“Those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.”
- George Bernard Shaw
Founded in San Francisco in 2021, we believe in living a life full of joy, love, gratitude, and sharing. My life changed in June. The world needs to know about the healing power of these sacred medicines.
These feelings inform and guide our core beliefs. We are exploring models to create a regenerative economy rather than a purely extractive one.
I had been working with Mike Margolies (psychsems), who was introduced to me by Izzy from MAPS, We met at the Portal community center and that's where I met my colleague Kwasi and we started on this adventure.
Mindlumen came from the phrase, mind illuminating
Mind illuminating guided experiences should be available to the world. We want to make it available to anyone that needs it and help the guides and therapists offer their services to all who are genuinely ready to explore their minds. We want to build a giving, regenerative, rather than an extraction economy.
The world needs to know the power of the community to help explore consciousness in a serene setting. Costs should not be a barrier to those seeking or providing healing.
Mindlumen is a community-owned peer-to-peer holistic wellness marketplace & infrastructure that facilitates safe and seamless access to psychedelic support and other wellness services (preparation, experience, integration). We cannot stop the use of psychedelics, we CAN reduce harm to people who want to access this medicine. We are building a 3 sided marketplace that connects seekers (people who need healing), with practitioners (therapists/guides/facilitators/sitters) and spaces (Airbnb for healing spaces) while maintaining privacy and transparency.
We do NOT engage in the sale/acquisition of any illegal substances. We offer harm reduction services in a decentralized, distributed way at speed and scale.
Why?
We are in a renaissance for mental health healing because psychedelic-assisted therapy is proving more effective than traditional, expensive SSRIs that have side effects. Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF have all established psychedelic research institutions. MDMA and Psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms) are completing phase 3 trials and are expected to come off Schedule 1 in 2023. Many are engaging in the psychedelic field because they believe everyone deserves access to healing. The current process takes too long and it has way too much friction. There is no way to have any sort of reputation that can be relied on for seekers wanting to trust practitioners. The shared vision produces an ecosystem that values open science, collaboration, and community. As the field grows, there is a yearning for ways to maintain these fundamental values. For Mindlumen, we will focus on the journey from preparation to integration in settings at the clinic and beyond the clinic.
Our Vision
The World needs to know about these medicines. We aim to make it painless and frictionless for seekers, practitioners/facilitators, and journey space providers. The platform navigates & facilitates connections between these communities in service of the seekers. Costs and friction should not be a barrier to those seeking healing.
Our Goals
Make it painless for the seeker
Remove friction for healers so they can focus their energies on the seekers and their experiences.
All excess profits from Mindlumen go to the non-profit to create a regenerative ecosystem of individuals, collectives, and companies
How will we achieve this Vision?
People seeking healing have very different criteria for what they want in a practitioner/facilitator/therapist - everything from gender and experience of the guide to taste in music and payments. They want a frictionless way to find, filter, and select first and then have a frictionless experience from prep thru integration.
That's the problem we are solving in a safe, secure, pseudonymous way, leveraging crypto and blockchain with a DAO model operating as a distributed digital co-op at scale.
By creating a DAO that operates as a distributed co-op that will live long after we are all gone as a self-sustaining organization with no hierarchical management or leadership structure, like today’s extractive capitalistic model.
To solve the challenges of decision-making in a co-op, we use a DAO governance model that allows for distributed decision-making at speed with tokenization as an economic incentive model. Just because someone has more money or in our case, more tokens, doesn’t mean they should have more power in governance. This is what most traditional crypto companies essentially are. DAOs allow us to break that mold of centralized decision-making to create a community collective where everyone that contributes value, earns currency ($LUMEN). The larger the collective, the better the value and more decentralized the decision-making needs to be, in order to maintain speed and scale, with complete transparency, ownership, and efficient governance.
Anyone that contributes to the mission and vision, earns tokens. Everyone involved in the community can earn by giving so we can fulfill the collective mission of creating a regenerative economy where everyone has a stake AND is involved in the governance at speed and scale.
We envision many such DAO collectives that will exist with their own tokens that we can exchange tokens or fiat to use for all kinds of products and services in the psychedelic community and beyond.
How we can partner with you?
We believe in creating a regenerative economy, where you earn by giving. The extractive model of today hasn't served humanity well. Decision-making is centralized among a few who earn the highest, yet the people who do the work contribute the most and don't have an ownership stake or a voice in the governance of the organization.
Co-ops as DAOs are a way to build the regenerative model in the modern world, however, it is difficult to do at speed and scale. Tools now exist to create distributed digital co-ops with an economic incentive structure to change the way we serve humanity. The psychedelic space is the ideal collective community where this is realized.
Our non-profit programs are designed to recognize and reward individuals, collectives, and companies that contribute to a regenerative economic model. Become a partner that helps build a better, collective, cooperative, regenerative world.