Experienced guides dedicated to creating safe, sacred space for your healing journey
At Plant Medicine Thailand, facilitation is not about directing your experience, it's about creating the conditions for authentic transformation to unfold.
Our facilitators are trained to hold sacred space with reverence, experience, and deep respect for the intelligence of the medicine and your own inner healing wisdom.
We believe the most powerful container is one where you feel completely safe to surrender, explore, and integrate whatever arises.
At the heart of our facilitation team is Kay, the steady presence who helps hold the thread of your retreat from beginning to end. From orientation and preparation to ceremony, emotional support, and integration, Kay is often the consistent point of connection throughout the retreat experience.
While our retreats are held by a wider collective of experienced facilitators, Kay helps weave the container together, creating continuity, structure, and grounded support throughout every stage of the journey.
His role is not only to facilitate, but to hold the integrity, safety, and continuity of the entire retreat journey, ensuring each participant feels safe, supported, and deeply seen.
With over a decade of experience in traditional and integrative healing practices, Kay bridges ancient wisdom with modern understanding in a way that is both grounded and deeply compassionate.
Lead Facilitator & Founder
Shipibo Name: Isa Sheka ("Singing Bird")
Education: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison
Training Lineages: Shipibo, Yanawana, and Noke Koi of Brazil
Experience: Over a decade facilitating ceremonies and supporting deep healing journeys in Thailand
Before stepping fully into ceremonial work, Kay's journey began in science. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, supported by a U.S. Department of Energy research grant in nuclear fusion, and has worked in nuclear safety research in France while also lecturing in engineering in Thailand.
Yet through science, he found himself asking deeper questions - about consciousness, healing, identity, and the nature of human transformation.
This questioning led him beyond the laboratory and into a journey of self-discovery, spiritual inquiry, and ultimately, to the sacred traditions of plant medicine.
That path led him to Peru, where he trained in the Sacred Valley and immersed himself in traditional ceremonial practices and indigenous wisdom. Through this journey, he was given the Shipibo name Isa Sheka ("singing bird") by a respected elder healer of the Peruvian Amazon.
He is also an apprentice of the chief of the Noke Koî tribe of the Brazilian Amazon, continuing his study of indigenous wisdom and ceremonial traditions through direct lineage and lived practice.
Peruvian Amazon
Isa Sheka ("Singing Bird")
Traditional wisdom practices
Brazilian Amazon
Direct apprenticeship
Over the years, Kay has facilitated hundreds of ceremonies in Thailand, supporting participants through deep emotional healing, spiritual growth, and profound inner transformation through structured ceremonial practice, prayer, and medicine songs.
Alongside his ceremonial work, Kay has trained in martial arts since childhood, including Karate, Taiji, and internal martial disciplines studied across Okinawa, Taiwan, and Chiang Mai.
These practices integrate into his understanding of energy, discipline, presence, and healing. The embodied awareness cultivated through decades of martial training informs how he holds space: grounded, alert, responsive, and fully present.
Each year, Kay returns to Peru to continue studying with his teachers, maintaining a living relationship with the traditions that guide this work. This ongoing devotion ensures that the space he helps hold remains rooted in authenticity, humility, integrity, and deep respect for the medicines and traditions themselves.
Our facilitation model is grounded in a collective approach. While Kay provides continuity and structure, the retreat container is held by a wider team of experienced practitioners—each bringing their own gifts, training, and presence to support your journey.
Traditional icaros and ceremonial songs guide the journey, creating sonic anchors for navigation and healing within the experience.
Our facilitators hold space with quiet strength, deep listening, and respect for the intelligence of the medicine and your own inner wisdom.
From preparation through integration, we provide consistent emotional support, safety, and gentle guidance tailored to your unique process.
While Kay provides a visible point of contact and continuity, our wider facilitation team works behind the scenes to support the integrity of the ceremonial container.
We intentionally do not publicly list all facilitators to protect the privacy and safety of both our team members and the sacred space they help create.
This practice honors the intimate, vulnerable nature of plant medicine work and ensures our facilitators can hold space without the pressures or exposure that come with public visibility.
You will meet and connect with your full facilitation team during the retreat itself, in person, where trust is built through presence rather than profiles.
We do not come to this work to fix you or direct your experience. We come to create a space where you can safely unfold, explore, and return to yourself.
Our role is to hold the container with reverence, steadiness, and care—so you can do the work only you can do.
The medicine is the guide. Your own inner wisdom is the healer. We are simply here to make sure the space is safe enough for both to emerge.
The ceremony plants the seeds. Integration is how they grow.
Our facilitators don't just hold space during ceremony, they help you prepare beforehand and support you in making sense of what emerges afterward.
Explore our retreats or learn more about how we support your integration process.
