Maestro Rono Meni
Our senior maestro. Leads the first and fourth ceremonies of every week.
I started Ceiba because I could not find a retreat I would send someone I loved to. Plenty were beautiful. Almost none would tell me who was in the room at four in the morning, what happened if a guest’s heart rate climbed, or how much the maestros were actually paid.
So I built the answer to those three questions first, and designed the retreat around them second. A licensed physician reads every application before anyone takes a payment. A doctor stays on site through all seven nights and is awake through every ceremony. The maestros are named on this website, credited, and paid a full professional fee plus travel whether four guests come or twelve.
The house opened on 28 July 2026. I will not dress that up. We do not have ten years of reviews and I am not going to buy any. What I can do is publish the protocol, publish the price, publish the names, and decline the applications we should decline. Roughly one in five does not proceed, and that number is the one I care most about protecting as we grow.
If you are weighing us against a center with a longer history, ask both of us the same four questions: who reads my medical file, how far is the nearest hospital, how are the healers paid, and how often do you say no. Ask for it in writing. Then choose whichever answer you trust more. If that is not us, I would genuinely rather you went there.
He is not a shaman, a healer or a facilitator, and he does not serve medicine or sit in ceremony with guests. That work belongs to the maestros. His job is that the protocol, the pay and the integration promise are real.
Written down so you can check them, and so we cannot quietly drop one as we grow.
Every application is read by a licensed doctor before a place is offered or a payment is taken. Medications are assessed individually and any taper is planned around your own prescriber’s timeline, never around a week we want to fill.
Declined applicants are never charged, always get the reason in writing, and receive a referral list of practitioners who work with the conditions we cannot hold safely. Growing will not change this ratio.
A full professional fee per week plus travel and time away from their communities, paid whether four guests come or twelve. They are photographed only with permission, and we never reproduce Shipibo textile patterns as decoration.
One maestro for every three guests. We run twenty two weeks a year rather than fifty so that the team, the land and the maestros all recover. A bigger group is a cheaper group, and a worse one.
Four calls in the first three months, then quarterly for a year, with the same lead who read your file before you travelled. They call you rather than waiting to be chased, on your time zone, at no extra charge.
Ayahuasca is not a treatment for any condition. Participants report lasting change, and we cite the peer reviewed research along with its limitations rather than around them. Anyone promising you an outcome is selling, not screening.
Four maestros from the Paoyhan and Nueva Betania communities in Ucayali, a physician, and an integration lead. Everyone who touches your week is on this page.
Our senior maestro. Leads the first and fourth ceremonies of every week.
Works with plant baths and the dieta alongside ceremony.
Second maestro in most ceremonies, and the one guests tend to talk to at dawn.
Reads every application, runs intake, and stays on site awake through all four ceremonies.
Our integration lead is introduced by name on your screening call, before you commit to anything, because they are the person you will still be speaking to a year later.
A walled property on the floor of the Sacred Valley, chosen for two unromantic reasons: it sits well below Cusco, so guests arrive able to rest, and it is close enough to the city that a hospital is an hour away rather than a day.
One maloca, twelve rooms nobody shares, a dieta kitchen with a nutritionist, and a plant garden the maestros walked before we signed anything. This is a Quechua valley; the medicine and the icaros are Shipibo, and we say so plainly rather than implying a local lineage we do not have.
Every center our age has these gaps. Most hide them behind stock photography and borrowed testimonials.
We opened in July 2026, so there is no decade of guest history to read, and we will not buy or borrow any. What we publish instead is the protocol, the price and the names, all checkable before you pay.
Twelve guests and twenty two weeks a year is the whole business, by choice. If you need a specific week at short notice, we will often be full and we will say so rather than squeezing you in.
We make no medical claims and will say so on your screening call if you are hoping for one. Guests who arrive expecting a fix tend to leave disappointed, and occasionally worse.
Screening takes about two weeks and the dieta takes three more. If you want to sit in four weeks, we are the wrong center and we will tell you in the first email.
We will keep adding to this rather than quietly rewriting the beginning.
Ceiba was founded on 28 July 2026, so the center is new. The people in it are not. Our four maestros have more than seventy years of practice between them, and Dr. Márquez has worked in internal medicine in Cusco for over a decade.
You should ask harder questions, and we would rather you did. Ask who reads your medical file, how far the nearest hospital is, how the maestros are paid, and how often the center says no. Ask for the answers in writing. A center’s age matters far less than whether it will answer those four.
Michael Vale founded and owns it. He is not a shaman, a healer or a facilitator, he does not serve medicine, and he does not sit in ceremony with guests. His job is that the medical protocol, the maestros’ pay and the integration promise are real.
A full professional fee per week plus travel and time away from their communities, paid whether four guests come or twelve. They are named on this site and photographed only with permission. We do not reproduce Shipibo textile patterns as decoration.
Because two maestros can genuinely attend to twelve people and not to thirty. It is one maestro for every three guests, with a physician awake in the room. A larger group is cheaper to run and worse to sit in.
Yes. Cusco, Pisac, Iquitos and Costa Rica are our houses, run on the same protocol, the same pay standard and the same twelve guest limit. If another location suits your body or your calendar better, we will tell you and book you there instead.
None. Ayahuasca is not a treatment for any condition. Participants report lasting change, and we cite the peer reviewed research with its limitations rather than around them.