A doctoral dissertation that investigates the ways that our sacred experiences in altered states may support spiritual growth and transformation outside of clinical settings.
This story begins with the fight to reform U.S. Drug Policy.
In United States popular culture, psychedelics have been shaped by a Drug War since at least the 1960s (and for much longer if, we really get to the heart of it). With a research “renaissance” driven primarily by Western psychiatry and New Age spirituality, it might be easy to look toward modern-day psychedelic spiritualities and see them only as a vehicle for elistist escapism or capitalistic gain.
But this is only a fraction of the full story, because every day in the United States people use psychedelics (and other substances for that matter) for spiritual and religious purposes – despite the risk of incarceration, and in spite of potential harms. Why is that?
Regardless of what the media portrays or social media suggests, there are many underground communities of people who seek out psychedelics for spiritual nourishment and transformation. Such individuals do not necessarily seek “healing” or “cures” for neurological or psychological “disorders”, nor are they seeking to escape or numb the human condition.
Rather, they seem to seek a cathartic relationship with Self, Community, and Cosmos through altered states, an act which is undeniably a Human Right. The rituals and ceremonies through which such states are achieved are more than ceremonial rites of passage as documented by anthropologists, but in the modern framing of a Drug War, they are a Human Right of Passage, something that ought to be protected as a matter of Religious Freedom. Instead, they are criminalized, the end result carrying a risk for life confined to a cage. How strange, that this reality exists alongside a global boom in research, capital, and popular use. How has it come to this?
Because illegality prohibits research into their potential benefits, we have to be very creative in how we investigate cases where drug use may have lead toward spiritual insights and positive, transformational experiences. The best methodology to apply in this case was Organic Inquiry, which relies on personal narrative as data to help investigate a research question.
Though limiting in its scope, this study will help illuminate one way that psychedelic-inspired spiritualities may support the development of pro-social behaviors and nurturance in an at-risk community.
The clinic is not the container.
Due in part to the illegality of sacramental substances, psychedelic spiritual communities are left out of policy discussions, and are stigmatized or satirized through disrespectful cultural tropes. Indigenous wisdom keepers that have stewarded psychedelic compounds in the Americas* are without question the prime example of this circumstance and are necessarily and justifiably at the center of this important discussion. (Visit for more in-depth discourse on this subject).
Additionally, there are spontaneously forming and spiritually attuned communities that have emerged alongside psychedelics and psychedelic culture in recent decades who are also deprived of their agency and voice on matters of psycehdelic policy reform – this the inherent result of a Drug War. This has been evident in the rapid expansion and evolution of the Decriminalize Nature movement that has evolved in the past decade as a counter to mainstream and venture-capital funded psychedelic science and drug development.
Often in community, though perhaps more frequently in solitude, the majority of us who use psychedelics and have positive experiences are not using these substances at a clinic, but in community with their peers and friends in pro-social settings. Such populations are very difficult for researchers to access, so studies are limited to those with direct entree to the demographic.
While there are certainly a wide-range of opinions and interpretations of policy and ethical stewardship of psychedelic therapies, the overarching message emerging on this side of the “psychedelic renaissance” is that science and New Age spirituality represent only a fraction of the population who engage in psychedelic use, and more bridges of understanding are necessary if psychedelic drugs are to be protected as a matter of liberty and religious freedom for all.
In an effort to reframe the cognitive structures that dominate the psychedelic policy discourse, this study engages scholarship that frames birthing AND altered states as sacred rites of passage which supersede human laws, not as pathologies that necessitate State interference or Medical intervention.
Grounded in the Researcher’s lens of lived experience, this study offers a cohort of women the space to share their most sacred stories around the sacred use of psychedelics. To help inspire one unfamiliar with these realms to understand the context of spiritually inspired altered states, this study orients the reader in the field of psychedelic midwifery, a convergence of disciplines that builds a scaffold between the wisdom and sanctity of spiritual midwifery, and the limitations of the psychedelic renaissance’s political framings.
The drug is not the cure.
The nature of the psychedelic experience can be difficult to describe, but on the other side of the ineffable encounter is often a renewed sense of social cohesion, and even feelings of loving kindness toward others and the Earth. In community, people often describe these encounters as a spiritual experience, but in a clinic, they are limited by the language of the study, and the bias of the researchers.
A spiritual understanding of drug use would not allow for the drug war to perpetuate as it has, and continues to. While the alternative may be more palatable to the media, psychedelics are not the only illicit drugs that elicit positive pro-social responses. This reality runs counter to narrative of governing agencies that demonize drugs and incarcerate people who use them — and it runs counter to the narrative that pathological illness or impending death ought to be a prerequisite for legal access to psychedelic induced altered states.
By and large, psychedelic research relies on psychiatric and psychological framings, rather than on spiritual referencing or self-desrcribed interpretations that continue to develop over the lifetime integration period. Respondents will rate their clinical experience as being spiritually significant, but what does that mean to a regulator who caters to their electorate? How does that land for the majority of the population whose religions abhor substance use?
If a spiritual framework is applied to the drug user and seeker, psychological pathology becomes instead a story of spiritual health. The individual is offered compassion, instead of being demonized, stigmatized, criminalized, and sometimes, institutionalized.
As I tried to advocate for political reform in my community, I routinely faced obstacles in communication because of this cognitive barrier. This was not for lack of definitions or evidence of the merits of psychedelic therapy, but because those guiding reform efforts operated from an entirely different pedagogical understanding of the sanctity and function of psychedelic substances, or any substance for that matter. Bias and stigma permeate the way we think, and subsequently the way we view the world around us.
It seems that despite best intentions and stellar scholarship, a scientific understanding of drug use is not enough to communicate the potential for psychedelic spirituality, nor it’s status as a Religious Right.
How do we transform stigma and bias, when one is unwilling and unable and uninterested in seeing the wider view?
Outside of major metropolitain centers, psychedelic spirituality is not an easy conversation at city council. Nor does it square up alongside fundraising and drug development timelines or in board meetings. One might see that psychedelic spirituality seeks to be the counterweight capital growth. And according to many, spiritual transformation is the root of psychedelic therapy, and the only reason it “works” differently than conventional drugs or psychotherapy, especially in treatment resistant scenarios.
In the absence of their personal lived experience with these substances, I could not help but think that the right question, asked of the right demographic, could help to illuminate to regulators how psychedelic experiences offer meaning, guidance, nurturance, and support in peoples lives. From there, perhaps I could finally find a common ground and further communicate how these substances help to fulfill the human drive for spirituality and fellowship in spite of their presumed harm and cultural framings as medication for psychological or physical illness.
The researcher is not objective.
How do we inspire curiosity and openness after decades of cultural demonization, and painful experiences endured under the Drug War? In the academic realm of Transformative Studies, we learn to create cognitive bridges across disciplines, to construct the common ground from which a real dialogue can eventually take place.
My aim as a transformative scholar is to expand the world views of regulators who hold others’ lives in balance. I utilize narrative research and transformative research methodologies, including Organic Inquiry, to help facilitate this. Weaving together theory and story, this study will create a cognitive bridge that may help regulators see the bigger picture of something sacred that they have no direct experience with.
Organic Inquiry begins with the Researcher’s perspective and lived experience, which is inherently never objective. Instead, the researcher fully names their bias and embraces it as a research tool. This is why, of all the thousands of psychedelic minded subcultures and spiritual communities that exist, from ayahuasca circles and DMT communities, this study focuses exclusively on my own relevant rites of passage as a Millennial woman in the U.S. who is navigating pregnancy and childbirth as a “motherless daughter” – a woman who was maternally bereaved in childhood.
Aged 25-42, Millennial women are in their prime reproductive years, and many are considering whether or not to conceive. Fear of childbirth is often high on the list of reasons why many choose not to. With new technologies available, the threat of climate change looming in the back of their minds, and rising rates of maternal mortality, elective C-sections, and post partum depression, Millennial women in the U.S. approach motherhood from a very different place than generations past. Women in my demographic who have likewise experienced maternal loss before puberty, are additionally navigating developmentally impactful grief and trauma, and exhibit higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance misuse, and other mental health disorders that tend to flare in response to pregnancy and mothering.
In my own lived experience I hold several maternal and birth-related traumas, and have at periods in my life claimed boldly that I would never bring a child into a world with such a dismal future ahead. Enduring childhood sexual abuse then rape as a young adult; navigating a surprise pregnancy and a medical malpractice case resulting in a late-term abortion; conceiving with loving intention, then delivering a surprise twin who was still born — these events have dramatically shaped my experience and interpretation of women’s health, and all were made more traumatic because I was navigating these realms without a maternal figure.
But through psychedelic ritual and spiritual practice, I found the mothering and nurturance my spirit needed to survive. Connecting with community, I found support for my own healing process, and found spiritual practices that grounded me where decades of traditional psychotherapy and medication had failed.
My life had been saved, repeatedly, by substances and communities that were criminalized. What ethical person would not advocate to extend and preserve the same opportunity to others?
I worked toward political reform, but change was slow, with seemingly impassable mountains of bureaucracy. We used to argue eloquently in the language of the oppressor. But over time I began to understand that before laws would change, hearts and minds had to be moved. We organized and advocated. “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Then “Cognitive Liberty”, and “Social Justice” were the resounding cries, and I echoed the sentiments wholeheartedly.
But at the end of the decade I see clearly, my tactics were off. Instead, it seems that venture capital and mega churches have emerged to dominate the discourse. We were warned. And by now, we have hopefully learned that hearts and minds do not sway through logic or rhetoric or legal precedent, they open through compassion. We will not succeed in ending the drug war if we seek to change people’s minds. What we need instead, is to transform ideas.
If my regulators cannot hear alternative truths because a socially conditioned stigma blocks their minds, then I must work to expand their lens of the impacts psychedelics can have upon the Human Spirit. Ultimately, this is the project of Psychedelic Midwifery, to re-conceive the idea of a “rite” of passage, to reimagine the sanctity of the human body, and to reassert that spiritual practices and communities are the basis for psychospiritual development, not molecules or methods or men with good intentions. Instead, we center the birthing mother, literally and philosophically.
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