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Increasing the Safety of Ayahuasca Sessions

A harm reduction course
for facilitators in
non-traditional contexts

Apply for admission to the course

About the Course

6 months / 45 hours of clases
Every week 1 hour of new video lessons 

90 min Q&A call every two weeks

 

Over the past five years, ICEERS has collaborated with a multitude of guides, facilitators, sitters, researchers, psychologists, and doctors to gather better practices to reduce risks and increase the safety and ethics of ayahuasca ceremonies in non-traditional contexts.

We poured everything we learned into this course to reduce risks and enhance safety of ceremonial plant work.

 
New videos every Monday

One hour of new video lessons every week offer in-depth knowledge in ways to improve your practice. Everything is designed so you can adapt the course to your schedule watch at your own pace 

Live dialogues every other Thursday. 

Twelve live sessions with instructors and guest speakers to go deeper into topics, answer questions, share experiences and learn collectively. Live every other Thursday at 19:00-20:30h CEST. A recording will be available for those who cannot attend.

Download specialized resources and protocols

You’ll receive health questionnaires, release forms, emergency protocols, and other guides to mitigate risks and increase the safety of your sessions.

See Course Calendar

Why are we doing this course?

 

The globalization of ayahuasca outside of its Amazonian context has generated new potential benefits, as well as potential risks that affect guides, participants, and the plant community as a whole.

This can involve physical or psychological risks, drug interactions, dangerous interpretations of experiences, or more subtle issues such as dual relationships between guides and participants. Plant medicine sessions in the Global North can bring certain challenges which often do not arise in traditional contexts.

Finding valid information on these topics is not easy. Many facilitators working outside the Amazon don't have easy access to support from doctors, psychologists, and other professionals.

In this context it is essential to incorporate a harm reduction perspective and prevention strategies to minimize the potential consequences that legal or illegal plant consumption could pose to individuals or societies.

That is why ICEERS presents this prevention initiative to increase safety for people who are working with plants outside the countries of origin.

 

Why ICEERS?

For more than a decade ICEERS has been hosting dialogues between facilitators, participants, clinicians, researchers, psychologists, and psychiatrists about ayahuasca safety and ethics.

Our Support Centre has handled more than a thousand inquiries on integration and medical questions. 

All this knowledge was distilled into this easily accessible online course we are now offering to the community.

Program


Our eight-module program covers the most important considerations for increasing safety for facilitators and participants. The course combines theoretical learning with live dialogues with instructors.
  
SEE FULL COURSE CALENDAR

Instructors

David Londoño

David Londoño is a Colombian psychologist, psychotherapist, and integration specialist with 20 years of experience in traditional Indigenous medicines.

As part of his training, he lived for six years in the Peruvian Amazon, where he settled with the aim of deepening his knowledge of psychotherapy, traditional medicine, and the bridge between the two.Throughout his career, he has worked in various contexts and cultures, including in Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Spain, where he, among other things, coordinated therapeutic teams in treatment centers that employ master plants and trained care staff in integration practices

He is currently part of the ICEERS team, where he coordinates the Support Center that offers integration sessions to people from across the world who have had difficulties with psychedelics. He also teaches courses on integration, ethics, safety, and good practice in the therapeutic application of master plants in non-native contexts.

Jerónimo Mazarrasa

Jerónimo Mazarrasa has more than twenty years of experience in the world of ayahuasca. He is the Director of Social Innovation at ICEERS and founding member of the Platform for the Defense of Ayahuasca (Plantaforma). He traveled extensively in South America researching a wide range of ayahuasca practices encompassing Indigenous, mestizo, religious, and Global North perspectives. For the last five years, he has focused on how to integrate the plant medicine ceremonial contexts outside their countries of origin. He has dialogued with hundreds of facilitators to establish minimum safety standards and self regulation processes for the ceremonial plants community.

Marc Aixalà

Marc Aixalà is a practicing psychologist, psychotherapist, and certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator who specializes in supporting people facing challenging experiences with expanded states of consciousness. He worked at the KosmiCare psychedelic crisis intervention service since 2010. He founded the ICEERS Support Center in 2013 and has assisted hundreds of cases. Marc has collaborated with facilitators from different countries to promote safer psychoactive plant practices. He is trained in the MAPS MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and is currently a psychedelic therapist in clinical trials involving psilocybin. He is the author of the book Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness.

José Carlos Bouso

José Carlos Bouso is ICEERS' Scientific Director. He is a clinical psychologist with a PhD in Pharmacology. He studied at the Autonomous University of Madrid, the IIB-Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute in Barcelona, and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute in Barcelona. He previously developed studies on the therapeutic effects of MDMA ("ecstasy") and psychopharmacological research on the acute and long-term neuropsychiatric effects of many plant-based and synthetic substances. As the Scientific Director of ICEERS, José Carlos oversees investigation on the potential benefits of psychoactive medicines for public health including cannabis, ayahuasca, and ibogaine. He has co-authored numerous scientific articles and several book chapters.

Constanza Sánchez Avilés

Constanza Sánchez Avilés is the Director of Law, Policy and Human Rights at ICEERS. She is  a political scientist with a PhD in International Law and International Relations. Her main areas of work and research are national and international drug control policy and the intersection between drug control, human rights, and social justice. From 2007 to 2013  she was a lecturer and researcher at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). She has been a visiting professor at the University of Miami (2010), the University of San Diego (2012),  and research assistant at the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO) in the United Kingdom (2013). 

Mijal Schmidt

Mijal is an Integration Psychologist at ICEERS Support Center - El faro. She is a clinical psychologist specialized in crisis intervention, clinical psychology in hospitals, and therapeutic accompaniment. For 10 years she has been working with master plants and as an integrator of psychedelic experiences from a clinical perspective. She holds a master's degree in musicology, through which she has investigated the power of sacred songs (ikaros) and studied their transmission in the liminal space of interspecies communication.
She founded and directed the Lazo y Voz Clinical Intervention Organization and coordinated various interdisciplinary teams treating patients and families.

Frequently Asked Questions

About the course

Agenda

Fees

Others

Requirements 

This course is intended for people who facilitate or host ayahuasca ceremonies and who want to enhance the safety and ethics of their work.

 

This course is for you if:
  • You are someone who facilitates, supports, or organizes ayahuasca sessions.
  • You want to increase safety for yourself and those participating in your sessions.
  • You want to enhance your work with validated harm reduction protocols for physiological, psychological, and legal safety.
  • This course is specially indicated for you if you feel don't need this course.
This course is NOT for you if:
  • You want to learn the energetic, ritual, or ceremonial aspects of working with ayahuasca. That's a different training which takes many years of personal commitment to learn.
  • You are looking for an introductory (or advanced) course on shamanism. ICEERS will not teach this.
  • You want to learn how to be a ceremonial guide. Such work cannot be properly learned in an online course like this.

Admissions and Fees

In order to make the course accessible to students from different countries, we have adjusted the price according to the country where you reside.

A countries - 135 €
Residents of Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, among others.

B countries - 195 €
Residents of Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, South Africa, among others.

C countries
- 470€ in a single payment (save 25€) or
- 495€ in two monthly payments of 247.50€
Residents of European area countries, USA, Canada, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, among others.

You can see the full list of A, B and C countries here.

Additionally, there is a limited number of scholarships for people who can demonstrate financial need, risk of social exclusion, or who belong to marginalized or underrepresented groups. Until April 2nd you can apply for scholarship during the registration process. 

All prices above include obligatory 21% Spanish VAT.
Apply for admission to the course

Towards safer practices
in ceremonial plant work
in non-traditional contexts