Psilocybin Sessions
We offer various Psilocybin Sessions that use a body-focused healing model and holistic approach to treatment.
There is an option for a 4 day or 9 day Program
Psychotherapist Led, Psilocybin Therapy for Individuals
Psychedelic Somatic Institute offers professional, psychotherapist led, individual psychotherapy using psilocybin mushrooms (truffles). The programs are specifically designed for people experiencing mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, dissociation, complex childhood trauma, addiction or existential concerns. PSI is not a ceremonial group retreat center or a sitter program, it is a clinical program staffed by US licensed psychotherapists specifically trained in the use of psychedelic medicines for mental health. We provide intensive psychedelic treatment in Amsterdam, and conduct clinical training for mental health professionals in the US and Europe.
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Psychedelic medicines are experience dependant meaning they change their expression and outcomes depending on the context in which they are used. Unlike psychiatric medications such as Prozac where it doesn’t matter if you take it alone, or with friends, or in a therapy setting, psychedelics depend heavily on factors such as your internal psychological state, your assessment of whether your environment is able to support deep processing, and your sense of the person you are working with. For people wanting to engage with these substances recreationally, spiritually or simply out of curiosity, a ceremonial or group context will be fine and provide benefit. If you are looking to engage psychedelics as a medicine for working with mental health conditions, you’ll want an individual, one-on-one, psychotherapy setting with a trained clinician. The processing and individual focus required for deep personal healing is simply not available in a group setting. Your system will naturally limit the depth of your work. This is an appropriate evaluation of your environment and what it can and cannot provide.
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Psilocybin is a powerful Tier-2 medicine (see page 28 of the PSIP White Paper) meaning that it is remarkably transformative for the person whose system is ready for it. Whereas Tier 1 medicines such as cannabis and MDMA process the traumatic events in a person’s life, and establish a foundation of nervous system health, psilocybin being a Tier 2 medicine can work much deeper. It dismantles and reassembles your identity, the ‘I’, that got formed by those events. Psilocybin works with the very fabric of reality that your system constructed and is such an entrenched layer of programing that it appears fully real versus being a constructed sense of the world that was put into place very early in life. Dismantling your sense of self, other and reality is, of course, destabilizing, and requires integration sessions. Psilocybin therapy is not about the number of sessions or dose so much as it is about the trust you have with yourself, your environment and the clinician as you go into the unknown.
‘Can this team hold me if I fall apart?’ is a good question. The more the answer is ‘yes’ the deeper you will go in your sessions. For many of our clients, falling apart is the ideal response. Psilocybin psychotherapy is not about pleasurable experiences or interesting insight, it is about core dismantling and corrective emotional and physical experiences based in human psychological development.
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It is for this reason that we engage all of our clients with Tier-1 work with six hours of cannabis assisted psychotherapy during their stay with us prior to engaging psilocybin. We see cannabis as an equal partner to psilocybin in this reconstructive process as it effectively cracks dissociation and more generally prepares a person’s autonomic nervous system for the psychological shifts psilocybin demands.
The PSI program is an intensive four or eight day stay at our location in Amsterdam.
Magic truffles are the sclerotia of Psilocybin mushrooms that are not technically the same "mushrooms" as "mushrooms". They are masses of mycelium that contain the hallucinogenic chemicals psilocybin and psilocin.
In October 2007, the prohibition of hallucinogenic or "magic mushrooms" was announced by the Dutch authorities.
The ban on the mushrooms did not outlaw the hallucinogenic species in sclerotium form, due to authorities believing it to be weaker than the mushrooms. The psilocybin truffles which once made little sales became the only legal option to produce. Today smart shops in the Netherlands offer magic truffles as a legal alternative to the outlawed mushrooms.
Psilocybin Truffles