Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Jeffrey Breau
1 citation
At Burning Man 2023, the Cloud-9 Camp's night-long ceremony with the psychedelic 2C-B began with an intention-setting ritual, a common practice among psychedelic users. This chapter analyzes the form and function of that ritual, drawing from ethnographic observation and interviews with the 14 camp members who participated. The ritual served as an entry into the altered state of consciousness, and the analysis explores why intention setting is ubiquitous in clinical, spiritual, and personal psychedelic use.
PsyArXiv
July 10, 2025
Roman Palitsky, Caroline Peacock, Jeffrey Breau et al.
preprint
Psychedelic facilitation training in the US is an emerging discipline focused on developing skilled interpersonal support and safety monitoring to enhance therapeutic potential and reduce harm. A quality improvement project interviewed representatives from 13 established and emerging training organizations, identifying common priorities such as careful trainee and faculty selection, content emphases, and addressing spiritual and existential topics. Gaps included the need for continuing education for graduates, parity with other disciplines, and field standards. Greater collaboration and exchange about best practices could benefit programs and trainees as the field evolves.
Psychedelic Intersections
January 17, 2025
Jeffrey Breau, Paul Gillis-Smith
Since the 1960s, Harvard Divinity School has been a central hub for research on psychedelics and religion, yet building a rich scholarly community around this field is still in its early stages. The Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology, drawn from the 'Psychedelic Intersections: Cross-cultural Manifestations of the Sacred' conference, presents original interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of psychedelics, religion, medicine, race, Indigeneity, law, the underground, history, and anthropology. The volume frames psychedelics as intersections where unlikely groups meet and as intersectional forces that challenge existing conceptions of power, law, and spirituality. It invites readers to imagine multidisciplinary, collaborative, self-critical scholarship that is attuned to complexity and diversity.