OUR APPROACH

THE CONTAINER IS THE WORK

A psychedelic experience can be profound. But an experience alone is not the work.

What happens before matters. Who is sitting beside you matters. Your body, your history, your relationships, and your recovery matter. What happens when things become difficult matters. And what you do with the experience when you return to ordinary life matters.

That’s why a Merkaba Retreat isn’t built around medicine.

It’s built around you.

There is no single ingredient that makes a Merkaba Retreat what it is. The container is the work.

WE DON’T BELIEVE ONE LENS IS ENOUGH.

Human beings are too complex to be understood through a single framework. You are not only your psychology. You are not only your nervous system. You are not only your trauma or your spiritual experiences. Our work draws from multiple ways of understanding what it means to heal, change, awaken, and become more fully ourselves.

CLINICAL WISDOM

Psychology, trauma awareness, attachment, addiction, sexuality, relationships, mental health, and clinical discernment help us recognize patterns, respect complexity, and ask better questions.

RECOVERY WISDOM

Recovery has taught us to respect both transformation and vulnerability—to understand addiction, compulsive patterns, sobriety, relapse, craving, and the temptation to confuse an extraordinary experience with lasting change. Not everything that feels liberating leads to freedom.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

We make room for mystery, devotion, consciousness, prayer, silence, and the sacred. We have our own spiritual practices and traditions, but you are not required to believe what we believe. Your experience does not need our interpretation in order to be meaningful.

RELATIONSHIP

Healing does not happen in isolation. How you relate to yourself, to us, and to the people you love can reveal as much as any extraordinary experience. Relationship doesn’t simply surround the work. Relationship reveals the work.

EMBODIMENT

Breath. Movement. Kundalini & Hatha Yoga. Sound. Rest. Yoga Nidra. Nervous-system reset. Sometimes understanding comes through insight. Sometimes it comes through the body.

CEREMONY + INTEGRATION

Ceremony can open something. Integration asks what you are going to do with what opened. We hold them as one continuous movement—because insight becomes meaningful when it begins to enter the way you actually live.

THE MEDICINE IS NOT THE RETREAT.

At Merkaba, we work with a specific and intentionally limited group of psychedelic and earth medicines:

Psilocybin · Bufo · Kambo · Rapé · Cacao

And a Merkaba Retreat does not have to include medicine at all. We don’t approach medicines as a menu of experiences to collect, assume that more medicine means deeper transformation, or begin by asking which medicine you want.

We begin with you.

If medicine becomes part of your retreat, it is considered within the larger arc of the work and discussed openly beforehand.

Sometimes medicine may be appropriate. Sometimes less is appropriate. Sometimes none at all.

THE MEDICINE SERVES THE RETREAT.
THE RETREAT DOES NOT SERVE THE MEDICINE.

SAFETY IS NOT A FORM YOU SIGN.

Safety is an ongoing practice of attention and discernment.

Every Merkaba guest completes an independent medical screening with our Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner who partners with Merkaba Retreats for medical screenings. The screening considers health history, medications, potential interactions, contraindications, and other factors that may affect what is appropriate.

Guests pay directly, and when the retreat is booked, the screening cost is credited toward the retreat total.

But medical screening is only one part of discernment.

Something can be medically permissible and still not be wise for a particular person, at a particular moment, in a particular context.

So we keep listening.

We would rather disappoint an expectation than override a concern.

INTEGRATION BEGINS BEFORE THE RETREAT.

We don’t believe integration starts the morning after an experience. It begins before you arrive.

We begin with relationship, intention, preparation, medical screening, and understanding the life you’re actually living. Not simply: What do you want to experience? But: What are you hoping will become different because of it?

There is space to slow down. To talk. Rest. Move. Feel. Question. Make meaning—or resist making meaning too quickly. Not every experience needs to be immediately understood.

Eventually, you go home. Back to your relationships. Your work. Your recovery. Your habits. Your responsibilities. Your Tuesday morning. That’s where the retreat continues. What changes now? Integration isn’t turning an extraordinary experience into a beautiful story. It's allowing what happened to change how you live.