Why integrate?
You received some big stuff on your trip — integration is the process of doing good things with it after you get back. As a psychedelic integration coach, I help you do that.
Whether your psychedelic journey was euphoric or agonizing (or both, or neither), the things you experienced in it deserve your focused attention and application when you return to the day-to-day. If you want to learn from your journey, integration is essential. And like any new activity in which we want to do well, a good coach can be a game-changer.
A definition: “Integration is a process in which a person revisits and actively engages in making sense of, working through, translating, and processing the content of their psychedelic experience. Through intentional effort and supportive practices, this process allows one to gradually capture and incorporate the emergent lessons and insights into their lives, thus moving toward greater balance and wholeness, both internally (mind, body, and spirit) and externally (lifestyle, social relations, and the natural world).”
— Synthesized from Bathje, Majeski, & Kudowor, 2022:
What is integration coaching?
Psychedelic integration coaching is structured support to help you move from exploration to transformation before and after experiencing a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Trying to muddle alone through the meaning-making and life-changing insights you gained from a psychedelic journey can be pretty rough. We weren’t meant to do this stuff solo. Having a coach who can listen, reflect, help you recognize stuck areas, work with you to identify goals, and supply personalized exercises and resources to accelerate learning and maximize outcomes can ensure the transcendent becomes transformational.
One important distinction: Psychedelic integration coaching is not psychotherapy. I do not provide therapeutic or medical services. Clients with medical, psychiatric, or psychological conditions and/or challenging life circumstances requiring licensed intervention should seek such care from professionals qualified to provide it. See the FAQ for more info about this.
Meet Eric
Academic Credentials & Expertise
I have 33+ years of experience in the investigation, cultivation, and preservation of learning environments that promote individual’s self-directed growth. I have a bachelors degree, a teaching credential, and a masters degree in education, all from UC Santa Barbara, and I have a masters degree in theological studies, and a doctorate in education, both from Harvard. I have written or co-written three books and have authored scores of research and practitioner articles in the field of education. As a university professor, nonprofit leader, and consultant, I have worked with a variety of students, interns, and clients around the country. In my varied roles and projects over the years, I have always focused on what people need to optimize their learning and growth.
In 2024, I completed the psychedelic integration training provided by the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS). That course and my instructor, Marc Aixala, showed me how to take my experience and training in adult development, culturally sustaining pedagogies, interviewing techniques, hermeneutical and constructivist philosophies, theological inquiry, and instructional design and apply it in my work as an integration coach. Certificate on file.
ICEERS Training
I live in the Wood River Valley of Idaho. I’m in my late 50s, and I’m a husband, dad, coffee drinker, avid reader, mountain biker, occasional paraglider pilot, skilled shirt ironer, and wannabe drummer. I have a 3YO boy, so my Magna-Tiles skills are rad. I really like cookies. I’m still trying every day to figure out how best to live, but I find the best connections to others, ourselves, and our world are made when our biggest questions are wide open.
Life Stuff
What’s my approach?
I focus on the moves you can make to optimize the benefits from your psychedelic experiences. I won’t tell you what your psychedelic journeys mean — that’s for you to discern. What I do is help you to prepare for them, make sense of them for yourself, then translate your new knowledge into actionable steps you can use to transform your daily existence. You’ll likely have a bunch of new things you want to think about and do after a psychedelic experience — I can help to translate those into goals and behaviors.
Like any good coach, my job is mostly to listen, observe, reflect, suggest, support, and supply resources and exercises to help you get better at whatever you want to improve. It’s about your meaning-making, your intentions, your epiphanies, your moves.
I can’t wait to see what you’ll do!
How do I work with clients?
I advocate a flexible, individualized, 3-phase process: Planning, Processing, and Transforming.
The planning phase involves a tight set of activities that help one open to medicine and prepare for the psychedelic experience. Safety and intentionality are prioritized here, as is the cultivation of a good coaching alliance where trust, healthy risk-taking, playful experimentation, and collaborative goal-setting are foundational. Getting ready is often half the fun!
The processing phase happens when people immerse themselves in the expansiveness, epiphany, and perhaps even the pain they brought back from their non-ordinary state of consciousness. This is when we make meaning of it all, practice new (or very old) ways of working with it, and observe what different approaches do for us. We gotta use it or we lose it!
The transforming phase is composed by the choreography of new moves, and the consolidation of knowledge drawn from the psychedelic journey. Here we should realize the achievement of goals and have good reason to celebrate and deepen our commitments. An oft-repeated mantra can help anchor us here: It’s not so much about “feeling better,” but about “getting better at feeling.”
In general, my coaching work across these phases is primarily to inquire, listen, tend, suggest, and strategically resource clients to optimize both the pace and outcomes of their psychedelic integration. Please see the FAQ for more details about what this often entails.