I’ve spent my career helping people change.

For most of my career, I trusted the tools I had been given. I trained deeply in addiction and recovery, sexuality, trauma, Internal Family Systems, cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, and transpersonal approaches, to name a few. I built a practice, supervised clinicians, and spent years helping people navigate some of the most complicated moments of their lives.

 

And when psychedelics or earth medicines entered the conversation, particularly with clients in recovery, I was often cautious. Sometimes very cautious. I understood the risks, and my own recovery made those questions deeply personal.

 

Then my life changed.

 

After eleven years of sobriety, I relapsed during a period of profound personal upheaval. What followed were several difficult years of trying to regain something I thought I already knew how to do. I returned to the practices, therapy, recovery work, and spiritual disciplines that had supported me before. And still, something was missing.

 

Eventually, my own search led me to an earth-medicine retreat in Mexico. That experience changed the trajectory of my life.

 

It did not give me a universal answer. It gave me a deeply personal one. My relationship with recovery changed. My spiritual life changed. And after a period of uncertainty about what the next chapter of my professional life would be, my direction became remarkably clear.

 

I began studying. I trained in psychedelic medicine and indigenous medicine traditions in Mexico, pursued additional education in the United States, began working more intentionally with psychedelic/earthmedicine preparation & integration, and eventually found myself on the other side of the position I had once occupied.

 

I had gone from being cautious enough to sometimes become the gatekeeper to being enthusiastic enough to sometimes become the cheerleader. Neither was sufficient.

 

What emerged was the clinical stance I now teach: a third posture—one grounded in openness without credulity, harm reduction without endorsement, curiosity without projection, and respect for transformative experience without abandoning clinical discernment.

 

And then my colleagues began calling. Clinicians and supervisees were encountering psychedelic experiences in their own caseloads and asking increasingly urgent questions: What am I supposed to do with this?

 

That question changed the direction of my work. Because I realized the edge of the map wasn’t somewhere outside our profession anymore. It was already in the therapy room.

 

Today, much of my work is devoted to helping clinicians develop the knowledge, presence, discernment, and ethical capacity to meet what is already arriving there. That is why I teach. That is why I consult. And it is why I am writing The Psychedelic Clinician.