Ep39: Alycia Fridkin on her psychedelic childhood, the relief of altered states, and finding home with her Jewish roots

Alycia Fridkin is an equity and anti-racism health policy activist who has been working in public health and harm reduction settings for over two decades. As a queer Jewish White settler living in Vancouver, BC on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam and Squamish Peoples, she currently works for the Provincial Health Services Authority in Indigenous Health as a collaborative practice and policy lead. As we hear a bit about in our conversation together, Alycia is also the founder of Jewish Third Space, a retreat based initiative that integrates Jewish wisdom with transformative embodied practices— a reflection of the way she has reclaimed and blended her spiritual and cultural roots with her psychedelic unfolding. In our conversation together, we talk about her chaotic childhood experiences, and the roles that both fear and magic played in making sense of herself and the world around her. We talk about her desire to ‘get high’ in her teenaged years, and explore two formative experiences—one with LSD and one with MDMA-- that both reflect the unique mix of fear and magic that Alycia experienced in childhood in many ways.

Shownotes

• Jewish Third Space: https://jewishthirdspace.net/
• The Spaces Between: https://www.thespacesinbetween.net/
• Alycia’s JewWitch tarot reader website: https://www.azrasilverstein.com/

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Music credit: Music by Mass X Audio from Pixabay

#psychedelics #podcast #tripreport