Integrating Ayahuasca and Psychotherapy: A Holistic Approach to Sustainable Mental Wellness
With the rise in publicity and media attention given to the potential physical and mental health benefits of ayahuasca psychotherapy and other Amazonian plant medicines, increasing numbers of people are travelling to South and Central America seeking treatment and resolution of both emotional difficulties and specific, often long-term mental health challenges.
Here at Pisatahua we work with many retreat participants who arrive hoping to seek support, treatment and clarity around challenges with their mental health and we’ve been working to understand how we can best use our retreats and approaches to support these goals.
We have found that retreat participants seeking this type of support generally fall into one of two categories.
The first is those retreat participants seeking support with more general and sometimes existentially oriented malaise such as “disconnection” or “dissatisfaction” with life and the second is those participants seeking the specific treatment of a diagnosed condition such as anxiety, depression or post- traumatic stress disorder.
While the promised improvement and resolution of both emotional difficulties and mental health challenges are all possible when working with Ayahuasca and other Amazonian plant medicines, experience has taught us that it is not always a straightforward undertaking. While the medicine alone can support this process, we are increasingly seeing that additional assistance is both deeply beneficial and often necessary for retreat participants hoping to experience significant long term and sustained improvements to their general well-being and mental health.
In response to this learning we made the decision to offer additional mental health support on our retreats and for the last two years have been working with onsite psychotherapists to develop our approaches to working with mental health and emotional well-being through onsite support and a comprehensive retreat integration program.
Since deciding to offer mental health and integration support as a part of our retreat programs we’ve had a lot of questions about what integration, psychotherapy and mental health support have to offer retreat participants and how these approaches support and inform the plant medicine work and shamanic practices we offer in our healing programs at Pisatahua.
Broadly speaking, we have come to see the way that the practices of working with both traditional plant medicine and western psychotherapy align to offer us deep awareness of our histories, patterns and the places in our lives where we feel caught or stuck and a path that leads to a greater sense of wholeness and alignment in our lives. While psychotherapeutic practices focus on the slow building of this awareness through reflective dialogue with a therapist, the plant medicines work offers these openings through visions and insights received in ceremony.
Here at Pisatahua, like many retreat centres in South America that work with international guests, we have learned that these rapid insights and deep healing can be lost when retreat participants return from retreat to their familiar situations, environments and relationships. In addition to this we understand that travelling to an unfamiliar environment and cultural context like the Amazon and working with approaches that invite us to meet our fears, face our shadows and deal with unprocessed emotional traumas can be challenging, confronting and anxiety provoking, especially for retreat participants managing additional challenges with their mental ill health.
This we see, is where psychotherapy can come into play, with its capacity to offer practically oriented emotional support and strategies for embedding the learning and healing from ayahuasca back into our day to day lives.
At Pisatahua we’ve taken these insights and developed a two-pronged approach to embedding psychotherapy into our programs, through the provision of practically focused mental health support from our onsite psychotherapist during retreats and the development of a comprehensive retreat integration program.
While the mental health support we offer entails a framework of pre-retreat screening and assessment and general onsite support for the duration of the retreat, the integration program offers a comprehensive integration guide and workbook alongside post ceremony group sessions with our healer and regular individual sessions with our therapist.
It is our hope that this approach will allow participants to feel safe and supported at all stages of their retreat journey and to feel that they’ve got the necessary supports and tools to translate the healing and insights gained on retreat into positive long improvements in emotional well being, mental health and overall quality of life.
Some experts are suggesting that ayahuasca and other forms of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy might one day take the place of psychotherapy and more traditional approaches to working with mental illness. Our choice to work with a mental health specialist here at Pisatahua ultimately represents our belief that neither is better but that both can support and inform the other, providing a safe supportive environment in which participants can maximise their experiences of growth and healing on retreat and continue to experience lasting and sustained benefits long after their return home.
Spread the word. Share this post!