Brian Robertson - The Church With No Doctrine: Rethinking Power in Psychedelic Spaces

Aug 4, 2025

Brian Robertson, the creator of Holacracy and founder of Ledgeway Sangha, shares profound insights on building community through psychedelics. He discusses the unique model of the Ledgeway Sangha, emphasizing peer-to-peer healing without rigid doctrines. Brian explores the transformative journey of integrating Holacracy in spiritual contexts, shedding light on legal challenges faced by psychedelic churches. He also highlights the power of love and acceptance in fostering genuine community connections while advocating for a shift towards more inclusive spiritual practices.

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ANECDOTE

Brian's Shift to Psychedelic Church

Brian Robertson shifted from organizational innovation to psychedelic spirituality after embracing joyful psychedelic journeys with friends.
This led to forming Ledgeway Sangha, a psychedelic church focused on loving acceptance without doctrine.

INSIGHT

Holacracy as Living System

Holacracy is a decentralized management framework replacing traditional hierarchy with distributed authority.
It structures organizations like a living organism with autonomous roles and evolving governance.

INSIGHT

Leaders Driving Holacracy Adoption

Leaders adopting Holacracy usually have high developmental capacity and often psychedelic experience.
This advanced mindset supports complex adaptive system management and cultural transformation.

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In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, host Paul F. Austin welcomes Brian Robertson—creator of Holacracy and founder of Ledgeway Sangha—for a thought-provoking conversation at the intersection of organizational design, spiritual community, and psychedelic practice.

Find full show notes and links here: https://thethirdwave.co/podcast/episode-315/?ref=278

Best known for reimagining how companies structure authority through Holacracy, Brian now brings his systems-level insight into the realm of psychedelic spirituality. He shares the origin and mission of Ledgeway Sangha, a legal psychedelic church rooted in peer-to-peer healing, communal practice, and non-dogmatic love. Together, Paul and Brian explore how this innovative model bypasses conventional hierarchy, integrates softer entheogens like 2C-B and 6-APB, and builds a path toward legal protection for churches operating outside mainstream psychedelic frameworks.

Brian Robertson is best known for creating Holacracy, the most comprehensive framework in the world today for running self-managed companies using a decentralized power structure in lieu of a traditional management hierarchy. He’s founded and built many organizations over the past 30 years as an entrepreneur, including HolacracyOne, which helps companies use self-management to unleash creativity and empowered leadership, and the software company GlassFrog, which helps both traditional and self-managed companies drive organizational transparency, agility, and alignment to purpose.

To date, tens of thousands of companies in over 50 countries have embraced his pioneering methods and ideas, and his frequent public speaking seamlessly weaves between business, management, consciousness, and love. Brian is currently focused on building Ledgeway Sangha, an entheogenic church and community-building organization that’s harnessing psychedelics to help people release judgments and resistances into loving acceptance of all that is.

Highlights:

From Holacracy to entheogenic spirituality
Why Ledgeway Sangha has no doctrine or belief system
Love as the norming force in community
2C-B and 6-APB as self-integrating medicines
The case for subtle, sovereign psychedelic journeys
A new model of psychedelic integration through consistency
Why hierarchy undermines safe psychedelic containers
Legal strategies under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
Creating a church for mystics, not priests
Poetry, presence, and redefining spiritual transmission

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