I’ve spent much of my adult life learning how to be useful without needing to be in charge.
D.A.R.E. to Know
My relationship with psychedelics began in 1995, when a trusted friend introduced me to LSD on my 19th birthday. I was skeptical enough to spend months reading before saying yes—and curious enough that the questions psychedelics raised about consciousness, meaning and reality never really left me.
I’ve since watched a psychedelic counterculture become a movement, and a movement become an industry.
In 1998, I attended the Mind States conference in Berkeley and encountered people like Rick Doblin and Alex Grey. I remember thinking how incredible it would be if someday I could actually work in this field… and how unlikely that seemed.
Fifteen years later, I was doing exactly that.
From Wilderness Support to Psychedelic Harm Reduction
Long before psychedelic facilitation became a profession, I spent years working with young people in wilderness and experiential education. That work taught me lessons I still carry: environment matters, relationship matters, challenge isn’t necessarily harm, and people are often capable of considerably more than we imagine when given trustworthy support.
Those principles eventually found another home in psychedelic harm reduction.
For ten years, I worked with MAPS and the Zendo Project in training, onsite support and program leadership, eventually serving as Programs Manager. I helped build and support teams caring for people navigating difficult psychedelic experiences in the decidedly uncontrolled environments of festivals and events.
Those spaces taught me something that continues to shape my work:
Good support isn’t measured by how much you do. Sometimes expertise is knowing when not to intervene.
A person crying isn’t necessarily a problem to solve. Confusion doesn’t always require interpretation. Discomfort isn’t synonymous with danger. And the person supporting a psychedelic experience doesn’t need to become the most important person in it.
From Harm Reduction to Regulated Psychedelics
As psychedelics have moved from underground communities and research settings toward regulated practice, I’ve continued moving with the field.
I completed Colorado psilocybin facilitator training and practicum through InnerTrek and entered Colorado’s regulated natural-medicine ecosystem. I now work with individuals while also mentoring emerging facilitators and developing educational approaches to psychedelic support.
The professionalization of psychedelics brings extraordinary opportunities. It also raises questions I believe are worth protecting:
How do we become more skilled without becoming more controlling?
How do we provide meaningful support without creating dependence?
How do we honor expertise while preserving participant sovereignty?
How do we know when to help—and when to get out of the way?
Those questions became Psychedelic Butler.
Why a Butler?
The participant is the hero of their own experience.
My job isn’t to tell another person what their psychedelic experience means, where it should take them, or who they should become because of it.
My role is closer to Alfred than Batman: prepare carefully, anticipate needs, maintain safety, offer perspective when useful, tend to what needs tending—and remember whose story this actually is.
I don’t claim to be your guru, shaman, healer or interpreter.
I’m human: experienced, fallible, attentive, curious and committed to becoming increasingly skillful at supporting another person’s process without making it mine.
What I Bring
Two decades of psychedelic experience and community practice.
My relationship with psychedelics began in 1995 and has included personal exploration, community practice, harm reduction, education and professional support.
A decade with MAPS and the Zendo Project.
Training, onsite psychedelic support, team leadership, program development and years spent alongside people navigating experiences that didn’t necessarily go according to plan.
A foundation in wilderness and experiential education.
Years of learning how environment, relationship, appropriate challenge and human resilience interact.
Colorado-regulated psilocybin training.
Facilitator training and practicum through InnerTrek, bringing lessons from community harm reduction into a rapidly professionalizing field.
Mentorship and education.
Supporting emerging facilitators in developing not simply more techniques, but greater discernment, humility, boundaries and capacity for relationship.
Stewardship, Not Certainty
Psychedelics aren’t necessary for a meaningful, examined or spiritually rich life.
Sometimes the right answer is yes.
Sometimes it’s not yet.
Sometimes it’s not again.
I don’t believe psychedelic stewardship means convincing people to have psychedelic experiences. It means helping people develop the information, relationships, discernment and sovereignty necessary to make their own choices—and supporting them responsibly when those choices include psychedelics.
The medicine may open the door.
You decide whether to walk through it.
A Psychedelic Butler simply holds the lantern.