For a long time, I felt like life was something that happened to me. Like I was moving through the days, checking the boxes, doing what I was supposed to do, but not really living it. Not choosing it. I didn't have a word for that feeling then. I just knew something was missing, and I didn't know how to find it.

I grew up in a traditional household and built a life that matched, one that looked right from the outside. I was married. I had a job. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do. But underneath it, I was deeply unhappy, and I didn't have the tools, or the permission, to look at why.

The unraveling happened slowly, then all at once. I left my marriage. I left my job. I moved from Colorado Springs to Boulder and found myself in a new life with the man who is now my husband, surrounded by people who were openly exploring psychedelics. I was curious in a quiet, private way, the kind where you look something up and then quickly close the tab. I was also embarrassed to be curious. This wasn't the kind of thing people like me did.

My husband saw something in me that I couldn't yet see in myself. For Christmas, he gifted me three guided psilocybin sessions.

I researched obsessively. I read everything I could find. And when the day finally came, I chickened out.

For weeks after, I came up with every reason not to try again. I was too anxious. The timing wasn't right. Maybe this just wasn't for me. But something kept pulling, quietly and stubbornly, until I stopped making excuses and made the appointment.

I walked into that room afraid of almost everything. I was scared of embarrassing myself in front of my guide. I was convinced I'd spend the entire time anxious, that I'd do it wrong somehow, that I wasn't built for this. I was scared of what I might find inside myself, and whether I could handle it.

What I found was a hedgehog in a burrow.

I know how that sounds. But something in me knew immediately, not intellectually, but in the way the body knows things before the mind catches up. It represented an emptiness I hadn't yet allowed myself to process. Choosing my husband had meant choosing a life without children, and I had carried that quietly, without fully setting it down. The medicine brought me there gently. I asked it to take me deeper, to show me what it would be like to hold life inside of me. I was shown exactly that. What followed was one of the most profound experiences of my life — a joint decision, made together with the medicine, to release what I had been quietly carrying and step fully into the life I had chosen.

I had gone in carrying one intention. I came out having been shown something I hadn't known I needed to see.

“That experience didn't just change me. It revealed my purpose.”

I became a psychedelic guide because I am my own ideal client. I know what it feels like to suspect there is more to life than what you're living, and to have no idea how to get there. I know what it feels like to be skeptical of all of this, to roll your eyes a little, and to still be curious anyway. I know what it feels like to be ashamed of being curious, and to be scared walking in.

All of that is welcome here. More than welcome. It's exactly who this work is for.

If you're reading this and something in it feels familiar, I want you to know: you don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to believe in anything yet. You just have to be willing to show up. I'll meet you there.