Working with sacred medicines and expanded states is about bringing healing to restore balance. At the Center for Consciousness Medicine we aim to repair disrupted, blocked, and agitated relationships and energy systems within ourselves, our clients, our communities and with the Earth. Contemporary mainstream culture is in a dire state of imbalance. The Center for Consciousness Medicine hopes to serve as an example of how to build balanced and sustainable relationships. One facet of this effort is to address economic imbalance.
The ideology of “you can have it if you can pay for it” is sourced in an unbalanced system (capitalism) where money and opportunities are not equally distributed. Whether we like it or not, we are born into (and benefit or suffer from, to varying degrees) different kinds of inherited privilege or oppression, and so participate in systems of imbalance and exploitation — classism, racism, sexism, colonialism, and their ongoing psychological and economic effects. True healing requires us to unravel the damage, trauma, and violence that has been done to us and that we’ve done to others, intentionally or not, and to lend our energy to restoring balance.
It is our responsibility and privilege to participate in the natural cycle of taking energy where needed and releasing or sharing excess, as in a balanced ecosystem. With an approach of gratitude for our lives and what we have been gifted, some easy to receive, some more challenging, and with an embracing sense of a non-attachment to non-essential material goods, we can contribute to remediating disparities in our social ecosystem, moving towards balance. With an approach of gratitude for our lives and what we have experienced (be it easy or challenging), and with a healthy understanding of what is essential and what is excess in our lives, we can contribute to remediating disparities in our social ecosystem.
Healing work should be accessible to all who wish to receive and share it. This includes both access to care (as a client) and access to education (as a facilitator of that care). Because healing work requires relationships grounded in shared life experience and belonging, the Consciousness Medicine Community needs practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds in order to make our work truly available to a wide range of people.
We believe in committing to our values full-heartedly and acting on them, and we hope you will join us. This means being willing to financially support, proportional to our means, the expansion and accessibility of the work we believe in enough to invest our time into. We look to our mother, the Earth, for guidance in creating an energy exchange akin to what we see around us in a healthy ecosystem. All participate proportionally as part of a whole and all comes to balance.
To these ends, in order to act in line with our commitment to accessibility and balance, and to allow the School to meet its operational costs, we have implemented an income-based tuition structure. This more objective tuition structure allows greater accessibility without asking people of limited financial means to expose and defend their personal or cultural trauma to strangers in a scholarship application process. This approach requires integrity, an honest look at our place in the human ecosystem, and a willingness to expand our ideas of value and worth and to lean into our interconnectedness.