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-assisted couples therapy offers a path to profound intimacy, healing, and trust. MDMA (often called "the love drug") enhances empathy, trust, and emotional openness, allowing couples to navigate difficult conversations without defensiveness or blame. This experience can help heal deep wounds by letting go of past conflicts land emotional barriers. It also enhances communication and allows participants to speak and listen with clarity, vulnerability, and compassion.
Our protocol primarily focuses on trust, as it is the cornerstone of lasting love and the essential foundation for a deep, enduring connection. By creating a safe and supportive environment, MDMA-assisted therapy allows couples to reconnect on a deeper level, fostering mutual understanding and emotional closeness.
Whether you're seeking to heal old wounds, improve communication, or reignite the spark in your relationship, this therapy offers the possibility to build a stronger, more resilient bond. Many participants in clinical studies with MDMA have reported improved relational functioning—including greater emotional openness and empathy with partners,
increased emotional safety and bonding, enhanced communication skills, reduction in PTSD symptoms and relational distress. Couples report feeling more connected, empathic, and open after sessions. Preliminary findings suggest MDMA helps reduce defensiveness, help address attachment wounds and relational trauma, allowing both partners to engage more constructively with each other on challenging topics.
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.
A preparation course valued at $109 is included with the retreat at no extra cost
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