PT533 – Psychedelics in Palliative Care: Screening, Safety Measures, and Experiences With the Divine, with Livi Joy
Psychedelics Today
Psychedelics Today, LLC
4.6 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2024
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Psychedelics in palliative care has become an exciting new framework for people looking to ease anxiety and embrace spirituality, but the concept is not as simple as just providing a substance.
In this episode, Joe interviews Livi Joy: Director of Health and Safety, Existential Palliative Ministry Lead Facilitator, and more at Sacred Garden Community (SGC).
As she screens applicants for SGC (and Beckley Retreats), she talks a lot about the process and the safety measures that are absolutely necessary when using psychedelics in palliative care – especially under the framework of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Does the patient have at least one strong support person? Do they need to start or increase therapy? Does their home need to be rearranged due to possible fall risks? How will certain medications muffle their experience? Are they truly physically healthy enough to be able to handle a powerful journey? And also, is the sacrament always necessary?
She discusses:
- How preparation questions for a journey are often in line with preparation for death
- Why it's important to provide these experiences for people far from the dying process itself
- What Sacred Garden's core tenant of faith that everyone can have a direct experience of the divine in this lifetime means to her
- Atheism and the complications that arise when discussing spirituality and consciousness: Who's really in charge?
- How psychedelics can help with understanding and preparing for death, but our culture is too death-phobic too embrace it
and more!
For links, head to the show notes page:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to psychedelics today. This is Joe Moore coming at you from Brackenrich, Colorado. |
| 0:18.2 | Today on the show, we have Levi Joy, who is part of the Sacred Garden |
| 0:23.9 | community and also working in the existential and palliative ministry there. Very interesting |
| 0:30.8 | organizations that we're going to dig into quite a bit. We have some questions about inclusivity. |
| 0:36.1 | We have some questions about how do we do palliative well here in the psychedelic land? |
| 0:41.6 | And what does it look like to form a psychedelic church and be part of it? |
| 0:46.7 | So a lot of really fun range. Levy and I got to meet at the Discovery Sessions event this past April, which was lovely. |
| 0:55.0 | So Levy, thanks for being on the show. |
| 0:57.1 | I'm excited to chat more, and I hope you all enjoy this episode. |
| 1:04.2 | Hi, everybody, Joe Moore here, joined by Livy Joy. |
| 1:07.6 | How are you today? |
| 1:08.9 | I'm good. Thanks, Joe. |
| 1:15.4 | Glad to have you on. You're quite deep in the Bay Area scene involved in the Sacred Garden community and the existential and palliative ministry. |
| 1:25.1 | Before we dig in, I kind of want to say like, what happened to get psychedelics on your radar? How did, how did these plants or substances come on your radar in a meaningful way? It's not like, oh, like acid was interesting once, and then it came to me, however you want to talk about it. Yeah, no. And, like, I kind of follow this trend that I see a lot, |
| 1:46.3 | like kind of like a lot. I mean, I do a lot of screenings. I screen for two organizations. I'm |
| 1:51.1 | deep with Sacred Garden community, but I also screen for Beckley retreats. And so I like, |
| 1:55.8 | I talked to a lot of people about their experience and kind of follow this arc of, you know, I had some recreational |
| 2:04.6 | experiences, a lot of recreational experiences in my late teens and early 20s. Some of those really |
| 2:11.9 | were really super profound. And then, you know, I took a step back. For me, it was because my Riki master was |
| 2:20.1 | really like, you got to choose one or the other. What are you doing here? And so I took a pretty big |
| 2:25.8 | break from psychedelics, but also because I had a really big LSD experience, a really big LSD experience in my early 20s that really did take years to |
| 2:38.5 | integrate and probably was like most integrated by a 5MEO experience that was also really |
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