NeuroArt Nexus with Mareesa Stertz: Psychedelics, Sphinx Gate, and the Practice of Inner Hygiene

​📅 Monday, 26 Oct 2026
🕖 7PM CEST/ 1PM EST
📍ONLINE

Everyone wants to save the world. But what if the answer isn’t fixing what’s broken, but learning to embrace and process what we’ve been taught to reject?

​We’ve been taught to treat human struggle as something to fix, hide, or escape, rather than as an experience we can process, learn from, and transform. Individually, this can reinforce shame and avoidance; collectively, it can contribute to polarization, dehumanization, and cycles of harm. What might be possible if we flipped the script?

​Mareesa Stertz’s experiences with psychedelics and community helped her rethink her relationship to struggle, inspiring a body of work spanning immersive art, storytelling, and community-building. Her evolving framework of Inner Hygiene aims to make working with difficult experiences a more approachable part of everyday life, grounded in emotional literacy and the capacity to process what we experience.

As founding artist of Sphinx Gate, she created a monumental immersive art experience featuring two 34-foot-tall sphinxes that debuted at Burning Man in 2025. She is a co-founder, costeward, and head of communications and programming for the Global Psychedelic Society, a network of nearly 300 societies across 40+ countries. Stertz created and hosted The Healing Powers of Psychedelics on Gaia, co-founded Lucid News, and is the founder of Your Story is Everything, a series of self-authoring story courses. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Psychedelics Today, and DoubleBlind.

​TheSphinxGate.org | GlobalPsychedelic.org | YourStoryisEverything.com