Why we exist

Our pain is labeled but not always honoured.

We are taught to fix, diagnose and get diagnosed, use band-aids, walk in straight lines. Instead of asking “What happened to you?“, we medicalise and pathologize trauma. Somewhere along the way we forget our joy, our creativity, our connection to nature and to each other – a life force that gave things a meaning.

But what if your symptoms are a doorway? What if your pain is a survival strategy? What if the disorder is in the story in which there was no other choice? And what if all this is an opportunity? To remember. To connect. To return to a peace you‘ve always known.

It won’t happen on a picture-perfect wellness retreat, in a transformative week or month. It won’t be a smooth and cheery ride. It will be a messy dirt road. The role of therapy is to guide you through it. We are here to help you get back in touch with your own compass and we promise to do it with compassion, a commitment to quality & a lot of love.

We are building Curacura to help integrate novel mental health treatments into healthcare and self-development. We believe there is a safe, honest, effective and respectful way to apply both evidence-based and traditional healing practices.

  Our approach

Not all “somatic“ is made equal

 If we treat trauma as we always have, we’ll experience the same consequences we’ve always endured. Traditional therapies engage the prefrontal cortex to analyse and verbalise trauma, which is good, but insufficient. Trauma impacts deeper structures (the amygdala and brainstem) which are hardly accessible through conversation and need to be regulated via engaging the body and sensory systems to access these regions of the brain.  

It can be hard to navigate the world of somatic (body-centered) therapies and easy to fall prey to spiritual bypass, pseudo-wisdom and pseudo-healing. Our facilitators and therapists are skilled professionals with world class training and lots of experience. It isn’t a badge of honor. It’s our most essential promise to make no compromise when it comes to the quality and depth of our approach.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy as one of the several tools

Psychedelics may soon become a mainstream salve or magic pill to cure modern plagues like loneliness, social anxiety, dopamine addiction, overwork, environmental and communal alienation and other habits and lifestyles that make our society sick and divided. Guided by self-interest and consumption, we utilise and colonise nature and indigenous culture - the origin, guardians and keepers of psychedelic medicine. There is no shortcut to health and wellbeing, no immediate benefit and psychedelics will not become a quick fix for decades of ignorance and suppression. Integrated in therapy, alongside other body-centered approaches, plant medicine and psychedelic compounds may turn into a revolutionary mental health treatment.

Modern science and ancient wisdom 

What if the scientific and indigenous knowledge systems are not in opposition but in conversation? Indigenous communities around the world have relied on plant medicine for centuries. A relationship shaped by deep respect and devotion to protect nature not as separate but as one with the human world. Our culture has evolved to extract – a benefit, a result, an achievement or immediate fix - reducing nature and traditional healing practices to compounds and clinical outcomes. Scientific inquiry has brought remarkable progress in medicine and technology saving and extending life. The integration of these two knowledge systems does not mean merging them into one. It means holding space for multiple ways of understanding and building safe containers for these systems to grow.

 From perfomance to personal responsibility and connection

Humanity is immensely successful at turning our most innate behaviours into performance metrics. We have built entire medical and educational systems that fetishise what’s measurable and deprioritise what’s messy including relationships or our inherent surrender to nature’s healing capacity. Community and nature are the real healers. Our biggest teachers. When we disconnect, we lose our way, when we reconnect and relate, we become rooted again.

We base our approach in the healing power of groups and communities as well as personal responsibility. We are guides on our client’s journey towards healing and self-development and this relationship is just as important to us as the quality of our methods and techniques.