Ego Death Café: A Contemplative Exploration Of Ego Death Through Neuroscience, Myth, And Meaning-Making

FREE for AMAPP Members (you can access your discount code in the Slack channel under #webinars)

If you are not a member but would like to join please head to the website https://amapp.org/apply-for-me... to sign up before registering for the event.

Non-Members can join us for $15 +BF

“When the ego dies, the soul awakens.”
— (attributed to) Carl Jung

In this AMAPP webinar, we gather as clinicians, guides, seekers, and human beings to explore one of the most profound, disorienting, and sacred experiences that can arise in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: ego death. Whether through expanded states of consciousness, contemplative practice, grief, or spiritual awakening, the dissolution of self invites a powerful unmaking — where the familiar "I" disappears, and something deeper begins to emerge. Together, we will explore ego death through clinical insight, cross-cultural traditions, neuroscience, and lived experience — holding space for the mystery with compassion, humility, and deep listening.

What We’ll Explore: Clinical & Neuroscience Perspectives
Explore how ego dissolution manifests in psychedelic states. Learn how to differentiate ego death from depersonalisation or psychosis, and how to support clients navigating identity loss, narrative collapse, and the liminal space of becoming.
Grounded in polyvagal theory, trauma-informed practice, and psychedelic neuroscience, this session offers practical tools for supporting others — and ourselves — through threshold experiences.

🧳 Preparation & Integration Support
When ego death arises during a psychedelic journey, it can lead to profound transformation or fragmentation, depending on how it is held. We’ll explore how to ethically and compassionately prepare clients for the possibility of ego dissolution and how to support its integration in the days, weeks, and months that follow.
This includes:

• Setting context before the journey: framing ego death not as a failure or pathology, but a potential emergence

• Post-journey tools: narrative reweaving, body-based grounding, grief work, and creative expression

• Practitioner self-reflection: noticing countertransference, staying regulated, and tracking one’s own ego boundaries while holding others

• Cultural and spiritual humility: honouring diverse worldviews about identity, self, and soul

You'll leave with frameworks for navigating these deep spaces in clinical and community practice — and a renewed sense of reverence for the mystery of identity and its unravelling.

💀 Meditation: Dying Before Dying
Drop into a guided contemplative practice inspired by death awareness traditions, mysticism, and the psychedelic journey. We’ll explore the felt sense of surrender, the wisdom of impermanence, and the sacredness of letting go — not only in the mind, but in the body and soul.

📖 Poetics & Metaphors of Dissolution
From the desert initiation of Christian mystics, the Sufi concept of fana’ (annihilation of self), and shamanic dismemberment rites of Indigenous cultures, to the Hindu concept of ahamkara (ego-identity), Buddhist anattā (no-self), and the Dark Night of the Soul — ego death has long been a sacred threshold in human experience.
We’ll draw from archetypal stories such as:

• Inanna’s descent into the underworld, where all symbols of self are stripped away

• The Mayan journey through Xibalba, a mythic realm of challenge and rebirth

• The Greek tale of Ariadne’s thread, a metaphor for unravelling and reweaving identity

Ego death has always been whispered through myth, ritual, and metaphor — and we will explore how to speak the unspeakable, both in therapy and in the shared mystery of being human.

🫖 Lived Experience Sharing Circle (Bring Your Tea)
Bring a warm cup of tea or coffee and join us in a gentle, human-centred space. In this informal sharing circle, we’ll reflect on our own encounters with ego death, identity dissolution, or transformative psychedelic experiences.
You’re invited to speak from the heart — or simply listen — in a container of presence, respect, and vulnerability.

🌟 Who This Is For:

• AMAPP clinicians, therapists, and psychedelic facilitators supporting clients through spiritual emergence, ego death, or identity transformation

• Psychedelic explorers, seekers, and artists who have experienced ego death or threshold states of being

• Humans are curious about what lies beyond the self, and how we return from that space changed

🧘‍♀️ What to Bring:

• A cup of tea, coffee, or comforting beverage

• A journal, if you wish to reflect

• Your whole self — honest, tender, unmasked, and curious

You will be sent a Zoom link on the day of the event.