PsySoc Social: Special Guest from Mark Waking Light & Psychedelic Storytelling

This month, we're over-excited to welcome our special guest Mark Waking Light, the founder of the Jam of a Lifetime  psilocybin ceremony retreats, a seasoned guide in the realms of psychedelics, plant medicines, and spiritual exploration. With over 30 years of experience, Mark will share tools and insights for navigating psychedelic experiences with greater awareness, resilience, and depth.

How do you prepare for a psychedelic experience to change your life?

Come and join us to find out what you can do during the course of a psychedelic experience as it unfolds to make yourself most receptive to its transformative potential. This talk explores techniques for navigating the realms of psychedelic experience, presenting practical tools for deepening the positive potential of psychedelics to inspire personal healing and cultivate spiritual growth. Whether you’re preparing for a journey, integrating a past one, or simply curious about the inner landscapes psychedelics can open up, this is a space for reflection, insight, and connection.

WHAT TO EXPECT:

Talk followed by Q&A from Mark Waking Light: this talk will explore how to stay present, grounded, and open during intense or mystical experiences - drawing on practices from shamanic, yogic, tantric, and hypnotic traditions. From mantras and breathwork to shadow work and surrender, you’ll leave with practical techniques to amplify the healing and transformative potential of altered states.

Psychedelics Storytelling: this is becoming a must for our monthly socials. There will be the opportunity for all of us to share our psychedelic stories - the weird, the tricky and the downright wonderful. This part of the evening will be open-mic style and we will have a sign-up sheet to add your name to the list of storytellers. Your stories should be no more than 5 minutes and there's no need to rehearse what to say or come particularly prepared - often the best stories are told off-the-cuff and from the heart!

A Beautiful Psychedelic Community: Get access to our wonderful community coalescing around all things fungi. Many people at our socials have become life-long friends. Most of our members come alone, this is a safe and welcoming space for everyone, no matter your age, sexuality, background, gender, ethnicity or nationality. Fungi  know no boundaries, which is the ethos we bring to our socials. 

Delicious Food and Drink: Indulge in the mouthwatering plant-based offerings at Love Shack, where creativity extends to the kitchen. Their menu features delicious, sustainably sourced dishes and drinks crafted to nourish the body and delight the senses. It’s the perfect accompaniment to an evening of artistic exploration.

SCHEDULE

• 18:30: Arrive, socialise & grab a  drink
• 19:15: Talk and Q&A with Mark
• 20:00:  Dinner & / or grab another drink
• 20:30: Psychedelic Storytelling
• 21.30pm: Ends

VENUE

Join us at 6.30pm on Wednesday 30th July at Love Shack, a vegan restaurant and cocktail bar spread over three beautiful exposed brick arches in the heart of Hackney, East London. 

Flying solo? The majority of people arrive at our Monthly PsySocial events alone! It's a great opportunity to meet other like-minded people and members of our community. 

Mark Waking Light 

As the founder of the Jam of a Lifetime psilocybin ceremony retreats, Mark Waking Light creates spaces for spirit and art to embrace the true calling of the human heart. He has over 30 years of experience working with sacred plant medicines and transpersonal trance. Mark has presented workshops and talks at Breaking Convention, World Ayahuasca Conference, and other conferences on integrating psychedelics into secular culture, practical techniques of navigating spiritual experiences, psychospiritual integration of psychedelic experiences, and guiding meditation through poetry and music. Starting in 2012, he is the founder and co-organizer of the Jam of a Lifetime, a sacred plant medicine ceremony retreat in the Netherlands. Integrating inspiration, creativity, and embodiment with the journey of self-discovery, the Jam of a Lifetime provides a new kind of interdisciplinary cultural space designed to enable various psychospiritual practices and musical traditions to discover the transformative potential of psychedelics. The Jam of a Lifetime offers a safe and supportive environment for people from all walks of life to legally take a powerful psychedelic with the musicians and facilitators they know and love.

With a PhD from the University of Cambridge, Mark is a designer, artist, scientist, entrepreneur, and consultant who loves to bring beautiful ideas to life. Helping to transform good ideas into great businesses, he works as an innovation strategy consultant for tech startups. He has advised on diverse technologies, from generative artificial intelligence and blockchain applications to news analytics and medical imaging. As a creative technologist, he also assists professional artists in translating vision into reality. As a designer of television show formats, he worked on reinventing political debate for the social media generation by empowering online democracy to have a real world impact. As a medical data science consultant, he is helping pharmaceutical companies understand which patients are most likely to benefit from the new medicines they are bringing to market. In the psychedelic community, he regularly advises psychedelic practitioners, retreat providers, and drug discovery researchers.

OUR TEAM

Carlotta Artuso

Carlotta is an Event Coordinator at The Psychedelic Society, with a deep passion for nature, personal and collective growth, mystical experiences and food (Italian roots play a big role here!).

Psychedelics have profoundly transformed her life, opening her mind to new perspectives and deeper self-awareness, allowing her to break free from the 9-5 grind and to launch her own PR and Events company -  Carlotta PR.

She believes in their potential to heal and transform, and she's passionate about advocating for their safe, intentional use to inspire positive change and open new pathways of consciousness. Follow Carlotta on instagram at @carlotta.artuso

Callum Browne

Callum is an event coordinator for The Psychedelic Society and a life-long learner in the exploration of consciousness. He has completed a MSc in Medical Anthropology at University College London where he specialised in research on the phenomenology of consciousness, psychedelics and the therapeutic and healing arts in mystical traditions around the world. 

Callum regularly delivers talks and workshops on mental health, meditation and the breath to companies, groups and festivals across the UK. He is an advocate of transformative and psychedelic experiences that are grounded in transpersonal and somatic philosophy and psychology. These are the experiences that cultivate the experience and wisdom to remember and embody our connection with ourselves, others, nature and the beyond. Follow Callum on Instagram at @calibraid 

Find Your Community with The Psychedelic Society

REFUNDS POLICY: Please note, we do not arrange refunds or exchanges. When possible we encourage reselling on Ticketswap.

ACCESS:  We do our best to include everyone in our events, regardless of health circumstances. If you have access requirements please email the event organiser directly to discuss. Many facilitators are able to offer reduced ticket prices for those truly unable to afford the ticket price. If this applies to you, do please get in touch with the event organiser.

For PSYCHEDELIC KNOWLEDGE AND RESOURCES please check out the Psychedelic Society website. 

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MEMBERS of the Psychedelic Society get a discount off almost all of our events.
Join from £5 a month and become part of this amazing community with invites to special events and more.