A grief tending ceremonial psilocybin retreat within ancient coastal forest rooted in regenerative community life, in partnership with The Grief Space
São Luís, Portugal
24 - 30 May
return to life
Rooted Healing and The Grief Space are offering retreats seeded in the medicine of grief tending, nature, psilocybin and ceremony.
This work is centred around the exploration and integration of grief, in all its forms, to cultivate healing and belonging, and to create a new relationship with both grief and life. This is a process of emerging, surrendering and remembering, where your true essence is enlivened and nourished.
Whether you are grieving a personal bereavement or loss, tending to the parts of you that never received love, feeling the collective sorrows of the world or longing for community where grief and love are welcomed as sisters, then you have arrived. Welcome.
our approach
Our nature-led grief tending and psilocybin retreat offers insight into creating a new relationship with grief and cultivating healing and belonging by weaving yourself into deeper intimacy with life.
Transformational grief and psilocybin ceremonies are woven within a grounded programme of somatic and transpersonal psychology, deep ecology and homegrown nutrient dense nourishment amongst rare ancient coastal forest on 130 hectares of community tended wilderness and permaculture life in Portugal.
During ceremony, we carry the medicine of live ceremonial songs and sounds as a key ingredient to holding transformational journeys. You can expect heart-full immersive soundscapes as you delve into the depths of memory, consciousness and natural beauty.
The wisdom of nature and place guides our programmes and core philosophy. We see psilocybin as a catalyst for personal, social and ecological change, which is why we marry this work with regenerative living, where you can taste the beauty of life in balance.
We are a multidisciplinary team of grief tending facilitators and healing arts professionals with both traditional animistic (shamanic) understanding of ceremonial work, along with psychological expertise. Our approach ensures that you are equipped with tools and practices for your ongoing integrative healing. We understand that psychedelics are one of many other facets required for life-lasting healing and growth.
The marrying of psilocybin with grief tending arrises from the acknowledgement of the synonymous nature of these two pathways, recognising the alchemy with which we can allow our full humanness to unfold through new and ancient eyes.
We take great care in the intake process, as well as providing a thorough preparation and integration programme before and after the immersion. We also cultivate long-lasting community and peer to peer support.
We appreciate the leap of faith into an experience like this takes and are here to support you with your decision-making process, with awareness and integrity around the acknowledgement that this approach is not for everyone.
your journey
Apply
Submit your information to help us advise on whether Psychedelics are the right option for you in this moment.
Connect
Connect with a member of our team over video call to ask questions, learn more about our approach + ensure this is a good fit.
Confirm
Secure your place on our intimate immersion with your deposit. The rest is due 1 month prior unless a payment plan is arranged.
Prepare
Our preparatory programme involves resource sharing, practices and an online group call with your facilitators.
Immerse
A full week’s programme to support your transformational healing journey, held by an experienced team, rooted in nature.
Integrate
We provide a 2.5 month integration programme with 3 live group calls, resources, practices + community support.
why psilocybin
Abundant in its nature, psilocybin exists all over the world making it an embedded thread within our collective ancestral heritage. Research reveals it to be one of the safest and most promising non-addictive psychedelics (entheogen), proving to support long-term neurogenesis, which is the formation of new neuronal cells in the brain.
With evidence suggesting its ritualistic use as early as 9,000 years ago, it has been shown to aid in healing multiple physical, emotional, mental and spiritually rooted health conditions. Science is also recognising its capacity to increase creativity, deepen nature connectedness and even reshape our relationship with death.
We see psilocybin as a catalyst for personal, collective and ecological change, showing us how to interrelate with compassion, creativity, intuition and curiosity.
Dive deeper in our resource hut.
within ceremony
We, as human beings upon this earth, have sat in ceremony since time immemorial. It is our birthright to cultivate time together to connect with our shared humanity and our relational dance within the web of existence. Ceremony offers us a healing containment to delve into the depths of our heart’s questions, sorrows, joys and dreams.
Ceremony brings us back into a state of belonging, which balms the losses of the modern era. It is an alchemy of intention, song, prayer and elemental relationship, through which our personal and collective voices of longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit. This act is indigenous to the psyche, invoking a form of ‘direct knowing’, which is often ineffable but experienced through the fabric of our being.
through grief tending
Originating from the root word ‘tenderness’, grief tending invites us to bring compassion to our grief, as we would to a small child or a wild garden. Grief tending is the understanding that to be human is to know loss. It is the practice of welcoming grief so that we can keep our hearts open to life. It is coming home to the recognition that we all have grief, whether it’s for the losses in our lives, the unmet longings or the sorrows of the world.
Grief tending is the understanding that our earth needs us to grieve, just as it needs us to pay attention. It is the trust that when we grieve and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we open ourselves to connection, authenticity and intimacy. As we remember the lost art of grief tending where all is welcomed, we restore our connection to each other, ourselves and the earth. We emerge with the capacity to hold it all; love and loss, grief and gratitude; life and death.
our programme
Each day’s rhythms are rooted within spacious moments to nourish and digest the deep work that brings us together. Delicious home-grown nutritious meals will be served throughout. Below is a guide to our programme.
What’s included?
2 Psilocybin Ceremonies with live song + sound
1 Psilocybin Forest Walk Ceremony
Grief Tending, Somatic + Transpersonal workshops
Nature-immersed shared or private accommodation
Homegrown organic nutrient dense meals
Canyon wild swimming + picnic
Access to 130 hectares of rare forest habitat (no noise pollution)
Embodied regenerative living: Lessons from the land
All herbs + medicines we offer throughout
An in-person 1 on 1 session with a facilitator
Thorough preparation + integration programmes, including:
1x preparation live group call and 3x group integration calls
1 on 1 connection call
Full support, community + resources
Airport shuttle
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things”
Wendell Berry
“To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul – to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”
— Francis Weller
our home
welcome to regenerative community life
Tending a regenerative eco off-grid farm and co-living space based in the coastal natural park in South Western Portugal, this is a unique and special opportunity to truly marry the healing of inner and outer landscapes. This predominantly educational project creates hope for future generations, to show which practical possibilities are out there in terms of reversing soil erosion and implementing land restoration, eco construction, passion based learning, local food security and bioregional life-ways.
with nourishment straight from the land
We grow organic vegetables and fruit in our terrace gardens and food forest. We also keep sheep for an animal and land management practice that mimics nature to benefit both grazers and biodiversity, improving water and mineral cycles. Our plates will be a celebration of true regenerative life-ways, including an abundance of home-grown and home-produced plants, nutrient dense meat (mutton), butter and cheese. We will celebrate our final feast with local fresh fish from the market (V and GF options too).
and a local canyon to explore
A 15 minute drive takes us to a special, hidden and treasured place. Following a soundscape of gentle breeses and goat herd bells, we will walk along the river to the beautiful waters of the canyon. There is a potent charm to this place, an ancient memory that awakens through a baptism-esque bath in the healing waters followed by a warm embrace of ancestral rock. We will spend much of the day here, nestled in the canyon’s embrace, picnicking together in the shade of the trees.
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
your guides
We are a multidisciplinary team honouring and merging ancient healing practices with people and place-based receptive needs. Learn more about our core team below, who are supported by further team members such as volunteers, local/visiting facilitators and musicians, and of course, our incredible garden growers and cooks as well as our permaculture community.
core team
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Veronica Stanwell
Founder + Lead facilitator
As a multidisciplinary healing + creative arts practitioner, Veronica weaves her love for soma, psyche, land and song into a life-long emergence of service and creativity. From wild Welsh lands, her deep enquiry into expanded states of consciousness within indigenous traditions of the Americas and Mother Europe’s native ways, guides her fascination with the fabric of life. With over a decade of diverse facilitation experience and an MSc in Consciousness + Transpersonal Psychology with the Alef Trust, Veronica carries this work with a grounded compassion and resilience.
Founder + director of Rooted Healing and hosting the accompanying podcast, Veronica’s longing for an intimate relationship with life is apparent and contagious. She serves to remind you that we belong and that the mystery of life is worth falling in love with, again and again.
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Nici Harrison
Founder (The Grief Space) + Lead facilitator
Nici Harrison is a grief tending facilitator, writer and speaker. She is founder of The Grief Space, a platform to shift the narrative on grief, inspire healing and bring together community.
Grief was the gateway that brought Nici home to herself, a retrieval of her authenticity and truth. She came to grief work, as many of us do, through the experience of a deep personal loss. It was a complicated grief filled with fear, anxiety and confusion. It was loss so fracturing to the human heart that it took Nici nearly a decade to find her way back to her body and back to a sense of safety.
Nici has studied with Francis Weller, Sophy Banks and Jewels Wingfield, amongst others, and is also a transformational coach, carrying deep reverence for the art of grief tending in all its forms.
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Lilja Þorsteinsdóttir
Support psychologist
Lilja is an experienced Psychologist from Iceland who specialises in group psychedelic integration, healing trauma, psychedelic harm reduction, and treating addiction and chronic pain and illness. She has created a safe platform full of courses to help people get in touch with their playfulness and creativity, increasing people’s self-understanding and connection with themselves and the world around them. Lilja offers needed perspective on both the healing potential of psychedelics in psychotherapy and the risks involved.
Lilja has also been immersed in native traditions in Ecuador to gain deeper insight into group psychedelic-assisted healing, learning with medicine keepers and masters and offering 1 on 1 support when needed. Lilja will be available throughout our time together, supporting ceremonies and offering 1 on 1 council.
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Migjen Hasani
Support facilitator
A multi-musician and facilitator of trust, breath and connection practices, Migjen weaves his enquiry of entheogenic understanding into grounded group support. With a mixed German-Albanian heritage and fascination with cross-cultural wisdom exchange, he approaches this ancestral work with care, curiosity and humility. With experience supporting ceremonies during his 14 months in Latin America, Migjen will be offering his presence, percussion, songs and support in ceremony, also guiding practices for our rest and integration, along with ensuring the smooth running of our time together.
Alongside this work, Migjen also teaches and is committed to contributing to inclusive cross-cultural place-based education.
our exchange
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Dorm £1,800
Share with up to 5 others. The dorm may be mixed, depending on bookings. The deposit is £700/€800 and payment plans are available.
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Shared Bell Tent £1,900
Share in a non-mixed bell tent with 1 other. The deposit is £700/€800 and payment plans are available.
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Private Bell Tent £2,200
Enjoy a private and tranquil stay. There are 3 in total so these get booked up fast. The deposit is £700/€800 and payment plans are available.
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Private Room £2,400
Enjoy a private and tranquil room. There is only 1 available so book early. The deposit is £700/€800 (per person, if sharing) and payment plans are available.
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Tree House £2,300 / 2 sharing bed £2,100 each
Embrace nature in our iconic treehouse. Spending a week underneath the crown of this 100 year old cork tree is something rare and unique. The deposit is £700/€800 (per person, if sharing) and payment plans are available.
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Scholarship
Our mission is to create opportunity for all who feel called to join us to have access, whether through a partial bursary or a fully funded place, depending on your application and situation. We take a holistic, global view on this, so please consider your status globally before applying. For example, our local Portuguese community and BIPOC folk will have priority. Email aisha@rootedhealing.org.
further information
Our maximum capacity is 14 participants. You can book additional days either side of the retreat in your chosen accommodation (recommended for softer landing and integrating), which is about £20-50 per night, depending on your accommodation.
Shuttles are at 2pm from Lisbon or Faro (depending on bookings). Arrival to the retreat is at 4pm. The departing shuttle is at 12pm on the final day and takes 2 hours to Faro or Lisbon.
Please read our terms and conditions before booking.
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Interest free payment plans are available and must reach completion prior to our in-person retreat.
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"The Rooted Healing team craft their experiences with a level of care, cohesion and wisdom well beyond their years. Like a bottle of precious artisan wine, this will get even better with age and attract awards and accolades . My prediction is that in this coming decade of earth medicine (psychedelic-assisted) interventions and nature connection immersions, they will set a new benchmark. The question which will define one's experience will simply be: "Were you facilitated by Rooted Healing or not?"
Matthew Zylstra (Eyes for Earth)
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“I feel so full of wonder, gratitude and inspiration after the incredible body-soul nourishment I received with Earth Medicine. I loved how the retreat weaved playfulness with sacredness. The effects have been both subtle and profound. The week offered medicine in so many ways - from the food, the land, the family we created as a group, the sense of belonging, the moving ceremonies, the reverence for nature, the deep rest, the heart-songs, all climaxing with the magical medicine itself. I’ve received healing on every possible level of my psyche and I feel the ripples to such far-reaching places. There are so many moments from the week that have crystallised in my memory to cherish always. Thank you so much to the beautiful souls that held the container of this magic for us. It was true alchemy.”
Brighitta Moser-Clark
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“This was indeed my 1st meeting with psychedelics and, my word, was it amazing! The facilitators at Rooted Healing couldn't have done a better job at organising such a heart felt, wonderfully nourishing retreat for us. The parts workshop really called out to me and the psychologist Lilja helped me make sense of something I'd been grappling with for years! Almost everything at the retreat was a 1st experience for me therefore overwhelming but in a good wa. Thank you all so much for holding us closely in your hearts for the week and making a safe sharing space to encourage healing. The sense of community we had was special and I feel I've left there with another family. I imagine so many people have been helped with this one retreat alone and I pray your work continues onwards and upwards. If you have any reservation about booking this retreat, think again, it is profoundly life changing! I have a whole new perspective on my life now”
Radhika Mistry
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“The facilitators, the singing, rituals, and our whole group opened my heart in a way it has never been open, or a long time forgotten. It was like the first best friend group I had in my teenage years. Pure curiosity, vulnerability, so much joy and playfulness, trust, love, and our home was the safest place I have ever been. I immediately feel good when I think of it. My life has changed through this experience.”
Eva Simin
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“It healed my soul, helped me to forgive my mother and let go of the past, to surrender, to deeply connect to myself in a profoundly gentle and feminine way. It’s the most transforming medicine retreat I’ve ever been to. The facilitators are absolutely dedicated and incredibly talented medicine women, who cherish and revive ancient wisdom in healing ceremonies and rituals. Whose love and care as space holders felt so safe to release, unfold, surrender. Their beautiful lullabies and windchimes at the child spirits ceremony were pure magic. There are no words to describe the gratitude I feel. You brought the fire of love back to my heart and reunited me with nature and community.”
Ganna Nestrerenko
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"My week retreat was a truly transformational experience. Set in beautiful and wild surroundings, our daily workshop practices supported our healing process. The ceremonies were conducted with exquisite attention to detail and I felt held and supported all along. All the way through I was well nourished with amazing food and true connection with my fellow participants. Again, the experience was profoundly soothing and insightful. PS. the value of this incredible work was very, very affordable for what we received.”
Catherine T.
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“It is hard to put into words how thrilled and touched I am by the work and dedication of the people who were involved. The creativity and the strength that I was able to recharge in the circle still has an effect on me today. Their ceremonies, their stories, their singing and the fun we had as a group touched my soul. Here, love really is in every detail. An unforgettable spiritual experience.”
Katrin Jahns
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"“This retreat was definitely a powerful and transformative journey which took me to the unknown shoreside of my inner self. A metamorphosis full of promises, tears, laughs, smiles and an utter rage for life that will remain etched in my heart and flesh for eternity.”
Elisa Henny
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“This one of the most amazing experiences I ever had. Veronica has a unique and beautiful way of constructing a retreat which not only opens the soul but creates a powerful, loving and sharing space. This will not be the last of her retreats I shall go on.”
Gini Holden
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“I have been lucky enough to attend 2 Rooted healing gatherings and could not recommend them enough. From the very first moments that I arrived I felt held and supported. I found myself deeply trusting of all the space holders and that feeling really helped with the building of a community with all the other guests. These experiences have been some of the most connected, creative and deeply nourishing experiences of my life. They help to remind me that I am the magic and I am the medicine.”
Helen Turner
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"I have just come back from a week with Rooted Healing experiencing the mushroom medicine for the first time in my life. Prior to the retreat I was quite worried and uncertain, but in the end I had fantastic time. Everything checked out: the location was beautiful, the team very experienced, knowledgeable, kind and supportive, and the program very well crafted - all to support myself and 14 others on our journeys. Regardless where you are at, I cannot recommend it enough. Thank you for all your efforts to put this together, this was a very special experience I will cherish for a long time."
Edyta Krakowiecka
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“The retreat was such a beautiful and transformative experience. I was able to reconnect with my inner child and leave feeling a new found sense of love for myself, for others and for nature. I met some of the most beautiful souls and gained a new family. Thank you for creating a space for us to feel safe and held.”
Hailey Garcia
“We show up for grief, not solely for our individual healing, but also to enable us to respond to the critical needs of our times.”
— Nici Harrison
explore our resource hut + FAQs
protect biodiversity
Ancient woodland, wildflower meadows and endangered species are sponsored with the future forest company every time you join us at a gathering or on a course.
