Beyond the Medicine: What Decolonizing Psychedelic Healing Really Means

As psychedelic medicines move rapidly from traditional communities into clinics, research institutions, retreat centers, and new systems of care, an important question is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore:

What happens to the knowledge, people, cultures, and relationships from which these medicines come?

Decolonizing psychedelic healing does not necessarily mean rejecting Western clinical practice. It can mean recognizing that clinical science is one knowledge system among many, and that traditional, ancestral, communal, and spiritual ways of understanding healing have their own value.

A more integrated approach can draw from evidence-based methods, psychedelic-assisted therapy, trauma-informed practices, and clinical ethics while also honoring contemplative traditions, ancestral relationships, ceremony, community, and Indigenous knowledge.

As one practitioner explains, “I don’t believe decolonizing the field requires us to reject any knowledge. It requires us to stop mistaking one knowledge system for the whole.”

This perspective was explored by Nazia Taylor, a Developmental Psychologist, in her presentation, “Beyond the Medicine: What Decolonizing Psychedelic Healing Really Means,” part of a broader discussion on intercultural translation and intergenerational repair in African contexts.

Sarah Lynn Thomas and Danny Yepez of Behold Retreats attended the seminar where Taylor presented and recorded her presentation. We are sharing these perspectives because the questions she raises extend beyond any one medicine or tradition. They speak to a broader challenge facing the psychedelic field: how can plant medicines and other healing practices move into new cultural and clinical settings without losing sight of their origins, communities, relationships, and responsibilities?

While Behold Retreats does not offer Iboga or Ibogaine, understanding conversations around medicines such as these can help inform the wider discussion around psychedelic healing, cultural context, responsible practice, integration, and respect for ancestral and Indigenous knowledge.

Bringing Different Knowledge Systems Into Conversation

Western clinical practice offers valuable structures for psychedelic work, including evidence-based approaches, trauma-informed care, therapeutic frameworks, and systems designed around safety and ethics.

At the same time, Eastern contemplative traditions offer longstanding practices involving mindfulness, breath, body awareness, and consciousness. African traditions bring different understandings of ancestral relationships, communal ceremony, intergenerational healing, medicine, and the relationship between people and land.

These perspectives can raise different questions about what a person is, what illness means, what healing looks like, and who participates in the healing process.

The goal is not necessarily to choose one tradition over another. Instead, it is to understand what each can contribute while remaining rooted in the cultural origins of the practices and medicines being used.

This becomes particularly important with Iboga.

Iboga Is More Than a Molecule

International interest in Iboga and Ibogaine has grown significantly, particularly in the United States. Much of the modern conversation focuses on the potential therapeutic applications of Ibogaine, including its investigation in areas such as addiction and mental health.

But Iboga did not begin as a molecule waiting to be discovered for therapeutic use.

It exists within living African traditions, including Bwiti traditions, with their own knowledge systems, ceremonial practices, responsibilities, and relationships with the medicine.

That distinction matters.

Intention: Looking Beyond the Individual

One way of bringing these principles into practice is through three interconnected movements: intention, immersion, and integration.

The first is intention.

In a conventional therapeutic framework, intention might begin with a question such as:

What do I want from this medicine experience?

But traditional frameworks can invite a deeper set of questions:

Who am I coming from?

What am I carrying?

Who am I asking on behalf of?

In some ceremonial contexts, this may involve lineage, ancestors, divination, prayer, or other practices that place an individual’s experience within a larger network of relationships.

The speaker shares the example of a young woman who entered the work hoping to heal her relationship with her mother.

During divination, her ancestors and grandmothers were called upon, and she asked for protection from her grandmother as she explored her relationship with her mother.

What emerged during the ceremony was an understanding that the difficulty she experienced was connected to something older. The relationship between mother and daughter was also connected to a previous generation and a wound that had traveled through the family.

The shift was not simply about discovering another explanation for her suffering. It changed the frame through which that suffering was understood.

When lineage becomes part of the conversation, the question of what someone is asking for can change because the individual is no longer viewed as an isolated person.

“The pain had traveled through generations before arriving into her relationship with her mother.”

Immersion: Culture Is Part of the Therapeutic Space

The second movement is immersion.

When someone enters a medicine space, the physical and cultural environment can influence the experience.

A ceremonial space might include photographs, beads, soil, candles, food, or other objects connected to a person’s heritage. Music, instruments, prayers, and invocations can come from their own cultural and spiritual traditions rather than being treated as interchangeable elements of a generic ceremony.

This is important because the setting is not neutral.

What surrounds us can shape what becomes accessible to us.

The speaker describes an example involving the Islamic call to prayer, the azan. When it was played during a ceremony, it immediately connected a participant with her late father, her faith, and a deeply personal part of herself.

In another ceremony, the sound of a particular drum opened a memory associated with the loss of a village from an earlier generation.

These experiences illustrate why cultural specificity can be more than an aesthetic choice. Cultural memory can be deeply connected to identity, family, spirituality, grief, belonging, and meaning.

The medicine experience does not happen inside an isolated nervous system. It happens within a person who carries memories, relationships, culture, faith, family, history, and community.

Integration Is About Returning to Relationship

The third movement is integration.

In contemporary psychedelic therapy, integration is often described as the process of making sense of and applying insights from a psychedelic experience after the medicine session ends.

But in many African contexts, integration can extend far beyond an individual therapeutic process.

It can take place in homes, classrooms, families, communities, rituals, stories, and relationships.

It can involve returning to a more balanced relationship with family, community, culture, land, animals, ancestors, and oneself.

This broader understanding also challenges the assumption that expanded states of consciousness must always involve psychedelic substances.

Across cultures, people have long used practices such as prayer, chanting, drumming, dancing, fasting, vigils, contemplation, and communal ceremony to enter different states of awareness and deepen their relationship with themselves and their communities.

What a Classroom in Sudan Can Teach Us About Healing

The speaker offers another powerful example from work with children living through war and conflict in Sudan.

After several weeks of practicing contemplation, a young girl closed her eyes and began to cry.

From a clinical perspective, her response could be understood through therapeutic concepts such as bilateral stimulation. But when she was asked what was happening, her explanation revealed something more profound.

She was crying from relief.

Previously, closing her eyes had been associated with danger, a bomb, an attack, someone dying, or the sudden sound of violence.

Now she could close her eyes and experience quiet.

Her family already carried practices involving prayer, chanting, and mindfulness. Rather than introducing something completely foreign, the practice connected with something her system and community already understood.

The experience raises an important question for modern psychedelic and mental health care:

What if healing does not always require bringing something new into a person’s life? What if sometimes it means reconnecting them with resources that already exist within their culture, relationships, and community?

Healing Does Not Always Mean “Curing”

This perspective also changes how we understand healing itself.

The speaker recalls the death of her own father and being invited by her spiritual mother, Mama Sinoe Ene Kyo Eliza, into a prayer with her lineage and the Maasai community in Kenya.

The prayer was slowly chanted around her, one person after another, until everyone was participating and she was standing in the center of the circle.

She did not know exactly what was being said.

But she knew what it meant.

Her grief was not hers to carry alone.

She was surrounded by people, lineage, spirituality, and community.

This reflects a different understanding of healing, one that is not necessarily centered on eliminating symptoms or “curing” an illness.

It is about returning to wholeness.

Altered States Have Always Been Part of Community Life

Across many cultures, expanded states of consciousness have not existed solely within the context of illness.

They have been part of life itself.

Harvest gatherings. Weddings. Births. Funerals. Prayers for rain. Community celebrations. Initiations. Vigils. Dancing. Fasting. Drumming.

These experiences are not necessarily organized around a diagnosis.

They can instead mark transitions, strengthen belonging, facilitate communal grieving or celebration, and deepen relationships with people, animals, land, ancestors, and the spiritual world.

This offers an important expansion of the modern psychedelic conversation.

The question is not only:

How can psychedelics be used to treat illness?

It can also be:

What can altered states teach us about relationship, belonging, meaning, community, and wholeness?

The Individual Is Not the Whole Story

In many traditional frameworks, the individual does not exist separately from the relationships around them.

As the speaker describes it:

“The ceremony holds the individual. The community holds the ceremony. The ancestors hold the community with spirit.”

This creates a very different picture of healing.

Rather than placing the entire burden of transformation on an individual, healing can become something that is witnessed, supported, and held by a wider network of relationships.

That perspective may be particularly relevant as psychedelic medicines become increasingly commercialized and integrated into Western systems of care.

As Psychedelic Medicines Travel, Responsibility Must Travel With Them

The psychedelic field is entering an extraordinary period of growth.

When a traditional medicine crosses borders and enters new clinical or retreat settings, the medicine itself is not the only thing that travels. Questions of responsibility, cultural context, stewardship, and reciprocity travel with it.

For practitioners working with these medicines, this can mean asking not only, “How can this medicine help?” but also:

Where does this medicine come from?

Whose knowledge surrounds it?

What responsibilities accompany its use?

And what happens to the communities and traditions from which it originates?

As Nazia Taylor puts it:

“If the medicine travels, responsibility must travel with it.”

Medicines and practices are crossing borders and entering clinics, research institutions, government discussions, retreat centers, and emerging systems of care. The growing celebrity conversation around plant medicine has also brought increased attention to the experiences of athletes, entrepreneurs, and other high-profile individuals who have explored these practices.

With that movement come choices.

What do we preserve?

What do we translate?

What do we adapt?

And what might we accidentally leave behind?

Why This Conversation Matters to Behold

At Behold Retreats, this conversation matters because psychedelic work cannot be separated from the broader questions of safety, intention, integration, community, and responsibility.

Although Behold does not offer Iboga or Ibogaine, the questions raised in Taylor’s presentation are relevant to the wider psychedelic conversation and to the way people approach plant medicine experiences.

For Behold, the future of psychedelic healing is not about choosing one knowledge system over another. It is about learning to recognize different ways of understanding healing while approaching them with respect and humility.

As Sarah Lynn Thomas of Behold Retreats explains:

“For me, the future of psychedelic healing is not about choosing between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous approaches to medicine; between modern science and the sciences of nature developed by Indigenous peoples over generations; or between emerging knowledge and ancestral wisdom. It is about learning to recognize and hold these different ways of knowing with respect and humility.

These medicines remind us that healing is rarely just about the individual; it is about our relationships with ourselves, one another, community, culture, spirit, and the Earth. As these medicines move into the wider world, honoring Indigenous wisdom cannot become another form of extraction. At Behold, we hold a responsibility to ensure that respect, reciprocity, and meaningful benefit travel with them.”

Sarah Lynn Thomas, Behold Retreats

What Kind of Future Are We Building?

Perhaps the most important question is not simply how psychedelic medicines can be used to treat illness.

Perhaps it is what happens when we begin from a different premise.

What if we begin with relationship?

With lineage.

With community.

With culture.

With ourselves.

With spirit.

With the land and the people from whom these medicines originate.

As psychedelic healing continues to evolve, the opportunity is not to replace one knowledge system with another. This broader conversation is also reflected in the growing interest in psychedelics among influential entrepreneurs and high performers. It is to create a more expansive understanding of healing, one that can hold clinical science alongside traditional wisdom without erasing the roots from which that wisdom comes.

And perhaps the deeper question for the future is this:

What changes in how we build the collective future of psychedelic healing if healing was never about treating illness to begin with?

Asante, meaning “thank you” in Swahili.

Continue Exploring Psychedelic Healing With Behold

The conversation around psychedelic healing is larger than any single medicine. At Behold Retreats, we believe it is also about preparation, intention, integration, community, and approaching these experiences with care and respect.

Explore more of our resources on plant medicine, psychedelic healing, and integration, learn about upcoming Behold Retreats, or take our retreat quiz to discover which experience may be right for you.