Category: Risks & Challenges

Things don’t look good. It’s getting harder to be an optimist. It doesn’t matter if you are liberal, conservative, man, woman, old, young, even wealthy or poor — there is a sense that we’re moving through dark times. Worse, it seems to be hitting us from every direction: health, safety, economy, relationships, ecology…

Of course, not everyone agrees. Pinker (Our Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), Rosling (Factfulness), and Norberg (Progress) argue that — contrary to what our brains (and the media) want us to believe — we are living in the safest, healthiest, most educated, and most prosperous times in human history. Then again, plenty argue the opposite. Graeber & Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything), Hickel (The Divide), and Mann & Wainwright (Climate Leviathan) claim that inequality, ecological collapse, autocratization, war, and mental health crises put humanity at risk.

I am not a global trends analyst but a psychotherapist. In my sessions, I don’t deal with the reality of the world, but with my clients’ perceptions of it. This makes my work both easier and harder. Easier, since we don’t need to figure out what is “real” (although at times reality-testing is useful). Harder, since facts don’t matter as much as how clients feel about them. (Nietzsche wrote, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”) In any case, I keep hearing concerns about the state of the world. It’s been a while since a client said, “I have a good feeling about where things are going,” quite the opposite, anxiety and depression have surged worldwide—up about 25–30% since 2020—with U.S. rates of depression rising over 60% in the past decade, reaching historic highs.1

How can we face this reality? Faced with distress, our brain seems to have a limited number of preprogrammed responses: fight, flight, freeze, or appease. Depending on circumstances, we select the most viable. We can despair, give up, curl into a little ball and wait for impact, pray for divine intervention, etc. With my clients, we’ve explored many of these alternatives. None of them (with the exception, perhaps, of some forms of prayer) feels truly satisfying.

Fortunately, there are other options. Some existentialists, who also faced extreme circumstances (WWII, Nazi occupation, concentration camps), urge us to accept the absurdity of existence (not an easy thing to do) and remember that even in the worst situations (e.g., Frankl in Auschwitz), we still have the possibility — even the responsibility — to choose how to respond. We have agency. Our actions matter. We get to choose; we must choose. Regardless of the outcome, it is we who define the meaning of our lives. Some take it even further. Leaders such as Gandhi, MLK, or Thích Nhất Hạnh urge us not only to avoid running from suffering but also to face violence without succumbing to it, to transform hatred through love, and to act decisively with compassion.

There is yet another possible (and perhaps puzzling) approach. As a transpersonal psychotherapist and psychedelic facilitator, I am familiar with the teachings of sacred plants and mystics throughout the ages. Paralleling Buddhism and Hinduism, plant medicine consistently reminds us that life is illusory, a cosmic game or līlā. Many times, I’ve witnessed clients cracking up (what I like to call the Cosmic Laughter) when they realize how silly and pointless our toils are — echoing Julian of Norwich saying, “All shall be well” amid Europe’s plague, or Ramakrishna’s supposed answer to why suffering exists: “to thicken the plot.”

How are you facing our current situation? How is the barrage of negative news affecting you? What resources do you have to move forward? Please remember: if you are struggling, if you feel despair (perhaps the healthiest reaction to our profoundly sick society), reach out. You are not alone. We are not made for suffering in isolation. There is help.

Since my clients are not mystics (yet), and many would not even consider themselves activists, my job is not to philosophize or tell them what to do. I am there (and here) to explore alternatives, to empower them (and you) to make their own decisions. How to face suffering, and what to do about it, is a deeply personal choice. Yet, perhaps influenced by those same mystics and plant-teachers, I — most of the time — remain optimistic. Mostly because every day I witness in my practice the strength, beauty, and dignity of our shared human struggles.

Perhaps, until each of us finds our own answers, the best we can do — as Vonnegut suggests — is to remember that “we are all here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

  1. Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2025/20250416.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com
    https://www.who.int/news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide?utm_source=chatgpt.com ↩︎

Why psychedelic guides need training, humility, supervision, and ethical accountability

There is an ongoing discussion in different forums about the problem of abuse in psychedelic circles and the need to train guides better. I could not agree more.

We all need to make a solid commitment to safety, professionalism, and accountability in the field of psychedelic-assisted guiding and psychotherapy, insisting on the importance of comprehensive training for guides. It is my hope that the psychedelic community worldwide, both aboveground and underground, takes notice and keeps this conversation going.

Helping others work with expanded states of consciousness is not an easy job. I’ve been at it for over 20 years now, and I’ve seen a lot. Of course, every profession has its occupational hazards. Still, I am convinced that, due to what it attempts to achieve, being a psychedelic guide is not for the faint-hearted. Aspiring guides should take note of this.

Psychedelics can be understood as nonspecific amplifiers or catalysts that make it possible to take a journey into one’s psyche and explore otherwise inaccessible deep recesses of the unconscious. This means that they can bring whatever is hidden deep in the unconscious to the surface. As any psychotherapist can tell you, this has incredible healing potential and, conceivably, is also a recipe for disaster.

It is common knowledge that the unconscious holds all kinds of repressed and disowned material. Among other things, it includes our darkest impulses, hidden wounds, and private fantasies, often of a sexual or aggressive nature. If that were not enough, we must add archetypal and transgenerational forces dwelling in the collective unconscious.

The psychedelic guide’s job description includes the willingness and ability to work with these wild subterranean currents, operating both in the client and the guide, to facilitate healing and growth. A good guide must be able to engage not only at the mental-emotional level, but also with the body, energetic, archetypal, and spiritual dimensions of experience.

To do this, guides need more than enthusiasm. They need clinical literacy, ethical grounding, relational maturity, somatic awareness, cultural humility, and a respectful understanding of the spiritual and ceremonial traditions they may encounter. Quite an undertaking.

With such a high bar to meet, mistakes are bound to happen. In Mexico, an old proverb says: “In the soap maker’s house, everybody either falls or slips,” meaning that one should not be quick to judge others because, sooner or later, we too will make a blunder.

In a way, guiding happens at the soap maker’s house.

But how can we reduce the risk of making such mistakes? The answer is quite simple: training, training, training. Or, more specifically, learning, doing our inner work, staying humble, and getting plenty of supervision.

Being fully aware of the pitfalls of guiding, any guide training should begin by discussing ethics. Then it should continue talking about ethics throughout and end by reminding trainees again about the value of ethical behavior and their responsibilities toward clients.

When I teach, I spend time talking about transference, including erotic transference, and countertransference; working with shadow material, both the client’s and the guide’s; working with physical touch; respecting boundaries; working with childhood and attachment wounding; and appreciating the power differential in the guiding relationship. I put particular emphasis on reminding students how and why the stakes are even higher when clients are in expanded states of consciousness.

However, talking about ethics is never enough. I help students understand why these ethical principles and healthy boundaries are needed. Experience has shown that ethical principles rarely work when presented as a list of “thou shalt not.” They only function when guides internalize and commit to upholding them.

As is often pointed out, psychedelics are going through a renaissance. Among the many aspiring practitioners who want to become guides, a few always want to do it for personal, often unconscious, reasons. There is often a guru or messiah syndrome somewhere to be found, or old hidden childhood wounds crying for attention.

I see my job as an opportunity to teach them that being a guide requires profound humility, endless openness to learning, and an unwavering commitment to serve others.

As expressed earlier, being a psychedelic guide or a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist is not for the faint-hearted. It demands standards of care, ethics, and practice well above those in many related professions. The stakes are higher, and the potential for damage, and healing, is formidable.

Let us all reiterate our pledge to continue working to become guides devoted to such standards. Let’s do it together.

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