Beyond Set and Setting
Ecodelic Attunement to Regulate Nervous Systems
I am very excited to be able to share with my Netherlands Community some of the work that I've been integrating across different genres of thinking and being and playing. Not just academia. Not just contemplation. Not just movement arts. But all of them together from a the perspective of a practitioner.
The notion of ecodelic perspectives (deriving from our ecology, rather than psychedelics, products of the mind) was first suggested by Richard Doyle as a term. But it has been practiced by 99% of our animistic indigenous ancestors. Ecodelic framing is an invitation to understand conscious experience from the outside-in.
So much these days it's faddish to believe in idealism. Whether in the philosophical idealism of Bernardo Kastrup and certain strains of object-oriented ontology, or panpsychism that leans more on the mind than the matter side of things; or, in the New Age baloney of The Secret and the Law of Attraction, there's a tendency to privilege individual internal belief as magical thinking which creates not just our own experience, but the world around us.
Such Solipsism can easily degenerate into narcissism leaving us in an ugly world that begets more ugliness.
In contradistinction to these trends, I suggest that a far older and more more grounded approach to consciousness in our environments is key to understanding psychedelic experience. This is the ecodelic approach which biosemiotics suggests starts with our Umwelt — that bubble of life that shows up to us in our material environment according to our species-specific sensory receptors but also the way that we are trained and accustomed to think and feel about our surroundings. All life forms from viruses and bacteria to fungi, plants, and animals like us, see partially the world. Whatever reality is, there's no way that we would ever be able to grasp it all because no body has all the sensory faculties to make sense of it. Which isn't a problem. Instead, we have the opportunity of making longwave Beauty in the world that we inhabit: Beauty and comfort and affordances for experimentation, safe mistakes, expression, creativity—which doesn't undermine the source of our existence or hurt other beings needlessly.
Through a series of somatic practices morphing with taoism, yoga, and other traditions, I’ll lead us through a sensory experience of itentifying and meeting the tension - often hidden - we carry. Bringing our nervous system home towards finding new reset points is a long-term practice, but we’ll make some headway and anchor in some exercises that are fun and rewarding. In the evening, after a sumtious dinner together, thorugh lecture and live and djed music, I will guide us through this ecodelic approach to medicine work, ceremony, and liberatory expression.
Please join us at the Psychedelic Salon at Ruigoord, the legendary 50-year squatted Village on the outskirts of Amsterdam, committed to making more with less and providing a free space for thinking, being and moving.
On April 5th, 2025 all day and into the night will be experimenting and experiencing together what it's like to be one with our environment, an environment that we are intentionally making more beautiful so that we can relax our nervous system and have more internal resources to deal with the challenges our species currently encounters.
https://psychedelicsalon.nl/yogi/