Amanda Feilding

Born on 30 January 1943, Feilding was the youngest child of Basil Feilding (great-grandson of the 7th Earl of Denbigh and of the 3rd Marquess of Bath) and his wife, Margaret Feilding, who was his second cousin. She was born and brought up at Beckley Park in Oxfordshire, a Tudor hunting lodge with three towers and three moats, which was owned by her father and situated on the edge of a fen outside Oxford.

From an early age, Feilding was interested in states of consciousness and mysticism. At 16 years old, she embarked on a journey to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with £25 (about £743 in 2025), where her godfather, Bertie Moore, had become a Buddhist monk. Although she did not reach Ceylon, Feilding hitchhiked as far as the Syrian border, where she spent time living with Bedouins before returning to the UK. Feilding then studied Comparative Religions and Mysticism with Professor R.C. Zaehner, and Classical Arabic with Professor Albert Hourani. She concentrated later on learning about altered states of consciousness, psychology, physiology and, later, neuroscience.

Feilding had her first psychedelic experience at 22 years of age, when an acquaintance spiked her coffee with a massive dose of then-legal LSD. She retreated to her family home for months to recover.

Feilding gained notoriety in 1970 when she performed trepanation on herself, with a dental drill. She made a short art film about the experience, entitled Heartbeat in the Brain. The 1998 documentary A Hole in the Head contains footage from Heartbeat in the Brain. Feilding also began to microdose herself with LSD while she was in her 20s. A 2019 Guardian article offers this analysis: "It would be fair to say... that her credibility as an advocate has not always been helped by her storied history with self-experimentation".

Trepanation was part of her exploration into the effects of different techniques to alter and enhance consciousness. During this period, she wrote Blood and Consciousness, which hypothesized that changing ratios of blood and cerebrospinal fluid underlie changes in consciousness, and also described the theory of the "ego" as a conditioned reflex mechanism that controls the distribution of blood in the brain.

Beckley Retreats

Beckley Retreats is a network of psychedelic retreat centers co-founded by Amanda Feilding in 2021. It provides programs utilizing psilocybin and operates in jurisdictions where psilocybin is legal, including Jamaica and the Netherlands.

Beckley Psytech

Beckley Psytech was founded in 2019 by Fielding and her son, Cosmo Fielding Mellen, as a drug development company based on Feilding's research. The company's aim is to convert her findings into commercial drug treatments. In 2025, Beckley Psytech merged with atai Life Sciences. The merged companies became known as AtaiBeckley. As of 2025, AtaiBeckley is in clinical trials with 5-meo-dmt, also known as BPL-003, to be used to treat patients with treatment-resistant depression.

Beckley Waves

Beckley Waves is a venture capital studio co-founded by Feilding in 2021. It invests and provides mentorship to entrepreneurs who build infrastructure for the sale and legal access to psychedelic medicines and therapies. In 2023 it purchased the ketamine therapy provider Nue Life.

In 1966 Feilding met and formed a relationship with Dutch scientist Bart Huges. From the late 1960s, she lived with British-born author Joseph Mellen, with whom she had two sons.

Feilding and Mellen separated in the mid-1990s. On 29 January 1995, she married James Charteris, 13th Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March (then known by the courtesy title of Lord Neidpath), under the Bent Pyramid in Egypt. Feilding also used the title of Lady Neidpath.

When discussing how her mother viewed her life when Feilding was in her 30s, she made this comment during an interview: "There I was, druggy, trepanned, unmarried, with two sons – bastards, as she might have seen them – and she didn’t mind a bit".

Feilding worked at her family home, Beckley Park, near the village of Beckley, Oxfordshire. As of early 2019, the property housed the offices of five researchers and interns. Some news articles refer to Beckley Park as her residence, but Feilding and her husband maintained an official residence at Stanway House in Gloucestershire and also owned Gosford House in East Lothian.

In 2014 Feilding sold a version of the Chardin painting Le Bénédicité from the collection at Gosford House. It was attributed to the school of Chardin and sold for £1.15M. A subsequent examination revealed Chardin's signature, leading to its reattribution as the second known example in Chardin's own hand. It was resold for $10.5m (£8.5m) in January 2015. Feilding unsuccessfully sued the original dealer for negligence.

On 12 May 2025, Feilding posted a message on her Instagram account reporting that the immunotherapy treatment against liver cancer, which she had undertaken for the best part of a year, had not worked and as a result she had "shifted my focus to spending more precious time with my family and friends." She died at Beckley Park on the evening of 22 May 2025, at the age of 82.

In 1998, Feilding founded the Foundation to Further Consciousness, later renamed Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust which claims to promote a rational, evidence-based approach to global drug policies and initiates, directs, and supports pioneering neuroscientific and clinical research into the effects of psychoactive substances on the brain and cognition. The central aim of her research was to investigate new avenues of treatment for such mental illnesses as depression, anxiety, and addiction, as well as to explore methods of enhancing well-being and creativity. The Foundation states that Fielding co-authored over 50 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Feilding was the Founder and executive director of the Foundation.

Through the Beckley Foundation, Feilding initiated, directed, and, supported scientific research investigating psychoactive substances, such as cannabis and other psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy).

She was a significant figure in modern psychedelic research, with the New Scientist calling her the "Queen of Consciousness". Among her projects are a study investigating the efficacy of using psilocybin as an aid to psychotherapy in overcoming depression and nicotine addiction, a brain imaging study investigating the effects of psilocybin and MDMA on cerebral blood supply, an examination of the effects of cannabis on creativity and of the importance of the THC/CBD ratio in mental health, and the first brain imaging study investigating the effects of LSD on the brain.

Feilding was also active in drug policy reform and was among the first to compile evidence upon which new policies could be formed, arguing that benefits as well as harms should be considered. In 2007, Feilding convened the Global Cannabis Commission, producing a report authored by a group of leading drug policy analysts, which lays out a plan for possible reforms of cannabis control policies at national and international levels. 2011 saw Feilding bring together members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy Reform (a panel of world leaders and intellectuals) and political leaders from 14 countries interested in reform. Together, at the House of Lords, they launched the Beckley Foundation Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform, a joint initiative with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform, which was set up to support the BF's initiative to drive forward alternative approaches to drug control to create more humane, evidence-based policies that would reduce the potential harm of drugs to individuals and societies.

In 2013, President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala asked Feilding to advise on the Guatemala government's policy on drugs, and in 2015, Mark Golding, the Jamaican Minister of Justice, invited Feilding to advise him and the government in developing plans for the country's new system of cannabis regulation. In May 2016, in response to the enforcement of the Home Office's Psychoactive Substance Act, the Beckley Foundation published a chapter on the regulation of new psychoactive substances (NPS) from an upcoming report entitled Roadmaps to Regulation: Cannabis, Psychedelics, MDMA and NPS.