Stepping into ceremony is not just a single night’s experience, it is the beginning of a living initiation. This handbook is your guide into that threshold.

Created for seekers, cycle-breakers, and vision-holders, the Temple Abzu Preparation Handbook is a comprehensive companion that helps you prepare for the deep work of ceremony, not only physically but emotionally, energetically, and spiritually.

Inside, you’ll find:

Dieta & Physical Preparation: A clear, detailed roadmap for tending the body as an ecosystem, including foods, substances, and energies to release so the medicine can meet you in clarity.

Medical Considerations: Guidance on medications, supplements, and conditions that must be approached with care, with safety held as the highest priority.

Mental & Emotional Preparation: Practices to ground, center, and attune, drawing on the Q’ero Medicine Wheel, shadow work, and daily rituals that help you meet ceremony with presence.

Common Challenges Before Ceremony: Reflections on fear, resistance, and emotional surfacing, and how to recognize them as part of the path rather than obstacles.

Working with the Medicines: An overview of Ayahuasca, Niños Santos, and Hapé, their histories, spirits, and the unique ways they teach, heal, and transform.

The Ceremony Experience: What to expect in the unknown, from surrender and visions to purging, ego dissolution, ancestral healing, and encounters with the unseen, all offered with grounded insight and reassurance.

Integration Guidance: Tools to weave what you’ve received back into your life, including reflection prompts, integration planning, and how to carry your medicine long after retreat.

The Ofrenda: How to engage in ayni, sacred reciprocity, with the altar, offering your prayers and gratitude as part of the ceremonial field.

This is not a checklist or a rigid set of rules. It is an invitation into right relationship with yourself, with the medicines, and with the living intelligence of the Earth. Whether you are preparing for your first retreat or deepening your path after many, this handbook will help you enter the ceremonial container resourced, grounded, and ready to receive.

This is your preparation before the preparation, the medicine before the medicine.