The Alembic

09/08/2025

Join us!

09/06/2025

08/28/2025

Something Spooky This Way Comes is a celebration of all things occult, ghostly, ghoulish, noir, beastly, and ghastly. If it makes the hair on your neck stand up, I want you to submit your art. If you have monsterish, undead, resurrected, in the afterlife, or just plain haunting art, I would love to see it.
Please only submit 2D work, or if it has 3D components, it must hang on a wall. Please nothing larger than 60 inches on either side.

Important Dates:
Submissions due: September 13th
Notifications sent out: September 15th
Artwork due at the Alembic: September 27th
Show opening: October 11th
Show runs for about 3 months. Exact end date will be share upon acceptance.

08/20/2025

The Chalice is a recurring psychedelic salon held at the Berkeley Alembic the first Wednesday of every month. Instead of the mainstream focus on clinical trials, legal frameworks, and psychotherapy, the Chalice will draw from the deeper humanistic wells of history, poetry, the gods, ethnobotany, humor, and mystery. We are less interested in fetishizing psychedelic substances or psychedelic experiences than in cultivating psychedelic culture and exploring what it means to be psychedelic people.

This first half of this event will be streamed online.

08/20/2025

Ralph Metzner's Life and Legacy of Consciousness Exploration
City Lights, The Alembic, CIIS’ Center for Psychedelic-assisted Therapy, and the Green Earth Foundation present a tribute to the life and work of pioneering visionary, psychologist, writer and psychedelics researcher Ralph Metzner. Join us for an afternoon of personal recollections and deep dive explorations of the ideas and philosophy of a trailblazer in the study of human consciousness.

This event will be in-person and streamed online. City Lights will have all of Ralph’s books for sale onsite.

Contributers: Gary Bravo, MD, Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, Cathy Coleman, PhD, Gail Colombo, Uwe Doerken, Jamy Faust, MA, Charles Grob, MD, Alan Levin, LMFT, Peter Maravelis, Roger Marsden, PHD, Valeria McCarroll, PhD, LMFT, Silvia Nakkach Knapp, MA, MMT, Michael Ziegler

08/20/2025

DEPTH BODY: Where What's Deep Within You Dances, with Mackenzie Amara

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. —Gospel of Thomas

The body goes deep. It is both the tool of all the expansion and exploration we will engage during our lifetime, and the epicenter of every limitation, addiction, and distracting fascination we will ever experience. It is the gateway to freedom and the reason we are tricked by the illusion of unfreedom in the first place. It is an avenue for full expression — and a hindrance to experiencing fullness. It is, all at once, our home and not our home.

In this workshop, we will practice using the body as an instrument of authentic truth, regardless of how the body is showing up, whether wily, weird, or tightly wound. We will turn our suffering into art, and our joy into contagion. We will dance, first and foremost, and throughout our time together, each participant will be given the opportunity to be witnessed in their expression, in whatever form it takes.

The movement in this workshop draws from 5Rhythms, the 360 Emergence, developmental movement theory, ritual theatre, and authentic movement practices. Dancers are invited to follow their body’s lead in a free-form, meditative, ecstatic dance. The music is carefully selected to evoke depth, emotional range, and honest embodiment.

08/20/2025

Our organs keep us alive and in good health—but how well do you actually know them in your own body? Can you sense them? Did you know the pancreas feels like a wet bag filled with overcooked oatmeal, or that the heart is more of a vortex than a pump?

Join Bex Naj, Elena Lake, and Dr. Myles O'Donnell for a day of organ stories and embodied exploration. Elena will introduce the art of tactile sensing and help you connect with your own innate sensing capacities. Myles will share locations, functions, and textural cues for various abdominal organs, along with stories from their clinical practice. Bex will guide you into the “mind” of each organ through gentle movement, partnered touch, dialogue, and group explorations of organ dynamics.

Possible organs we’ll explore include the lungs, heart, esophagus, stomach, blood, pancreas, liver, small intestine, large intestine, and kidneys. We’ll work with tactile and experiential cues on our own torsos, with partners, and with props—cradling water balloons to explore hydrostatic pressure, or reenacting embryological patterns through group movement.

Our organs can store mechanical tensions that radiate to other parts of the body—such as the shoulders or neck. Myles will demonstrate organ release techniques on volunteers, while Bex leads partnered touch and dialogue to help us sense our organs from the inside out. Together, we’ll discover how their origins, shapes, and relationships offer insights into our whole selves.

08/20/2025

So much of our time with others is spent reliving the past or projecting into the future. In fact, it’s surprisingly rare to really be with someone in the moment, even when we're right there with them.

But what if we had a way to fully meet one another, right in the Here & Now?

When stories about the past and plans for the future fall away, what’s left in their wake is just empty space, ready for a new kind of social experience to occur. This is the space we step into when we play The Present Moment Game (TPMG).

So, what is The Game? TPMG is an hour-long social meditation that offers a simple yet powerful technique to help people drop into full presence. We call it a game, but it’s really just a framework to deepen present-moment consciousness with like-minded individuals looking to cultivate this awareness together, in community.

Intrigued? Come play and see what it's like to experience a full hour of Right Now.

08/20/2025

Author Benjamin Forest presents an overview of his book, Trip of a Lifetime: The Psychedelic Path to Healing, Loving, and Living—a guide to psychedelic transformation. Part memoir, part self-help guide, and part spiritual manifesto, Trip of a Lifetime walks readers through the essential phases of preparation, navigation, and integration of the psychedelic journey.

In Trip of a Lifetime, Benjamin Forest shares his raw, poetic account of radical healing through psychedelics—and shows you how to ignite your own transformation.

Whether you're curious about psychedelic healing, preparing for your first journey, or integrating a recent trip, this book is your compassionate and wise companion.

This class will focus on exploring the psychedelic experience through the lens of the Hero’s Journey.

“It’s more than a guidebook; it’s a transmission of love.”

– Dr. Stefanie Kleine, co-founder of the Sacred House of Eden

This event will be in person and streamed online.