I am a core faculty member for the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI), specializing 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 address cultural appropriation and how to recognize and dismantle internalized colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy so that we may better examine culturally appropriative practices within today's culture and the psychedelic zeitgeist. 

My Work as an Educator and Trainer

As an educator and trainer, I have delivered a number of talks for the professional psychedelic community through the Nowak Society and other guest lectures, including the importance of psychedelic facilitator ethics through the lens of existential shadow work as a main stage speaker at the Emergence Festival in 2022. I co-teach introductory psychedelic therapy workshops with colleagues at An Enduring Love, and am a co-founder and lead trainer for Elemental Psychedelics.

While many practitioners now offer ketamine-assisted therapy, my practice specializes in blending the depth of the work with psychedelics in a therapeutic model that values the therapeutic relationship.  As ketamine-assisted therapy started gaining traction in the field, a true therapeutic approach was not being utilized frequently in many clinics. Most individuals, for example, were only receiving KAP and getting ketamine within a brief therapy model or going to clinics that were simply administering IV ketamine without the addition of therapy. The way I have practiced with ketamine was not happening on a large scale - and this is something I wanted to change. I was also finding extreme value in tapping into my non-clinical earth-based ritual training, offering more ceremonial components during KAP sessions as a way to help clients connect with the depth work available to them and deepening the potential for a more psycho-spiritual journey. 

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.