Amanda Feilding set up the Beckley Foundation with a passionate desire to understand the mechanisms underlying consciousness and its changing states, and to explore ways of harnessing the healing potential of these compounds. Fascinated by their capacity to initiate mystical states of consciousness and heighten creativity, Amanda Feilding quickly recognised their transformative and therapeutic power.

Although spirituality is almost as taboo as psychedelics themselves in the scientific community, one of the Beckley Foundation’s goals is to explore in depth the link between the two – knowledge which could be key to fully harnessing their transformative and healing potential.

“At the core of the healing experience brought about by psychedelic-assisted therapy, is the mystical experience.” – Amanda Feilding

 

Relevant resources:

• An informative talk on meditation and psychedelics by Marco Schlosser, the researcher who designed the Micro-meditation study
• An inspiring talk on Psychedelic experience and Buddhism by a Zen Buddhist teacher Jogen Adam Salzberg
• Linkage between psychedelics and meditation in a population-based sample in the United States an article by our collaborator Otto Simonsson and Simon Goldberg
• Characterization and prediction of acute and sustained response to psychedelic psilocybin in a mindfulness group retreat, Smigielski et al.
• Psilocybin-assisted mindfulness training modulates self-consciousness and brain default mode network connectivity with lasting effects, Smigielski et al.
• https://descendingthemountain.org/where-to-see/  A documentary based on the research conducted in psychedelic naïve expert meditators during a meditation retreat in Switzerland.
• Zig Zag Zen, a book that offers a conversation about Buddhist practice and the psychedelic spiritual experience.
• Medito is a free meditation app that can help you to start or deepen your meditation practice.