![Participants listening to a lecture](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-02/Lila%20Workshop%20photo.jpg.resize.jpg?itok=DYVomuYK) # Resacralizing Contemporary Psychedelic Practice: Reflections on Tending the Spiritual in Psychedelic Care for Community Settings February 02, 2026 [ Lila Rimalovski ](/people/lila-rimalovski-0) During the final days of the Fall 2025 semester, I huddled in the conference room at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) over blueberry muffins while snowflakes dusted the garden outside. I sat in a circle with thirty strangers—clinical researchers, therapists, religious leaders, chaplains, activists, facilitators, and lawyers from across the country—each of whom brought a combination of intellectual rigor and relational openness that cultivated what I imagine will be one of the most transformative experiences of my time at Harvard Divinity School. This intergenerational and interdisciplinary cohort gathered for the three-day workshop: “Tending the Spiritual in Psychedelic Care for Community Settings.” It was the second event in a two-part series designed by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith, Program Leads for the CSWR’s Psychedelics and Spirituality initiative, and offered in collaboration with Roman Palitsky and Caroline Peacock, both of whom are affiliated with Emory University’s Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. Our facilitated modules and all-group discussions created a profoundly generative space for the academic and professional discourse concerning spiritually responsive care in psychedelic settings. What I hadn’t fully understood about this landscape was a crucial gap outlined by Roman in our first module: most legal psychedelic facilitators in the United States are licensed therapists, and most therapists—nearly 70%, according to a study of 550 practitioners published by the American Psychological Association—grossly lack competencies in spiritual care. Most care-seekers of psychedelic therapy (66% to 86%, according to a 2018 paper) report their sessions to be some of, if not the, most spiritually, existentially, religiously, or theologically significant experiences of their lifetimes. These four domains make up the letters in SERT— spiritual, existential, religious, and theological—an acronym that is popular in spiritual care scholarship (on which Roman and Caroline have written extensively). In essence, the current legal psychedelic landscape in the U.S. is couched within a professional sphere that largely lacks the competencies to effectively and respectfully support care-seekers through their experiences. Indigenous healers, chaplains, religious leaders, and spiritual care providers, on the other hand, are well trained in meaning-making and spiritual accompaniment. They often have culturally attuned capacities to work with individuals who identify with specific cultures or cosmologies. With the exception of a few cases pertaining to religious exemption (like legal psychedelic churches, which we learned about from facilitator Jay Michaelson, a Rabbi, lawyer, and law professor), most spiritual care providers are not permitted to facilitate psychedelic experiences in the United States. Hence the problem. While most legal psychedelic therapists do not work on interdisciplinary teams with spiritual care providers, it seemed that my fellow workshop participants were the very people interested in, and poised to, change that dynamic. Without such training or education, many psychedelic therapists run the risk of perpetuating epistemic harm and unwarranted pathologization, ideas introduced by one of our facilitators, Daan Keiman, who is a seasoned trainer of psychedelic-assisted therapists in the Netherlands. In a landscape already patterned with professional misconduct, inadequate ethical guidelines, and documented cases of psychical and sexual abuse, here exists yet another area where harm between practitioner and care-seeker might arise. During her session on decolonial approaches to medicine work, Belinda Eriacho (Diné/Navajo and Zuni traditional healer, and a co-founder of the Church of the Eagle and the Condor) pierced the intellectual approach with a raw dose of truth: synthetic psychedelics such as MDMA and ketamine are not lifeless substances. They, too, are spirits. The animate aliveness of Ayahuasca, Huachuma, or Psilocybin does not exclude their pharmacological relatives. Each practitioner, regardless of the substance they work with, should be attuned and trained to this reality. All sacred medicines—what I’ve been reductively calling psychedelics—are couched within spiritual worlds that have their own layers of nuance and elemental allies (smudges, songs, herbs, etc.) designed to navigate their respective terrains. Since I am an animist myself, this concept is not new. Still, how often do I want to relegate the lab-grown, patented molecules to a world separate from the sacred, cultural, or ecological origins to which all psychedelics (and related therapies) owe their gratitude? Often, it turns out. Naturally, the big question arose: what might the psychedelic landscape in the United States have looked like if psychotherapy had not been the chosen path by which to legally disseminate these ancient, earth-bound, culturally held, and spirited plant and fungal vehicles of divinity? While we briefly entertained this inquiry, I was grateful that our focus shifted more towards the question of what now? How might spiritual care providers collaborate with, train, or educate psychedelic practitioners about SERT-related oversights and necessary competencies? What interfaith alliances of spiritual leaders might emerge to remind the psychedelic public of their cultural, ecological, and spiritual allegiances? I didn’t walk away with answers, but I left certain that this world was better because a group of diverse practitioners formed a shared commitment to speak truth in a movement ripe with pressures of commodification, appropriation, psychologization, and speed. I felt hopeful that we could infuse our respective spheres with a new emphasis on spiritually and culturally attuned psychedelic care, both as a means of harm reduction and as a way to honor the vast Indigenous lineages that are forever forming and informing the field. With Big Pharma swooping in fast and legalization gaining momentum in more states than I can track, the need for informed policy and practitioner protocols is here and now. As a Psychedelic Chaplain Intern, facilitator of the CSWR’s Psychedelics Reading Group, and assistant producer of the Harvard Law School conference, “Psychedelics in Monotheistic Traditions: Sacramental Practice and Legal Recognition,” in 2025, I walked into the workshop already persuaded— or so I thought— that spiritual care was an essential and often missing component of the so-called psychedelic renaissance. What I discovered instead felt akin to a vocational wake-up call. The weekend’s conversations were worthy of amplification far beyond our close-quartered sessions. This cross-disciplinary intersection of religion, spirituality, psychology, and chaplaincy is an area ripe for more research. The work here has real impact, and it’s something I’m committed to digging into over time. Bibliography American Psychological Association. “PsycNet Record: 2017-52047-001.” PsycNet. . Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. “December Workshop.” . Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. “Psychedelics and Spirituality Reading Groups and Workshops.” [https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/research-programming/transcendence-transfo…](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/research-programming/transcendence-transformation/psychedelics-spirituality/reading-groups). Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. “September Workshop.” . Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. “Tending the Spiritual Workshops.” [https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/research-programming/transcendence-transfo…](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/research-programming/transcendence-transformation/psychedelics-spirituality/tending-spiritual-workshops). Emory University Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. “Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality.” . Emory University Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. “Jay Michaelson, PhD, JD.” . Hartogsohn, Ido. “The Meaning-Enhancing Properties of Psychedelics and Their Mediator Role in Psychedelic Therapy, Spirituality, and Creativity.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 12 (2018). . Kaalogii. “Kaalogii.” . OPEN Foundation. “Become a Responsible Psychedelic Therapist | ADEPT Training Programme.” . Oxhandler, Holly K., and Kenneth I. Pargament. “Measuring Religious and Spiritual Competence across Helping Professions: Previous Efforts and Future Directions.” Spirituality in Clinical Practice 5, no. 2 (2018): 120–132. . Palitsky, Roman, Deanna M. Kaplan, Caroline Peacock, Ali John Zarrabi, Jessica L. Maples-Keller, George H. Grant, Boadie W. Dunlop, and Charles L. Raison. “Importance of Integrating Spiritual, Existential, Religious, and Theological Components in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies.” JAMA Psychiatry 80, no. 7 (2023): 743–49. . Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, Harvard Law School. “Jay Michaelson, J.D., Ph.D.” . Psychedelics and Monotheistic Traditions. “Psychedelics and Monotheistic Traditions.” [https://www.psychedelicsandreligion.info/.&nbsp](https://www.psychedelicsandreligion.info/. ); See also:- [ Chaplaincy ](/topic-tags/chaplaincy) - [ psychedelics ](/topic-tags/psychedelics) - [ Spirituality and Psychedelics ](/programming-threads/spirituality-and-psychedelics)