Where the name comes from
Beckley Retreats carries a name that was earned over half a century, not chosen for a brand.
Amanda Feilding started asking questions about consciousness and psychoactive substances in her twenties, and never stopped. In 1998 she founded the Beckley Foundation, named for Beckley Park, her family home in Oxfordshire, to bring rigorous science to substances the world had largely stopped studying. Over the next twenty five years, the Foundation's research with Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins, and other institutions helped build the evidence base the field now stands on.
Amanda also worked directly with governments. In Jamaica, she was invited by the Ministry of Justice to help shape the country's approach to cannabis policy, work that deepened a relationship with the island her family would return to for the rest of her life.
Her mission, as she put it, was to widen access to the life‑changing potential of psychedelic experiences for everyone. Amanda called the Beckley Foundation her art project. She was glad to see the clinical world embrace synthesized compounds in careful, medical settings, but her own vision reached further: set and setting mattered to her, nature mattered, and so did who was holding the space. She believed there was something at work beyond chemistry alone, and that the artistry of the experience was not a detail to strip away.
The next generation
By the 2020s, Amanda's two sons had each built something of their own out of her work. Cosmo founded Beckley Psytech, taking the same science into drug development and clinical treatments. Rock, together with Amanda and Dan, founded Beckley Waves, a venture builder for companies carrying psychedelic care safely out into the world.
Beckley Retreats is one of those companies.
2021
By the time Amanda, Rock, and Dan founded Beckley Waves, Neil Markey had already left the corporate world behind. He had spent time in Mexico, connecting people with the Huichol and teaching meditation, looking for work with more meaning than his corporate career had offered.
Beckley Waves co-founded Beckley Retreats PBC with Neil in 2021, a continuation of the vision Amanda had spent her life building toward: giving people who are not unwell a safe, thoughtful way to have these experiences, in a non‑medical environment built for well people. As a public benefit corporation, Beckley Retreats has a formal mandate to improve access to the program, advance the field through research, and be an example of a conscious company, one built around a multi‑stakeholder approach rather than shareholders alone.
Jamaica and the Netherlands are the only two countries where psilocybin is fully legal, which is why Beckley Retreats works in those two places and nowhere else. Working with psilocybin is federally illegal in the United States.
Jamaica
Amanda had been coming to Jamaica for decades before Beckley Retreats existed, through her family's own long relationship with the island and through her work with the Jamaican government on drug policy. Along the way she grew close with Dr. Dingle Spence, a Jamaican physician who had spent years exploring how psilocybin might support people facing serious illness.
Amanda introduced Rock and Neil to Dingle, and Dingle brought them to meet Blaise, who owns a 2,000‑acre former sugar and cattle estate in Trelawny called Good Hope. They knew within a day. The first Beckley Retreats programs ran there in 2022, and Dingle has been part of the team ever since.
April 2023
In April 2023, the family returned to Good Hope to celebrate two things at once: Amanda's 80th birthday, and the 25th anniversary of the Beckley Foundation. Friends and collaborators from across Amanda's life came to celebrate with her, including Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and a long‑time friend of Amanda's, along with Paul Stamets and Sean Lennon.
“A healthier, more beautiful world is possible.”
Good Hope was never meant to be just a venue. It is a place Amanda loved for most of her life, and the place her family chose to carry her work forward.
Beckley Retreats is the flagship to come out of that choice. And Good Hope is where we hope this field builds a center of excellence: a home for research, for training, and for the programs themselves, for a long time to come.
-2-1.png){kind=logo}
