Medicine Mallorca

Spain / Ireland / Colombia
Medicine Mallorca
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 red flags
F

 

Atmosphere

Features

Atmosphere and feature ratings above are based on Best Retreats research (October 2026). They will be updated if Medicine Mallorca submits its own information.

Medicine Mallorca (formerly Ayayni House): An In-Depth Review for Ayahuasca Retreats in Mallorca, Ireland and Colombia

Former name. This operation previously ran as Ayayni House, including its Irish history. Our profile under that name, Ayayni House, keeps the earlier record.

Ayayni House is an ayahuasca operation founded in 2019 by Joanna Shilson, who now sells retreats in Mallorca under the name Medicine Mallorca and appears on booking platforms as “Joanna Yagé.” It runs three- and five-night ayahuasca retreats in the hills near Palma for €950 to €1,450, an annual 11-day trip to Mocoa, Colombia, and, in Ireland, ran a year-long “Bioshamanism” course near Mullingar, County Westmeath, that included ayahuasca and kambo. Reviews on Retreat Guru and BookRetreats are nearly perfect, but none of those pages mentions Ayayni, Ireland or her surname. In November 2025 an Irish investigative outlet described psychiatric emergencies at an ayahuasca and yopo weekend near Mullingar and captioned a photo “An Ayayni retreat in Ireland”; the article’s free text does not name the organizer, so that link is unverified. Her course teaches that every symptom has an emotional cause, drawing on Ryke Geerd Hamer’s discredited “German New Medicine.” No medical staff, questionnaire or emergency plan is published, and DMT is illegal in Ireland, the UK and Spain. We list it as not recommended.

🎯 At a Glance

  • Locations: A country house near Esporles, about 10 minutes from Palma, Mallorca, with one 2026 retreat in Alcúdia, according to its Retreat Guru listing; an Irish venue near Mullingar, County Westmeath, in the Republic of Ireland, named in its 2023 to 2024 course syllabus; and a jungle lodge about 20 minutes from Mocoa, Putumayo, for its Colombia trip. Our earlier profile said Northern Ireland; we found no venue there.
  • Approach: Ayahuasca ceremonies with live music, breathwork, “dynamic movement,” rapé and sananga, framed by Joanna’s “Emotional Biodecoding,” with kambo offered as an extra in Mallorca and included in the Irish course and the Colombia trip.
  • Suitable For: Not recommended. Anyone still considering it should insist on medical screening and understand that ayahuasca’s active compound is a controlled drug in each European country where it operates.
  • Costs: In Mallorca, €950 for three nights with three ceremonies, €1,450 for five nights with four ceremonies, and €800 for a private ceremony, including airport pickup, shared rooms and meals. The 11-day Colombia trip is €2,700 (US$3,646 on BookRetreats) plus domestic flights. The Irish course cost €5,820. BookRetreats deposits are fully refundable only if you cancel 30 or more days ahead.
  • Overall Assessment: Warm booking-platform reviews and small groups, outweighed by an unverified but closely matching press account of psychiatric emergencies at an Irish weekend, pseudoscientific medical teaching, no medical staff or screening, kambo and yopo in the mix, ceremonies in countries where DMT is illegal, no registered company, and a rebrand that separates the Irish history from the Mallorca bookings. Directory evaluation: F.

💬 What Guests Are Saying

PlatformRatingReviewsNotes
Retreat Guru (Medicine Mallorca)5.00 / 539May to October 2026 visible
BookRetreats (Joanna Yagé)4.99 / 538March 2025 to September 2026; one review pool shared across all listings
Google, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, AyaAdvisorsNo rating0No listings found

The positive picture. Booking-platform reviewers praise Jo’s warmth and integration work, feeling safe, the small groups, the live music, the garden and pool and the food. One reviewer stresses that a health check beforehand is “an absolute must.”

The negative feedback. No review below four stars is visible on any booking platform. Our earlier profile reported numerous negative Reddit accounts from 2019 to 2023, including a 2022 post saying “too many people have had bad, unpleasant experiences” and a February 2025 post calling the Mallorca retreats “very dangerous,” along with descriptions of emotional harm, a “creepy,” manipulative or cult-like atmosphere and facilitation described as “narcissistic,” and one Facebook account praising a “magical atmosphere.” Those accounts remain unverified. The independent account we found is described in the Incident Report below.

Who is writing the reviews. All visible reviews are booking-platform reviews under the Medicine Mallorca and Joanna Yagé names, with booking “gifts” such as a free kambo session and an online integration session. None of those pages mentions Ayayni, the Irish course or the surname Shilson, which keeps the Irish history out of view of people booking in Mallorca. The links between the brands are clear from shared contact details: the Mallorca booking site’s logo links to ayaynihouse.com, and a 2025 Mallorca listing gives Ayayni’s Irish phone number and email. If you have attended, we encourage you to share your experience through our submission form.

🚩 Incident Report

We searched review platforms and English and Spanish-language news for reports involving Ayayni House, Medicine Mallorca, Joanna Shilson, “Joanna Yagé” and co-facilitators Francesco Pariset and Olimpia Zajac.

  • Psychiatric emergencies (Ireland): On November 18, 2025, the Irish investigative outlet Dispatch described an underground weekend at a rented country house near Mullingar where about 20 people took ayahuasca and had yopo blown into their noses. It reported that a man in his 60s convulsed, screamed and banged his head against a wall, and that a young woman became agitated, undressed and was restrained and taken upstairs. A photo in the article is captioned “An Ayayni retreat in Ireland, taken from a brochure.” The free text does not name the organizer, so the link to Ayayni is unverified, though Ayayni’s documented venue is near Mullingar.
  • Deaths and serious injuries: None found.
  • Sexual misconduct: No allegations found.
  • Legal action: No police action, prosecutions or lawsuits found.

Our earlier profile found no confirmed theft, sexual misconduct or criminal activity and said the negative accounts lacked details of physical harm; the Dispatch account, if it concerns Ayayni, describes physical danger.

If you have experienced or witnessed an incident with Ayayni House or Medicine Mallorca, please report it confidentially.

🔍 Critical Notes

Pseudoscience in the curriculum. The Irish course syllabus states that every symptom has an emotional cause and that its bio-decoding method can address “a life-threatening disease,” presenting Ryke Geerd Hamer’s work as foundational; the operator’s new YouTube channel describes its work as “rooted in” Hamer’s. Hamer, whose medical license was revoked in Germany, promoted “Germanic New Medicine” as a cure for cancer; it is regarded as pseudo-medicine, and Spanish medical authorities held him responsible for dozens of preventable deaths, according to Wikipedia. Teaching it alongside ayahuasca and kambo is a serious warning sign.

The law in each country. In Ireland, DMT is controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977; a Santo Daime leader was convicted of supplying it in 2007 and a later religious exemption bid failed, according to Bia Labate. In Spain, DMT is a scheduled drug, although courts have acquitted some ayahuasca importers, and the Guardia Civil raided ayahuasca retreats in Alicante in 2025 and in Sagunto in September 2026, where clients included people from the Balearic Islands, as Mallorca Diario reported; neither case involved this operator. In Colombia, yagé is neither permitted nor prohibited by specific law. Our earlier profile called Ireland’s position “ambiguous”; it is not, since DMT supply has been prosecuted there.

No company. We found no registered company in Ireland or Spain. The Irish course asked students to pay into a personal bank account.

Corrections to our earlier profile. The Irish venue is in County Westmeath, not Northern Ireland. Prices are published. The main operation today is in Mallorca, not Colombia. Booking-platform reviews are nearly all five stars, so “heavily mixed” no longer describes its visible reputation. We found no source for the phrase “originated from a vision of healing,” for “energy work” or for charges for follow-up; those remain unverified.

🆘 Screening & Mental Health Risks

We found no medical questionnaire on any listing. Preparation is a private chat “about childhood experiences and physical symptoms” and 48 hours without drugs, alcohol or red meat, and people taking SSRIs are told to send their dosages “on WhatsApp” for assessment, according to the Medicine Mallorca listings. There is no stated policy on MAOIs, heart conditions or psychiatric history, no medical staff are named and no emergency protocol is published. The Irish syllabus gave kambo with advice only to drink water and expect vomiting. Yopo, which contains DMT-family compounds, was used at the Mullingar weekend Dispatch described. ICEERS notes that ayahuasca’s MAOI component makes it dangerous with SSRIs and other serotonergic drugs and that it is contraindicated for people prone to psychosis. Our earlier profile described screening as limited and post-session support as lacking; integration circles and a group integration meeting are now listed. Never stop a psychiatric medication to qualify for a ceremony without your prescriber’s guidance.

🧪 Brew Substance

Joanna says she learned from the taitas of Putumayo, where yagé combines the Banisteriopsis caapi vine with chagropanga leaves, as Erowid explains; the brew’s source is not published. The Colombia trip includes a medicine-making day and ceremonies with Inga healers, including Maima Ana and taitas Victoriano and Gabino of Yunguillo.

📍 Location, Setting & Style

  • Setting: A Mallorcan country house with a garden and pool in the hills near Palma; a jungle lodge with cabins, a maloca and a pool near Mocoa.
  • Rooms: Shared same-sex rooms for two or three in Mallorca; two-person en-suite cabins in Colombia.
  • Style: A Western-led program of ceremonies, music, breathwork and emotional “decoding,” in groups of up to 8 to 12.

Practical guidance: Airport pickup from Palma is included. The Colombia trip requires a domestic flight from Bogotá to Villagarzón.

Should You Book?

We do not recommend it. If you are considering any ceremony led by this team, ask for a written medical questionnaire, the names and qualifications of anyone providing medical cover, an emergency plan, and an explanation of how the Bioshamanism teaching on disease is applied to guests. Read our guide to verifying retreat facilitators.

The Team & Story

Joanna Shilson signs the About page of ayaynihouse.com as founder and says Ayayni began in 2019. On booking platforms she describes herself as a “shamanic therapist, body worker, and breath worker” with more than ten years of work with medicines and many trips to learn from the taitas of Putumayo. Francesco Pariset, a medicine musician who says he has lived in Colombia for eight years, handles the Colombia trip, and Olimpia Zajac, a musician also listed by Avalon in Spain, plays at the Mallorca retreats. We did not independently verify anyone’s training.

Prep & Integration Tips

Before any ceremony: Disclose every medication and condition in writing, plan any change with your own doctor, and do not accept medical advice that replaces conventional treatment. After you return: Arrange support from a qualified therapist at home. Our guide on how to research ayahuasca incidents can help you check any operator.

Pros & Cons

ProsCons
Small groups in MallorcaUnverified but closely matching press account of psychiatric emergencies
Near-perfect booking-platform reviewsPseudoscientific teaching on disease
Airport pickup includedNo medical staff, questionnaire or emergency plan
Prices publishedDMT illegal in Ireland, the UK and Spain
Integration circles listedRebrand separates the Irish history from Mallorca bookings

Book Your Ceremony

Medicine Mallorca lists retreats from November 2026 through December 2027 and a Colombia trip in February 2027. We do not recommend booking. Best Retreats does not take bookings; learn more about our mission.

Last reviewed October 2026.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Consult a qualified medical professional.

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