23 January 2026
Tending the Living Laboratory: How the True North Guild Is Cultivating an Ecology of Ethics
By: Liana Sananda Gillooly, Executive Director, North Star Project
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXVI
When psychedelics are stripped from their cultural, relational, and spiritual contexts and reduced to products, they become another commodity in a broken system. We must not allow a market logic to define the value of what is, at its core, an initiation into humility, interdependence, and awe.
Five Years of Evolution: From Pledge to Practice
In the fall of 2019, five people came together to address an emerging reality: a for-profit psychedelic sector was inevitable, and without intentional design, it would likely follow familiar patterns. North Star’s founding commenced with the publishing of We Will Call it Pala by co-founder David Alder, a story which illustrates how even well-intentioned founders face systemic pressures that can pull them away from their original values. Traditional corporate forms create incentives that prioritize short-term shareholder returns, often at the expense of broader stakeholder wellbeing, including that of patients, practitioners, and communities. We recognized that without deliberately building different structures, the default demands of conventional business models would risk overriding the healing-centered values that had brought many into this work in the first place.”
We began with the simple but radical act of asking the field what integrity meant to them. Through hundreds of conversations with healthcare professionals, therapists, wisdom keepers, elders, activists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and patients, we co-created the North Star Ethics Pledge, seven principles that have since gathered over 1,200 signatories. In 2021, we convened one of the first psychedelic business forums in history, in partnership with Horizons. The following years were dedicated to embodied integration of the 7 principles through community gatherings, educational offerings, and relational trust-building. In 2023, we published Structures & Practices for Purposeful Organizations, a 40-page manual on ownership, governance, accessibility, and benefit-sharing.
But something was missing. We had principles, frameworks, and commitments on paper, yet we lacked ongoing practice. We didn’t have a laboratory to explore how to operationalize the values we professed to share under real conditions.
After a long pause in 2024 to study regenerative economics, systems thinking, organizational design, and relational practices, we returned with clearer questions: How do we support leaders in growing their capacity for discernment, self-honesty, and mutual accountability? What would it look like for psychedelic leaders to practice ethics together, not just talk about it?
The answer became the True North Guild, a year-long community of practice made up of 19 CEOs and founders across clinics, biotech, training programs, retreat centers, media platforms, and public-benefit companies that all identify as being part of the psychedelic ecosystem.
Starting in August 2025, the Guild has met in monthly sessions, developed shared resources, and received education from a series of experts across the field of transformational business. Rather than granting certification or upholding a purity test, the Guild asks something more demanding: that leaders move through the seasons together, examine themselves and their operating patterns, surface real dilemmas, and learn to hold each other accountable.
“Business as Usual”
When psychedelic companies default to conventional business logic, we see predictable outcomes.
Companies racing to patent naturally occurring compounds and traditional Indigenous practices, often without consent or involvement from necessary stakeholders. Investor expectations to scale faster than safety protocols recommend. Pricing models that make healing accessible only to the wealthy. Marketing that commodifies mystical experience into lifestyle branding. Governance structures where those most impacted by decisions, such as patients, traditional practitioners, and frontline staff, have no pathway to meaningfully participate. Cultural appropriation disguised as innovation. Staff burnout normalized as dedication. And the quiet compromise of leaders who entered this field through their own healing journey who now must make decisions that prioritize quarterly returns over practicing in the principled ways that shaped their own healing experiences.
This does not occur through moral failure, rather this is what these structures produce. When a company accepts venture capital, fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder returns becomes law. When growth becomes the primary metric, corners get cut. When competition is the organizing principle, collaboration becomes a threat.
The psychedelic field can have all the right intentions, all the heartfelt mission statements, and all the ethics pledges in the world. Yet without examining the foundational architecture of ownership, governance, and capital, those intentions get overridden by structural imperatives in countless ways.
We acknowledge these dominant paradigms currently prevail in psychedelics. Part of North Star’s work is meeting present conditions with clear eyes by engaging in harm reduction within rigid systems through supporting founders as they navigate structural pressures while preserving their values. Simultaneously, we’re committed to moving the field toward transformational models that might include decentralized ownership and governance, foundational benefit-sharing, and deliberately developmental organizations. The dual approach of working within the present reality while building toward structural transformation is how we believe lasting change happens.
Shadow Work as Structural Practice
North Star does not position itself, or any participant, as “the most ethical” entity in the room. We do not exist to certify moral superiority. The ethical commitment we ask for from each participant is the willingness to engage one’s own shadow by naming limitations honestly, noticing when fear or ambition shapes decisions, examining how power moves through one’s company and relationships, and revealing the parts of the business that feel tender, unresolved, or conflicted.
Our theory of change is simple: We cannot steward psychedelics with integrity if we exempt ourselves from the very transformation they invite us into. This means not only holding altered states with reverence, but allowing those experiences to reshape how we lead, govern, and relate in ways that match the nature of the medicines themselves.
Psychedelics are deeply relational. They create encounters with aspects of ourselves we’ve avoided, with others in moments of profound vulnerability, with ancestors and lineages, with the natural world, and with the mystery that transcends our understanding. The medicines invite us into ongoing relationships with the insights they reveal. The Guild exists as a living practice of relational accountability across all of these dimensions. It provides the space to regularly investigate our ways of being and operating, to examine underlying epistemologies that shape our thinking, to interrogate the assumptions that our beliefs are constructed upon, and to learn how to manage the patterns inherent within the constructs of business.
The psychedelic ecosystem will only be as ethical as our collective capacity to metabolize conflict, name shadow honestly, repair harm, and build trust without collapsing into blame or shame.
Beyond Metrics: Ethics as Living Practice
One central teaching inside the Guild is that just because something is measurable doesn’t make it meaningful. Modern business culture worships dashboards, KPIs, and standardized frameworks. In psychedelics, ethics will never be fully articulated in a neat spreadsheet or by an ethics badge. The same medicine, in different hands, at different doses, with different preparation, in different cultural contexts, can produce radically different outcomes. Ethical practice requires the capacity to see and respond to these contexts, and to build our capacity to work with complexity rather than flatten it into universal standards.
In the Guild, we work with ethics as something:
Relational: Accountability is only possible within relationship
Felt: Your nervous system tells you when you’re out of alignment
Slow: Trust and repair cannot be rushed
Situated: Context, lineage, and culture matter
Dialogical: Wisdom arises in conversation, not isolation
Humbling: It reveals our blind spots
Composting: It unbuilds what no longer serves
Devotional: It is practice, not performance
Metrics are still absolutely necessary to track things like pay ratios, accessibility, safety incident reporting, employee satisfaction, and so on. Our Guild is developing these measures and intends to use them wisely. Yet a company can have an impeccable conflict resolution policy on paper and still have a culture where no one dares to use it. One can measure the number of ethics trainings completed without measuring whether behavior change actually occurred. Without the organizational capacity to utilize the insights that metrics reveal, metrics become performative rather than demonstrating how an organization is learning, adapting, and becoming more ethical over time. The Guild aims to help its members build what organizational theorists call a ‘deliberately developmental organization’: one designed to grow peoples’ capacity to see themselves clearly and act with increasing integrity, even under constraining conditions.
Starting Within: Three Core Capacities
The Guild is built around a fundamental insight: ethical maturity requires the capacity to hold ourselves accountable, especially when it’s uncomfortable. We’ve begun our year-long journey with developing three specific capacities:
The Practice of Self-Location
Before we can hold ourselves and others accountable, we must understand how power, privilege, fear, and ambition move through us. The journey begins by asking leaders to locate themselves:
- What patterns from dominant business culture do I believe are necessary for my company’s survival, even if they feel misaligned with my deeper values?
- What fears arise when I imagine shifting away from traditional models of governance, control, or incentives?
- What assumptions have I made about ethics, DEI, or sustainability that treat symptoms but don’t touch root causes?
- What company practices or policies am I afraid to look at because they might cost me reputation, comfort, or control?
The Practice of Relational Accountability
Integrity cannot be cultivated in isolation. The Guild asks each leader to examine their relational ecology:
- Who am I accountable to? Do I have people in my life or company who can stop me?
- Who can call me out and have it land? Who has the relational trust to say the thing I don’t want to hear?
- Who are the stakeholders I have real, living relationships with? Who is missing from my ethical ecology?
- How do I currently repair harm? Do I have a process, or do I avoid rupture by over-optimizing for harmony?
The Practice of Somatic Discernment
Ethical knowing isn’t only cognitive, it’s embodied. Leaders learn to notice:
- When does my stomach knot? When does my breath tighten?
- Can I feel inside my body when I am performing?
- What sensations come through when I feel in alignment? Where do I feel it?
This felt sense becomes a compass leaders can return to when frameworks fail.
How It Works in Practice
In our monthly meetings, the guild explores active challenges being faced by executives. Some examples include:
A training platform founder faced investor pressure to disconnect content from indigenous knowledge systems and underground practitioners that have not been developed in academic or research settings, prioritizing evidence-based medical protocols. This dilemma was brought to the Guild, where we examined fears around economic failure versus mission betrayal. We discussed content curation guardrails, how to practice boundary-setting with sponsors, and the need to find mission-aligned funding sources. The work to practically integrate this is ongoing.
A supplier of GMP psychedelic materials brought forward the dilemma of facing pressure to sell to unvetted retreat to increase market share. The Guild discussed alternatives such as creating a vetting criteria for purchasers that includes safety protocols and the possibility of referral networks with trusted operators. We explored the challenges to sometimes saying no to quick revenue. The practical integration of these insights remains ongoing.
What’s Emerging: Quarter One Results
After four months of practice, we’re beginning to see shifts that are both unmeasurable and mappable. Leaders who might otherwise be competitors have become genuine colleagues, willing to share their successes and struggles. The Ethical Dilemma Portal, a confidential submission system where companies can surface real conflicts, is being used with actual dilemmas involving staff remuneration, fiduciary obligations conflicting with safety, navigating cultural appropriation concerns, and the challenge of protecting intellectual property. These aren’t hypotheticals or abstract scenarios, they are living tensions that founders are grappling with, and benefiting from collective wisdom. We’ve also launched an internal Library of Best Practices, a living repository where Guild members can access and contribute governance models, policy templates, and decision-making frameworks. The goal is for this library to grow as companies test approaches and share what works and what doesn’t in practice. We plan to publish this library at the close of our year together. We’re developing a voluntary self-reporting framework where companies can assess and publicly share their adherence to best practices across key ethical dimensions. We aim for the framework to normalize not achieving perfection. We hope that companies will name where they’re strong, where they’re falling short, and where they intend to grow. Shared language is taking root: Three Horizons Thinking helps leaders identify when they’re operating from business-as-usual assumptions versus transitional or regenerative models. The practice of “declaring the shadow” invites us to name growth edges, acknowledge where fear drives decisions, and identify where integrity feels compromised. We hope to normalize this practice so that a company declaring its shadow can be seen as a strength, and not as a dark mark. Perhaps most significantly, leaders are discovering they don’t have to carry ethical complexity in isolation. The Guild itself has become a form of support for peers who are walking through the difficult work of building companies in a complex, powerful, and dynamic ecosystem.
The Ethical Dilemma Portal is now open for voluntary submissions. We invite leaders across the ecosystem to contribute real dilemmas around power, governance, organizational design, and integrity. Each submission strengthens our collective ability to learn, reflect, and evolve. As we prototype this system, we commit improving it with a secure purpose-built platform shaped by actual practice and feedback.
In August of 2026, at the close of our year together, we plan to publish and open source all of our findings, tools, and resources as an offering to the field.
Our Own Shadow: What We’re Learning to See
We would be hypocrites to ask others to name their limitations without naming our own. North Star is a young organization finding its footing in real time. Our team and advisory committee is predominantly white while working in a field shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems. A small group of elders and wisdom keepers have agreed to join a council, yet without having the funds to compensate them, we have not fully engaged them. Our small team holds enormous capacity constraints, limiting our community engagement and stakeholder inclusion. We are building the program while operating it, aiming to be responsive to the needs of the Guild as they emerge while also providing high quality education needed for transformation. Our funding depends on companies with resources and philanthropy. We sometimes confuse articulation with embodiment as we name relational ethics more easily than we can live them. We hold tension between wanting to scale impact and knowing that depth requires slowness. Some of the frameworks that shape our epistemology and praxis can be found here. I personally hold power, positionality, and privilege inside of the field of psychedelics through having served at MAPS and on the Board of Chacruna, as well as in other roles in the ecosystem.
We acknowledge that we, too, are learning to locate our blind spots, repair when we miss the mark, and remain accountable to the relationships and responsibilities we carry. This work asks as much of us as it does of anyone we serve.
Building the Conditions for a Different Future
Our vision is to create a critical mass of companies whose ethical practices become so robust, so interconnected, and so mutually reinforcing that they shift what’s considered normal in the field. We believe that companies who operate with integrity will prosper together, creating economic and cultural incentives that pull the whole ecosystem toward better ways of operating.
The psychedelic field does not need more brands of ethics. It needs more practice. More containers capable of holding complexity. More leaders willing to engage their shadow. More communities capable of metabolizing conflict rather than collapsing under it. More systems and frameworks for implementation, and the space to experiment.
The True North Guild is but one experiment. It is imperfect, emergent, and alive. Yet it represents something essential: a willingness to sit in the fire together, to admit what we do not know, to apprentice ourselves to the work of relationship, and to become students of our own impact.
Ethics is not a destination to arrive at. It is a field to tend. A relationship to return to especially when we falter.
This is the work before us.
Disclosure: North Star received a grant from MAPS in support of its work.
Liana Sananda Gillooly
Liana Sananda Gillooly is Executive Director of North Star, and MAPS Alum, and consults psychedelic companies and funders. Previously, she helped build the prominent cannabis investment firm The Arcview Group. She has been committed to ending the drug war and building a just movement around psychedelics and cannabis for the last 15 years. Through intersectional collaboration, she seeks to co-create “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” with allies working on regeneration, indigenous rights, human rights, humane technology, collective liberation, and purpose-driven economics. She offers her services as a consultant and public speaker.
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