Alpine Awakening Retreat
- echoes of the wild -
5-Day Plant Medicine Journey
Banff, Alberta - Canada
July 11 to July 15, 2025
$3275.00 CAD
- we bridge the gap between ancient and modern teachings; mushrooms are a spiritual experience, not a clinical ego experience...
We provide the setting, guidance and expertise. Nature provides the medicine to enable you to experience the liberating power of awe and wonder, and most importantly the relief you seek.
We have known of the therapeutic and life transforming potential of psilocybin mushrooms since the 1950‘s. Now we have dozens of recent studies from diverse sources that affirm the unrivaled healing and life enhancing potential of psilocybin mushroom sessions in the right setting.
There is no ‘trip’ — only the unveiling of what has always been.
The mushroom merely clears the dust from the lens of your soul. - Maia Pollan
Alpine Awakening Retreat
Spirit Journey in the Heart of the Canadian Rockies
July 11 to July 15, 2025 {5-Days}
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Experience deep transformation and self-discovery, blending the serenity of Banff’s untamed wilderness with the tranquil beauty of its alpine lakes.
4-nights in Peaceful Haven... grounded for the perfect Spirit Quest
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Begin your Alpine Exploration in a stunning mountain lodge, nestled amidst breathtaking landscapes of Banff National Park. This cozy yet luxurious sanctuary offers the perfect balance of comfort and connection, with private rooms and communal living spaces — designed to foster meaningful interactions with your fellow participants.
Each day, we will venture into the majestic Rocky Mountains, to begin your Heroes Journey with the Magic of the Mushroom where soaring peaks, pristine lakes, and ancient forests provide a breathtaking backdrop for meditative hikes and soulful reflection.
As you walk these sacred lands, the stillness of the mountains will inspire a deeper connection with yourself and the world around you. Evenings will be spent in **heartfelt conversations by the fire**, sharing stories, insights, and the warmth of kindred spirits.
To enhance your journey, Sip the Ancient Elixir of Ceremonial Cacao and Mushroom Teas — ancient plant medicines revered for their ability to open the heart, deepen spiritual awareness, and reveal profound truths. These ceremonial experiences will guide you toward inner healing and clarity harmonizing your mind, body, and spirit.
For the final chapter of your retreat, on the last morning, set sail on a peaceful cruise across Lake Minnetonka, — concluded with a nourishing picnic by the shore, offering time for integration, gratitude, and connection before stepping back into the world with renewed clarity and purpose.
Join us for this extraordinary retreat — wilderness and water, stillness and movement, self and spirit come together to create an unforgettable journey.
Magic mushrooms are not an escape — they are a return.
A homecoming to the self you forgot in the noise of the world. - Maia Pollan
Friday:
✹​
4 p.m
Arrival to Lodge
Room Assignment
Get Cozy
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5:30 to 6:30 p.m
Meet and Greet
Charcuterie Board & Cocktails
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6:30 p.m
Cacao Ceremony
Forgiveness Ceremony
Dyad Communications
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8 p.m Dinner
Scrumptious Vegetarian
9 p.m to 10 p.m
Sharing Circle
Campfire w/Mushroom Teas
Tuesday:
✹
9 a.m
Energy Flow
Wake-up Central Nervous System
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- Integration Coaching
- Maintaining Peace
- Maintaining Spiritual Maturity
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Embodying and Understanding
- Psychedelic Experience
- Daily Practices
- Micro-dosing
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11 a.m DEPARTURE
Morning Boat Cruise
(Lake Minnewanka)
Breakfast by Water
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What Extra to Bring:
Backpack w/water bladder
Winter Hiking Boots - Winter Attire - Layers - Pants (no jeans)
Saturday:
✹​
8:30 a.m (open-mind prep)
Pranayama Meditation
Vinyasa Yoga (beginners)
Intention Setting
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10 a.m to 4 p.m
Begin Session Journey
Hike to Location 30 mins
Begin Session Journey
Nature Appreciation Play
{approximately 6 hours}
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5 p.m to 6:30 p.m
Individual Time
Journalling / Napping /Jacuzzi
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6:30 p.m Dinner
Delicious Pescaterian
8 p.m to 10 p.m
Mocktails/Holistic Teas
Game Night
Sunday:
✹
8:30 a.m (open-mind prep)
Pranayama Meditation
Vinyasa Yoga (beginners)
Intention Setting
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10 a.m to 4 p.m
Begin Session Journey
Hike to Location 30 mins
Begin Session Journey
Nature Appreciation Play
{approximately 6 hours}
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5 p.m to 6 p.m
Individual Time
Journalling/Napping/ Jacuzzi
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6:30 p.m Dinner
Banff Village Restaurant
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8 p.m to 10 p.m (Night Tour)
Sunset Star Gazing Rockies
- Professional Tour Guide -
Monday:
✹
9 a.m
LEAVE FOR TOUR
Breakfast Smoothies on the Go
Micro-dosing Day
- Lake Louise -
- Moraine Lake -
- Bow Falls -
- Hot Springs -
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Ammenties and Food
Pic Nic Lunch
Snack Pack Bags
5 p.m ​
Wagon Ride Western Cookout
Banff National Park
8 p.m to Bedtime
Relax / Jacuzzi / Journal
Private Time
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Growth is inevitable when you dissolve the walls of perception and let truth flow freely, like water through the cracks of a once-rigid mind. - Maia Pollan
Awakening in the Heart of Banff
Immerse yourself in the breathtaking beauty of Banff, Alberta on a journey of deep healing, self-discovery, and renewal. Our Vita Retreat blends the sacred plant medicine of magic mushrooms with, powerful landscapes, and meaningful connection, creating a space for profound transformation.
Highlights of your experience include:
Sacred Mushroom & Cacao Ceremonies – Journey inward with 2-guided spirit voyages. The first will take place amidst the majestic mountains, and your 2nd along tranquil waters.
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Heart-Opening Cacao – This heart-opening ritual, combined with psilocybin, allows you to access deeper emotional layers, fostering introspection and emotional release. Known as the "food of the gods," cacao will help you embrace forgiveness and open your heart to transformative healing.
Integration and Reflection – Set aside dedicated time each day for integration and reflection to process your psilocybin experiences. Through group discussions and personal reflection, these moments offer a space for sharing insights, gaining deeper understanding, and learning from one another’s experiences.
Monday Day Tour and Western Cook-Out:
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Lake Louise & Moraine Lake – Witness the awe-inspiring beauty of these turquoise glacial lakes, where the stillness of nature invites deep reflection.
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Bow Falls – Stand before the rushing waters, allowing their energy to mirror your own release and renewal.
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Banff Hot Springs – Let the soothing warmth of natural mineral waters melt away tension and restore balance to your body and spirit.*
Wagon Ride & Western Cookout – Step back in time with a scenic horse-drawn wagon ride, followed by a classic outdoor cookout under the open sky.
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Tuesday Morning Prior Departure:
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Lake Minnetonka Cruise & Picnic – Close your retreat with a peaceful morning boat cruise, followed by a nourishing lakeside picnic, allowing time for integration and reflection before returning to daily life.​
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Our Vita Alpine AwakeningPlant Medicine Retreat is an invitation to slow down, reconnect, and embrace the wisdom of the land and water as you step into your next chapter with clarity and purpose. ​
Healing begins when the mind surrenders to the wisdom of the heart—and mushrooms are the gentle teachers that guide the way. - Maia Pollan
Essential Role of Guides
When we seek empathogens for therapeutic or self-improvement purposes, we are often striving to break free from entrenched patterns of thought and emotion that have impeded our ability to heal and evolve.
Magic mushrooms, which contain the active compound psilocybin, work by converting into psilocin once ingested. This compound interacts with the brain’s receptors, fostering the creation of new neural pathways and facilitating communication between brain cells.
As a result, psilocybin mushrooms encourage new ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving the world. This process unlocks fresh perspectives, emotions, and an effortless release of old patterns, allowing for a deeper, non-judgmental awareness and clarity.
The setting amplifies this experience, providing a safe-space for release and opens us up to heightened states of awareness. But the true potential lies in how the experience is guided and processed.
It’s not just the plant medicine itself that unlocks these profound insights — it's the quality and focus of the experience, which can be shaped and enhanced with skilled guidance.
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Experienced facilitators are key to navigating altered states, offering safety and the expertise to guide your journey toward deeper healing. They ensure the experience stays focused and meaningful, while also helping participants integrate the insights gained into everyday life — a crucial step for lasting transformation.
Many seeking spiritual or entheogenic experiences may struggle to access and stay open to different levels of consciousness, often feeling overwhelmed without proper guidance. Skilled facilitators offer support, clarity, and reconnection to inner wisdom, ensuring healing extends beyond their spirit journey. Their expertise enhances the chances of breakthroughs and makes the experience more impactful.
Guides also help individuals using empathogens to break free from limiting patterns, directing and enriching the journey for deeper insights and smoother post-session integration, ensuring healing extends beyond the session.
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. A supportive environment further amplifies this effect, facilitating release and nonjudgmental awareness.​​
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Connect to Wholeness
We do indeed live in a wondrous and enchanting world, but for many of us the wonder and enchantment has faded or even, disappeared entirely. When this happens we lose our deeper connection to spirit and our sense of wholeness to life and the world.
This can happen due to emotional and physical trauma, anxiety, depression, personal loss, a dysfunctional cultural environment, relationship changes, perpetual suffering or unrelenting stress. We also live in a world that is desensitizing and changing at a breakneck pace.
As a result of any combination of the foregoing, we lose our connection to the deeper aspects of our being; our spirit wanes and we feel fragmented and often times, can even feel lost.
In a state of wholeness we:
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are confident in our life path.
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have an enhanced ability to concentrate.
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feel exuberant about life in general.
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experience a deep and fulfilling gratitude.
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have more compassion and empathy.
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feel a profound connection to the universe.
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feel a deeper connection to spirit.
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are no longer hobbled by tragedies of our personal history or conceptual hang-ups.
Find the relief to restore your sense of wholeness, reinvigorate life and renew your vision of yourself and the world - returning home with a long-lasting, permanent shift. We are confident in our method and approach we offer and, we look forward to being the journey with you to Reclaim Your Life.
Psilocybin, like a soft snowflake on our consciousness, opens up new pathways of perception - allowing us to rediscover the beauty and purity of innocence that lays within us, often neglected and unseen.
Inner Healing Intelligence
We put you in-touch with your innate ability to heal and grow, and to empower you to be responsible for your own healing. Turbulent and often difficult emotional processes may be easier to work with and resolve when we tap-into this Intelligence.
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The body possesses an extraordinary and intricate healing process, constantly striving towards restoration. This inherent ability to heal is exemplified by the ever-present healing of a cut or a bruise. Similarly, the psyche also demonstrates a profound intelligence and capacity for healing, as evidenced by the transformative power of plant medicine.
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Through these substances, the hidden depths of our psyche is unveiled, revealing a remarkable healing potential, extending beyond the physcal realm.
Set and Setting
Set refers to, "where you are in your life,: what beliefs you may have, how you think and essentially the internal make-up of yourself."​ Setting refers to, "external factors: who you are with, where you are and the environment the medicines are taken in." ​
We feel the set and setting are crucial elements in optimizing the journey of the voyager and enhances their awareness to explore uncharted territories within themselves that may have otherwise been neglected.
As guides we recognize that the environment must fosters comfort, safety and openness. By carefully cultivating the set and setting, we aim to provide a supportive space where voyagers can fully immerse themselves, allowing you to delve deeper in your subconscious.
Transformation Support
It is encouraged to discuss openly any strong feelings, fears or concerns that may have arisen during your experience. The concepts that you encounter on a visionary voyage can be challenging to interpret, and may require skilled guidance. ​
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Psychedelic guiding has three stages; preparation, experience and integration. Thoughtful attention to allthree stages is needed to maximize the opportunity for a positive outcome
We collaboratively work with you to analyze the information and make sense of it, helping to connect the dots and uncover meaningful insights. Our role is to support the exploration in synthesizing your individual perspectives into a cohesive narrative, fostering a deeper understanding and integration.
Personality is a strategy devised by a child. Our true, original self lays under our personality, in the trans-personal ground of our being, at our core.
Release Old Behaviors
Empathogenic experiences enabled by plant medicines such as psilocybin mushrooms have unequivocally demonstrated unrivaled efficacy in the treatment of these conditions. ​
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Freedom from PTSD
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Unshackle Trauma
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Overcome Alcoholism
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Alleviate Depression
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Narcotic Addictions
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Suicidal Idealization
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Relationship Issues
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Ease Anxiety​
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Obsessive Compulsions
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Mitigate Eating Disorders
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Anti-social Behavior
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Loosen Grip of Terminal Illness
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Address Mortality Fears
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Undesirable Habits in General
Our method of guidance is based on the principle of inner healing intelligence. As a result, we adopt a non-directive approach allowing for organic guidance to unfold. Over the years psychedelic guides have discovered, like the body, the mind possesses an innate ability to heal. However, for mental-emotional conditions an external catalyst is often needed to initiate this transformational process.
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Our non-directive setting creates a space where advice-giving is set aside and the participant's own insights take center stage. Our goal is to empower the 'explorer' to uncover profound discoveries about themselves, with minimal interference or influence from our end.
We feel the true integration of the explorer's experience occurs after their journey. allowing them the freedom to fully process and internalize the insights gained. This is where us, as your guide, will actively engage in the integration process by facilitating open discussions, providing guidance and encouraging reflection.
Our suggestions at the right moment, may help you make a pivotal discovery or retain and important insight.
You Want a Retreat to: Revolutionize Your Story!
Maia's Message to You:
"Sacred mushrooms are the most promising safe entheogens to re-enter our culture."
Plant medicines are and can be the direct source needed to renew and restore an individual's connection to wholeness, while also inspiring their own health of being. Empathogens can and do relax the mind chatter to enhance our ability to approach and respond to life without egoistic patterns or misguided unconscious mental states of blame, shame, guilt, embarrassment, avoidance or judgement.
As a voyager, you are not having a drug experience, but rather, learning how to become open to your own inner worlds, reunite with one's self and make use of a vast range of experiences prior, during and after your journey.
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As your guides, we offer our unique complimenting skills to know the terrain, sense where you are in your journey and be able to advise or caution you where it is deemed appropriate. We serve as a steady and supportive presence; we understand our authenticity and awareness are an integral part of creating a warm and inviting set and setting and is, instrumental in having you feel safe and secure to transcend deeper heights of consciousness.
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We recognize we are doing sacred work and the importance of establishing a sincere relationship. We honor the trust you've placed in us to ensure you do have a transcendent experience based in compassion, healing, kindness and love.
Like freshly fallen snow, psilocybin gently blankets our minds, melting away the layers of cynicism and reconnecting us with the innocence and wonder of the world.
What makes Vita Retreats unique?
Embark on a remarkable journey of self-exploration and growth led by Maia, a seasoned guide and facilitator with over 30 years of experience in organized self-guided, intimate and group psychedelic exploration retreats. Together, you will venture into the realms of healing and evolution, guided by Maia's expertise as a hermetic initiate, holistic cognitive therapist, psychedelic facilitator, and spiritual mentor.
Empowering Personal Journey: With Maia's complementary attributes and wealth of knowledge, her retreats offer a unique opportunity for renewal, refreshment, healing, and evolutionary growth. Through her guidance, you can experience powerful shifts in perceptions and develop healthier relationships that align with your true self.
Unlocking Transformation: Maia's extensive experience with various altering substances and emotional receptors, such as psilocybin (mushrooms), has revealed the potential of psychedelics to release cultural conditioning, trauma, addiction, and mental setbacks. Discover the potential for new neural imprints and behaviors that can lead to enhanced clarity and empowered decision-making in your life.
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Witnessing Healing and Release: Maia has witnessed the benefits of empathogens in releasing deeply embedded emotional addictions and challenging societal programming. She has also been witness to the healing and release of oppressed trauma, substance abuse, and various emotional and mental states, including depression, eating disorders, Tourette Syndrome, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety.
Expert Guidance and Support: With Maia as your guide and mentor, you can trust in her extensive experience and wisdom gained from 30 years of personal explorations. She is dedicated to creating a safe and nurturing environment for your inner journey, offering a resource of knowledge, inspiration, and support throughout your retreat experience.
Childhood Innocence Awakens: In Banff's embrace, the retreat channels the spirit of innocence from days gone by. This special place resonates with Maia's heart, creating an atmosphere that effortlessly brings out the wonder and curiosity of childhood – a magical energy that permeates every aspect of the experience.
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Journey of Synergy: The dance between nature and plant medicine creates a remarkable synergy. Banff's pristine landscapes, untouched by time, harmonize effortlessly with the profound healing potential of the plant medicine experience. This harmonious fusion amplifies the transformative effects, allowing you to surrender, heal, and rediscover your true essence.
Experience the power of psychedelics as tools for self-discovery and liberation, under the guidance of a trusted facilitator who is committed to your well-being and evolution. life has been that of a scholar, with a drive for information, deeper understanding and deeper connections, while freeing the minds of humanity from bondage and suffering.
Maia, a seasoned and esteemed guide, has personally guided thousands of individuals, just like you, in transforming their lives and altering their perspectives and relationships with themselves and the world. In addition, she collaborates with a team of experienced co-hosts and facilitators who bring their expertise and support to the transformational process. Together, they will assist you in unlearning, acquiring, remembering, and developing the skill-set needed to fully embrace the life that's waiting for you.
For our sanity to be strong and flexible, we must be willing to allow for occasional expressions of spontaneous movement and action.
Alpine Awakening:
Echoes of the Wild
4-Day Plant Medicine Journey
Canadian Rockies - Banff, Alberta
July 11 to July 15, 2025
∞ Your Package Includes ∞
4- Night Accommodation
4 Scrumptious Homemade Dinners
3 Snack Boxes for Day Outings
All Beverages
All Additional Meals
2 Psilocybin Spirit Journey's
Banff Day Tour (Micro-dosing Day)
Cacao Ceremony
Breath Work Meditations
Guided Northern Lights Night Walk
Wagon Ride | Western Cook-Out
Post Integration Included
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All Taxes Included
<airport​ transport from Calgray if needed>
$3295. CAD​
