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The first time Dalia* took ayahuasca nothing happened. The second time it changed her life. It was 2017, and she had joined a dozen strangers in a chalet outside Barcelona. Everyone was searching for something. For many it was a way out of misery: an escape from years of addiction, or a last-ditch attempt to survive crippling depression. Dalia, a therapist in her early 30s, hoped ayahuasca would help her process the recent death of her mother. “I felt completely alone at that time,” she said. “And I think in some form that’s how everyone there felt.”
The retreat, run by a wellness company called Inner Mastery, began with the two dozen participants talking about their expectations, before imbibing ayahuasca. The Amazonian plant brew, which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful naturally occurring psychoactive, induces an altered sense of self and reality. Users often report revisiting past trauma or repressed experiences.
Within an hour of her first dose, Dalia began to yawn uncontrollably, then she felt cries escaping from her mouth. She vomited, and then the trip began. In what she would subsequently learn was a common experience, she felt as if a part of her was dying. She had several visions, but one, towards the end of her trip, conjured the anxiety around money that had haunted her for years. Money was just an illusion, she realised. She felt soothed.
The next week, Dalia decided she wanted to train with Inner Mastery to help others have the same healing experience. The company offered training programmes for those who wanted to work with ayahuasca, but they cost thousands of euros. “There was an energy that I connected to, and it told me to go ahead and pay the money,” Dalia said.
Inner Mastery was a large organisation, with centres in 14 countries and regular events in many more. Retreats took place over weekends in centres across Europe and the Americas. More than 100 regular participants decided they not only wanted to take ayahuasca but train to administer it, and began building their lives around the company. “It felt like joining a family,” Dalia said. She wasn’t the only one driven by a sense of being part of a movement. Other members reported finding a community of like-minded people: spiritual seekers looking for meaning. “Most people there were black sheep,” said Adrián*, another longstanding participant. “Those on the outside who didn’t question anything were like NPCs [non-player characters, the mindless figures in video games who can’t think for themselves]. Everyone on the inside wanted to heal the world in some way.”
The head of Inner Mastery was Alberto Varela, an Argentine entrepreneur, who founded the company in 2013. Often dressed in white, with a nest of grey curls behind his domed head, Varela would speak for hours from a throne-like chair, his voice slowly rising and falling. He described Inner Mastery as the first ayahuasca multinational. Having experienced an ayahuasca ceremony in Colombia, he came up with a formula more suited to a western market, stripping the ceremony of its religious connotations and rebranding it in the new age language of self-realisation. The only way to survive in a sick world, he said, was to turn inwards and heal yourself. Gone was the collective tradition, wherein members of a community would drink ayahuasca together; in its place came gatherings of strangers, all drawn in by the belief that ayahuasca could help them gain insight into their individual lives.
At its peak in the late 2010s, Inner Mastery claimed to have more than 130 staff running 1,000 retreats for 30,000 customers each year. It had a training academy, a media department, a travel agency, a dedicated streaming service and later its own cryptocurrency. Its retreat centres, about 20 sprawling villas rented or owned by Varela’s network of companies, eventually became communes where dozens of Inner Mastery employees-cum-followers could live – for a fee.
Like all new recruits, Dalia helped cook meals for retreats or cleaned for little or no pay. “It was normal to work from the morning until 4am or 5am the next day, when the ayahuasca sessions usually finished. It was relentless. We barely slept,” she said. But she was buoyed up by their sense of mission. “We were building something incredible.”
The popularity of the retreats and their link to mind-altering substances inevitably attracted speculation. Some people called it a cult. “It was something we used to laugh about,” Dalia said. “The word cult was just a way to discredit anyone taking a different path or trying to change the world. Once you see it like that, many people, myself included, end up thinking: ‘So what if it’s a cult? I don’t care. It’s doing me good.’”
But over time, Varela began to draw criticism for the way he ran the business. His staff were underpaid and overworked, his manner overbearing. He built a hierarchical organisation that made him rich, while many of his employees went into debt with the company. He promoted ayahuasca as a panacea for all suffering, and despite having no training, practised a confrontational and sometimes cruel form of therapy on vulnerable people with serious trauma. Traditional practitioners and healers protested he was bringing their practice into disrepute. Ayahuasca was not something you could roll out on an industrial scale with minimal oversight, they said. Accidents would happen.
Before spirituality, Alberto Varela’s passion was business. Born to middle-class parents in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1960, he believed himself to be exceptional from a young age. As a teenager he eschewed drugs and alcohol. His only vice was work, he claimed. At 17, he started a clothing company. By the time he was 30, he was married with three children, but after his wife left him, he realised he needed to make a change. He signed up for sessions with Osvaldo Gordín, a life coach and marketing expert. The two men became followers of Osho, the leader of the Rajneesh movement, who was known for rejecting asceticism in favour of material abundance and accumulating a fleet of 93 Rolls-Royces.
Together, Varela and Gordín started a marketing consultancy. It was the early 90s, and Argentinian society was flirting with a new culture of success that valued wealth and conspicuous consumption. Varela excelled in this world. “It’s incredible,” he later wrote. “People pay to be told lies, and they are happy to believe them. How easy it is to control, dominate, lead and manipulate a man!”
By 1999, Varela had followed his ex-wife to Spain, where she had moved with their three children. He took ayahuasca, or yage as it is also known, for the first time a year or so later when visiting the mountains outside Bogotá, Colombia. He claimed the Indigenous shaman, or “taita”, saw special qualities in him. When he returned to Madrid, he launched an alternative medicine centre, positioning himself as a western conduit to Indigenous ayahuasca rituals.
Varela had spotted a lucrative opportunity. Meaning “vine of the dead” in Quechua, ayahuasca has been used by Amazonian Indigenous groups for centuries. In shamanic cures and initiation rituals, for which the guides undergo long apprenticeships, the plant brew is believed to aid communication with ancestors, spirits and gods. Interest in ayahuasca began to grow in the west during the late 20th century, fuelled by disenchantment with conventional mental health treatments, and a growing western appetite for altered states and new spiritual experiences.
By the mid-2000s, Varela was starting to offer ayahuasca ceremonies alongside reiki and meditation at his Madrid centre. Soon he was expanding to other parts of Spain. Those who met him around this time were struck by his drive. “He was intelligent, observant and very hard-working,” said Hugo Oklander, a fellow Argentine and early collaborator. But Oklander could see his ambition had no limit. “I don’t think it was possible for him to ever be satisfied.”
Ayahuasca had been used under the radar in therapeutic settings since the 1980s. “The police didn’t even know what it was. You could bring it into the country without any issue,” said Manuel Villaescusa, a psychologist who has worked with ayahuasca for two decades. But Varela wanted to reach a much larger market. He bought full page ads in alternative health magazines, promoting ayahuasca as a cure for a range of ailments, according to Villaescusa. The attention brought customers, but also scrutiny. One local news crew ran a story based on claims Varela was leading a cult.
In December 2008, Spanish police raided a villa in an upmarket suburb of Madrid, interrupting 21 people, three of them children, who were reportedly watching a porn film while they waited to take ayahuasca. Forty kilos of the plant were seized, and Varela, who was identified as the leader, was arrested on charges of crimes against public health. “It was a bombshell,” Villaescusa said. “Ayahuasca had been tolerated for 20 years and then suddenly not only are the police raiding a ceremony but the story appears in every newspaper in the country, and the first contact the Spanish public has with ayahuasca is associating it with some kind of [alleged] sex cult.”
Varela went to prison for 14 months. By the time he came out, he was determined to expand his plans for an ayahuasca business. “Like criminals who prepare bank robberies while they’re locked up, I planned my own heist,” he later said. “When I got out, I would multiply by 1,000 the energy I put into this before I went to jail.” Varela’s release from prison coincided with the financial crisis in Spain and a surge in anger at politicians. He capitalised on his newfound fame and styled himself as a guru persecuted by repressive authorities. He published a memoir, then a free magazine, which he distributed in Madrid’s vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios. Its content was a mix of new age therapies and self-promotion. Most of its early covers featured Varela’s adult children and their modelling careers or world travels.
In 2011, the year after his release from prison, Varela spent several weeks at a commune called Budas Factory near Seville, run by a self-declared guru called Fulvio Carbone. The commune hosted a series of in-person courses promising enlightenment, reportedly costing upwards of €1,500. Varela was accustomed to casting himself as a leader, but at Budas Factory, “the ‘Master’ had met someone from whom he could learn”, wrote Rafael Palacios, a mutual acquaintance of the two.
That same year, a Spanish nonprofit dedicated to exposing cults claimed Budas Factory used fasting and aggressive group therapy sessions to make participants more susceptible to manipulation. Carbone disbanded his organisation after being caught on a hidden camera claiming an aloe vera cream marketed by his organisation could cure cancer. By the time the commune closed, Varela was working on his own plans.
After the bad publicity that came with Varela’s arrest, once he was released from prison, Spain’s small community of ayahuasca practitioners tried to reason with him. “We tried to persuade him to stop using aggressive marketing and adopt a more ethical approach to participants,” Villaescusa said. But Varela declined. “He was convinced that he had been chosen to bring ayahuasca to the world, and that we were cowards for not working in the open.”
In 2013, Varela bought a popular Facebook group for ayahuasca users for US$4,000 and started advertising himself as the “first westerner granted authorisation to use ayahuasca” by Indigenous experts in Colombia. Within months he had hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, centred on his Facebook community, which he called Ayahuasca International. For anyone in Europe searching online for more information about the Indigenous brew, Varela’s organisation was usually the first they would see.
At this point, there was no company yet, just an idea. Varela went on a whirlwind promotional offensive, organising conferences and workshops on ayahuasca and personal development across Europe and Latin America. By his side was his compatriot Oklander, who had spent several decades in Asia exploring meditation, body work and other therapies only to conclude that few could really help people. He hoped ayahuasca would be different. While Varela managed the Spanish-speaking world, Oklander oversaw international expansion, flying to different cities every weekend to promote the newly launched company.
Perhaps Varela’s most lucrative innovation came in late 2013 with the School of Ayahuasca, a training academy for those who wanted to administer the brew themselves. These “facilitators” were a low-cost alternative to traditional shamans. Training cost €150 a day, and often added up to several thousand euros before new recruits could begin to work for the company. Trainees earned a commission by finding new customers. One former member compared it to working for a telemarketing firm. “The aim was to sell, sell, sell,” he said. In practice, it functioned like a multilevel marketing scheme. “The School of Ayahuasca operated to indoctrinate people and entrap them. They went into debt with the company,” said Oklander, who after co-founding the company later turned whistleblower. “It was machiavellian.”
Cristian Alcalá came into contact with Inner Mastery in 2015 when he picked up a friend from one of its retreats in Spain. “There was something different about her. She just seemed to sparkle,” Alcalá said. He was intrigued and decided to take up a role as a handyman in one Inner Mastery centre in Spain. Not long after he began, Varela offered to send him to train at the company’s base in the Colombian jungle, where it sourced the plant brew. Alcalá had no money to pay for his ticket, but Varela brushed this aside. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay for you, and when you come back, you’ll bring some ayahuasca with you,” he told him.
Alcalá said yes immediately. “At 35 I had never even left the country and suddenly they were putting me on a plane to go to Colombia to take ayahuasca with local shamans,” he said. After two weeks in the jungle, he returned to Spain with 40 kilos of ayahuasca disguised as a product to treat wood. (Ayahuasca’s legal status varies between countries. DMT, the psychoactive alkaloid found in the plant, is included in the United Nations convention on psychotropic substances. But the ayahuasca brew itself is not under international control.) Soon Alcalá was leading ayahuasca ceremonies. He spent the next four years running retreat centres in Mexico and Italy. “They gave me the opportunity to see myself as something else,” he said.
By 2016, the company had opened centres in Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Mexico and Uruguay. Employees ran retreats and sent profits back to Varela in Madrid. A single weekend retreat could make up to €40,000, Oklander said. The company also developed other revenue streams, like offering trips to Colombia, additional psychoactives or selling ayahuasca directly online to customers. Varela bought supplies cheaply, paid employees little, and usually in cash, and declared little or nothing to tax authorities, according to Oklander. “It was incredibly profitable,” he said. “Like drug smuggling lite.”
Varela structured the organisation like a multinational conglomerate: services were contracted to subsidiaries under a holding company, limiting financial and legal liability. Nothing was in Varela’s name. “That was part of the strategy. The idea was you could never see the whole thing,” Oklander said.
The bigger Inner Mastery got, the more criticism it drew for its high prices, understaffing and cost-cutting. At one overcrowded weekend retreat priced at about €450, instead of buckets, customers were given plastic bags to be sick into, one review complained, resulting in a room of people hallucinating around “puke landmines”.
Some staff members began to fear it was putting participants in danger. Ayahuasca sessions entailed loss of control, physically and emotionally, and it could get frightening and messy. “In our team meetings there was a lot of emphasis on the wellbeing of the participants and the team, but in practice it became clear that the expansion of the company was above that,” Adrián said.
In its rush to enter new markets, Inner Mastery held events wherever it could, packing tripping participants into yoga studios or hotel conference rooms under the supervision of inexperienced facilitators. At one such retreat in a dance studio on the outskirts of Cologne, around 2016, one man had an adverse reaction to the brew and started acting aggressively, pacing around the room in circles. Fearing he might hurt someone or himself, Adrián tried to calm him down. Eventually, the man went outside to sleep in his car. When Adrián went to check on him a few hours later, he was gone. “I was really worried he could be driving around Cologne in the midst of a psychotic episode,” Adrián said.
At another retreat, a woman became paranoid after taking ayahuasca, fearing the organisers were planning to attack her while she was under the influence. “She just fled. She jumped over a wall of the house and ran off, without her shoes, her phone or anything,” Dalia said. Later that night police arrived at the retreat after the woman had turned up at the station, practically naked, claiming someone had tried to steal her organs.
Within Inner Mastery, losing control was often interpreted as a necessary step in each person’s “process”. Soon after joining the organisation as a trainee, Dalia was encouraged to take yopo, a snuff and powerful hallucinogen, which the company was adding to its menu of psychoactives on offer at retreats. “We were encouraged to try it as trainees. Really, we were guinea pigs,” she said.
Almost immediately after the snuff was blown up her nostril, Dalia felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She remembers screaming for help before blacking out. When she came round, someone told her she had stopped breathing, and a doctor employed by Inner Mastery had resuscitated her. The doctor told her it was a good thing. “You had an incredible process, the best of everyone,” he told her later. The next night, the same doctor pushed Dalia to take ayahuasca. “You were calling for your mother last night; you have to speak to her,” he told her. “Take a high dose. A really high dose.” She did as directed, and in the hours that followed Dalia lost all sense of herself.
The next day, when she woke up, her clothes were soiled and her head bruised, apparently from falling. At first she felt ashamed, but like many in the organisation, Dalia learned to see her shame as a product of her own resistance to change. “No one said: ‘You were on the verge of dying.’ Quite the opposite, I was told I had the best trip of all and they congratulated me.”
Varela frequently emphasised his connection to Colombia, where Inner Mastery owned a property and sourced its ayahuasca. With the profits he made, Varela said he was supporting the Indigenous community in Putumayo that he claimed had authorised him to work with the sacred plant medicine. But in 2015, representatives of the Cofán Indigenous community denounced him as an impostor. Varela had falsified his authorisation and used it to promote his business, they said, and they had seen none of the money he claimed to be collecting on their behalf. Anyone attending Inner Mastery retreats was putting their life and health in “serious risk”. (The complaint was echoed in an open letter signed by 100 academics and anthropologists, who claimed Inner Mastery had taken advantage “of the ignorance, credulity, good faith and vulnerability of many people”.)
Varela denied the accusation. He said the Cofán community had tried to blackmail him for a share in Inner Mastery’s profits, and after he refused, were taking revenge. His lawyer threatened to sue them for libel. Inner Mastery conferences in the US descended into shouting matches as staff faced down Indigenous protesters who claimed the company had appropriated ayahuasca for profit.
Varela increasingly saw himself as under attack, claiming he had received threats to his life. “Twice armed men came to my hostel in the Colombian jungle to kill me,” he later told a Spanish journalist. “The reasons are complex, but in short it’s because I’m white and Argentine, and mixed up in a spiritual shamanic world in which I dared to take the medicine out of its ritual and cultural context to spread it across the world in combination with psychotherapy.”
Varela devised his own form of psychotherapy. Before his first arrest in 2008, he had been accused of practising therapy without a licence, he told Dalia. “And so he called it ‘anti-therapy’ or ‘not therapy’ to avoid any issues,” she said. All work should be carried out in groups, Varela insisted, “because the ego can lie better in private”. He would use “chaos” and “confrontation” to “unmask the lies and beliefs we hold about ourselves”.
In psychedelic-assisted therapy, “integrations”, or sessions held after taking hallucinogens, are a common practice to help participants understand their experiences. But Varela often seemed to use his “anti-therapy” to lead participants to his own predetermined conclusions. “He would push ideas and thoughts on to people,” Dalia said. A common theme was telling people to break up with their partner. “It was dressed up as a way to help people be free, but really it was quite twisted.”
Through the training academy, new recruits would learn to replicate Varela’s method. The confrontational approach could be unsettling. In one promotional video from 2016, a woman lies face up on a mattress. Around her is a circle of onlookers. Her limbs are pulled in different directions by the four people closest to her. She wails, her eyes closed, while they tell her: “You’re a bad sister.” “I hate you.” “You deserve to die.” In another, a young woman wearing only a bra sobs in a circle of sniggering onlookers, before storming out. In the next scene of the video, she is shown embracing Varela.
Dalia had suffered physical abuse as a child, and so when Varela told her she needed to stop identifying with the pain of her inner child, it made sense. But his methods could be cruel. One day, when she started to cry, he mimicked her, wailing theatrically and repeating: “Look at her, the little hurt girl. Let’s all cry like her!” On his cue, others joined him, forming a circle around her, laughing while she sobbed.
As the company grew, so did the number of accidents. On a rainy March day in 2019, a 31-year-old Hungarian man arrived at a hospital in the Dutch city of Eindhoven looking for help. It was early morning and he was displaying signs of confusion, the police report later noted, but he was not admitted. He left the hospital, only to reportedly return a second time before being sent home again. He was found dead at the bottom of an apartment building soon after.
Police concluded the man had probably died by suicide. They found DMT in his bloodstream and learned he had just attended a retreat in a nearby town called Eersel in a property owned by Inner Mastery. A few weeks later, police raided the house and arrested several employees of the company. “We tried to stop him, because we don’t want people to leave in the middle of the night,” an Inner Mastery spokesperson told Dutch reporters after the case became public. There were risks involved in retreats, they added, but the organisation had followed its protocols to protect its customers.
Varela’s only response to the deaths was to say that people who take ayahuasca do so at their own risk. Within Inner Mastery, responsibility for accidents was often placed on participants, said Dalia, who was working for the company in Spain when word spread that someone had died at a retreat. Another former Inner Mastery member was more blunt, telling me that those who had bad reactions were directly to blame: “They are not going to therapy, which they need. They are not ready to face what ayahuasca or other substances bring to their psychology after being consumed. So it may end up very badly for the person, including killing themselves or jumping from a window.”
In October 2019, three Inner Mastery employees – the manager, master of ceremonies and the person who prepared the ayahuasca – as well as the company itself, were investigated for their role in the Hungarian client’s death. Eventually, the prosecutor’s office dropped manslaughter charges, but charged the three with drug offences for supplying ayahuasca. According to witness statements, which contradicted Inner Mastery’s initial statement, the Hungarian man had taken iboga, a powerful psychoactive whose effects can last up to 48 hours, then later ayahuasca.
Inner Mastery had begun offering iboga alongside ayahuasca and other psychoactives a few months before the accident. Taking iboga and ayahuasca in the same retreat significantly increases the risk of an adverse reaction, said José Carlos Bouso, scientific director at The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS), a nonprofit that supports psychedelic therapy.
Separately, a second man died at another retreat in the Netherlands six months later, after combining the plant brew with other unnamed substances. At trial in 2022, two Inner Mastery workers were convicted for transporting, providing and processing ayahuasca and sentenced to 100 hours’ community service and a suspended two-week prison sentence.
The case involving the death of the Hungarian man finally went to trial in January this year, where the court held one Inner Mastery employee responsible for possession and supply of ayahuasca and “ignoring the health risks of DMT”. A second employee and Inner Mastery itself will face the same charges at a trial set for September.
Former members of Inner Mastery say the company initially gave participants forms to list any history of psychosis or other drug use that could conflict with ayahuasca. “But the main problem was people lied,” Oklander said. Facilitators often had little or no medical or psychological experience. Oklander said he was regularly called in to deal with difficult cases. One time he was woken in the middle of the night after a woman in apparent psychosis began scratching her arms, drawing blood. “I took her to a shower and got under the freezing cold water with her, and held her. That worked,” he said.
At some point, staff began conducting brief interviews to screen participants, but a small minority of participants continued having psychotic episodes. “If you do it well, it’s very, very safe. But if it’s done wrong you multiply the risks of an accident,” said Villaescusa. Bouso agreed. “Ayahuasca on its own is quite safe, physically. What you have to be aware of are the psychological effects.” More than 800,000 people across the Americas, Europe, Australia and New Zealand took ayahuasca in 2019, according to Bouso’s organisation. In a report, it found that between 2010 and 2022, of the 58 deaths linked to ayahuasca, many involved other substances, pre-existing health conditions, or other circumstances.
Within Inner Mastery, it was difficult to express reservations. Varela would make a person feel ashamed for asking questions, and “that was the end of the argument”, Oklander said. The two fell out, and Oklander brought a civil suit against Inner Mastery for unpaid wages in 2019, which he won. He also made a criminal complaint to police, saying he’d been an “unwitting participant” in tax fraud and crimes against public health. In his complaint, he included messages from senior company leadership to employees, which threatened to “immediately fire” anyone who didn’t send profits back to the company’s headquarters in Madrid.
By the early 2020s, negative attention was growing, and Varela started locking the gate to the company’s headquarters outside Madrid, where he lived. In the early days of the organisation, Varela had emphasised the anti-hierarchical ethos of the company. But over time, he seemed more and more focused on his own profile as a leader. “Little by little, he started wanting to be everyone’s master,” said Alcalá, the handyman turned retreat centre manager.
Varela’s writings and hours of talks betray a dark obsession with weakness. He wrote constantly about “slavery”, “domination” and “control,” seeing society as divided between dominant and submissive people. In 2016, Varela published a blog post about the power imbalance between men and women. He described “feminine energy” as “a wave that emanates from a woman and heads toward a man, drowning him, rendering him useless, humiliating, breaking him, and stripping him of almost all power”.
There have been several accusations of sexual abuse against members of Inner Mastery over the years. Last year, one woman told Spanish TV that she suffered abuse at a retreat. She alleges that when she was in a semi-conscious state, having allegedly been pressured into taking ayahuasca, several people touched her inappropriately. In a separate incident, the company said it fired an employee after he sent explicit messages and photos to clients.
Other accusations centred on Varela himself. One anonymous account – on a blog set up to collect testimonies of alleged victims of the organisation – accused Varela and a collaborator of encouraging women to masturbate in front of them to overcome sexual repression.
In March 2020, a few days after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, Varela appeared in a video, naked from the waist up in a dimly lit room, to chastise viewers for reacting with fear as the virus spread. After taking ayahuasca he had a vision, he explains: “I created the coronavirus.” Or rather, we all did, through our fear. The real risk is not physical, but spiritual, he said.
For the company, the retreats were more important than ever. But when lockdowns made them impossible soon after, Varela turned to another idea. All staff were instructed to sell tickets to his online talks. Stuck at home, Dalia began cold-calling people, but struggled to make sales. She found little sympathy from her superiors in the company. “Whenever I brought it up, they would respond in the same way: ‘You’re not committing. You’re full of resistance. You’re sick.’”
After three years of relentless work and spending about €10,000 on training courses, Dalia began to lose faith in the organisation. For one thing, she seemed stuck on an endless training cycle. “Later I realised it was because they knew I had money,” she said. “There was a clear interest in delaying my authorisation.” As Dalia’s suspicions about Inner Mastery grew, she came across ideas Varela had passed off as his own in the canon of other spiritual thinkers, from Krishnamurti to Eckhart Tolle. “You start looking into it and you realise he has taken a potpourri of things. Some of them may be quite powerful. But they are not his ideas.”
As the pandemic wore on and profits took a nosedive, Varela announced that its employees had become spoiled. From now on, they would all be self-employed and pay their own social security contributions. Varela also encouraged his employees to move into the communes. Dalia considered leaving everything and joining the commune, but at the time she was looking after her elderly father. “They pressured me, saying that caring for him was a prison,” she said. Dalia no longer trusted Varela. “He said it was beneficial to your process to live in the centres, that it allowed you to devote yourself, but what it really allowed was him to charge each person €400 every month for a shared room.” Finally, she sent a message to a group chat saying she was leaving. She was told her back pay would be given in the company’s own tokens, which can only be spent on more Inner Mastery retreats.
Adrián had experienced a similar moment of clarity when he finally had the opportunity to visit the company’s base in Colombia a few years earlier. Travelling to the jungle was a prize dangled in front of all employees, and the prospect of the trip had helped Adrián to ignore his increasing doubts over the company’s treatment of its staff. But when he arrived, he realised that the lush tropical jungle he had seen so many times in promotional videos was not as remote as it seemed on social media. A few metres away from where participants took ayahuasca, a busy highway abutted the property. For Adrián it was the final straw. This sleight of hand seemed to betray something fundamental about the organisation’s priorities. The company had once felt like a family to Adrián. Now, just like Dalia, he had come to think it was all about making money.
As allegations against Inner Mastery became harder to ignore, police began investigating the company. Complaints against Varela had been growing for years. In 2021, a mother claimed he had brainwashed her daughter. “I know that he speaks in her ear while she is high and makes her do what he wants,” she told a TV crew after neighbours protested outside the group’s headquarters.
Varela’s business practices rebounded on other practitioners using hallucinogens. In 2022, Spanish police set up a taskforce to deal with cults and opened a hotline. After a tipoff, reportedly from a local evangelical pastor, dozens of officers stormed an isolated lodge in the mountains of northern Spain and searched for signs of “neoshamanic” cult activity. Feathers, drums and a bamboo pipe were displayed for the police camera and four people were arrested. The next year, a judge dismissed the case, ordering that police return the seized ayahuasca to its owners. “If they had done this to Varela, who is exploiting people, I’d understand,” the group’s leader told a Spanish newspaper after his arrest. “But I’m just a medicine man who doesn’t care about money.”
“[Inner Mastery] was a very organised operation, which stands in contrast to most other groups offering ayahuasca, which usually involve only four or five people and don’t operate outside their local areas,” said Marcos Quinteiros, a deputy inspector with the national police. “There are no precedents in Spain of an organisation like this.”
In July 2023, police officers in riot gear carrying battering rams raided one of the Inner Mastery villas outside Madrid. Officers across the country simultaneously raided five other retreat centres, surprising some of their suspects as they performed ayahuasca ceremonies. Police arrested 18 people and confiscated €24,000 in cash, 1kg of mescaline and 60kg of the dark, viscous ayahuasca brew.
Varela was one of those arrested. At the time, he had just been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and had been focusing his energy on making a series of documentaries that recounted his achievements and featured followers praising him effusively. He died in October 2023 as the investigation threatened to destroy the organisation he created. His 17 co-accused face charges including criminal conspiracy, crimes against public health and practising medicine without a licence. The case is still being investigated by courts ahead of trial. At the time of his death, Varela was also facing charges of sexual assault.
Inner Mastery continues to advertise ayahuasca retreats across 13 countries in Europe, down from more than 40 at its peak. The company still promotes itself on social media, but its website now carries a disclaimer: “We are not a religion or a cult.” Varela is notably absent from the literature, and some retreats are advertised under alternative company names. Inner Mastery did not respond to requests for comment on its operations or to a detailed list of accusations against the company and Varela.
Slowly, over months and years, Dalia has rebuilt her life. She now sees that the more she gave to Inner Mastery, the more she lost touch with her life outside the organisation. “I’m shocked looking back at the level of self-deception,” Dalia said. “It was like a form of hypnosis where I convinced myself [Varela] knew what he was doing, and that we were part of something much bigger that was going to help awaken the world and bring about a real transformation.”
One thing she does not regret, though, is using ayahuasca. She felt that its influence had helped her resolve personal difficulties that had remained after years of therapy. Dalia now works as a therapist herself, occasionally working with ayahuasca independently. Sometimes those who try it solely out of curiosity leave with little new insight, she said. But over the years, Dalia has come to believe it’s often most effective for people who are already in crisis. “I’ve seen the most radical transformations in those who are suffering most.”
* Some names and identifying details have been changed
