CREATING WINGS OF PROTECTION AROUND SACRED MEDICINE
Awake in the Dream: School of Integrative Consciousness (DBA Inspired by Alchemy) provides online education, certification and community for therapists and wellness practitioners who want to support their clients as they prepare for and integrate the often life-changing impact of psychedelic medicine.
Our first offering will be a 6 month Psychedelic Medicine Integration Certification. Graduates of this training will have a fundamental understanding of the history, pharmacology, and contraindications of the most commonly used psychedelics in addition to demonstrated competency applying a proprietary method of psychedelic integration and much more.
In addition to our certification program, we are building a member-based community and offering monthly educational programming to pioneer intersectional learning opportunities based on psychological expertise, mysticism, indigenous wisdom, and ecological consciousness.
Not a renaissance, a remembering
Psychedelic-assisted healing is an ancient community practice that is reemerging in the United States after decades and centuries of suppression, taboo, and misinformation. With so many Americans suffering mentally, physically and spiritually, the time for psychedelic-assisted healing to be remembered by our collective has never been more pressing. However, in order for this practice to be most effective and in integrity with its origins, we don’t just need psychedelic experiences. We need education, community engagement, continued support, and a culture of reverence that honors the sanctity of the medicines themselves.
In 2019, 1 in 5 adults in the United States were considered to have a mental health disorder, yet most of the American population goes without mental healthcare (samhsa.gov, 2020). This is caused by a dramatic shortage in the workforce, increasingly unaffordable fees associated with psychotherapy, as well as a lack of trust in our healthcare system. For this reason, many individuals resort to receiving mental health support from their Primary Care Provider, who, regardless of good intent, are not equipped to support on an emotional or spiritual level.
If we are to heal our collective and personal wounds, we need to reevaluate how our community members are receiving guidance on their path to wellness.
With proper preparation and integration support, psychedelic experiences can provide a depth of healing that takes years of conventional therapy to reach. Whether or not these medicines have been approved, people have benefitted from them throughout the ages, and they will continue to do so. The capacity of these medicine’s for healing is uniquely powerful, and the crisis we are in as a culture will have people seeking out these ways to improve their lives. It’s up to us to rise to the occasion of engaging with these medicines responsibly and reverently.
Awake in the Dream is forging a path that reconnects science to spirituality, psychology to earth-consciousness, and self to the collective, in service to a paradigm shift in modern medicine.
We’re calling in aligned investors who want to support this transformative venture.
Do you know without a doubt that we need new and holistic forms of mental health support?
Do you feel concerned that psychedelics will be exploited or abused without proper education and community engagement?
Do you believe that we need to care for our spirit just as much as our body and mind?
If you’re called to support our vision and to help protect the future of psychedelic medicine, we’re currently raising our seed fund and we’d love to speak with you. To find out more about our offerings, financial model, business plan and investment opportunities, contact us via the form below.
Meet the founders
Together, Katherine and Ophilia bridge the mystical and the psychological. With Katherine’s expertise of a multi-decade practice in psychotherapy, dreamwork, and psychedelic integration, and Ophilia’s lifelong cultivation of earth-honoring ceremonial arts, they are perfectly poised to create a legacy of intergenerational and intercultural healing. Through educating on right-relationship to ourselves, one another, the planet, and of course - psychedelic medicines, they believe that humanity can thrive. They are diverse in age and racial identity and are deeply committed to cultivating a new paradigm that reflects their intersectional wisdom.
Dr. Katherine Lawson
Dr. Katherine Lawson is an Integrative Mental Health Specialist, a certified Embodied Imagination ® practitioner, a consultant, therapist, and an international speaker. She has spent nearly two decades examining the intersections between healing, dreaming, mysticism, and psychedelics. As a BIPOC woman, a cancer survivor, and the parent of a son who she nearly lost to addiction, she teaches and utilizes holistic therapies for PTSD and other types of unprocessed wounds, as well as sharing stories of healing. She is fascinated by the interactions between the brain, mind, body, and personality, as well as the powerful ways in which societal and spiritual factors affect health and happiness. She has recently published Dreamwork for Growth and Healing: A Guided Dream Journal.
Ophilia Mandara
Ophilia is a multi-hyphenate artist, guide, and ceremonialist who’s spent the last decade working as an administrative, marketing, technological, and creative support to independent artists, non-profits, and tech startups. From her upbringing in Buddhism to her initiation in a lineage of ancestral repair, Ophilia’s life has been saturated with the mystical. Born to be a psychonaut and healer, Ophilia was trained in Reiki at age 9, and was reading books on shamanism and psychedelics by age 12. Exposed early on to the impact of intergenerational trauma, mental illness, and addiction, she knows the power of plant medicines to transform lives, and is deeply committed to stewarding and protecting the use of these medicines as they proliferate in mainstream culture.