Town Hall Seattle and April Pride present
Psychedelic Salon: Making Meaning
Story, Integration, and the Psychedelic Experience
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
The journey doesn’t end when the medicine wears off. In many ways, that’s when the real work begins.
We are meaning-making creatures. Long before there were clinical frameworks for psychedelic experience, there were myths, archetypes, and the act of telling someone what you saw — ancient technologies for translating the untranslatable. Integration, at its core, is a story problem: how do we make sense of something that exceeds our existing vocabulary? How do we bring it back?
In this season finale, we explore the art and science of integration through the lens of meaning-making — the role of narrative, ritual, creative expression, and wisdom traditions in anchoring what psychedelics reveal. We’ll ask how writers, musicians, and artists have used these experiences to reshape not just their own lives, but our shared culture. And we’ll examine what gets lost when a psychedelic experience is processed through a purely biomedical lens — and what becomes possible when it isn’t.
An evening that honors both the research and the mystery.
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About the Speakers
Frederica Helmiere came to psychedelics not through clinical training, but through meaning-making itself. Trained as an eco-theologian and scholar of religion at Yale and Dartmouth, she has spent two decades studying how ancient wisdom traditions hold experiences that Western frameworks struggle to categorize — and what gets lost when a psychedelic experience is processed through a purely biomedical lens. She directed the Psychedelic Practitioner Core Training at Synthesis Institute, serves on the Ethics Committee of Gather Well Psychedelics, and is one of 60 experts contributing to the EPEE Project, developing practical guidelines for clinicians encountering spiritual and mystical experiences in their patients. Her particular contribution to this field is what she calls spiritual literacy: the capacity to recognize, hold, and respond to the meaning-laden dimensions of psychedelic experience without pathologizing them, prescribing belief, or flattening the depth that makes this work matter.
For more than a decade, April Pride has created brands and convened conversations at the intersection of women’s health, gray-zone medicine, and harm-reduction education. She launched the Psychedelic Salon in 2023, looking to move beyond the isolation of podcasting and connect in person with the psychedelic curious in Seattle, one of the first U.S. cities to decriminalize entheogens. Today, she hosts the Salon in partnership with Town Hall Seattle, where six times a year, a growing community of patients, practitioners, and curious newcomers gathers to hear local and national experts on the law, aging, grief, integration, and more. April’s work has been featured in New York Magazine, Forbes, Vice, and The Guardian.
Visit aprilpride.com for more information on April’s work, including her podcast, Substack, psychedelic events, and more.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle and April Pride.
Events are offered for informational, entertainment, and educational purposes only. Read Town Hall’s Program Content Policy.
Program Note
This event is offered for informational, entertainment, and educational purposes only and should not be construed as medical, legal, or other professional advice. Read more here.
This is part of the Psychedelic Salon Series
