My initiatory journey

the story behind the vision, philosophy and creation of initiation.rites

My relationship with psychedelics began far earlier than most people would expect. As a child, around the ages of nine, ten, and eleven, I was exposed to powerful psychedelic experiences involving substances such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. These experiences occurred without any safety precautions or any meaningful understanding of what I was stepping into. In some cases, the quantities consumed were many times larger than what would generally be deemed a sufficient full dose for an adult. The resulting experiences involved profound alterations in consciousness, loss of ordinary identity structures, overwhelming fear and confusion, and states that I now recognize as forms of premature ego dissolution.

For me, the result of these experiences was fragmentation. At an age when my identity, nervous system, emotional body, and sense of self were still developing, I experienced mind altering states that I did not have the capacity or awareness to understand. Looking back, I view those experiences as an early fracture within the psyche and emotional body—highly significant and destabilizing events that would leave lasting imprints on my life.

For many years afterward, I stayed away from psychedelics completely. I knew they were extremely powerful, and I was terrified by them. Those experiences left me humbled, confused, and in a state that I now describe as existential shock. I didn't understand what had happened, what I had experienced, or how deeply those experiences would influence the years that followed. They left me carrying questions that would remain unanswered for decades. Yet despite the confusion, fear, and destabilization they created, those experiences served another purpose. Although I would not fully understand it at the time, those early encounters with psychoactive substances had opened something within me. In the decades that followed, that opening would gradually express itself through a growing curiosity about reality, life, death, existence, and the deeper mysteries of the universe. In many ways, the same experiences that left me fragmented also helped shape a lifelong search for understanding. One that would consume much of my contemplations.

Over the years, as life continued to unfold, unresolved emotional layers within my being would eventually express themselves through addiction, disconnection, and periods of profound struggle. After years of difficulty, multiple treatment attempts, and exploring many conventional approaches to recovery, I eventually found myself confronting a possibility I never expected: returning to the psychedelic territory I had avoided for more than 20 years following those early childhood experiences. What drew me back was not curiosity, recreation, or experimentation—it was necessity. As my struggle with opioid dependency deepened, I found myself being called toward ibogaine treatment, a medicine that had attracted much attention for its potential role in addiction recovery. In many ways, it represented a return to the same domain I had chosen to stay away from for more than two decades, the same domain I never fully understood, and the same domain that had left me carrying unanswered questions for much of my life. Consciously stepping back into that world was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. But this time, the context was different. There was meaningful intention behind it. There was a profound purpose for meeting these experiences once again. Of course, these early life experiences with psychedelics were only one thread within a far more complex tapestry of influences that would ultimately shape my life, behaviours, struggles, and relationship with addiction they still did however play a massive role in how my life would play out.

It would be from this work with ibogaine that I would begin to understand my earlier childhood experiences with psychedelics through an expanded lens. What I once saw only as frightening mind altering experiences, I eventually came to recognize as encounters with forces and states of consciousness that deserved far greater preparation, guidance, support, integration, and respect than I had originally approached them with. Through continued work with Kambo, Ibogaine/Iboga, Ayahuasca, Bufo, and other traditional and ceremonial practices, I came to understand that these medicines are extraordinarily powerful tools and that, when approached within an intentional and well-supported framework, they can serve as powerful initiatory catalysts for increased self-awareness, healing, resilience, transformation, personal growth, and expanded states of consciousness. Equally, when approached from the opposite perspective these same experiences can leave individuals confused, destabilized, fragmented, or struggling to understand what they have encountered. This realization became one of the inspirations behind Initiation.Rites: the understanding that powerful transformational experiences are often best approached not as isolated events, but as meaningful initiatory processes supported by preparation, guidance, integration, and respect for the journey itself.

This understanding became one of the foundational principles behind Initiation.Rites. The medicine matters, but the container matters too. The preparation matters. The progression matters. The guidance matters. The integration matters. And the respect shown toward the individual, the medicine, the process, and the traditions matters. As I continued along this path, I was exposed to both high-integrity and low-integrity approaches to medicine work. I experienced firsthand the consequences of entering powerful processes without adequate preparation, support, screening, guidance, or integration, and I also experienced what becomes possible when these same elements are approached with skill, responsibility, humility, and care. These experiences reinforced a lesson that would eventually become central to Initiation.Rites: the medicine alone is not enough. The quality of the container matters. The quality of the facilitation matters. The quality of the preparation, intention and integration matters.

In many ways, Initiation.Rites was born from my direct lived experience of both sides of this work: the fragmentation that can result when powerful psychoactive experiences are approached without adequate preparation, support, integration, or understanding, and the profound healing, clarity, self-awareness, resilience, transformation, and liberation that can emerge when these same processes are approached intentionally, responsibly, and within a well-supported framework. This is why I feel called to this work—not because I read about the transformational potential of these sacraments, but because I have personally experienced both the consequences of incomplete initiation and the benefits of approaching these powerful processes with reverence, preparation, guidance, and care.

Although addiction became one of the primary ways these deeper patterns expressed themselves within my own life, I eventually came to recognize that the underlying dynamics are not unique to addiction alone. Questions of identity, purpose, fear, loss, disconnection, unresolved emotional experiences, limiting beliefs, self-sabotage, and the search for meaning, strength, direction, resilience, and expanded states of awareness are part of the broader human condition. While the outward expressions may differ from person to person, many of the deeper challenges that drive human behaviour are remarkably universal. In this sense, Initiation.Rites is intended as a framework for conscious growth, self-discovery, healing, transformation, and the ongoing process of becoming, and is not limited to any one type of individual, group, belief system, condition, life circumstance, or stage of development.

Initiation.Rites exists to offer a modern initiatory framework rooted in preparation, gradual progression, ceremonial experience, and ongoing integration—a framework that honours the individual, honours the medicines, honours the traditions, and honours the profound responsibility that comes with supporting human beings through meaningful thresholds of transformation.