Book

On the Economics of the Work

What the container requires.

An honest accounting — because the cost surprises people, and the surprise sometimes becomes the barrier between them and the work.

When someone asks me why this costs what it does, I used to try to explain in the moment. It rarely landed well. So I am writing it down here, once, with care.
A Note Before We Begin

This is not the Sacred Reciprocity page.

That one is about ecology, access, and the tiers I hold. Read it here if you have not already.

This page is about the foundation underneath the Abundance rate — the labor, the lineage, the medicine, the risk. What it actually takes to bring you a held container.

I am not writing this to convince. I am writing it to make the choice clear. If this is the work for you, you will feel it. If it is not, that is its own clarity.

The Visible and the Hidden

What you see, and what you do not.

What you see is the ceremony. The two or three days I sit with you. The medicine in the cup. The candles. The held field.

What you do not see is everything underneath that makes the held field possible.

A single ceremony, honestly accounted, is roughly three weeks of work. Not in the room with you — but in the room before and after the room.

The ceremony is the visible part. The container is the work.

The Long Becoming

The labor of becoming this.

I have not been training for two years. I have been training for sixteen.

The Dagara lineage. The Quechua mountains. The Kahuna teaching. Generative trance hypnosis. Shamanic bodywork in clinical and therapeutic settings. Trauma-informed practice by deep training and by lived experience. Botanical and ritual ethnopharmacology. The slow accumulation of what it takes to safely hold a roomful of people across the threshold and back.

The closest legible comparison in the dominant world is a medical residency — the years of intensive, low-paid, full-immersion preparation that precedes the years of practice. Most of those years are not compensated. They are the entry fee for the work itself.

What you are paying for, in part, is sixteen years of becoming the kind of practitioner who can hold what we hold together.

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The ceremony is the visible part. The container is the work.
The Honest Comparables

What this costs in the wider world.

I want to place this in context, so you can see what it lives alongside.

Wedding planning and event production.

The closest legible analogue in the dominant economy is the high-end wedding planner. They, too, do weeks of preparation for one day of presence. They, too, are on-call across long arcs. The industry standard for full-service planning in Los Angeles is fifteen to twenty percent of the total event budget, with luxury full-service starting at forty thousand dollars before food, venue, or materials. The industry's own copy describes a single wedding as one hundred fifty to three hundred hours of work. Senior planners charge one hundred fifty to two hundred seventy-five dollars an hour.

Plant medicine retreats in legal jurisdictions.

A premium retreat in Jamaica, the Netherlands, Peru, or Costa Rica runs five thousand to eight thousand five hundred dollars per person for a single substance — typically psilocybin or ayahuasca, rarely both. Beckley Retreats Jamaica, one of the most credentialed legal operators, opens at five thousand five hundred dollars per person for a six-day program. These retreats are often run by facilitators with less individualized attention than what I hold, with a single medicine, in container settings less choreographed than mine. I am not naming this to argue down on them. I am naming it because this is what the market currently bears for less.

Therapy intensives and integration coaching.

A Somatic Experiencing retreat runs three hundred to seven hundred dollars per day. A full ketamine-assisted psychotherapy protocol runs three thousand to seven thousand dollars for a small number of sessions in a clinical setting. Experienced plant-medicine integration coaches charge two hundred dollars or more per hour for the conversation after the medicine — not the medicine itself, not the container.

Concierge medicine and curated wellness.

The model where one practitioner holds a small panel of patients with intensive personal attention runs eighteen hundred to forty-eight hundred dollars annually at the standard tier, up to fifty thousand dollars at the high tier, and one hundred thousand dollars or more at the ultra-premium tier. Canyon Ranch's curated longevity retreats — bundled specialist teams in a single setting — run twenty thousand dollars per person for a single program.

I am not in any of these worlds. But this is what the dominant world pays when it asks for what we offer here — one well-trained specialist, holding a small number of people, with deep care, in a rare medicine stack, with the safety and integration arc included.

The Math, Laid Plainly

One ceremony, in hours.

For the people who want to see it.

The work Hours, approximate
Medicine preparation — sourcing, cooking, bottling 24–30
Intake, prep calls, video course delivery, expectation-setting 15–20
Container-keeping practice in the weeks before 20–30
On-site arrival prep, altar, food, space-setting 12–16
Ceremony itself — on-call across three days 72
Aftercare across the three-month integration arc 15–25
Per-ceremony total — about three weeks of full-time work. ~160–190

It is, not incidentally, the same order of magnitude that the wedding industry openly describes for a single event — one hundred fifty to three hundred hours behind one day of presence. The hidden labor is not a quirk of my practice. It is the shape of any work that holds a small number of people across a major threshold with care.

For the Sake of Clarity

What this is not.

It will help you understand what you are paying for if you understand what you are not paying for.

This is not a wellness retreat. There is no spa. There is no Instagrammable lighting. The food is good, but the meal is not the point.

This is not a tourist experience of someone else's lineage. The lineages I carry, I have been initiated into. I have spent years in their soil. I name them with care.

This is not a substance you take with a guide present. The medicines I work with are beings I am in long relationship with. They are not transactions. They are guests we are receiving together.

This is not therapy, and it does not replace therapy. It does work that therapy can take years to do — and it works better in concert with therapy than in isolation.

This is not a guarantee. The work moves through people in ways neither of us can fully predict. What I can guarantee is the container — that you will be held with care, that the field will be clean, that you will be met where you are.

The Last Frame

A word on what is hidden.

In the dominant economy, you pay what something costs because the cost is visible. The price tag includes the labor.

In the ceremonial economy, much of the labor is hidden — because most of it is the practitioner's own embodied becoming. You are not paying for a service rendered in a moment. You are paying for the sixteen-year arc that made the moment possible, and the three-week arc that makes it possible this time.

This is hard to price because it is hard to see.

I am asking you to trust that what you cannot see is real — and that what you can see is one-tenth of what you are receiving.

When You Are Ready

The tiers, with this in mind.

This page exists so the tiers make sense.

The Abundance rate is the work at its true value. The Patron rate is for those who can give beyond their own use, so the Community and Accessibility tiers can exist at all. The Community rate is at-cost. The Accessibility rate is below cost — a scholarship I hold for those who are called and who cannot meet the full exchange in money.

The tiers are a living practice. I do not require income verification. I trust you to choose honestly.

Read the tiers → Send a note

I share this not to argue for the cost, but to make it legible.

If you are reading this and the work feels called to you despite the cost — that is its own kind of yes. We will find the path.

If you are reading this and the cost moves you away — that is also its own kind of yes. There are many paths. This one may not be yours, at least not now.

Either way, you are met with care.

Adi Marie