Preparation/integration consultation

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.

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.

Peyton has a deep love for mushrooms, both for their medicinal and culinary gifts. Her zeal for local, fresh, and wholesome cooking has led her to work with many species of mushrooms in the pursuit of cooking food that is nutritious for our bodies and spirit, blending vegan cuisine and herbalism. Beyond the kitchen, Peyton's political-social work is focused on regenerative food systems, research that led her into mycoforestry, foraging, and working with fungi for closed-loop systems. Her appreciation for fungi in their culinary and ecological roles carries over and naturally flows into her reverence for fungi as medicine and teachers. As a lover of Life and a student of the Earth, she turns to plants and fungi as guides for remembering the truth of our nature. She has learned the magic of mushrooms after many years of working with them, serving them, and facilitating others' experiences. Along with her explorations in Earth Medicines, Peyton has been practising Hatha Yoga for many years. In combining meditation into her daily religious practices, she has found psilocybin mushrooms to be extremely helpful for deeping meditative experiences, better understanding of the Self, and attuning with the Divine.