Breaking Convention 2025

I’ve been to all seven manifestations of the Breaking Convention conference, which started out with a relatively humble gathering at the University of Kent in 2011, progressed and expanded into a long run at the University of Greenwich, and now happily resides on the rolling slopes of the Streatham campus of the University of Exeter. More than ever this year I was overwhelmed by how far it’s come, how it’s simultaneously exploded past its origins, and maintained and matured its initial vision.

This vision has always included the push to assert the validity of scientific and medical psychedelic research, and the massive expansion of such research in the past decade or so is something that Breaking Convention can claim to have had a bit of a hand in. But persisting some kind of fidelity to the underground roots of modern psychedelic culture — not to mention foregrounding our debts to indigenous traditions — also figure in this vision. These aspects seem to not only have survived the conference’s expansion, but thrived and complexified, without losing vibrancy.

I missed the first morning, and was disappointed to miss seeing if they did — as they did last time, in 2023, the first year at Exeter — a show of hands to gauge who was there for the first time. I was astonished, back then, to see well over half the hands, maybe two thirds, shoot up. I did catch the closing ceremony this time, though, and thankfully they decided to do this show of hands again. Again, well over half. Maybe there were always more first-timers than I suspected. But it seems likely that the combined factors of relocating outside London, and restarting after the pandemic hiatus, have contributed to this surge in interest. As a Londoner I actually love its new location — it makes it more of an event to travel there. I’ve heard that many non-Londoners appreciate not having to brave the big city and its expenses. And, I suspect lockdowns gave people plenty of anxiety, and plenty of time to read, research and consider things like psychedelics as potential remedies. Just two factors among many, no doubt – the end result of which is a conference brimming with vitality.

Even at conferences I’m not a seasoned veteran of, the highlights are of course usually between the tracks, the random meetings and impassioned conversations that flourish before, after, and around the programmed talks and seminars. At Breaking Convention, for me this is amplified by a feeling that I’m familiar with most of what’s on offer, so these days I’m more inclined than ever to just mosey around and catch up with old and new friends. Still, while my sampling of the programme was scattered, it consistently undermined this jaded sense of over-familiarity with the field.

It’s always a pleasure to catch psychedelic historian Andy Roberts, and his trip through the overlooked world of clandestine British LSD labs in the sixties, with its motley bunch of associated oddballs, was a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining prelude to the launch of a new edition of his Albion Dreaming.

I enjoyed Natasja Pelgrom‘s talk on ‘The Hidden Fallout of Spirit-Led Decisions in Leadership and Life’, a cautionary look at the perilous tendency of psychedelic states to command us to take immediate real-life actions. Natasja infused her scepticism with some bitter wisdom from her own experiences in psychedelic start-ups, where the fusion of business responsibilities and ‘ceremonial guidance’ can — and does — lead to some damaging clashes between higher wisdom and lower realities. I recently had my own brush with this compulsion to act on trip insights — thankfully not linked to major financial operations, and thankfully something I backed away from in any case. But it was a nice affirmation to hear this talk underlining the wisdom of holding back.

I caught most of Ashley Murphy-Beiner‘s talk, which examined case reports of psychedelic-assisted therapy where someone experiences the apparent recollection of previously unconscious memories of child abuse. I didn’t take many photos at the conference, but I had to snap her slide summing up her research. There seemed to be no more succinct expression of the profound tricksiness of psychedelic revelations, made painfully poignant by the context of deep suffering, but still embedded in a wider therapeutic context which knows from experience that navigating these ambivalent waters can lead to profound learning and healing.

I was recently disappointed by the new Errol Morris documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders — it was interesting, but it seemed as if Morris had a clause in his contract that insisted he forcefully merge his own sensibilities with the sensationalism-tinged, never-too-in-depth Netflix vibe. It was a compensation, of sorts, that Tom O’Neill, author of the book Morris worked from, appeared at Breaking Convention — and turned out to be the opposite of a disappointment. O’Neill’s contention is that Charles Manson was deeply implicated in the tangle of US intelligence experiments with mind control and counter-cultural subversion. Given the recent inane mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, it was refreshing to find O’Neill presenting his speculations with finesse and prudence. Someone asked him if he was paranoid about doing public lecture tours touting such sensitive accusations against the establishment, and he politely chuckled as he explained he was forced to answer this question at every Q&A, and no, he hadn’t been tailed by cars with tinted windows. This was conspiracy theory served with a refreshing dose of down-to-earth sanity.

Jaded over-familiarity can of course be remedied by intentionally seeking out things that are habitually passed by, so on the Friday afternoon I thought I’d settle in for the ‘Abrahamic Religions and Psychedelics’ track. Michael Fine was up first, presenting his ethnographic research into the unlikely adoption of ayahuasca use by some ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews in Israel. Naturally this is somewhat contraversial in these communities, but those who partake report a deepened appreciation of their religious traditions. Of course the connection between Judaism and ayahuasca owes much to the recently departed Benny Shanon, whose 2002 Antipodes of the Mind was a landmark work in psychedelic phenomenology, and whose speculations on the role of ayahuasca-like concoctions (based on plants native to the Middle East) in early Jewish history, hover suggestively around contemporary Jewish interest in this brew.

Next was Annette Kaye, who was raised conservative Christian, veered away from this background, then returned to Christianity via psychedelic mushroom experiences. She currently leads psychedelic Christian retreats in the Netherlands. As with Shanon’s Judaic ayahuasca theories, speculative works like John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross hovered in the background of Kaye’s talk, but they were gently brushed aside to make room for her own very real experiences and ideas. Largely these centered around a strange sentiment from the work of mystic Meister Eckhart: ‘What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.’ Kaye presented an emphatically feminist conception of Christianity, replete with juicy visions of cosmic vaginas. For myself, given my formative spiritual years as a goddess freak, this was all strangely familiar. I wondered how Christians — most of whom are firmly wedded to the tradition’s emphatically patriarchal central metaphors — might react. I suspect that for some the contradiction of traditional metaphor, together with it being located — in some sense — within the tradition, and together with the ever-more apparent residues of visceral misogyny in our culture, might result in Kaye’s brand of spirituality being subtly more disturbing than the comfortably ‘other’ opposition of atheism or Satanism. I’m not sure those people were at Breaking Convention, though.

Rounding off this curious track was the most potent talk of the entire conference. Iyad El-Baghdadi is a prominent Norwegian-Palestinian intellectual, who was imprisoned in (then exiled from) his home in the UAE for his dissident online journalism during the Arab Spring. In exile it seems he encountered Rick Doblin, whose MAPS organisation has been a major force in the psychedelic renaissance, and underwent MDMA and psilocybin therapy for the PTSD he suffered in the wake of his brutalising imprisonment. Now, during exile Iyad also befriended Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist who was assassinated by Saudi agents in 2018. Iyad’s first MDMA session occurred around the time of Kashoggi’s death, and was darkly clouded by the event. Then he chose to undergo his first psilocybin session on the second anniversary of Kashoggi’s death. He confessed to the timing of this with the jocular grimness which any seasoned psychedelic person, whose decisions seem retrospectively to be both foolish and just right, will be familiar with. Deeply versed in the details of Kashoggi’s death — which included his grisly dismemberment — through his journalistic work on the case, Iyad ended up reliving the entire process in excruciating detail. What shocked him was that he wasn’t at all disturbed by empathy for Kashoggi, but was utterly occupied during the session with pity for his murderers. Contemplating the evil they represented, he wondered if a world without evil could exist. Immediately, he was thrust by visionary machinations into such a world — which he described as ‘worse than hell’. The lack of possibility of evil rendered the entirely ‘good’ universe a crushingly joyless block of meaningless activity. Out of this, Iyad’s Islamic faith was renewed with a bizarre gratitude for his terrible experiences, and the meaning his life has gained through being able to work for peace. Mentioning the situation in Gaza, he emphasised that he retained plenty of anger, but had discovered an ability to separate it from real hate. Given the rise of all manner of religious traditionalism and fundamentalism in the world, and the ambivalent potentials of psychedelics, the crossover between these phenomena frankly scares me. This track of talks — moving from interesting, to engagingly contrarian, to Iyad’s heartfelt and deeply moving testimony — allowed me to see a chink of light, the potential for cautious hope amid the righteous hatred. Discussing Iyad’s redemptive vision of evil, an audience member quoted errant Jew Leonard Cohen’s line ‘There is a crack in everything / That is how the light gets in’. Iyad politely pointed out that the line is probably rooted in Rumi’s ‘The wound is the place where the Light enters you.’ I’m sceptical that this suggests anything more than a peripheral point of conciliation between these religions — a point which relies, in the end, on the interdependence of good and evil — but I left this track glad that even this place exists.

On Saturday morning I thought I should catch at least some of the ‘Rave & Revolution’ track. The name of the first speaker, Erica Lagalisse, seemed familiar for some reason. It took me until just before she came on stage to remember that she wrote the fascinating 2019 book, Occult Features of Anarchism. This complex and sensitive examination of conspiracy theories and modernity seems pretty well timed, in retrospect, and since the pandemic Erica has been promoting the book at festivals and raves, and wrangling with the explosion of toxic conspiracism in the overlaps between New Age culture and fringe politics. She spoke here on her long-term project of analysing the role of play and the carnivalesque. Her bibliography slide cited a piece she collaborated on with the late David Graeber, which will hopefully see the light of day soon. Graeber’s work on this topic, especially his piece for The Baffler, always struck me as deeply important, and it’s an exciting prospect to discover Erica’s own important engagement with this theme.

Next, over in the main hall was the ever-wonderful John Constable talking about his experiences mixing his ‘DIY shamanism’ with older New World traditions such as the Santo Daime church and the Wixarika peyote lineage. John’s work establishing the Crossbones Graveyard garden of remembrance for outcasts in Southwark, London — which was inspired by a high-dose LSD experience in 1996 — is a resonant testament to the fact that new, Western, urban visionary experiences are perfectly capable of establishing profound ongoing traditions. Great respect for older traditions mingled freely with inspiration from singularly modern psychonauts such as Antonin Artaud, as John channelled Breaking Convention’s ethos with enthused panache.

Another vibrant veteran of the conference, Erik Davis, spoke next, developing his recent work on Blotter, a history of acid blotter art, into a more expansive vision of the McLuhanesque aspect of psychedelics: the active and productive role of the embodied media — from living plants to esoterically decorated sheets of paper and garishly branded vaping contraptions — that conduct these strange psychedelic messages into our neural systems.

The one smaller-scale seminar I caught found Anna Ross, John Anderson and Karen Llewelyn of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group sharing their experiences of psychedelic advocacy in Scotland. Discussion ranged from efforts to get ketamine treatments for alcoholism underway to the speculative druidic lore around the humble Liberty Cap mushroom. As much as the main stage fireworks, this little gathering sparked with an encouraging sense that the contemporary psychedelic resurgence still holds much potential, strengthened through its diverse penetration of all walks of life.

My afternoon finished up in the marvellous off-piste Roborough Studio — where even the toilets were festooned with gorgeous plant life — absorbing a hefty chunk of French filmmaker Vincent Moon‘s revelatory 6-hour ‘live cinema’. The floor of the dark studio space was replete with Persian rugs, cushions, and a few armchairs at the back, surrounding Vincent at his central mixing desk, where he unceasingly mashed together audio and video from his years of nomadic exploration of diverse global musical and spiritual events. Santo Daime ceremonies dissolved into someone playing a piano in the middle of a desert, intimate indigeous healing rites merged with a Russian industrial DJ’s performance, then some acapella singing in some Mexican side street, then a scene of two young near-naked hippies, arms locked together, gracefully rolling around in jungle mud wearing wireless headphones, lost together in some secret shared world. In recent years my exhaustion of conducive films for the late stages of trip experiences, and my frustrated flicking through streaming channels searching for material which found the right balance between absorbing beauty and provocative novelty, has left me with a vague fantasy of something I dubbed ‘ambient cinema’. Within seconds of settling onto a cushion watching Vincent’s inspired improvised creations, I felt I had finally arrived at a concrete instantiation of the object of my yearning. Apparently Vincent’s Petites Planètes project freely shares all of his footage under a Creative Commons license, a fact which leaves my media hunger reeling with possibilities.

The after-party on Saturday night was impossibly effervescent, and I was excited at the prospect of Mixmaster Morris’s set. But I heard rumours that he was ill, and after a few final enthused conversations, the previous two nights of drinking caught up with me, and my waning energies whispered that I risked illness of my own if I persisted. I retired early, beaten, but carrying a glowing ember of encouragement for our deeply precarious future deep down inside.