What is a Mind Guide?
I’m a Mind Guide: a companion who walks beside you into the fountain of your life, across the terrain of your awareness. I help people tune into the architecture of experience: how meaning forms, how perception generates, how presence deepens, and guide them through the doors where a new kind of life becomes real. I help people find out who they are, and become them. To take the longing — that sense of what’s possible in this life — and actualize it.
A Mind Guide? I have been called an “Inner Engineer,” and a “Soul Chiropractor.” A “Reality Designer,” a “Philosophical Companion,” and an “Ontological Mentor.”
But Mind Guide fits best. It’s crisp and more encompassing than any of those.
By “Mind” I don’t just mean thoughts. I mean the deeper field: body, energy, awareness, relationship — all the layers of self and being we live through. Mind as more fundamental than bodymind. Mind as your way of knowing, relating, creating, becoming.
Whatever you call it, my work helps people let the big questions *change them* at the root of their experience:
Who am I?
What am I here to do?
How do I meet this insane moment?
What is real?
What matters?
I do this through what I call psychoactive conversations: dialogues that wake you up and re-code the inner patterns shaping your life.
This draws on three main pillars of work, each their own paths:
Meditation: waking up, sharpening the tools of the mind, discovering, deepening into and shifting one’s identity from the individual self to an experience of life as a whole.
Awakened Interbeing (& Circling): practicing deep relational presence, healing in the interpersonal, and working within actual relationships: couples, business partners, children, and otherwise.
Psychedelic work: supporting profound inner journeys, and guiding the integration of insights into lasting growth.
I integrate these into a coherent approach to human transformation, one that’s practical & mystical, fiercely alive & deeply rooted: a trans-lineage, genuinely 21st century Tantric path (not sex tantra, but there is a rabbit hole we’ll skip over.)
Beyond my one-on-one work, I also believe something extraordinary is becoming possible between us. My term for it is Awakened Interbeing — the potential for human relationships, groups and collectives to wake up together, to become something new in consciousness, and to act with real power and coherence in the world. This has been the core of my calling since I first stumbled onto it in grad school 15 years ago now.
We are living in intense times, but I believe something luminous is being born. If we meet this moment with depth, courage, and clarity, something beautiful can unfold. A liberation of the human spirit.
With Great Love,
Andrew
The rest of this page covers some more detail from the above
OK, so why “Guide?”
The word Guide comes most directly from my work with psychedelics. At first, it surprised me that people would pay me just to sit with them during a journey. After all, I’ve done so many of these alone. What value was I really adding?
A friend gave me the metaphor that helped it land: Sailing from Amsterdam to England on a small boat can be done alone. But most people, if they’re serious about making that trip, want someone on board who’s done it before. You can drown, after all. The presence of someone experienced changes everything. So yeah, I might be the type of idiot that would just jump in a boat and do it — but most people aren’t!
Still, in real life, I’m not steering the boat for you. I’m not driving your mind or body. I’m facilitating: attentive, responsive, offering presence and perspective. I point out beautiful views. I help you steer around boulders. I walk beside you as you walk your path. You’re the one doing the journey.
I can teach you how to meditate, but you have to sit. I can teach you how to Circle, but you have to show up vulnerably. I can sit with you in a psychedelic journey, but you’re the one traveling. I can help integrate a peak experience, but you’re the one who must embody it.
What I offer isn’t a prescription, or even a map: it’s partnership, presence, and experience.
In a time of post-post-modern multiplicity, where no single path could work for everyone, the word Guide honors the uniqueness of each person’s unfolding, without losing the plot. We’re not all here to awaken the same way. We’re not here to become the same kind of human.
I think of it like the X-men. You and I might both have gifts/ mutant powers, but yours are not mine. Your blend of powers, and the path you’ll walk to unlock them, is uniquely yours. My role isn’t to replace your authority, it’s to help you find it.
And we do need some superheroes. And they need guidance. People who know the terrain, and can walk with you while you discover and create your path. That’s how I work.
So then, what is it that you do, exactly? What is a Mind Guide?
In short: I guide people through processes of deep inner transformation, focused on developing the capacity for sustained self-awareness, embodied wisdom, and relational depth and skillfulness, rather than on achieving any specific goal (which might well be a part of the whole.) The kind of transformation that reshapes how you relate to yourself, others, and the world. I help people integrate the lessons that arise when we lean into discomfort, face our shadows, and align with our deeper truths, becoming more available to what’s real and what’s possible. To what’s you.
A few metaphors:
Sometimes, it’s like visiting the house of your inner world. I poke around, curiously: Why is the bed here? Would you like something more colorful at the entrance? Oh hey — this lamp’s unplugged…
Together, we explore how your mind and consciousness construct your reality, like an engineer reading blueprints, or a coder reviewing the source. We find the seams, untangle the knots, and reimagine the design. Not just conceptually, but in the way your life actually feels and unfolds.
Other times, it’s more like dancing. I move as fully and freely as I can, and in that, I notice: hey, you’re not moving that arm.
Why not?
I might ask, or I might just place presence there, the way a skilled body worker touches a forgotten part, inviting it back into the whole.
In either case, we enter your experience together, and emerge better aligned, more alive, and more ready to serve the world from who you truly are.
So wait, you do… (Coaching/Teaching/Therapy…)
How this looks in any moment might be like a number of things that do have a recognizable name and form, but isn’t reducible to any of them, being more fluid, creative, alive, and integrative. In no exact order:
Meditation & Awareness Practice
I teach a trans-lineage approach to meditation, aimed not just at altered states but at transforming your relationship to life and self. It’s practical, profound, and personal. Whether you’re just beginning or deep into your practice, I help you bring awareness into the core of how you live, move, and relate.
My approach here is:
Embedded: integrated moment to moment in life
Lineage-Agnostic: not bound to any single tradition
Student-centric: co-created for your path
Post-metaphysical: honoring mystical insight without dogma
Trauma-aware: grounded in psychological and relational safety
Intersubjective: rooted in the relationship
Current: informed by a raft of modern understanding without being reductive
And, let it not get lost, since it’s at the core of everything else: awakening is a real phenomenon, it is wonderful, it’s very easy to miss. Having a steady, unconfused guide can make all the difference.
Circling & Awakened Interbeing
I guide individuals and groups into the depths of relational practice. I work on four layers:
Personal: authenticity, shadow work, relational skillfulness, psychological growth and maturity.
Trans/sub-personal: soul expression, subtle energy, integration, deeper shadow work
Awakened Interbeing: the experience of shared presence beyond self & between selves
Agentic Interbeing: applying that awakened presence in social, economic, and organizational life.
In short: I teach relationship as a path of awakening.
Coaching & Life Crafting/ Life Design
What I do often looks like coaching, but I’m less focused on goals and outcomes, and more on *you.* I bring spiritual depth to life transformation, and practicality to spiritual growth. I’m here for the long arc, not just the sprints. Some coaching is like this, much is not.
Psychedelic Guidance & Integration
I sit with people as they intentionally explore psychedelics, helping them prepare, navigate, and crucially—integrate what emerges. I don’t offer substances, but I do offer experience, steadiness, and an approach that honors the sacred while staying grounded in real life.
Not a Shaman, exactly
I’m also not a shaman — not traditionally, and not in the neo-sense either. But I do live and work in the imaginal, that subtle realm where Shamans carry out their work. I honor the sacred, walk alongside mystery, and have learned — inside and out of many journeys — to do so with humility and care.
NOT Therapy (but adjacent)
Some of my work overlaps with therapy: emotional healing, pattern shifting, learning regulation, but I am not equipped — it is neither my interest nor my specialty — to be working with the longer-term traumatic work of therapy nor the social-work side of things. I work best with people who are basically functioning, but stuck, misaligned, or hungry for more. I do often help people integrate therapy into a fuller, more soul-aligned life path.
Not quite a teacher, either
Are you a teacher, then? I have also been called this word, so kind of? I hold expertise where I have it, and don’t back down from offering guidance you might not have, but the real authority I aim to awaken is yours. I don’t hold a lineage; it’s a living conversation.
This is apart from the baggage of the term “Spiritual Teacher” under which some nasty human beings have left a trail of human damage in the name of the highest ideals.
In any case, “Teacher” doesn’t capture what I think is most exciting today. Authority, but not single authority. Gifts, powers, and skills, which show up uniquely for each of us. A ‘meta-lineage’ training ground: a place where the living human qualities of the fruits of our paths can jam out together.
So I don’t teach at you. I meet you, walk with you, and help uncover the deeper intelligence that’s already inside you. I’m not a Buddha. But I’m a good Buddhy.
And I’m a Friend
— clearly not just any friend. I show up as a human being: curious, open, present, walking beside you. That quality of ‘holding multiple roles at once,’ of having both an informal and formal relationship with someone is also transformative itself, and creates the conditions for something rare.
So, a Guide
I work in all these ways, sometimes separately, often interwoven, to help people wake up, clean up, grow up, and show up more fully in their lives.
You might come to me from one session, or a season, or a stretch of years. You might start with meditation, and end up unraveling your relationship patterns. Or take a trip and discover you’re ready to change your entire life. It all belongs.
Yeah but what do you actually do?
Derp? Oh maybe you mean:
I talk with people. We sit together. These conversations are psychoactive: they shift things.
Together we look at how you’re participating in your life… and change it.
The World I want to help Bring About
We live in a time of profound unraveling, and profound potential. The old ways are clearly failing us, but the new ways haven’t yet taken shape.
Still, I see it. I see the outlines of an emerging consciousness that operates in a radically different way than what brought us here. A way of being that doesn’t collapse into ideology or reactivity, that moves with presence and coherence, rather than control and coercion.
I believe that awakening — not as a peak experience, but as a way of life — can become ordinary. Not distant or mystical, but present in our everyday, practiced in relationships, embedded in our systems. A deeper consciousness, shared among us, simple, accessible, and real, can change how we live, how we relate, how we build, how we lead.
When that’s embodied, if we can pull it off, when they’re the context we meet within, regularly and ordinarily — not present only in our inner lives but in how we do business, make decisions, raise children, and shape communities — then a different kind of world starts to become possible, where wisdom and aliveness aren’t luxuries, but norms.
Oh we are so early in that.
Very early.
And there are no guarantees we ever get there.
Some days, this possibility feels seductively close — a breath away. Other days, it feels so far it’s meaningless, like a dream from another life.
But this is the world I work towards, and I keep choosing it. And I know I’m not alone.
For Whom?
People who tend to get the most from working with me often share some things in common:
*Highly intelligent — not just in the cognitive sense, but curious, discerning, and hungry for depth.
*Already on the (some) path — they’ve been practicing, exploring, and asking big questions for a while. Many have had profound spiritual or mystical experiences (integrated or not.)
*Sensitive and relationally attuned — deeply aware of others and the field between (though often with some challenges holding self/other/all in awareness at the same time.)
*Open-minded — willing to experiment, explore, and shift perspectives.
*Trauma-and-developmentally-aware — with some understanding of how their past experiences shape their present experience.
*of all ages, though most often with people in their late 20s up to about their late 40s.
Otherwise: they’re all over the map: gender, background, beliefs, work, class, ethnicity, politics. If what I’m saying resonates for you, even if you don’t check every box, we might be a fit.
A Meta-Lineage, an Ecology of Practice, A Landscape of Awakening:
I’m not doing this alone, obviously. I collaborate with others who share similar values and approaches, especially in group settings where it’s powerful to have multiple skilled presences holding the space.
I am committed to helping foster what I call a meta-lineage: an ecology of guides, practitioners, and teachers who bring different strengths, but share a deeper alignment in how they hold space, meet others, and walk the path.
If that resonates — if you’re someone doing adjacent work, or curious to explore how we might collaborate — I’d love to hear from you.