Eco Consciousness & Ayahuasca: A Talk with Greg Wrenn

The planet is heating up, oceans are acidifying, species are dying off—and at bottom, it is because of humanity’s flawed relationship with nature. What part might Ayahuasca have to play in healing this relationship?

Author and poet Greg Wrenn, a former lecturer at Stanford University, went through a process of healing his own relationship with nature, and himself, using this jungle medicine. Tonight, he shares his story with us.

Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis is both a queer coming-of-age story and a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing.

Highlights:

• Explore a healing paradigm possibly more powerful than many traditional therapeutic models, and the role psychedelics can play in our time of widespread mental illness and ongoing climate crisis.
• Hear a well-crafted tale that weaves threads of memoir, mental health struggles, scientific research, and good-old-fashioned psychedelic adventure.
• Get your book signed! After a talk and discussion-based Q+A, Greg Wrenn will sign copies of his book. The second ticket tier ($25) includes a book, which you will be able to pick up at the venue.
• Connect! As always, we will have an opportunity afterwards to meet other like-minded individuals in this community, and come away with new friends.

This event will be held at the Psychedelic Assembly and hosted by BPS's Director of Community, Patrick.

We look forward to seeing you there!

A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Greg Wrenn is the author of the forthcoming Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis, an evidence-based account of his turning to coral reefs and ayahuasca to heal from childhood trauma, and Centaur, which poet Terrance Hayes awarded the Brittingham Prize. Greg's work has appeared in The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. As an associate English professor, he teaches environmental literature and creative writing at James Madison University, where he weaves climate change science into literary studies. He is a trained yoga teacher and a PADI Advanced Open Water diver, having explored coral reefs around the world for over 25 years. He lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with his husband and their growing family of trees.

Show More

A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well.
Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.
Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It’s a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Along the way, as his ecological conscience wakes up, he takes readers underwater to the last pristine reefs on earth, and into the psyche.
Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

222 E 46th St, 222 East 46th Street, New York, United States