Long before laboratories studied it, psilocybin lived inside ritual. Spanish chroniclers recorded the Aztec teonanácatl, and the Mazatec people of Oaxaca have kept a healer-led mushroom ritual alive into the present day. In 1955, R. Gordon Wasson took part in one, led by the healer María Sabina, and his 1957 account in Life magazine carried the story to the West. The attention that followed brought hardship to her and her community, a reminder to speak of this work with care.

Africa offers a clue and a parallel. Saharan rock art at Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, estimated to be 9,000 to 7,000 years old, has been read by some researchers as showing mushroom use.

What does psilocybin do? One leading model, REBUS, proposes that it loosens the brain's top-down habits of prediction, so that more of what is present can reach awareness. Stanislav Grof called such substances non-specific amplifiers: a catalyst that brings forward what is already within a person and magnifies the effect of the setting, the people and the preparation around it. In a Johns Hopkins study of 36 volunteers, about 60 percent rated their session among the five most meaningful experiences of their lives, and said so again 14 months later.

The science is still young, clinical results for depression are promising and mixed, and the field agrees that setting matters even though it has yet to be tested rigorously. That is why preparation and integration are built into the design. In Guardians of Transformation, psilocybin is offered in a decriminalised, supported setting.

Tobacco is one of the oldest plant teachers of the Americas. Charred tobacco seeds found in a hearth in Utah are about 12,300 years old, the earliest evidence of its use, though how it was used there remains open. By the time Europeans arrived it was widely regarded as sacred, and Columbus was offered tobacco as a gift in Cuba.

Within a century it had become a global commodity, and the commercial tobacco that followed became a substance of harm. The older traditions kept a different relationship. Among the Huni Kuin of the Amazon it is the "quintessential healing substance", and Amazonian Quechua speakers call it the "father of all plants". There a trained maestro tabaquero prepares and gives it within a dieta of seclusion, accompanied by chants called icaros. Across many North American Indigenous nations, tobacco is recorded as an offering for prayer.

In these traditions tobacco is understood as a conscious, wise presence that can teach through dreams and visions, so it is approached first with prayer and an offering. The lesson reaches beyond the plant: before asking anything of it, or of anyone you guide, you begin by giving, listening and asking for guidance.

In Guardians of Transformation, participants learn to work with tobacco through prayer and offerings. It is held as an offering for intention, in the traditional manner, and within the ritual setting the lead facilitators work with the plant on their own behalf. We believe this teacher is best received from an initiate, so ingestion in any form is left to those initiated into its ways.

Cacao has travelled a long way to reach the ritual table. Archaeologists found traces of it among the Mayo-Chinchipe people of what is now Ecuador, between 5,450 and 5,300 years ago, in starch grains, theobromine residues and DNA, which supports the view that cacao was first domesticated in the upper Amazon. About 1,500 years later the Olmec and Maya were making cacao drinks. The earliest chocolate residues in Mesoamerica, from Mokaya vessels (about 1900 BC), point to drinks shared in social settings that conferred prestige, and a vessel from El Manatí (about 1750 BC) came from a ritual space. By about 600 BC, Maya spouted jars at Colha, in Belize, held it too.

Cacao reached Africa much later, in the nineteenth century. Tetteh Quarshie, the man credited with bringing it to the Gold Coast, carried beans home from the island of Fernando Po and planted them at Mampong in 1879, although his credit has been disputed. Today West African farmers grow much of the world's cacao. Africa has its own ritual of the shared offering in the kola nut, which Igbo families break in prayer to welcome guests, invoke guidance and honour the ancestors. It is a different plant from cacao, and it speaks the same language of prayer and offering.

Today cacao is valued for theobromine, a gentle stimulant, and for the warmth and openness many people feel when they share it. The modern cacao circle is a recent adaptation of this heritage, and we honour it as that.

In Guardians of Transformation, cacao is woven into the immersion as a heart-centred ritual for intention, connection and shared reflection.

In many traditions the word for breath and the word for spirit are the same: prana in Sanskrit, pneuma in Greek, ruach in Hebrew, spiritus in Latin. Breath is the oldest teacher we carry with us. Yogic traditions developed pranayama as a discipline of breath and attention, and the Buddha's Ānāpānasati Sutta, one of the discourses of the Pali Canon, teaches mindfulness of breathing as a path from the body to the mind. In the early 1970s, after legal LSD research ended, Stanislav and Christina Grof developed Holotropic Breathwork, joining deep, continuous breathing with music and bodywork.

Research has begun to look at what these traditions practised. A systematic review of 223 studies found that voluntary slow breathing raised vagally mediated heart rate variability, a marker of the body's settling, parasympathetic response. A 2023 meta-analysis of randomised trials, covering 785 adults, found small to medium reductions in stress, anxiety and depression.

In Guardians of Transformation, we work with three ways of breathing: conscious connective breath, a continuous breath that invites deeper feeling and awareness; regulatory breath, a slower breath that supports the nervous system in settling; and breath as meditation, where the breath itself becomes the object of attention. Each session is guided from start to finish.

Your own breath is the first thing a person in your care picks up on, and learning to steady it, follow it and rest in it is how you arrive in the room before you offer anything else.