About this Retreat
Nicole Redmountain is a mother, herbalist, integral therapist, anthropologist, mentor, facilitator and conductor of ceremonies with sacred plants, as well as nature's elements.
Nicole has worked with ayahuasca for the last 20 years - of these, 12 years alongside indigenous peoples from the amazon (Huni Kuin and Yawanawá), as well as learned from other tratidions from the Brazilian coast (Tupinambá, Guarani).
Learning from midwives, herbalists, curandeiros and curandeiras from diverse indigenous traditions in North, Central and South America, Nicole focused her healing particularly with the medicines of elements, sacred circles for women, offering cacau ceremonies, and other ecotherapies and tools focused on ancestral practices and wisdom.
She is co-founder of Munay Vale Encantado (Heart Medicine Enchanted Valley), in Juquitiba, Brasil - amid the atlatntic rainforest - where she and her husband work offering spiritual retreats, living experiences, volunteering, workshops and individual healing. The center joins traditions from earth centered people, with herbalism, sustainability, natural building, permaculture and deep ecology.
She also has a small hand-crafted herbal business called Raiz do Meu Ser, offering shamanic crafts and nature's medicines.
She loves supporting people in their self-discovery and healing journeys, helping them reconnect to the greater community of life, to the sacred aspects of living, and to finding their inner medicine, purpose, and bliss.
Details of this retreat
In a time of collective human crisis, nature’s sacred medicines have moved out of forests and deserts to find themselves in cities and centers offering westerners the possibility for deep healing, transformation and a more integrated and harmonious way of living. Ceremony and connection with these sacred plants can offer us great insight, but sustaining change and healing usually comes with how you prepare, integrate and work with what you accessed in your experience.
Although the sacred and ancestral dimensions have always been an integral part of traditional people’s belief systems and existence, they are not commonly a part of our western paradigm. As much as we possess this wisdom in our bodies, most of us have forgotten how to learn and walk alongside these mystical experiences, deeply connected to the greater web of life. In addition, many who come into contact with non-ordinary states of consciousness prompted by the connection with sacred plants return soon after into a material western framework that lacks the community, as well as the language and tools to embrace and create a container that supports people who are undergoing these spiritual awakenings. Thus, the guidance and structuring of these precious experiences in integration after ceremonies and psychedelic sessions is an essential part of the process, that allows us to move towards wholeness.
In our one-on-one session, we will collect elements from your experience looking at setting (place and location, structure of ceremony or session, conductor, music, therapist, group..) and set (what was your preparation, state of mind, purpose, knowledge of the work, diet, emotions, etc) to create a map of the territory in which you experienced this non-ordinary state of consciousness. Here we will also collect feelings, sensations, memories, and insights, embracing the psychological and emotional dimensions of this experience. We will look at the subconscious and spiritual material brought up by these sacred plants.
In this context we might focus on different levels of integration depending on the experiences you might have had:
- Organizing internally, reflecting and weaving connections between what you have accessed in ceremony and your life, expanding the benefits of the experience;
- Dealing with challenging and hard situations during ceremony (confusion, panic attacks, strange thoughts or physical reactions/discomforts)
- Working with the emergency of traumatic memories, loss of control and fear that might have emerged during the experience.
- Working to ground and balance sensations and feelings causing distress that are lingering days AFTER ceremony: anxiety, paranoia, sadness, fear, confusion.
Stepping into work with sacred plant medicines is much akin to an initiation - a rite of passage where we leave behind what is known to temporarily step into a limitless realm of Great Mystery, beyond the mind and day-to-day consciousness with which we perceive and operate. The sacred plants come into play as friends and spirit guides, reminding us that we are responsible to this earth and hold power to learn, grow, change and heal.
Within this understanding, I support spiritual seekers to find and create a familiar roadmap of the entheogenic experience, with which they can navigate, helping to translate portions of this spiritual realm and its language of metaphor and time, into something more palpable. The source of my framework in which I operate is seated on traditional Brazilian indigenous wisdom and practice (native groups from the Amazon that I worked alongside for 12 years), in addition to the empirical knowledge gained from working directly 20 years with the plants in ceremonial context, and with spirit guides. This is a place where we form bridges between the psychedelic experience and your personal life, making it relevant and meaningful to you.
OTHER ONLINE SERVICES THAT I OFFER:
Preparation for ceremony with forest medicines: Shamanic Protocols and grounding for entering your psychedelic/spiritual experience (90-minute session)
Inner Medicine Mentoring - Packages of 4 - 12 mentoring sessions (90 minute each session)