Psychedelics & The Soul - Simon Yugler & Michael Garfield

Designed for a new generation of psychedelic facilitators and seekers, Psychedelics and the Soul invokes the traditions of Jungian depth psychology, mythology, and Indigenous cultural wisdom to meet a critical question of our times: How can the emerging field of psychedelic medicine heal the soul amid planetary crisis and collective opportunity? Psychedelic therapist Simon Yugler invites the reader on a mythological journey, using depth psychology to explore 10 universal themes that transcend our individual experiences—and reveal how psychedelic medicine can heal the soul and our collective unconscious in a time of uncertainty and initiation:

• The Well: The Unconscious, Symbolism, & the Mythic Unknown
• The Temple: Beyond Set & Setting
• The Underworld: Initiation, Grief, & the Descent to Soul
• The Serpent: The Body, the Shadow, & Shedding Your Skin
• The Trickster: Marginality, The Crossroads, & the Guide of Souls
• The Monstrous: Trauma, Exiles, & the Archetypal Wound
• The Leader: Power, Liminality, & Inner Authority
• The Sacred Mountain: Ecstasy, Vision & Mystical Experiences
• The Tree of Life: Animism, Climate Change, & the Ensouled Earth
• The Journey Home: Integration, Community, & Feeding the Village

Each archetype acts as a prism, using myth, fable, and universal wisdom to reflect back to the reader the collective experiences and unconscious truths that shape our psyches—and that are made more profound and accessible through psychedelics. Yugler shares how entheogens and plant medicine open a gateway to our understanding of our culture, selves, and interconnected reality toward wide-scale social and planetary healing.

SIMON YUGLER has taught with five psychedelic facilitator training programs, including Naropa University and Inner Trek, a pioneering legal psilocybin facilitator training program based in Oregon. His work integrates Jungian psychology, mythology, and Internal Family Systems therapy, focusing on psychedelic integration, masculinity, and depth psychology. His journey began with anthropological research in an Aboriginal Australian community at the age of twenty. He's served as a retreat leader and therapist at MycoMeditations, a leading psilocybin therapy retreat center in Jamaica, for a year and a half.

Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield's work helps people navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and playfulness we'll need to thrive in it. His work as a "knowledge artist" draws on over twenty years of exploration as a prolific essayist, public speaker, musician, scientific illustrator, editor, social media manager, research analyst, and teacher. Michael has inspired and provoked audiences everywhere from The Santa Fe Institute to Mozilla to MAPS to Meow Wolf, The Long Now Foundation to SXSW to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Along the way, he has published hundreds of essays, paintings, songs, and videos while touring four continents, contributing to award-winning documentaries and peer-reviewed publications, moderating large online communities, hosting long-running improv monthlies, and raising two kids. His new project, the grant-funded network forum Humans On The Loop, explores the nature of agency and wisdom in the age of automation.

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