Vision, Mission, Values
About Us
Vision
We envision a thriving, equitable world in which psychedelic care is accessible, respected, and practiced for personal healing and collective transformation.
Mission
Our mission is to support individuals’ healing and participate in a shift in collective consciousness by training and supporting psychedelic practitioners in the Gather Well approach.
Guides trained and certified by Gather Well will have cultivated the skills, empathy, and attunement to skillfully and ethically serve others, fostering environments where clients feel safe, respected and empowered to explore their inner worlds.
Values
Integrity
We commit to high ethical standards, helping ensure that our practices are transparent, accountable, and respectful of all individuals’ dignity.
Compassion
Our work is centered on a deep empathy for the complexity of the human experience, which guides our approach to care and interaction within our community.
Excellence
We strive for the highest quality in everything we do, from training our practitioners to providing direct care. We ensure that our services are as efficacious and evidence-based as possible, and continuously evolving.
Experience affirming
We recognize individuals’ diverse paths and backgrounds and foster an environment where all voices are heard, respected, and integrated.
Transformation
We embrace the potential of psychedelic services to transform lives and the collective and we commit to advancing the field through research, education, and thoughtful practice.
Our approach
We are in favor of more inclusive practices with psychedelics that do not ascribe solely to a psychotherapeutic framework or psychologized lens of self, other and the collective. Here at Gather Well we synthesize trauma informed counseling frameworks and ceremonial practices, approaching these practices with reverence and a goal toward healing, balance, and wholeness.
This model is:
- Somatically informed, meaning it draws on the wisdom of the body.
- Trauma-informed, meaning practitioners learn the complex ways trauma is experienced, held in the body, and can impact the life of an individual and of culture.
- Community informed, because we are all interconnected. Community health and well being is inextricably linked to individual health and well-being.
- Non-dogmatic, spiritually informed, meaning these practices are free from particular religious affiliations while remaining deeply rooted in Spirit, reverence and reciprocity.
- Context and culturally informed- Within this frame, we view addiction, mental illness and other “pathologies” as symptoms of imbalance within people but also within the culture that they exist in. Thus, we seek to bring an individual back into balance in all aspects of their lives, while also maintaining a cultural context, and believe in a collective responsibility to change culture to relieve suffering for the individual, rather than relying on the individuals most suffering to change the culture.
Ultimately, holistic approaches are not new ideas, but rather reflect and draw upon indigenous wisdom traditions that perceive the human as an integral thread in an interrelated web of nature, and greater contexts of existence.
How we approach our programs
We believe that in this current moment in time, in our contemporary Western culture, with our range of societal challenges – racial injustice, gender inequity, wealth disparity, political divisiveness, rampant addictions, rising mental health challenges, the climate crisis, and rampant spiritual disconnection – a particular shift in consciousness is called for. We believe that many of these are symptoms of a lost connection to each other, to the earth, and to a larger context of existence. We are designing programs that cultivate a restoration of this awareness, a set of requirements that we see as important for facilitating powerful and dynamic experiences with psychedelics, and we are providing the opportunities for practice and oversight.
Our commitment to the well-being of those we serve
Our core principles and commitments serve as a living declaration of our dedication to creating a conscientious, supportive, and transformative environment for those we come into relationship with and for those who entrust us with caring for their well-being.