Restoring Connection to the Sacred: Self, Community, Nature, and Spirit.

Vision

PRATI imagines a world where people flourish and thrive in right relationship with the natural world.

Mission

Through psychedelic medicine, PRATI nurtures a new approach to mental health, and illuminates a pathway for individual and planetary healing. We do so by expanding professional capacity for transformational care, restoring a relational paradigm of health and healing, and conducting clinically relevant research.

Faculty

Our training faculty represents a diverse group of professions, backgrounds, training, and personal stories. We are connected by our desire to heal people, our professions, and the planet with the support of psychedelic medicines. Drawing on a rich base of teaching and research experience, each of us feels powerfully drawn to advancing this important work.

Board of Directors

IN DEPTH

PRATI is built upon a unitary mental model—that of Wholeness. This concept is reflected in our design and philosophy; our mission, vision, and purpose; our work and our community. Wholeness is a relational model which reflects a deep truth: we are interconnected and interdependent beings. Wholeness derives from a worldview known by many names across time and traditions, including but not limited to: non-duality, complexity science, systems thinking, interbeing, indigenous wisdom and deep ecology.

While we remain unique individuals, we are also innately bound to each other and to the web of life. From this awareness, we believe that psychedelic medicines enable us to access the Wholeness within us and, in doing, heal our wounds of separation by revealing our true nature.

As such, we believe psychedelic medicine fits naturally within a living system model of health and a holistic medicine framework.

The Living System Model of Health Diagram

Sudak, N.; Harvie J. “Integrative Strategies for Planetary Health”. Integrative Medicine 5th Ed., edited by Rakel, D., Minichiello, V. (ed), Elsevier Press, 2022, p 887

Also known as integrative medicine, this medical approach acknowledges the interconnection of mind, body, and spirit. It embraces complexity science, which illuminates the innate ability of all living systems to heal, adapt, and evolve.  Mental health—an inner state of Wholeness— represents a balance in this ecology of body-mind-spirit. We believe psychedelic medicines are one of our most powerful tools to support spiritual healing and, in turn, whole-person healing.

From this holistic context, PRATI’s purpose arises: To Restore Connection to the Sacred: Self, Community, Nature, and Spirit. Below, we explain these concepts and how they guide our work.

Self

Psychedelic medicines have the ability to uncover our Wholeness by removing the veil of our constructed, separate self. We create this ego-bound self as a means of survival, to cope and function in a less-than-perfect world. We cling to it dearly and falsely believe it to be the entirety of who we are. This results in a painful separation from one another, our planet, and our true nature. Psychedelic medicines quiet this false self through their action on the default mode network, enhancing interconnectivity among diverse areas of the brain. With these barriers removed, we can experience our psyche in its Wholeness and touch the truth of our unity with life and the cosmos. Our taste of the whole psyche illuminates the truth of our Wholeness and charts a path toward greater personal and planetary healing.

Community

Science establishes that humans are wired for connection. In turn, psychedelic medicines anchor this understanding as a profoundly felt knowing. This truth sits in contrast to our flawed societal systems (the spheres of interaction where we work, live, and play) built on false beliefs in an oppositional hierarchy of human value and “othering.” The result of this tension is a pressing desire to realign and transform our human-made systems so that they foster connection, diversity, equity, dignity, and our shared humanity—to restore balance so that our outer world may become a reflection of a healed inner world. This reimagining, reconnecting, and redesigning of Whole Community is as vital a part of our work as that of Whole Person, Whole Self.

Nature

Our false identity as a separate self disconnects us from our true nature. From this illusion, we believe we are independent and isolated—merely self. We lose sight of the fact that we are interwoven with the natural world, our bodies more non-human cells than human, part of a living planet upon whose gifts—air, water, food, shelter, clothing—we depend for our very existence. Psychedelic medicines increase nature-relatedness, a sense of being one with nature rather than separate from it. In this experience, unity with all life becomes a revealed truth that can’t be reversed or ignored. As such, it drives an urgency to restore our connection with a living planet and heal humanity’s broken relationship with the natural world of which we are a part. The insight of Whole Nature is no less essential than Whole Self in our work. It is merely one layer of our ecology and our Wholeness.

Spirit

Psychedelic medicines help us expand consciousness to touch the ineffable—something greater than ourselves, a larger whole. Studies into mystical experiences evoked by psychedelics have shown this revelation can be deeply transformative, providing lasting relief from psychospiritual distress and prompting profound, beneficial changes in mood, behavior, and personality. It is a gift of the medicines. We use the term Spirit to describe the ineffable. Some may prefer the terms consciousness, love, god, the great mystery, or oneness. This awareness is bound with the lessons, teachings, and wisdom of not only psychedelic medicines but of the universe itself. Put simply, Spirit is the source of Wholeness that the medicines help us return to. It is central to the healing power of our work, despite our imperfect attempts to grasp and define it. Therein lies its beauty.