When Grief Becomes a Gateway: How Losing Her Mother Led Lena Franklin to Transformative Ayahuasca
Artem SmirnovFull Interview with Lena Franklin at the bottom of the page
Lena Franklin shares her transformative journey with psychedelics and her work as a medicine woman and facilitator.
Lena grew up in a culturally rich household with a Vietnamese Buddhist mother and a Presbyterian psychologist father, which created a foundation blending Eastern spirituality and Western psychology. Her spiritual awakening began following her mother’s sudden death at age 57, which plunged her into existential questioning and led her back to the meditation practices her mother had taught her.
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Watch: From Grief to Sacred Medicine: How My Mother’s Death Led Me to Peru
“We cannot take someone to a depth we haven’t been ourselves.”
-Lena
Read: How Losing Her Mother Led Lena Franklin to Transformative Ayahuasca
Her first psychedelic experience was an intense ayahuasca ceremony in Peru’s Sacred Valley during a difficult period when she was leaving a marriage that was “beautiful on the outside, but vacant on the inside.” During this ceremony, she experienced ego death, felt her body disintegrate into Mother Earth, and saw the “masks of perfection” melt away. This profound experience changed her life trajectory, helping her remember who she truly was beyond societal programming
“I saw the false pieces of myself. I saw the faces of unworthiness. I saw the masks of perfection. I saw all of that melting away and this kind of radiant, limitless light and power move through me.”
After working with ayahuasca, Lena began working with psilocybin and eventually co-founded the East Institute and East Ministry, guided by what she describes as “a council of elders.” She maintains her personal practice by participating in around three ceremonies annually, believing this provides a balanced approach to her inner work while maintaining “clean medicine” in her facilitation work.
Lena is currently developing specialized healing programs for veterans with PTSD and TBI, adapting her methodology to their specific needs and training veterans to become facilitators themselves. She believes psilocybin is particularly effective for veterans due to its longer duration, which provides “a more sustainable change over time.”
Throughout the interview, Lena emphasizes the importance of integration, personal responsibility in healing, and viewing psychedelics as tools within a larger ecosystem of consciousness rather than quick fixes. She sees her work as bridging ancient indigenous wisdom with modern approaches and believes normalizing conversations around psychedelics is essential for collective healing and evolution.
Q&A with Lena Franklin
What kind of changes did you see in your life after that experience?
Lena: “So many, I mean, letting go of what people think, like really not giving a shit anymore about what people think, which is very liberating when you get to that point where you can take the projections, you can take the judgments.
People want to place their story of who they think you are, who they think you should be onto others. And so letting go of that was so freeing because one of my imprisoned self imprisonments was playing into the narratives that people placed on me. So it was like I didn’t even know what I liked. I didn’t even know who I was. I didn’t even know what I gravitated towards because I was so conditioned to be this perfectionistic, high achieving person in the world because that equated to love and connection. So being liberated from that was just life altering. Of course, leaving my marriage, which was kind of in the middle of all of that. And that was really interesting because I also left friends and friendships were dying away, old communities I was a part of were dying away. And so it was this willingness to let go, to let go of the illusion of safety.
What’s your practice been with the medicines? What does it look like on the daily, on the weekly, on the monthly, on the yearly?
Lena: “I go into ceremony maybe about three times a year. And at least one of those will be with grandmother ayahuasca, and then the others, typically psilocybin. I’m working with some other medicines now. But for me, that feels like a really balanced way to continue my own inner work, you know, because of course.
I kind of look at it like, especially if you’re a facilitator, a shaman, a practitioner of psychedelic medicine, you are around other’s energy so frequently. And then you’re also with your own inner stuff, the psyche. It’s almost like they’re schmutz. Like if you look at a gas lamp and there’s soot on the inside of the glass, you know, we need that spaciousness to really clean off the schmutz and to really be with what’s present. And so for me, it’s been about maintaining clean medicine in my embodiment of the work. I fully believe, and this is what I teach my students and clients, we cannot take someone to a depth we haven’t been ourselves.”
In your opinion, why is it important that we normalize conversations around psychedelics?
Lena: “When we normalize conversations around psychedelics, we allow everything to be present. It’s like a meditation or a ceremony – life is a living ceremony.
If we treated every moment of life like we do ceremony, you know, we get the medicine of the moment, whatever that moment brings. So allowing everything to be present in the conversation, even, especially if it’s a challenging conversation, without judgment, without blame, without denial, just holding that container. That’s how we evolve collectively. That’s how we evolve together. That’s how actual collective healing and transformation happen. So it’s one of the reasons why I love your project so much is it’s important to get the perspectives of diverse array of people across the board, because that is the mandala. That’s the collective evolution that’s needed. So yeah, it’s essential.”
Watch the full interview with Lena Franklin
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