Rachael is a writer and environmental consultant who advises nonprofits and foundations on climate change. With an expertise in tropical forests, Rachael has conducted fieldwork in the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon, Borneo, Uganda and elsewhere. After almost a decade in climate policy, Rachael has turned her attention to the spiritual implications of our current ecological crises. Rachael stumbled into psychedelics as a participant in a psilocybin clinical trial for major depression. Her writing excavates the potential risks, rewards, and societal implications of medicalizing and commercializing mysticism. Her work interrogates the intersection of the mystical and the moral, and envisions the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness in current and future forms of religion. Rachael explores these themes as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions.
March 16, 2017
I hypnotized some of the attendees and put them on cocaine, pot, beer, and even ecstasy. I interviewed them afterwards and asked them if it felt real. And each of them said yes. Quite real. Then my head exploded.
March 23, 2017
A 3-part series on one participant's high dose psilocybin experience in the Pharmacokinetics of Psilocybin in Normal Adult Volunteers study at the University of Wisconsin.
March 27, 2017
Part 2 | This time my dose was 45 mg of pure psilocybin. I took it and waited for the show to begin. There was fear and a sincere hope that this experience would not be as hellish.
April 3, 2017
Part 3 | Dose #3 was the most intense, powerful, horrendous, terrifying, awful experience of my life. In the end, it was all worth it.
April 6, 2017
Psychotherapy-assisted psychedelic experiences may revolutionize how we treat mental illness. The philosophy and techniques have evolved over the past 50 years.
April 7, 2017
Let’s go forward in time through the government’s ban on psychedelics, and look how it has blossomed into the psychedelic renaissance.
April 13, 2017
If someone overdoses from heroin or opiate drugs and has to be revived by paramedics or police with naloxone, they will be charged with “inducing panic.”
April 26, 2017
The undaunted spirit and psychedelic warrior of love and light, Nick Sand, the outlaw chemist, died in his sleep on Monday April 24th at the age of 75.
May 8, 2017
By limiting the psychedelic community to a certain homogeneity, it’s ultimately excluding to its detriment.
May 10, 2017
The families of the disappeared people have had to organize among themselves, do their own investigations, and push state agents such as the police, judges, and the general attorney to do their job.