Welcome to Community is the Medicine!
Brooklyn Psychedelic Society's official blog and podcast (and slogan!)
Introducing Community is the Medicine
Today, June 13th 2023, is an important day for Brooklyn Psychedelic Society. And that’s because its Brooklyn Psychedelic Society’s 8th birthday! That’s right. 8 years ago in 2015, twelve people gathered in Prospect Park to share their stories of healing, growth, and transformation with the help of psychedelics. I was there myself at the very first meeting, at the age of 24, after having moved to NYC less than a year ago.
To celebrate our 8th birthday, I am honored to announce we are launching our blog and podcast (which you are reading now), Community is the Medicine. Through this platform we will be writing articles, recording podcasts, interviewing psychedelic leaders, and talking to community members around the topics of community-based healing, transformation, and our mission to become a nonprofit psychedelic co-op.
The story behind the name
We are calling our blog (and also our official slogan) Community is the Medicine because of after 8 years of organizing in the psychedelic space here in NYC, I am convinced that while psychedelics are an important catalyst for change, it is by being in community of others seeking healing and growth that brings about lasting transformation. I know because I have experienced it myself.
What brought me to the very first BPS meeting 8 years ago is a story many of you have already heard. A year prior to that meeting, I had lost a very close friend of mine to suicide. His name was Erik. He died in April 2014. A few months after Erik’s passing, I took MDMA at a rave in my hometown of Syracuse, NY. While I took it with the intention to dance, the MDMA didn’t actually kick in at the rave even though I had taken what seemed to be a full dose.
Instead, it kicked in at a very relaxed after party that was an unintentionally therapeutic set and setting. When it began to kick in, I felt a dense, heavy ossified shell of armor that had been around my heart melt away. What was underneath that armor was an infinitely tender, infinitely radiating pool of love that I had forgotten about. And with my armor put to the side, a deluge of memories, wounds, traumas, and anxieties that I had been carrying around with me began to be processed one by one.
It felt like I had a filing cabinet backpack that I had been carrying around for years; but instead of files it contained folders and folders of undigested emotional material. And this resulted in profound, sustained changes to my sober life afterwards. I felt something that I hadn’t felt in years: capital ‘L’ Love. I was able to listen to people better. I was more in touch with myself. I felt an unbridled sense of empathy for pretty much everyone. Especially for my friend Erik. Life seemed to be suddenly teeming with love. And the person who I wanted to see and feel what I felt was no longer able to experience this, at least not on this Earth.
While my friend had access to psychiatrists and therapists, psychedelic therapy was still relatively taboo in 2014. It was still seen as something done underground and primarily for recreation. Additionally, my friend Erik was lonely. He didn’t have many people by his side who were struggling with the things he was struggling with; he didn’t have many people around him who could relate to the existential difficulties he was facing. What he needed was community. And what me and the BPS team have been building over these years is kind of transformational community that I wish my friend had access to. And through the experiences I’ve had and I know others have had through our community, it’s why I believe Community is the Medicine.
Trellises as a metaphor for healing and growth
If you take a look at the Community is Medicine logo, you’ll notice a trellis. A trellis is a metaphor for how we at BPS understand psychedelic experiences and the healing and growth journey that often follows. A trellis is a gentle support structure that helps a plant grow. A trellis isn’t imposing or coercive. It doesn’t try to change the plant into something its not. Rather, a trellis helps a plant grow in the direction that is right for that plant as that plant.
Often times, when we have a powerful psychedelic experience we might see ourselves (to continue with the metaphor) as a fully blossomed rose. We can see the parts of ourselves that we have ignored and also the wounds that have hindered our full blossoming. But when we come down from the trip, even though we might have seen our potential as fully blossomed version of ourselves, we might still be at the bud stage of our healing and growth journey. One thing that psychedelics and plant medicines don’t do so well is give us a realistic sense of time. And much like plants, we as humans need time and patience as we journey towards blossoming.
A trellis is a gentle support structure to help us go from the bud stage to fully blossoming. That is what I see as the role for the journeys, integration circles, and events put on by communities such as BPS: to act as a trellis, a gentle support structure, to help people heal, grow, and blossom. And, importantly, for healing and growth of a plant to take place, it needs soil. The trellis can’t help someone grow if they are not rooted in something. Community is that soil.
Community is the nutrient-dense foundation from which we are supported by others to bravely go about our transformational journeys and be alongside each other when the going gets tough. I myself have experienced so much healing and insight by being vulnerable and sharing my experiences with BPS community members who are different than myself. Having internalized wounds and a desire to heal is something all humans have, no matter their race, background, or socioeconomic status. And to heal those wounds and initiate a path of growth is best done alongside others who are on a similar journey.
Community is the Medicine
The idea that community is the medicine isn’t a new idea that we at BPS came up with. What we have been doing at BPS for 8 years and Westerners have been doing for decades (along with hundreds of other psychedelic societies around the world!) is something that Indigenous communities have been doing for millenia! That’s right. Thousands of years. Psychedelics have pretty much always been done in community.
As psychedelics are entering the mainstream, the primary vehicle us Westerners have for delivering psychedelics is our medical system. The medical approach, while important and a modality that will undoubtedly bring healing to many, comes with a few shortcomings. Principally, that it will be quite expensive and does little to address isolation, a known primary cause of the conditions that psychedelics treat. We need to integrate psychedelic healing into our culture using approaches that are as transformational as the medicines themselves. And that approach is community.
Luckily, there’s already a long history of community-based businesses that can serve as a guide: cooperatives. Co-ops are businesses that are owned or governed by the community that produces or uses its goods and services. If done right, co-ops put profits in service of people rather than vice versa. But as of yet, the co-op model has not been applied to the psychedelic space in a way that is meant to be shared and repeated. And that’s what we seek to change here at BPS!
Through this blog and our work at BPS, we hope to not only build a healthy culture around community-based healing and psychedelic co-ops, but help start a movement to make sure that community and psychedelic healing is something available to everyone. We need new ways to relate to ourselves, to each other, to Nature and to Spirit. Otherwise, this planet of ours will likely be uninhabitable by humans in the not too distant future. But I have full belief that with the right people and the right vision, we can create new containers for healing and relating that can be transformational not just for us as individuals, but for society as a whole.
As we say at BPS, Community is the Medicine. And with your help, we can bring this medicine to the world.