Katherine wears many hats. Maybe too many. She is a graduate student studying the intersection of Jewish ecstatic prayer experiences and psychedelics. She owns a mindfulness retreat center, and she’s a chaplain in Boston-area hospitals. If she could, she’d cure her patients’ cancer, soothe their depression, but instead, she works 60-hour-plus weeks, letting her patients’ struggles seep into her psyche, powerless to offer anything but compassion.

Because of her studies, she’s tapped into the latest research on the therapeutic use of psychedelics, so when she heard that Shefa, a Jewish psychedelic support nonprofit, was launching a retreat for Jewish professionals struggling with burnout, she jumped on it.

“My natural state is one of a workaholic, and my truest self is not a workaholic,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy using an alias due to the stigma associated with psychedelic use. “My truest self has a lot more equanimity, a lot more personal balance, more resilience, greater capacity for compassion. Work simultaneously demands all of those things from me and also ratchets up anxiety. All of the chaos of work brings a lot of symptoms out. I was looking to return to a more balanced state.”

Although Katherine has “journey[ed] on psychedelics,” she said, the retreat “was the first time I’d done any psychedelic dive in a Jewish context.” The experience expanded her ability to support her patients.

The five-day retreat, titled the Idra Project, was held in Portland, Ore., during the final week in October with six participants. The project was named after a term used for the gatherings held by  the second-century sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, where he revealed mystic insights to his followers. The retreat included two-day-long psilocybin ceremonies at the Cora Center, a licensed psilocybin service center supervised by the Oregon Health Authority, and plenty of rest and relaxation at an Airbnb where participants ate kosher meals, went on nature walks and studied Jewish texts.

Psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms or shrooms, was legalized for use in licensed centers in Oregon in 2020, and this was Shefa’s first such retreat, with another scheduled for January. The Cora Center is not a Jewish center, so Shefa integrated Jewish rituals into Indigenous practices led by Cora facilitators. In the near future, after refining the programming based on participant feedback, Shefa plans to study the retreat outcomes.

In the post-pandemic and post-Oct. 7 period, Jewish professionals are increasingly experiencing low resilience and burnout, Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, CEO of Shefa, told eJP. He’s hoping the retreats help Jewish leaders care for themselves so they can care for their communities.

Over 35 people applied to attend the retreat, with six attendees chosen, including rabbis, havurah leaders and educators from across the country.

“Burnout, especially for religious professionals, is such a clear problem, and this is really one space where psychedelics can make a difference,” Roman Palitsky, director of research projects in spiritual health at Emory University, which has partnered with Shefa in the past, told eJP.

Jewish leaders are already using psychedelics, he said. If used correctly, psychedelics can be a positive support, but they also have the potential to cause damage if not used in a safe, guided space. “It could be especially helpful to folks who are from a Jewish community to have it in a way where their tradition is respected, appreciated, accorded dignity and turned into a resource for them.”

There are impediments to rolling this out more widely. One is the legal issue, with psychedelics still banned in most states. But also, the retreat was “incredibly expensive to hold,” Kamenetz said. Attendees paid $1,800, but the retreat cost tens of thousands for Shefa. It couldn’t have happened without support from the Sheri Eckert Foundation, a nonprofit with the mission to “increase equitable access in the emerging state-regulated psychedelic healthcare movement.”

The psilocybin experience was “the most profound spiritual experience of my life, hands down,” Katherine said. The first ceremony allowed her to release much of the grief she had been suppressing.

“I was with Hashem for hours and hours that day,” she said. “It’s the first time I’ve encountered any kind of personified version of Hashem. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in any kind of one-to-one relationship with Hashem, with Hashem as a friend as opposed to Hashem as a concept or as something incomprehensible.”

Katherine’s journey allowed her to dance “with a sort of feminine version of Hashem,” she said, adding that she realizes that describing it “sounds really weird…when you’re sober.”

This “feminine version of Hashem… gave me a tour through a beautiful and broken world in a deeply welcoming sense,” she said. “I felt like an honored guest being shown all of the majesty of the mended and the broken altogether.”

During the second ceremony, participants were more lucid, Katherine recalled. They sang, discussed Torah and joked with one another. “It’s the most welcome I’ve ever felt as a Jew in my own experience with peers. It became this sort of sacred, tiny community of Jewish practitioners of varying degrees of observance and faith and tradition all together in one place, feeling in absolute connection.”

Rabbi Eric, also using an alias, has felt overworked and emotionally exhausted in recent years as a rabbi who works to support other rabbis. “I don’t know if I ever felt rest the way that I felt rest on that second day,” he told eJP.

At one point, while the participants were passing a talking stick and taking turns sharing their experiences, the non-Jewish facilitator of the ceremony paused and said, unprompted, “I felt like there was a temple that emerged in the middle of this room.”

The comment “broke” the participants, Eric recalled. “We are a nomadic people,” he said. “We’ve literally been carrying this temple around for generations. That is how we walk in the world. It’s how we walk in the wilderness after Egypt. There is literally the imagery and the narrative of us schlepping around a temple to be with God. It’s embedded in who we are as a people. And [the facilitator] said, I wish I could have taken some of the weight from you… All of us started to cry in that moment.”

The retreat was “a Shabbat unlike any other Shabbatot,” he said. When he returned to work, he felt lighter, without the stress that had been overwhelming him for so long. “It doesn’t change how we relate to our work, but it was healing so that we’re able to continue in the work that we need to.”

While the psilocybin experience was the centerpiece of the retreat, the participants also simply needed to decompress, Kamenetz said. “It’s not surprising that people who work really hard to support others just need a gift to be able to be served three meals a day that [they] didn’t have to cook. [They didn’t] have to take care of anybody. We took care of them.”

Shefa’s goal is to hold these retreats regularly for different segments of the community, including Israelis healing from war-related trauma, Orthodox women and professionals at different stages of their careers. Shefa hopes to expand its offerings to other states, such as Colorado, which is also legalizing psychedelic retreat centers.

Since returning to work, Katherine continues to zip from emergency to emergency, but after her journey dancing with what she experienced as a female version of Hashem, “that presence… continues to accompany me,” she said. “My prayer is so much deeper right now. My presence with my patients feels more profound, because I’m able to be with them without flinching, especially when things get really hard for them.”