deep listening, and powerful medicine work together to return people to themselves.
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We are a non-profit retreat center hosting ayahuasca retreats for spiritual development in the Atlantic rainforest. What makes our retreats unique are the workshops that have been designed specifically to enhance the ayahuasca experience. In these workshops you will learn tools to explore and work on yourself, and to integrate the insights that you receive in the workshops and the ayahuasca ceremonies. Our focus is to help participants apply the insights to their everyday life to make practical long-lasting changes.
Another highlight of our retreats are the exquisite ayahuasca-friendly vegan meals prepared by our in-house chef who specializes in functional nutrition. We prepare our own ayahuasca brew from plants grown organically and sustainably at our center.
Our retreats also have yoga classes, massages, visits to some of the most beautiful beaches Brazil has to offer, and a natural pond where you can swim and soak in the sights and sounds of the rainforest. See more
