Speaker Bio
Nir is a certified (Eurotas) transpersonal psychotherapist in private practice, Director of the Mindfulness Based Psychedelic Integration Certificate at Impulse - Integrative Clinical Center, Co-founder of Safe Shore - a psychedelic education and harm reduction project and co-founder of SafeHeart - a registered charity that provides free-of-charge psychotherapy for the survivors of the October 7th terror attack on the raves in southern Israel.
He holds a Master’s in Transpersonal Psychology from Middlesex University (through the Alef Trust), trained in Hakomi body-centered psychotherapy and a student of Jungian Analytic Psychotherapy in Bar Ilan University and of the Grof Legacy Training in the Holos center in Czech Republic. He had the privilege to support hundreds of psychedelic crises in parties and festivals and to train more than 1000 psychedelic harm reduction sitters through Safe Shore's Holding Space workshop.
He also serves as an advisor to the Israeli Parliament’s Committee for the Fight Against Drugs and Alcohol.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Psychedelics under terror: Providing psychedelic-informed therapy for the survivors of October 7th
Thousands of people were under the influence of psychedelics during the terror attack on the psytrance rave in southern Israel on October 7th, and had to navigate their way out to safety while witnessing the most horrific sights one can imagine. In order to provide immediate treatment and prevent the development of chronic or subchronic PTSD, a group of therapists and psychedelic harm reduction activists co-founded SafeHeart - a registered charity thats provides free-of-charge psychedelic-informed psychotherapy for the survivors. 3 months later, SafeHeart is working in close collaboration with the Ministry of Health and its clinical operation includes hundreds of licensed clinicians who provided psychotherapy for more than 2500 people.
The term psychedelic-informed psychotherapy refers to the fact that all of SafeHeart's therapists were selected not only on the basis of their training and experience with acute trauma, but also on the basis of their acquaintance with the various aspects of psychedelic experience and science, so that they will be able to better relate to survivors' experience and facilitate the integration process.
In this talk, I am going to present some of the preliminary findings from our research project (in Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities) about the simultaneous occurrence of a psychedelic experience and an acute traumatic event, share some positive and negative ways with which different psychedelics may have affected survivors' journeys into safety and discuss the core aspects of psychedelic-informed therapy and its importance for the survivors' wellbeing.