Nick Boeving, PhD
Lecturer
Email: nicholas.boeving@aleftrust.org
Personal website: recoveryrebellion.org
Biography
Nick Boeving, PhD, is a Stanford trained writer and social scientist whose research focuses on transpersonal, psychedelic, and existential approaches to recovery from substance use disorder. He is also the founding director of recoveryrebellion.org, a nonprofit devoted exclusively to rewriting the narratives of addiction and recovery to include the place of plant medicines and to push past the limiting binaries of traditional recovery paradigms.
Dr. Boeving studied comparative mysticism and the psychology of religion at Rice under Dr. Jeffery Kripal and completed his doctorate at Sofia under the legendary pioneer in the scientific study of human consciousness, Dr. Stanley Krippner. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University Forgiveness Project under Dr. Fred Luskin, he became the executive director of clinical operations for Iboga Treatment Centers in Baja, California, a holistic rehabilitation facility that utilizes plant and other existential medicines to help identify, transform, and heal the traumas and emotional losses from which all addictions originate.
His work has been published in Pastoral Psychology, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, Religious Studies Review, Tikkun, and the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies.
Research interests
As a scientist specializing in finding new ways to treat addictions, and as a clinician working on the front lines of the opioid epidemic, Nick is interested in exploring the potential for psychedelics and other existential medicines to heal the root causes of substance use disorder. His other areas of interest include medicine and spirituality, entheogenic shamanism, comparative addictionology, the history of psychology, and scientific language and theory as mystical discourse.
Key publications
Boeving, N. G. (2021). Book review: Decoding Jung’s metaphysics: The archetypal semantics of an experiential universe. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 40(2), 121-128. https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2021.40.2.121
Boeving, N. G. (2020). Metabolizing Death: Re-Thinking Recovery from Substance Use Disorder through the Creative Cartographies of William James and Ernest Becker. Pastoral Psychology, 69, 169–186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00907-4
Boeving, N. G. (2010). Sneaking God (Back) Through the Back Door of Science: A Call for a Comparative Addictionology. Pastoral Psychology, 59, 93–107. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0217-7
Gleig, A., & Boeving, N. G. (2009). Spiritual Democracy: Beyond Consciousness and Culture. Review Essay of The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, Edited by Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman. Tikkun, 24(3), 64-68.
