🧘 Elevating Recovery: Expanding Out of Addiction with the Intentional Use of Psychedelics

The traditional stance on addiction views addiction as a disease or disorder that is rooted in a compulsive dependency to a substance or behavior. Oftentimes it is looked at as a harmful behavior that an individual cannot stop.

We aim to challenge this traditional stance while birthing a new paradigm for viewing, understanding, and treating addiction and mental health. When looked at deeply, addiction is an attempt to feel normal and whole through a coping mechanism of self-soothing. In fact, for many individuals, addiction can be a way of saving their lives by suppressing uncomfortable emotions and releasing pent-up pain stored in the body and subconscious mind.

What if there were more effective ways of tapping into that unconscious and getting to the root of suffering by generating self-knowledge, transformation, and growth? Addiction is a fragmentation and disconnection from the soul.

Our leaders have first-hand experience overcoming addiction with the intentional use of psychedelics. With over 2,000 support sessions conducted by our community of volunteers over the last 6 years and over 5,000 students educated through our courses, we have seen firsthand how small integration groups providing psychedelic peer support can make a positive impact on the lives of those overcoming addiction, and contribute to the larger effort of overcoming this complex and devastating issue. We believe the integration of growth that develops after a psychedelic experience and the community of support provided is just as important as the journey itself.

While traditional methods like the 12-Step Method can be helpful for some, they can also perpetuate abstinence as the only route to true sobriety. They prescribe a long-term dependency on support groups and disempowering narratives. Even the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, saw the potential of psychedelics in supporting recovery and maintaining sobriety(though his proposal to integrate LSD into the first step of recovery was largely ignored.)

As more studies and clinical trials on psychedelics yield impressive results in enhancing addiction treatment, it is more important than ever for the addiction recovery community to take these new approaches seriously. Unfortunately, most formal groups still look at the use of these ancient ancestral tools as nothing more than a relapse or the development of another addiction.

Our work is informed by and in partnership with indigenous communities from the Amazon. Partnering with psychedelics as a tool for healing is an ancient practice. In fact, indigenous communities have allied with plant medicine as a part of their culture for thousands of years. They do this by gathering regularly in sacred ceremonies to heal and support each other in the community. We are here to steward the resurgence of these ancestral medicines into the psychedelic renaissance in the modern world. We believe addiction is a response to living in an unnatural world. This evolutionary mismatch breeds isolation, loneliness, and a disconnection from nature. By learning from indigenous communities and their approach to connecting with the natural world through reciprocity rather than exploitation, individuals in the program can redefine their relationship with substances and effectively address the root causes of addiction, rather than using psychedelics as another form of addiction.

We use the support structure of a community to foster a strong long-term healing container to help people integrate psychedelic experiences and trauma.

That's why we started "Psychedelic Recovery". We noticed that while a lot of attention and support is going toward researching the medical benefits of psychedelics, there's not nearly as much support for those using psychedelics as a means of recovery outside of clinical trials, who make up the vast majority. We believe that informal communities and approaches can play a crucial role in turning an insightful psychedelic experience into real-life changes, but often lack the same level of funding and resources. Our goal is to change that and provide a comprehensive and replicable framework for the support and empowerment of those on the journey toward healing and recovery.

This project was created to raise money to support the expansion of our global, online recovery support group and mission to empower individuals to awaken from the slavery of addiction under the banner of a new organization - “Psychedelic Recovery”, a sister organization of the San Francisco Psychedelic Society. As a new initiative, we aim to further the conversation, research, and healing opportunities for individuals committed to this process of metamorphosis.