Ceremonia is a house on the Cascadia coast for guided psychedelic experience and the long, careful work that surrounds it. Preparation before. Presence during. A soft place to land after.
We believe the extraordinary deserves to be treated as ordinary care: prepared for slowly, held well, and woven back into a life that can carry it.
0Practice founded
0Ceremonies held
0Integration hours
0Guests per circle, at most
One night, five movements
The CeremonyArc
Every stay at Ceremonia follows the same five-movement shape. As you read, the light of this page will travel with you: from daylight, through twilight, into the deep, and back out to dawn. Let it.
IMovement One · Weeks before
Preparation
The ceremony begins long before you arrive. Over three weeks you meet your facilitators, write a letter to the person you hope to meet inside yourself, and let the ordinary noise of your life grow quiet enough to hear what you actually came for.
Two preparation circles, held by video or in the tea room
Full medical & psychological screening, honestly applied
An intention letter, sealed until Integration
Gentle dietary and media guidance for the final ten days
IIMovement Two · Arrival day
Threshold
You cross a literal threshold: a cedar doorway between the road and the garden, and you leave your phone in a small wooden box beside it. What follows is an afternoon designed to lower your shoulders. Warm broth. A room of your own. The sea, doing its patient work.
Arrival tea and the handing-over of devices
A private room facing either forest or water
Opening circle at dusk, intentions spoken aloud once
The quiet hour: no speech from last light to lamplight
IIIMovement Three · The ceremony night
The Deep
There is a place under language. The night is built so you can go there and be entirely unafraid of the dark: two facilitators for every four guests, music played and sung live, a hand available at all hours without ever being imposed. You are accompanied the way a shoreline accompanies the sea.
Guided session in the round hall, firelight and wool
Two facilitators per four guests, awake until dawn
Live music: cello, voice, and the house harmonium
Nothing is asked of you. Nothing is scheduled. You are simply kept.
The mandala blooms as you travel
IVMovement Four · The morning after
Return
Dawn does not ask anything of you, and neither do we. The morning after is deliberately empty: sunrise broth on the east porch, silence until noon, the garden path if your legs want it. The most important hours of the whole arc are these unhurried ones, when what you found begins to settle.
Sunrise broth and sea air, no conversation expected
Silence held by the whole house until midday
First-words circle: one sentence each, nothing more
An afternoon of rest, warm pools, and slow food
VMovement Five · The year around it
Integration
The ceremony is one night. The work is the year around it. You leave with a calendar, not a memory: six integration sessions with the facilitator who sat with you, a monthly community circle, and your intention letter, returned to you at the moment it will mean the most.
Six one-to-one integration sessions across six months
Monthly community circles, in person and by video
Your sealed intention letter, opened at session three
Warm referral to licensed therapists wherever deeper work calls
Preparation · The mandala blooms as you travel
A practice you can keep
The house breath
Every ceremony at Ceremonia opens and closes with the same cadence: four counts in, four held, six let go, two of rest. It is the first thing we teach and the only thing we insist you take home. Try it now. Three rounds is enough to feel the floor of yourself.
Inhale
4 counts
Hold
4 counts
Exhale
6 counts
Rest
2 counts
Guided by the ring. Stop any time.
Ready·
The people who keep the room
Held by steady hands
Nobody facilitates at Ceremonia with fewer than three hundred attended ceremonies and a clinical or lineage training we can name out loud. These are the three who will know your name before you arrive.
Mariam Osei
Lead facilitator · Head of house
Mariam has sat through more than seven hundred nights in the round hall, and she still arrives an hour early to warm the room. Trained first as a hospice nurse, she brings the same conviction to ceremony that she brought to the bedside: that no one should meet the vast unaccompanied.
MSc Psychology, Univ. of British Columbia · Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, Meridian Institute · 12 yrs hospice & palliative care
Élodie Vasseur
Integration therapist
Élodie is the person you will see the most and remember the longest. She holds the six months after your ceremony the way a gardener holds a season: patiently, and with an unreasonable faith in what is already planted. Her integration room has one rule, written above the door: nothing you found is too strange to say here.
Registered Clinical Counsellor (BC) · MA Counselling Psychology, Cascadia Graduate School · Trainings in IFS & somatic experiencing
Tomás Reyes-Calder
Breath & somatics · Night keeper
Tomás keeps the night. He is the low voice by the fire, the cellist at three in the morning, the one who taught the house its breath. Guests tend to describe him the same way: I never once saw him hurry. He apprenticed for nine years with ceremonial breathwork lineages in Oaxaca before making the coast his home.
Certified Breathwork Facilitator, Pneuma School · BC Emergency Medical Responder · 9 yr apprenticeship, Sierra Norte lineage houses
CEREMONIA CLINICAL · PROTOCOL DOSSIER 04-C
For clinicians & researchers
The warmth above is not a substitute for rigor; it is the delivery mechanism for it. Every element of the Ceremonia arc maps onto contemporary protocol structure for psychedelic-assisted therapy, and the entire operation is designed to adopt clinical governance the day regulation permits it. This section restates the house in the language of evidence.
01 · Screening & exclusion
Structured intake mirrors published trial criteria: personal or first-degree family history of psychotic-spectrum disorders, uncontrolled cardiovascular conditions, and contraindicated medication classes are absolute exclusions. Approximately 22% of applicants are declined or deferred, and every deferral includes a referral pathway.
02 · Session structure
The five-movement arc corresponds to the preparation / dosing-session / integration architecture used in modern trials: two manualized preparation sessions, one attended experiential session at a 2:4 facilitator-to-participant ratio, and six manualized integration sessions over 24 weeks. Where regulation permits, the experiential session proceeds under licensed medical oversight.
03 · Measurement
Outcomes are tracked with validated instruments at baseline, +1 week, +8 weeks, and +26 weeks: WEMWBS for wellbeing, MEQ-30 for experience quality, and a structured adverse-event log reviewed monthly by our external clinical advisor. Participants may opt out of data collection without affecting their care.
04 · Facilities & training
The round hall meets ambulance-access and emergency-egress standards; a BC-licensed Emergency Medical Responder is on site for every ceremony night. All facilitators complete 120 supervised hours before holding a room, plus annual recertification in psychological first aid and trauma-informed practice.
Osei, M., Vasseur, É., & Aldana, R. (2025). Retreat-based preparation and integration scaffolding: a naturalistic cohort of 412 participants. Journal of Psychedelic Praxis, 7(2), 114–131.
Whitfield, H., & Nakamura, S. (2024). Facilitator ratio and subjective safety during attended experiential sessions. Cascadia Review of Consciousness Medicine, 3(4), 88–102.
Aldana, R., et al. (2026). Silence-first morning protocols and 26-week wellbeing retention. Integration Studies Quarterly, 2(1), 9–27.
Vasseur, É. (2025). The intention letter as a fixed integration anchor: a mixed-methods analysis. Journal of Psychedelic Praxis, 7(3), 201–216.
Protocol dossier, training curricula, and de-identified outcome summaries are available to licensed clinicians and IRB-affiliated researchers on request.
We make no medical claims. Ceremonia is not a treatment, a cure, or a therapy substitute, and we will correct anyone, including our own marketing, that suggests otherwise.
We say no often, and kindly. Screening exists to protect you, not to fill rooms. Roughly one in five applicants is declined or deferred, always with a referral and never with a fee.
Consent is continuous. You may pause, stop, or leave any part of the arc at any moment, and touch of any kind is offered only by prior, specific, revocable agreement.
We operate only where the law allows. Programs run exclusively within jurisdictions and frameworks where this work is legal, and our clinical wing exists so that we never have to improvise on this point.
Reciprocity is a budget line, not a sentiment. Five percent of every retreat fee goes, audited and published annually, to the lineage communities whose practices this field is built on.
Aftercare has no expiry date. If something from your ceremony surfaces two years later, you call us, and someone who knows your name answers.
Three ways through the door
Retreats & tiers
Every tier includes full screening, the house breath practice, and our no-questions cancellation care. Pricing is published because asking should never be the awkward part.
One day · No medicine
The Still Point
$480 per guest
A single daylight retreat for those beginning, or simply curious: the house breath, a facilitated intention session, the gardens, the pools, and lunch grown thirty metres from your chair. Many guests come here first. Some find it was all they needed.
The complete five-movement arc as it was designed to be walked: three weeks of preparation, four nights at the house around one attended ceremony, and six months of integration with the facilitator who sat with you. Four guests per circle, never more.
For those in a true season of change. Everything in The Quiet Bloom, extended to a full year of companionship: twelve integration sessions, quarterly day returns to the house, and a standing seat at every community circle. The slowest, deepest way we know how to do this.
Fictional offerings with fictional pricing · Sliding-scale places are held in every circle
When you are ready
The door is already open. We keep the room warm.
Invitations begin with a conversation, not a checkout. Write to us, tell us nothing more than what draws you, and someone who will actually be in the room writes back within three days.