What Happens at Casa Sagrada on Ceremony Day
Casa Sagrada means Sacred Home.
And it is, first and foremost, Brad and Sarah’s home.
Casa Sagrada is where they raise their family, live their everyday lives, prepare food, play music, let animals run wild and free, and have held countless ceremonies over the years.
Throughout the house you’ll find objects, textiles, instruments, plants, photographs, feathers, and gifts collected over decades of travel, relationship, friendship, study, and ceremony. Everything has a story.
When you come to ceremony here, you’re being welcomed into a home that has been lived in, loved in, and shared with many people before you.
Here’s what you can expect when you arrive.
Arrival
On the first night, guests arrive at Casa Sagrada around 5:30 PM.
We’ll welcome you into the ceremony space, where you’ll choose your place for the night, meet the other participants and team members, continue relaxing and hydrating, walk around, sit by the fire, watch the spectacular sunset, relax and hydrate, or simply sit in stillness and take it all in.
There’s no need to do anything particular during this time.
While everyone is getting comfortable, Brad and Sarah begin meeting privately with each participant for their individual consult (consulta).
Your Consulta
Every participant has time alone with Brad and Sarah before ceremony.
This is an opportunity to talk about why you’re here, your intention, anything relevant from your medical form, and anything that has come up for you as you’ve been preparing.
It is also a safe space to ask any questions.
Brad and Sarah may share something from their own experience, offer another way of looking at what you’re bringing into ceremony, or listen.
This conversation allows them to know a little more about you before you all enter ceremony together.
The Opening Conversation
Once everyone has completed their consulta, we gather as a group.
Brad and Sarah talk through the practical protocols for the evening, and share whatever feels important for that particular night.
No two opening conversations are exactly the same.
Sometimes Sarah tells stories. Sometimes Brad shares something he’s been thinking about. Sometimes the conversation goes somewhere nobody expected.
And sometimes everybody laughs a lot.
This is also your opportunity to ask any final questions before we begin.
The First Cup
Around 10 PM, we prepare to drink.
Sarah, Brad, and the medicine team bless the ayahuasca through music, love, prayers, and chants before the first cup is served.
Everyone approaches the cup individually and returns to their place.
Once everyone has drunk, we sit together in silence.
This is time to be with yourself, the medicine, your intention, and whatever arises.
Music
We allow plenty of silence at the beginning of the ceremony.
When the time feels right, the music begins.
Music is an important part of the way we hold ceremony at Casa Sagrada. Throughout the night, you may hear live and recorded music, traditional icaros, chanting, prayer, instruments, and sometimes complete silence again.
Brad, Sarah, and members of the ceremony team remain present throughout the night.
We’re paying attention.
Whether that is walking you to the bathroom, bringing you water, holding your hand, or reminding you to breathe, we are in the space to be of service.
Healings
During the night, Brad and Sarah may offer individual healings, and members of the ceremony team may also share particular practices they have been taught and given permission to use.
For us, a healing is a sharing of love.
Over many years, different teachers and traditions have shared tools with Brad, Sarah, and members of our team. These may include prayer, feathers, wayras, chondur, ortiga, lotions, plants, song, touch, and other practices.
We share these tools with enormous respect for the people and traditions that shared them with us.
Brad and Sarah don’t consider themselves the source of anyone’s healing.
Your relationship with the medicine, nature, your faith, your body, and yourself is your own.
We are here to infuse the space with love, music, prayer, and our personal unshakable trust in the medicine.
Morning at Casa Sagrada
One of the beautiful things about sitting in ceremony through the night is getting to experience the full arc of it.
At some point, we stop serving medicine. The night becomes quieter. People go deeper inward. Your body begins to soften into the space, and for many people, there comes a point when they finally fall into a deep sleep for a couple of hours.
And then nature begins to wake you.
The darkness slowly lifts. The birds begin singing. The jungle starts moving again. The light changes.
There is something very beautiful about waking up as the natural world wakes up around you. After spending the night so deeply inward, you begin returning alongside nature, back into your body, back into the space, back into the rhythm of another day.
It is a simple reminder that we are nature too. Our bodies have their own rhythms, and ceremony gives us a rare opportunity to experience them without clocks, screens, schedules, or all the other things that usually interrupt them.
As everyone begins to wake, we slowly start nourishing the body again.
Someone may bring you a warm cup of tea, soup, oatmeal, fresh organic fruit, or whatever we have prepared that morning. There is no rush. You can stay wrapped in your blanket, sit by the fire, walk outside, watch the ocean, talk quietly, or listen to the birds and let yourself arrive.
Morning at Casa Sagrada is still part of the ceremony.
We give it time.
The Closing Conversation
Around 6 AM, we gather again.
Brad and Sarah offer some closing remarks, but we intentionally don’t turn the morning into a long sharing circle.
After the ceremony, there can be a natural desire to immediately decipher what happened during the night. To tell the story, interpret the visions, compare experiences, and try to figure out what everything meant.
We encourage you to wait.
Ayahuasca often speaks through metaphor, and understanding doesn’t always arrive at the same time as the experience. When we begin comparing stories, it can also be easy to wonder why someone else saw something you didn’t, why your experience looked different, or whether the medicine “worked.”
No hierarchy of experiences exists here.
Over the next few days, you will eat, shower, sleep, rest, and allow your nervous system to settle. As you return to your body and your everyday life, logic begins to return too. Sometimes that is when the metaphor and the meaning begin to meet.
Sometimes it takes four days.
But it can also take four months. A year.
And sometimes there is nothing to decipher at all.
You don't need to chase an answer before it is ready to arrive.
After the closing remarks, there is nothing you need to do. Nourish yourself. Rest. Sleep. Let the experience be what it was.
If you are sitting with us for a second night, you will return to Casa Sagrada around 7:30 PM. Your consulta has already happened, so the second evening begins a little differently, with more time to arrive and prepare to sit together again.
What Makes Casa Sagrada Different
People sometimes ask what makes Casa Sagrada different.
For us, so much of the answer comes back to relationship, reverence, and experience.
Brad and Sarah have spent decades sitting with different tribes, cultures, traditions, teachers, and medicines, and have held space for thousands of people over the years.
They carry deep reverence for the elders and traditions that have taught them, and humility about their own place within those traditions.
They don’t call themselves shamans, healers, or teachers.
Decades of experience have given them the ability to understand the people sitting in front of them.
Many of the ancient traditions and practices that inform ceremony come from cultures with very different relationships to family, community, spirituality, the body, trauma, and the natural world than the Western people who arrive at Casa Sagrada today.
Brad and Sarah understand that distinction.
Over the years, they have learned how to create a bridge between the traditions they have been entrusted with and the Western mind, while remaining deeply respectful of the medicine and the people who shared these practices with them.
That understanding shapes the way ceremony is held at Casa Sagrada.
The groups are intentionally small, with no more than ten participants. Brad and Sarah are present throughout the experience, from your consulta before ceremony until the closing remarks the following morning. The ceremony team is small, attentive, and deeply familiar with the space and the way we work.
We know your name.
We know why you’ve come.
We pay attention.
We share the night.
There is a tremendous amount of experience behind the way Casa Sagrada holds ceremony, but also a tremendous amount of humility.
We know what has been shared with us.
We know what we have been permitted to share.
And we know that ultimately, the relationship is between you, the medicine, nature, your faith, and yourself.
If you are preparing for ceremony at Casa Sagrada, the Preparation page and the Dieta guidelines cover everything you need. And when you are ready to take the next step, we are here for you.
