OPEN Foundation

Psychedelics as Energy Medicine: Addressing Conceptual Gaps in Contemporary Psychedelic Research

🗣 Nida Paracha, PhD Candidate

⏰ Wednesday 29 April, 2026 8PM CEST (7PM BST, 2PM EDT, 11AM PDT)

📍 Online via Zoom

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As psychedelics and plant medicines increasingly enter mainstream therapeutic and clinical settings, greater attention is being drawn to a persistent but underexamined phenomenon in psychedelic healing contexts: the apparent ability of some practitioners to sense and respond to participants’ needs with striking nonverbal precision, often described as working with energy, spirits, or “reading energy.” Such claims are commonly met with skepticism in biomedical research, they are difficult to operationalize, test, and distinguish from suggestion, expectancy, or other relational processes. Yet the phenomenon itself remains insufficiently studied, even as energy-based and culturally specific healing practices continue to appear in Indigenous, retreat, and clinical settings.

In this talk, researcher and ethnographer Nida Paracha draws on more than four years of fieldwork across psychedelic healing contexts to explore what is actually happening in these moments. Are they expressions of deep embodied expertise? Interpersonal attunement refined through years of practice? The power of ritual, music, and shared cultural frameworks? Or something that current research simply doesn’t have the tools to address?
Rather than reducing these reports to any single explanation, this talk considers the full range of possibilities, and asks why psychedelic research has been slow to develop rigorous methods for studying them. Yet this is not only a methodological gap. When people are in altered states, questions of suggestion, influence, and interpretation become an urgent ethical matter, and the frameworks we use shape the quality of care itself.

Who is this for?
  • Researchers and scientists curious about the methodological and ethical blind spots in psychedelic research
  • Therapists and clinicians working in psychedelic-assisted therapy who encounter relational dynamics that are hard to name or measure
  • Facilitators and retreat practitioners who regularly navigate energy-based or intuitive ways of working
  • Anthropologists, sociologists, and science & technology scholars interested in how knowledge claims are made at the edges of biomedicine
  • Anyone who has had a psychedelic experience that blurred the boundaries between self and other, or felt themselves on the receiving end of something they couldn’t quite explain, and wants to engage seriously with what ethnographic research has to say about it

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nida Paracha is a lawyer, researcher, and activist. She has lived and worked in Pakistan, Maldives, Europe, Colombia, and the United States mostly in legal and carceral spaces. Currently doing her PhD in anthropology at University of Chicago, she practices psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, Reiki and psychoanalysis. She is reframing the scientific orthodoxy of treating psychedelic assisted therapy as a form of energy healing and is interested in questions of energetic intimacies and how they re-shape ethical relationships between the self, the social, the political, and the ecological.

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