Every journey begins with a possibility.

Couples Soul Dance

I have spent most of my life curious about what allows human beings to truly see each other.

Long before psychedelics became part of the conversation, transformation was my life's work.

For more than three decades, I have had the extraordinary privilege of training people around the world in transformation - watching human beings discover that the stories, defenses and patterns they had lived inside for years were not necessarily where their lives had to end.

And for nearly two decades, I have had a particular love affair with couples.

Because there may be nowhere that our humanity becomes more visible than inside a long-term relationship.

We fall in love and we genuinely see one another. And then life happens.

Children. Careers. Success. Disappointment. Sex. Money. Exhaustion. Family. Loss. Aging. Unspoken hurts. Expectations. The thousand tiny moments that accumulate between two people who once could not imagine wanting anything more than simply being together.

Slowly, almost invisibly, we begin protecting ourselves from the very person we most want to reach us.

This is the dance.

And that became the foundation of my Couples Retreats and eventually my book, The Birds and Bees of Joyful Monogamy.

I have witnessed couples who had not truly heard one another in years finally hear the feeling beneath the words.

I have celebrated people recognizing that the argument they had been having for twenty years was never really about the thing they thought they were arguing about.

I have been inspired as armor came down, piece by piece.

I have been humbled watching two people look across a room and suddenly see the person they once chose, and then have the courage to choose again.

And through all of it, one question has continued to intrigue me: What allows us to get underneath the defenses that keep us separated from one another?

That question eventually led me here.

Medicine did not create my work with couples

My work with couples led me to become curious about medicine.

That distinction matters to me and it makes all the difference.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a Master's degree in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a background in transpersonal psychology. I have spent decades studying transformation, consciousness, relationship, trauma, communication and the remarkable ways human beings protect themselves.

And I have tremendous respect for what I still do not know.

My relationship with indigenous wisdom began long before I had language for it. I was raised as a white child alongside Ojibwe culture in Northern Wisconsin, and grew up with an appreciation for a worldview in which relationship - to community, land, spirit and one another - was woven into life differently than it was in much of the world around me.

Today my husband is indigenous and a Curandero, and my respect for medicine traditions continues to deepen.

I approach these medicines with that history in my bones. I am humble in my curiosity and always reverent for the wisdom within each of us.

I am mindful and grateful for the cultures that carried medicine traditions long before our contemporary culture rediscovered them in this fourth revival.

At the same time, I am present that all medicine must be approached with a clinical understanding that powerful experiences deserve thoughtful preparation, appropriate screening, a carefully held container and meaningful integration afterward.

Because the medicine is not the relationship

You are. Your partner is. Your history is. Your nervous systems are.

Your promises, disappointments, dreams, sexuality, wounds, laughter, defenses and extraordinary capacity to love one another are.

Medicine may sometimes create a window through which two people can see and hear each other differently.

The couple still has to walk through it together.

That is where I believe my life's work belongs.

I am far less interested in creating an extraordinary extraordinary-state experience than I am in what happens afterward.

Can you hear each other differently?

Can you interrupt the dance you have practiced for ten, twenty or thirty more years and enter a new one?

Can you recognize when an old wound is speaking instead of the person standing in front of you?

Can you remain present when every instinct says defend, withdraw, fix, attack or disappear?

Into the next heated conflict?

Into parenting, when a teenager is attempting to pivot you against each other?

Into Tuesday morning with dogs barking, the car and your inner fuel tank both on empty?

Before you say yes

Questions worth asking about couples, psychedelics, safety and transformation.

I love my partner. I am also scared. Is that a reason to stop?

This is a beautiful opening question because your answer can be: fear deserves information, curiosity and respect, not persuasion. Both partners need an authentic yes. This may be listening inward and choosing from what you want with courage.

Will I lose control?

Psychedelics can alter perception, cognition and emotional experience substantially, and responses vary between people. You may experience less of your usual control over what arises. That is different from losing yourself. Part of preparation is building enough safety that you do not have to fight every feeling, memory or insight that appears.

What if I say something I can never take back?

Altered openness is not a courtroom deposition. An insight arising during an experience can be explored later when both people are ready to be in inquiry and discovery. Revelation does not automatically equal fact.

What if my partner discovers they do not want to be married to me?

I think that this is probably lurking underneath a surprising number of hesitations. The purpose of doing this work is not to force particular relationship outcomes. A responsible container makes room for truth, compassion and integration rather than extracting decisions during an expanded state of consciousness. Usually the answer is far more nuanced and not black and white.

Will the love and connection we experience be real, or just the drug?

The feelings can be entirely real while the state is chemically facilitated. The meaningful question is what remains accessible afterward. Integration tests the insight. Life tests the love.

Can psychedelics become addictive?

Classic psychedelics have a comparatively low potential for dependence. One widely cited population study found that approximately 4.9% of people who had used psychedelics met criteria for dependence, the lowest rate among the drug categories examined. More recent research using the broader diagnosis of hallucinogen use disorder has also found that the large majority of people who use hallucinogens do not develop a use disorder.

Could difficult memories or trauma surface?

Yes, and that possibility is precisely why screening, preparation, support and integration matter. Johns Hopkins emphasizes that encouraging clinical safety findings come from carefully screened people in highly controlled supportive settings, and should not simply be generalized to recreational or unscreened use. Difficult or traumatic memories impact your life and choice, whether or not you are conscious of them.

What if one of us has a beautiful experience and the other does not?

Couples often compare. Why did you not feel what I felt? Why were you not as open? That is fertile ground for shame and interpretation. Two nervous systems do not owe one another identical journeys. And all good for unpacking.

What if nothing profound happens?

Wonderful question. Psychedelic culture can inadvertently create performance anxiety around having a breakthrough, mystical experience or life-changing revelation. Nothing has gone wrong because fireworks did not happen. There is always powerful observation and discovery with or without fireworks.

Can one experience really change a relationship?

This becomes your doorway to the distinction I have taught forever: experience versus transformation. An extraordinary weekend is an experience. Transformation is what gets practiced Tuesday morning when the dishes are in the sink and somebody feels unheard.

Why preparation? Why can we not simply have the experience?

Because the medicine is not the curriculum. Preparation creates language, agreements, intention and safety. The couples MDMA literature and research specifically identifies setting, shared intentions, communication skills and subsequent integration as important elements of the relational container.

What actually changes between couples?

A particularly useful peer-reviewed paper identifies eight proposed relational pathways in MDMA-assisted couple therapy: empathy, communication, social connection and support, non-avoidance, openness, attachment and safety, bonding and social intimacy, and relationship satisfaction.

Who should not do this?

It is critical that you be forthcoming with past and present mental health concerns, or cardiovascular concerns, as well as the medicines and supplements that you take, if you are pregnant or have any other health concerns as you consider this experience. This is not to say that you cannot participate in this work, but for your safety and well-being, clarity and conversations need to occur. And possibly some other preparation or only the use of certain medicines may be indicated.

Breakthrough by Design

There is a wonderful story in Stealing Fire, by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, about teams at Google using altered-state practices to work differently together. The book moves through Navy SEALs, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, athletes, artists and researchers, all exploring a similar question: Are there states of consciousness in which we have access to information, creativity or perspectives that simply are not available in our ordinary way of thinking?

That question has stayed with me. And more than that, the possibility of what is being researched and discovered has inspired me.

James Fadiman has spent decades exploring another version of it. In The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, he writes about people preparing very deliberately for an experience - thinking beforehand about questions that they want to explore, creating the right setting, with skilled support nearby and then giving real attention afterward to what was revealed.

This is not about the journey - it is about what someone brings back.

Over decades now, there are documented research and stories of people suddenly seeing a business problem differently, understanding a relationship from an entirely different perspective, recognizing a pattern they have repeated for years, having a creative idea arrive almost whole, or realizing that the question they had been trying so hard to answer was not actually the important question.

That is the territory I want to explore with you in Breakthrough by Design.

Imagine five or six people coming together. Entrepreneurs, founders, creators and people who are genuinely curious about a specific challenge they are facing. People with enough life experience to know that thinking harder does not always get us somewhere new.

Before we ever meet in person, we begin with candid transparency, giving each other a window into our unique challenges and how we approach our world.

The magic is in the fact that those gathered are not experts in your field, they have their own areas of expertise and blind spots. But they can serve you simply through witnessing how you process, see things and where your mind wants to settle.

What are you working on - right now?

Where have you turned the challenge round and round and still cannot see it from another perspective?

What decision has kept you stuck?

Do you feel like something is slightly hidden and you cannot quite get to it - the breakthrough on the other side?

Sometimes someone has a very specific question.

Sometimes they simply have a sense that there is more to see other than the problem.

That is the initial meeting - in inquiry.

Because after 35 years of working with over a hundred thousand people in transformational environments, I am clear the experience begins long before the experience.

Then we come together on at the start of the intensive, to begin to see through a different lens, in a journey that supports seeing each other fully, and hearing each other's feedback from a open place. No defenses. No posturing. No artificial small talk.

If, on Day One, you say that you have been trying to decide whether to sell the company you spent twelve years building, I want everyone in that room to understand what that question means to you.

If another person has an idea they cannot quite get their hands around, I want us to hear and see where the real struggle is.

If someone says, Everything in my life is working and I have absolutely no idea why I'm restless, I know that each person will hear that inquiry from a place that is usually unavailable.

Day Two is the exploration day.

There is zero of ordinary life competing for your attention. No phones. No computers. Nowhere else to be.

Music. Pacing. Support. Your station at the ready.

And you enter an extraordinary state of consciousness with an intention, while remaining open to the possibility that something entirely different may want your attention.

That distinction matters to me. You ask a question without demanding the answer.

You can have an intention without controlling the journey.

People sometimes describe solutions appearing from directions they would never have consciously considered. Others report seeing connections between things that had seemed completely unrelated. Sometimes there is an encounter with an old memory that suddenly changes the meaning of something happening today. Sometimes the discovery is surprisingly practical.

And sometimes the big revelation is wonderfully simple, like, I have known this for years. I just finally saw it.

Sunday morning, we gather a day's work - a lifetime's work.

Over coffee. Over breakfast. Sitting outside if the weather cooperates, we are present with each other.

What did you see?

What surprised you?

What feels important this morning?

What are you less certain about?

What suddenly feels clear?

And then we start looking at what any of it means in the world you are returning to. That is where the word Design came from for me.

An extraordinary experience can be fascinating. A beautiful insight can remain a beautiful insight.

I am interested in what happens when you bring something home.

Maybe you finally make the decision.

Maybe you redesign something.

Maybe you have the conversation.

Maybe you abandon the project.

Maybe you start one.

Maybe nothing happens immediately and three weeks later something you saw on Saturday suddenly makes complete sense.

There is research beginning to help us understand some of this. Scientists have observed changes in communication between brain networks during psychedelic states, including patterns involving the default mode network - the system frequently associated with our ongoing sense of self and our familiar internal narrative. Researchers are also studying psychological flexibility, changes in perspective and the unusual associations people sometimes make in these states.

Studies have not simply found that people enter an altered state and instantly become more creative. Some measures of creativity actually become less predictable during the acute experience.

What appears more interesting is what can happen to perspective, association and flexibility - and what may continue unfolding afterward.

That feels much closer to what I have witnessed in all transformational work: Breakthrough rarely arrives according to schedule.

You create conditions, prepare well, ask valuable questions and surround yourself with people capable of listening deeply.

Then, in unfamiliar territory, you pay attention.

That is Breakthrough by Design.

A very small group of interesting humans getting unusually curious about what they have not been able to see yet.

Foundations of a Family

When I was just completing high school my dad and stepmother decided they were getting a divorce. I was the youngest in the family, and it was clear that the handwriting was on the wall for quite a while.

Dad was rarely home and my stepmother was in therapy. When they were together, there was a lot of loud arguments and drinking. My six older brothers and sisters were already out of the house, but I had a front row seat to the upsets.

And this was a family that had already endured five years of courts deciding the custody case between my dad and mom, when I was eight years.

Another divorce and dividing a family that had already been through hell and back to create a real feeling of family. That was when I contacted by brothers and sisters and decided we should start the FAMILY FEELING FOUNDATION.

I wanted us to remain a real family, connected and loving, even if our parents were no longer that.

I could feel the places where we had joined loosening, and our parents attempting to have one side or another. It was breaking my heart.

We have held on to each other in most cases, and we have lost a few, which my FFF was attempting to prevent. It is out of this that I wanted to create a special Journey for Families to journey towards and with each other, and not away from each other with the pulls of our busy lives.

Journeying Together

I have given a little of my own family history as a way to acknowledge that all families carry history. There is no such thing as a perfect family, which is partly how we become who we are in the world.

Years of birthdays, arguments, vacations, divorces, celebrations, disappointments, inside jokes, old hurts, births, deaths, things that were said and things everyone quietly agreed to stop talking about.

And through all of it, we develop roles.

The responsible one.

The difficult one.

The successful one.

The caretaker.

The scapegoat.

The black sheep.

The peacekeeper.

The one who left.

The one who stayed.

And if you have ever sat down together to discuss events that occurred or arguments, you know that everyone has a completely different recollection of what occurred and an entirely different perspective.

Years later, everyone may be grown, living entirely separate lives, and still find themselves stepping right back into those roles when the family comes together.

Usually there is at least one person in a family who reaches a point where they want something different. The disrupter.

It may happen because the children are grown and there is finally enough distance to look back and question.

Perhaps years of therapy or personal work have made one or several family members curious about another way of being together.

Sometimes life makes the invitation considerably more immediate - a serious diagnosis, a death, a marriage, a new generation entering the family, or simply the realization that time is moving faster than we had ever imagined.

Sometimes everyone is simply tired of loving one another from opposite sides of a chasm, which has become even more apparent with the political divide in the United States of America. A divide that has many families not speaking to each other.

Foundations of a Family is a carefully prepared and supported journey for families who want to meet one another differently.

The intention is not to decide who remembers childhood correctly.

It is not to conduct a trial of Mom and Dad, or Stepparent and real parent, or any other configuration of families.

It is not to force forgiveness or manufacture closeness.

The invitation is much simpler and perhaps more challenging: Can we become curious about one another again? Like we were as children.

Do you remember when you did not really care what your sister or brother thought about something you loved. You loved them and that was enough.

Before anything happens together, I meet individually with each family member to understand what each person is bringing to the journey - because we all have baggage that has been packed for quite some time.

What happened in this family from their perspective?

What still hurts?

What do they wish the others understood?

What are they afraid might happen?

And importantly, does each person genuinely want to be here and understand the possibility?

Everyone completes screening and intake independently. Contraindications are reviewed. Expectations, intentions, safety and safety protocols are established beforehand.

There is also preparation together.

Because a family enters the room carrying much more than individual intention - there is an intention of the whole.

We begin looking at some of that system before the journey ever begins.

What happens when someone disagrees?

Who moves toward conflict and who moves away?

Who takes responsibility for everyone else's feelings?

Where does listening stop?

What happens in your body when your father says that thing?

What happens when your daughter looks at you that way?

And can we begin noticing those reactions before automatically becoming them?

The journey itself takes place within a deliberately constructed setting with experienced support and considerable preparation behind it.

And each person will have the support of tools to support in hearing with the heart.

You will have the support of inner guides that have defenses loosen with an openness to really seeing and hearing what is occurring.

One family member may encounter grief.

Another may understand something about a parent they have never understood.

Someone may see the cost of a role they have played for thirty years.

Someone may simply experience their brother, sister, mother, father or grown child outside the story through which they have known them.

There may be laughter.

There may be tenderness.

There may be things that finally get said.

And there may be long stretches where very little needs to be said at all.

On the final day we come back together to put words to what happened and what was seen and heard.

What do you understand differently, and from here, what would each person like the family to know?

What feels like it does not need to be spoken?

And what might we begin creating from here?

Because a powerful experience does not erase family history. It is the work afterwards that really matters.

There is structured integration during the first five days, written reflection, individual input, family support and continued connection through a private chat (this one with guidelines for connection instead of divisiveness).

The family meets again online for integration during the following month.

The question gradually changes to Who do we want to become with one another now?

Perhaps the greatest possibility is not creating the family everyone wishes they had thirty years ago. It is discovering the family that might still be possible today.

Private or Semi-Private Deep Dive

There are moments when a person understands their pattern completely because they have worked on that pattern for years.

They know where it began.

They have talked about it in therapy and at trainings.

They have read the books, meditated, gone to ashrams and still it lingers.

They can explain their attachment pattern, identify the childhood experience beneath it and recognize the moment their nervous system begins doing the thing it has always done.

And then it does it again. And the same voice echoes from within with the same tired but convincing refrain:

I am not enough.

Something is wrong with me.

They are going to leave me.

No matter what I do, it is not going to be good enough.

I do not matter.

No one loves me.

The frustrating part is that another part of them already knows these statements are not true, and they have lives that prove it is not true.

This work begins in that gap.

What happens when insight has arrived, but the old internal pattern continues to organize experience?

Private and Semi-Private Intensives for the Self are designed as carefully prepared explorations of that territory.

The intention is not to eliminate the personality, abandon ordinary identity or remain in an extraordinary state.

We need an ego. We need continuity.

We need to know where the car keys are, what time the meeting begins, which people we love and which body belongs to us.

The possibility is something subtler:

For a period of time, can the grip of the familiar story soften enough for another experience of yourself to become available?

You may already know intellectually that you are enough, but what would happen if, for a while, you experienced yourself without organizing everything around the possibility that you are not?

That is where this work begins.

The extraordinary state creates an opening. What you build through that opening becomes the work.

The following day matters.

The first five days matter.

And up to 21 days there is an opportunity of neuroplasticity where you can implement different thoughts, actions and experiences.

Yes it is practice with your thoughts, speaking and doing.

Because the goal is not simply to have an extraordinary experience.

It is to return to an ordinary Tuesday morning and discover that the old story has a little less authority over your life.

Default Mode Network and ego loosening - core research

One of the earliest modern imaging studies came from Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues in 2012. In healthy volunteers receiving psilocybin, researchers found decreased activity and connectivity in important brain hubs, including the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, both central parts of the DMN.

A 2015 study looked directly at the neuroscience of ego dissolution. Fifteen healthy participants received psilocybin or placebo during fMRI. Stronger reports of ego dissolution were associated with reduced connectivity between medial temporal regions and higher cortical regions, disruption within the salience network, and altered communication across brain systems. In English: there was an experience of softening of ordinary ideas about the self that corresponded with measurable changes in how the networks were communicating. A loosening.

In 2022, Daws and colleagues studied people treated with psilocybin for depression and found that normally segregated functional networks became more globally integrated and flexible following treatment. Greater network integration was associated with improvement in depression.

Then came the particularly important 2024 Nature study. Researchers repeatedly scanned participants before, during and after psilocybin and found widespread brain-network desynchronization. The largest acute effects occurred in the Default Mode Network. Boundaries separating normally distinct networks became less pronounced, and changes in network organization tracked the intensity of participants subjective psychedelic experience. Even more interestingly, reduced connectivity between the anterior hippocampus and DMN remained detectable for weeks afterward.

So a useful model is: Ordinary consciousness - relatively stable networks help maintain a coherent self, personal history, beliefs, expectations and predictions.

Extraordinary state: some of those boundaries temporarily become less rigid; familiar patterns of self-processing lose some of their dominance; communication across networks changes.

Afterward: the brain returns toward ordinary organization, while some changes in connectivity and psychological perspective may persist.

The grip of what we believe is me and fixed ideas about ourselves loosen.

Neuroplasticity: the possibility of new pathways

There is another research stream that belongs directly beside the DMN work: psychedelics appear capable of promoting forms of neural plasticity.

In a landmark 2018 Cell Reports paper, Calvin Ly and colleagues showed that several serotonergic psychedelics increased structural and functional plasticity in cortical neurons, including neurite growth, dendritic spine formation and synaptic function in preclinical models.

Then Yale researchers were able to watch structural changes occur in living mouse brains after a single psilocybin exposure. Within 24 hours, dendritic spine density and size in frontal cortical neurons increased by approximately 10%. Importantly, a portion of those new structural changes was still present one month later.

That does not mean a human belief such as I am unlovable is literally replaced by a new dendritic spine. The research does support something more subtle and potentially much more important: the nervous system may temporarily enter a state in which established patterns become more modifiable.

Plasticity by itself is not healing.

Plasticity means change is more possible.

What a person experiences, practices, reinforces, relates to and chooses during and following that period may matter tremendously.

Mystical experience and enduring change

The strongest argument that depth of experience matters comes from the clinical studies of people facing life-threatening cancer.

In the Johns Hopkins randomized trial, 51 cancer patients with significant depression or anxiety received either a very-low-dose or high-dose psilocybin session. High-dose psilocybin produced substantial decreases in depression, anxiety and death anxiety, while increasing quality of life, meaning and optimism.

At six months: 78% continued to show a clinically significant antidepressant response. 83% continued to show a clinically significant anxiety response. Depression remission was approximately 65% and anxiety remission approximately 57%. More than 80% reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction attributable to the experience.

A parallel NYU study involved 29 patients with cancer-related anxiety and depression. A single psilocybin session combined with psychotherapy produced improvements in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, demoralization, spiritual well-being and quality of life.

And then something remarkable happened when researchers went back years later: of the surviving participants they could contact, reductions in depression, anxiety, hopelessness, demoralization and death anxiety remained evident. At approximately 4.5 years, 60 to 80% still met criteria for clinically significant antidepressant or anxiolytic response, and 71 to 100% attributed positive life changes to the psilocybin-assisted therapy experience and/or rated it among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

That one is extraordinary. They did not receive psilocybin every week for five years.

Something about the experience - embedded in preparation, psychotherapy and integration - appears to have profoundly altered the relationship many participants had with illness, meaning and mortality.

The difficult experience study

Researchers surveyed 1,993 people about the most psychologically difficult psilocybin experience they had ever had. 39% rated it among the five most challenging experiences of their entire lives. Yet 84% nevertheless reported that they had benefited from the experience.

There were genuine adverse outcomes as well: some participants put themselves or others at risk, some required medical attention, and a small number reported persistent psychiatric problems. Greater dose, greater intensity and a lack of trained support or conscious setting increase risk.

Challenge can become transformative. Challenge is also a reason for screening, preparation, skilled support and integration rather than romanticizing intensity.

Yes it is practice with your thoughts, speaking and doing.

Because the goal is not simply to have an extraordinary experience.

It is to return to an ordinary Tuesday morning and discover that the old story has a little less authority over your life.