045: "Ayahuasca, anxiety and the reason people get stuck in psychedelic work" with Adam Aronovich

Adam Aronovich is a doctoral candidate at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, focusing on Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry. He is the Co-Founder and COO of Hidden Hand Media, and the Director of Therapy and Integration for Rē Precision Health. Adam is an active member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC) and part of the Ayahuasca Community Committee at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. In the last four years he has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, where he has been doing qualitative research in collaboration with ICEERS, the Beckley Foundation, and, more recently, the Centre for Psychedelic Studies at Imperial College. Beyond his work conducting and coordinating research, Adam facilitated workshops in the Peruvian Amazon and he regularly facilitates workshops in Mexico. He is also a process facilitator and integration support coach in private practice.

In his role as a workshop facilitator at the Temple of the Way of Light, an ayahuasca retreat center in the Amazon we met personally at the end of 2019.

You’ll hear Adam share some of the insights he has gained through his research, as well as personal experiences while working with different healing modalities like ayahuasca. A prevailing theme that emerges from his research is that the primary dimension of healing for most people is relational. We discuss the importance of the collective dimension of well-being, which is completely at odds with institutional approaches that focus only on the individual.

And Adam explains why the healing process at a psychedelic retreat is a co-creative process that is shared rather than a passive process of becoming a consumer of a treatment that is handed to you. He describes how our stories and narratives influence our healing experience, which, according to his research, can be the biggest obstacle along a person's healing journey.

On a more personal note, he shares how psychedelics have helped him with his own anxiety, enabling him to better contextualise whatever arises. You will also learn where most people in psychedelic work get stuck and how transgenerational trauma can affect our well-being.

Finally, we talk about the reasons for our crisis of meaning in the Western world and how psychedelics can help to navigate a way between the needs of a system on the one hand and finding balance on one’s own path on the other.

I’m happy that Adam found the time to share his extensive knowledge on the topic with me. It brought back lots of memories and stories of my own first ayahuasca retreat in Peru where he served as a great facilitator and guide.

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