Psychologist, Psychology Professor, Psychedelics Advocate
Date of Birth: 05/29/1989 (29 in ceremony)
Lives in Massachusetts

Leia Friedman, M.S., is an adjunct professor of psychology, writer, spiritual emergence coach, and the co-founder of Boston Entheogenic Network (BEN). Her mission is to integrate nonordinary states of consciousness with ecopsychology and ethnobotany, and she has found profound personal healing through her work with visionary plants, mind-body practices, and radical self-expression.

Leia writes and presents around the world on the topics of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, psychedelics and feminism, the practical neuroscience of consciousness, and the value of psychedelic community groups. She is the creator and voice of The Psychedologist podcast on Consciousness Positive Radio and maintains the Integration Resource List, which tracks mental health organizations and organizations that help people integrate psychedelic experiences, for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Through the Boston Entheogenic Network, Leia promotes a conscious, inclusive and supportive approach to altered consciousness exploration for the social benefits of public health, human rights, and activism. She uses a harm-reduction approach to guiding people who experience altered states and provides peer support at east coast music and art festivals like FractalFest, Wormtown, and Strangecreek. Leia spoke at Oregon Eclipse Festival on A New Psychedelic Renaissance: Shifting perspectives from drugs to medicines and will speak at the Envision conference in Costa Rica on Permaculture, Sex and Psychedelics and Horizon’s Perspectives on Psychedelics in New York. Leia will speak at the Envision conference in Costa Rica before her journey to the Peruvian Amazon with Cosmic Sister to Peru.

Leia completed her Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology in 2013 and quickly discovered that the “reductionist, colonized, patriarchal and pharmaceutical state of mental health care” wasn’t for her. She received her Permaculture Design certificate through Starhawk’s Earth Activist Training, participated in Upward Spirals’ Sustainable Living Expedition in Costa Rica and did peer-to-peer counseling with the Zendo Project at Envision.

Leia is also a passionate advocate for social and climate justice, psychedelic legalization, and safe, appropriate accessibility. She hopes psychedelics can “wake up the world to recognize the consequences of human action and the potential for healing ourselves, our communities, and the planet from the devastation of human activity.”

“When more people start expanding their consciousness, I think it will bring people to a place they wouldn’t otherwise be,” she recently told the Boston Globe.

Leia plans to address childhood trauma and a negative relationship with food, including bouts with anorexia and bulimia, in the medicine space. “I am taking off my masks and costumes and striving to be in full integrity with myself,” she says. “This involves being transparent and realistic about what sort of work is needed to address my lifelong toxic relationship with food and dysmorphia about my body.”

When she returns from Peru, Leia plans to move to Happy Acres Farm in Sherman, Connecticut, where she can practice her knowledge of permaculture and continue developing The Psychedologist.

Cosmic Sister Plant Spirit Grant 2018
Women of the Psychedelic Renaissance Grant 2018
Ayahuasca Retreat: Temple of The Way of Light