Rebekah Senanayake
PhD (C), MSc, BSc (First-class Honours)
Anthropologist & Cultural Psychologist
Founder and Lead Researcher, Inner Visions
Fellow International, The Explorers ClubRebekah is a Cultural Psychologist and Cultural Anthropologist advancing ethical, cross-disciplinary inquiry into altered states of consciousness. She is a Fellow International of The Explorers Club, and was recently named one of the Top 25 Emerging Leaders in Psychedelic Research and Modern Theory. Based in Aotearoa New Zealand where she was born, and drawing on her Sri Lankan heritage, Rebekah brings a multicultural lens to her work with traditional communities in the Amazon.
Academic Foundation
Rebekah holds degrees in Psychology, Cultural Anthropology, and Cross-cultural Psychology, and is completing her PhD in Cultural Anthropology. Her experimental studies examine ego dissolution, sensory deprivation, and the effects of classical psychedelics on cognition, identity, and wellbeing. With 400+ hours of sensory deprivation experience, she combines academic rigour with embodied insight.
Her research has been generously supported by competitive grants from Victoria University of Wellington and Education New Zealand. She has co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles on indigenous religious belief and ontology, and developed a scale to assess phenomenological experiences of ego-dissolution occasioned by classical psychedelics.
Professional Recognition
Current Work
Amazon Expertise
With 27 months of field experience in remote Amazonia, Rebekah has undergone intensive ritual protocols requiring months of restricted eating, isolation, and deep jungle exploration while living in traditional communities. In 2019, she was formally invited to pursue an apprenticeship with the Kichwa, becoming the first known woman to do so in the region in one of the oldest plant medicine lineages. Her work builds on long-term relationships grounded in reciprocity, respect, and shared learning with diverse traditional practitioners across multiple Amazonian cultures.
Her fieldwork explores plant medicine, ritual technologies, and expanded states through culturally embedded, collaborative inquiry rather than extractive research. This immersive approach has taken her through some of the most challenging traditional protocols in the Amazon, providing unparalleled insight into indigenous knowledge systems from a female, multicultural lens.
Through Inner Visions, her strategy and research consultancy, Rebekah advises institutions, visionary companies, and public-facing leaders working at the edges of culture, science, and consciousness. Clients seek her expertise in translating across disciplines and worldviews, bringing clarity to the ethical, cultural, and strategic complexities others avoid.
In 2024, Rebekah founded the Student Association of Psychedelic Investigation (SAPI), an interdisciplinary research association investigating altered states of consciousness across cultures, their neurological and physiological effects, and their role in human evolution.
She has delivered invited lectures worldwide, including at Princeton University, and presented at leading conferences and podcasts. Her areas of expertise include hallucinogens, traditional knowledge, ontology, ethnobotany, ethnography, and ritual, with precise quantitative and qualitative analytical skills developed through years of rigorous training.
Rebekah brings the same focus to physical pursuits as intellectual ones as an advanced weightlifter and Iron(wo)man-in-training who has cycled across Europe. She is currently writing her first book exploring how integrated altered consciousness can blueprint lasting transformation systems.
For consulting, speaking, and advisory opportunities at the nexus of psychedelics, culture, and conscious leadership.