The work

Not a protocol.
A living process.

A synthesis of Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, energy body work, breathwork, and sacred plant medicines — held within a relational container that honors the body, the parts ( IFS ), and the spirit of the Seeker. Nothing is forced. Nothing bypassed. Everything in its right order and its right time.

Modalities

Preparation and Ceremony support

01

Internal Family Systems

A framework for understanding the interior — the managers who run the show, the protectors who have been doing so since childhood, the exiles who hold what was too much to bear, and the essential self at the centre that no trauma has ever touched. IFS provides the language. It is the bridge between what the Western mind can hold and what the medicine reveals. Working with medicine without it means working without a map.

02

Somatic Experiencing

Somatic Experiencing is offered outside ceremony to help the body build enough safety, awareness, and capacity to meet what medicine may later reveal. Trauma does not live only in the story. It lives in incomplete nervous-system responses, sensations, impulses, and protective patterns held in the body. SE helps these responses soften or complete, so cognitive insight can root in embodied experience and the person can enter ceremony with greater trust..

03

Psychedelic Somatic Work

Psychedelic somatic work listens to the body while the medicine opens what ordinary awareness cannot easily reach. Sensation, breath, tremor, pressure, numbness, impulse, memory, emotion, and collapse are all treated as communications from the system.

The work is not to override the body or force release. It is to track what emerges, support the nervous system, and allow unfinished protective responses to soften, complete, or reorganize at a pace the person can safely hold.

04

Energy Body Work

Direct hands-on work with the places where trauma is held not as memory but as arrested energy in the physical body. The meridians, the chakra system, the structural tensions that have been compensating since the original wound — addressed through acupressure, Thai massage, moxibustion, and elemental medicines. What IFS names from the outside, the energy body work reaches from within the physical form itself.

05

Breathwork & Ceremonial Medicines

Breathwork, Hapé, and Sananga are used as preparatory ceremonial supports, not decoration. They help orient attention, awaken sensation, steady the breath, and reveal how the nervous system is meeting the field. The response may show sensitivity, guardedness, collapse, resistance, openness, or readiness. These early signals help guide pacing, intensity, and whether deeper medicine work is appropriate that day.

06

Integration & Ongoing Support

What arises in ceremony must be met, witnessed, and gradually reorganized into the way you live.

Integration is not an afterthought. It is where insight becomes embodiment, where revelation is tested in relationship, choice, work, and daily life.

You are held by a team of trusted practitioners who can support the process through therapeutic, somatic, relational, medical, and spiritual lenses — at the pace your life and nervous system.

The Core of the work

Healing the thorn in the soul

Every protective structure — every pattern, every strategy, every compensatory behaviour, every way you have learned to move through the world — is organised around something.

For people who have learned to compensate well, this is easy to miss. Things are working. And yet there is often a persistent sense that the work has a ceiling — that something underneath has not moved, no matter how much has been built above it.

Not a symptom. A root. The original disconnection, the wound that formed before you had language for it, the place from which everything else has grown outward like rings from a pebble thrown into water.

IFS names the part that carries it — the exile, a wounded self inside the system who has been holding something unbearable for a very long time. Shamanic traditions call the wounding itself soul loss. Gabor Maté calls it the disconnection from self. Payam calls it the thorn in the soul — not the part who carries it, but the original wound around which the entire protective structure has organised. The exile is not the problem. The exile is the one who has been holding the thorn.

The name matters less than the recognition: there is something underneath all the other work that has been pointing toward it without quite reaching it. This is what this work reaches for.

"The body receives what the mind cannot resolve. All the cognitive work in the world has nowhere to root until the feeling beneath it has been met. Change the feeling — the mind follows. It has never worked the other way around."

The thorn is not reached through understanding. It is reached through being present to it — with the body, with the breath, and with the medicine.

The Medicines

Each one a Relationship, not a substance

Payam works in the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States. In each jurisdiction, the ceremonial use of the medicines he carries is either legally permitted, decriminalized, or held within a protected religious framework. The specific legal context for any given medicine is addressed directly in the intake conversation.

Sananga
Eye drops made from a medicinal root — producing an intense, brief experience of heat and pressure that shocks the system into full presence. Administered in corpse pose with breathwork, the passage through sananga is itself a ceremony: a confrontation with intensity, a surrender to what cannot be controlled, a clearing of the visual field and the energetic body before the primary medicine arrives. How a person meets sananga often mirrors how they will meet what comes next.
Ceremonial preparation and clearing. Used before primary medicine to open the energetic body and reveal the person's relationship to surrender and intensity.
Hapé (Rapé)
An Amazonian tobacco-derived ceremonial medicine used at the beginning of every ceremony — before the primary medicine arrives. Delivered through the nasal passages via a ceremonial pipe, hapé activates the system, purges physical and emotional toxins, and most importantly reveals the state of the protective parts. How the system responds to hapé tells the facilitator everything they need to know before proceeding. Three hours of release from hapé alone means the ceremony pauses. The system is not yet ready. Hapé is also used during ceremony to break looping, ground the person, and move stuck energy through the body.
Used in every ceremony. A litmus test, a preparation, and a working medicine in its own right. Also used to read the protectors' readiness before the primary medicine begins.
5-MeO-DMT
The most non-dual of the medicines. Where psilocybin opens the psyche and MDMA softens the defences, 5-MeO-DMT dissolves the boundary between self and everything else entirely. There is no story, no imagery, no narrative — only the direct experience of being without the one who is usually doing the experiencing. The ego does not loosen. It disappears. What returns is not the same.
Most appropriate for people with significant preparation and prior medicine experience who are ready to meet the ground of being directly. Not an entry point. Not for people still in active trauma processing. The integration requirement is substantial and ongoing.
Psilocybin
A spirit medicine with its own consciousness — not one entity but a collective, each strain carrying its own qualities and its own wisdom. Psilocybin is benevolent but uncompromising. It will show you what is actually there, not what you hoped was there. It creates entropy in the default mode network, opens access to the limbic system, and makes available what years of careful avoidance have kept just out of reach. MDMA opens the door. Psilocybin walks through it.
Most appropriate for deep trauma work, reaching buried exiles, and working with the root of long-held patterns. Requires significant self-energy, careful preparation, and a facilitator who understands how to work with what arises. Not appropriate for all personality structures.
MDMA
An insight medicine — synthetic, but no less remarkable for it. MDMA works simultaneously as an anxiolytic and an analgesic: it extinguishes fear, softens the structural armour of the body, and releases the grip of the protectors. The snow globe that has been shaking for decades finally settles. The parts that have been running the show begin to sense that it is safe to rest. The essential self becomes accessible — often for the first time in years. It does not reach into the fully repressed; that is where psilocybin goes. It works with the material that has been pushed to the edges of conscious awareness but not yet buried.
Most appropriate for PTSD, severe anxiety, attachment wounds, and people with limited access to self-energy. The medicine of first relationship — the one that builds trust between the person, the facilitator, and the work itself.
Ketamine
Turns the default mode network off. A reset. The ordinary frame — the accumulated identity, the role, the matrix of patterns — momentarily suspends, and the person can witness themselves from outside it. Combined with MDMA it becomes something remarkable: ketamine quiets the protectors while MDMA brings warmth and life energy back, allowing self to be present as witness while the work proceeds. Also a pathway for people in the deepest distress when other medicines cannot safely be reached.
Most appropriate for treatment-resistant depression, first-stage work, significant protective structure, and as a combination partner with MDMA for people who need both a reset and a softening.

An Honest Assessment

This work is not for everyone

Life context

This work can open things that take time and structural support to integrate. If the circumstances of your life cannot currently hold significant change — if the matrix of relationships, work, and identity cannot flex — the timing may not be right. This is not a barrier. It is a part of the preparation conversation.

Contraindications

Certain psychological, psychiatric, and medical conditions may require support this work does not replace. These may include psychosis-spectrum or bipolar conditions, severe dissociation, significant cardiovascular conditions, uncontrolled hypertension, seizure disorders, and medication or substance interactions. Readiness is assessed carefully in preparation, with clinical collaboration when appropriate.

Readiness

Not timing. Readiness. There needs to be enough malleability in the system — enough self-energy present, enough parts willing to soften — for the work to be safe and useful. This is assessed through the preparation process. Sometimes the answer is: not yet. That is an honest and honourable answer.

The right medicine

Just because a medicine exists does not mean it is right for you. Just because a dose is available does not mean it is the right amount. Each medicine has its own wisdom, its own relationship to different psychic structures, its own contraindications. The selection is always made in conversation — with the person, with what has emerged in preparation, and with the medicine itself.

When youre ready

“The question is never how much. The question is: what does your system need right now, in order to open safely”

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