About this Retreat
Elena hails from Mexico City and has meandered through different continents in the pursuit of knowledge in different fields. Today, she spends most of her working time growing a plant-dye garden and thinking of joyful ways to engage children and adults in outdoor learning and nature-connection. She also works with Siddiq in the lab growing the mushrooms utilized in the sessions. She is fascinated by self-directed learning and fostering autonomy in everyday life.When she isn't working, she pursues long hikes as a form of self-guided therapy and loves foraging for food, medicine, and crafts.
She has extensive personal experience working with psychedelics and brings an earthy comforting feminine energy, appreciated by many, to our sessions.
Siddiq, founding director of the association, grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. He has been exploring the intersections of nature connection, meditation, and psychedelic medicine for the last 15 years.
He is a scholarship winner of the Somatic Plant Medicine Integration certification and and Trauma-informed Plant Medicine Masterclass offered by Atira Tan. As signatory of the North Star ethics pledge for psychedelic practitioners, he is guided by integrity and sincerity as foundational principles in his work.
His approach to psychedelic assisted therapy is grounded in an ongoing intensive study of the latest clinical research from the leading universities in the world. Influenced by the pioneering work of Dr Gabor Mate and Dr Basel van der Kolk in uncovering the somatic dimensions of trauma, his toolkit is based in psychosomatic therapy and incorporates elements of Dr Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, Dr David Bercelli's Trauma Release Exercises, emotional release exercises from the Reichian tradition of body-based psychoanalysis, and breathwork-based methods of nervous-system autoregulation.
He has spent months on intensive silent retreat, focusing particularly on nature-based practices of embodied contemplation such as pilgrimage and wilderness rites of passage. He has developed relationships with many species of fungi, building bioreactors and countless compost piles to produce inoculum for feeding soil fertility, foraging for wild edible and medicinal mushrooms, fermenting food and drink with wild and cultivated aerobic and anaerobic fungi, and setting up a laboratory for cloning and growing wild and cultivated species for mycoprotien, mycogardening, and mycotherapy. He has grown intimate with the life-cycles of mushrooms, from spores to mycelium to fruit. His investigation of psychedelic fungi has led him to study the ethnomycological traditions of the world, from modern curanderos to precolonial Native Americans, Siberian shamans, ancient Greek Mysteries, all the way back to the ceremonial practices of our paleolithic ancestors.
Details of this retreat
We are a nonprofit association offering legal, individual 1:1 psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions to those in need. MDMA has been shown to be particularly effective for PTSD and CPTSD because it uniquely addresses both the emotional and physiological components of trauma in ways that other psychedelics, like psylocibin, do not.
Unlike standard psychedelics, which can intensify emotions unpredictably, MDMA allows for emotional processing in a controlled way. MDMA increases oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine, which promote feelings of safety, connection, and self-compassion.This makes it easier for patients to engage difficult memories without shutting down or dissociating. MDMA also promotes neuroplasticity, allowing new perspectives and more flexible, compassionate self-narratives to arise.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has conducted extensive research on MDMA-assisted therapy for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and have yielded promising results
We are graduates of Somatic Plant Medicine Integration certification and have completed professional training in the Trauma-informed Plant Medicine Masterclass offered by Atira Tan. We are signatories of the North Star ethics pledge for psychedelic practitioners, guided by integrity and sincerity as foundational principles in our work.
Based on the standard protocol for clinical practice developed by Johns Hopkins University, Imperial College London, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and others, our sessions are conducted individually, in comfortable, quiet, cosy indoor environments, close to nature, with one or more monitors present at all times to offer non-intrusive, non-directive care and support. We invite individuals to embark on a long-term, multi-stage journey with us, in which the session itself is merely one phase.
Our approach is grounded in psychosomatic therapy and incorporates elements of Dr Peter Levine´s Somatic Experiencing, Dr David Bercelli´s Trauma Release Exercises, emotional release exercises from the Reichian tradition of body-based psychoanalysis, and breathwork-based methods of nervous-system autoregulation.
For more information about us, please see our website mycosomaticmagic.com
A preparation course valued at $109 is included with the retreat at no extra cost
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