Tending the Spiritual In Psychedelic Care for Community Settings

DECEMBER 5-7

The December Tending the Spiritual workshop for community settings provided attendees with a broad overview of approaches to spiritually responsive care tailored to community psychedelic settings. Learn more about this pilot program and the CSWR's psychedelic chaplaincy efforts in the Harvard Gazette.

Organized and hosted by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith and the Center for the Study of World Religions, these workshops are a collaborative effort with Roman Palitsky, MDiv, PhD and Caroline Peacock, LCSW, DMin, both of whom are affiliated with Emory University. Roman and Caroline will lead the workshop along with guest lecturers.

Note: this workshop is application-based, and applications have now closed.

Workshop Information

Find information below on the schedule, lecturers, and modules for this "Tending the Spiritual" workshop. Direct any questions to psychedelics@hds.harvard.edu

Caroline Peacock (lead facilitator): Rev. Caroline Peacock, DMin, LCSW, MDiv, is the director of spiritual health for Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Dr. Peacock is a certified educator with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, an ordained Episcopal priest, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a certified teacher in Cognitively Based Compassion Training™. She has been with Emory Healthcare since 2013, where she received her training as a spiritual health educator. Prior to training in spiritual health, she worked as a clinical social worker in New York City. She has a passion for offering compassionate, respectful, inclusive and effective patient and family-centered care.

Roman Palitsky (lead facilitator): Roman Palitsky, MDiv, Ph.D. is Director of Research Projects for Emory Spiritual Health and Assistant Professor for Emory University School of Medicine. His research program investigates the pathways through which culture and health interact by examining the biological, psychological, and social processes that constitute these pathways. His areas of interest include biopsychosocial determinants in cardiovascular health, chronic pain, and grief. In collaboration with Emory Spiritual Health, his research addresses cultural and existential topics in healthcare such as religion, spirituality, and the way people find meaning in suffering, as they relate to health and illness. His work has also focused on the role of religious and existential worldviews in mindfulness-based interventions, as well as implementation and cultural responsiveness of these interventions.

Jeffrey Breau: Jeffrey Breau, MDiv. is program lead for the Psychedelics and Spirituality initiative at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. His research focuses on contemporary psychedelic churches and psychedelic chaplaincy. He is currently conducting a multisite ethnography of psychedelic spiritual communities in the United States. Jeffrey is also a Project Affiliated Researcher of PULSE (Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. He is co-founder of Harvard’s annual Psychedelic Intersections conference and is co-editor of the Psychedelic Intersections: Anthology.

Belinda Eriacho: Belinda Eriacho (Diné/Navajo, Zuni lineage) is a traditional healer, cultural advocate, educator, author, and international speaker dedicated to Indigenous wellness and culturally grounded plant-medicine practices. She holds degrees in Health Sciences, Public Health, and Technology, and is currently an intern in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Belinda is trained in MDMA-assisted therapy, ketamine-assisted therapy, and EMDR, serving as a bridge between ancestral healing and emerging mental-health modalities. She served on Colorado’s Natural Medicine Act Work Group and co-founded the Church of the Eagle and the Condor. Belinda’s work uplifts Indigenous knowledge, strengthens cultural safety, and advances ethical, community-rooted healing pathways.

Daan Keiman: Daan Keiman (they/he) is the Educational Lead of the OPEN Foundation, where they lead the development of ADEPT, a comprehensive two-year training program for psychedelic-assisted therapists. With a background in the social sciences and spiritual care (University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Daan has a private practice as a Buddhist and Psychedelic Chaplain. They co-founded several initiatives in the psychedelic field, including the Psychedelic Salon at Ruigoord, The Guild of Guides Netherlands, and the Communitas Collective Foundation, which develops community-based models for psychedelic care. Daan lives next to a natural park in Hilversum with their partner, a dog, and their best friend.

Jay Michaelson: Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School. Dr. Michaelson’s scholarly work focuses on the intersections of law, spirituality, and religion, most recently regarding the religious use of psychedelics. In Spring 2025, he convened the first-ever symposium on psychedelics in monotheistic traditions at Harvard. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination. Outside the academy, Dr. Michaelson is well-known as a journalist and a teacher of meditation and spirituality. He lives outside New York City.

Module 1: Overview of Spiritual, Existential, Religious, and Theological (SERT) domains (Roman Palitsky)

In this workshop, participants will learn the definitions of SERT terms and gain understanding of how they may be present within psychedelic experience. Participants will learn how chaplains, psychotherapists, and other disciplines may approach SERT concerns within PAT settings. Participants will learn about the diversity of SERT themes that may be present for persons utilizing psychedelics.

Module 2: Spiritual Care in Communal and Plant Medicine Work: Trauma-informed and Decolonial Approaches (Belinda Eriacho)

This workshop examines the role of spiritual care within communal and plant medicine healing environments, with a focus on trauma-informed practice and decolonial principles. Participants will explore the historical, cultural, and spiritual foundations of plant medicines and consider the ethical responsibilities involved in engaging with sacred healing traditions. Emphasis will be placed on relationship-centered approaches, cultural humility, and practices that honor lineage, sovereignty, and ancestral knowledge. Through discussion and guided reflection, participants will develop a deeper understanding of how to support spiritually safe, culturally grounded, and community-aligned pathways to healing.

Module 3: Spiritual Care in Novel Psychedelic Spiritual Communities (Jeffrey Breau)

This workshop will discuss novel psychedelic spiritual communities (NPSCs)—new religious movements that are forming around psychedelic sacraments. It will focus on how spiritual care is approached in these communities and the challenges they face creating pluralistic, non-dogmatic religions. The workshop will draw from Jeffrey's multiyear ethnographic research on NPSCs in the United States. He will offer insights from interviews and fieldwork to explore how theology, ritual, ethics, commodification, safety, and more shape spiritual care in subtle, and not so subtle, ways.

Module 4: Navigating Law and Practice in Psychedelic Spiritual Communities (Jay Michaelson)

Most psychedelic religious/spiritual practice is in legal limbo, neither definitely legal nor definitely illegal. Other than file costly, risky applications for legal exemptions, there are best practices for community leaders to operate within the law, or at least minimize their risk. In this session, Jay Michaelson -- who is both a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School and a rabbi & scholar of religion -- will give an overview of the legal landscapes governing religious psychedelic use, and ways in which psychedelic communities have integrated legal best practices into their religious or spiritual practice. We'll also explore some of the tensions around how the law understands religion, sincere religious practice, and the use of psychedelic compounds. And we'll have plenty of time for questions and discussion, since every case is different.

Module 5: Navigating Spiritual Difference in Psychedelic Experience from a Spiritual Care Framework (Daan Keiman and Caroline Peacock)

In this joint session, Daan Keiman and Caroline Peacock explore a broad understanding of psychedelic chaplaincy that extends beyond clinical spiritual care to include ceremonial leaders, community builders, and psychedelic practitioners. Daan will introduce a theoretical framework for working in interreligious and pluralistic contexts, where practitioners inevitably encounter clients whose existential and spiritual orientations differ from their own. The framework outlines three axes of difference: worldview alignment, interpretive approach, and setting, and offers a topology of how sameness and difference can be approached from different faith traditions, secular orientations, and spiritual lineages. Building on this foundation, Caroline will guide participants through practical group techniques such as covenant-building, containment, and bridging. Together they will move from theory to tangible practice, exploring how a shared spiritual language and ethical presence can be cultivated within diverse psychedelic and spiritual care settings.

Workshop 6: Community Ownership and Co-design to Support Spiritually Responsive Plant Medicine Work in the Community (Belinda Eriacho)

This workshop explores how community ownership and co-design can shape spiritually responsive plant-medicine ecosystems grounded in cultural integrity, relational accountability, and collective healing. Participants will engage with frameworks for meaningful collaboration with community leaders, wisdom carriers, ceremonial practitioners, and facilitators to co-create ethical, inclusive, and culturally rooted healing pathways. Emphasis will be placed on honoring Indigenous knowledge systems, cultivating community consent and stewardship, and designing medicine-centered spaces that uphold spiritual safety, reciprocity, and sovereignty.

Workshop 7: Weaving Worldviews: Psychedelic Chaplaincy as Bridgework (Daan Keiman)

In this participatory workshop, Daan Keiman invites the group into psychedelic chaplaincy as bridgework, the practice of weaving new and emergent understandings across spiritual, existential, and cultural differences. Drawing from case studies in psychedelic therapy, ceremony, and spiritual care, Daan explores how practitioners can engage with phenomena such as “spirits” or unseen presences, without reducing them to either metaphor or asserting them as facts rooted in a specific worldview. They explore how these encounters instead can become opportunities for dialogue, meaning-making, and relational attunement. Daan offers concrete tools, such as a model that helps practitioners think about different spheres of practice: navigation, contemplation, regulation and integration, and shows how these come alive vis-a-vis this phenomenon. Through experiential exercises and shared reflection, participants will explore psychedelic chaplaincy approaches that are grounded in ethics, cultural humility and joyous curiosity, and can make the invisible dimensions of psychedelic work tangible and concrete. This form of bridgework involves bridging practices, life worlds, and beliefs and helps to insulate the emerging field from poor meaning-making, epistemic harm, cultural mis-attunement, and appropriation. This session moves toward lived practice, inviting a collective inquiry into what it means to weave worldviews and to tend to the spiritual dimensions of psychedelic experience with integrity and care.

December Workshop

Tending the Spiritual In Psychedelic Care for Community Settings

Workshop Information

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