Revenge of the Shadow

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Integration

Just when you thought it was safe to step into the sunshine – the Shadow’s back! With its sidekicks Golden Shadow, Collective Shadow, Cultural Shadow, Anti-Shadow and your Anima alone knows what else…

‘Memorabilia’ by Luna Ikuta showing at Wavelength: A Momentary Spring, Beijing Times Art Museum China till 1 July

Thought integrating ‘the parts of you that you’re most ashamed of and keep hidden’ was the trickiest part of Jungian shadow work?

You may be unsurprised to learn that the cycles are just beginning.

There’s the ‘golden shadow’.

This includes the silver linings that inevitably accompany the regular shadow’s negative traits.

Plus perhaps more importantly the agreeable and positive aspects that we’ve smothered. We might suppress compassionate urges to appear indifferent (hard and cool in other words).

"We take the collective shadow and make it our own”

Sounds reasonably clear-cut.

Yet be wary of discriminating between the golden shadow and the murky, original one. “The ‘positive vibes only’ culture is anti-shadow,” says says Jungian analyst Dr Ido Cohen, lecturing in Vital’s shadow work lecture series, "what might be happening that oppresses the shadow?”

That’ll be ‘the collective shadow’. It’s the one who also nailed Christ to the cross, and willingly elects dictators. "We take the collective shadow and make it our own,” Dr Cohen expands. 

“We can absorb the collective shadow, or become numb to it,” adds Dr Portal. Likewise we might celebrate our outsider status; just as psychonaut heads like to do. Should we attempt union? Or consolidate independence? 

“What does integration look like?” says Dr Ido Cohen, “Moving away from these systems and creating something new? Or is it taking pieces of the experience and carrying forth?”

British christian ecologist Paul Kingsnorth has a stark view on navigating shadow work. ‘Sacrifice and surrender are at the heart of faiths,’ he points out, ‘Nobody wants this. But maybe it’s what we have to do?’

Serving up more Integration articles here on New Psychonaut:

Heoric Doses of Reality

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Integration

Peak existence is the new peak experience, says 5-MEO DMT expert Dr Malin Vedøy Uthaug

By Trulee Hall from ‘Plays on Foreplays’, at Rusha & Co, Los Angeles, February 4 till March 11, 2023

The strictest lesson psychedelics taught me, is that they themselves are not important. It’s lived experience that is. 

I don’t mean a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers existence. (Although I am all for that too, especially as part of some ‘path of excess leading to the palace of wisdom’ thing). I mean stuff like Dr Malin Vedøy Uthaug does.

The 5-MEO DMT research maven took up free diving while stuck in, y’know, Egypt during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I believe our society has emotional constipation. We need to get that shit out”

This helped over come her fear of deep open water – ‘thalassophobia’ – and since she’s set two free diving records in her native Norway.

“I believe our society has emotional constipation. We need to get that shit out,” says the firebrand, who’s swift to remind us that “different diets lead to a different psychedelic experience,” certainly according to plant medicine purists.

This is felt on the material plane: “Putting the body back into the equation, is the way forward,” Dr Uthaug claims.

This could mean bioenergetic therapy to encourage consciousness ‘integration’ on a physical level. Or… actually doing things as opposed to just talking about them. 

“Changes need to be actively translated into your life,” says Dr Uthaug… which admittedly is likely to mean unexpected challenges, hard truths, and personal growth generally earned the hard way as per usual.

“In the light of day, insights are about lifestyle”

The trip is only part of the healing. You do the rest with the actions you undertake. That the mushroom or whatever told you to do.

“A more holistic framework is what I’d love to see going forward, here in the space,” says Dr Uthaug, “Take an exaggerated example: when an addict take a psychedelic, they realise, oh, I shouldn't be taking this substance anymore because it fucks me up, right? And so in the light of day, insights are about lifestyle.”

Ceremony in Jamaica with Sacred Transitions Retreats and New Psychonaut

Treasure Beach ‘The Cornwall of Jamaica’ is where I’d send anyone close to me pondering a first experience.

Take a look.

Psychedelic overground

Space

Rugby lads on ibogaine, reality stars in hyperreality and tarot cards swapped for toys. Turns out the revolution will be fun

Inevitably, models gather in St Tropez for a charity fundraiser hosted by Christian Angermeyer’s Aurora Institute

With celebs like Sharon Osborn extolling the virtues of ketamine therapy get ready for the neighbourhood popping their heads through the door of your clinic.

The psychedelic renaissance has flowed beyond the dinner party circuit on to the high street. Ketamine treatment is even more of a talking point than the toad thing. KAP got a shout out from UK TV’s Loose Women co-host Frankie Bridge (the striking one out of The Saturdays who had short hair) and Hello! mag went large.

Dr Leary’s orbiting urn would spin at an angle that defied conventional physics to see trite psychedelic lifestyle design clichés replaced by… trite lifestyle design clichés.

Sports stars have been hot on their daytime TV counterparts’ heels: gridiron megastar Aaron Rogers puts a late career surge down to ayahuasca and other football players extol psychedelic healing for concussion and stubborn injuries. Combat sports are beloved of thugs but played by gentlemen so being miles ahead doesn’t count.

Even the middle market are getting out there. Gen-X footwear designer Patrick Cox spoke about his new life as an Ibizan 5-MEO DMT facilitator to Hadley Freeman in The Guardian this summer. Ever intrepid, Freeman ‘smoked toad’ [sic] despite her editor’s express instructions.

A Vital study group chum undergoing ketamine therapy recently declared that sock puppets had been added to her clinic’s table of tripping props (with the spirit animal cards and crystals). She spent the session happily playing with them. 

Maybe this doesn’t sound ‘mystical’ enough to those of us with well-thumbed copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 

Chatting away to the guides during the medicine experience, or wanting to go outside, can be a distraction from the work you’re there to do apparently. After you’ve come down you could be disappointed you didn’t get any of that done. I don’t disagree that it could feel like a waste of time for all concerned.

“Wit is the ability to find hidden similarities linking two ideas which are contrasted with each other”

But on psychedelics ‘what comes up, comes up’ to use the platitudinous truism. TV’s Dr Bill Richards, the veteran John Hopkins’ researcher featured in Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind said laughter “May be what’s needed” in his own Vital lecture.

I rubbished Freudian psychoanalysis in issue #11 by ranting about how the only therapeutic system that’s been established as ‘fact’ for 100 years has poisoned our intellectual conversation and our mental healing.

Turns out Freud wrote about the importance of humour in 1905’s The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Before putting pen to paper he took the opportunity to discuss the subject with hilarious cards from his Viennese social whirl.  The many positive conclusions included, ‘Wit is the ability to… find hidden similarities… linking two ideas which in some way are contrasted with each other.’

Laughter is the yang of meditative, non-dual understanding’s yin. The unconscious plays a leading role both in devising clever quips and responding to them in real time, without conscious analysis. On top of healing relational trauma, laughter and play in adults are also ‘positively correlated’ with increased sociability, spontaneity, tension release, innovation, de-stressing, longevity, immunity, energy levels, teamwork and parasympathetic nervous system activation. 

“Whether I was crying or laughing, was not too important”

And never mind the cave paintings, because psychedelics gave us jokes. The 2021 research paper Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution says, ‘In particular, the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion.’ 

LSDExperience.com a compendium of the finest, trip writing includes this anonymous quote: “Whether I was crying or laughing was really not too important, except on the conventional level. The important point was that the tree of my emotions was being vigorously shaken and liberated of some withered leaves which had hung on too long.”

Spiritual emergencies, fearful reactions, and sudden life changes are likely to be of more concern for ketamine entrepreneurs and therapists than the number of mystical versus humorous experiences per week going down in their clinic. But not for nothing does the Bible call humour ‘the best medicine.’ It could be comparable to spirituality, or philosophy for coming to terms with complex and contrasting themes.

At dinner, or on the high street.

It’s legislators who seem out on the fringes now.

IRL is a bummer

Integration

Returning to everyday existence brings depression patients right back down

Nick Cave ‘Soundsuit’ at In the Black Fantastic Hayward Gallery till September 18

Psychedelic integration isn’t the ideal topic for water cooler chat with your line manager on a Monday morning.

Meditation, vegetarian diets, forest bathing and volunteering, all inspired by the cosmic visions on a magic mushroom trip. It all sounds suspiciously like hippy stuff, guaranteed to create even more disconnect between you, your news cycle-bedevilled colleagues, wine-guzzling borderline alcoholic partner, and rigid family. 

“Most of the people I’ve worked with have had a disappointing crash. Integration is partly about managing that disappointment. You can’t separate the drug from the therapy – and the community you go back to after a session,” said Dr Ros, AKA PsiloDep 2 clinical lead Dr Rosalind Watts at Psych Symposium’s integration panel earlier this year also featuring Ian Roullier, co-founder of trial subject support and campaigning group PsyPAN. 

“My colleagues think it’s extreme… whacky”

PsiloDep 2 trial subjects were given 35 to 40 hours of therapy, which is more than I’ve had in my life. But costs, for a start, kept post-experience integration services light. The trial subjects’ woe prompted Dr Ros to manifest ACER, her integration platform that “involves getting into nature and a closely bonded support group, that’s saved all of us during the pandemic,” says Roullier. 

Former international-level professional sportsman and Iboga advocate Rory Lamont was on the panel too. played rugby, a traditional contact sport that’s notorious for its conservative values. He only had the informal WhatsApp group set up by the folks on his retreat for succour. 

“I went through some difficult challenges post experience,” he told the panel, “The connection with the medicine is just the start: we want to embody the insights but if we’re not being met by our family and friends it’s isolating and can bring back the loneliness, and the depression.”

The new approaches his insights compelled him to take were nightmarishly distant from his existing lifestyle. “These medicines get to the root of our suffering, the trauma and disconnection from family, friends, society,” he says, “Instead we get a connection to mother nature and community, that brings about the profound healing.” After the experience is over though it’s straight back to ‘real life’, such as it is. Most of my colleagues think it’s extreme, whacky,” says Lamont.

“The worst part is when you feel the effect fading, and you can’t access it any more”

PsyPAN co-founder Leonie Schneider says psilocybin was “the start of a long healing process which I’m very grateful for, but it’s quite a thing to be involved in. I didn’t get the ego death, the mystical experience, and came out slightly disappointed. But I got some other, incredible things that we wren’t what I expected.” Schneider may not have been able to get those benefits without experienced integration support. 

Ian Roulllier also took part in Compass’ psilocybin trials, where “my depression came back as soon as the drug wore off. But there was a strong focus on integration with a group centred on Maudsley Hospital [where Compass and the UK NHS public healthcare provider are building a dedicated centre in woodlands of New Bethlehem AKA ‘Bedlam’ asylum].” 

The drugs are catalysts and require the integration to have long-term tangible effects, says Roullier. Trial subjects can’t breeze into Imperial for another heroic dose top-up, “The worst part is when you feel the effect fading, and you can’t access it any more.” 

Although there were moments of oceanic boundlessness. 

“The best is every now and then I check in, and just go out on the grass, and feel it under my feet,” muses Roullier, movingly and sincerely, “But I did get attacked by a swarm of wasps once. I thought, am I still tripping?”

More mushroom tea, vicar?

Approach

Savvy brits in the space are sussed to self-care. But the vulnerable are left behind

Contemporary graffiti in east London

Here’s a ray of optimism, before I start even attempting to unravel the respective messes that are Britain’s drug laws and mental health provision.

A judge in Cumbria, northern England just said she hoped ’the law will catch up with science’ when pardoning an accused man for growing his own magic mushrooms to benefit his mental health.

Britain has the highest depression rate among children in Europe, along with one-third of the continent’s drug overdose deaths and its worst alcohol problem. Mental health problems cost the British economy £118 billion annually. The situation is apparently more dismal than we even think. Lockdown saw a 47% increase in young people seeking help and I need hardly quote again my recent article elsewhere detailing the stigma that still exists in the workplace around stress and burnout.

It’s characteristic of the British legislature to turn a benign blind eye to self-medication while dragging its feet on psilocybin prescriptions. Former prime minister (PM) Boris Johnson and his pantomime villain advisor Dominic Cummings supposedly had psychedelic therapy as a political cause celébre partly because Brexit meant chances to the law could be actioned quicker. Now they’re out of the game, things are even worse in the corridors of power.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group

UK home secretary Priti Patel says she’ll ban ‘middle class’ cannabis smokers from nightclubs and take away their passports to derision from even Daily Mail readers. Front runner for new PM Liz Truss has turned Judas on her 420-friendly past.

The centre left is no better with its leader Keir Starmer, a former head of public prosecutions, saying he’s “seen too much damage” in his former role. Dude, the unremittingly grim extraction economy lifestyle is the problem across all classes especially the estate-condemned non-working class. Not the weed itself.

While kids opting for dank oblivion above all else is a problem, it is hardly caused by marijuana alone and previous alternatives like booze and heroin are frankly worse. My entirely subjective opinion from the ground is that the approach reeks of not upsetting near-senile, control-freak baby-boomers.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group that are actually part of the UK’s centre-right Conservative [Tory] Party. Its campaign to legalise cannabis and psychedelic therapies has the blessing of former prime minister John Major, ex-Tory leader William Hague, current Northamptonshire police, fire and crime commissioner Stephen Mold, plus ex-MI5 (it’s like Homeland Security) chiefs Lord Evans and Baroness Eliza Manningham-Butler.

Over half of voters from even right-wing parties believe in the legalisation of psychedelic therapy, according to a YouGov poll quoted by broadcaster and former advisor to PM Theresa May Tom Swarbrick. Thought leaders like the redoubtable Zoe Cormier of good eggs Guerrilla Science are also in the media front lines doing the mushroom god’s work.

Meanwhile the country’s largest NHS trust are opening a new dedicated facility in the grounds of the former ‘Bedlam’ hospital alongside Compass Pathways which you can read about elsewhere in this issue.

The naturally British reaction is to quietly do what it seems the justice system, NHS and general public are already doing. Which is plough on regardless leaving the government apparatus and armchair windbags to their own ineffectual posturing. 

Hymn of the Big Wheel

Therapy

My home town of Bristol boasts a psychedelic ‘amazement’ park and therapy clinics. How did that happen?

Jeremy Deller, ‘Wiltshire Before Christ’ photo by David Sims for Aires Arise

“Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” declares Dr Ben Sessa of my home town where Awakn Life Sciences is based.

How? Not only with Britain’s first psychedelic clinic – accessible without a referral – but also the world’s first immersive psychedelic ‘amazement park’. Bristol is making up ground, perhaps, for its heritage in tobacco and slavery.

The clinic is the first branch of Awakn Life Sciences, opening also in London (opposite Euston Station) fronted by Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa and addiction treatment icon Dr Celia Morgan. As of earlier in 2022, AWAKN’s main investor is the UK government. 

Wake the Tiger is the name of the day trip destination. A lockdown brainstorm from festival innovators Boomtown, it is actually named after Peter Levine’s trauma tome Waking the Tiger. Creative director Lak Mitchell’s wife is a shadow-specialising psychotherapist, and suggested it. Wake the Tiger’s backdrop narrative offers a journey to an alternative dimension where all the unwanted clutter of consumer culture ends up; the sequence begins with a luxury living development where the only thing really living is a tree in the lobby.

Wake the Tiger in Bristol, the world’s first psychedelic ‘amazement park’

Stu Tallis who sorted the branding at Taxi Studio, told the website Business Leader, “It pushes the boundaries of imagination and represents the truly unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity… it needed to be scalable to accommodate the possibility of replicating the experience across the country and becoming a multiverse. It is a category-defining moment representing a sea change in how immersive art experiences are created.” 

Opening in late July 2022, Wake the Tiger received £1.85 million in crowdfunding. Reviews are gushing, from those microdosing or otherwise. Kids get in free. They don’t know they’re born. Dropping a Purple Ohm to watch Bristol City lose at home to Swindon (by four goals) was all that we had in my day.

“Wake the Tiger is a unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity”

Bang in the middle of the upmarket Clifton district is AWAKN’s Bristol ketamine clinic. The Times dispatched its most simultaneously verbose and glib columnist, David ‘Fatty’ Arranovitch to check it out. Unlike more intrepid reporters (hem-hem), he did not try it out. Although he does end the piece by pointing out the potential for psychedelic treatment of obesity, after beginning by complaining about the walk up Constitution Hill that I and my chums made to school most mornings, while daydreaming of the next time we could obliterate the pain of a rigid, parentified upbringing in service to the slave morality. Sorry, flashbacked and regressed a bit there.

Professors David Nutt and Celia Morgan, who form the Awakn dream team with Dr Ben Sessa

Anyway, another AWAKN is planned for Manchester later this year while Oslo in Norway was the first AWAKN to open. AWAKN’s chief advisor is Professor David Nutt, a national treasure since he was sacked as the government’s drug policy advisor for saying LSD (and ecstasy, and cannabis) was less harmful an intoxicathan alcohol on daytime TV. Dr Sessa, who Vital students will hear from in Week 13, I believe is the most forthright and refreshing middle-aged man in the psychedelic space internationally right now. 

AWAKN’s special sauce though is arguably provided by Celia Morgan. The fabulously clever redhead is also Exeter Uni’s head of psychopharmacology, and inspires fervent adoration from her Phd students. The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) are funding two-thirds of the costs for her alcohol use disorder treatment programme with the very British name of ‘Project Kestrel’, although KARE was used instead once the bureaucrats got their hands on it.

Professor Morgan appeared in Business Insider’s list of the most important women in psychedelics earlier this year. Devising the first official cure for alcoholism, though would assure her a place in medical history. There are no flies on Morgan, who has discussed the dangers of chronic recreational ketamine use on BBC Woman’s Hour – “I’ve met teenagers who have to wear catheters,” is her conversation-stopper.

Professor Morgan has even adapted psychedelic therapy for both the addiction and ketamine aspects of Project K: “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects,” she told The Guardian newspaper in its own report, “We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.”

Morgan embarked on Project Kestrel as a final year student at once-mighty University College London (which is about to open its own psychedelic mega-department headed up by the highly plausible Rosalind McAlpine). She pulled together strands of her friend’s experiences of recreational ketamine use with her family’s of addiction, and laid the foundations of an approach that could wrest thousands of sufferers and those close them from the living hell of alcoholism. Plus cut the £5.5 billion the UK loses to the condition every year. Morgan’s test subjects stayed clean 87% of the time after six months, compared to a measly 2% beforehand.

Many have pointed out that it could be the therapy itself that’s making the difference, provided at very high quality in the trials for free, just like in the depression trials. (That this is not your regular psychoanalytic therapy is a matter for another time, although props to Arranovitch for quoting a patient as saying “it was more about the boozing than my mother”). 

Only 8% of addicts ever seek treatment as it is, due to stigma or the way they’re not guzzling miniature brandies on the commute like a TV stereotype. It’s this ‘not quite in crisis, yet’ group who suffer too and are arguably more motivated to seek treatment should it be available without a CV-staining, divorce-prompting  diagnosis. Dr Sessa too stresses that childhood trauma isn’t usually born of what we know as ‘abuse’ – corporal and cruel punishments – and instead is a feature of many material-focussed western upbringings.

“We wanted evidence based therapy shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse, plus work with the ketamine state”

Dr Sessa is a soundbite slinger, which I as a journalist appreciate. “Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” is one of his best shots, and he’s done a lot to catalyse that.

‘There is only one good use for a small town. You hate it and you know you'll have to leave,’ sings Lou Reed on the opening track of Songs for Drella, his and John Cage’s 1990 concept album dedicated to Andy Warhol.

I left my own home town of Bristol for university in 1992, aged 18. Since, it has realised its media image as a Mecca of skateboarding, street art and… intentional drug taking (plus plasticine animation, as local artist Banksy rarely misses the opportunity to point out). And in the past six months, Bristol has even superseded modern-era triumphs such as the aforementioned world’s favourite artist’s Dismaland exhibition, in the admittedly dismal Weston Super-Mare, a former holiday resort notorious for its quicksand beaches. 

But I remember my home town for its repression, casual violence, and nihilistic ennui, caused mostly by traumas and addictions that while ‘low-level’, eat away at the soul and body nonetheless. And it’s partly because they will never be seen as a source of necessary concern; we change only when we have to. If the West of England is coming unstuck from those behaviours, then I shall never slag it off again. I might even go to Wake the Tiger. 

Re-Story-Ation

Therapy

Ancient principles for living encourage a wondrous view of the world. Is this the ‘re-enchantment’ with life we need?

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Rainforests gave the West spectacular medicines for the body. Could their way of life provide healing for the mind too?

Half of all pharmacological medicines are derived from plants, including recent innovations, and 25% come from global rainforest. Curare, the muscle relaxant Amazonian tribes used to stun animals, prompted a revolution in anaesthetics and modern medicine. Quinine was the first cure for malaria. Vincristine and Vinblastine from Madagascar, used the treat cancers, have vastly extended the chance of surviving childhood leukemia.

Now, thousands flock to ayahuasca retreats to balm their souls. But passionate field researchers both young and old claim the lifestyle and ideology around the medicine is essential to redemption.

“Our profound alienation is a consequence of turning relationships into things”

Washington-based Joseph Mays, wields a master’s in ethnobotany from the University of Kent – a likely hotbed of radical thought – after observing responses to globalisation from the Yanesha in central Peru. He’s published a smart medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve and works as the program director of Chacruna’s arse-kicking Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI).

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Mays cracked his bonus Vital lecture off by quoting Karl Marx like a boss.

“Marx spoke about the ‘metabolic rift’, man’s alienation from nature,” says the scholar and activist, “We are now in ‘The Anthropocene Epoch’.”

That’s the conceptual geological era we’re living in now. The official one’s the Holocene. The Anthropocene represents a time man begins to have geological impact upon the Earth, roughly marked by the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

“We should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind”

Ernst Junger warily observed the march of technology throughout the 20th century. He wrote that it was best explained by the senseless, arbitrary nature of the First World War. Not only in the power new weapons had to slaughter hundreds in a moment, but the absence of any serious evaluation of why it was happening.

Junger considered the endemic, fatalistic nihilism he witnessed in the trenches, and in the commuter era that followed it, “a new, terrible practice” and spoke of “the loneliness of man in a new, unexplored world, whose steely law will be felt as meaningless.”

Vincent Blok, in his acclaimed Ernst Junger’s Philosophy of Technology writes that our enlightenment values of '“Reason and humanity, of morality and individual freedom” count for nothing now they are wedged within the indefatigable gears of… The Anthropocene.

“The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable”

Mays quotes feted Brazilian anthropologist, Cambridge lecturer and writer of Cannibal Physics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who writes that our profound alienation is a consequence of “turning relationships into things” and “perceiving life as a collection of detached objects.”

The animistic view though is “inherently subjectifying” in contrast to the objectified modern era. It also stands alongside our own subjective spiritual beliefs, working as a system to integrate Earth and consciousness.

“We are now in The Anthropocene Epoch”

Breaking the dichotomies – mind-body, mankind-Earth, civilisation-environment – can also free us from our alienation. Our energy spent on tweaking existing problems could go into designing alternatives. “Maybe we should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind, and imagine many other compositions or assemblages,” says The Life of Plants writer Emanuele Coccia in his introduction to Modern Alchemy, a new series of photographs by Viviane Sassen published by JBE Books, photos from which you see here.

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from JBE Books

Learning on the job develops a deeper relationship with the non-human elements of vocation and personal growth. Individual responsibility and local ‘bottom up’ development puts ownership for our immediate experience in our own hands, away from the distraction of political infighting.

Communities are marginalised in a similar manner to the environment. Energy is better spent providing a container for them to address their “own needs, and their own priorities in a self-directed manner from the ground up” as a forest would. Or like Somerset UK’s Frome Model of Compassionate Primary Care that has slashed hospital admissions by 40% over a decade, which you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

“Biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked,” says Mays, “And the culture of plants and communities are inter-dependent. The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable.”