The Aware Project (www.awareproject.org) hosts a series of monthly Psychedelic Awareness Salon events in Los Angeles and San Diego. We are creating a connected and educated community that feels passionately about balancing the conversation about psychedelics.
Join the Aware Project and leaders in the Southern California psychedelic/entheogenic community for a panel and community discussion of issues of power, sexuality, gender, race, and ethical practice.
Over the next few months the Aware Project is planning a new series of events, the Psychedelic Community Dialogue series, to create space to have these important conversations. Let’s come together in community to address what we need, the standards we want to set, and the future we want to create.
SCHEDULE
Doors open at 7 PM for mingling and tea. Tea provided by the I.AM.LIFE Guayusa Tea Lounge.
Panel and Community discussion starts at 8 PM
DESCRIPTION
The imbalances of power within our society are glaring at us more and more. With the backdrop of the #metoo and multiculturalism movements, we see that same issues facing our psychedelic/entheogenic subculture and we are in need of taking a deep self-reflective look at how we may be perpetuating these problems.
How are we conducting ourselves?
What are our blind spots?
Why do we continue to support shamans and practitioners who commit sexual abuse?
Why are straight, cisgender males generally the ones that get main speaking spots at conferences?
The answers to these questions are easy to uncover through a historical lense, but how can we now cultivate truth and reconciliation, healing, and create lasting changes?
Join us as we heal, learn, grow, and create together!
Community Dialogue #1 June 26th - Culver City
We will focus this discussion around sexuality, sexual dynamics, and power in psychedelics/entheogens. The national and international community has been embroiled with conversations around abuses of power and sexual misconduct. Recent events in our own Southern California community show similar patterns. Let us come together to discuss what is needed to provide healing spaces for victims, council for perpetrators, and a vocal culture of zero tolerance for abuses of power.
Community Dialogue #2 July 18th East Side TDB (WE NEED A VENUE that would be conducive for a community discussion, please help us! Email hello@awareproject.org)
Facing the Shadow: Community discussions on diversity, race, and privilege in psychedelics psychedelics/entheogens
PANELISTS
SITARAMAYA SITA, who has traveled and worked in the Amazon for the past 17 years, is a spiritual herbalist and plant wisdom practitioner formally trained in the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. Founder of PlantTeachers, dedicated to cultivating entheogenic awareness, and Producer of the Visionary Convergence conference, she lectures, teaches, and works with individuals and groups in ceremonies and stewarding plant dietas. She currently trains, teaches and practices to heal personal, institutional and cultural trauma. PlantTeachers.com
LIANA SANANDA comes to us from a diverse background that spans across anti-war and drug reform activism, event design and production, film production, artist representation, and art curation. She spent several years working in the cannabis industry at the ArcView Group and now is the Development Officer at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS.org).
TONY MOSS is a visual and recording artist, event producer, and founder of I.AM.LIFE, a non-profit event production company focused on interconnectivity. His work is a synthesis of passions in art, spirituality & science, with emphasis on the evolution of human consciousness and potential. From 20 years experience working with ayahuasca, he is a public advocate for "right relationship" use of all plant medicines. tonymoss.me
ASHLEY BOOTH is founder of the Aware Project: Rethinking Psychedelics and co-founder of InnerSpace Integration. She has a background in environmental science and is currently working towards a Masters in Social Work. Her work blends her background in the sciences with a deep spiritual core ignited through the use of entheogens. She currently works as a study coordinator for a MAPS clinical trial. AshleyBooth.net
FURTHER SUPPORT
If you are a woman that has suffered sexual misconduct by a shaman or facilitator, Katherine MacLean (katherinemaclean.org) on the East Coast created this email to gain council and report abuses: hello@psychedelicwomen.com
TICKETS
Pre-sale tickets are $15. We have a limited number of volunteer positions if you can't afford the ticket price (please email hello@awareproject.org, first come, first serve). We will likely sell out so please buy your ticket beforehand! THERE WILL BE NO TICKET SALES AT THE DOOR!
TEA
Make the I.AM.LIFE Guayusa Tea Lounge link to our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/140526806108760/.
VENUE
Our friends at The Collective HQ have opened up their doors. For more info, check out http://www.thecollectivehq.com/
PARKING
Street parking is available. Please be mindful of signs. Allow extra time if you can, as finding a space can be difficult.
Synergistically Co-Created & PRESENTED by:
*** I.AM.LIFE. ***
I.AM.LIFE combines life-affirming art, music & media to create immersive, transformational experiences of interconnectivity. We create and nurture connections with the natural world, each other, and indigenous peoples to support a more thriving, just, and sustainable world. To foster and nurture a sense of value and respect for the importance of “native wisdom” in the modern world. https://www.iamlifeproject.org/
*** PLANT TEACHERS ***
PlantTeachers support the preservation, conservation and stewardship of land in Peru which is held as a global resource where Medicinal and Master Teacher Plants are cultivated and old growth trees, waterways and rainforest flora and fauna are protected. Collaborations with Nihue Rao promote the development of integrative medicinal practices, utilizing multiple healing disciplines for people all over the world. www.plantteachers.com
*** AWARE PROJECT ***
Our aim is to balance the public conversation about psychedelics, spread accurate information, and give a new face to psychedelia. We feel that this change will occur through connection and relationship, one individual at a time.We are calling on everyone whose lives have been improved through the mindful use of psychedelics to educate themselves and become ambassadors for the psychedelic experience. Show those around you that people who use psychedelics mindfully cross all social, racial, economic, and political boundaries. http://awareproject.org/
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This group is being designed as a secure space. It is not a place to seek, encourage, or participate in the procurement of controlled substances. Do not bring, buy, sell, transfer, or arrive on any illegal substances, or swap information on how to buy them. Members who violate these basic house rules will be removed from the group and will not be allowed to attend future events.