Frequently Asked Questions.

Plant medicine has proven to be safe and effective in addressing common mental health challenges (anxiety, depression, addictive disorders, PTSD, amongst others), as well as improving well-being and performance in healthy individuals, benefiting from improvements in cognition, mood, behaviour, brain function, and social connectedness.

At Behold Retreats, we put our customers first. We provide safe, legal, and luxurious environments for your journeys of self-discovery and transformation. We work with the highest quality therapists and coaches, and adhere to the highest medical and safety standards to provide the best available context for our guests.

We provide a convenient end to end service that includes education, therapy/coaching, travel to a retreat, and integration of your experience into your daily life. We also provide post-retreat support to our customers, connecting you with sustainable practices to maintain positive momentum.

Behold Retreats is focused on improving the performance and well-being of high-performing individuals, and to support them in connecting with their purpose and inner strength. Our motivation to work with this group is that they are disproportionately well-placed to improve our world, to spread the message of the importance and potential of plant medicine, and therefore begin to make more available (democratize) legal and economic access for all.

Our customers are motivated to do deep introspective work to improve the quality of their own lives, as well as those around them. For those who are interested in plant medicine for primarily recreational purposes, we would encourage you to look elsewhere.

All of our programs emphasize work during preparation (pre-retreat) and integration (post-retreat). While the retreat itself is obviously of great importance, high quality preparation and integration will set you up to maximize the sustainable benefits for your life.

During the retreat, you can expect to have breakthroughs and realizations that if implemented, can bring significant improvements to your quality of life. While these realizations are often described as “ineffable” or impossible to describe, the opportunities / realizations typically fit into one these three broad categories:

1. Opportunities for improving how you relate to yourself (e.g. being more loving towards yourself, stop blaming yourself or being so hard on yourself).
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2. Opportunities for improving how you relate to others (e.g. being more patient, empathetic, understanding. Seeing your loved ones as perfect as they are). 
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3. Opportunities for improving how you relate to the world and environment (e.g. how you can improve the world, how to live more consciously, sustainably, etc)

These realizations that become available through the wisdom of plant medicine are often described as feeling “more real” than everyday waking reality. The key in our experience is to integrate these experiences – and to weave the opportunities for improvement into your daily life.There are many stories of personal breakthroughs and transformations available online, and we would encourage our customers to spend a bit of time reading about them or watching them on YouTube.

At Behold Retreats, we work alongside our customers to identify a program and retreat experience that is suited to you and your needs. We will guide you along the number of decisions to be made, which includes, for example:

1. What plant medicine is right for me (e.g. Ayahuasca, San Pedro, or Psilocybin mushrooms).
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2. Where would I like to have my retreat (Amazon, Costa Rica, Netherlands, Portugal, etc)
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3. Would I prefer to go alone, with a partner, or with friends? Why?
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4. Do I want to do a private retreat, or share the experience with others?
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5. What should I do directly after my retreat? Should I take time off, or return to work?

As we progress through life, it is common for our ways of thinking to become more “hard-wired” over time. We become lazy or “efficient” in our cognition, and our response to stimuli from the world becomes more automatic, almost pre-determined. It can be useful to think about that friend or family member who has become so rigid in their ways of thinking, that you already know how they will respond to some piece of news or information. 

Like it or not, this hardwiring, or loss in neuroplasticity is happening to the majority, and research has shown that the strength of our Default Mode Network (DMN) plays a crucial role. Given the amount of stimulus and the complexity of the world, our DMN simplifies and automates our response to what our brains come to consider as an overwhelming amount of information. In a positive light, this can be seen as necessary and energy-efficient. However, this can also be considered as loss of human consciousness and potential.

When we work with plant medicine, the activity in our DMN is temporarily dampened, and we are provided unprecedented access to our own cognition. We experience a sort of reconciliation between the respective components of our brain. fMRI scans have shown that under the influence of plant medicine, the neurology of an individual looks similar to a practiced monk who has meditated for 20,000+ hours.In a sense, plant medicine opens a door and lights a path to improved and expanded states of consciousness that can be made available for all.

Through even a temporary experience in these states supported by plant medicine, people typically see and feel how they can make improvements to their own lives. Additionally, it is quite common for people to take up contemplative practices (mindfulness, meditation) to experience the benefits in a more sustainable fashion.

For all of our customers, we do extensive medical and psychological screening to ensure you are a suitable candidate for plant medicine therapy. Some plant medicines (e.g. Ayahuasca) are more physically intensive than others, and so dietary changes are recommended ahead of your retreat experience.

In all cases, we will guide you along the way to ensure your safety and security.

We protect the privacy and confidentiality of all our clients, in recognition of the stigma that can surround the topic of plant medicine. However, we believe it is important for us to be able to have conversations about mental well-being, and to begin to break down the stigmas in relation to mental health as well as plant medicine.

To this extent, we encourage and support our clients to spread the message as and where they feel comfortable to do so.

Please feel free to reach out directly and we will answer whatever other questions you may have. We would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that we recommend all prospective clients to do their own research to make a fully informed decision on participating in plant medicine.