Have you ever stood at the edge of who you were and had nothing to reach for?

I have, and each time, the plants were there with the answer. Without fail, because I had spent years building a relationship with the earth.

I was the child who talked to trees and was told, with tenderness and genuine concern, to come back to reality.

So I did.

I built the life that was the “dream.” You know the one, 10 years at a desk slaving away doing audit and tax compilation. I even joined the Treasury Department to compile all the financial data (boring), but the truth is, I’m great at auditing companies & the government.

I had a row house in DC with a garden I tended for eleven years, the credentials, the stability, the performance of a self that fit the room.

Underneath all of it, the panic attacks came anyway. Alcohol ruled my world at one point.

However, my animating spirit pressed against every wall of a life built to contain the expanse of my purpose.

What pulled me through was not a single breakthrough but the slow, devotional practice of plant relationship. One herb at a time. One moon cycle at a time.

The ancient covenant between humans and the earth that has been honored since before psychedelics had a renaissance, a regulatory framework, or a name.

In 2013, two rivers converged, clinical herbalism and plant medicine ceremony, where the apothecary and the jungle find each other.

I put my bet out to the universe in 2014 when I quit my job and went full-time into the study & becoming of the person I continued to nourish and dream about.

By 2017, a vision quest had distilled what had been quietly true the whole time: the reason the medicine was integrating into daily life rather than cycling through peak experience after peak experience was the herbal relationship. The daily practice. The allies were already growing nearby, already in communion with what the ceremonies were opening.

I witnessed the psychedelic renaissance grow into a global conversation while its most fundamental truth went unremarked at every conference, every integration circle, every gathering of the movement. Psychedelic plant medicine requires plant medicine allies to integrate the body, spirit, and soul. So I built the method I needed and could not find anywhere else.

In 2022, I sold the DC house, released the garden I had tended for eleven years, and bought land in New Mexico.

I call it the Temple of Sacred Alchemy, a physical home for the method, where The Temenos Project now roots itself into the high desert earth as a biodynamic garden, food forest, labyrinth, and tea house in active becoming. 

If you have ever stood at the edge of who you were and had nothing to reach for, that is exactly where this work begins.