Groundwork Practice
Developing the Capacities to Guide
Over four months, theory becomes embodied through live online community discussions and exercises, at-home exploration, and the development of your capacity with self, others, and the medicine during two residential psilocybin mushroom retreats within legal and regulatory frameworks.
Groundwork Practice is where you experience the approach.
You learn alongside experienced facilitators and a small cohort of peers, and you take a close look at the capacities you already bring to guiding and the ones that still need to grow.
Groundwork Practice is not primarily about learning how to guide others. It is an opportunity to experience the work from within, to explore your own relationship to transformation, and to understand what the role of guiding asks of youÂ
The Transformational Arc
Throughout Groundwork Practice, participants spend time with different phases of GatherWell’s Transformational Arc Model. We explore our personal and collective orientations toward these phases and develop new ways of relating within ourselves, in relationship with others, within the collective, and in relationship to the role of guiding.
The curriculum is a thoughtful and deliberate series of experiences designed to cultivate expansive ways of thinking, feeling, sensing, relating, being, and doing in service to individual and collective transformation.Â
Throughout Groundwork, participants explore:
Self, Identity & Lineage
- Locating oneself in the here and now through one’s current experience of identity, culture, and positionality within the collective.
- Locating oneself within personal family lineage, cultural lineages, and chosen lineages.
- Grappling with the formative interpersonal, cultural, historical, and ancestral influences present in how we are showing up for life.
- Practicing embodiment of our emotions with honesty and care, while respecting the wisdom of the body, senses, and spirit.
- Exploring the fears, discomforts, responsibilities, and internalized patterning around embodying emotion.
Belonging, Relationship & Reciprocity
- Exploring what a culture of care, belonging, reciprocity, and interconnectedness means to us individually and together.
- Engaging relationship to place and land as a context of belonging that extends beyond societal spheres.
- Exploring practices that foster connectedness to the Earth and considering what perspectives held by Indigenous communities can teach non-Indigenous people without being appropriated.
- Engaging the role of ritual in fostering relationship to self, other, collective, spirit, and place.
- Inquiring into our relationship with the mushrooms and exploring our orientation to these animate beings individually and societally.
Ways of Knowing & Relationship to Change
- Questioning the dominance of logical, conceptual, and mental ways of knowing within ourselves and our relationships.
- Embracing otherness, disturbance, complexity, and opportunities for growth.
- Questioning what we think we know and making space for possibility, creativity, liberation, and connectedness.
- Embracing the creativity that emerges when we slow down, become receptive, move with embodied emotions, and lead with curiosity in relationship to the unknown.
- Tending to endings, transitions, periods of change, and integration, while reflecting on learning, growth, and unfinished processes.
Developing GatherWell's Core Capacities
Groundwork Practice is designed to create opportunities for participants to explore and develop the capacities GatherWell believes are foundational to guiding.
The Core Capacities we attend to are:
- Self-Reflection
- Awareness and Engaged Relationship to Identity, Positional Power, and Social Inequity
- Empathy, Compassion, Humility, and Curiosity
- Consideration and Care About Your Impact on Others
- Non-Defensiveness, Openness, and Both/And Perspective
- Navigating Complexity and Complex Relational Dynamics
- Recognizing and Working with Activation in Self and Others
- Openness and Courage in Relating to What Is Unknown
Groundwork is an opportunity to develop greater awareness of these capacities and to understand how they may shape one’s readiness to take on the responsibilities of guiding.
What might you take away from Groundwork Practice?
Participants may expect to come away from this phase of the program with:
- A deepened sense of possibility for transformation of self and culture.
- A stronger sense of camaraderie with peers who are exploring the role of helping others through transformational experiences.
- A clearer understanding of the capacities the role of guiding asks of us and one’s current capacities to serve as a guide.
- Personal expansion and growth through engaging in the program and participating in psilocybin-containing mushroom ceremonies.
- A framework for understanding transformation through GatherWell’s Transformational Arc Model, applicable in one’s life and in practices of supporting others.
Groundwork Practice Format
Groundwork Practice consists of in person retreats and online live class time. Cohorts online meeting times are generally four times per month, with some months varying. Until dates are set, one can assume: Â
- 2-3 six-hour Saturday sessions
- 1-2 three-hour weekday sessions
There is an in-person weekend retreat at the beginning and another one at the end of the four months in which participants are guided by GatherWell Lead Guides in a group ceremony, supported by a robust preparation and integration framework.
Groundwork Practice consists of
Small Cohorts
Groups of approximately 8–15 participants, with geographical overlap where possible, allowing participants to develop meaningful relationships with peers and facilitators.
Virtual classroom sessions
Live facilitated exercises, group discussions, interpersonal process, and ritual practices following GatherWell’s Transformational Arc Model.
Residential retreats
In-person, long-weekend gatherings centered around a group ceremony with psilocybin mushrooms*, framed by group and one-to-one preparation and integration.
Affinity groups
Self-determined affinity spaces for people of similar identities across cohorts, creating opportunities to explore program themes more deeply through the lens of identity.
Structured self-reflection
Prompts, activities, reading materials, and media to support engagement with program themes.
Access to ethics infrastructure
GatherWell’s Ethics Infrastructure overseen by the Ethics Committee provides support and accountability across relationships and learning environments within GatherWell. This includes an ethical grievance reporting system providing anonymous reporting for members of the community.
*Any engagement with psychedelics takes place in a jurisdiction where it is legal to do so and in compliance with the regulatory framework of that jurisdiction. This may be in partnership with Churches operating under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, state regulated infrastructures, or in countries that have regulatory frameworks for legally engaging with the substance engaged.
Progressing to Apprenticeship
While Groundwork Practice is not an evaluated phase of learning, moving towards the apprenticeship pathway is a meaningful threshold.Â
Learn more about moving from Groundwork Practice to the Apprenticeship
We intentionally protect Groundwork Practice as an experiential and authentic process. Participants are not being evaluated while they are in the Groundwork Practice phase of the program to avoid an impulse to perform their development for the sake of progressing to Apprenticeship.
For those who decide that they want to continue into Apprenticeship, there is a reflection process after Groundwork Practice. Participants reflect on their own development alongside perspectives from the peers and facilitators who have shared and supported their experience.
Together, we consider growth, the development of GatherWell’s Core Capacities, coherence between self-perception and others’ perspectives, and, most importantly, curiosity, self-awareness, and willingness to learn and change.
At this threshold, we are asking: Has this person developed the foundational capacities and orientation needed to enter Apprenticeship with the potential to responsibly learn to guide others?
Participants may miss no more than 20% of classroom hours and must attend both residential retreats during the Groundwork Practice phase to be eligible to continue to the next phase of training.
Groundwork Theory and Groundwork Practice may also be taken independently by those who want to deepen their capacity for relational, cultural, and transformational work without becoming psychedelic guides.
Groundwork Staff
Groundwork facilitators work in pairs and cultivate learning environments that can attend to multiple forms of intelligence, individual emotion, and group dynamics.
Facilitators bring:
- Capacity to skillfully move toward and hold difficult material and conversations.
- Strong embodied ethics and a stance of service.
- Familiarity with somatic resources and practices that support mindfulness and nervous system connection.
- Experience creating process spaces that foster safety, informed consent, and trauma-informed practice.
- Capacity to communicate directly and offer feedback in ways that support learning and growth.
Residential retreats and ceremonies with psilocybin mushrooms are staffed by GatherWell Lead Ceremonial Guides and vetted assistants with experience facilitating groups in ceremonial contexts.
Explore the next phase:
Groundwork Theory
Phase One
Develop foundational frameworks, language, and perspectives for approaching transformation, relationship, culture, care, and guiding.
Groundwork Practice
Phase Two
Where we explore these ideas through embodied practice, personal inquiry, community, retreat, and ceremony while developing a clearer understanding of one’s own capacities and relationship to the work.
Apprenticeship