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 honours the body, the parts, and the whole person. Nothing forced. Nothing bypassed. Everything in its right order.

Modalities

What is offered in Ceremony

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

Trauma does not live in the story. It lives in the body — in the nervous system's incomplete responses, the places where energy has been arrested since the original wound. The body is a satellite dish. Eighty percent of the nervous system communicates upward. Until you work with the body directly, all the cognitive understanding in the world has nowhere to root. SE is the methodology for completing what could not complete at the moment of impact.

03 Psychedelic Somatic Work

Sacred medicines as teachers — not substances to be administered, but sentient entities with their own wisdom and their own relationship to each person who sits with them. Held within a carefully titrated, relational process that asks permission of the parts at every step. The medicine does not override the system. It enters into dialogue with it — at the pace the system can receive.

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

Hapé and sananga are not decorative. They are the first layer of the ceremony — used to read the nervous system, peel back the initial layers of protection, and prepare the ground for what comes next. The system's response to these medicines before the primary medicine arrives tells the facilitator everything they need to know about what the protectors are doing and whether the ceremony should proceed.

06

Integration & Ongoing Support

The work does not end on the mat. What arose in ceremony must be met, witnessed, and allowed to reorganise how you live — not in a weekend, but over time. Integration is not an afterthought. It is the phase where the shift becomes permanent, where the insight becomes a genuinely different way of being in the world. Held by the team, at the pace that the life and the system can absorb.

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 high-functioning people 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 stone thrown into water.

IFS calls it an exile. Shamanic traditions call it soul loss. Gabor Maté calls it the disconnection from self. Payam calls it the thorn in the soul. 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 is the instrument through which life is experienced. Until you go into the feeling — all the cognitive work you have done has nowhere to root. And once you change the feeling in the body, the mind changes. Not 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, with the medicine, and with a facilitator who has navigated this terrain in his own body and knows the difference between a process unfolding and a system in distress.

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.

On Dosage and Titration

Working with the permission of the system

The Western instinct — more medicine, higher dose, let go and trust — is understandable. People arrive in pain. They want it to move. But flooding a system that is not ready does not accelerate healing. It bypasses the parts that were placed there for very good reason, overwhelms the witnessing self, and produces backlash, re-traumatisation, and experiences that cannot be integrated. This is the primary cause of bad outcomes in psychedelic work.

Titration means working with the body's own intelligence. Starting where the system actually is. Building the relationship between the person, the facilitator, and the medicine — gradually, with trust — before asking the system to open further. Sometimes the person is asked: how much do you think you need right now? And when the system is genuinely ready, it knows. The answer is usually precise and usually right.

Sometimes all it takes is a kiss. When the relationship is right, when the context is right, when the medicine is right and the parts have been genuinely prepared — a small amount opens everything. The question is never how much. The question is: what does this system need, right now, in order to open safely? And the system is always part of that conversation.

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 personality structures — particularly cluster B presentations — require significant clinical support that this work does not replace. When the self is buried many floors beneath the basement and parts have become fully identified as the personality, the medicine can open more than the system can currently hold. This is assessed carefully in preparation.

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”

begin a conversation

Not a protocol.A living process.