This medicinal psychedelic retreat is helping women through their dating trauma
It’s no secret that psychedelic therapy has been becoming the new trend. It’s great for PTSD and working through deep trauma that can’t be touched through your current psyche. It seems to be a normalized dinner topic these days.
Recently a friend told me about a retreat in San Diego where she worked with a personal shaman to guide her through a psychedelic journey with mushrooms. She attended this retreat at a center called Kavana, a psychedelic refuge for women. This retreat has locations in both Mexico and San Diego. They take pride in offering more personalized healing journeys rather than large-scale retreats.
Kavana was created by Devora (Debbie) Elise Sostman, an integrative plant medicine facilitator and somatic practitioner. Her professional exploration of altered states of consciousness began at John Hopkins in their Psychedelic Research Center. She was especially interested in looking at the effects of the chemical psilocybin when used for anxiety or depression disorders. Since her studies she has facilitated hundreds of highly intentional and personalized healing experiences, which is what led to Kavana.
Sostman’s idea was to create a safe space for women who wanted to explore a deeper consciousness through psychedelic therapy and personal guidance. Sostman has hosted over 150 psychedelic journeys at her retreat. She has done deep research on how to conduct the correct dosage that will give the user a proper healing experience. Kavana offers a choice of a few different psychedelics. The most common is psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms), but there are other hallucinogen options such as LSD, MDMA, and ketamine.
There are different experiences to choose from. According to a participant, the pricing for group journeys ranges from $655 to $1,999, with a private journey costing an estimated $2,700. Neither option includes lodging accommodations or travel. This cost is purely for the amenities of the retreat site alongside the medicinal costs. This includes comprehensive services designed to support your entire healing process. It typically covers pre-retreat preparation, personalized psychedelic-assisted therapy, in-the-moment facilitation during the experience, and integration support afterward. The integration services include practices like somatic therapy, journaling, and breathwork to help you process and embody the insights gained. These elements work together to create a deeply transformative and supportive journey.
So when my friend was casually bringing all of this up at dinner, I was intrigued to learn what specifically led her to exploring psychedelics.
Her main topic to explore was her ability to love again. At 50 years old, normal therapy wasn’t cutting it for my friend. I continued to ask her about the benefits and side effects of her journey.
She opted for the personalized journey and chose psilocybin, which is most well known for its hallucinogenic effects that aid in the release of serotonin. This helps build new neuroplasticity in the mind. When you “build” neuroplasticity, you’re essentially training your brain to create fresh pathways that enhance cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation, and overall mental resilience. So essentially, it can help your brain heal from trauma and strengthen your cognitive abilities that are imperative to self-healing. CNN reported a study in 2023 showcasing these verified changes through documenting groups of psilocybin users by interviewing them before and after they had taken the drug.
I asked my friend to share each step of the process. She chose to go through an organization, Psychedelic Passage, that helps you find therapists who use psilocybin in states or countries where it is legal. You are then given an assessment and recommended therapist profiles to choose from. They provide a lot of information about how to choose the right therapist, how to choose the right medication, and even where to find test kits for that medication. They also provide information on what a journey could look like and stress that everyone’s journey is different. She chose Sostman with Kavana to lead her journey, which brought her to San Diego. She also chose to digest psilocybin in a pill form that could be made into an herbal tea.
Prior to her arrival, she and Sostman had three integration sessions, which included conversations about why she was seeking treatment, her background, and what could happen. Sostman encouraged the effect of letting go, and beautifully shared an ideal way to look at the medicine as “a metal detector of the mind”; she repeated that “it was not going to show you what you want to see but what you need to see.” This gave my friend comfort and readied her for the journey she was about to embark on. When she arrived, she and Sostman talked again about what could happen, preparing her for the possibility that she might twitch, throw up, or feel lightheaded. She was advised to welcome any sensation and to release these emotions and bodily functions without judgement. They did yoga and meditation prior to taking the medicine. She chose to drink the tea outside in a more natural setting. When she finished, they moved inside where she put on an eye mask and lay in a bed. She played music, her own playlist created just for the journey. Sostman started the journey with a meditation where she was asked to imagine herself in a canoe. She was urged to ask the canoe to take her where she wanted to go.
In the beginning, she started twitching and felt a block in her throat. She threw up after a few minutes and then the true journey began. She connected with the music and found that each song showed her a journey or aspect of her life that needed healing. She kept seeing lions in the trees, which represented a strong change happening. The visions for her were otherworldly but very comforting.
After the six-hour journey, she immediately had a mindset shift. The sensation of feeling “high” quickly dissipated. She felt weak because she had cried for most of the journey.
Her experience helped her realize that she had been holding on to a lot of self-doubt, grief, and unparalleled stress. Going into the journey, she had also been having a lot of neck and back pain that was now completely gone. Sostman sat with her for another two hours afterward, where they talked about what she had experienced. What she saw was so “out of this world” for her that at first, it was hard for her to understand how it would affect her life. However, she felt hopeful for the future and lighter going into it.
When she returned to New York, she realized that it was going to be a slow process to deeply integrate her learnings from this journey in San Diego. What she did know is that it was up to her to either put what she saw away and chalk it up to a nice experience or to continue to seek the meaning of it. She’s still gaining understanding of what she experienced but realizes things that would have affected her emotionally before no longer bother her in the same way. She found a humble acceptance in realizing that she had at least 45 years of trauma that she had been carrying around. She knew that wasn’t going to magically be erased within a six-hour journey, but she understood that she now had the tools to move forward.
She said to me, “Life is still going to be life,” but she was no longer afraid of it. This experience also helped her achieve the confidence she needed to take a chance on romance. Before the retreat, she hadn’t been on a date in four years. After her journey, she has gone on three dates so far this year–with plans to enjoy many more.
Through this journey of animalistic visions, vomiting, and crying, she found a way to open her heart to possibly finding love within herself and the world.
