You have already done the work.This is the question that comes after it.
Not psychedelic therapy, not a medicine, and not a healing retreat. Awaken with 5 is a three-month protocol built around a single private 5-MeO experience in Kelowna. A month of preparation comes first, then one day, then eight weeks of weekly work afterward. The day is the part people ask about. The eight weeks are the part that decides whether anything holds.
- Medically Screened
- 1-on-1 Experience
- Three-Month Container
Not becoming. UNbecoming.
Most people who apply have done years of work already, and it did what it was built to do. The thing that kept generating the need for it is still running.
Not everyone who applies is eligible. A physician decides that, and it is not a decision we can overturn.
Why you're here
You have probably done a fair amount already. Books, breathwork, a therapist you liked and stayed with for years. Some of it worked and some of it didn't, and the life it produced is good enough that you would not trade it.
What brings most people here is a question rather than a problem. Not what is wrong, but what all of it is standing on.
For some people there is also something underneath that never settled, and the work reached everything except that. Whatever it is pointing at was never yours to carry. If that is you, this is for you too — it is simply not the requirement, and most people who come here are not carrying it.
The knock is quiet either way, and it does not go away. It is also not answered by more of what already worked.
Or none of that is true. The work is finished, the life is good, and you are simply curious what it is all standing on. That is reason enough. Several of the people who have come here arrived with nothing they wanted fixed.
The question we are asked most often is whether this takes your edge.
It doesn't. For a few minutes it removes the sense that there is someone in here who has to hold everything together, and the drive turns out not to have been resting on that at all. People come back with the same ambition and less weight behind it.
The second question is how long it lasts. Minutes.
Most people who come here have never taken a psychedelic of any kind, and several have said afterward that the brevity was what let them say yes.
Our approach
No group retreats. No spiritual bypass.
The nearest thing to this is not a retreat. It is the other professional engagements you have paid for: defined scope, months rather than days, a named person accountable for it.
Hold us to that standard. Ask who is responsible, and what is left when it ends.
Not psychedelic therapy.
It doesn't fix your ego, process your pain, or integrate your trauma. It interrupts the operation those tools have been working on top of.
Not a group experience.
Private. One-on-one. Not performative, not ceremonial, and nobody else in the room.
A Three-Month Protocol
The day is the smallest part of it. The month before and the eight weeks after are what make the change hold.
What the protocol looks like
This isn't a day trip. It's three months.
Preparation
One month before
One month. Medical screening, with eligibility determined by a licensed physician. Nervous-system preparation, which trains your system to stay open while its own alarms are firing. A daily practice drawn from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Sessions with a licensed clinical therapist, who is preparing you rather than treating you. You arrive ready instead of hopeful.
The Experience
One day
One day, one-on-one, starting at nine. The first hour is orientation: what the day will be like, what to expect, and every question you have while you can still ask them. The room has corner windows over the lake, and eagles go past.
Then a two-hour window, in which each administration's acute effects last ten to thirty minutes. The last thing said before the first one is “as you are ready, take your last exhale.”
Afterwards, at least ninety minutes of reflection and debrief before anyone goes anywhere. 5-MeO is metabolised quickly and clears fully, so there is no comedown. What people report instead is exhaustion over the following days, from a nervous system recalibrating. We arrange a ride back to where you are staying.
Integration
Eight weeks after
Eight weeks of weekly one-on-one work, every session mandatory. This is the part that gets skipped everywhere else, and it is why most psychedelic experiences end up as a story someone tells rather than a change someone keeps. The experience opens a window of neuroplasticity. The eight weeks are what gets built inside it.
The day is a few hours. Everything that decides whether it holds happens in the three months around it.
What holds it
The experience is the shortest part of this. Everything below is why it doesn't fade.
Eligibility is determined by a licensed physician — not by us, and not by you. He conducts the intake conversation and the clearance himself. A registered nurse is on site when he indicates it, and reachable and available to come on site otherwise. This is not a ceremony run by someone who did a weekend training.
We track change with the REWired Index, our own pre- and post-protocol assessment. We started measuring recently, so it covers fewer than fifty participants to date.
Fifty people is not a clinical trial. We say so because the alternative is to let you assume it was one.
Suffering runs as a sequence: separation, then identity, then meaning-making. Integration works that sequence in reverse. What you get is a structure rather than a belief to practise.
Why 5-MeO
Most psychedelics add. More imagery, more content, more material to interpret for months afterward.
5-MeO does the opposite, and does it in minutes: no visuals, nothing to bring back, and for a short while no sense that there is anyone here to bring it back to. That is the mechanism. It is also why the molecule belongs at the end of an architecture instead of the beginning of one.
- 5-HT1A
- Non-Visual
- Minutes
Who you'll be with
You won't do this alone. Nicholas and Fehren Kusmich facilitate every experience personally, one-on-one, supported by a network of medical and clinical professionals. Between them: more than a decade of work at the intersection of nervous-system architecture and non-dual inquiry, and over 300 facilitated experiences.
In their words
Nothing around me has changed, and I have changed quite a bit. The first thing that I've told close people around me is that it was like there was an emotional reset button, and I really mean that. Like a button or a switch that was just pressed.
I'm still comfortable being who I am. I'm not concerned about stories that I may have told myself in the past, and if I do sort of go down that path, I'm very aware of it and I can get myself out of it quickly.
I'm able to just stand up for myself and be myself around others, regardless of what they think of me.
Eligibility is decided by a physician, and some people are turned away. Others simply aren't at this point in the work.
If the knock is familiar, the next step is a conversation.
Application, then a conversation. Medical screening comes after that.