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The Elemental Program

Ethical Commitments

Ethical Commitments to Training

At Elemental, we place a high value on ethical and competent psychedelic care and practice. One of the tenants of our mission is to train and support the creation of skilled providers who are passionate about ethics, safety, and right relationship.
In our view, psychedelic facilitator training should always include experiential components. Most practitioners in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy also recommend that practitioners interested in the field have an experiential process to better comprehend the unusual experiences and transpersonal terrain involved in this work. It is best to undertake this process with the same medicine that will be used in actual practice and treatment.

We note that safe and competent practice in the emerging field of psychedelic-assisted therapies depends on many factors, such as one’s foundational skills and years practicing, prolonged and paced engagement with the medicine one intends to work with, ongoing continuing education and training, and appropriate supervision. It is our view that a single training, including a single Elemental psychedelic facilitator immersive training, is not alone sufficient to begin a psychedelic-assisted therapy practice, though is a necessary step towards becoming a competent psychedelic-assisted therapy facilitator. 

“By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.”

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Parker Palmer

The Courage to Teach

Ethical Commitments to our Program Participants

Participants are informed and safe.  We are committed to creating safe containers both physically and energetically. By safe we refer to rules and guidelines for medicine space that are made clear and well communicated to all participants. We require participants to agree to abiding by group rules, and thereby develop boundaries both for each person and the group. All of our faculty are trained in psychedelic facilitation and have extensive experience with creating safe physical environments for psychedelic use.

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Participants have access to ongoing support. We know our training and retreat participants well through screening and we are available for 1:1 support to participants in the weeks following a training or retreat. We offer the opportunity for ongoing clinical supervision, consultation, and coaching in individual and group formats and local resources for ongoing community connection. We realize that Elemental trainings and retreats are not meant to serve as therapy, but that big experiences can arise during training medicine sessions. During screening, we ask participants to confirm that they have formal and informal support systems in place that can help them to continue to process and integrate their medicine experiences outside of the training support that Elemental faculty offer.

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We resolve disagreements and conflict with transparency and compassion. We strive to have direct and open dialogue about conflict, disagreements, grievances, and harms. We realize that we may unwittingly cause harm, and that although the attempt to create safe space is there, the reality is that no space is completely safe for all people. We recognize our own limitations and are willing to and desire to have conversation that allows us to see what we cannot see. We strive to engage these conversations with respect and kindness. We invite productive communication and a willingness to engage in mutual growth and learning. We believe that ‘cancel culture’ alienates people and creates a larger individual and collective shadow. Wherever we can, we subscribe to ‘call in’ culture where challenges are handled directly and openly with care, compassion, and a growth mindset. 

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Ethical Commitments for Training Participants

At Elemental Psychedelics, we care deeply about serving as good stewards of psychedelic medicine work and the psychospiritual spaces opened up for people in this work. We strive to maintain a high standard of integrity for participants who go through our training and retreat programs.

 

For this reason, we reserve the right to withhold training certificates if during the training program a trainee exhibits ethically problematic behavior such as, but not limited to:

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  • engaging in skills and/or practices outside one's scope of practice

  • engaging in sexually suggestive or romantic behavior with another trainee (or client/patient) during medicine sessions

  • engaging in consensual or non consensual touch during medicine experientials outside of those types of touch agreed upon during training 

  • exhibiting racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, or classist beliefs either by way of language, action, or other behavior that is recognizable by faculty, other trainees, or the community to whom they serve

  • failing to participate and engage with course material during the training weekend such to the extent of missing training sessions or not engaging group discussions and experiences​

 

In addition, if after completing and Elemental training a trainee  

  • is reported to their licensing board and found ethically responsible by said licensing board to have been engaging or demonstrating any of the aforementioned behaviors

  • has been found guilty in a court of law for crimes akin to aforementioned behaviors

  • has been accused by multiple parties to have engaged in any of the aforementioned behaviors

Elemental Psychedelic reserves the right to revoke the training certificate and the trainee may no longer advertise themselves as having been trained at or by Elemental Psychedelics. 

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