Mapping The Landscape of Psychedelic Experiences, One Journey at a Time

Dedicated to Savana Bloom Champion

I sat on the edge of a rock outcrop, enveloped by rolling red crevices and threads of solid stone that flowed like the stream that used to nestle between them. Looking out over a bottomless canyon where my thoughts could rest without an echo.

An inner challenge had been accumulating and I felt confused, overwhelmed, and uncertain. Best practices for building a software company would advise building a product or service for the current needs of the market. I had met numerous clinicians who wanted Maya to service their scheduling functions and ease their reimbursement workflows. I understood that ceremonial retreat leaders wanted a way to accelerate their intake processes and tighten their communication channels. Researchers understood the value of real-world evidence, but continued to ask whether Maya could cater to their double blind placebo controlled clinical trial studies. And investors hurriedly glanced past the mission part of the pitch in search for the SaaS metrics they had been taught to rely on to de-risk their investment decisions and maximize their returns in the shortest time frame possible.

Through countless conversations with the professionals and experts co-creating this psychedelic field of research, treatment, and ceremony, I had heard what hundreds of intelligent people believed Maya should be. And in this web of thought, I had completely lost sight of what I believe Maya can be.

Photo by Jason Dolin from Pexels

As I sat between the ancient Moab rocks, and for the first time in months, I closed my eyes, stopped thinking, and just listened.

And the stone said:

“What will it be like when Savana has her first psychedelic journey?”

My 10 month old daughter, Savana, may one day choose to try psychedelics as an adult. I hope she never experiences a level of trauma that would deserve clinical treatment with these medicines, but I have no doubt she will pass through life’s peaks and its valleys, and I wonder if she’ll find growth or healing in psychedelic experiences. Perhaps she’ll embark on an intentional quest of self-discovery through altered states of consciousness, however they might be induced 20 years from now.

What would her first journey feel like for her, if Maya fulfills its highest purpose? Instantly, the vision became clear and the obvious emerged.

There will be clarity. A level of clarity that very few people know is even possible or attainable in a field shrouded in the ineffability of ‘mystical type experiences’, as the scientists have come to call them.

I smiled. The question was no longer what the professionals of today want Maya to be, but what the practitioners of tomorrow need Maya to be, if we are to see psychedelics in their full potential for humanity.

Clarity.

The thought evolved… I believe we can harness the wisdom of the lineages and bridge the gap between theoretical research and real-world psychedelic practices. We can marry scientific rigor with intuition and cultural wisdom. We can collect the world’s cumulative knowledge and channel it towards a safe, expansive, and scalable future for psychedelic healing.

‘But how can I build a business on this concept when it’s not the solution people are asking for today?’ my lizard brain said as thought and fear lurched back in. At the same time another voice responded ‘No one ever asked for the iPhone’.

I imagine many asked for a flip phone that was smaller, something to make cheaper calls, a color screen, or a better keyboard for typing faster. But who could have imagined their mobile phone would turn into the most important technology in their life? That it would evolve from a tool into a platform for connection, learning, access to information, and a channel for ideas to flow more freely?

Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Inspirational data visualization artwork — Tatiana Plakhova

So with this in mind, imagine a map co-created by the entire community of psychedelic guides explorers, one journey at a time. A visual map depicting the landscape of psychedelic experiences, encompassing data on every measurable variable of personal health and wellbeing, set and setting, preparation and integration, and their impact on the individual’s outcomes.

A map so powerful that clinicians can guide their patients with collective knowledge at their fingertips, and ceremony leaders can heighten their own insight and intuition with insight from their global community of peers.

And with this coordinated effort to aggregate evidence for best practices and harm prevention in place, imagine a platform for researchers, scientists, payors, and legislators to be able to make data-driven decisions about the harnessing of psychedelic medicine based on real-world evidence and not the personal biases or political stigma of the past.

I believe that in the future, Savana will be able to approach her first psychedelic journey on the foundation of collective wisdom from the elders who have charted their journeys before her. She will have clarity about which stigma to avoid and which rituals to include; which invitations to say ‘no’ to and which invitations to lean into.

She will inevitably chart her own course and the medicine will work through her as it’s meant to. And perhaps she’ll find stillness and joy, perhaps she’ll learn something important about herself, perhaps she’ll expand her own awareness of the creative capacity within her. Perhaps she’ll help to create a better Earth for us all.