Cultivating Joy: AEDP, Ketamine, & Mindfulness

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We encourage early application to complete the screening process and secure your place in this transformative experience.

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Course Description

This pioneering experiential retreat invites AEDP therapists to explore the profound synergy between AEDP psychotherapy’s transformational approach and ketamine’s neuroplasticity-enhancing properties. Experience firsthand how these modalities can amplify each other before considering how to integrate them into your clinical practice. (The didactic course in ketamine-assisted AEDP therapy will follow February 6-9, 2026.)

Join us at Menla for a deeply immersive retreat where healing, connection, and transformation unfold naturally. Together, we’ll experience how ketamine can enhance the AEDP core affective change processes by reducing anxiety, bypassing defenses, creating states of heightened receptivity, and activating the innate healing capacities that AEDP recognizes as transformance. In the context of this relationally-rich setting, ketamine’s ability to promote neural interconnectivity becomes a powerful catalyst for therapeutic work—first enabling the deep processing of emotional suffering and trauma, and then facilitating the transformational shifts that create pathways into flourishing.

Grounded in the latest neuroscience research, AEDP, a healing-oriented, radically relational, experiential therapy, harnesses harnesses positive neuroplasticity through a four-state model of transformation, with a systematic methodology for the integration of transformational experiences, including non-ordinary states of consciousness. The four-state model of AEDP maps out the process of emotional transformation from emotional suffering to wellbeing, vitality and flourishing:

Integration and Supporting the Emergence and Consolidation of the Authentic Self Experience: Experiencing the natural unfolding of wholeness, integration, and truth sense that emerges when painful emotions are fully processed and transformational experiences are metaprocessed. This retreat offers a rare opportunity to experience how AEDP’s deep emotional processing, followed by metatherapeutic processing, can reliably access these integrative states, marked by a deep sense of joy, safe relational openness and wonder.

Accessing Our Capacity for Healing: Navigating through defenses that both protect against emotional pain yet maintain suffering, while detecting glimmers of transformance from the start.

Processing Core Emotional Experiences: Tapping into deep feelings stored in the body to process what was previously too overwhelming to face alone, bringing forth corrective emotional and relational experiences.

Facilitating Transformational Processing: Using AEDP’s unique metatherapeutic processing methodology to work with the healing experiences that emerge when painful emotions are fully processed, catalyzing upward spirals of vitality and energy to fuel the integration of the new learning,

Why AEDP and Ketamine?

Seamless Integration Framework: AEDP’s 4-state phenomenology provides a clear roadmap for navigating the transformational journey—from suffering to joy and connection—making it an ideal companion for ketamine experiences.

A Systematic Methodology for Promoting Post-Psychedelic Integration of Non Ordinary States of Consciousness into Self to Further the Reconsolidation of Healing and Transformation: Beyond simply having the ketamine experience, AEDP Psychotherapy’s metatherapeutic processing offers a structured methodology to process, metabolize, and integrate these transformational experiences into wholeness, connectivity, and wellbeing.

Amplification of Positive Neuroplasticity: Ketamine creates a window of enhanced neuroplasticity that, when combined with AEDP’s experiential techniques, can accelerate the rewiring of entrenched emotional and relational patterns.

Deepened Healing Capacity: Experience firsthand how AEDP’s approach to undoing aloneness and processing emotional experiences synergizes with ketamine to access deeper levels of healing.

Personal Experience: Personal transformation that informs professional practice

Professional Application: Have a personal experiential grounding for integrating ketamine into your AEDP as you learn to apply your AEDP skills to support clients through non-ordinary states of consciousness and integration, which will in turn accelerate their healing.

Groundwork for Personal/Professional Integration: Return to your practice with a deeper capacity to facilitate transformation and integration for your clients.

Over four transformative days, you’ll experience:

Three AEDP-Informed Ketamine Sessions: 3 optional sessions of SL ketamine, guided by experienced facilitators, lead to experiences where defenses naturally soften, allowing previously defended emotional material to emerge within a relationally safe container.

Deep Emotional Processing: Access and work with core affective experiences within a framework specifically designed to process them to completion.

Metatherapeutic Processing: Experience AEDP psychotherapy’s systematic methodology for integrating transformational experiences, allowing you to witness the upward spirals of positive affect and vitality.

Undoing Aloneness: Engage in both dyadic and group practices that deepen emotional resilience and authentic self-experience through profound relational connection.

Mindfulness and Somatic Awareness: Develop heightened attunement to the body’s signals of both defensive activation and transformational potential.

Integration Framework: Bridge personal transformation with professional applications through structured preparation and integration sessions.

Restorative Environment: Experience transformation within Menla’s serene mountain setting, with optional massage and spa treatments.

Additional Support: Pre-Retreat Didactics: Explore the theoretical bridges between AEDP’s transformational model and ketamine’s neurobiological effects.

Post-Retreat Integration Sessions: Make use of the post-ketamine period of expanded neuroplasticity to extend the integration experience to consolidate and expand transformational shifts, serving as a bridge from personal experience to therapeutic practice.

Who is this for

This retreat prioritizes AEDP-trained clinicians, with registration open to:

● Level 1 clinicians (Immersion graduates)
● Level 2 clinicians (Immersion + Essential Skills and/or individual supervision; with Immersion +ES1 + AEDP supervision as the optimal experience )

Priority access continues through the end of July 2025, after which registration opens to other helping professionals seeking their own healing experience while gaining an introduction to AEDP principles.

Safety is our foundational commitment. Each participant undergoes careful screening to ensure readiness for this group experience and appropriate candidacy for ketamine work.