Psychedelic Quests—
What’s the big idea?

Words Design HotelsImages Beckley RetreatsDate 09 January 2024

Across the globe, psychedelic therapy is helping many people find spiritual meaning, often replacing the role of conventional religion and congregation.

With the psychedelic market predicted to be worth $7 billion by 2027, tailored support systems are popping up at a time when communities are beginning to offer more guidance.

Beckley Retreats is one such initiative; hosting science-backed psilocybin ceremonies and psychedelic retreats across Jamaica and the Netherlands. It is part of the Beckley Foundation—a think tank and NGO dedicated to furthering psychedelic research and advocating for policy reform. We spoke to Neil Markey, co-founder and CEO of Beckley Retreats as part of the Design Hotels 2024 Further Forecast. Read an excerpt below about why the shift in culture is gaining so much momentum.

Why has well-being become increasingly holistic?

I think that mental health has gotten to a crisis point in the Western world. If you look at the incidence rate of anxiety or depression, it’s just gotten worse and worse. At the same time, doctors and specialists are prescribing more and more medications. When people get pushed to their limits, then they begin exploring other options. That shift has also been progressively reinforced by the body of data being built and developed.

When were you introduced to healing modalities like psilocybin?

I got into this because I was miserable. I was an officer in the Army in Special Operations. It got to a point where I needed to consider other options. By then, I had done the Western medical system; the SSRIs, the anti-anxiety medications. At best, these meds work like Band-Aids; they’re not getting to the root cause. I wanted to feel better and the first helpful practice I found was meditation. From there, I had the opportunity to try psychedelic experiences. To me, it soon became quite clear that psychedelics were enhancing or accelerating what I was trying to do with meditation, so I started incorporating those experiences into my practices.

Your retreats are informed by psychotherapy, neuroscience, and somatic elements like breath work. Tell us about this.

In Western science, everything is reductionist. We try to isolate a single variable, but we look at how this work has been done in an indigenous context for thousands of years, and it was all about these complementary modalities. They did it in nature, in groups and with music; they did it with breath work and with meditation. You want people to rely on positive habits and ultimately not need anything external to feel good. And you want people to find things that work for them, so we give our guests exposure to different practices to “try on”.

Do you believe the cumulative effect of these practices could have a positive impact on communities or even societies?

These experiences can dramatically change people’s relationships with themselves and how they perceive themselves, and change everything’s relation. None of this is in a vacuum. It’s pretty clear in physics that there’s some interconnectedness but it’s still all at the mind level. But if you give someone exposure to this, and they experience the interconnectedness of everything, they experience that idea of oneness, which is actually what you see in physics. That’s the truth of things and it’s powerful. It helps people make decisions differently. So yes, this can change how people show up in the world.