The USA, UK & EU · By introduction only
Healing the thorn in the soul
For people who have built a successful life and still sense that something essential remains unaddressed. Something lingers within - beneath the patterns the compensations, the weight that other modalities and interventions may have identified but not moved. This work goes there.
“My work has essentially been about marrying and bridging the gap between Western evidence-based therapeutic models and shamanic medicine — and walking both paths.”
Most psychedelic practitioners stand in one world — the clinical or the shamanic. Payam has spent twenty years learning to stand in both simultaneously: holding the rigour of Western therapeutic models and the depth of initiatory medicine work, without collapsing either into the other. This is a rare position. It is what makes the work safe. And it is what makes it go somewhere.
Who comes here
You have done the work.
Something still remains.
I
High-performing people who feel the cost of how they got here
You have built something real and you operate at a high level. And underneath the performance there is something that has never been addressed — not for lack of trying, but because no approach has quite reached it.
II
People who have tried other approaches and found them insufficient
Therapy, coaching, meditation. Real progress in understanding what happened. And still: the same weight, the same pattern, the same part of you that does not shift no matter how clearly you can now describe it. Understanding is not the same as healing.
III
People who sense there is a root to what they are carrying
Not symptoms. Not stress. A thorn — the original wound from which the compensations, the protectors, and the patterns have all grown. You have felt it your whole life but perhaps could not name it. You have simply not known how to reach it. That is what this work is for.
The work
Not a protocol.
A living process.
The body holds what the mind
has spent years refusing to see.
Eighty percent of the nervous system communicates upward — body to mind. Trauma does not live in the story you tell about what happened. It lives in the place where your body still believes it is happening. Most therapeutic approaches address the mind's understanding of the wound. This work goes to where the wound actually lives.
Internal Family Systems gives language to the interior — the parts that protect, the parts that were hurt, the essential self that has never been touched by any of it. Somatic Experiencing gives the body's own intelligence room to complete what it could not complete at the time. Sacred medicines open what neither can reach from above alone.
Together, used gradually and with permission of the system, they reach the thorn. And when the thorn is out, what grows in its place is not a new version of yourself. It is the original one — the one that was always there beneath the compensations.
Internal Family Systems
A framework for understanding the interior — the managers who keep things running, the protectors who have been doing so since childhood, the exiles who hold what was too much to bear, and the essential self that has never been harmed.
Somatic Experiencing
The body holds what the mind has refused to finish. Working directly with the nervous system — with sensation, breath, structure, and the body's own intelligence — to release what has been held there, often for decades.
Psychedelic Somatic Work
Sacred medicines as teachers, not treatments. Held within a relational, titrated process — working with permission of the parts, not over them. The medicine opens what cannot be reached from above. The facilitation guides what it reveals.
Energy Body Work
Direct hands-on work with the places where energy is arrested at the site of the original wound. What IFS names and somatic work approaches, the energy body work reaches through the body's own field.
Breathwork & Ceremony
Hapé, sananga, and breathwork drawn from multiple lineages — used as preparation, as litmus for the protective system, and as passage. Each one peeling back another layer before the primary medicine arrives.
Integration
What arose on the mat must be met in life. Integration is not a debrief. It is the ongoing process of allowing what the medicine showed you to reorganise how you live — supported by the team, over time, without rush.
The Process
Unhurried.
From first contact to ongoing life.
Introduction &
First Contact
Screening &
Medical Review
Deep
Preparation
Ceremony
Integration
Ongoing
Support
Introduction & First Contact
Screening & Medical Review
Deep Preparation
Ceremony
Integration
Ongoing Support
Founder & Principal Facilitator
Hollowed
by the work itself
Payam was born in Iran, displaced by revolution and war as a child, and took political refuge in Germany before eventually arriving in New York. His early life was baseline suffering — not as a concept, but as the water he swam in. He did not seek the medicines. They found him, at the point when there was no other direction left to go.
“Is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?”
Therapists, psychiatrists, and physicians now refer patients to him when conventional treatment reaches its ceiling. The same professionals consult him on how to bring this work into their own practice. Facilitators working with these medicines seek him out for mentorship on cases beyond their experience — and for their own healing. This recognition was not sought. It arrived through the work itself.
He does not call himself a shaman. He does not call himself a therapist. He walks both paths without collapsing into either. His grandmother was a healer. The trauma was the road back to the lineage. He would not change any of it.
How to reach Payam
This work is offered
by introduction only
There is no intake form. There is no waitlist in the conventional sense. If someone whose judgment you trust has sent you here, reach out. A brief conversation will tell us both whether this is the right moment and the right fit.
from the work
"The generations ahead of me, who I will never meet, will be free because of what we are doing now. That is enough. I am planting trees in whose shade I will never sit.”
payam