Working with sacred medicines and expanded states is about healing the individual and the collective to help restore balance. At Gather Well Psychedelics we aim to repair disrupted, blocked, and ruptured relationships within ourselves, communities, cultures, and with the Earth. Contemporary mainstream culture is in a dire state of imbalance. Economic systems, systems of exchange, are one of the many areas we seek to contribute to restoring  balance, in an otherwise outdated and vastly imbalanced paradigm. At Gather Well, we are taking a different approach to tuition that is more equitable, that creates greater accessibility to this work.

We believe that healing work should be accessible and is deserved by all regardless of means. This includes both access to care (as a client) and access to education (as a facilitator of that care). 

Current predominant ideologies of value and worth are sourced in an unbalanced system (capitalism) where money and opportunities are not equally distributed. Whether we like it or not, we are born into (and benefit or suffer from, to varying degrees) different kinds of inherited privilege or oppression. By virtue of the systemic nature of these things, we are all affected by and participate in classism, racism, sexism, colonialism, and their ongoing effects on individuals and the global society in which we live. True healing as individuals and as a collective requires us to look honestly at these systems and our role within them, to unravel the damage, trauma, and violence that has been done to us and that we’ve done to others, intentionally or not, and to lend our energy to restoring balance. There are various frames for this balancing of energy including the concept of reparations for those that have extracted or oppressed others, or whose lineages have extracted from or oppressed others for their own, often financial benefit.

It is our responsibility and privilege to participate in the natural cycle of taking energy where needed and releasing or sharing excess, as in a balanced ecosystem. With an approach of gratitude for our lives, and with a sense of a non-attachment to non-essential material goods, we can contribute to remediating disparities in our social ecosystem, moving towards balance. 

We look to our mother, the Earth, for guidance in creating an energy exchange akin to what we see around us in a healthy ecosystem. All participate proportionally as part of a balanced whole. We have far to go as a human family in this regard. 

To these ends, and in order to act in accordance with our commitment to accessibility we use an income-based tuition structure; individuals pay according to their means. This tuition structure allows greater accessibility without asking people of limited financial means to expose and defend their personal or cultural trauma to strangers in a scholarship application process. We believe in committing to our values full-heartedly and acting on them, and we hope you will join us. This means being willing to financially support, proportional to our means, the expansion and accessibility of the work we believe in enough to invest our time into. This approach requires integrity, an honest look at our place in the human ecosystem, a willingness to expand our ideas of value and worth, and to lean into our interconnectedness. 

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