While in recent years there’s been a great deal of attention given to the importance of “set and setting,” one critical contextual aspect of psychedelic experimentation remains under-discussed: how popular folklore, trends, memes and trendy discourse, orient and condition experience, interpretation, meaning-making and integration.

The perverse incentives of the attention economy, coupled with long standing processes like the medicalization and psychologization of psychedelics and plant “medicines” have primed many facilitators and plant-medicine providers to align with visibility strategies that prioritize clicks and follows. They often propose a psychologized and medicalized orientation, mixed with the medical libertarianism typical of wellness culture, modern neoliberal spiritualities and sanitized bits and pieces of indigenous ontologies. We liberally use terms such as “medicines,” “healing,” or “doing the work,” not always questioning the assumptions underlying these approaches.

In this session, we will talk about “Healing Culture” and examine the ideologies, narratives and politics that shape and envelop much of the “work” we do, often unconsciously. From New Age spirituality, Pop-psychology, the marketing of caricature-like versions of indigenous ontologies dressed as “ancestral wisdom,” conspiracy slop and all the way to consumerism, loneliness, alienation and the hyper-individualism typical of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism.

Through a humorous exploration of Healing Culture as filtered through the Spectacle of social media, We will see why its critical to question and expand our understanding of what “Healing” is and could be, the limits of individual healing and how to move forward by shedding light on the intrinsic links between individual and social, cultural and environmental health.

This event is part of the OPEN Plus Membership.