Hosting the SEA Symposium on Psychedelics

On Tuesday 10th June, I had the pleasure of facilitating the latest SEA Symposium, titled Altered States & Open Doors: Psychedelics and the Practice of Being. We were upstairs at The Prince Regent in Marylebone. It was a convivial, cosy gathering of existential therapists and more, fuelled (in my case) by fermented wheat, and held in the open, dialogical spirit that defines the SEA community.

I began with some reflections on the strange encounter between psychedelics and psychotherapy: not just what they do, but what they ask of us—about presence, ontology, ethics, and the very frame of the therapeutic relationship. We explored what it means to “work with” altered states: whether induced by substances, suffering, or the sheer strangeness of being alive. What comes through the door isn’t always diagnosable, or even nameable, but we must meet it all the same.

The conversation meandered, as it should, through personal stories, clinical questions, and philosophical edges—from shamanic cosmologies to regulatory double binds, from the wildness of ayahuasca ceremonies to the quiet rupture of a client’s spontaneous mystical experience. We then returned to the ethical posture of the therapist: not just what we say or do, but how we hold the mystery that others entrust to us.

I’m grateful to everyone who joined, spoke, and sat in that shared space of inquiry. If the doors of perception were open that night, it was because we opened them together.

With thanks to Paul McGinley, Ben Spray and the Society of Existential Analysis for the warm invitation.

The Society for Existential Analysis

The Prince Regent in Marylebone