VISION
PSYCHEDELIC REVOLUTION BEGINS IN PSYCHEDELIC EDUCATION
We focus on personal experience, supervised hands-on practice, and self-knowledge through personal transformation.
Our serious and profound hybrid residential-online three-year curriculum has an hour intensity of 1.400 hours plus dissertation (for those in the MA or PhD pathways). We emphasize in therapeutic models of transpersonal psychotherapy, knowledge and healing interventions from core shamanic lineages, and insights from modern psychedelic medicine research. The Psychedelic Therapy Training is a non-profit project from AWE Foundation.
We offer a Master of Arts in Psychedelic Therapy and a PhD in Psychedelic Studies through our partnership with Ubiquity University, and a Certificate for Transpersonal Psychotherapy through our partnership with EUROTAS (European Transpersonal Association).
Half of the program (700 hours) is committed to our non-residential program led by leaders and pioneers in the psychedelic field. The other half is committed to experiential work in our intensives: therapy retreats, dietas, initiations, and pilgrimages. Half of the intensives are focused on experiential transpersonal therapy, the other half take place in indigenous territories: A A'i-Cofan reservation in the Amazon, a Massango/Babongo village in Africa, and Wirikuta the peyote pilgrimage site in Mexico.
INDIGENOUS
WISDOM
TRANSPERSONAL
PSYCHOTHERAPY
PSYCHEDELIC RESEARCH
INTEGRATING TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOTHERAPY, INDIGENOUS WISDOM, AND FINDINGS FROM MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH
INTENSIVES
We have two ten-day intensives each year for a total of six intensives throughout the program.
Half of the intensives are retreats dedicated to experiential psychotherapy where the participants will have the opportunity to do personal work, healing, and self-knowledge while at the same time learning first hand from expert psychotherapists while they work with amplified states of consciousness, legitimate psychedelics, bodywork, gestalt, systemic constellations, transpersonal psychotherapy, and meditation.
The other half of the intensives consist of pilgrimages to indigenous territories where the students can begin to build relationships with authentic psychedelic communities and elders while learning from their shamanic traditions and power plants. We are usually received as locals as we have been developing relationships with these communities for many years. They have all gifted us tribal land inside their reservations where we have built small community houses which house our students during pilgrimage.
Through years of conversation with the political leaders and spiritual elders of these communities, the intensives in these territories are carefully designed to give voice to what these traditions want to show to the world, respecting and honoring their authentic ways.
NON RESIDENTIAL PROGRAM
The online classes will be led by teachers with vast experience in different fields of knowledge around psychedelic medicine and therapy. Each semester includes four to five modules, each of a new theme and with a new teacher. The online learning process involves 700 work hours, Students are expected to dedicate around 7 hours a week to the module. There is a 90 minute lecture each week with the teachers, plus complimentary reading, practical exercises, meetings with the tutors, and interaction in the forums.
INITIATIONS IN AMPLIFIED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
First 01 Semester
Historical and philosophical concepts in psychedelic therapy
Torsten Passie, Rick Doblin
Ethics and care
Kylea Taylor
Psychedelic Crisis and Harm reduction
Maria Carvalho & Ines Macedo
Preparation, Integration and After Care
Second 02 Semester
Transpersonal Psychology
Jorge Ferrer
Psychopharmacology
Ignacio Carrera
Ethnopharmacognosy
Jonathan Ott
Neuroscience
Robin Carhart Harris
Entheogenic Shamanism(s)
Susana Bustos
SIA THECI
Ai-Cofan reservation
10 days - Sucumbíos, Ecuador
The Cofan people are an ancestral indigenous tribe native to the Sucumbíos and Putumayo amazon regions of northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. They are experts in the knowledge of yage (ayahuasca). This pilgrimage takes part within two of their reservations in the jungle where we are able to have access to the oldest and most knowledgeable shamans of their tribe which never travel outside the jungle. It is not a private-western-influenced retreat center, we are welcomed by the whole community inside their villages and houses. They are offering students teachings and seven high-dose yagé ceremonies run by their most respected elders:
Taita Albertino Lucitante
Taita Atiambi-ai
Taita Querubin Queta
Grandmother Maria Toiquema
Grandmother Tntn Lucitante
Taita Tiberio Lucitante
Taita David Queta
Taita Gonzalo Criollo
...and support from the whole community
NOESIS
10 days - Guasca, Colombia
Our first transpersonal retreat incorporates enneagram and self-knowledge, gestalt, authentic movement, 5 rhythms, breathwork, core shamanism, and experiential dynamics around the inner healer, the triune brain, and love. There will be ample opportunities to have first-hand experience with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and group work.
EDUCATING THERAPISTS FOR A REVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Third 03 Semester
Psychopathology and mental health
Alejandro Napolitano & Anya Loizaga
Transpersonal approaches to mental health
Beatriz Vega
Psychosis, spiritual emergency, and spiritual competency
David Lukoff
MDMA assisted psychotherapy
MAPS MDMA Therapy Training (part A), Marcela Ot’alora, & Torsten Passie
Fourth 04 Semester
Ayahuasca
Anja Loizaga
Psychedelic mushrooms and Psilocybin
Malynn Utzinger
LSD
Torsten Passie
Iboga and Ibogaine
Jonathan Dickinson
Ketamine
ECSTASY
10 days - Guasca, Colombia
This retreat is a deep exploration around death, birth, and ecstasy. It also includes family and systemic constellation work for the wounded healer and the spirit. In addition to personal work, there will be space for therapeutic tools and models to be practiced. Students will begin to support supervised psychedelic sessions between each other.
PILGRIMAGE
10 days - Wirikuta, Mexico
Wirikuta is the main pilgrimage site for the Wixaritari-Huichol people. Each year hundreds of Huichol pilgrims journey to Wirikuta in search of the sacred peyote. Students will quest for vision in this sacred territory and perform mitote ceremonies with Huichol elders.
The Wixáritari identify the peyote with the deer and undertake an annual hunt with arrow and bow to obtain the Híkuri (Peyote). In Wixárica cosmogenesis it is in this place where the sun was born, Wirikuta is the center of the world, the place of the ancestor gods, the place where the sacred life of the tribe originates.
Fifth 05 Semester
Applied transpersonal psychotherapy
Jorge Ferrer
Entheogenic Shamanic Practices: Principles & Tools
Susana Bustos
Sound and Music
Joel Olivé
Somatic Therapies
Legal Panoramas for psychedelic therapy, research, and activism
Ismail Ali
Sixth 06 Semester
Social practice and supervision
Social practice is another area in which this program transcends the framework of a regular educational program, reaching into the power of cultivating an attitude of committed compassion and transpersonal activism towards health and wholeness. Students will be able to choose between projects in our partner psychedelic retreat centers and clinics, or projects conducted by the ONCA foundation or our partner non-profits. Each student will be assigned a supervisor or mentor who will support and supervise the psychedelic practice of the student performed during this time.
EMPTINESS
10 days - Bahia Solano, Colombia
Our third retreat explores links between psychedelic medicine, meditation practices, and oriental philosophies; especially Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Dzogchen. Most of the retreat is in silent meditation, including the psychedelic sessions.
IBOGA
INITIATION
15 days - Gabon, Africa
The Bwiti community in Mimongo is a mixture of Pygmaea, Massango, and Mitsogo shamans. They will offer us three initiation ceremonies: Initiation into Mabandji (possession trance), Missoku (consultation and healing), and Dissoumba (Bwiti). Students will be able to initiate in one of the three paths that they choose, and learn from the other two as observers. The village is two days into the jungle from Libreville the capital city (where the airport is) and each initiation will last many days, for this reason, this intensive has a duration of at least 15-20 days.