My Story

Thank you for your interest in my work. I am a licensed psychotherapist with 18 years of experience working in trauma healing and mental health.

My journey with Ayahuasca began when I closed down my therapy practice in San Francisco in 2012, sold everything I had and went on a multi-year around-the-world trip. At the time, I felt I had reached a plateau in my work and my life and I took an extended sabbatical to explore a new chapter.

In the course of my travels I did intensive meditation retreats in Thailand and Myanmar, explored shamanic healing practices in Tibet and India and eventually made my way to the Peruvian Amazon. Little did I know that my first Ayahuasca retreat would completely alter the course of my life.

Within 6 months of that first retreat, I moved to Peru, and then spent the next 3 years living, breathing and working with ayahuasca plant medicine. In that time, I began a formal shamanic apprenticeship with a traditional ayahuasquero and I did a dozen shamanic plant medicine diets with many other medicine trees that are part of the vegetalismo healing tradition in the Peruvian Amazon. I eventually learned how to facilitate ceremonies and guide people through intense and powerful experiences in ceremony. I also helped lead large ayahuasca retreats with as many as 40 participants, some who stayed with us for weeks at a time as they delved deeply into their personal work and cultivated a spiritual path.

When I returned to the United States in 2018, I knew that I could not go back to doing traditional psychotherapy ever again. My experiences with Ayahuasca had profoundly changed how I understood trauma, wounding, healing and the relationship between our minds, our bodies and our energy systems.

So I studied and learned new modalities that also involve altered states of consciousness that allow us to go a lot deeper than simply talking about things. Tools like hypnosis, shamanic journeying, EMDR, parts-work, somatic approaches, and other kinds of journey work that can be done in a counseling or therapeutic setting. I draw on these tools and all of my experiences with ayahuasca when helping people to integrate their ayahuasca ceremonies.