Psychedelic Society Community Symposium and Story Telling
The Psychedelic Society of Minneapolis is proud to present our community symposium. Join us as we feature selected speakers from our local community and learn about efforts in the Midwest to promote the psychedelic renaissance! We will also close out the night with an open mic storytelling session for anyone to come up on stage and contribute their favorite story about a psychedelic experience.
We will also be raising funds and taking donations for local charities supporting homeless outreach in the Twin Cities, including VEAP and Second Harvest.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
6:00pm – Doors open
6:30pm – Start of symposium, opening remarks from Jessica Nielson
6:45pm – Day Host-Jablonski: "Speaking Psychedelics to Youth: Thoughts on educating teenagers about psychedelic therapy"
7:15pm – Christopher Gunlock, MHS: "How to Liberate Psychedelics and Liberate the Mind"
7:45pm – Kitty Sipple: "Walking in Liminal Spaces: A Closer Look at Gender-Expansiveness & Psychedelics"
8:15pm – Link Swanson: "Belief, Expectation, and Psychedelic Drug Mechanisms"
8:45pm - Ryan Westrum, PhD, MA: "Psychedelics: Personalize your integration practice"
9:15pm – Open mic story telling
Jessica Nielson, PhD is a neurobiologist, data scientist, psychedelic researcher and founder of the Psychedelic Society of Minneapolis.
Day Host-Jablonski is an Emergence Medic and Radical Perfumer from Madison, Wisconsin. She is a healthcare educator, herbalist, writer, and ceremonialist. She is one of the organizers of the Madison Psychedelic Society, and produced the 2018 Midwest Psychedelic Therapy Symposium.
Christopher Gunlock, MHS is a recent graduate of Integrative Medicine, but has formally studied mathematics, audio production, and meditation as well. He is a budding integrative health coach, with an emphasis on people that use psychedelic integration in their personal healing journeys. He strives to build bridges between a person's practical, material world and their inner subjective, spiritual world to bring as much of the ideal version of the self into physical existence as possible. Because he sees methods such as psychedelics as a vital tool in this endeavor, he also contributes online media to the Psychedelic Society of MPLS in the form of blogs, videos and social media presence.
Kitty Sipple is a gender-awesome queer non-binary femme. They are finishing up their Multidisciplinary BS at The University of Minnesota, focusing on Engineering Studies, Holistic Health & Healing, and Plant Biology. They are deeply focused on centering research around finding viable solutions for the issues that society places on marginalized communities, particularly the trans & non-binary community. When they are not focused on the magical world of science, Kitty loves making Spotify playlists, researching adaptogenic mushrooms, and building psychedelic relationships with plants.
Link Swanson is a graduate student in the PhD Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Minnesota. Link’s work aims to characterize the brain mechanisms of expectation in perceptual and cognitive information processing. Toward this goal, Link investigates the role of the serotonin system in supporting expectation-related neural processes, with a specific focus on understanding the mechanisms of classic psychedelic drug effects. Link holds a BS in psychology and a BA in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. His publications include Unifying Theories of Psychedelic Drug Effects and The Predictive Processing Paradigm Has Roots in Kant.
Ryan Westrum, PhD, MA is a nationally recognized psychedelic integration expert. For more than 15 years, his primary focus has been working with individuals and groups facilitating experiential therapy and integrating psychedelic journeys into healing and personal transformation. Ryan speaks on a myriad of topics and leads experiential groups, like dreamwork integration therapy and psychedelic integration groups. The founder of healingsoulsllc.com and psychedelicintegration.net; Ryan offers a multitude of models ranging from hypnosis to various forms of breathwork practices to engage in therapy and working towards wholeness within oneself. Ryan is a registered integration therapist for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), as well as the co-author of the book The Psychedelics Integration Handbook.