Intro
Hello sweet souls. Here is another collection of words delivered to your inbox with love. I want to first extend a warm welcome to the 54 new subscribers since the last edition was sent out. For those of you that are new, this is The Flying Sage Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at whats happening with our growing community and a space where I share some of my personal thoughts around psychedelics in a longer form format.
As with each edition, I would like to first share a personal journal entry of mine dating back to 2016 during my solo backpacking trip to Europe. The reason I chose this particular journal entry is because it has connections to what I would like to share with you in the following section…
May.23.2016
“What are inhibitions to understanding? It becomes clear that the obstacles standing between us and our goals can be boiled down to lack of understanding.This is clear when it comes to intellectual matters. If you want to pursue a life creating biotechnology, you will have to develop an intermediate understanding of biology and technology. If you want to pursue a life in law, you will have to develop understanding of government, social justice, ethics etc… Developing these types of intellectual understandings is a common practice and paths to do so are abundant, well-illuminated and embedded in much of modern culture.
Inhibitions to these pursuits of understanding are also fairly obvious to recognize. Socioeconomic background, physical health, household environment, neighbourhood safety, government support… all of these factors are part of the reality that is acquiring quality education.
There is however another form of understanding that floats beyond the familiar.
How does one find what excites them? How does one become more open-minded? How does one learn to find acceptance? How does one learn to love. How do we live without regret?
Simply put, one achieves such endeavours through experience. However, there is, in my opinion, a less passive quality to experience. When one applies their own awareness to their experience and becomes present, experience takes a new form.
You could say it is given zest.
Human intuition. A game of mind, body or soul. Possibly an artifact of all three. From what I see, intuition eludes many of us. I have begun to notice my intuition is very valuable if I listen to it. Although it is very quiet, something that underlies it, or possibly is it, remains a steady and strong guide towards experiences at hand.”
Psychedelic Assisted Embodiment
When I look around, most of the people I know offering psychedelics in safe and professional contexts are not therapists. Despite this, psychedelic-assisted therapy is positioned as the primary legal and mainstream container for these powerful experiences to be offered.
Although this method has the most scientific support from clinical trials and other research, I think it’s prevalence is more a result of inertia as opposed to effectiveness and practicality.
Looking around, there are so many individuals stepping into psychedelic facilitation from a wide variety of backgrounds and I think this is a very important aspect of the psychedelic renaissance to appreciate.
It is actually an aspect that I hope continues to expand and grow stronger in tandem with the traditional therapeutic container. An aspect that I hope we as a collective lean into instead of shy away from.
Psychedelic Assisted Therapy is only one form of healing with psychedelics. It’s a very significant one because it is what many existing research programs and clinical trials have been based on but my hope with this article is to invite us to widen the scope of what is possible and embrace the full spectrum of what therapeutic psychedelic use could look like.
Let’s embrace the fact that any of these following people can be a great psychedelic guide without learning what it takes to be a therapist or to do traditional therapy…
A professional dancer
A painter
A pharmacist
A doctor
A psychotherapist
A nature guide
An actor
A nutritionist
A lifeguard
The list could keep going. At first this list might seem arbitrary, but in The Flying Sage community, I personally know one of each of those people who have gone on to become a skilled psychedelic guide. The last one being me.
Yep, that’s right, a few years ago you would have found me in the pool teaching swimming lessons to little toddlers or sitting on a high rise chair in the summer soaking up the sun on the Vancouver beaches.
So where am I going with this? Well, if you take away anything from this article, please consider the following…
Knowledge around how to be a safe and effective guide can come from experience using psychedelics.
Or in other words, knowledge and wisdom comes from experience.
“Yeah duhh” you might be thinking to yourself. “Isn’t that the hallmark of life? Isn’t that true for all forms of experience?”
I would agree. But I want to venture a little further with this point because I think there is an epistemologically distinct form of knowledge gained from psychedelic experiences compared to traditional forms of experience.
Let me try to illustrate this with a counter-example.
If I was out here saying “democratize dentistry”, I don’t think I would be able to make a similar statement. That is, I would not be able to say knowledge around how to be a safe and effective dentist can come solely from the experience of dentistry.
I’m not a dentist but I can recognize that dentistry, along with a lot of regulated professional domains, is founded on a complex system of knowledge that needs to be instructed by another human, either verbally or through printed/visual language. You can not become a safe and effective dentist simply by going to the dentist. If that was the case then I would have been a pretty good dentist by the time I was 15. The same can be said about construction working, astrophysics, carpentry and almost every other professional domain.
BUT.
I think you can become a safe and effective psychedelic guide simply by going to the psychedelics.
The psychedelic experience is unlike any other experience nature provides to us. One of it’s unique properties is that it allows us to connect with our inner healing intelligence - that powerful, internal and intuitive energy with a natural affinity towards wholeness.
Another powerful feature of these experiences is that they connect us to a vast and rich tapestry of knowledge embedded within nature and the collective subconscious.
These experiences directly reveal parts of our psyches in a self reflexive way. Stan Grof calls psychedelics “non-specific amplifiers” in that the experience they produce is intertwined with the thoughts, personality and experience of the person doing the experiencing. These experiences also bring us to our senses in a profound way. Terence McKenna calls this the primacy of direct experience. Wittgenstein called it the “present at hand.”
Both of these concepts point towards the truth that “what you can reach is what’s real. And everything else becomes progressively more hypothetical, more abstract.”1
So what am I getting at here?
Psychedelic experiences can offer a unique form of knowledge that open the doors to embodied wisdom of their effective use through integrative practices.
The actual process of integration and engaging with these medicines allows someone to develop their own relationship and skill at navigating the terrain which is an essential skill for any effective guide.
Of course everyone’s definition of a skilled psychedelic guide is going to vary but after guiding about a hundred sessions myself and speaking with many different practitioners here in Vancouver and around the globe, I think this is the most important quality of them all.
Let’s stop focussing so much on the Psychedelic Assisted Therapy and recognize the extremely wide applications psychedelics have. Let’s embrace the wide variety of roles that practitioners can take on and the diverse backgrounds that can give rise to authentic understanding and lived experience with these medicines, spirits and entities.
Let’s stop trying to force a paradigm shifting tool and intelligence into an already broken system.
How about we start focussing on Psychedelic Assisted Embodiment instead of Psychedelic Assisted Therapy?
The Flying Sage is Flying
Over the past few years, it has felt like The Flying Sage was pre-flight. People would frequently complement the growth of the community to me and make off handed puns that the organization was flying, but you know what… I was always reluctant to feel that way. From my vantage point, it felt like we were slowly picking up speed along a bumpy and uphill runway.
But I feel that is starting to change now.
We have lift-off 🚀
Aside from some of the exciting announcements I will include below, one of the main indicators of this for me is that the community seems to be taking on a life of it’s own and becoming self sufficient. An analogy I used recently was that It feels an orb has been pushed to the top of a mountain and now it’s reached the crest where it is beginning a slow descent down the other side.
I have no doubts the path ahead will have more uphill but for now, I am excited to start taking some steps back and watch this beautiful orb do it’s thing.
Welcome Gabriele
I am really excited to announce that I have filled the position for Community Manager with The Flying Sage. It was a very hard decision process as we had close to 30 candidates apply. I am grateful to everyone that submitted their interest in this position and it’s now my pleasure to introduce you all to Gabriele Kuzabaviciute.
Gabriele is originally from Lithuania but moved to Canada seven years ago to pursue an MSc in Computational Media Design. Vancouver is now her home where she connected with incredible people who ignited her passions for marketing, design, technology, and community growth. She has previously worked with brands such as Adobe, Tedx, Pantone and Rumble Boxing. Professionally, she is a digital media designer, responsible for developing, implementing, and overseeing digital design and marketing strategies for organizations. Her expertise extends to user experience design but also event planning, and fine art. Gabriele's deep commitment to alternative healing methods found a welcoming home in Vancouver's flourishing scene. She is eager to connect with others and help grow the Flying Sage Community.
I am excited to start working alongside Gabriele and it feels wonderful to have her initially joining to support around events, operations and marketing. She is new to the community so please join me in giving her a warm welcome and above all, my one request to any of you reading this is to offer her the same level of support that you have graciously offered me over the past few years. 🤍
If you would like to connect with Gabriele, you can reach her at gabriele@theflyingsage.ca.
P.S It’s also funny since my partner’s name is Gabrielle and our first Community Leader’s name is also Gabriel. Try not to get confused! I guess we’re just surrounded by angels! 😇
New Event Cadence
We are now running 4-5 in-person events per week here in Vancouver with the following cadence…
Despite this being a big jump from our summer cadence, we are finding that most events are selling out. We are currently figuring out how to effectively offer more value to members in addition to simply offering more events so stay tuned for this!
Vancouver Psychedelic Society
As some of you might know already, towards the end of the summer we hosted a collaborative event where we announced the joining forces of the Vancouver Psychedelic Society and The Flying Sage.
Together, we are now one and the same organization committed to offering transformative and accessible events here in Vancouver. I am deeply grateful to the V.P.S for putting their trust in me and The Flying Sage community to help steer the V.P.S moving forward.
Farewell Until Next Time
I hope you have enjoyed this edition of The Flying Sage Journal. If you would like to read more things like this, please consider subscribing and sharing this with a friend. Also, please follow me on Twitter as well! I hope to post there more often.
I would LOVE to hear any feedback you have on this newsletter and what I have shared. Please feel free to reach out to me directly: michael@theflyingsage.ca
With psychedelic love and gratitude,
- Michael 🤍
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/primacy-of-direct-experience