Meet your facilitators
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.
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. Guests wanting to figure things out on their own often realise that if support was available, a few missteps could have been avoided; 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.
Benefits of integration
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.
