BONUS | Traumadelic Culture & The Colonization of Indigenous Plant Medicine | Adam Aronovich

On this episode I speak with Adam Aronovich, who I met six years ago when I arrived at an ayahuasca retreat centre in the Peruvian Amazon to teach yoga for a few months. Adam lived and worked there for four years, facilitating retreats and performing research on healing outcomes among the Western participants.Since that time, we’ve been keeping an eye on each others work and have found ourselves arriving at similar viewpoints about the problems and limitations of what he calls healing culture.The catalyst for this conversation are the two recent articles I’ve published outlining my critique of what I’ve termed Traumadelic Culture, which is in my view, the result of the assimilation and capture of psychedelic culture by therapies that are obsessively focused on childhood trauma and perpetuate a victim narrative that disempowers and depoliticizes individuals. In my critique, I draw the work of post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman, as well as my study of yoga and other indigenous healing systems.As a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Communications focusing on Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry, as well as years of on-the-ground experience, Adam brings an acute awareness of the cultural and political impacts that spiritual tourism and the exportation of Western ideals and prejudices have on indigenous healing systems and local cultures.And through his popular Instagram account @HealingFromHealing which is full of darkly funny and acerbic critiques of healing culture, he lends a bit of much-needed catharsis and levity to the conversation.➤ LINKSAdam's website: http://healingfromhealing.comThe Rise of Traumadelic Culture & The Capture of Psychedelics: https://medicinepath.me/journal/traumadelic-cultureBeyond Trauma: Re-Visioning Trauma Therapy: https://medicinepath.me/journal/beyondtrauma➤ RELATED EPISODESMPP78 Jeremy Narby https://tinyurl.com/mpp78-JeremyNarbyMPP44 Carlos Suarez-Alvarez https://tinyurl.com/mpp44-carlossuarezalvarezMPP09 Jeronimo Mazarrasa https://tinyurl.com/mpp09-jeronimomazarrasa