The program starts on Tuesday, April 19, 2022

The Standard Tuition for our coach certification program is $7900 Full Pay. You can also choose the installment plan, which involves a $1500 down payment and 8 Installments of $1050 automatically charged to your credit card.

A special Early Bird rate is available to those who commit by February 25, 2022: $6800 Full Pay or $1500 down payment and 8 Installments of $875.

This is an intensive 8-month program with 1-2 live calls a week. Some weeks may include virtual weekend retreats which may be 1 or 2 half days in length, once or twice a month. Expect to spend 4-6 hours a week exploring the program content. This looks like 2.5-3 hours of weekly lectures, with the remainder of the time spent reading, working on assignments, and completing the lesson quizzes. All lectures and virtual retreats will be recorded so that you can access the training at any time.

Call schedules vary week by week depending on the call topic or modality being taught, Guest Faculty availability and their time zone. In general, Zoom calls will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays and are up to 90 minutes in length.

Each month’s schedules will be provided 1 month in advance. All live calls are recorded and will be added to the Student Portal after broadcast.

Virtual retreats take place once a month, and may be 1 or 2 half day experiences, for 2-3 hours in duration each day.

Though Lorna is based in Spain, the vast majority of our guest faculty and students are located in the United States, so time zone compatibility is most aligned with North American time zones. Because the movement to decriminalize and legalize psychedelics for mental health and wellness is most prominent in the United States, we want to ensure that this training is accessible to the expanding group of aspiring coaches and therapists who wish to work in the legal psychedelic sector.

That being said, all calls are recorded and available on-demand in the student portal. Lorna, or one of her team, will be available to answer questions posted in the Facebook group.

Here’s how to submit your application for the upcoming 2022 Plant Spirit School Coach Certification cohort.

Step 1 - Fill out the online application form completely. The form will save your answers if you need more time to submit thoughtful answers, and are unable to complete the application in one sitting.

Step 2 - Pay the refundable $97 application fee. If you are accepted into the program, the $97 application fee will be applied towards your tuition. If you are not accepted, it will be refunded.

Step 3 - Wait for notification via email of your application status. If your application is accepted, you will receive an online calendar link to book your Admissions Interview.

Step 4 - Show up for your Admissions Interview. You’ll have a chance to meet Lorna or a member of the Admissions Team who will evaluate if you are an ideal fit for the upcoming cohort based on your interests, motivations, and experience. You will also be able to ask questions to determine if the program is an ideal fit for you.

We prioritize applicants who have attended entheogenic ceremonies on a regular basis for at least one year. This is because we feel that it is essential that a psychedelic integration provider know what a psychedelic experience is, before offering integration support.

Indeed it is possible for many types of coaches who are familiar with altered states of consciousness achieved through other modalities to offer transformational services to a client who is seeking support for specific goals or outcomes, as well as challenges that may have been revealed by medicine work. However, we believe that the positioning of oneself as a “plant medicine integration specialist” warrants personal experience with plant medicine ceremonies. 

The Plant Spirit School Integration Coach Training Program is designed specifically for people who wish to be coaches, rather than therapists. Most of the psychedelic-assisted therapy programs are training people to support patients receiving psychedelic medicine (such as ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin) in a clinical setting. These patients are typically seeking psychedelic therapy to address mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, addiction recovery, and chronic pain.

The few other psychedelic coach training programs do not center their curriculum on sacred plant medicines and fungi, particularly the contemporary cultural landscape around their use. One notable program is focused on addiction and recovery, and only touches upon psychedelic integration. Another is focused on microdosing.

Our coach training program is oriented towards people who participate in sacred medicine ceremonies for healing, spiritual insight, and personal growth. The program focuses on transformational modalities as well as shamanic practices to support achieving desired outcomes in life. This may include tangible goals, such as attracting a life partner or making a career change. It may also include inner goals, such as activating creative flow, developing intuition, or cultivating confidence.

Decriminalization and legalization of psychedelics as breakthrough treatments for mental health is expanding around the world. As a result, the current demand for psychedelic therapy is growing rapidly, with patients of legal ketamine clinics experiencing long wait times. Because psychedelic medicine remains illegal in most locales, many are turning to underground facilitators, plant medicine ceremonies, and retreats.

With the increase in interest for psychedelics, there is a proportional increase in demand for integration support. At the moment, there is a bottleneck with notable organizations that are training psychedelic therapists - they are not graduating people fast enough. This is why there aren't enough qualified people to meet the increasing demand for psychedelic medicine.

The promise of psychedelics to address the global mental health crisis is only as strong as the availability of qualified integration specialists who can support clients through the most transformational experience of their lives. This is why now is an opportune time to become a certified plant medicine integration coach.

Integration support is a responsibility that requires certain skills and training to do well, that anyone can learn. Some ceremony facilitators do offer integration packages but many do not. High-end retreat centers like Soltara in Costa Rica offer ongoing integration support.

The ones that do typically have a psychotherapy or coaching background. Others, such as indigenous ceremony leaders, shamanic healers, and medicine musicians may not be well-resourced or trained to offer ongoing support. Organizing and leading ceremonies and retreats is already a lot of work, many have day jobs, and thus do not have the extra capacity. Many do not feel it is their responsibility to provide integration support.

Ceremony guardians and helpers, volunteer members of the community, who assist the ceremony often do not have the skills or capacity to provide ongoing integration support either. They just volunteered all night, so the additional labor is beyond their pay grade!

What happens all too frequently is that participants are left to process the insights, emotions, and traumas activated by the ceremony experience entirely on their own. More often than not, cry outs for support are met with platitudes like “Trust in the medicine!” rather than referrals to specialists more qualified to support the ceremony participant in healing and integration. 

Due to the nature of the psychedelic experience, lack of adequate integration can potentiate past traumas leaving individuals grappling with new personal challenges triggered by the ceremony itself. Having a referral network of trained integration providers is imperative for the safety and well-being of participants.

Underground ceremony facilitators are often ill-equipped to provide ongoing support since their primary focus is hosting and leading ceremonies. Ceremony assistants are typically members of the community who volunteer their time to support a ceremony, not ongoing integration support to participants.

With the expansion of sacred plant medicines around the world, medicine culture is becoming increasingly globalized and multicultural. These days, there are more non-indigenous people consuming sacred plant medicines and facilitating medicine ceremonies than indigenous.

Because of this phenomenon, we thought it essential that the integration practices being taught are appropriate for contemporary Western culture since those in most need of integration support are typically those from Western societies in the Global North.

For this reason, 70% of the program is focused on transformational modalities that were developed in the West with 30% of the program based on indigenous wisdom teachings.

We would love to include indigenous wisdomkeepers in a more prominent way, but the way that they teach is much more conducive to in-person, residential, apprenticeship-oriented instruction. The indigenous teachers contributing to the program have primary responsibilities as healers in their community and face many logistical challenges in accessing the internet. We do our best to invite wisdom keepers to share their wisdom over Zoom but also have to rely on locally recorded content filmed with the support of our field correspondents.Should you decide to travel to their community, the wisdom keepers welcome you with open arms.

A shaman can be defined as an earth-centered community guide and healer who travels between worlds to gather and transmit information that helps individuals and the community. A “shaman” is a person regarded as having access to, and influence in the world of benevolent and malevolent spirits. A shaman acts as an intermediary between the natural and supernatural worlds, using magic to cure illness, foretell the future, control spiritual and elemental forces, and affect outcomes in the physical world. Typically such people enter a trance state during a ritual and practice divination and healing.

The origin of the word “shaman” is believed to come from the Tungus Evenki language of North Asia, whose word “saman” means the (very roughly) holder of knowledge. The term “shamanism” was first applied by Western anthropologists as outside observers of the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols, as well as those of the neighboring Tungusic and Samoyedic-speaking peoples.

Upon observing more religious traditions across the world, some Western anthropologists began to also use the term in a very broad sense. It was used to describe unrelated magico-religious practices found within the ethnic religions of other parts of Asia, Africa, Australasia, and even completely unrelated parts of the Americas, as they believed these practices to be similar to one another.

Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian and leading interpreter of religious experience, writes "A first definition of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be: shamanism = 'technique of religious ecstasy'."

While it may seem impossible to define such a broad range of phenomena experienced by a pantheon of distinct spiritual and religious practices under a single word derived from North Asian culture, and some argue, to do so is “cultural appropriation”...

The truth is, from a linguistic perspective, language often follows and evolves based on a commonly accepted understanding of what a word means by its users. So while the word curanderismo is more accurate when describing ayahuasca shamanism, and pajelança is more accurate in describing shamanism on the other side of the border in Brazil, in the English language the word “ayahuasca shamanism” dominates keyword searches for this phenomenon.

And so it is that “shaman” and “shamanism” have become the accepted, most commonly used words that describe the ancient practice that involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world in order to affect real change.

It’s important to note that not all medicine ceremony leaders are healers. Because few people in English speaking society know what “pajé”, “onanya”, “marakame”, or “curandero” means, and most understand the concept of “shaman”, we’ve chosen intentionally to use the word “shaman” in our literature in order to communicate this concept, for lack of a better alternative word. 

We are not a church, supported by membership dues, or regular tithing from a spiritual community that we support with religious services. We are a for-profit educational platform that pays our faculty and team fair market wages.

There is considerable expense involved in publishing digital information, from web hosting to expensive software subscriptions to copywriting, to graphic design and video editing. We sell courses and programs in order to cover those costs.

We are also in favor of socialized medicine, but sadly no government is subsidizing the costs of sacred plant medicine ceremonies!

While indeed the plants growing in Nature ARE free, it does take a lot of time, energy, and expertise to find them, extract them, then make them into medicine. It also takes considerable time, energy, and expense to lead an all-night ceremony. Typically this labor isn’t free.

Most of the people who believe that “sacred plant medicine should be free” are Westerners who confuse plant medicine shamanism with Eastern spiritual traditions, where spiritual services were conducted for free for the community, and the community regularly tithed the monastery cash and harvest on a monthly basis, allowing monks and nuns to focus entirely on spiritual practices.

To expect indigenous people and native Amazonians to do all of this without pay is not so different from the colonialism that once made the indigenous slaves of the conquistadors.

We expect to be paid for our work. We pay doctors in the West. Why shouldn’t plant medicine healers and shamans be paid well also?

The tuition fee is a fair and competitive reflection of the value provided by this intensive program. In our considerable research into comparable programs, The Plant Spirit School Coach Certification program offers more live calls with more expert faculty, and a larger library of resources than most programs of this caliber.

High-end, high-touch group programs with live calls and personalized coaching support, typically offer only 2-4 live calls a month. We offer 4-6 lectures a month, as well as monthly virtual workshops and retreats. 

We do have many offers that require much lower investment, and these are typically home-study courses. We also have a scholarship program for qualified BIPOC applicants with financial needs.

We are a small, for-profit private social enterprise with the social benefit objective to:

[+] Increase awareness of the therapeutic benefits of entheogenic medicines when used safely, responsibly, and with integrity,
[+] Further harm reduction education and training, so that entheogenic healing spaces are safe, especially for BIPOC and LGBTQA+ participants
[+] Raise awareness of the sustainability and social justice concerns arising from the globalization of ancestral plant medicines,
[+] Expand diversity, equity and inclusion in the psychedelic sector, so that participation and healing may be accessible to all

And a commitment to continually re-invest company revenues towards furthering these objectives, while providing meaningful, fulfilling employment for the dedicated, hardworking members of our team.

We are not a volunteer-run nonprofit organization that relies on individual donors and grants in order to operate. All of our faculty are compensated a fair market value for their wisdom and expertise. Furthermore, the team of dedicated staff who have worked around the clock for months to bring this program to life is also paid a fair market wage for their labor. We believe everyone deserves to be paid for their labor, above all, healers and wisdom-keepers.

Like most companies, we keep our valued team employed throughout the calendar year, even though the business only brings in meaningful revenue during major event launches and program enrollment periods, which take place twice a year. Therefore we need to charge tuition rates that can keep the business running and provide our team with the stable employment they deserve.

Neither are we a venture-funded initiative supported by high-tech or cannabis capital. All revenues generated from the sale of Plant Spirit School programs go back into the company to create new, educational offers. The Plant Spirit School is a self-funded business that follows the principles of Sacred Commerce, whereby the Founder is the last person paid.