This adaptation of the velada tradition for RETIRO VELADA honors its Mazatec origins, while distinctly reconfiguring its elements to suit a contemporary, transpersonal retreat centered around legal plant medicines, nature cosmology, and a dynamic, dialogic approach.

Adapted Core Characteristics

• Role of the Hablador: The hablador is not simply a storyteller but an inspired mediator whose creative language, dialogic presence, and capacity for eloquent speech shape the ritual field and open channels for collective and personal illumination. Taking on this role within the retreat, the practitioner orchestrates spoken guidance, calls forth wisdom, and leads participants through liminal space with intentional speech, poetic narration, and dialogic invitation—“curing with language” and facilitating the co-creation of meaning rather than the transmission of fixed dogma.
• Legal Plant Medicines: Rather than ritual psychedelics rooted in local religious syncretism, RETIRO VELADA employs legal ethnobotanicals, chosen for their capacity to facilitate deep introspection, somatic release, and imaginative expansion. Their use is ceremonial yet intentionally secular and exploratory.
• Nature-Focused Cosmology: The retreat dispenses with Catholic iconography, prayers, and saintly invocations, instead centering the elements—earth, water, fire, air—and nature spirits as entities for honoring and communion. The vast cosmos is not a distant abstraction but an intimate, immediate space for encounter and inquiry, forming the lived metaphysics of the ritual.
• Transpersonal Exploration: RETIRO VELADA distinguishes itself as a transpersonal retreat: biography and social identity are de-emphasized to foster a radical exploration of consciousness. The process privileges self-transcendence, accessing collective, archetypal, and hidden layers of being that are not constrained by personal history or narrative.
• Dynamic Meditations: The retreat is punctuated by dynamic meditative practices—movement, breathwork, guided silence, dialogic explorations—to open, clarify, and transport participants through various states of awareness over the course of the day.
• Rigorous Fasting: Dietary discipline and periods of fasting are implemented not solely for purification, but as a conscious technique for surfacing latent psychic and somatic materials, heightening clarity, and advancing the work of the retreat.