Be the Medicine
Zachary Nasbaum
Zachary joins us for Chapter 10 - 'Grief and Death'.
This session will explore aspects of the current landscape in which most of us experience our grief and our relationship to death: a prevailingly materialistic and technological overculture that is often characterized by a disconnection from place/land/nature, a loss of intimate exposure to the dying process, and an absence of communal spaces of grieving. In this session we will ask questions such as: What has been lost amidst this ‘modern progress’? How do we support ourselves as facilitators to reestablish and strengthen conscious relationships to nature, death and grief? How can we bring this awakened reverence and deeper experiential knowledge into ceremonial and/or clinical spaces to more powerfully support another’s healing? What role can psychedelics and plant medicines play in preparing us for death and in assisting us in working with grief more holistically? And what do these medicines have to teach us about what is beyond death, and about our relationship to Mystery itself?
Zach Nusbaum is a long-time student of plant medicines, death, grief, and the ways in which these can connect us more deeply to the Mystery of life. His offerings weave together insights from almost two decades as an initiate in an entheogenic religious tradition, 10 years in pediatric palliative care and hospice, and his lived experience as a father, son, husband, student, teacher, brother, and spiritual seeker. Zach completed a Masters of Divinity degree in 2014, and is currently a student in the 3-year Ecstatic Mysticism program run by AWE.
At present he works for a pediatric palliative care and hospice team based in Raleigh, NC, while also offering one-on-one counseling and ceremonial work independently. In his practice Zach specializes in the cultivation of a conscious relationship with death as a transformative catalyst; grief, loss, and bereavement; and psychedelic preparation/integration.