La Fuente · Valle de Bravo · A Homestay Intensive
Plant Medicine Retreats
A private, multi-day container built around a ceremonial centerpiece — with preparation before, unwavering support during, and integration after, held by both of us.
One ceremony, held whole.
A plant medicine retreat at La Fuente is the most complete expression of our care. It is for one person or one couple at a time. There is no group to fold into and no schedule to keep up with; the days are shaped around you, and the ceremony sits at the center of them like a hearth.
You arrive prepared, because we will have spent the weeks before together — diet, intention, the practical questions. You are met at the airport, fed from the garden, and held from the first hour to the last. Then we stay with you into the months after, because the ceremony is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.
Who this is for
This is for the person who is ready to meet something, and wants to do it with two people who will not look away.
- A first ceremony, approached carefully and without a crowd
- Returning to the medicine after years, in a quieter container
- Grief, a life transition, or a long season that needs a turning point
- A couple who want to do this side by side
- Someone who has sat in group ceremonies and now needs one held just for them
- Integration of an experience that never fully landed
How it unfolds
Four to seven nights, with one or two ceremony nights inside them. Everything else is arranged around those.
Prepare
Two to four weeks of preparation together: an online session, a dietary lead-in, and the practical and emotional groundwork, so you arrive ready rather than braced.
Ceremony
One or two ceremony nights with a rest day between. Morning practices, garden meals, the steam bath, and the land carry the days around them.
Integrate
A closing session before you leave and follow-up sessions in the month after, with Alexa or Luke, so what opened takes root in ordinary life.
What surrounds the ceremony
Morning practices
Breathwork, movement, and meditation each morning — gentle, unhurried, and yours to skip.
Kambo
Available as a preparatory cleanse with Luke, an IAKP-trained practitioner, for those it suits.
Steam and cold
The hammam and the cold plunge — heat, stillness, and the oldest medicine on the property.
Bodywork
Thai yoga massage on arrival, and again as the days ask for it.
Garden meals
Everything cooked from the garden and the market, to the diet the ceremony asks for.
Sacred sound
Live, channeled sound through the night — never a playlist.
Sacred Counsel does not administer, supply, or handle any controlled substances. Ceremonial experiences are provided by independent, third-party facilitators operating under applicable local laws; we hold the preparation, the container, and the integration.
Held by both of us
Your Guide
Luke DeStefano
Integrative Health Practitioner · Ceremonial Facilitator
For more than twenty years, Luke has been guiding people through healing — on ceremony floors and in somatic work across Vietnam, the Himalayas, Thailand, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and southern Mexico, apprenticing with teachers in three traditions along the way.
He was initiated into the Dharma Mountain lineage of Vietnamese Buddhism, and has held ceremonial space for two decades — as an IAKP-trained Kambo practitioner, Thai massage therapist, and guide in breathwork, QiGong, and meditation. At La Fuente he keeps the mornings, the body work, and the container.
- Integrative Health Practitioner — Level 2
- Initiate — Dharma Mountain lineage, Vietnamese Buddhism
- IAKP-trained Kambo practitioner (2016)
- Thai Massage Therapist
- Wim Hof Method Practitioner
Your Guide
Alexandra Ellis
Mental Health Counselor · Integrative Health Coach
A mental health counselor with ten years of clinical practice and a parallel training in integrative and ceremonial work. Alexa's first career was inside the conventional mental health system; she is fluent in it, and clear-eyed about what it can and cannot do.
Her clinical approach is somatic, attachment-based, and trauma-informed. Her integrative approach adds the rest of the human — nutrition, sleep, ritual, season, story. She works with anxiety, grief, identity, transition, trauma, and the long tail of profound experience that traditional therapy is often unequipped to meet. At La Fuente she runs the counseling practice and the integration work that follows every ceremony and retreat.
- LPC · Integrative Health Coach
- M.A. Psychology, Salve Regina University
- B.A. Mental Health Counseling, Brown University
- Somatic · attachment-based · trauma-informed
Begin the conversation
Every retreat starts with a free 30-minute call. Tell us what you're carrying, and we'll tell you honestly whether this is the right shape for it.
One of the four homestay pathways. See all ways to stay at La Fuente.