The story of how psychedelics supercharged my spiritual awakening and transformed my career

My life changed irrevocably in 2016. My father — a stalwart, stoic, intellectually intimidating Marine Corps Colonel — died in the spring at the age of 69. While grieving the loss of my father, I began evaluating my life and my priorities. I broke up with my romantic partner and quit my service industry job with the steady paycheck. I decided to bet on myself and make the leap to full-time private practice. With the flexibility of running my own business, I started showing up regularly at a local yoga studio. I began connecting with earnest, health conscious, and spiritually minded folks. All of these events, unbeknownst to me at the time, were guiding me toward psychedelics and an invitation to elevate my consciousness.

When one of my favorite yoga teachers announced she was leading a yoga retreat into the Peruvian Amazon, I knew I needed to go. I signed up immediately. As I began researching the Amazonian region of Peru, I learned it was the home of ayahuasca. Something whispered to me to go for it and I said “yes.” I found an ayahuasca healing center that felt intuitively right and signed up for a ten day retreat. A few months later, I arrived in the jungle with curiosity and reverence.

Ayahuasca cracked open my heart and made me question a version of reality I had been clinging to for years. The medicine shook my soul free and helped me release an unhealthy attachment to scientific materialism. I was psychologically tested, pushed into unfamiliar realms, and forced to directly face my fears. One could say the teaching style was a bit harsh, but the lessons were unequivocal, undeniable, and life-altering. Ayahuasca helped me expand my consciousness by revealing a vast spiritual landscape I had been blocking for years. When I got home, my therapy practice blossomed. The medicine cleansed me, revealed truths, and helped me see my therapy clients with fresh eyes. I became a better therapist and a more loving human.

My soul stirring, heart opening experiences in the jungle propelled me to pursue training in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and iRest® yoga nidra meditation. I see an incredible amount of overlap between psychedelics and meditation. Neuroscience also supports this claim, as both practices can facilitate ego dissolution and brain activity outside of the default mode network. I view them both as powerful catalysts on the road to greater resilience, emotional freedom, and liberation. When clients inquire about these healing modalities, I enjoy dispelling the myth that they are magical elixirs. I emphasize that psychedelics and meditation demand active engagement, a letting go of expectations, and a willingness to stay with yourself during challenging moments.

In traditional talk therapy, clients often avoid anxiety-provoking material and resist facing shameful parts of themselves. We gently work with that resistance to understand its protective function — gradually melting the defenses to unearth core affective states. Psychedelic-assisted therapies, on the other hand, do not give clients the luxury of slowly chipping away at those defenses. As much preparation as we do, most clients have no concept of what it will be like to enter the ketosphere — a mind bending, logic defying, ineffable space.

The fortitude and courage of my KAP clients inspires me, and I believe my love and admiration shines through in the therapy room. This work buoys my soul, and I feel energized and enlivened after a KAP session. In my role as a KAP therapist, I provide calming, grounding cues drawn heavily from my mediation training; I encourage clients to welcome all that arises and perceive everything as a messenger. As my clients bravely open themselves to this delicate, highly variable, and psychologically disruptive space, I feel at home and at ease. There is simply no other type of work I would rather be doing. I am drawn to depth-oriented modalities and present-focused experiential approaches. Is there anything more meaningful and more in the here-and-now than walking alongside your clients as they journey beyond an ordinary state of consciousness?