Frequently Asked Questions

Nope. I’m excited to help folks before and after, but not during, psychedelic experiences.

I never have and never will supply psychedelic medicines.

My work is to help clients prepare for and consolidate learnings from non-ordinary states of consciousness.

I do not. Integration work is distinct from psychotherapy. Consequently, I do my best to establish and reinforce clear boundaries between what a therapist does and what and integration coach provides.

That said, integration is often optimized when a client is also seeking therapeutic guidance. This is why, as part of your integration efforts, I highly recommend to all of my clients that they seek regular mental health supports from a licensed psychotherapist, psychiatrist, analyst, social worker, marriage/family/child counselor, or other mental health professional. Such professionals’ training can be essential in the often challenging work of addressing trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and a whole host of psycho-social issues that are so common in us humans and which are often elevated during and after psychedelic journeys.

Yep. I feel like it’s the population I best understand and can most help.

Why? Because masculinity, as it is often constructed and perpetuated in the modern West, can be quite a burden to one’s growth, relationships, and positive impacts in the world. I know this because I have lived it and continue to struggle with it. I’m committed to working with men who want to go there.

“Go there”? Go where? Simply: I think we’ve been colonized, so we colonize. We’ve been abandoned, so we abandon. We’ve been harmed, so we harm. To see this inheritance is not to feel bad about ourselves but to position ourselves to release it, to be released from it.

I think it’s freedom we seek and want to give, but the systems we inhabit (and sometimes reproduce) want us stuck. We can’t get where we need to go from here. We have to leave here first, to wander, listen, stretch, expand, and grow — psychedelics can help a lot with this. And if we do the work after our journeys, we can navigate to a whole, authentic, caring, just, accountable, powerful, nimble, and thriving self.

What do you mean by “men”? Glad you asked. I identify as a cis-het male (pronouns: he, him, his) and I want to work with folks who identify (primarily) as men, whose gender and social expression is largely male. Stated another way, I am best prepared to work with people who are rooted in male identifications. This means I am fully prepped to work with clients who live in the binary, and I also welcome and embrace a whole fluid rainbow of gender identities, expressions, and sexualities as long as the client has primary associations with maleness.

So it’s all about men, then? Yes, and no. Many are waiting for us. Many need us to transform. In one way or another, you’ve likely seen the signs or heard the call. The need is urgent, which is why we must move intentionally and g o s l o w. I think we can do this because, really — we must. My question is: Will we?

Quite possibly, and maybe not. It depends on the kinds of things you are observing, learning, experiencing, and desiring. I have zero expectation that anybody’s individual psychedelic integration work will affirm or deny any specific beliefs, religions, mystical traditions, or understandings of the divine. As an integration coach, the source, means, or even the content of the insights we receive in psychedelic journeys are typically less important than their interpretation and application.

Consequently, I am as thrilled to work with clients who seek deep spiritual knowledge as I am to work with those who prefer more material inquiries and explanations. I literally don’t care what you believe, but I care a lot about how we all choose to live based on those beliefs. That’s where I think integration can be most valuable — in how we live.

It’s also why I work pretty hard to make sure I never define such experiences for you. It’s your trip, your worldview, your paradigm, your life. I just wanna help you make the most of it.

Oh man, there are a bunch. A quick list:

• Ego inflation. Expansive, euphoric, powerful experiences can convince the ego that it’s equally vast, and that can lead to an amplified sense of self and exaggerated assessments of one’s capacities. For sure, we contain multitudes, the universe is infinite and indescribably beautiful, and we may have transcended self/time/space during our journey, but psychedelic experiences can lead us to epiphanies about such things that make us feel a bit too extraordinary if not messianic. We should cherish these experiences, but we should also get real about their boundedness. Ego inflation may feel great, but it actually reduces our competence to live in the real world. Good integration takes the power and expansiveness of a psychedelic experience and helps us “keep it real,” applying it in ways that retain its magnitude without inflating our selfhood into something it’s not. In the end, we’re human, not super-human, and integration done well keeps us acquainted with both our magnificence and our humility.

• Spiritual bypassing. You know when people say “It’s God’s plan” when faced with unspeakable loss or indecipherable complexity? That’s spiritual bypassing. Likewise, folks who take psychedelic journeys can sometimes use experiences of oneness, expansiveness, messages received from the spiritual realm, contact with ancestors, the presence of entities, etc. to evade the work required to transform oneself and perhaps improve or heal one’s context and relationships. People spiritual bypass when they mystify things to escape having to do anything about them. We may all indeed be part of a singular universal oneness, and there may be other realms that shape our lives (I dunno!), but until we translate that awareness into how we live, we may be avoiding the very problems that led us to seek non-ordinary states of consciousness in the first place. That said, it’s totally okay and really kinda normal to spiritual bypass for a bit after a journey—truly, the stuff we experience can be BIG and BEYOND WORDS—as long as we eventually get to work on what it means for how we shall then live. That’s why integration is so essential.

• Addictive patterns in psychedelic intake. People who seek the extraordinary but never fully commit to the work needed to make sense of and apply it can devolve into a rapid cycling of trip after trip after trip, each perhaps as magical as the last, but with no real grounding in one’s life down here on earth. Similar to spiritual bypassing, psychedelics can promote a repetitive avoidance pattern where individuals seek to stay high as often as possible to sidestep the need to face real world experiences and problems. This can lead to an unhealthy relationship with medicine, and risky behaviors in obtaining and dosing psychedelic substances. Research has found that the quality and depth of the psychedelic experience, rather than the frequency of use, are primarily linked to psychological flexibility and overall well-being. So if you’re going to use psychedelics to expand your consciousness and/or heal and transform yourself, then you need abundant space and time in between journeys to “do the laundry.” Committing to integration ensures we don’t get caught up in the escapist trap of drugsdrugsdrugs, forever chasing the extraordinary but never translating it into the ordinary.

• Psychedelic missionaries. Without sufficient integration, we can also become creepy and annoying psychonautical evangelists. Even when our intentions are pure and we want others to get the kind of heart-opening, spirit-healing, mind-expanding, and life-changing states of consciousness we’ve experienced, we can sometimes bowl over our friends and family with our enthusiasm. Our tall tales of psychedelic journeys—particularly when they’re accompanied by spiritual bypassing or a clear lack of application in how we live better and more authentically—can alienate the very people with whom we most want to connect on that level. For real, we can sound crazy. So before you go off and shout about psychedelics to everyone you know, work hard to integrate your journeys into your own life. Rather than try to convince folks, it’s typically best to just BE the transformation you’re seeking and wait for folks to ask about it. Then, if they inquire and it’s safe, look for mellow ways to communicate what you have learned about yourself and the universe (or however you frame it) and see if they want a similar experience for themselves. If so, there’s your opening to discuss psychedelics.

• Retreat and isolation. Another risk in failing to integrate is that we can retreat into our own journeys and their lessons, isolating ourselves from the real world with endless rabbit holes of exploration and rumination. We may do this temporarily to sustain the focus needed to synthesize new knowledge and trace what it suggests about how we may choose to live—that can be a really good thing. But if the caves we explore just get deeper and further from the light of day, then we may need to force ourselves to pop back up to the surface and re-join those who miss us. If our friends and family are wondering where we went, that’s a sign we’ve been isolating and delving perhaps a bit too deep and/or tool long. If what we saw and felt in our non-ordinary state of consciousness isn’t effectively brought into our daily life, we run the risk of using psychedelics to disappear rather than show up renewed, recharged, revitalized, and ready to live/learn/love expansively.

Not even.

I am a reflector, not a director. I am a coach, not a priest.

My job, if done well, is not to be needed. If after working with me I become obsolete because you now have the tools you need to integrate your psychedelic experience yourself, then we have been successful.

Truly, it’s not about me or any claims to having a “bee-line to the dee-vine.” It’s about you and your biggest possible self.

I’m just a person who has worked hard to learn how to hold space for folks to process big ideas. I’ve done that work for a long time now, with a lot of different people in a lot of different settings. I’m now focused on holding that space for men who are processing psychedelic journeys because I find the expansiveness, learning, growing, and healing in that work to be tremendously inspiring.

So what I offer is essentially this: a safe container for exploration, personalized processes that facilitate growth, empathy for struggle and joy, motivation to persist even when it sucks, connection to ensure we’re not alone in this work, focused time and space to keep our commitments vital well after the euphoria fades, humility that I definitely do not have “the answer,” hunger for big open questions and deep respect for those who dare to ask them, sensitivity to nuance and complexity so we don’t end up too simple in our solutions, and resources to enhance our capacity to be who we are in the world as it is.

If this feels like something you want, I hope you’ll reach out.