Webinar September 26th, 2022. Healing from Healing: Psychedelics and new age hyperindividualism (Adam Aronovich)

Psychedelic experiences and psychedelic facilitation don't happen in a vacuum. While there's an overall increase in the awareness of the importance of set and setting, we rarely pay much attention to a critical component: the overarching discourse and narratives that condition experience, interpretation, meaning-making and integration. The recent ongoing medicalization of psychedelics and plant "medicines" have primed many facilitators and providers to align with a hyper-medicalised orientation. We use terms such as "medicines", "healing" or "doing the work", not always questioning the assumptions underlying these approaches. 

In a Zoom webinar organized by the Association for Psychedelic Education & Culture on Sep 26th at 7PM (UTC+3), medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry doctoral candidate Adam Aronovich will facilitate a discussion about "Healing Culture" where we will 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", conspiritual rabbit holes and recreational paranoia and all the way to consumerism, loneliness, alienation and the hyper-individualism typical of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism.

We will see why it’s critical to expand our understanding of "healing", and shed light on the intrinsic links between individual and social health, cultural health and environmental health, and where we can draw inspiration from indigenous ontologies without romanticizing or idealizing them.

Webinar tickets (€9/€6) are available in our web store. The cheaper price is for students and other low-income people; you can activate the discount by writing "alennus" in the discount field when doing checkout. The webinar is free of charge for members of Psykedeelisen sivistyksen liitto ry (Association for Psychedelic Association & Culture) who have paid their membership fee for 2022 – members will receive a registration link through email. Memberships are also available in our web store.

Adam is a doctoral candidate at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, focusing on Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry. He is an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC-URV) and part of the Ayahuasca Community Committee at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Adam spent more than four years conducting research and extensive fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, where he also facilitated Ayahuasca workshops in the context of shamanic and medical tourism.

He is the creator of Healing from Healing, a social media platform that casts a critical, skeptical and humorous gaze at Healing Culture. Adam is currently the director of therapy and integration for Rē Precision Health, a wellness centre in the Pacific Coast of Mexico. He also facilitates preparation and integration processes in private practice, and helps clients reframe “Healing” within relational and recreational frameworks and a secular, humanistic, grounded and open-ended interpretive and epistemic orientation.

More info on the organizer here.