Cocoon is a year-long transformational group coaching program for women.

Together we create a protective, nurturing space for personal and group metamorphosis.

Cocoon is catalyzed by sacred medicine, grounded in group alchemy, and in harmony with the seasons and cycles of the Earth, Moon and Sun.

Spend a year crafting your prayer and living that prayer into being within a circle of support.

Offer yourself as a vessel of support to the prayers of other women.

Who is Cocoon for?

Cocoon is for women yearning to enter a season of deep, sustainable transformation.

This could include...

Moving through a life initiation (into womanhood, motherhood, cronedom)

Reconfiguring through and after loss (death, separation, empty nesting, serious illness)

Experiencing a crisis of meaning (Is this it?)

Healing relational wounds (we are wounded relationally, we can heal relationally)

Exploring lineage and legacy (What do I carry with me? What am I bringing forward and leaving behind?)

Grieving cultural poverty and loss (Where are our rituals and rites of passage?)

Identifying your role in civilizational upheaval (What is my power and responsibility?)

Liberation from a pattern that does not serve (How can I truly get free?)

Methods and Rhythm

Facilitator -
Dr. Stephanie
Van Hope

In truth, it is less important who I am than what I can hold, reflect, and fortify in you. The work of facilitation is at its best when it is invisible. But I will share with you what has shaped my walk and how it can support your safety and growth. My purpose is to create sacred space for transformation connected with ritual, the elements, and reverence for life. I have created this program as a synthesis of multiple streams of training, knowledge and experience over the last 15 years.

I have a background as a a Registered Nurse, certified Nurse Coach, and Doctor of Nursing Practice in the specialty of integrative health and healing. I have worked primarily with people and families traversing the end-of-life passage. Nurse coaching explores how the big themes of meaning, purpose, and priorities are expressed in the small, mundane, and foundational activities of everyday life to create tangible change. I am a certified Psilocybin Facilitator in the state of Oregon. I served as a guide for a research trial of psilocybin for cancer-related anxiety. And I served for multiple years as a learning facilitator for Synthesis Institute’s Psychedelic Practitioner Training Program, mentoring pods of students through the core training program, as well as a founder of the Holistic Psychedelic Nurse Collective. My work is informed by all of the above, but I offer Cocoon solely under the title of psilocybin facilitator.

What is particular to my path is that I spent over a decade immersed in spiritual community studying sacred wisdom traditions, particularly of Turtle Island. During these years I lived the practices of sacred medicine work, sweat lodge, vision quest, and community land and relationship tending. I am an herb and song carrier. Our community hosted and were received by indigenous elders to share teachings and traditions. During this time I witnessed both the immense gifts and also the dangers of community living and spiritual devotion. I have since closed this chapter of my life and carry forward with me the blessings and the cautions, both of which are foundational to my approach to group psychedelic work.

I am a daughter, sister, friend, wife and a mother of two very young, very energetic children. We live in the Charlotte region of North Carolina, land traditionally stewarded by the Catawba people.

Approach
&
Safety

The entire program is based around the concept of slow medicine, of utilizing both action and rest to allow the work to seep into your bones, of creating a breath before and after every movement.

This program will invite you to change (you would not commit your energy and resources if you did not desire change) but it will be in a manner that is easeful and sustainable for depth and longevity.

Together we will listen for the direction your heart wants to travel, take the steps along the path, and tend the path as we go so that it will always be available for you.

This primary method used in this course is community alchemy. This is our foundation. Sacred mushroom medicine is a potent catalyst within the the cocoon of community. My approach to working with the spirit of the mushrooms is one grounded in reverence and trust.

We offer reverence to the mushrooms in the following ways:
• Taking our time, allowing a whole year for this prayer to unfold
• Acknowledging the spirit of the medicine and the spirit of the land
• Holding ceremony on land that we can make offerings to and deeply connect with
• Creating an offering of financial reciprocity to the local indigenous people connected to the land we practice on
• Engaging sacred medicine practices of energetic permission, protection, and hygiene, ceremonial structure, sacred space tending, purification rituals, music and other approaches to uphold a space of consciousness

We engender trust and safety within psychedelic work in the following ways:
• Utilizing a screening process to ensure medical, social and spiritual readiness of all participants
• Spending eight months learning about each other, tending our container and mending ruptures so that we arrive to ceremony as trusted collaborators
• Practicing techniques to ready our minds, hearts and nervous systems for the intensity of sacred medicine work
• Working within the framework of legal facilitation which offers standards of accountability for the facilitators and service center and may allow certain participants with sensitive circumstances to feel more safe participating
• Keeping an appropriate group size (12 women) and engaging ample support of co-facilitators during retreat journeys (1:3 ratio)

Calendar & Themes