Do you feel
your soul
calling?
SOULSEEKERS.AU invites you to step into an experience that is grounded, intentional, and deeply spiritual. We are a Sydney community on a psychedelic and spiritual journey from Sydney to the Brazilian Jungle that seeks the sacred and heals through channels to the soul and dimensions where spirit lives.
A Disciplined
Spiritual Container
SOULSEEKERS.AU is not a retreat assembled from wellness trends — it is a sampradaya, a teaching passed through unbroken lineage. We do not promise transformation. We arrange the conditions: discernment in the entry, preparation of the body and mind, sanctity in the ceremony, and integration after. Each piece in its proper place. We do not claim to make you new. We open a door and let you walk through it yourself.
A place is not given to whoever asks. Each application is read carefully. Not everyone who knocks is ready to walk through, and saying so plainly is part of the work.
The mind cannot be prepared in a weekend. Before the threshold, each traveller is taught what to expect, how to sit, what to attend to, what to bring. Preparation is half the practice. The other half is patience.
The ceremony is the form kept by people who knew the territory — handed forward, generation by generation, because the form holds what the medicine alone cannot. Not theatre, it is a means of knowledge — pramana — handed down through teachers who knew the territory. The form is precise. We do not improvise. We do not perform. We listen.
What opens must be tended. Sravana — listening. Manana — reflecting. Nididhyasana — sitting with what was seen until it becomes how you live. The work does not end on the return flight — it begins again, quietly, in the ordinary days that follow. Integration is where the journey becomes a life. Integration is not what happens after the ceremony. It is the ceremony continued.
A retreat.
A sacred passage.
Every element here has a reason — ritual, ceremony, facilitation, rhythm — drawn from traditions that have done this work long before any of us arrived. You will not be left to navigate altered states alone. Those who hold the space were trained by those who were trained by those who knew. The set is prepared. The setting is held. The medicines, the ceremony, the integration are a single, careful passage of one continuous teaching. See, this is not built on spontaneity. The Vedanta teaching is plain: the seeker does not need to become someone new; the seeker needs the right conditions to recognise what was already so. Here, the conditions are the teaching.
Rooted in ancestral wisdom,
held with responsibility.
The Indigenous lineages that carry these medicines have done so for centuries — long before they were noticed or fashionable. The intention is not escape. It is recognition — of self, of lineage, of a depth that ordinary life rarely makes room for. You are not being taught something new. You are being shown what was always there.
Explore How We Do It →The Six Pillars
of the Journey
SOULSEEKERS.AU is a Sydney-based community journeying together to Brazil for sacred psychedelic immersion. Rooted in ceremonial entheogens, ritual, healing, and travel, the experience forges deep connection. The journey doesn't end in the jungle — it continues back home, where shared transformation becomes friendship with a sense of tribe.
Entheogenic Medicines: like Ayahuasca, Kambô, Sananga, Rapé, Psilocybin, Peyote and São Pedro held within ritual, can open a doorway to an expanded state of consciousness, deeper self-awareness softening the ego, amplifying intuition, and revealing the roots of long-held patterns.
Explore →The medicine alone is not enough. The ritual is the invocation — preparation, cleansing, and prayer make us conduits through which the spiritual descends. The deities meet your expanded consciousness and reveal what your life is asking of you next. The ceremony does what the medicine alone cannot.
Explore →Sankalpa: a heartfelt intention, set before the journey. Not a wish, not a goal — a recognition of what the soul already knows. The question sits quietly: Why am I here? What do I seek? Carried through every ceremony, the sankalpa becomes the compass.
Explore →When we access a higher consciousness → we open a realm where the mind’s defences soften and the soul’s hidden stories rise whole → seen, felt, and released in one living movement. What years of talking may circle, a single night can illuminate → transmuting grief → letting go of fear → the body finally exhaling.
Explore →Crossing time zones does something the rest of life cannot. The body loses its grip on routine — sleep, hunger, small habits of being you — and a kind of openness arrives unbidden. The nervous system softens. Defences loosen before you ask them to. By the time you reach the jungle, the medicine has somewhere to land. The travel is part of it.
Explore →After the jungle, you come home — but the people you walked beside come home with you. Months and years on, they are still there: holding your process, mirroring what you saw, and helping the revelation find its way back into ordinary life. Friendship becomes medicine. The tribe becomes the living map after the emancipation.
Explore →Ceremonial
Entheogens
Entheogenic Medicines: like Ayahuasca, Uni, Kambô, Sananga, Rapé, Psilocybin, Peyote and São Pedro held within ritual, can open a doorway to an expanded state of consciousness, deeper self-awareness softening the ego, amplifying intuition, and revealing the roots of long-held patterns.
The vine of the soul — the oldest teacher in McKenna's pantheon. A powerful Amazonian plant intelligence that facilitates deep inner work, emotional release, and expanded states of consciousness. Held within ceremony, song, and lineage, it speaks not to the mind but through the soul.
Kambô is the green fire of the Phyllomedusa frog, pressed in small burns onto the skin. The Matsés say it carries the strength of the jungle in — and for one hour, carries out everything that isn't yours: heaviness, blockage, residue. You don't enjoy it. You are emptied by it. And lighter.
Sananga is a drop of bitter sap placed directly into each eye. For a few minutes the world is fire. Then the fire passes, and you find what the Yawanawá have always known: you were looking through dust. The eye becomes the lens it was meant to be. And what the eye does outwardly, the medicine does inwardly — clearing the surface of the mirror you'd forgotten was a mirror.
Rapé is sacred snuff, blown by another's breath through a hollow tepi into each nostril — a small thunderclap that puts you, immediately, here and now. The Shanenawa say it sweeps the trail clean: whatever ghosts were following the mind drop off at the door. What is left is the breath, and the work.
In Food of the Gods (1992), McKenna describes how these medicines dissolve the cultural and behavioural patterns that shape ordinary perception. The sacred mushroom — used in ceremonial context — opens access to deeper states of awareness, dissolves habitual thinking, and facilitates profound personal insight.
A sacred cactus of the Huichol tradition. The Wixárika walk for weeks across desert to gather hikuri at Wirikuta, the place where the world was born — every year, the way you might visit your mother. Peyote is heart-medicine. Whatever you bring into the circle, by morning you understand it was loved the whole time.
Wachuma — an Andean cactus medicine for heart opening and clarity. Where ayahuasca takes you inward, Wachuma takes you outward, into the world the eyes were always trying to see. Mountains breathing. Light arriving. Other people, unexpectedly, beloved. It teaches by widening rather than deepening.
Feitio is the slow, reverent preparation of the ayahuasca brew, the two-day vigil in which vine and leaf become medicine. The pajé and his apprentices gather the vine and the leaf, Banisteriopsis caapi and chacruna, pound them, layer them, set them upon the fire and with prayer tend the cauldron through the long Amazonian night. Song, silence, intention. Veneration, homage, devotion. What enters the pot is plant. What leaves it is medicine.
Sacred
Rituals
The medicine alone is not enough. The ritual is the invocation — preparation, cleansing, and prayer make us conduits through which the spiritual descends. The deities meet your expanded consciousness and reveal what your life is asking of you next. The ceremony does what the medicine alone cannot.
Pajelança is one of the archaic healing currents of the Brazilian forest. The pajé works between the human, natural, and spirit worlds → chant, plant, breath, ritual → invoking spirits, ancestors, and the divine.
This is a more pleasant form of spiritual cleanse. The banhos de ervas (Indigenous herbal baths) are an older bio-tech. Plants, water, intention clear what the body carries: heaviness, residue, and relationships that are out of order. Step in and let the lineage do the work.
The dance was never about dancing. It is the body remembering it is part of something larger → the steps repeating animals and seasons and stars → the way a wave repeats the sea. The memory of step and song, of foot meeting earth, of breath rising into chant.
Ancient Vedic sunrise ritual from India, honouring the Sun as source of life, order, and consciousness. Mantras, breath, offerings, and silent alignment with the rising light.
Kirtan arises from India’s bhakti lineages — communal call-and-response chanting where sound is a living bridge to the sacred. You sit, you sing, and somewhere in there your heart starts to open. Maharaj-ji used to say: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God. Kirtan is how we remember. Together. Out loud.
The threshold ritual that marks the passage from ordinary life into sacred time. Setting group intention, invoking protection, and entering the ceremonial container together as one. You do not cross this threshold alone.
See: this is not an introduction. The medicine has called you, and you have already begun. What we offer here is the container — preparation, context, intention — that lets the expanded state become a teaching rather than an experience.
Sankalpa
Saṅkalpa is a Sanskrit word with no clean English equivalent — closer to "heart-vow" than "intention." In the Vedic tradition, it is the seed of action: the form a thought takes before it becomes a deed. Before the journey begins, you are asked to sit quietly with the oldest question a human can carry: Why am I here? What do I seek? Not what you would like to feel. Not what you would like to fix. What you, underneath all of it, are actually asking for.
A heartfelt intention — a solemn vow made to yourself before entering ceremony. Not a wish or a goal, but a deep recognition of what the soul already knows it needs. 'When you are able to employ your will always for constructive purposes,' Yogananda taught, 'you become the controller of your destiny.'
Before the first ceremony, you sit. No phone, no notebook, with the question: Why am I here? What do I seek? Yogis call this svādhyāya — self-inquiry — and the work is to ask from the honest place rather than the polished one. The answer is not constructed; it is uncovered. What surfaces becomes the saṅkalpa. Everything else follows.
Bert Hellinger’s work is shaped by his observations of kinship duty and belonging. It treats ancestry as a living field: belonging, order, and reciprocity are held as guiding symbols to help you translate powerful experiences into relational truth. What you carry that was never yours can, sometimes, be put down.
The tarot evolved from fifteenth-century Italian playing cards into a system carrying Christian mysticism, Hermetic philosophy, and Kabbalistic correspondences. Used well, it is not divination but conversation — seventy-eight archetypal images placed in front of you so the unconscious can speak. Jung called such systems mirrors of the psyche. The reading does not predict your future. It shows you the patterns you have been participating in.
Jyotiṣa, the "science of light," is one of the six limbs of the Vedas. It uses the actual positions of the constellations rather than the seasonal grid, which is why a Vedic chart often disagrees with a Western one by roughly twenty-four degrees. A reading tells you which season of your dharma you are walking through.
Reiki was systematised by Mikao Usui in Japan in 1922. The practitioner places her hands on or near the body and allows what the Japanese called rei-ki — universal life-force — to move through. The body knows where it is needed.
Theta brainwaves are a measurable EEG band of 4–8 Hz, present in deep meditation and the moments before insight. Vianna Stibal's 1995 technique teaches the practitioner to enter that state consciously. Beliefs guarding your saṅkalpa from being lived can be seen, named, and quietly released. The intention, then, can breathe.
Journaling, rest, conversation, slow meals, ordinary kindness — these are the real work. Integration in the context of contemplative or entheogenic ceremony refers to the structured process of metabolising acute insight into durable behavioural and cognitive change. What was seen on the mat or in the medicine has to be carried, one quiet day after another, into the parts of your life that have not yet caught up. The saṅkalpa, lived in the ordinary, is what makes the extraordinary actual.
Healing
When we access a higher consciousness → we open a realm where the mind’s defences soften and the soul’s hidden stories rise whole → seen, felt, and released in one living movement. What years of talking may circle, a single night can illuminate → transmuting grief → letting go of fear → the body finally exhaling.
The word yoga means "yoking" — the union of body, breath, and mind into a single instrument. Hatha Yoga emerged in medieval India from tantric and ascetic lineages, refined by Patañjali into a precise discipline: posture (āsana) steadies the body, breath (prāṇāyāma) steadies the mind, the mind (eventually) steadies itself.
Don’t make an effort to meditate. Instead, let Vedic Meditation, handed down for thousands of years in an unbroken line of teachers, give you a personal mantra to sit with. The mind, when allowed, settles on its own. There is nothing to manage. There is only the mantra and the silence behind it.
There is one part of the autonomic body that the mind can also reach: the breath. Yogis have known this for at least two thousand years. Prāṇāyāma is one of the eight limbs of Patañjali's yoga — the art of regulating the breath so that the breath, in turn, regulates the mind, the lever by which the autonomic nervous system is moved.
Cold-water immersion combined with breath discipline traces back centuries — Tibetan tummo (inner-fire meditation), Norse and Russian cold-water bathing, the Japanese misogi waterfall practice — and was systematised for the modern world by Dutch practitioner Wim Hof in the 1990s. A brief plunge into cold water, paired with slow breathing and steady attention, does measurable things to the body: heart rate stabilises, inflammation drops, the nervous system rearranges itself.
Walking does not heal you. Walking removes what was not yours: the role, the story, the noise. What remains is the witness — sakshi — older than the body, older than the path. Walking becomes prayer—breath syncing with earth, senses softening, attention returning to the body.
You may have felt this yourself: lying under the stars and finding, quite suddenly, that something old in you stirs. Not curiosity. Longing. The stars do not give you what you ache for. They remind you that you ache at all.
Where earth, water, air, and sound converge for purification, prayer, and renewal. The waterfall has nothing to teach you. It only does what it does. But when you sit before it, the noise inside you is shown to be temporary. The falling water cleanses the body and steadies the mind, washing away stagnation through grounding and release.
Body-led processing — working through the nervous system to release stored tension, trauma, and emotional contraction held in the tissues. The body knows what the mind cannot yet say. To heal the body is to heal the story it has been asked to carry.
Sacred places, rivers, forests, saints, orixás, and ancestral sites as a form of pilgrimage — land as teacher and healer, not backdrop. Each site carries its own medicine. The journey continues between ceremonies.
Days are structured yet flexible. Quiet moments — sleep, walking, journalling, simple meals in the sun — let insights from ceremony settle without analysis or agenda. Integration, Ram Dass knew, is not a technique. It is the grace of allowing.
Travel
Crossing time zones does something the rest of life cannot. The body loses its grip on routine — sleep, hunger, small habits of being you — and a kind of openness arrives unbidden. The nervous system softens. Defences loosen before you ask them to. By the time you reach the jungle, the medicine has somewhere to land. The travel is part of it.
Held between two moments on Bondi Beach — we move as a group, travel far beyond the familiar, and return to the same shore: changed, connected, grounded. The shore is unchanged. You are not. The bookending is intentional: ceremony works best when the threshold is held at both ends. Returning to the same physical location closes the loop, allowing the nervous system to register that the journey has concluded and integration can begin.
Every logistical burden is removed. International flights, visas, travel insurance, internal transfers, all meals, accommodation, ceremonies, spiritual consultations, guided tours — arranged. Ceremony works best when the container is held by someone other than the participant. Your only task is to arrive. Everything else is already done. The container is held. You step into it carrying nothing but the question you came with.
Rest, beauty, and safety as prerequisites for inner work. Three hand-selected pousadas in Alto Paraíso and São Jorge — Vila Toá, Recanto da Grande Paz, and Caminho das Cachoeiras — each set on the edge of the Cerrado where mornings carry birdsong and open air through spaces designed for stillness.
Food as relationship — between body, mind, environment, and the subtle forces that shape consciousness. Seasonal, plant-based, and prepared with care. Eating as daily ritual and preparation for ceremony. The body, fed wisely, becomes a willing instrument.
Sydney
Community
After the jungle, you come home — but the people you walked beside come home with you. Months and years on, they are still there: holding your process, mirroring what you saw, and helping the revelation find its way back into ordinary life. Friendship becomes medicine. The tribe becomes the living map after the emancipation.
You don't just travel together — you grow together. The group becomes what the Buddhists call a sangha and the Vedic tradition called satsang: the company of those committed to truth. Something happens in ceremony that does not happen anywhere else: people see each other without the usual armour. The mechanism appears to combine synchronised altered states with shared meaning-making.
Post-experience integration is now widely recognised in psychedelic-assisted therapy research (MAPS, Imperial College, Johns Hopkins) as essential to durable outcomes. Group integration sessions — typically held in the weeks and months following ceremony — provide structured opportunities to consolidate insight, process residual material, and translate altered-state experience into behavioural change. The journey doesn't end on the return flight — it ripens over months with the support of those who were there. Integration is a communal art.
You cannot see your own face. You can only see it reflected. New relationships break old identity loops, mirror what you have been hiding from yourself, and regulate the nervous system through what neuroscience calls co-regulation.
The community holds shared rituals, meditations, and small celebrations — keeping the flame lit between journeys and deepening the inner work over time. Sadhana is the daily practice that turns insight into life. Without it, even the deepest ceremony fades to memory.
Decades of longitudinal research (the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of human happiness, 1938–present) have established quality of relationships as the single strongest predictor of long-term health, mental wellbeing, and life satisfaction — stronger than income, education, or genetics. There is a kind of friendship that does not happen in cafés. It happens in the dark, when both of you are scared, when the medicine is doing what medicine does, when the only person you can find by your hand is someone who has known you for two days.
Those Who
Walk Beside You
Pajé Maná
Shanenawá
A bridge between people, plants, and the unseen world, carrying ancestral Shanenawá wisdom. As priest, healer, and ritual guardian, he works with medicinal plants and forest spirits through respect and listening.
Pajé Huse
Shanenawá
A son of the forest, of the Shanenawá nation — the Povo do Pássaro Azul. He carries what is given: prayer, plant, breath. To sit with him in ceremony is to remember that the medicine does not work alone. It works through the one who is steady. He is steady.
Nawashahu
Yawanawa
One of the most respected contemporary carriers of Yawanawá ceremonial music. She embodies how song, healing, and ritual function as living medicine within Yawanawá culture.
Ykashahu
Yawanawá
Daughter of Putanny and Chief Biraci Nixiwaka. The slow learning of the songs, the medicines and the silences between them.
Cantora and liderança-in-formation, carrying her mother's saiti chants, rapé, sananga, and the brew.
Yan Santos
A veteran Sydney corporate consultant born in Brasilia, Yan volunteers his time to work with recognised local practitioners — bringing his Sydney community to entheogenic ceremonies with respect, preparation, and care.
Giriraj Fe
D'Angelo
Committed to the yogic path shaped by study, practice, and service — guided by time, discipline, and direct transmissions that bridge lineage, daily life, and inner inquiry.
Mariane Bogo
Holding a Bachelor's and Master's in Psychology, Mariane has spent 8 years supporting emotional healing, trauma integration, and inner transformation — bridging modern psychological science with ancient spiritual traditions.
Mauricio Brito
With 40 years' experience, Mauricio doesn't just read cards — he reads people, patterns, and timing. Calm, intuitive, and deeply human. His readings are clear, grounded, and true — offering insight that lingers long after the cards are folded away.
Vedic
Astrologist
Works with timing, karma, and intention to prepare the inner landscape — so whatever arises has context, meaning, and direction. Integration becomes easier and deeper when you recognise themes already present in your chart.
Tassila Gayatri
Helps regulate nervous systems, process trauma, and make meaning of non-ordinary states. Prevents confusion, spiritual bypassing, and dependency by supporting emotional maturity, clarity, and responsibility.
Gustavo Barros
Advanced scholar in Taoist alchemy, breathwork, ice immersion, meditation, sacred movement, martial arts, Vedic maps, belief work, DNA science, and modern psychology — to prepare, stabilise, and integrate transformation.
Local Guides
Keepers of histories the maps cannot hold. The history is not the past. The place works on you, and they translate.
Kirtan Singers
Kirtan asks for a circle. The Singers begin a phrase; the room finishes it. Song and room become one body — devotion through breath, name, and drum.
Alan Cavalcante
A photographer is a kind of witness, and Alan is patient. He carries no agenda but presence — the discipline of seeing what light has already made, and giving it back to you later, as remembrance.
New Friends
New friendships anchor insights into real life, expand emotional range, and build resilience.
The Sacred
Landscape
Chapada dos
Veadeiros
UNESCO World Heritage listed. The plateau under your feet is Pre-Cambrian quartzite — among the oldest landmasses on the planet, and the 4th chakra of Mother Earth. Being here recalibrates something subtle.
Alto Paraíso
Alto Paraíso translates as "High Paradise." The town sits at 1,272 metres in the Goiás cerrado, 220 kilometres north of Brasília. It has become a destination for what the world calls "alternative" — yogis, ayahuasceros, astrologers, healers — which sometimes obscures what is actually unusual about it.
Tribal Village
The Shanenawá are Pano-speaking forest people of Acre — roughly 770 remain. They carry ayahuasca (umi), kambô frog secretion, and the mariri song-lineage. They do not consider plants to be substances. They consider them to be teachers with names and preferences about how they are approached.
Vale da Lua
Vale da Lua is what happens when water and stone have a billion years to discuss things. The quartzite has been polished, ribbed, hollowed into pale lunar basins. You walk in and lose your sense of which century you are standing in.
Pousada Vila Toá
Vila Toá is seventeen bungalows on the lip of the Cerrado, looking across at the Serra da Baliza. An infinity pool, a restaurant where the produce was picked that morning. Marketing language: modern comfort in harmony with nature. Recent guest ratings average 9.5 across booking platforms.
Recanto da Grande Paz
Some places offer shelter, which is older than accommodation. Pousada Recanto da Grande Paz is chalets and apartments arranged around a garden in Alto Paraíso. A spa, outdoor pool, homemade breakfast. The name means "haven of great peace." Held lightly. Fed well.
Caminho das Cachoeiras
Twenty years in São Jorge, five hundred metres from the park gate. Rooms, bungalows, pool, sauna. The gift is acoustic: falling water threads every quiet moment. The body keeps listening.
São Jorge Village
São Jorge is about 250 people inside Chapada dos Veadeiros — once 3,000, in the quartz-mining boom of the 1950s. What stayed became artists, hippies, healers. By the third day you belong.
Brasília
Built from scratch in the heart of Brazil — a masterclass in modernist urban design. UNESCO World Heritage sites: The National Congress, the Cathedral, Palácio do Planalto, and the Itamaraty Palace.
Eight Days.
One Transformation.
Research on intensive retreat formats — from MAPS, Imperial, and contemplative neuroscience labs — suggests that 7–10 days of sustained immersion in altered-state work produces measurable neuroplastic changes that briefer formats do not. Eight days is the considered minimum. Dates confirm once a minimum of 10 people commit; the group is capped at 20 places for facilitator-to-participant ratio.
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Ready to
Step Forward?
Every traditional rite of passage is built in layers, each opening only when the previous has been honoured. Steps 1–2 ask only for honesty — a conversation. Step 3 introduces the first commitment. Steps 4–6 build the financial and legal scaffolding the journey requires. Step 7 is the quieter preparation. Each step opens only when the previous is met. This is how the old passages were built.
Frequently Asked
Questions
The ceremonies take place in Brazil, where ayahuasca and related plant medicines have been used legally in religious and ceremonial contexts for over a century. The Santo Daime tradition was formally recognised by the Brazilian government in 1986. We work with recognised Indigenous practitioners — Pajé Maná Shanenawá and the Yawanawá Sisters — within the appropriate legal and cultural frameworks.
This kind of journey is open to everyone — but not everyone is open to this kind of journey. The work involves entheogenic medicines, sacred rituals, long-haul flights, jungle conditions, and prolonged discomfort. The level of physical readiness, courage, and resolve required is roughly that of parachuting from a plane. You have to feel, in your own heart, whether you have the guts. If the answer is honest and yes, you are ready.
Everything is included. Flights from Sydney, visas, insurance, transfers, every meal, every bed, every ceremony, every consultation, every guided journey on the ground. The total cost falls between AUD 8,000 and 10,000, with the exact figure depending on flights and currency fluctuations. The full payment rhythm — when each step is due — is laid out in § 10 Next Steps.
Reach out — WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, or email — to express your interest. The journey takes off only when 10 people have committed; the circle is capped at 20. Your interest is what makes the journey possible. The full payment rhythm — when each step is due — is laid out in § 10 Next Steps.
Yes. Two members of the team are dedicated to this work: Mariane Bogo (Psychologist & Therapist) handles preparation, integration, and the psychological dimension; Tassila Gayatri (Somatic Healer) attends to the body and nervous system. Both are present before, during, and after the ceremonies. Safety is not a feature added to the work — it is part of how the work is held.
Pre-immersion preparation is structured across the two weeks immediately preceding departure. Standard elements: dietary simplification (reduction of stimulants, alcohol, and heavily processed food); intention-setting and journalling; gentle daily movement (yoga, walking, or breathwork); reduced screen and decision load. Detailed preparation guidelines, including dietary recommendations and intention-setting practices, are sent to you after acceptance.
Both — by intention. You travel, eat, and move with the circle. But the moment of meeting the medicine, and the integration that follows, are entirely your own. Group size is capped at 20 to support facilitator-to-participant ratio (research consistently shows that smaller, well-held groups produce stronger integration outcomes than either large group or solo formats). Daily structure alternates between collective activities — meals, ceremony, shared travel — and solo reflection time. The combination of group cohesion and personal interiority is built into the protocol.
No prior experience is needed. What matters is not familiarity with altered states, but the sincerity of the question you bring. What this asks for is honesty, openness, and the willingness to approach the work with respect and intention. The physical readiness, courage, and resolve called for is roughly that of parachuting from a plane. You have to feel, in your own heart, whether you have the guts. If the answer is honest and yes, you are ready.
SOULSEEKERS.AU is not a registered company or non-profit. There is no ABN, no invoices, no corporate paperwork from this end — only the legal and operational documentation provided by licensed operators in Sydney and in Brazil who handle logistics. Yan Santos is the volunteer organiser. This is, at its simplest, a group of friends travelling to Brazil to experience sacred rituals together.
Yes. Before your deposit (AUD 1,008), you sign a Terms of Responsibility document — taking full responsibility for your participation, confirming appropriate medical insurance, and acknowledging you've followed the preparation guidance. The waiver is standard practice for adventure travel and is required by the Brazilian operators: the Indigenous practitioners holding ceremony, and the resort hosting us. It protects all parties from legal claims arising from injury, illness, or death.
Yes. Travel insurance is bundled with your flights through the same Australian travel agency and is included in your Step 6 payment (AUD 2,000 — see § 10 Next Steps). The agency selects the carrier on the day of booking. The policy covers medical emergencies only: ambulance, hospital, and treatment. Yan stays with you throughout any medical event. It exists to ensure one person's illness does not stop the group's work — a practical safeguard, not comprehensive trip protection.
Five things, in order: approval (the first and most important step), a signed Terms of Responsibility document, payment of the deposit and subsequent steps (see § 10 Next Steps), a valid passport, and confirmed time off work. Exact dates are shared before the deposit is due, so you only commit once your calendar can hold the journey. Meet these five, and you can come with us.
Recommended, not compulsory. Every initiation in the older anthroposophical sense begins with the soul asking for the consent of the line it came from. Speak with your parents. Honour the ancestors — they are not gone but are still part of the field you stand in. Tell them what you are about to do, as best you can. Ask for their blessing. Permission given from that source moves differently than permission you grant yourself. "Honour your father and your mother," the Hebrew commandment says. You do not enter the circle alone. You enter carrying everyone who came before you.
Dates are set once a quorum of 8–12 committed travellers is reached. No deposits are taken before that — only expressions of willingness. The group then meets to decide the date, with input from our Vedic astrologist on auspicious timing. Once everyone agrees, the deposit is taken (Step 5, AUD 1,008 — see § 10 Next Steps). Flights are booked next, and the journey takes shape.
Just breakfast at Bondi Beach. Not an interview, not a screening — a chance to step out of the internet and meet face to face. We talk about what each of us is trying to get out of the experience, what we are working through, what we have been through, and where we want to go. Honesty is welcome. Vulnerability is held. (Step 3 in § 10 Next Steps.)
In principle, everything on the website is included — the goal is for the group to do everything together. In practice, a few items may sit outside: donations to practitioners or sites we visit, merchandise and souvenirs, and any activity you choose to do solo. The website reflects the fullest version of the journey; some details may flex with practitioner availability. Any exceptions are communicated through the WhatsApp group before they happen.
Anything outside the group programme — solo excursions, side activities, individual consultations not listed. These are welcomed; the cost is yours. If an extra practitioner becomes available mid-trip and the group wants to add a consultation, that also sits separately. To know what any listed practitioner costs, ask them or ask Yan — SOULSEEKERS.AU adds no profit margin. Organising this is a labour of love.
Keep pulling on the thread that brought you here. The next step is small: a message to Yan — email, WhatsApp, or Instagram, whichever fits. He sends you an application form and walks with you from preparation to integration. There is a moment at which the journey becomes irreversible, and you will know it long before it arrives. Until then, take your time. The thread is still in your hand. Nothing happens by surprise.