Below is a transcript from Beckley Academy’s feature on The Trip Report podcast. You can find the full episode at the link here or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:00] Zach Haigney:
I just want to read a headline from a press release today. “Beckley Academy publishes first open source learning framework to advance psychedelic assisted therapy training standards.”
And from the responses that I’ve seen on LinkedIn and elsewhere, this is a welcomed Piece of research. And, I don’t think it’s obvious why it’s such an important contribution to the space. So I want to get into that for sure. But first, why don’t we just jump in and go around the horn and introduce ourselves and, Deb, why don’t you kick us off?
[00:00:35] Deborah Gardner:
Okay. Thanks, Zach. I’m Deborah Gardner. at Beckley Academy, I’m the head of education. I am a longtime educator. I’ve been in the education industry for about 17 years. first as a teacher of students with learning differences, and then for a decade, with Sensory Motor Psychotherapy Institute as the director of education, which if you’re not familiar with it, is a somatic based trauma and developmental injury methodology.
[00:01:08] Shirelle Noble:
Wow. I’m so excited to be here. I just wanted to say that. so I’m Shirelle Noble and I’m part of the co founding team at Beckley Academy along with Deb. I lead growth and partnerships and, I’m currently in the process of becoming a psychedelic therapist and in a grad program myself at Naropa. And, I’ve been working in the psychedelic field for the past five years.
I care a lot about conscious capitalism and co-founded the North Star Project, and also spent two years at MAPS working on public education projects. and, uh, yeah, this is just such an awesome group.
[00:01:46] Danielle Herrera:
And besides being Shirelle and Deb’s biggest fan, I’m the course facilitator at Beckley, one of the course facilitators. I’m a licensed psychotherapist specializing in psychedelic assisted therapy, ketamine assisted therapy currently. and I have a private practice. I also do clinical consultation for, alchemy and supervision for alchemy community therapy center, as well as for CIS.
[00:02:13] Zach:
thank you all. Welcome. Welcome to the Trip Report. I should also mention that Shirelle was the first one who prodded me to start a podcast several years ago. So
[00:02:27] Deb:
talking for two years about wanting to do a podcast together, so this is our dream come true in this moment right now.
[00:02:33] Zach:
Great. all right. so, so let’s jump into this, recent publication. and, and I know that Shirelle and Deb, you were the co authors of, of this, but, maybe Deb, why don’t you give us a sense of the scope and what exactly you birthed into the world today?
[00:02:53] Deb:
Yeah, so, let me start by just saying, I came into this industry, psychedelic assisted therapy, from somatic psychotherapy, as we talked about in my introduction, and in the middle of a development project, for Beckley Foundation’s you know, a flagship course, which now is called Relational Psychedelic Assisted Therapy.
And I had to get myself up to speed very, very quickly on what was already out there in the field in terms of what training programs looked like. So this research came out of a personal need, but also it turned into an opportunity to really look at across organizations, across medicines, what these thought leaders, you know, who have already developed, codes of ethics, who have already developed, standards of practice, you know, touching on competencies for psychedelic assistant therapists, and to really look at all of that data and say, okay, what does all of this say about what therapists need to learn in training programs?
And so from that we really created a standardized set of learning objectives, using APA’s Behavioral Health Learning Objective Framework to create a baseline for safe and ethical practice. It’s not necessarily frozen, right? A curriculum is a living thing. It has gaps, you know, there are things that are missing.
There’s also harms that come with standardization, but it gives us a sense of what everyone already knows. it really means about practicing well, practicing good and, ethically in the field.
[00:04:20] Zach:
I, I think of it as like the way we’ve talked about this in the past, the, the image that I got, it’s like, it’s almost like a living document Like it’s, it’s going to grow and sort of morph and change as research advances.
I mean, I think it’s important to point out like, this is really early in this iteration of psychedelic. Medicine, let’s call it, you know, there’s obviously a long history of indigenous practice and, and contemplative practice but this is sort of the coalescing of, of information that’s coming from either published peer reviewed research or, programs that are existing in this time and place.
Is that kind of how to understand it?
[00:05:00] Shirelle:
Yeah I can contextualize it a little bit. This is really a framework, first and foremost, and we titled it that way because we wanted people to be able to look at these sets of, learning objectives and be able to build off of this baseline set that is the focus of, Deb and my’s publication.
So it’s a framework, but it’s also a methodology. And I think that that’s really important to highlight, because one of the things that Deb and I found is we looked across all of the existing public, documents that we pulled from. So codes of ethics, therapy training manuals, like ones that many people will recognize.
So the MAPS code of ethics, you know, the MAPS therapy training manual. The Association for Ketamine Practitioners, their codes of ethics. when we look at all those documents, they are so foundational, but they’re not written for educators. And so the methodology piece is super important, where by using, the APA’s guidelines for writing, learning objectives, we’re actually, creating, a pathway for other people to adopt this methodology, and then build off the framework, and that’s one of the reasons why, we wanted to publish this open source.
And so, following in the footsteps of Amanda Fielding, who has been such a champion for research and for women in research, we published this open source that people can build off of it.
[00:06:28] Zach:
Danielle, in your experience as a clinician, as a provider, as a therapist, can you kind of contextualize this for those in your profession and in your seat how it might affect them, how they could use it, how it will, does that make sense?
Join the Beckley Academy Mailing List
[00:06:46] Danielle:
Totally, yeah, that what Shirelle and Deb have published it’s a game changer for the field, and it’s, it’s pretty much what the field has been, calling for, which is some standardization, some, systematizing, some actual methodology that can be provided, to all of us very new, bright, doe eyed, psychedelic therapists, who, We want to add this to their practice for the long run.
So what this means for therapists is that, and especially folks who are like kind of newer to the field, is that they kind of have a direction of what it might look like to actually become specialized in psychedelic therapy. and for there to be standards in how we’re doing the work, and it’s not just this random piecemeal assortment of, of trainings, and certifications that may not mean anything, so it’s, it’s been huge to read their work.
[00:07:40] Zach:
if we step back and think about the field as a whole right now, so we should just as like a timestamp, it’s the end of February in 2024, You know, if we’re, if we’re looking ahead, fingers crossed, knock on wood, MDMA assisted therapy from Lycos therapeutics is FDA approved. In six months, eight months time, 10 months time, hopefully sometime this year. Right. that I think the field and. Everybody’s like looking to that as like a, you know, a watershed moment in this field. And, and, and as a result, that is MDMA assisted therapy, right? Like the therapy is a huge component of that.
and a lot goes into credentialing, uh, training. Certifying, therapists. And this is like an entirely new in this context and the medical context, domain. And so what, like where does this fit in into that kind of global picture of, what the next 12 to 18 months looks like as this sort of Cambrian explosion of, you know, hopefully therapists flocking to. Training programs like Beckley Academy and getting certified and operationalizing as psychedelic therapists.
Right. Am I making sense? Deb, you’re nodding like vigorously. So I’m going to, I’m going to turn it over to you.
[00:09:09] Deb:
Yeah, yeah, the way that I look at it, and, and Kelly O’Donnell said this the other day, we were on a call, a panel discussion, Cheryl and I with the APPA, and Kelly O’Donnell was there too. And she said so much of this work, right, is really just good psychotherapy. And in this research that we’ve collected and now published, you really do start to see how much of it really is just sort of like amplified psychotherapy skills.
And there are sort of nuances, things that need to be. enhanced, like an enhanced, uh, you know, informed consent for touch, right? And these elements that become really important, or even therapists and enhanced therapist self awareness, right, during practice. And these parts become really evident, right, that are necessary for good psychedelic assisted therapy.
And, in that same sort of vein, we’ve had someone from Lykos reach out actually today to ask for the framework because I think what it does is it highlights for them. particularly because we’ve included an indigenous, cultural competency perspective. It highlighted for them what was missing from the MAPS training manual when it was written so many years ago, right?
Now we’re here where we are in two, uh, what year is it? Um, 2024. Right? And we have these really great resources. We have these other ways of thinking about research. We have other ways of thinking about. You know, bringing in community, that can be integrated right into their already fantastic training method, in their training manual.
And so I think that there’s this opportunity to really take a look at what matters most in this field for all people who are in leadership positions.
[00:10:49] Shirelle:
Yeah, I have a couple things to build on what Deb said. particularly around like what does, what matters for people in this field? And um, Zach, you’ll remember when there was the call for comment from the FDA on research protocols, right? And there was a lot of discussion around psychological support.
do we provide psychological support with dosing sessions? Who provides psychological support? Does psychological support mean psychotherapy? These are very important discussions and all of them impact ultimately patient outcomes. And so I think what this research does, is that it showcases that the therapy skills are really key to this modality.
And what it does is it allows for us as a field to come together from our multidisciplinary perspectives and say, okay, So, nurses who might be assisting people during a dosing session, here’s some learning objectives that could be ethically included into their training. And in fact, it would build upon the care skills that nurses already have coming from there.
License in their educational background. it’ll do the same for other people across a care team. And then I think what it will also highlight is for therapists, like Danielle said, myself included, right, as a future psychedelic therapist. It’ll allow me to say, okay, this kind of a grad program will give me, you know, a good foundation.
And then this kind of a postdoc program. Will give me the actual additional skills that I need to hold space and not in non ordinary states of consciousness And it’s that non ordinary states of consciousness piece. That’s so so so important Because that’s where the additional vulnerability comes from and Danielle is really an expert in that so she could potentially speak to How this research showcases those skills
[00:12:58] Danielle:
Yeah, you know, I really love that Deb very naturally used the term amplified, like that it is good therapy. Yes, but it’s amplified therapy. And I love that because I think of psychedelics as being non specific amplifiers and Beckley will teach in that way. and like Shirelle is saying, there’s this quality of the learner, the student who is wondering what direction do I take in expanding my capacity, of enhancing my holding ability, the difference between, and we’ve learned this just in the infancy of our, like, first couple years here in Psychedelic Therapy, the difference between a sitter and a guide.
And if somebody’s leaning towards becoming a guide, what is like the depth work of being a guide actually look like? what does deep psychotherapy mean in the context of these altered states of consciousness, these non ordinary states, these non specific amplifiers? The dimensions that are accessed that can be touched during regular awesome psychotherapy that may take many, many years.
And. still may not capture or may not be experienced with the same intensity as one moment of psychedelic assisted therapy. So, yeah, I feel like their framework does really something to highlight what direction we take.
[00:14:24] Deb:
As an educator in the field too, I think it highlights the parts that are more challenging to teach like through traditional academia. So you know, so much of it is cognitively based and it’s, you can read about, you know, what inner healing intelligence is. You can read about what transference and counter transference are, but how do you teach to what’s actually happening below the surface in the intersubjective field.
And it takes, strategies that go beyond cognition, that, touch on the affective domain, touch on the somatic domain. And that part for me is a very, very interesting, right? Because this framework actually highlights those places where, you know, we have to teach to that and we have to assess what’s happening.
Yeah. You know, sort of inside the therapist system, or when they’re working with another person in relationship.
[00:15:11] Zach:
Deb, along those lines, I wonder if you can touch on, like, it’s, it’s occurring to me. I, I haven’t asked yet. Like, what are some specific things that are in this document or like, you know, for just like are tangible for listeners who, who might be wondering, you know, what’s in that?
[00:15:28] Deb:
Yeah. So, When Shirelle and I started this, we looked at 600 phrases that alluded to competencies across organizations, across medicines. We looked at the MAPS manual, MAPS code of ethics, Oregon health authorities, information about psilocybin.
We looked at what Janice Phelps said, Uh, Published Competencies on Training Psychedelic Therapists, ASKP3 Ethical Code and Standards of Practice, and CREA Ethical Guidelines, as well as Ethical Principles of Traditional Indigenous Medicine to Guide Western, Psychedelic Research and Practice.
So from those 600 phrases, we collated them and we categorized them. So we put them into general categories of ethics, cultural responsibility, and care. legal and risk management, medicines, safety, therapeutic methods and skills, stages of the process, which are preparation, dosing and integration, and then knowledge of complementary techniques.
From there, we applied the APA behavioral health guidelines to draft 150 learning objectives that speak to meeting those competencies.
[00:16:42] Zach:
So for example, like a learning objective in the domain of medicine. what might that be?
[00:16:51] Shirelle:
Yeah, so one example, Zach and Deb can expand upon this afterwards is, that some of the work that we found, and people talk a lot about therapist self work, but what does it really mean to train therapists in self work? So, In the ethics category, we have a subcategory about self awareness and self work, and a therapist working in this field would need to demonstrate reflective practice regarding motives, intentions, and biases when engaging in psychedelic assisted therapy.
And Deb, maybe you could speak to how That kind of learning objective really requires, a different way of teaching and then also one area that we see this going is also a different way of assessing.
[00:17:40] Deb:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good learning objective to bring up for discussion because it does touch on what’s happening, in the therapist’s own being, right? It involves all of their history that they’ve come to that teaching moment with, and what, I think we’ve talked about this before, Zach, is like we, we enact patterns all the time.
People love patterns and we constantly enact them and they’re often outside of our conscious awareness. When we’re trying to look at things like our intentions, the outside factors that influence them, our implicit biases and how they play out in ourselves, but also in our relationships with others, we need a framework for figuring out even what that is, right?
We need to be able to look at what in our history has brought us to the belief system that we have. How do we recognize when our belief system it’s sort of, influencing us to act a certain way or feel a certain way about a client or, you know, do something specific. And then how do we learn to interrupt that if it’s not helpful in that moment and do something different?
And I think Danielle can speak to this because we actually do this quite well in our course at Beckley Academy.
[00:18:48] Danielle:
Yeah. I’m really glad you’re bringing up this learning objective because it captures the elusive nature in which you’re trying to standardize something in which. That is almost, like, ephemeral in its nature, right? That isn’t, like, regularly talked about in, like, a, just, like, a rigid training, program.
And is instead something that has, like, depth and, like, process. And, in, uh, when I’m teaching for Beckley, there’s a lot of that. One of the things I think really, sets Beckley’s training apart from a bunch of other, psychedelic training programs, and I’ve done a lot of them. Almost to assess and because I love doing the work, is that, it’s very experiential, students in Beckley’s programs will actually have the like felt experience literally somatically as if they’re going through the psychedelic journey.
like, it’s a somatic experiential approach where the work is more so focused on them having a Like a depth based therapeutic process of their own material and Rather than just giving them material to put on top of their brain of how they might want to prepare the room and then sit for a client.
And it’s, it’s more, I guess, quick example is just that in most of my sessions and most of the teaching days, There’s somebody crying in class and it feels like group therapy. I think that’s the magic of a very therapeutic focus. having us psychotherapists teach the class and having an education expert writing the curriculum, which is usually what we’re seeing.
[00:20:25] Zach:
There’s a, a retired psychologist, turned author by the name of Rachel Harris, who has written a book called Swimming in the Sacred. And she was presenting her. Talk that, you know, when, when the book was published, this is probably last spring maybe, but she lives here in Maine in the summer and, so this book is about her almost like anthropological level work with, women, underground, psychedelic, and guides therapist.
and she actually had a moment of like poo pooing, you know, the psychedelic Renaissance of like the depth of practice that people have gone through. And This is like the inherent challenge of, something that has been both culturally stigmatized, legally. Outlawed, scientifically and, professionally vilified kind of like emerging as fast as it is, is that like building the plane, so to speak of like the infrastructure and the, formats that will afford safe and accessible access to. These things, and I actually, I remember I raised my hand.
I said, I think that is like all due respect, all due respect Rachel Harris. I think that’s overstating or overlooking the inherent challenge of this cultural phenomena. I don’t know where I’m going with this, except to say that, what I think you’re all pointing to and is implicit in this research that you’re doing is like, There is a lot that is going into this.
This is not merely slapping psychedelics onto like a cognitive behavioral therapy session or something like that. It’s that, it’s almost like there is a reimagining or a reconceptualizing of what, we mean by psychotherapy. I don’t know resonating with, with anybody.
[00:22:27] Danielle:
Sure, sure. And then I’d love to pass it to Shirelle. I just, I’m, I’m going to do the thing that I always do as a therapist, which is you’re one of my clients say, I’m not sure why this is even coming up. I don’t know what I’m doing. You just did it. You just gave us a metaphor. You gave us a metaphor. So perfectly, which is we’re trying to fly a plane without the plane being built.
And Deb and Shirelle just tried to build the plane using this resource, right? We were building the plane at Beckley. And, just pointing to that metaphor, I, I think, you know, in general on what you’re getting to too is that the psychedelic field is moving at, is such a fast pace.
And I said it was an infant earlier. It’s still an infant. It hasn’t grown that much further. They’ll dependent on us for care and nurturance. A ton of attention. and the undertow we use this metaphor in the class itself through meditations where we feel into the undertow, the current trying to pull us and how to stay rooted in our values and our ethics.
And that’s what’s being outlined in the research and Shirelle. I’d love for you to pick up there.
[00:23:28] Shirelle:
Yeah, thank you, Danielle. all of our work is so poetic. I, I really love that in this field. And Zach, I appreciated what you said about this reimagining. And I think what we’re really trying to do as a team here is reimagine education itself and therapist education itself. I think what we learn from psychedelics about, Healing is that the process of healing is transformative, right?
You are transforming and you are building resiliency. And those are the things that, I hope to, as a future psychedelic therapist, offer to my clients. And as an educator, and as a business person, those are the things that I’m trying to also offer to the broader, mental health and education.
Field because, you know, we’ve talked about this. You can’t change a system by the same rules, right? And so, we really have to figure out ways to create transformative education experiences. And especially in this domain, where so much of the work that happens in the room and in the medicine sessions is truly relational.
so we have to be able to teach those relational skills, teach those, skills to stay grounded. we talk a lot about polyvagal theory, but how do you actually apply polyvagal theory to the, Active education and, this is where I feel. So, so, so grateful to get to work with Deb because this is, truly the cutting edge, I think, of educational theory is, is what she’s developing and bringing to not only Beckley Academy, but the whole psychedelic field.
So that’s my tee up, Deb, for you to talk about transformative education.
[00:25:25] Deb:
Yeah, I think what’s really exciting about this research and where we can go from here is is really highlighting the parallel process right between learning and understanding. And therapy and transformation that happens in therapy. And if we think of learning like the therapy process, then what we want to help our learners do is deepen into experience, to, trust themselves, to create enough, safety, enough courage to go deeply into these, really deep psychological elements, right?
That, done alone, done on their own, could be scary, but they’re there with people, they’re there with, their, colleagues, they’re there with a teacher who is helping guide them, and when we start to envision learning in that way, it really opens up possibilities to think outside of theory, right?
To think outside of just learning as, you know, checking a box, as really sort of deepening into what does this really mean for me in my person and in relationship with other people?
[00:26:27] Zach:
I want to get clarity and Deb, you and I have talked about this. So I kind of know where you’re going to go with this, but you use the term a few times somatic embodied has also come up. and as a lay person with an interest in psychology and therapy and cognitive science, you know, I know enough to be dangerous, right?
And I, I can get myself in trouble. but when we’re talking about these kinds of things and, and Shirelle, you mentioned polyvagal theory and I don’t think it’s new, right? Cause I know that these things come from, well, you can trace them back to contemplative practices as old as the hills.
Right. But in terms of modern psychotherapy, I feel like people like Pat Ogden and Peter Levine have brought forward this somatically oriented approach to. Healing transformation, et cetera. And so maybe just touch on that. It’s come up a few times in this conversation.
I know it’s your orientation and it seems like, an evolution, if you will, from. Maybe a Freudian kind of psychoanalytical perspective and a departure from cognitive behavioral. It feels like something different, but I don’t know how to articulate it. So.
[00:27:46] Deb:
I think Lisa Feldman Barrett named this best in her book, How Emotions Are Made, which I suggest everyone reads. She essentially said we’re primed for action and also acting often before we have conscious awareness.
I don’t know if that’s for sort of a general population to understand this, but, but what it means is that our bodies are really efficient, bodies, brains, however you want to look at it, meaning that all of our experiences leading up until now, and as adult learners, we have many right, we’re taking in all of this input and we’re filtering through it.
This is all in our subconscious. Based on what we’ve know already, experiences we’ve had, our body decides, body brain decides, what we’re going to do. That can be incredibly useful, like, you might not pay attention while you’re driving to the store, for example, but you still make it there. But it can also be how we perpetuate unhelpful patterns, implicit biases, limiting beliefs, things like that.
And I think that’s where Pat Ogden’s work or Peter Levine’s work comes in because it really provides a framework for therapists to think about what’s happening in their body, right, and to notice first those first signs of, for example, In psychedelic assisted therapy or in therapy, the first signs of, transference or counter transference.
To be able to track, what’s happening in the system, the nervous system of their client, in themselves, in relationship together. There’s a dance of this energy between both of those people. And without a somatic understanding, it’s really hard to catch those early signs. Before you’re already acting on them. Now I think the really nice thing is that, the MAPS training manual actually references a lot of that somatic work because it was coming up in the same time as that somatic therapy movement.
[00:29:45] Danielle:
No, that, that’s great. Thank you. Yeah. You know, as a talk therapist by trade, I acknowledge that The place where, my field is, changing is in acknowledging that deep therapy cannot be done without the somatic body. and, you know, earlier you all were using words like reimagining and I wanted to bring us to the word remembering because there’s a return to, Ancient or indigenous epistemologies prior to colonial, structures of health where the body is not separate from the mind and all expressions of what we call pathological, symptomology is, is really just the intelligence of our body communicating was that something is happening.
in our emotional or spiritual realm. So, and then last thing is just like on, you know, like I said, the therapies fall short now when they don’t include the body. And I would also say that our spiritual practices fall short when they don’t, include application into how to be in this world. Right? How to be somebody who also works 40 hours a week, have kids, be partners, be kind to the people that we love, be in relationship, right?
So that’s the relational approach. That’s the somatic approach. I’m not seeing this in other trainings. I’m not even seeing this be a primary focus in psychotherapy, master’s level or PhD level programs. This is the cutting edge technology. So to speak of the of the fields, yes, The format where people are getting licensed and credentialed to practice have not adopted these ideas yet.
Interested in learning more?
Schedule time with our team today to take the next step in the growth of your psychedelic-assisted therapy practice.
[00:31:37] Shirelle:
Yeah, I can add, as a grad student, when I was looking for programs, I wanted to find a program that would, mean that I wouldn’t have to unlearn a lot of things to apply psychedelic principles. And so, that led me to Naropa because there was specifically a mindfulness program that was based in transpersonal counseling.
And the transpersonal piece is so important here because when we do psychedelic work, right, we are connected to the collective consciousness. We are interpreting symbols. We are talking to our ancestors. You know, there’s, there’s so much that happens that. You are not taught in a regular master’s program.
And so,it’s so incredibly important that therapists who are coming into this field recognize The ways in which the psychedelic assisted therapy training is going to add this new dimension, right? This psychedelic dimension, to their toolkit.
And a lot of therapists, and future therapists, myself included, are choosing to incorporate psychedelic therapy into their practice because we found Right, that other modalities don’t work for some of our hardest clients, our clients who are suffering from, PTSD.
Like, let’s remember the patient population that this is going out to first. It’s veterans who’ve experienced incredible amounts of trauma in war zones. It’s women, generally women, who’ve experienced sexual trauma. It’s people experiencing, the impacts of racism, systemic oppression, poverty. Like, these are very difficult cases. And we need a different kind of tool set to be able to work with those clients. But as a potential therapist, and as a future therapist, I also have to be able to hold that life experience that my clients will bring, that I most likely have no personal experience, and probably come from a different cultural background, and probably I come from more privilege.
And so I also have to be able to sit in the room. You know, human to human in that relational dynamic with their nervous system being, probably activated being asked to go and look at these difficult memories or share, things that might come up related to those things. And I’m not on a medicine like MDMA that’s working on my amygdala response, right?
Like, I have to sit there with those. Skills to be grounded, to hold their emotion, not make it about my emotion. and that requires a different kind of training. Right. And that’s very experiential, very experiential.
[00:34:45] Zach:
Yeah. So, I want to start to land the plane to continue the metaphor here in this conversation. And I just want to pose the question of, let’s imagine somebody who is relatively early in their career as a therapist, and they’re reading about, you know, MDMA is going to become, a prescribable drug in the near future.
And there’s these decriminalization and legalization campaigns kind of across the country. And elsewhere, other than, or in addition to, obviously seeking out Beckley academies training, how does one orient to this in a way that is, Appropriate or, useful for their career ambitions for their personal development like, obviously I’m suggesting they check out Beckley Academy’s website, but,
we’re talking about themes of, somatics and embodied practice and these types of things, but this hypothetical person that’s listening to this, can we orient them to this future career space, Danielle? Maybe you want to offer your insight as a professional working in this space.
[00:36:00] Danielle:
Sure. Yeah. Thank you. Zach. Yeah. You know what? I think you’re. Well, what you’re saying makes me think of, just that word again, relational, the person who is excited to do this work, the encouragement is to connect them and they can connect to their own therapist and talk to their own person.
People who are doing the work connect, um, network and, you know, I instantly thought of Kabir who works on our team and Kabir will chat with y’all if you’re interested in just in your, you’re having that experience of like, wow, I find beauty here. It is, um, it’s a big deal that you’re finding beauty you’re being drawn towards this work And so, you know, it’s like as above so below be be called towards the work and the intensity in which you are and then also like witness and experience The like, oh wow, there’s so much work I get to do now so that I can’t do this work That’s what came up for me.
I’d love to hear what deb and Shirelle think too Yeah
[00:36:55] Deb:
Yeah, the thing that came to mind for me is this metaphor that we often hear in the field, which is being a clean vessel. And what does that really mean? And I think there’s two parts to it, the clean part, right? It’s really about knowing yourself, doing that self work to really know what you bring to the therapeutic relationship.
And that could be seeking out consultation, it could be being in therapy yourself, it could be spiritual practice, there’s so many different ways to do that, and it’s probably multi faceted approach that is best. And then, the vessel aspect of it is you have to prepare yourself to hold space for all kinds of experiences, like Shirelle was talking about in her example.
And, the best way to do that is to get out there and talk to people and challenge yourself to. beyond what your comfort level is, right? Sit with the discomfort. Have uncomfortable conversations. and seek those out and really notice what happens in yourself as you’re trying to hold space for those uncomfortable moments.
because that’s going to be your best friend. Knowing what’s happening in your own system is your best friend in the process. And there’s so many tools out there. Courses, spiritual practices, all different kinds of things that people can do to, get prepared, so to speak.
[00:38:03] Zach:
I just want to comment, Shirelle, before I give you a chance, that was like a, such a profound. Practice or idea, Deb, of like seeking out challenging conversations and then tracking what happens in your body. I’m going to totally try to do that a lot and probably not do it most of the time, but I will aspire to that.
That is so that I, I get that.
[00:38:37] Shirelle:
Yeah. And, and I’ll, I’ll end with a, with a bit of a rallying cry. if you are considering this path and you’re in a career that’s currently unfulfilling and you have an inkling. That you have something to offer that you are interested in helping supporting other people on their healing paths. please come and join us.
Please come and join this field. we need more well trained space holders, therapists, nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, who can support. both the Western medical approach to psychedelic healing and other approaches, to psychedelic healing. We absolutely need you. And I can’t think of anything that could be more important to do with your time if you are well suited to do this work.
So be curious about the path, talk to people, find mentorship, find community members, and then commit to the path. Like we absolutely need more people who can come and support. Psychedelic healing.