- Rediscovering Our Ancestral Roots of Exploration - August 8, 2022
I get psyched about psychedelics. I adore the outdoors. Nature has been my savior. Psychedelics have been my guides to the recesses of my mind.
The truth is, in my years exploring various nature and psychedelic spaces, what still stands out to me more than anything is the predominance of white faces.
Over the years, developing a deep relationship with psychedelics and the natural world have been integral to my growth, healing, and wellness. Psychedelics initiate my internal wonder as much as the wilderness activates my external wanderlust. Unfortunately, for many people of color here in the United States, these relationships don’t currently exist. The truth is, in my years exploring various nature and psychedelic spaces, what still stands out to me more than anything is the predominance of white faces.
I’m not at all surprised this is where we have arrived. This story hasn’t changed, it’s been the same for centuries. The current collective disconnect from exploring our inner and external worlds reflects historical harms against Indigenous groups and people of color, and the legacy that still lingers.
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For millennia, the ritualistic use of psychedelic medicines and a deep connectedness to the land were integral to the healing practices of Indigenous communities and cultures across the globe. But colonization saw two worlds collide; and today, two worlds remain. The global systematic extraction of resources and intercontinental conquest of land disconnected Indigenous people across the world from their freedom of expression and exploration within their cultures, locations, and traditions.
In the United States, we stand on land violently taken from the natives and fly a flag of freedom over a nation built by chained and kidnapped Africans. More recently, the War on Drugs deafened communities of color with the reverberation of prison bars closing on our fathers, brothers, sisters, and mothers. Meanwhile, the incessant messages of “D.A.R.E.” and “Just Say No” echoed for decades through our classrooms and hallways at home.
These historic wounds live on in us, scarring our individual and collective bodies. Today, many people of color remain severed from our historical ties with psychedelic plants and stripped of our intimate bonds with our land. To heal and reconnect, we’re tasked with uncovering the truths about our pasts, rediscovering our ancestral roots of exploration, and venturing inward and outward on journeys of self-discovery toward a collective recovery of what we’ve lost.
Charting A New Course in the Psychedelic Space
For years, I didn’t feel safe entering any psychedelic space. After nearly a decade cautiously observing as the psychedelic renaissance was taking off, I launched into the expanding galaxy of psychedelic research and therapy when I joined a multicultural contingent of doctors, healers, and therapists at the MAPS MDMA-Assisted therapy training for therapists of color in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2019.
As many in the wider psychedelic community were making their annual pilgrimage to Nevada’s futuristic utopia of Black Rock City, our colorful crew was headed to face our pasts in our nation’s Southern lands, where the sight of a burning man symbolizes a much darker and violent history.
Our group of wounded healers spent a week in ceremonial circles, processing centuries of trauma and pain while maintaining the flames on the torches we carry for our ancestors. We connected deeply with ourselves, one another, and the lands beneath our feet. We connected deeply with our histories and shared our future intentions to promote psychedelic healing in our communities.
It was liberating to be heard and empowering to be seen in a psychedelic space where, usually, those who look like me are few and far between. I no longer felt like an outcast existing on the fringe of the psychedelic landscape. The safety of the space helped me shed the fear stymieing my career, and I began my journey working as a therapist in psychedelic research.
But last year, in just one instant, my vision of the long and distant mission to support a reconnection to psychedelic healing for people of color became much clearer. As Jeff Bezos launched a rocket into space with an all-white crew of “astronauts,” all I could think was, “Here we go again.” I know this story all too well. I see this play out every day here on Earth in my work as a psychedelic therapist. Wealthy white people go exploring, while people of color get left behind.
If you’re curious about what colonization looks like in our modern times, look no further than Amazon astronauts exploring outer space while affluent psychonauts invade the Amazon to have their psychedelic healing journeys.
If you’re curious about what colonization looks like in our modern times, look no further than Amazon astronauts exploring outer space while affluent psychonauts invade the Amazon to have their psychedelic healing journeys. This present-day allure of psychedelic tourism is the culmination of our collective submission to a culture of extraction, exploitation, appropriation, and domination.
For centuries, people of color have watched as resources and access have amassed in the mostly white upper classes. We see this trend continuing as psychedelic therapy becomes more mainstream. Healing is flowing, but there’s only one direction it’s going, reaching mostly people of means, while people of color remain unseen.
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Our collective mission is to let go of the status quo and cocreate a new reality. So, while the wealthy rocket to space to claim the future and prove the sky is not their limit, the next frontier for people of color is grounded here on Earth, rediscovering our roots and reclaiming our past.
Setting the Record Straight
As long as our history is a mystery, it’s hard to fully know or respect where we’ve been or who we are. For centuries, people of color have endured erasure and invalidation, moving through a whitewashed world where the realities of our past are regularly omitted or misrepresented. Every time our history is nullified, we’re collectively retraumatized, and this experience occurs on repeat throughout our entire lifetimes.
We are keeping colonization alive in the ways we are collectively retelling lies and passively absorbing absurd stories. Let’s start calling things what they are. Let’s remember them for what they were. Let’s start setting the record straight.
For decades, our nation collectively came together and poured our hearts and resources into the “critical” race to space. Today, we’re drifting apart, with little capacity or space to even talk or think about race. My critical theory is that we’re collectively neglecting truths about our history, further proving to minorities their low place on our country’s list of priorities.
What I remember most about slavery being covered in my history classes, is the fact that it wasn’t. Short readings were assigned, but I guess my teachers just couldn’t find the time. In one of my classes, we spent an hour on the middle passage, so I was appropriately blown away when we had an entire day to study the Donner Party.
As a young boy visiting Yosemite National Park, I learned of the “great” John Muir and hiked the trails named after him. We reflect kindly on his conservation efforts and explorations, but absent are any conversations on his settler colonial exploitations. As I walk these trails of tears today, I reflect on the Natives forcibly marched off their lands and my enslaved Black ancestors who could only dream of a trail or path to freedom.
Today, we learn of the psychedelic renaissance, but not much of what Indigenous cultures lost. As we highlight emerging science and research, we’re losing sight of the wisdom and traditions of Indigenous stewards and teachers.
Our stories need to be told. New narratives must be written. If our stories are told for us, we participate in realities that ignore us. If we don’t ensure that we are included, we will continue being excluded. Our choice is either to remain voiceless or to lift our voices in setting the record straight.
The Things We Carry
It will be difficult to move forward if we’re unaware of what we carry from our past. People of color still hold the lessons from our centuries of oppression. We have yet to fully escape the confines of our ancestors’ traumatized bodies and minds. Racism remains a cancer in our structures and institutions, while our unresolved issues pervade our tissues and our nervous systems.
As a young boy camping with my family, I learned that many Black people don’t camp or spend time exploring nature because my ancestors were harmed or killed when they went into the woods, or when they ventured too far. As a result of this historical trauma, we currently remain disconnected from our land and a powerful source of healing in the outdoors.
No space was a safe space for Blacks during Slavery and Jim Crow. As a young boy camping with my family, I learned that many Black people don’t camp or spend time exploring nature because my ancestors were harmed or killed when they went into the woods, or when they ventured too far. As a result of this historical trauma, we currently remain disconnected from our land and a powerful source of healing in the outdoors.
In my work as a psychedelic therapist, I see our historical trauma show up in the ways many people of color are skeptical of therapy with these medicines. Psychedelic therapy requires vulnerability and surrendering to an experience in a non-ordinary state that can be a giant leap to take for people who collectively haven’t been able to let their guard down for centuries.
The drug war has retraumatized people of color for decades. Psychedelics became Schedule I, Nixon named drugs “public enemy #1,” and it was people of color who were the number one target. The resulting mass incarceration and stigmatization have distanced many people of color from any consideration or interest in psychedelic exploration.
It’s no surprise that today, many people of color see harm where others might see healing. These enduring patterns are not pathological; they are protective. Our inherited trauma responses have an impact on what we do, where we go, where we feel safe, and where we don’t. I’ve learned to respect their ancestral guiding wisdom. Many spaces that were not safe for them in the past, are still not safe for us today. Yet, the embodied caution that served to protect our ancestors in the past is often distancing us from what could be most connecting and healing in the present.
Liberation through Exploration
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” – Joseph Campbell
While these patterns are current, they are not permanent. The future is ours to create. What we can develop a relationship with, we will feel safe with. Safety is fundamental to healing.
The irony is not lost on me that I found safety and freedom working in this field in the lands where my enslaved ancestors literally had no safety or freedom working in the fields. For my ancestors, freedom and exploration were privileges they never experienced. Safety was the exception; harm was the rule. I can now hear them calling for us to step into our birthright to explore these realms, freely, and safely, in ways they never could.
Through reclaiming our ancestral relationships with psychedelics and Mother Earth, we support the liberation and decolonization of our bodies and minds, reconnecting with the histories, freedoms, lands, and medicine traditions our ancestors lost.
Our collective liberation begins when people of color step out of the colonizer’s history and embrace new possibilities. When pushing the limits of the spaces and places we are comfortable, we will begin to transcend the prisons of our outdated patterns, shed our internalized oppression, and heal our individual and collective trauma. Through reclaiming our ancestral relationships with psychedelics and Mother Earth, we support the liberation and decolonization of our bodies and minds, reconnecting with the histories, freedoms, lands, and medicine traditions our ancestors lost.
As we discover these new opportunities for coming together in community, we’ll catalyze deeper reflections on our interconnection, and more fully tend to our interdependence. As we venture into the spaces we formerly feared to enter, they’ll become spaces where we feel connected, embodied, grounded, and centered. As we collectively rediscover our roots, we plant our future seeds, helping us emerge from the tangled weeds of our complex histories. As we find our freedom in exploration, we honor ourselves, honor our ancestors, and lay a fertile foundation for future generations.
Art by Karina Alvarez.
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