5 Questions for Rebecca Martinez

Rebecca Martinez was raised in the Pentecostal Christian Church in Oregon, went to Bible College, and became a worship leader at her church, but after her son was born when she was 25, she realized she no longer believed. She left her faith and her marriage, and moved to an urban farm community in Portland where she had her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin.

Five years passed, and in 2020, she got a job as volunteer and event coordinator with the campaign trying to pass Measure 109, the bill that established a path for Oregon to become the first state to permit the manufacture and sale of psilocybin. She promised herself that if Measure 109 actually passed, she’d work on ways to diversify the Oregon psychedelic community.

Last year, Martinez created the Alma Institute to train and mentor psychedelic facilitators who come from marginalized communities. Martinez also now serves on the Oregon Psilocybin Services’ Rules Advisory Committee for establishing standards for psychedelic facilitator training. The Microdose spoke with Martinez about her work with Oregon Psilocybin Services’ Training Rulemaking Advisory Committee, and the Alma Institute’s ethos towards training guides.

Where did the name Alma come from?

It's the Spanish word for soul. So much of this wave of psychedelics is oriented above the shoulders: we're talking about mental health, healing your brain, the default mode network. That's all great, but to me, it's an incomplete picture. If we're talking about collective healing and social justice framework for psychedelics, I feel like we're talking about healing our souls. And not just our souls individually, but our collective soul. 

While Oregon Psilocybin Services is figuring out what standards and rules training programs must have, the Alma Institute is also working on developing your curriculum to train guides and facilitators; Alma will then have to submit an application to the state to become an approved training program. What has the process been like for you working on both those projects at once?

On the Training Rulemaking Advisory Committee, we started from a rough outline of what the state was requiring at that point. It was broken down by hours, and then I added about 60 percent more hours on top of that — things we really believe are super critical for this kind of work. It's beyond just tacking on a DEI module; it's understanding indigenous reciprocity, the history and impacts of the drug war, and gender expansiveness. All these pieces impact the ways we can serve communities. When I put that together, it began as a conversation among colleagues, most of whom have been trained either by MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies] or CIIS [California Institute of Integral Studies], and for better or worse, they had a lot to say about what they felt was missing or could be better. 

From there, I was like, let's build upon what's good and take it further — let’s raise the bar and set a new standard, especially for how we serve people from historically marginalized communities. I rapidly discovered that my strength is in running an organization and carrying a vision forward. And as much as I love thinking about curriculum development, I'm actually going through my own training right now — it's a three-year psychedelic practitioner training with an intensive in Colombia through the non-profit AWE Foundation.* It’s a beautiful mix of Indigenous teaching and transpersonal psychology with Western-trained leaders. It's been amazing so far. 

All of this is to say that I'm really more of a student — and it’s been my aim to have everyone on the team be more qualified and have more life experience than me. So Alma’s training director, Dr. Diana Quinn, is guiding the curriculum development. We're going to be working on that from May through October, and our goal is to have a cohesive program assembled in October and be able to gauge from there when to launch a pilot cohort. Since the rules are still being put together, we can get this far — so we're really working off what we know for sure is going to be required. Then there's going to be a little bit of this back and forth as we get towards applying for approval with the state to make sure we're satisfying all these final pieces. 

There has never been a more exciting – or bewildering – time in the world of psychedelics. Don’t miss a beat.

The timing of developing a curriculum while also needing to comply with the still-developing state-wide standards seems tricky. How much of that curriculum can your team put into place before final Oregon state rules are released?

We’re trying to work in tandem with the timing of Oregon’s rollout. I would say 90 percent of training is really about larger principles and skill sets: inner work and self awareness, role playing, and practicing, and active skill building. And if you talk with underground practitioners, they'll tell you that firsthand experience and practice is everything — that the cognitive knowledge is foundational, but you really become a student the first day you start holding space for people. So it does feel really weird to be designing a curriculum where it's all didactic learning. Knowledge can sometimes become a barrier to doing a good job in holding space and having the soft skills to support people, because it creates a weird distance between the knower and the beginner, so we're going to be conscious of that. 

The other piece of our planning is the logistics of having a practicum. Programs that are doing ketamine, they already have a legal pathway to train interns: “Here, come watch this legal practitioner administering ketamine and then eventually start participating.” There's no real way for a training program to do the experiential part of training with psilocybin under Measure 109 until after January 2023 so we're going to have to partner with a site that’s administering psilocybin for that training. Fortunately, our organization has a site in northeast Portland and we’re forming a new entity to run it. Our site will have a sliding scale fee for receiving psilocybin services and will also be a place for our trainee graduates and students to get mentorship. My dream is to design a really well-rounded apprenticeship program that's a full 2,000 hours, where people are getting paid to be a second trip sitter. I think we need to question the paradigms that an 80 hour practicum readies you to hold space for someone in this field. You need 1,000 hours to cut hair! Not to be overly paternalistic, but we are talking about shepherding people through some of the most profound experiences of their lives. This is not light work. We're tinkering with our own consciousness and holding space for others to explore their own consciousness. It's a really big deal. 

I know equity has been a major point of discussion among folks on the Oregon Psilocybin Services Training Rulemaking Advisory Committee. How are you thinking about access to training, and access to psilocybin services?

A lot of early conversations about facilitation were anchored in this concept of psychedelic therapy, where it was almost implied that most people entering this field would be clinicians and therapists. And I really wanted to push back against that. Being a clinician or a therapist does not necessarily make you a good trip sitter. It's a very distinct skill set. It also feels important to not perpetuate the narrative that if you have letters after your name, you're basically already grandfathered in and qualified to do this kind of work. 

The opportunity with Measure 109 is that it didn't require guides to have graduate degrees.  As we design curriculums, there's an added responsibility on groups like Alma to make sure that students receive a baseline understanding of ethics, transference, or countertransference because we’re one of only a couple of training programs that are explicitly focused on creating a comprehensive training for applicants from a variety of vocational backgrounds.

And it’s also important to point out that Oregon is a very white state. Portland is among the whitest cities in the country, and finding a therapist of color in the city is nearly impossible, let alone a therapist of color. I have been around people who are probably great space holders, but because of my identifiers or because of our differences, I wouldn't feel safe going into my most vulnerable spaces and letting it all come out in a session unless we had some sort of shared identifier, where I feel like they have capacity for empathy on a deep level. I don't think that's something you can train. People should have the option of whatever facilitator they want. That may not be important to everyone, but to not offer that is a health equity problem. When we say all people should have access to these services, do we really mean all people? And are we willing to do what it takes to make that possible? That’s not just opening the door and calling that “access.” It's proactively removing the barriers that already exist to access. 

What has the response to Alma been like so far? 

We already have over 100 people on the waitlist for our training program. Training programs may receive permission from the Oregon Health Authority to open prior to 2023, and Alma could launch a small pilot cohort in the fall with 5-8 people, but we ultimately envision having cohorts of up to 40 people. 

I think it's a sign of how hungry the broader community is for these access points. I've heard so much talk in the last few years asking, “What are we doing to reach these communities?” There’s this narrative that the communities that have been marginalized are not interested or don't care about this work. 

But that's not reflected in my direct experience. I feel like there's an opportunity to instead ask, “Who is leading these efforts and from which communities do they come?” Our team is majority BIPOC, majority queer-identified, and about 25 percent trans or gender non-conforming. We need more people from these populations in leadership because then, the question of how we're going to reach communities almost feels like a non-question — it's a matter of saying, “Hey, we built this thing for our existing real life community.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

* Update, 6/20/22: Martinez is no longer a participant in the Awe training program.