My Approach

Psychedelic healing is more than just a matter of taking the right dose of a certain plant or compound the right number of times. Just as important is the way we take the medicine. It does not simply act on us, fixing whatever we deem wrong inside; rather we must partner with the medicine to help it help us have the opening we need. In my approach to psychedelic work, I draw upon the knowledge and experience I have accrued both as a healer and as seeker of healing to facilitate a meaningful encounter between you and the medicine: 

Creating Sacred Space

One of the revolutions of the psychedelic renaissance is that brain scientists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists alike are coming to a new consensus on the central role of spirituality in psychological wellbeing. Many of us walk around today feeling existentially empty and unmoored, bereft of any abiding sense of the meaningfulness of our existence or connection to something greater than self or identity group. Some carry the pain of spiritual trauma, having suffered shame, humiliation, or abuse within an authoritarian religion or cult. We hunger for meaning and transcendence as we hunger for food, for touch, for shelter. In their absence, we are left to cope on our own with the terror and grief of being alive, giving rise to all manner of symptoms, illnesses, and desperate self-medication.

A beautiful gift of psychedelic medicine is that it can awaken and heal the spiritual sense that is every one our birthrights. The way we invite this facet of the medicine is to think of this work not as just another appointment, but as a sacred moment, a ceremony. To create sacredness means to intentionally take a step out of the normal, everyday trappings of life. In our work, we sometimes incorporate various rituals as well as sensory experiences - sights, sounds, aromas - to help create a sacred atmosphere within which your work can unfold (we are also perfectly content to leave this stuff out if it is not your cup of tea). We are also well versed in many spiritual traditions, and can help you craft a medicine experience imbued with whatever symbols, ideas, or practices have been a source of sacredness in your life.

Bringing Insight to Intention

What first drew me to the field of psychotherapy was the natural joy I experience in helping people understand themselves better. Over the years, I have devoted myself to mastering the intricacies of personality development, the process by which our experiences in childhood and beyond shape our core beliefs about the world, and the strategies we predictably rely on to navigate its challenges (i.e. our personalities!). In our preparation sessions, we will spend time exploring how certain beliefs, patterns, or traumatic experiences are keeping you feeling stuck or in pain, piecing together a map of your individual psyche and where it’s trying to expand. Bringing this metaphorical (or literal!) map to the medicine can allow the work to be more profound, “showing” the medicine where to go and lending you a meaningful frame for the visions, ideas, and feelings you encounter on your journey inward. 

Mindful, Embodied Presence

As somatic psychotherapists, we specialize in helping my clients quiet their minds and bring curious and compassionate focus to embodied feelings and sensations. Why integrate this kind of body awareness into psychotherapy? Many of our most formative experiences, those that set in motion the patterns and strategies that will carry us into adulthood, happen before we can even make visual memories. Instead, they are remembered by the body in the habitual ways we move, hold ourselves, sense our worlds, and manage difficult or intense emotion. By mindfully attuning to the body's language, and listening to its long and profound memory, we are often granted more focused access to the core wounds underlying current points of pain and stuckness. Offering mindful attention to self before, during, and after a psychedelic session supports the power of the medicine to bring forward the unconscious memories and emotions most in need of release and reprocessing, as well as amplifying its gifts of joy, wholeness, peace and relaxation.