Grassroots Climate Justice, Indigenous Sovereignty, Immigrant Rights, Labor, GLBTQI, and Racial Justice movements face multi-layered challenges in their work to create lasting systemic change in our society. Their participants often carry the trauma from the oppression in their lives, and they then experience the compounding trauma of state and corporate repression in response to their activism to change those very conditions. Trauma does not just live in the bodies of individuals, but in the collective bodies of the organizations that drive movements for liberation. While strong grassroots base-building organizations are the engine of lasting change, they also can reproduce self-limiting barriers and toxic internal cultures that hinder the vision and strategy of social movements. This includes lateral violence, interpersonal moral-policing, disposability, reductive judgment, unhealthy approaches to conflict and power, and other self-marginalizing cultural dynamics that emerge from collective trauma. If movements are our main hope for deep societal transformation, then we have a responsibility to tend to these collective bodies with the same level of care that we have in tending to individual clients. Healing with entheogenic plant medicines has so much to offer frontline social movement activists, not just for the sake of individual healing, but for the transformation of how we organize and build cohesive groups that are life-affirming, inclusive, generative, and can both build and wield power. Joshua Kahn Russell has spent over 20 years organizing across social movement sectors. In this conversation with Daneille Herrera, he will share lessons from his own activist healing journey and applying modalities from the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition as well as psilocybin to support the healing and transformation of social movement organizations and leaders.
A conversation between Joshua Kahn Russell (he/him), Danielle M. Herrera (she/her) at Queering Psychedelics II (San Francisco, April 23rd 2023)