Welcome to the Existential-Humanistic Northwest August 2025 Lunch & Learn:
September 12, 2025 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Online only
Psilocybin Sessions for Existential and Death Anxiety
Facilitated by Lindsey Lerner
Join me for this workshop exploring how facilitated, legal psilocybin experiences can help clients work with existential anxiety and fear of death at all stages of their lives. Within Oregon’s new legal psilocybin framework, we can explore how ancient plant medicines and indigenous wisdom intersect, offering unique opportunities for healing and transformation. This presentation will be grounded in existential-humanistic principles and will weave together research findings, clinical insights, historical respect and perspectives, and case examples/audience participation.
Participants will gain a better understanding of Oregon’s psilocybin service model, including the roles of preparation, administration sessions, and integration, while also appreciating the sacred indigenous roots of psilocybin usage- gaining a better understanding of how meaning, presence, and authenticity can guide this work. Through case examples, we will examine how a single psilocybin session can help a client move toward greater acceptance and aliveness, and how, as therapists, we can ethically and skillfully provide support throughout this process. We will also reflect on our own views of life, death, and meaning-making.
If you are curious about the clinical use of psychedelics or interested in opening your mind to the use of new avenues of care to help with existential despair, then I invite you to join me for this workshop. I come to you humbly as a teacher, but also as a lifelong student and hope that we can all learn from one another during this lunch and learn presentation.
About the presenter:
Dr. Lindsey Lerner is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Licensed Psilocybin Facilitator, death doula, and psychonaut working and residing in Portland, Oregon. She has been working in mental health for the past 18 years and has been part of the psychedelic world for half her life. She has been curious about consciousness, death and dying (and near death experiences), non-ordinary states, existential thought and meanin-making since she was a young child, and utilizes the intersection of her personal and professional experiences to guide her work and advocacy, with a deep reverence for the originators of medicine, for the medicine, and the seekers of medicine.
