AAPi’s Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT) Interest Group hosts Otto Maier for their next webinar.
There is a growing fantasy within Western psychedelic therapy that healing should be linear, coherent, slow, and titrated. There is a notion that if a journey is difficult or destabilising, something went wrong. We are here to challenge that narrative. Explore how the psychedelic experience - particularly when it descends into chaos, grief, terror, or fragmentation - is often misunderstood and pathologized by modern therapeutic frameworks and wildly disconnected from the intelligence of an accurate and well held psychedelic therapeutic process.
Drawing from indigenous cosmologies, the alchemical process of nigredo, Stan Grof’s cartography of the psyche, and John Weir Perry’s visionary framing of psychosis, we offer a different orientation: that descent, disorder, and dismemberment are not detours from healing, but the very terrain through which the psyche renews itself. Psychedelic therapy, at its most honest, does not dampen symptoms - it uproots the entire ecosystem they’re growing in. And that is rarely comfortable.
In this conversation, we’ll explore how therapists can hold space not as managers of outcome, but as guardians of process. We’ll speak to the urgent need for symbolic and mythic literacy in integration work - how imaginal material must be witnessed on its own terms, not rushed into meaning or resolution. And we’ll distinguish between true harm and the painful but necessary movements of a psyche in metamorphosis.
About our guest: Otto Maier
Otto Maier currently works as a retreat leader with Tandava Retreats and the Head of Integration at FIVE. Specialising in Integration work his private practice, _Soul & Psyche_, supports individuals in navigating both ecstatic and traumatic states of consciousness by blending Depth Psychology, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Somatic work, Non-Pathologizing frameworks, and the ongoing decolonisation of the modern psyche.
Otto’s integrative approach to healing and psychedelic work has been translated into educational programs for fellow therapists and guides, adapted into training curricula across the psychedelic field, and is currently being applied in research on 5-MeO-DMT. His work centres on honouring the full range of human experience — not as something to fix, but something to be in a deep and reverent relationship with.
Webinar timing: 9:30 – 11:00 AM AEST
Access to the recording of this webinar: A recording of this webinar will be available through the CPD Webinar Library, but for the best experience and the opportunity to ask your questions, join us live. Everyone who registers will be advised via email as soon as the recording is available. Members have unlimited access to the recording, and non-members will have access for 6 months.