5-day Psilocybin Retreat Program
A Retreat Experience Combining Ancient Wisdom, Community and Integration
In partnership with Nectara, we invite you to embark on a transformative retreat programme in the Netherlands. Take full advantage of your psychedelic experience, combining intimate psilocybin journeys (max 10 people) with the power of community and integration support.
Integration is everything and it’s where the real work of stepping into your full potential really begins. With this programme, you can avoid the common hindrances as you won’t have to do this often-challenging work alone.
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Benefits Preparation
- Clarify your goals and purposes and find what you are seeking
- Increase awareness of patterns you wish to release or let go of
- Create a more directed psilocybin experience with clear intention
- Connect with your psychedelic facilitators and integration coach before attending the retreat
- Access to invaluable preparation tools
- Deepen healing and insights
- Minimise potential ‘bad trip’ experiences
- Develop tools to maximise the benefits during the psilocybin experience (breathing, mindfulness, understanding)
- Temper unrealistic expectations
Benefits of 5-Day Retreat
- Two psilocybin ceremonies for you to go deeper in your process
- One-to-one conversations and guidance from expert psychedelic facilitators
- Intimate group setting (maximum 10 people)
- Group sharing circles
- Complementary wellness activities
- yoga
- breathwork
- sound bath/healing
- and more
- Beautiful serene location immersed in nature
- Healthy vegetarian/vegan meals
Benefits Integration
- Translate insights and healing into real change
- Continuing the retreat experience when you return home
- Group sharing circles
- Complementary wellness activities
- Space to explore the layers of your experiences
- Increased personal agency and empowerment
- Increase understanding through deep exploration of your psilocybin experiences
- Minimise confusion and disorientation after your experiences
- Ground your experience into your personal story
- Lifetime access to community and complementary wellness tools (breathwork sessions, guided meditations, yoga, coaching sessions)
Increased Safety, Expanded Efficacy, Deepened Insights – Shiri Godasi
Shiri Godasi has been at the forefront of psychedelic integration and coaching for the past decade. Her psychedelic preparation and integration framework guides the individual through this process in a way that creates a strong foundation for real and lasting change. Nurturing empowerment and personal agency, Shiri cultivates an environment where each participant will develop their own tools, strategies, and confidence to reach their fullest potential and happiness.
Shiri has an impressive resume including, but not limited to:
- Founder of 5 psychedelic harm reduction organisations,
- Pioneer of psychedelic integration therapy
- Psychedelic therapeutic coaching
- Developing Psychedelic integration programmes and protocols for psychedelic facilitators
- Mental wellness and therapist specialising in trauma, depression, anxiety, and maladaptive mood and personality disorders
Trust, Acceptance, and Surrender – Lead Facilitator René
As a founding member of Acsauhaya and the visionary behind two other plant medicine retreat centres in the Netherlands, René has been a lead psychedelic facilitator and coach for over a decade, providing a space for profound personal growth and healing for thousands of participants from around the world. Throughout his journey, René has worked closely with indigenous shamans as well as practitioners from Western plant medicine traditions, bridging ancient indigenous wisdom with Western cultural understandings.
With his unmatched experience and expertise, René has created the safest and most conducive environment for you to experience this powerful and transformational process. Music, lighting, expert guides, and complementary wellness activities (yoga, sound healing) are all carefully selected to ensure the perfect ‘setting’. René inspires trust cultivating a compassionate and non-judgemental retreat space for you to explore your inner and outer worlds.
By joining this retreat, you will receive:
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- Lifetime access to a self-paced digital course to help you prepare your mind, body, and soul for a safe and transformative retreat with us. Explore the course at your own pace and keep returning to it after your retreat and any future experiences.
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- A beautiful set of psilocybin journeys held at our intimate retreat space in the Netherlands. Here, we pride ourselves in providing an experience combining ancient wisdom and natural medicine with professionalism and a caring team of support staff. Each in humble service and in loving dedication to your comfort and safety.
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- An online integration program to deepen new connections you have made and insights you received during your experiences with us. In just five weekly group calls, you will be invited to activate the full potential of your retreat with facilitated calls, simple group exercises, and a truly supportive space that will honour your personal journey and unique intentions.
Why we created this programme
Attending a retreat alone and being thrown back into the busy-ness of daily life after a powerful experience is not ideal. Research shows that over 53% of people who attend a ceremony will have some emotional and mental challenges in integrating the experience afterwards. And that’s not considering the loss of potential that happens without proper support.
Exciting new research indicates that a psychedelic experience opens up a ‘critical period’ in the mind reactivating a heightened level of neuroplasticity normally closed to us past the age of seven. This extremely valuable time allows you to recode behavioural and thought patterns no longer beneficial for you and implement new patterns that contribute to your overall well-being in a positive way.
From our extensive experience, people often leave our retreats with more questions than they came with. During a psilocybin ceremony, there is potential to become overwhelmed by information and insights that need time and space to be digested and integrated. Our guests commonly report that sharing their experience in the group setting benefits the processing of their journeys, describing these sessions as extremely powerful, almost as powerful as the psilocybin experience itself.
As we always say at the end of our retreats, the real work after a psychedelic experience starts when you go back into everyday life. With this programme you have the unique opportunity to extend the retreat experience by the continuation of important sharing circles and guidance throughout the integration process. During this important time after the retreat, people often describe the group sharing circles as being a journey of transformation in itself. Participants of psychedelic ceremonies who had to figure things out on their own often realise that support could have helped them sidestep a few barriers; saving valuable time, energy, and money.
This programme was designed by experts to offer preparation, guidance, and support beyond the retreat and into the integration phase. It will equip you with the resources you need to avoid common challenges that can cloud the process of bridging a psychedelic experience to the future you want to create for yourself.
These challenges can include, but are not limited to:
- Going back to your ‘old life’ with new understandings and confusion about how to reconcile this new mindset.
- Feeling others do not understand what you have experienced and, thus, not having someone to speak to.
- Lack of support resources to translate insight into tangible daily action.
- Other aspects of the experience which can cause confusion and distress such as; spiritual bypassing, ego inflation, and trauma responses. For more information on these aspects see below.
Avoiding common pitfalls will promote an unhindered and effective integration period. However, don’t worry, you will not have to figure it out alone. Our expert team of psychedelic facilitators and therapists will guide you through the subtle nuances and various layers of meaning contained within this powerful experience.
Phase 1: Preparation
Preparation for your retreat can make a significant difference on the psychedelic experience itself, as well as the integration period. Gain access to guiding tools and resources broken down into easily digestible chunks with Nectara’s self-paced preparation course.
Intention:
The quality of an experience is greatly enhanced by clarifying an intention for the ceremony. Intentions do not need to be specific but indicative of certain areas of your life or outcomes you seek to focus on.
Internal preparation (set):
Internal preparation refers to the internal physical, mental, and emotional aspects of your well-being. With more awareness about your current internal state, you can implement certain practices to ready yourself for the experience – ready, ‘set’, go!
External preparation (setting):
The setting refers to the social and environmental aspects of the experience. In this programme you will have an opportunity to meet your fellow participants and facilitators to become familiar with names and faces. The environment will be completely optimised by Acsauhaya.
Preparation highlight:
Deepen your experience with optimal preparation, heightened awareness, and emotional balance.
Phase 2: Retreat
Be guided through two psychedelic experiences with expert facilitators who cultivate trust and the ability for you to surrender to the experience in a safe and supportive environment.
Our supportive retreat space offers the highest levels of care possible for you during your time with us, both in and out of the ceremony. Our facilitators implicitly understand the nature of a psychedelic journey and how to guide a person through these profound experiences so you can gain the most out of them.
With their support, your time at the retreat is a time of focused self-exploration.
Group sharing circles are an integral aspect of the initial integration phase and are held the morning after each experience. These offer a chance to reaffirm insights and gain new ones.
In addition, other group activities and complementary wellness modules (yoga, sound-healing etc.) enhance both your set and setting within the retreat space.
Retreat highlight:
Expert guidance provides the optimal environment to maximise the benefits of your psilocybin experience.
Phase 3: Integration Period
Avoid wasting time and confusion after your retreat. The integration period bridges your retreat to positive transformation, behaviour and lifestyle changes, as well as healing that is long lasting with psychedelics. Integration can be a lifelong dedication to your highest potential and we are here to provide you with lifelong tools to support you on this journey.
Don’t get caught in a cycle of chasing medicine. The time after your retreat is a unique opportunity to release old schemas and patterns that are maladaptive and implement new ones that increase your quality of life and well-being.
The integration program hosted by Nectara provides an intimate container where you can witness and be witnessed without judgement. This structured but flexible space will be co-created to ebb and flow according to the group’s unique needs and wishes.
It provides an environment where you can explore the nature of your psychedelic experience, the layers of meaning contained therein, and invaluable tools to propel your process of personal growth. With lifelong access to our library of resources, support is always available.
The facilitator of the integration program is Shiri Godasi, a trusted integration guide at Nectara. She is best known for her pioneering methods in the field of psychedelic integration and training psychedelic integration therapists.
Her role within the five weekly group calls is to lead an enjoyable, positive, and trauma-informed space where each person can share and participate in activities without pressure or fear of judgement.
During this phase, your personal journey will be honoured. Each group will co-create shared agreements to hold a safe space with mutual respect, consent, and respecting everyone’s boundaries.
Importantly, no one is required to do or say anything if they choose not to. All levels of participation are welcome, even if that means being a silent listener or observer for the entirety of the program.
Integration highlight:
Avoid losing precious integration opportunities with knowledgeable support that will equip you to foster lasting and meaningful change.
What is integration:
Psychedelic integration refers to ‘the process by which a psychedelic experience translates into positive changes in daily life’ (Frymann et al., 2022), without which this experience becomes transitory.
Integration of the psychedelic experience is an integral aspect of the process for those who wish to use this as a tool for significant personal, spiritual, and psychological change.
Risks of Non-integration:
There are three potential but common negative effects of not integrating the psychedelic experience properly (Aixalà, 2022).
1. Not taking full advantage of the experience:
Even after a positive experience, we may lose important insights or states of awareness due to a lack of integration or simply resulting from daily life crashing in after a psychedelic experience. From self-reports, hundreds of people who have had psychedelic experiences with or without an integration guide were profoundly different (Stolaroff, 2022).
For a transformative impact resulting from a psychedelic experience, good habits should be built on new foundations (Eisner, 2002). Largely, reports indicate that to have a transformative or therapeutic experience, failure to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by an experience with psychedelics results in a ‘waste of time’ (Aixalà, 2022)
2. Ego inflation:
Ego inflation refers to when the personality takes on aspects of the psychedelic experience in a way that creates a maladaptive personality structure. Our ego can absorb the insights of an experience inappropriately. Within the psychedelic space, we have access to multiple dimensions of experience which the ego can interpret falsely.
Susceptible to appropriating that experience, the ego can foster a self-absorbed and competitive spirituality; thus, the transcendental experience can become a hindrance to spiritual and personal growth (Aixalà, 2022; Hopkins, 2008).
3. Spiritual Bypassing:
Spiritual Bypass refers to a tendency of using a spiritual experience as an avoiding mechanism by calling upon grandiose concepts, such as transcendence, the unreality and impermanence of all things, the greater plan, or cosmic game (Aixalà, 2022).
Genuine contact with an ultimate reality and other such spiritual experiences can often result in a detachment from our own experiences (Masters, 2010). Integration helps us to ground these experiences in our daily life where we do not lose sight of our place in the world and how we approach the simplicity of everyday tasks, such as laundry.
References:
Aixalà, M. (2022). Psychedelic Integration. synergetic press.
Cowley-Court, T., Chenhall, R., Sarris, J. J., Carlos Bouso, J., Fernando Tófoli, L., Sátiro Opaleye, E., Schubert, V., & Perkins, D. (2023). Life after Ayahuasca: A Qualitative Analysis of the Psychedelic Integration Experiences of 1630 Ayahuasca Drinkers from a Global Survey. Natural Hallucinogens in Mental Health, 2(2), 201–221. https://doi.org/10.3390/psychoactives2020014
Eisner, B. (2002). Remembrances of LSD therapy past. https://erowid.org/culture/characters/eisner_betty/remembrances_lsd_therapy.pdf
Frymann, T., Whitney, S., Yaden, D. B., & Lipson, J. (2022). The Psychedelic Integration Scales: Tools for Measuring Psychedelic Integration Behaviors and Experiences. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.863247
Hopkins, J. (2008). Jung’s Warnings Against Inflation. In Hwa Buddhist Journal.
Masters, R. A. (2010). Spiritual bypassing : when spirituality disconnects us from what really matters. North Atlantic Books.
Stolaroff, M. J. (2022). Secret Chief revealed : conversations with Leo Zeff, pioneer in the underground psychedelic therapy movement. Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies.