Loneliness has a way of showing up uninvited. You can be in a packed maloca with twenty other people, the icaros rising and falling around you, and still feel like you’re the only person in the room. Anyone who has sat with ayahuasca, psilocybin, or any of the other master plants long enough has bumped into this. It’s one of the quieter teachings of plant medicine — and one of the least talked about in the brochures.

If you’re researching a psychedelic retreat right now, you’ve probably read plenty about ego dissolution, visionary states, and breakthroughs around addiction or depression. What gets mentioned less often is the raw, unglamorous experience of feeling deeply alone partway through a ceremony, and what to actually do with that feeling. So let’s talk about it honestly.

Why Loneliness Surfaces During Ayahuasca and Other Plant Medicines

Plant medicines tend to strip the furniture out of the room. The distractions you normally lean on — your phone, your work, your relationships, the steady hum of being busy — aren’t available in ceremony. What’s left is you, the medicine, and whatever you’ve been avoiding. For a lot of people, that includes a baseline loneliness they didn’t realise they were carrying.

Ayahuasca in particular has a reputation for pulling buried emotional material to the surface. Grief over people who’ve died. Old breakups that never really healed. The specific ache of childhood loneliness. A kambo session can do something similar in a more physical key. Psilocybin sometimes opens it more gently, like a slow tide. The substance varies; the underlying revelation often doesn’t — you’ve been lonely for longer than you admitted.

This isn’t a malfunction. It’s the point. Plant medicine for addiction, depression, and stuck life patterns works in part by showing you what you’ve been numbing. Loneliness is one of the most common things people numb. Alcohol numbs it. Endless work numbs it. Scrolling numbs it. Take the numbing away and there it is, waiting.

The Difference Between Being Alone and Being Lonely

Here’s where it gets interesting. Many people leave a retreat reporting that they still spend plenty of time alone — but the loneliness has loosened its grip. That’s not a coincidence. Somewhere in the ceremony, the wiring between solitude and suffering got rerouted.

Being alone is a circumstance. Being lonely is a story you tell yourself about that circumstance. The story usually goes something like: I’m alone because something is wrong with me. I’m alone because nobody really sees me. I’m alone and that means I’ll always be alone. Sit in ceremony long enough and these stories tend to show themselves for what they are — old, repetitive, often inherited.

I’ve watched people during integration circles describe this moment of recognition with something close to relief. Not because the loneliness vanished, but because they finally saw it wasn’t a fact about reality. It was a habit of mind. Habits of mind can be worked with.

What Letting Go Actually Means in This Context

“Letting go” is one of those phrases that gets repeated until it’s lost any meaning. On a retreat brochure it sounds simple. In ceremony, at 2 a.m., with your chest aching and the room spinning, it sounds like a cruel joke. So what does it actually mean?

It doesn’t mean forcing yourself to stop feeling something. That’s suppression dressed up in spiritual language, and the medicine sees right through it. Letting go, in the way the master plants seem to teach it, is closer to this: you stop fighting what’s already there. You let the feeling be in the room with you without immediately trying to fix it, name it, or push it away.

A facilitator I respect describes it as relaxing your grip without dropping the object. The loneliness is still there. You’re still holding it. But you’re not strangling it, and it’s not strangling you. Strange things happen when you can do that even for thirty seconds. The feeling moves. It changes shape. Sometimes it dissolves entirely. Sometimes it just becomes more bearable.

Practical Ways to Work With Loneliness Before, During, and After a Retreat

If you’re seriously considering a psychedelic retreat — particularly one involving ayahuasca, ibogaine, or psilocybin — it’s worth doing some homework on this specific territory before you arrive. The people who navigate loneliness well in ceremony are usually the ones who saw it coming.

• Before the retreat: Spend some honest time alone in the weeks leading up. Not productive alone time. Not meditation-app alone time. Sit on your couch for an hour without your phone. Notice what comes up. This is a tame preview of what ceremony will amplify.
• During ceremony: If loneliness arrives, try not to argue with it. Don’t demand it leave. Don’t tell yourself a story about why it’s here. Breathe, and let it be in the room. Facilitators are there for exactly these moments — let them know if you need support.
• After ceremony: Integration is where the real work lives. Talk to people who’ve sat with the same medicine. Journal the specifics, not the platitudes. Be careful about isolating yourself in the weeks following — the open state can amplify both connection and disconnection.
• Watch for the bypass: Some people use the retreat experience itself as a new way to avoid loneliness — chasing the next ceremony, the next breakthrough. The medicine isn’t a relationship. It’s a mirror.

One more thing worth saying: if your loneliness is severe, if it’s tangled up with serious depression, suicidal thinking, or active addiction, please don’t treat a retreat as a first line of help. Talk to a clinician familiar with psychedelic-assisted approaches. Reputable retreat centres will screen for this and will tell you honestly if they’re not the right setting for where you are right now. The good ones turn people away. Be wary of the ones who don’t.

The Quiet Gift Hidden in Sitting Alone

Here’s the part that surprised me the first time I encountered it. The people who do this work seriously — who sit with ayahuasca more than once, who take their integration seriously, who work with master plants over years rather than weekends — often end up describing solitude as something they actively want. Not all the time. Not exclusively. But as a real, nourishing part of their life.

That’s the turn. Loneliness was the symptom; solitude becomes the medicine. You learn that you can be alone with yourself and the company isn’t bad. That’s a profound thing for someone who has spent decades running from it. It’s also one of the more durable outcomes I’ve seen from this work — more durable, often, than the visionary content that gets all the attention.

None of this means a retreat is the right move for you. Only you can weigh that, and the weighing matters. But if loneliness is part of what’s pushing you to consider plant medicine — for addiction, for depression, for the dull background ache of being human — know that you’re in good company. Most of the people in the maloca next to you are quietly working with some version of the same thing.

If something in this resonates and you want to explore further, a range of curated ayahuasca and plant-medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Take your time choosing. The right setting matters more than most first-timers realise.