Episode 78 - Dr Ros Watts How Can Cultures Heal themselves ? Trees, Community,Psychedelic infrastructure and the Power of Integration
Welcome to this first full episode kicking off 2024.
After a ramble from me reflecting on our break and the podcast intentions for this year - I’m in conversation with Dr Rosalind Watts someone who I think personifies the story of becoming crew on Spaceship Earth in 2024.
Ros is a clinical psychologist by trade, a mother and lover of our living world.
Her work as the clinical lead for Imperial College London's Psilocybin trials has made her one of the most prominent voices and minds in the field of psychedelic research.
She has been named as one of the 50 most influential people in psychedelics as well as one of the top women shaping the future of psychedelics.
What sets Ros apart is her focus on integration, harm reduction and inclusion in the psychedelic space.
And the tools and structures that she's been building to cultivate connectedness after psychedelic experiences in communities of practice - are finding inspiration for their design from the natural world.
Her key learning has been that safe and effective use of psychedelics requires substantial integration support within communities of practice.
Crews, basically.
Ros co-founded the UK's first psychedelic integration community, ACER, which stands for Accept, Connect, Embody, Restore, where participants follow a year long process in community to connect more deeply to self, others and the natural world.
This is not an episode about psychedelics.
Ros has shared her journey into psychedelics in detail on other podcasts.
Psychedelics are showing extraordinary benefits in guided therapies in supporting humans through a whole spectrum of traumas and suffering (as plant medicines have done for millenia) - but, when we come through therapy we are ejected back into what is if we’re honest, a profoundly unwell culture.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
So maybe a question worth exploring is how do cultures heal themselves?
And this is the work Ros is dedicating her time and life to.
We spent time exploring this moment in time the beginning of 2024, the context we find ourselves in, how her learnings from years of research are shaping the direction of her work this year with particular attention on communities, place based psychedelic and healing infrastructure and trees, lots of talk about the wisdom of trees.
This is a conversation about:
The potential in human communities to care for each other,
To create spaces for connection and healing,
Acceptance of our individual diversity and suffering
Deepening our relationships with the more that human world.
Not as a nice to have but as an essential part of weaving life-centric cultures of place.
Cultures with strong resilient roots, able to face into the troubles and challenges coming down the line as the structures, systems and stories of modernity unravel.
I loved this conversation with Ros, I hope you will too.
Let us know in the comments what it brings up for you.
And please share it to someone else if it speaks to you.
Links
Playout :
12 Tree - Izzy Wazza Groova