My Journey Here

Psychedelic experiences have the potential to remind us that there is far more to this world and far more to our lives than we often realize. Sometimes these realizations are exhilarating, expansive, and blissful. Other times they can be unsettling, chaotic, and difficult to navigate. I am called to serve as an integration coach because I have experienced both of these polarities, and have spent the last fifteen years learning to make my life a direct response to that which is sacred in all things.

This chapter of my story begins in 2009. As a young college student I was experimenting regularly with a variety of psychedelic substances in both intentional and recreational settings. I was searching for something real, though I was not sure what that might be. One afternoon on a particularly strong psychedelic journey I found what I was looking for. Out of seemingly nowhere I experienced the intrinsic interconnectedness of the universe and remembered my inseparable unity with a God/Divinity that I hardly believed in up until that moment. Rather than studying literature, this experience (and a few others like it) compelled me to pursue a degree in religious studies. I suspected that there were others who had seen what I had seen and I wanted to know who they were, and what they did about it.

A few short months later, another trip brought me to an equal and opposite place; sitting on a couch at the afterparty of an EDM show, my world seemed to come unglued. What I would later come to understand as the spontaneous resurgence of a repressed childhood wound felt like incomprehensible chaos. By attempting to resist and suppress the terrifying thoughts and emotions welling up inside of me, I lost touch with my body; entering a surreal, dissociative state. Whereas the “God experiences” from some of my other journeys had naturally dissipated as the drug wore off, the dissociative haze and the resultant fear of what felt like impending psychosis haunted me with shame, confusion, and anxiety attacks for many months and rendered me unable to enjoy any psychoactive substances for nearly a decade.

Over the next year or so my world gradually regained its balance. I slowly began to understand that rather than overcoming my difficulties and returning to “normal”, I was meant to integrate both my wounds and my strength into my sense of self. While I probably could have arrived at this insight many months sooner had I been willing to seek more direct professional support, once I got the message, I got to it. Along the way I studied and later ghost-wrote a book about the Enneagram. I began a meditation practice and attended retreats in the Zen, Vipassana, and Vedanta traditions. I spent six months apprenticing with a shamanic practitioner from the Kogi lineage of Colombia. I learned how to feel my emotions more deeply. How to dwell in my body. How to grieve. I later re-explored my Christian roots, becoming a member of a Quaker community in Berkeley, CA. I studied the work of Joseph Campbell and Fr. Richard Rohr pertaining to rites of passage and initiation. These tools also helped me hold space and provide guidance for others, and gave me the confidence to begin offering support to people from a wide range of backgrounds.

Because I did not yet feel ready to return to the use of psychedelics, during these years I also found myself playing the role of sober-sitter for my community as friends of mine continued to explore altered states of consciousness. The more time I spent in service to others, the more clearly I could understand that my own inner struggle had not been an error or a punishment, but rather the beginning of a calling.

As I continued my study of theology at a graduate level starting in 2014, I also expanded my service work, volunteering at a hospice center and later at a street outreach organization in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Whether I was sitting with someone facing death, grieving tragedy, or deep in the throws of addiction, I found that there are common themes and energies that emerge during life’s major highs, lows, and transitions. In this sense, we are all walking each other home; down the same paths, through the same struggles, and past the same opportunities to make meaning and turn pain into beauty. In my current work as a clinical supervisor for Fireside Project's psychedelic support hotline I use my years of experience as an interfaith hospice chaplain, during which I learned to provide spiritual guidance, deep listening, and yes, integration support to people on the cusp of the ultimate “psychedelic” experience—death.