26 | Harvard's Last Psychedelic Intersections Conference: A Practitioner's Review

 

~14 MINS READ

THE FINAL PSYCHEDELIC INTERSECTIONS CONFERENCE AT HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL. TWO DAYS. THIRTY-SEVEN SPEAKERS. TWELVE COUNTRIES. ONE ENDING NO ONE SAW COMING. IN 1889, WILLIAM JAMES AND THE FATHER OF EUGENICS GOT DRUNK ON THE EIFFEL TOWER AND DESIGNED THE FRAMEWORK THAT STILL SCORES YOUR MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE. NOBODY ASKED WHY. SIXTY-THREE YEARS AFTER A DIVINITY STUDENT BUILT THE TOOL THAT LAUNCHED THE PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE, TWO SCHOLARS TORE IT APART IN THE SAME BUILDING WHERE HE WROTE IT. THE SACRED MUSHROOMS OF THE SIERRA MAZATECA ARE DISAPPEARING INTO THE EARTH. THE MAZATEC SAY THEY ARE HIDING. RUMI SAID LOSE YOUR MIND. AN AMAZONIAN CURANDERA SAID DOMINATE THE PLANT. BOTH MEANT IT. OVER A HUNDRED PSILOCYBIN CHURCHES OPERATE IN AMERICA AND ALMOST NO ONE IS PAYING ATTENTION. AN ANISHINAABE SCHOLAR NAMED WHAT THE FIELD REFUSES TO SAY: HEALING WITHOUT REPENTANCE IS EXTRACTION. HARVARD SPENT FOUR YEARS BUILDING THE MOST SERIOUS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR PSYCHEDELIC CHAPLAINCY IN THE COUNTRY. THEN WALKED AWAY. WHAT REMAINS WHEN EVERYTHING WITHDRAWS. TURNS OUT, LISTENING IS PSYCHEDELIC.

If the pursuit of truth requires surrender, what happens when the institution pursuing it surrenders first?

The sacrament does not ask where you went to school. It asks what you are willing to release.

I came to Harvard seeking knowledge. I left with something I cannot put on a résumé. A field still learning to walk taught me that the most important things we build are the ones we are willing to let dissolve.

“What are universities good for? The pursuit of truth. What are psychedelics good for? The exploration of truth.”
— Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School

The Magnolias Outside Swartz Hall Bloomed Before the Leaves (so did I)

I began writing this post on Friday morning, the first day of the Psychedelic Intersections 2026 conference, from a seat near the back of the James Room in Swartz Hall at Harvard Divinity School. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows that run the length of the wall, and through them I could see the kind of April morning that makes you remember why you endure New England winters. Crabapple trees flushing pink along the walkways. Daffodils pressing through mulch that still smelled like the last frost. The magnolias had opened overnight, those absurd, fragile blooms that arrive before the tree has even bothered with leaves. I have always loved that about magnolias. They do not wait for conditions to be right. They bloom into the risk. Between panels, students pulled blankets onto the lawn, someone with a hand drum joined a guitarist, and others drifted close, sitting in the grass like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The psychedelic field is asking something of us right now, and the answer might look like those students on the lawn. Slow down. Lean in. Listen.

There is a line I carry from a contemplative tradition: prayer is active listening. It felt appropriate to practice in this room. To let go of my agenda, my assumptions, my ways of knowing, and meet what was actually being offered. To see with new eyes. To be more like a curious child than an intellectual.

Disappointment Lives in the Ribs (the news, the surrender, the mid-step dissolve)

It was not in the program. It surfaced in the weight of Charles Stang's welcome (Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR)), in a comment from Jeffrey Breau, in the way Paul Gillis-Smith looked at the room like he was memorizing it. Jeffrey and Paul co-founded the Psychedelics and Spirituality Center at CSWR. By Friday afternoon, the news had traveled: the program is closing. This was the last conference.

Funding was available to continue. Donors had stepped forward. I overheard the Epstein files and the scrutiny they brought to Harvard's donor networks, the current administration is pressuring the university, and the political exposure of psychedelics at this moment proved too much. Progress is on pause. Not because the work failed. Because the world outside the room got louder than the work inside it.

My chest tightened. A familiar heat rose in my throat, the kind I recognize from ceremony when someone realizes what they were counting on is not coming. I placed my hand on my sternum and took a few slow breaths. Disappointment lives in the ribs. So does hope. They share a room there, and sometimes you cannot tell which one is speaking.

And then, the practice of surrender. Not resignation. The active release of what you thought was coming, to make room for what is actually here. You set your intention. You swallow the sacrament. And then the sacrament does what it does. Your only job is to stay present.

For years, I had been preparing myself to pursue a Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, a self-directed psychedelic chaplaincy concentration. Now the program in development is ending, the staff who built it are departing, and the ground I had planned to stand on dissolved while I was mid-step.

And yet. In his foreword to the 2024 conference anthology, Stang had written:

“Since the 1960s, Harvard Divinity School has been an influential hub of research on psychedelics and religion. Yet, in many ways, the work of building a rich scholarly community around this area of study is just beginning.”
— Charles Stang, Foreword, Psychedelic Intersections: 2024 Conference Anthology

Just beginning. That was years ago. Now the program that was just beginning is ending. Or is it? The pattern is worth noticing. Harvard has opened and closed the psychedelic door a few times since 1960. Each closure scattered seeds that grew somewhere the institution did not expect.

Set and Setting (what I carry into this room)

The history of psychedelics at Harvard stretches from William James in 1882 through Timothy Leary and Walter Pahnke's Good Friday Experiment, through the dismissals of 1963, through sixty years of dormancy, and into the reopening Jeffrey and Paul led in 2021. (Full timeline in the FAQs.) In 2024, I attended digitally. In 2025, I joined live. In 2026, my second year in the room. The founders said goodbye. Many participants could easily have been presenters.

What I carry into these rooms is uncommon: years guiding several hundred ceremonies, consulting with dozens of psychedelic churches, advocating publicly, and building innovative technology for the field. I have attended nearly every psychedelic event Harvard has offered to the public. Between panels, Harvard Divinity School students described a culture unlike other graduate schools. Several called it simply more human. And yet each gathering sends me home with more questions than I arrived with.

Three Doors That Opened in Both Directions (the polarities)

The conference kept returning to three tensions. Not problems to solve. Polarities to hold.

  1. Between measurement and mystery. The field's primary tool for studying mystical experience was challenged on its own premises. Stang proposed widening the definition of mysticism beyond transcendence to include the embodied, the sensual, the strange. Meanwhile, a scholar named what every practitioner knows: every encounter with the sacrament is singular. You cannot standardize the numinous. And yet the field must find ways to study it. The question is which instruments, and whose assumptions they carry.

  2. Between extraction and reciprocity. Three Indigenous scholars from three panels converged on the same truth: medicines once targeted for eradication are now celebrated when used predominantly by those who did the targeting. The field must decide whether it is taking or being in relationship.

  3. Between institution and initiation. Harvard is stepping back. The Psychedelic Chaplaincy credential does not exist...yet. The people doing the work are building the infrastructure from inside the practice, not from above it. One sociologist of religion called it initiatic sociology: you cannot understand a system you have not been digested by. The question is whether the field will be shaped by those who study it from outside or those who have been transformed by it from within.

These are not abstractions. I watched each one play out in real time throughout the conference. Here is what moved through my body as they did.

The Body Keeps the Conference (every panel I felt before I understood)

Professor of English Ramzi Fawaz (Wisconsin-Madison) opened the conference: "We have forgotten that humans are psychological beings with deep psychic needs that existed millennia before any of the systems we built."

I have sat across from enough people in ceremony to know he is right. The need that brings someone to the sacrament is almost never the need they name on intake. Beneath the anxiety is a longing for contact. Beneath the depression is a self that was never permitted to exist. Ancient needs wearing modern symptoms. What would mental healthcare look like if it began there?

The churches panel sharpened something I carry. Jules Evans, director of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, showed only three papers in ten thousand address guruism. I wrote: "Remember to ensure clients make meaning themselves." Evans asks what protects participants from predatory guides. Having been on the other side of that question, I also ask: what protects ethical guides from a client's projected trauma? Christine Diindiisi McCleave, Executive Director of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, named the moral contradiction: "healing without repentance." Paulina Valamiel, a sociologist of religion, described "initiatic sociology": becoming part of a cultural system rather than observing it from outside. I did not learn through studying psychedelic healing. I was broken open and rebuilt by psychedelic care.

Noah Feldman, University Professor at Harvard Law School, delivered the keynote I will carry longest. He connected psychedelics to AI: we have built machines that speak like us but are not conscious. "The importance of being human is going to inhere in the value to us of having human experiences." That sentence is the intellectual scaffolding for Journey Home, the technology platform I am building to support psychedelic practitioners and the people they serve. The machine sees the pattern. The human makes the meaning.

Comedian Adam Strauss performed The Mushroom Cure at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. The moment that gave me chills was Adam with his hands stretched out and open. Palms up. The gap psychedelic chaplaincy exists to fill, made visible in a single gesture. Cayla Bleoaja from Oxford named the structural argument: "The parts of psychedelic therapy that are expensive to deliver at scale are the parts that religious communities are structurally positioned to offer." If that observation were taken seriously, it would rearrange the entire debate about access.

I felt proud of the movement when six church leaders shared their stories. A church raided and reopened in twenty-four hours. A judge who wrote "existential humility" into the legal definition of religion: not knowing the answers as a form of religious sincerity. The founder of Zide Door, a psychedelic church in Oakland with over 138,000 members, told me his integration philosophy starts with one question: "A question so big that only your soul can answer." Practitioner wisdom. It does not come from a lab.

My heart rate changed when Patricia Kubala, a psychedelic therapy researcher, read Ka-Tzetnik's story: an Auschwitz survivor who, under LSD, saw himself in the SS man. "That means you've learned nothing." As a combat veteran, I know what it costs to look at the person you were capable of becoming. The sacrament opens that territory. Not comfort. Recognition. Healing that produces testimony. Testimony that serves the community. And a question the clinical model has no framework to ask: what do we owe each other after we have seen what we are capable of?

My jaw unclenched when Dr. Richard Saville-Smith, author of Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies, and a scholar from the University of Edinburgh, said, "I am a mad person," and the room held him. What psychiatry pathologizes, the contemplative traditions have often honored. Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, advised his students to become mad. The conference kept circling this question: what if some of what we call mental illness is a peak experience the culture has no container for? He and Sharday Mosurinjohn of Queen's University dismantled the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. Sixty-three years. Same building.

Thirty-four months after her dieta fuerte, on a separate continent, the plant announced itself again through the same somatic signature. She whistled its icaro for us in Swartz Hall. A healing song that crossed an ocean without being carried. The room did not applaud. It remembered.

The Night Two Men Got Drunk at the Eiffel Tower and Split Science in Half (Breen's history)

Benjamin Breen, Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz and author of Tripping on Utopia, closed Saturday with new archival findings. He framed the entire history of psychedelic science as a tension between two streams: surveillance science (Galtonian, quantitative, the logic that produces the FDA) and subliminal science (Jamesian, singular, what James called radical empiricism: the insistence that direct experience is data).

“These two streams are not a binary. They are entangled. The tools are value-neutral. It depends on how they are wielded.”
— Benjamin Breen, author of Tripping on Utopia

James's nitrous writings. Margaret Mead's unpublished LSD memo. Gregory Bateson saying psychedelics 'broke down the barrier between the perceiver and the thing perceived.' Then the night James and Galton got drunk atop the Eiffel Tower and co-designed a eugenics questionnaire and a census of hallucinations in the same conversation. Standing ovation.

For practitioners, this is not abstract. The discipline is holding both.

We Have Nothing for You but Each Other (the farewell)

Then Jeffrey spoke. He wove every panel through one word. "Listening is psychedelic," he said. Those are his words. They hold the conference. "Listening to people. Listening to plants. Listening to fungi, to molecules, to experiences, to cultures, to texts, to the earth, to the gods." Then: "We are committed to listening and to being in this community with you in the future."

Laura Tuach, Assistant Dean for Ministry Studies: "Psychedelic chaplaincy remains in its infancy." The magnolias outside agree.

Paul closed with words similar to those he used a few years ago.

“For anything that can help us make this world a bit more sublime ought neither to be suppressed, nor squandered.”
— Lisa Bieberman, 1968

Then: "We have nothing for you but each other."

I looked around the room. Some had that soft, distant look I recognized from ceremony. The one where the eyes are open but turned inward, like someone listening to the last note of a song they did not expect to hear.

What the Saguaro Knows About Dormancy (the walking tour, the seeds, what comes next)

I joined Jeffrey and Paul for the Harvard Psychedelic History Walking Tour. Six sites. Leary walked these paths before Harvard fired him. Richard Alpert, the Harvard psychologist who would become the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, walked them before everything changed. The questions William James asked in 1882 are still hanging in the air.

Stang answered the question his own foreword had posed. This is not an ending. It is the completion of one act and an intermission before the next. In the desert where I now reside, the saguaro stores water in its ribs for years before blooming. It does not mistake the absence of a flower for the absence of life. What Jeffrey and Paul built is in the ribs. The anthologies. The curricula. The network. They propagate.

Today, Lila Rimalovski, a Harvard Divinity School student, hosted a post-conference decompression session online. A tax accountant from the first conference who keeps coming back. A physician from California. A deacon from Brazil. A Persian scholar who said that reading Rumi to the audience made her emotional because her country is mostly known for war and explosions, and sharing literature brought a special kind of joy to her soul.

Jeffrey, on the call, said something that stood out: 'This work has to leave Harvard at some point.' And Lila closed with an observation that surprised me with its precision: 'Every conversation, I felt like something was being built, not taken apart. And there was joy in the room.' Joy is not a word I associate with academic conferences. It is a word I associate with ceremony. That the two converged here says something about what was created.

I trust the timing. Journey Home sits where technology, consciousness, and psychedelic practice converge: AI that amplifies the listening. As a next step, in a couple months, I will be participating in Harvard Medical School's executive education program on AI in Health Care, from strategies to implementation. Not a pivot. A refinement. The conference gave me the confidence that the idea is not premature.

Whether HDS remains the most astute pathway for psychedelic chaplaincy is a question I am sitting with. I am also exploring UC Berkeley's Center for the Science of Psychedelics, whose facilitation certificate was built for chaplains. Emory's Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, where chaplains and psychiatrists serve as co-therapists. CIIS, the first university program to train ordained clergy in psychedelic-assisted care. And Yale, where the Divinity School and the Program for Psychedelic Science are building a bridge between religion and psychiatry. No standardized credential for psychedelic chaplaincy exists. Which means there is an invitation to participate in it being built.

I share this so there is no doubt about what drives me. I chose to stand behind this work publicly, in full transparency, when the systems around it were not yet ready. That choice came with consequences. My spiritual practice with the sacrament was used against me in family court, and it compromised my relationship with my young children.

The judicial and political systems have not yet caught up to what science, the churches, and the lived experience of millions already know: that the freedom to heal and the freedom to explore consciousness are among the most fundamental rights a person holds. Everything I am building is in service of two things: getting closer to my children, and ensuring others have access to the healing that should never have been taken from any of us. Someday, I will tell them why their father did not step back. A Master of Divinity. A chaplaincy license. A Psychedelic Church. Not for ego. For my family. For everyone still waiting for access.

I believe the convergence of sacred ceremony and emerging technology is one of the most fascinating and important things happening in the world. Not because it is glamorous. Because the suffering is real, the tools are emerging, and the people willing to hold both with humility and commitment are still few. I am a young man on an uncertain pathway. A veteran. A father. A guide. A builder. Still curious about the great mystery. Still sitting present in the back of the room.

I came to Harvard to study the intersection of psychedelics and spirituality at the highest level. After this weekend, what I left with is harder to name. A deeper trust in the field's timing. A clearer picture of where I belong in it. The sound of a plant whistling from within. The image of a comedian with his palms stretched open. The weight of a survivor seeing himself in his captor. The quiet conviction that listening is, in fact, psychedelic. You cannot put any of that on a résumé. But it is what I am carrying forward.

Questions to Sit With

  • What are you listening to right now? Not hearing. Listening to.

  • What has withdrawn from your life recently? What is that withdrawal communicating?

  • Where in your life are you pursuing healing without repentance?

  • What would change if you approached your next challenge like a child, not an expert?

Perhaps the answer is not who, but how. Deeper listening. More willingness to be changed by what we encounter.

May the distance between who you have been told you are and who you actually are continue to close. May you find the courage to listen to what is speaking, even when the institution that held the space dissolves. The mushrooms do not need Harvard. And neither do you. But Harvard needed the mushrooms. And it will again.

If this work might be part of your next step, start with my Ceremony Readiness Guide. If you want to sit with others who are navigating their own thresholds, our online Integration Circles meet monthly.

If this landed, share it with someone whose reset may already be underway.

From my Heart to yours,

Yeshua Adonai

Psychedelic Guide

aboutyeshua.com

Book a discovery call

Yeshua is a traveling psychedelic guide currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. USMC combat veteran, former diplomat, and serial social entrepreneur devoted to mental health innovation, he has spent decades exploring contemplative traditions worldwide and learning to trust his own experience along the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

    • 1882: William James takes nitrous oxide at his Cambridge home. His writings on the experience and correspondence with Benjamin Blood about the "anesthetic revelation" become foundational to Varieties of Religious Experience.

    • 1936-1953: Richard Evans Schultes begins ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Amazon and Mesoamerica. His legacy shapes the entire discipline of ethnobotany at Harvard.

    • 1960: Timothy Leary arrives. He and Richard Alpert launch the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

    • 1962: Walter Pahnke conducts the Good Friday Experiment at Marsh Chapel, producing the data for the Mystical Experience Questionnaire.

    • 1963: Leary and Alpert dismissed. Pahnke submits "Drugs and Mysticism" to HDS.

    • 1963-2020: Dormant era. Adjacent work continues at the Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics (MGH/HMS).

    • 2021: CSWR launches "Psychedelics and the Future of Religion" speaker series.

    • 2022: Breau, Gillis-Smith, and Greer create the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour.

    • 2023 (April): First conference: "Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research." Student-organized. Nine Harvard schools. Keynote: Doblin and Pickard.

    • 2023: $16M Gracias Family Foundation gift establishes the Harvard Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture.

    • 2024 (February): First Psychedelic Intersections: "Cross-Cultural Manifestations of the Sacred." 27 scholars, 5 tracks, keynotes Hart and Luna. First anthology published.

    • 2024 (Fall): Two chaplaincy workshops at Faulkner Hospital. Landscape Analysis published: 70% of therapists lack spiritual care competencies.

    • 2024-2025: PULSE launches at Petrie-Flom Center. Feldman co-convenes symposium on psychedelics and monotheistic traditions.

    • 2025 (February): Second Psychedelic Intersections: "Betwixt and Between Chaplaincy, Plant Medicine, and Aesthetics." Including online 1,000+ attendees, 24 countries. Second anthology.

    • 2026 (April): Third and final Psychedelic Intersections: "Bridging Humanities, Religion, and Law." First two-day format. Three co-hosting schools. 37 speakers. Program announces conclusion.

    • 2026 (May): Program concludes. Breau and Gillis-Smith depart. Stang remains while stepping into a new level of presence.

    • 2027+: PULSE continues. Mahindra Center continues. Cross-campus access remains. Anthologies are open-access. The seeds are scattered.

  • The fourth and final annual conference on psychedelics, religion, and the humanities at Harvard Divinity School, held April 10-11, 2026 in Swartz Hall. For the first time, three Harvard schools co-hosted: the Center for the Study of World Religions (HDS), the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law (Harvard Law School), and the Mahindra Humanities Center (FAS). Thirty-seven speakers presented across eight panels and three keynotes.

  • Ramzi Fawaz (Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison) opened Friday in conversation with Phil Deloria on psychedelic pathways to embracing diversity. Noah Feldman (Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard Law School) delivered the Friday keynote on psychedelics as a pursuit of truth, AI and consciousness, and the epistemic discovery framework. Tiona Zuzul (Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School) delivered a Friday afternoon keynote on decision-making in emerging fields. Benjamin Breen (Associate Professor of History, UC Santa Cruz) closed Saturday with new archival research on the entanglement of surveillance science and subliminal science from William James through Margaret Mead.

  • The Psychedelics and Spirituality program at CSWR was part of the Harvard Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture, funded by a sixteen-million-dollar gift from the Gracias Family Foundation. That funding cycle concluded in 2026. Efforts were made to continue, and funds were raised, but Harvard chose not to extend the program. Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith, the program's co-leads and co-founders of the conference and walking tour, conclude their positions in May 2026. CSWR Director Charles Stang remains through summer 2027. This is not the end of psychedelic work at Harvard. The Petrie-Flom Center's PULSE project continues, the Mahindra Center maintains its programming, and cross-campus psychedelic research continues at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

  • No. As of 2026, no standardized credential exists worldwide for officially licensed psychedelic chaplaincy. The traditional Board Certified Chaplain pathway takes eight to ten years (bachelor's degree, MDiv, ordination, four units of Clinical Pastoral Education, two thousand hours of supervised work, board certification). No psychedelic-specific track exists within this pathway. Emerging alternatives include ministerial licensing through entheogenic churches such as Sacred Garden Community Church and Singularism, certificate programs that accept chaplains (CIIS, UC Berkeley's Psychedelic Facilitation Certificate), and the chaplaincy training workshops developed at Harvard's CSWR. Emory University's Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality is developing graduate-level training using a psycho-spiritual co-therapy model. Oregon and Colorado's state facilitation programs do not include a distinct chaplain role. The CSWR's landscape analysis found that all training programs acknowledge the importance of spiritual care competencies in psychedelic work, but most do not include dedicated content.

  • The Mystical Experience Questionnaire was created from Walter Pahnke's 1963 Harvard thesis. Saville-Smith and Mosurinjohn presented a detailed archaeology showing the experiment failed by its own criteria. Nobody had a complete mystical experience. Pahnke introduced an arbitrary sixty-percent grade bar. When Griffiths revived it in 2006, that bar was carried forward with no justification. The communal dimension of the original experiment was dropped for eyeshades and headphones. Their proposal: return to Pahnke's own five-part typology (mystical, psychotic, aesthetic, cognitive, psychodynamic). The sixty-three-year symmetry: thesis submitted at HDS 1963, dismantled at HDS 2026.

  • Multiple panels converged. Saville-Smith argues that "visions, voices, and possessions which psychiatry pathologizes can sometimes be better read as non-pathological." Hana Abbasian traced Sufi fana (ego annihilation), read Rumi in Persian, and showed mosque ceilings designed to alter consciousness through geometry. Rebekah Senānāyaka offered the counterpoint from the Amazon: "You need to learn how to dominate the plant." Not madness but discipline. In the Fourth Way tradition I practice, Gurdjieff called it the terror of the situation: the terrifying clarity of seeing through your conditioned selfhood. Both are true. The door requires willingness to lose your mind. And the discipline to find it again.

  • Friday: Fawaz/Deloria keynote on psychedelic pathways to diversity. Parallel panels: Psychedelics and the Humanities (Deepak Sarma on performed expertise, Paja Faudree on botanical reparations, Maria do Mar Gago on rye ergot and the witch, Jason Hoelscher on psychedelics as information technologies) and Churches: Care and Caution (Janik, Evans, Diindiisi McCleave, Valamiel). Afternoon: Psychedelic Shadows (Marlena Robbins on urban Native perspectives, J. Christian Greer on the Drug Fog of War, Butticci and García Cerqueda on the mushrooms withdrawing, Stuart Sarbacker on yoga and psychedelics). Tiona Zuzul keynote (HBS). Feldman keynote.

    Saturday: Psychedelics and the Law (Alex Kreit on rescheduling, Cheung and Klein on conflicts of interest, Appleman and Oliva on the wellness-grift nexus, Santiago Guerra on the peyote problem). Contemporary Spiritualities (Michelle Bentsman on Shipibo medicine songs, Jonathan David on Ultra-Orthodox ayahuasca, J. Gordon Melton on entheogenic communities, Sears, Butler-Truesdale, and Gezon on African Diaspora traditions). Critical Approaches to Consciousness (Saville-Smith, Mosurinjohn, Langlitz, Abbasian, Senānāyaka, Sarma). Healing and Trauma (Patricia Kubala on Holocaust testimony). Breen closing keynote.

    Evening: Adam Strauss, The Mushroom Cure, performed at the Mosesian Center for the Arts.

    The full speaker directory is here.

  • Maria do Mar Gago traced rye ergot from Portuguese peasant fields to Sandoz laboratories. J. Christian Greerintroduced "the Drug Fog of War." Appleman and Oliva mapped "the psychedelic-wellness-grift nexus." Jonathan David documented Ultra-Orthodox Jewish ayahuasca communities. Michelle Bentsman presented on Shipibo medicine songs. Sears, Butler-Truesdale, and Gezon on African Diaspora healing traditions. Stuart Sarbacker on yoga and psychedelics. Santiago Guerra on the peyote problem and Indigenous sovereignty.

  • Six church leaders participated: Zide Door (Oakland, 138,000+ members). Church of Direct Experience (former Mormon, 400+ ceremonies, integration learned from the Inga people in Colombia). Temple Mother Earth (Muslim founder, integration as daily community). Entheism Entheism pleople ("open source and post-dogmatic"). Sacred Garden Community Church (MDiv, thirty years). J. Gordon Melton documented over 100 entheogenic communities. Jeffrey called the church world "the most exciting part of what's happening in psychedelics in this country."

  • The clinical frame imposes constraints at odds with psychedelic integration: fifty-minute hours, insurance-driven session limits, diagnostic categories that flatten experience. My clients consistently tell me our work together is more effective than years of clinical therapy. I sense this is partly because the chaplaincy model is relational, not transactional. It allows the spiritual dimension to be honored on its own terms rather than coded as a symptom.

  • Reevaluating. HDS remains a strong contender (cross-campus Harvard access, unique multi-religious culture, intellectual seriousness). But with the program ending and the staff who built it departing, the future of psychedelic chaplaincy training at HDS is uncertain. I am also exploring UC Berkeley's Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Emory University's Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality (chaplain-clinician co-therapy model), CIIS, Yale, and Naropa. Each has strengths HDS may lack in the near term. If you are faculty, admissions, or a potential letter-writer at any of these institutions: aboutyeshua.com.

  • Book a discovery call. Share this post. Listen to the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour. Read the anthologies (2024, 2025). Watch the 2025 conference recordings. Download the Ceremony Readiness Guide. The path is being built by walking it.

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