When Spiritual Experiences Become Difficult
There are times when something is happening in your life that you don't know how to explain.
You may be going through a spiritual awakening that has become overwhelming. You may be experiencing a spiritual emergency, unusual states of consciousness, intense dreams or visions, or a profound shift in your sense of yourself and the world around you.
You may feel that something is attached to you, draining you, interfering with you, or affecting your thoughts, emotions, energy, or relationships. You may have experienced what you understand as an entity, possession, energetic interference, or an unwanted spiritual presence.
You may be recovering from a high-control spiritual or religious group. You may be trying to understand what happened to you and rebuild your ability to trust your own perceptions, choices, and inner guidance.
You may have had a psychedelic experience that opened something profound—or brought you face-to-face with something you weren't prepared for. You may be looking for preparation before a psychedelic experience, or support integrating what emerged afterward.
Or you may simply know that something is not right, but you don't know what to call it.
You don't have to know exactly what is happening before you reach out.
Meeting You Where You Are
My work brings together Depth Hypnosis, shamanic practice, spiritual counseling, and direct experiential work with altered states of consciousness.
The approach depends upon the person.
Some experiences are best approached through Depth Hypnosis. Some through traditional shamanic practices. Sometimes the two work together. There isn't a formula that says what kind of work someone needs before we have had a chance to listen to what is actually happening.
The work begins with you.
We take the time to understand your experience, what you have been through, what is happening now, and what you are seeking. From there, we can determine how to work with what is present.
The intention is not to impose an explanation on your experience. It is to help you develop greater clarity, connection, agency, and capacity to move through what is happening.
Shamanic Healing
My shamanic work is informed by Core Shamanism, including the work of Michael Harner, and by the contemporary shamanic healing approach developed by Isa Gucciardi, PhD, through Depth Hypnosis and Applied Shamanism.
Shamanic work begins with direct experience and relationship. Rather than asking you to adopt a particular belief system, we work experientially with the unseen dimensions of experience and with your own relationship to helping spirits, guides, the natural world, and the deeper parts of yourself.
Depending on what you are experiencing, this may include:
Soul Retrieval
Working with experiences of fragmentation, disconnection, or loss of vitality and supporting the restoration of parts of yourself that may feel absent or inaccessible.
Power Retrieval
Reconnecting with sources of strength, vitality, protection, and personal power.
Extraction
Working with experiences that are perceived as intrusive, foreign, or energetically disruptive.
Energetic Interference Release
Addressing experiences of energetic disruption, unwanted influences, attachments, or patterns that do not feel like they belong to you.
Cord Cutting
Working with persistent energetic or relational connections that continue to affect you and exploring what is needed to restore your own boundaries and energy.
Haka Mana Pattern Release
Working with patterns that have become embedded in the energetic and experiential field and supporting movement toward greater wholeness.
Drum Journeying and Healing
Using the repetitive rhythm of the drum to support movement into non-ordinary reality and direct experience with helping spirits, guides, and other sources of wisdom and healing.
Divination
Using shamanic methods of direct revelation to explore questions, circumstances, and possibilities when greater clarity is needed.
Depth Hypnosis
Depth Hypnosis is an integrative approach developed by Isa Gucciardi, PhD, that works with the deeper layers of consciousness to address patterns that may not be accessible through ordinary conscious awareness.
The work is experiential. Rather than simply talking about a problem, we can work directly with the underlying material.
Depth Hypnosis may be useful when you are experiencing patterns that you understand intellectually but cannot seem to change, when something from the past continues to affect your present life, or when you are trying to understand an experience that doesn't fit easily into ordinary categories.
It can also be used to support spiritual development, access inner guidance, explore altered states of consciousness, and work with experiences of spiritual emergence.
Spiritual Emergence and Spiritual Emergency
Spiritual growth is not always comfortable.
Sometimes a profound opening or change in consciousness can become difficult to navigate. You may feel unusually sensitive, overwhelmed, disconnected from ordinary life, flooded with emotion, unable to sleep, intensely connected to something larger than yourself, or uncertain about what is happening.
These experiences may be described as spiritual emergence or spiritual emergency.
We can work with the experience without immediately deciding what it means.
The work is to slow down, listen, establish grounding and stability, and begin to understand what is emerging. We can explore the experience through Depth Hypnosis, shamanic work, or both, depending upon what is appropriate for you.
Experiences of Possession, Attachment, or Energetic Interference
Some people come to me because they feel that something is present that should not be there.
They may describe an attachment, entity, possession, energetic interference, an unwanted presence, or a feeling that something is affecting them from outside themselves.
Within a shamanic framework, there are ways of working with these experiences, including extraction and other forms of energetic clearing.
I do not need you to convince me that your interpretation is correct before we begin. We can start with what you are actually experiencing.
In some traditions, this type of work may be called exorcism. My approach is grounded in shamanic healing rather than fear. The intention is to restore your sense of agency, connection, and wholeness rather than to reinforce fear about what you are experiencing.
Leaving a High-Control or Cult Environment
Leaving a high-control spiritual, religious, therapeutic, or other group can affect nearly every part of your life.
You may find yourself questioning your own perceptions. You may have difficulty making decisions without someone else's authority. You may feel grief, shame, anger, confusion, fear, or profound loss. You may be trying to figure out what you actually believe now that someone else is no longer telling you what to believe.
I work with people who are recovering from these experiences.
This may include what people commonly call cult deprogramming, although my focus is not on replacing one belief system with another.
The work is about rebuilding your relationship with yourself.
We can work with the effects of control, reconnect with your own inner guidance, explore what was lost, work with fear and shame, and begin to develop your own capacity for discernment and choice.
Psychedelic Preparation and Integration
Psychedelic experiences can open profound material.
They can bring forward memories, emotions, spiritual experiences, insights, difficult material, questions about identity, or experiences that are difficult to integrate into ordinary life.
I work with people both before and after psychedelic experiences.
Preparation can involve exploring your intentions, developing a relationship with inner guidance, understanding how you want to approach the experience, and establishing practices that can support you.
Integration is not a separate process from the rest of this work.
If something emerged during a psychedelic experience that needs attention, we work with it.
That might involve Depth Hypnosis. It might involve shamanic work. It might involve exploring a spiritual experience, working with difficult emotional material, connecting with a guide, retrieving a sense of power or wholeness, or simply finding a way to understand what happened.
We meet the experience that is actually there.
Regression and Earlier Experiences
Depth Hypnosis can also be used to explore material that continues to affect your present life.
This may include current-life regression, past-life regression, and work with buried or inaccessible memories, emotions, sensations, and patterns.
The material that emerges may come as a memory, image, sensation, emotion, symbol, or experience.
We don't have to decide in advance exactly what it is.
The focus is on understanding what is arising and working with what may be ready to heal.
Connecting With Guides and Inner Guidance
A central part of my work is helping people develop a lived relationship with inner guidance.
This may involve connecting with a guide through shamanic journeying, guided meditation, Depth Hypnosis, dreams, or other forms of direct experience.
The goal isn't to give your authority away to a guide, a practitioner, or a spiritual system.
The relationship is meant to support your own discernment and your own connection with what you know at a deeper level.
Over time, this can become something you return to again and again as you move through everyday life.
You Don't Have to Know What You Need
You don't have to arrive knowing whether you need an extraction, soul retrieval, Depth Hypnosis, regression, spiritual counseling, or something else.
You don't have to have the right language for what is happening.
You don't have to fit your experience into a particular spiritual framework.
We can start by talking about what is happening and what you are looking for.
From there, we can determine what kind of work makes sense.
If you are experiencing something difficult to understand, something that feels outside your ordinary experience, or something that you have not felt comfortable talking about elsewhere, you are welcome to schedule an introductory call.
I offer this work for people in St. Louis and the surrounding area, as well as remotely for people outside the region.
We can take the time to listen, explore, and see what becomes possible.
Begin the Conversation with an Introductory Call
An introductory call is an opportunity to talk about what is happening, ask questions, and determine whether this work is an appropriate fit for you.