Meet Our Founder, Dori Lewis

(she/her)


LPC-S, MA, EdM

Hi, I’m Dori. Welcome to my bio page and welcome to Reflective Healings’ internet face. As the founder of Reflective Healing (RH) in Fort Collins, CO, I want to share a bit about who I am, how RH came to be, and what the intention was and is behind this creation. 

After graduating from Columbia University with a dual masters in psychology and education, I worked with deeply traumatized communities in New York, NY and Westchester County. From a severely underserved and disenfranchised community in Brooklyn, to foster children and fractured families in southern Westchester, I got my early clinical experience in the trenches of mental health care. 

After years of devoting myself to serving these communities, I finally took the leap and left my family, my culture and everything familiar to try to breathe out here in Colorado in the fall of 2016. Although the beginning of my transition was rocky and at times, deeply painful, I eventually found community, purpose and a sense of home here in Fort Collins.

Then, in 2018, after a four-month solo backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, I started my very own practice: Reflective Healing. It was always my dream to have my own, little practice where I could serve in the ways that felt authentic and purposeful to me. 

Why Reflective Healing? Because I realized, after studying Buddhist books for almost three years, that as I was healing my own soul and becoming a more integrated person, I noticed that my clients were healing with me. As I grew and brought new material and a higher vibrational frequency to my own field, I began to see the people who worked with me begin to meet that energy. 

Through my own psychospiritual work with psychedelics, therapy, and community healing, I was allowing for more of the parts of myself to coexist within me, and around me, in a container of compassion and acceptance. And as I did this with more and more parts of myself – shadows and all – I was seeing myself more and more able to hold a larger container for those parts of my clients, with equanimity and acceptance. From that realization, Reflective Healing was born.

From that first seed, a beautiful garden has been growing slowly and steadily. Then, when I started to offer Ketamine therapy within the context of quality talk therapy, ethical and safe relationship and ongoing connection, weaving ceremony and ritual into these journeys, my practice bloomed. As more and more clients began seeking this type of psychedelic therapy (it was really not the standard of care at that time), I knew I could no longer hold this practice alone and I needed support. I knew I needed to build community with other like-minded providers who were steadily doing their own healing work, and who were committed to building strong relational containers with their clients. That’s when I started to find and connect with a few incredible providers who I not only wanted to work alongside, but I admired and respected deeply as colleagues. 

Now, in 2025, I’ve grown and continue to evolve as I integrate more of life and myself, changing with age, learning, and experiencing loss and love. And so has Reflective Healing. Today, Reflective Healing is the first micro-healing center in Fort Collins, and although it remains a relatively small, boutique private practice with the same values I started it with…it’s also evolving. We are so excited to be able to offer mushroom therapy as part of our counseling toolbox, and we are looking forward to what the future holds.

A little about me from the psychedelic medicine experience perspective: 

  • To date, I have stewarded nearly 100 ketamine therapy sessions and countless more individual and group ceremonies

  • I have been in a student/teacher relationship with a mushroom medicine elder from the Mazatec region of Oaxaca in Mexico since the summer of 2022

  • In that same year, I completed the MDMA MAPS part A training component and in 2023 received the second and final part of my MDMA MAPS certification as an investigator on the phase 3 crossover study

  • I have also received shamanic journey training from Sandra Ingerman

  • I worked “underground” doing mushroom work starting in 2018 and have stewarded well over 150 mushroom journeys, including group retreats, group circles and 1:1 sessions

My Public Work

My public work in the psychedelic space is critically centered on the topics of ethics, access, and power in psychedelic spaces, diversity, equity, and inclusion in the psychedelic psychotherapy space, and cultural appropriation as it relates to ritual and ceremony. As I continue to step away from full-time clinical practice, my passions have moved me to serve as an educator and steward of the emerging specialty of psychedelic therapy in all the clinical and non-clinical spaces where this work shows up.

In 2022, Dr. Shannon Hughes and I co-founded Elemental Psychedelics, a DORA approved (Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies) psilocybin mushroom facilitator licensure program. Through Elemental, we aim to combine classroom education, firsthand medicine experiences, clinical supervision and personal coaching, community connection, and a variety of special topic retreat offerings so that our students may anchor clearly into their own powerful creation using psychedelic therapy. Before starting Elemental, I was a core/lead faculty member for the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI), where I specialized in teaching new and experienced clinicians about set and setting, ceremony, and ritual within a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy model. Alongside content about authentic ritual and ceremony, I was the first faculty member to introduce the topic of cultural appropriation and how to recognize internalized colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. My aim was to bring these hard conversations to the forefront of the psychedelic education sector so that we as a community would begin to examine culturally misappropriative practices within today's culture and the psychedelic zeitgeist. 

My story and my work have been featured on a number of podcasts and online news sources:

My Personal Experience With Psychedelics

In my personal life, I have been using psychedelics for spiritual and existential exploration for nearly two decades. I have been exposed to both the light and dark of the psychic landscape and have sat with teacher plants in traditional medicine spaces, medicinal substances in therapeutic spaces, and recreational drugs in social spaces. Life has always filled me with a sense of curiosity. As a child, I knew there was more to see and understand about the experience of being human, and I was frustrated with the way religion and philosophy offered more of a conceptual framework than an embodied one. At an early age, I began crawling my way down the only rabbit hole I came across that seemed to scratch the surface of my curiosity and desire to know life more intimately; this is when I began to experiment with psychedelics. 

My playful, sometimes ungrounded, experimentation allowed me to touch beauty and also chaos and pain. My relationship with psychedelics forced me to tap into deep-seeded material which I struggled to integrate into my real life. It was here that I discovered for myself the powerful nature of plant medicines and psychedelics to open our access to deep healing – when in intentional and reciprocal relationship with the medicine – or open us to chaotic and confusing information that is challenging to integrate when not in right relationship with the medicine.

I have come to deeply value a slow and embodied approach to working with plant and psychedelic medicines – an approach that moves us from the conceptual into the body, into an integrated life. And I have come to honor all the pathways that bring us to our own right relationship with medicine paths.

As interest in psychedelic medicine continues to grow, I feel it is the responsibility of those who have a voice in our professional and psychedelic communities to stay informed and intercept and challenge disinformation and questionably ethical practices that are being put out into the public arena. Our own training program, Elemental Psychedelics, is the latest birthing: a women-led training center providing training through a feminine lens by guiding facilitators to tap into their own unique offerings and their own sense of right relationship in the psychedelic space. 

 Advanced Training, Experience & Associations

  • Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in the state of Colorado

  • Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor  in the state of Colorado

  • Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in the state of New York.

  • Bachelor's Degree from Muhlenberg College in Psychology

  • Dual Masters Degree from Columbia University in MA Psychology and MEd Counseling

  • Member of the Psi Chi International Honor Society during graduate studies at Columbia. 

  • Certified through PRATI (Psychedelic Research and Training Institute) in Ketamine and Psychedelic Medicine. 

  • PRATI Lead faculty and educator

  • Member of Sandra Ingerman’s course study on Ancient Practices of Shamanic Journeying.

  • MDMA MAPS Trained

  • CIIS Sex Therapy Certification Training