Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, Mindfulness and Compassion: Key Insights for Clinicians

Workshop Overview

Ever since Freud, psychotherapists have worked with non-ordinary states such as dreams, hypnosis, and free association to understand and heal the heart and mind. In the past decade, mindfulness and compassion practices have become mainstream tools, while more recently, research on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has mushroomed. Psychedelics, often combined with insights from mindfulness and compassion practices, now offer not only possible breakthrough treatments for PTSD, depression, addictions, and end-of-life anxiety but also provide new insights into the nature of psychological distress and mechanisms of healing.

What can clinicians learn from these developments? What can they teach us about the neurobiology of human suffering and flourishing? How can they inform our practice?

In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn practical tools and techniques derived from mindfulness and compassion-oriented treatment and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to help clients with a wide-array of disorders. We’ll explore ways to help clients integrate split-off traumatic memories, open their hearts, embrace vulnerability, surrender to the flow of ever-changing experience, move from isolation to deep connection with people and nature, appreciate the unreliable fluidity of thought, and find meaning in everyday moments.

You’ll learn how to use mindfulness and self-compassion practices along with other techniques to harness these healing mechanisms, while also gaining the knowledge necessary to help clients who might be experimenting with psychedelics to integrate and grow from their experiences.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Identify the common elements in a wide variety of psychological disorders

2. Describe how mindfulness practices work to resolve psychological distress

3. Discuss the role of compassion and self-compassion in psychotherapeutic progress

4. Summarize current research demonstrating efficacy and mechanisms of action in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy

5. Discuss how to advise patients considering psychedelic experiences outside of treatment and how to help those who engage in these to integrate the experience.

6. Discuss the role of transpersonal or “mystical” experience in both mindfulness-informed and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy

7. Describe practical ways to introduce the transformative elements of mindfulness and compassion-informed, and psychedelic-assisted sessions into other forms of psychotherapy

For more information and to register, please click HERE.

This program has been accredited by the Ontario Psychological Association.