Psychedelic Spiritual Care
BEGIN INITIAL INQUIRYWhat is Spiritual Care?
As we move through life, many of us recognize that we are also on a spiritual journey. Spiritual Care is dedicated support for you on this unfolding path through a relationship with a trained spiritual companion – a minister, healer, rabbi, chaplain and more – who offers deep listening, reflection and gentle guidance directed by the wisdom that lives within you.
There are many stories, myths and symbols across cultures and time to describe this path of deepening and connection. Your spiritual companion is trained to hold all paths and all aspects of life in reverence – accompanying you through the profound pain and suffering of being human while bringing your attention to the beauty as it also arrives.
Instead of offering therapy, advice, or problem solving, your spiritual companion joins you as you navigate through the extraordinary and the ordinary, and serves as a trusted guide through the depths of psyche and soul.
What is Psychedelic Spiritual Care?
Psychedelic Spiritual Care is simultaneously as old as the first Indigenous shamanic traditions while also being brand new to many today.
Grounded in humility, reverence, honoring, and reciprocity, Spiritual Care partners with plant medicines and psychedelics to open a new door into your deepest self and deepest knowing. Psychedelic Spiritual Care invites the intentional use of psychedelics into the practice of Spiritual Care through mindful ceremony, which can allow access to inner sources of knowledge & wisdom otherwise inaccessible.
When stepping into Psychedelic Spiritual Care, we aren’t necessarily focusing on healing or growth (though both are sure to happen) – but connection. Connection to your True Self, to all life – human and more than human – and to the Sacred. The psychedelic journey may allow you to experience these connections from a completely new embodied and felt perspective – a shift from your ordinary life – which in turn offers great insight into your unfolding spiritual path.
Some come to Psychedelic Spiritual Care with a relationship to a religious tradition and many do not. Most come with a sense of searching or longing, an ache of separation or isolation, or a desire to connect to something more – something hard to name. Many come to Psychedelic Spiritual Care with big life questions tugging at their hearts, spirits, minds, and bodies:
Big Life Questions that might bring you to Psychedelic Spiritual Care:
How do I find meaning in this life?
How do I heal from deep pain and brokenness?
How can I feel more alive?
Where can I find connection to something greater than myself?
What happens when I/we die?
What is my relationship to the Sacred/God/Goddess/Universe/Truth?
Am I connected to my ancestors? Did they heal with plant medicines?
Do I have a true purpose?
Do I have gifts to offer my community?
Why is there suffering?
As a sensitive person, how do I navigate all of these feelings?
What are my dreams communicating?
How can I connect to joy, pleasure and beauty?
How can I deepen my commitment to love and justice in this life?
Are psychedelic experiences real or just hallucinations?
Are psychedelic experiences valid spiritual experiences?
What do I do after having a really big psychedelic experience?
What does Psychedelic Spiritual Care look like?
Psychedelic Spiritual Care can take many forms including:
- Weekly, biweekly or monthly psycholytic cannabis-assisted sessions grounded in spiritual practice and ritual
- Weekly, biweekly or monthly Spiritual Care paired with intentionally planned psychedelic retreats.
- Psychedelic retreats only (with preparation and integration sessions)
At the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness, we are conditional advocates for the legal, safe and sacred use of psychedelics as a meaningful tool for spiritual exploration and deepening. All medicine work includes non-medicine preparation and integration sessions, as well as oversight from our Medical Doctor. Our clients go through a formal intake and assessment process with the clinic before being approved for psychedelic work with a Spiritual Care provider or Psychotherapist.
Psychedelic Spiritual Care can include:
-
Growth in self-knowledge and connection to others
- Growth in compassion, freedom and service
- Connection to nature and your body
- Deeper and more conscious engagement with the inner and outer world
- Discernment in decision-making and experiences of synchronicity
- Deepening connection to the Sacred, God, Allah, Tao, Community, Love, The Universe, Emptiness, the Ground of All Being – or however you might name that which is bigger than you – of which you are a part
- Learning to live and respond in ways that are healing for all creation
- Guidance toward connecting with a community of belonging
- Support through the cultivation of a mindfulness or spiritual practice
- Connection to creativity
- Healing from past spiritual trauma
Psychedelic Spiritual Care through Death, Dying, Grief & Loss:
Psychedelic Spiritual Care can support you through life’s big questions and also through life’s acutely difficult experiences including the death of your beloved, a diagnosis, divorce, disconnection from family and community, a natural disaster, spiritual trauma, ancestral trauma and more.
We are not meant to bear the pain of this life alone, but to be witnessed and held in and through it all. We grieve together.
Grief & loss show up in response to acute moments like death & dying, but visit our lives much more frequently. Whether it’s grief connected to loss of a job, home, way of life, friendship, or part of yourself or grief connected to climate collapse, white supremacy, or COVID-19 – – grief is here and longing to be acknowledged and moved through our bodies, hearts, and minds.
Many of us are remembering how to grieve.
Psychedelic Spiritual Care through Life Transitions:
Life is full of thresholds. Gradual transitions from one phase of life to another and more abrupt changes like having a baby or suddenly losing a job. Thresholds can be expected or unexpected, chosen or imposed, celebratory, painful, or the beautiful and mysterious mix of it all. By bringing mindful pause and intentional ceremony to these threshold moments, Psychedelic Spiritual Care can also support you through life’s transitions – big and small.
Examples of Life Transitions:
- Aging
- Retirement
- Divorce
- Marriage
- Job change
- Adulthood
- Moving
- Coming out
- Gender affirming surgeries
- New relationships
- Endings and beginnings