Rituals and ceremonies, whether traditional, modernized, or intercultural, are profound practices that foster interconnection, reciprocity, and a deep sense of relationality with life. We seek to explore how rituals and ceremonies, long known to facilitate healing from addiction and trauma at the individual level and lead to personal and group transformation, might be leveraged to promote planetary healing, sustainability transitions, and reciprocity with the natural world.
We hypothesize that ritual and ceremonial practices play an essential role to achieve sustainable and regenerative futures, particularly when they combine the strengths of Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to holistic health, well-being, transformation, raising of consciousness, learning, and relationality.
The SpiRitS Lab includes practitioners with extensive experience guiding sacred teacher medicine plant ceremonies. These entheogenic ceremonies are already helping to reconnect individuals to nature, dissolve ego-driven patterns of consumption, and restore reciprocal relationships with the Earth, thus catalyzing both healing, inner transformation, exploration of consciousness, and systemic shifts toward ecological and social harmony sustainability. The knowledge and wisdom these practitioners bring to the lab in invaluable.
The lab co-produces knowledge and long-term relationships and collaborations between researchers and medicine plant ceremony practitioners from all over the World to enhance humanity’s capacities for collective healing, transformation, and raising of consciousness. Medicine plant practitioners contribute their unique expertise on how to induce inside-out shifts in consciousness that address the root causes of environmental degradation, such as disconnection, overconsumption, and systemic inequality.
This work positions the entheogenic uses of medicine plants not only as tools for individual healing, transformation, and raising of consciousness but as a vital, understudied levers for systemic change, demonstrating their role in inspiring regenerative cultures, policy innovations, and sustainable futures.
The SpiRitS Lab investigates entheogenic uses of medicine plants in the Amazon rainforest as a powerful catalyst for sustainability transformations, bridging Indigenous traditions, ecological awareness, and social change.
This research focuses on how rituals rooted in Amazonian Indigenous wisdom facilitate collective healing, fostering deeper connections to nature, relationality, and alternatives to exploitative, consumer-driven systems.
Through empirical case studies and collaborations with Indigenous and spiritual communities, the lab explores how these rituals induce inside-out shifts in consciousness, reshaping worldviews, cultural narratives, and institutional practices toward Earth stewardship and community-centered pathways for regenerative living.
This work positions plant medicines not only as a tool for individual transformation but as a vital, understudied lever for systemic change, demonstrating its role in inspiring regenerative cultures, policy innovations, and sustainable futures.
The SpiRitS Lab co-produced a qualitative case study with a sweat lodge community in Phoenix, AZ that explored how the profound spiritual healing experiences with Native American style sweat lodge ceremony relate with sustainability transformations. This long-standing community emerged out of addiction-recovery programs that weave Native American sweat lodge ceremony with Western spiritual healing approaches such as the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. This study provides insight into how Indigenous-based ceremonies like sweat lodge can facilitate embodied experiences of relationality and deep spiritual connection that cultivate personal and collective healing important for sustainability transformations. We identified 12 expressed factors of spiritual healing that inform literature on inner-outer transformations for sustainability. We also consider the iterative practice of sweat lodge ceremony in relation sustained recovery from addiction for insight into sustaining inner-outer transformations for sustainability, and conclude that reconnecting such ceremonies into Western lifestyles may be vital for personal and planetary health.
The SpiRitS Lab incorporates drum circles as a way to examine how rhythmic practices can foster connection, presence, and collective attunement. Situated within a growing body of research on music, embodiment, and altered states of consciousness, drum circles offer a structured yet flexible environment for participants to explore the relational dynamics of rhythm and resonance. The practice highlights the capacity of collective music-making to bridge individual experience and group cohesion, while also raising questions about the role of ritualized sound in personal and ecological healing. By situating drum circles within broader investigations of ceremony and sustainability, The SpiRitS Lab seeks to understand how such practices might contribute to models of holistic well-being and regenerative community.
The SpiRitS Lab engages dream work as a means of investigating the symbolic, imaginative, and transformative dimensions of inner experience. Drawing on traditions that view dreams as sources of guidance and meaning, this practice creates opportunities to examine the intersections between psychology, spirituality, and cultural frameworks of interpretation. Dream work foregrounds the capacity of the unconscious to generate narratives that speak both to individual development and to collective concerns, particularly in times of ecological and existential uncertainty. By situating dream practices within a transdisciplinary context, The SpiRitS Lab explores how attention to dreams might enrich understandings of consciousness, relationality, and pathways toward personal and planetary healing.
The SpiRitS Lab approaches soulcentric nature-based practices as pathways for reconnecting human identity with the larger ecological and spiritual community. Grounded in eco-depth psychology and allied fields, these practices emphasize wandering, deep imagery, and ritual engagement with the more-than-human world. They invite participants to explore the relationship between inner life and outer landscape, cultivating an ecological sense of self that recognizes the human role within broader cycles of life. By integrating psychological insight with experiential immersion in nature, The SpiRitS Lab investigates how such practices can foster authenticity, belonging, and resilience in both individuals and communities.
The SpiRitS Lab practices collective memory work as a ritual of re-membering otherwise – a practice that honors spiritual, ancestral, and more-than-human dimensions of experience. Emerging from decolonial, feminist, and postqualitative traditions of collective biography, this work recognizes that memory moves not only through minds, but through bodies, landscapes, languages, and more-than-human kin. In this space, remembering becomes a deeply relational act – an ethical and ecological gesture toward the past that opens possibilities for living differently in the present. Through storytelling, embodied movement, and creative inquiry, we follow the threads that bind us across generations, geographies, and species. We read memory through memory, self through other, presence through absence, allowing what has been fragmented to come into view – diffractively, attentively, together. In gathering to re-member, we resist colonial erasure and reclaim memory as a space of regeneration, reciprocity, and the slow work of reworlding life otherwise.
