About Sweetgrass
The story behind the work, and why it matters now.
A Personal Journey of Healing and Purpose
For most of my career, I was good at what I did. Really good. I built marketing systems, scaled revenue, created brands. I helped launch the Grammy Museum’s digital presence. I designed education systems for the United States Air Force. I built over a hundred websites and guided organizations through complex growth challenges. I created an agency that generated roughly $1 million in revenue at its peak. From the outside, I looked successful—the kind of person who had figured out how business works.
But something was always missing. I kept building things that worked—that made money, that looked successful—but felt hollow at the center. Then I went through a series of spiritual experiences that fundamentally changed everything. Through plant medicine ceremonies and direct encounters with Source, I realized we are not these bodies, not these minds, not these business identities we construct. We are spirit, divine in nature, temporarily experiencing this human realm. And once you know that—truly know it, not just believe it intellectually—you can’t pretend anymore. You can’t go back to optimizing conversion rates for products nobody needs.
I tried to keep going. I had a company, employees, obligations. But the more awakened I became, the more I watched my entire life dismantle itself. Business partners betrayed me—the last one conned me out of my shares for less than $4,000 of a business generating nearly a million in revenue. Systems I built collapsed. Employees I trusted with my kind heart took advantage of me repeatedly, and I let them, because I was trying to be spiritual while operating in a world that doesn’t value that. Eventually I lost everything: the company, the security, the identity of being “successful.” I ended up living at my parents’ house at 41, bartending to survive, spending a year feeling completely stuck and lost.
In that stripping away—painful as it was—I made a promise to God and to myself: if I was going to use my skills again, it would only be to lessen the suffering of others. No more helping corporations extract profit from consumers. No more building brands for people who value money over meaning. Only work that serves healing, transformation, and awakening. This isn’t a career pivot or a repositioning strategy. This is what my soul demanded as the price of continuing. And now, with Sweetgrass, I’m keeping that promise—bringing a decade of strategic marketing expertise to the organizations doing the real work of healing humanity’s wounds.
The Path To The INEFFABLE
The shift didn’t happen in a boardroom or through a business book. It happened in ceremony.
Ayahuasca with a shaman in Peru, after climbing to Machu Picchu. 5-MeO-DMT—three times, each one peeling back another layer of what I thought was real. Psilocybin ceremonies. Breathwork that took me to the edge of dissolution. Sweat lodges in the jungles of Mexico, where the heat strips away everything that isn’t essential.
For four years, I studied to become a shamanic priest. Not as a credential or a title, but as a commitment. In front of my brothers in faith, I swore an oath: I would use my skills to lessen the suffering of others.
What these medicines showed me is difficult—maybe impossible—to put into words. There is a Source that connects all things, beyond space, beyond time, beyond the limitations of language or understanding. When you experience it directly, you can’t unsee it. You can’t go back to treating business as if profit is the point. You can’t optimize funnels for corporations when you’ve felt the interconnectedness of all beings.
It’s ineffable. But it’s also undeniable.
After those experiences, the material world looked different. I lost interest in possessions, in accumulation, in the markers of success I’d been chasing. What replaced it was a clarity about what actually matters: connection, service, reduction of suffering.
But knowing the path and walking it are different things.
The Promise and the Struggle
When the Ego Fights Back
I had made the promise. I had sworn the oath. But I kept trying to hedge.
“I’ll focus on serving healing work AFTER I get my business on the right track,” I told myself. “Just one more year of regular clients. Just until I have enough saved. Just until the company is stable.”
The universe had other plans.
Eventually, everything I was clinging to was taken. Business partners I trusted betrayed me—not once, but four times. The last one succeeded in stripping me of a company generating nearly a million dollars in revenue, for less than $4,000. Employees I gave freedom and trust to prioritized themselves, taking six months of sick leave over two years while the company bled. I ignored red flags constantly, hoping my vision would be enough to motivate alignment.
It wasn’t.
The loss wasn’t clean or quick. My ego raged for months. I fought reality with everything I had. And when the fight finally exhausted itself, I found myself homeless—not literally, but spiritually. No company. No clear path. No sense of who I was without the identity I’d built.
What I found in that void was a deeper connection to Source. The stripping away wasn’t punishment. It was preparation.
The Bible says, “Do not put your trust in the hearts of men.” I had learned that the hard way, over and over. Now, my trust rests in God, in Source, in All That Is. Not in partnerships that promise shared vision but deliver self-interest. Not in the belief that being kind and trusting will protect you from being exploited.
The lesson wasn’t to become cynical. The lesson was to establish clear boundaries. To trust the divine while protecting the work with legal agreements, clear expectations, and the willingness to walk away when alignment is gone.
That year of dissolution was the chrysalis. I couldn’t have done this work—serving healing organizations with integrity—without first having everything false burned away.
Why This Work Matters Now
I worry about what’s coming.
The organizations most aligned with indigenous ways—the ones doing this work with integrity, proper training, and deep respect—are often the ones least visible online. They don’t have aggressive marketing. They don’t dominate Google. They don’t have venture capital backing.
Meanwhile, the tech-bro retreat centers, the ones who see psychedelics as a growth market rather than sacred medicine, are hiring marketing agencies and scaling fast. They’re the ones showing up first in search results. They’re the ones attracting seekers who don’t yet know how to discern quality from exploitation.
And when those centers cut corners—when safety protocols fail, when facilitators aren’t trained, when integration is an afterthought—people get hurt. We’ve seen it in the news over the past decade: seekers raped during ceremony, participants dying from medical complications that should have been screened, trauma compounded instead of healed.
Every negative story feeds the backlash. Every scandal gives ammunition to the forces that want to shut this work down entirely—the systems that benefit from people remaining unwell, disconnected, and dependent on pharmaceuticals that manage symptoms without addressing root causes.
The organizations doing this right are fighting an uphill battle. They’re not just competing with other retreat centers—they’re competing with the narrative that psychedelics are dangerous, that this is reckless experimentation, that indigenous wisdom has no place in modern healing.
If the integrity-driven organizations don’t learn to reach people, the extractive ones will dominate by default.
That’s why I do this work. Not to help healing organizations “get rich.” But to ensure the people who need this medicine can find the practitioners who will hold them safely. To make sure that as psychedelics move mainstream, the voices leading the conversation are rooted in service, not profit.
This is what’s at stake. And this is why clear, honest, strategic marketing for healing organizations is sacred work.
The Tensions We Navigate Together
The organizations I work with face tensions that most marketers don’t understand—and don’t care to.
Tensions:
- Growth vs. Sacred Intimacy
- Western Frameworks vs. Indigenous Roots
- Making Money vs. Commodifying the Sacred
- Marketing vs. Manipulation
Growth vs. Sacred Intimacy
The organizations I work with face tensions that most marketers don’t understand—and don’t care to.
How do you grow without losing the intimacy that makes the healing work? Small retreat centers can hold space in ways large operations cannot. But if you stay small, you reach fewer people. If you scale, you risk becoming transactional.
How do you adopt Western business frameworks without severing the indigenous roots of this wisdom? Marketing funnels and automation have their place. But if you’re facilitating ceremonies rooted in lineages thousands of years old, can you really use the same playbook as a SaaS company? Where’s the line?
How do you make money without commodifying the sacred? Healers deserve to be paid for their work. Centers need revenue to sustain operations. But when profit becomes the primary driver, something essential is lost. I’ve seen it happen. The moment the medicine becomes a product, the integrity fractures.
How do you market healing work without feeling like you’re selling snake oil? Most marketing relies on urgency, scarcity, fear, and manipulation. If you’re doing genuine transformation work, those tactics feel disgusting. But if you don’t market at all, the people who need you never find you—and the centers cutting corners on safety dominate the search results.
These aren’t hypothetical tensions. They’re what keep founders awake at 3am.
I hold these tensions with you. I don’t pretend they have easy answers. What I bring is strategic clarity rooted in respect for what you’re protecting—and the business acumen to help you grow without compromising it.
Who I Don't Work With
- I don't work with organizations using synthetic compounds marketed as "medicine" for profit. Organic plant and fungi medicines have supported human healing for millennia. I believe in that lineage. If you're selling synthesized analogues as a pharmaceutical product, we're not aligned.
- I don't work with tech entrepreneurs who did ayahuasca once and now want to "disrupt healing." This isn't an app. This isn't a market to be captured. If your primary driver is financial returns and you see this space as the next big opportunity, find another consultant.
- I don't work with people appropriating indigenous wisdom without respect or reciprocity. If you're using sacred practices as branding but have no connection to the lineages, no relationship with indigenous teachers, and no interest in giving back—that's extraction, not service.
- I don't work with retreat centers cutting corners on safety. Untrained facilitators. Inadequate screening. Prioritizing volume over care. If you're willing to risk people's wellbeing for profit, we have nothing to discuss.
The Life I'm Building
I’m not building an empire. I’m building a life.
After everything was taken, I realized how little I actually need. There’s less to dust when you own less. Less to protect. Less tying me to one place or one identity.
Now I’m focused on simplicity and movement. I want to travel with my dog, Bhakti Bear. Climb mountains. Sit on beaches. Scuba dive. Skydive. Feel my body doing things that heighten aliveness. Then hike in solitude or meditate in silence.
This isn’t escapism. It’s alignment.
Living simply gives me space to focus on what matters: helping organizations that lessen suffering. I don’t need a big house or expensive things. I need enough to not worry about money, and freedom to move through the world in a way that feeds my soul.
This matters for the work I do because it keeps me honest. I’m not trying to extract maximum revenue from clients so I can afford a lifestyle I don’t want. I’m working with a handful of organizations I believe in, providing deep strategic value, and living well within my means.
I make enough to be free. That’s the goal.
It also means I understand the tension my clients feel between growth and simplicity. Between scaling impact and maintaining integrity. Between making money and serving the mission.
I’m not trying to get rich off this work. I’m trying to keep a promise I made in ceremony: to use my skills to lessen suffering.
The life I’m building supports that promise. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Our Vision: , Integrity, and Lineage.
What Success Looks Like
Ten years from now, I want to look back and know that the promise was kept.
I want to see healing organizations with integrity thriving—not just surviving. I want the retreat centers that prioritize safety, training, and deep indigenous partnerships to be the ones people find first. I want seekers to have access to medicine held by people who understand what they’re stewarding.
I want the voices leading the psychedelic renaissance to be rooted in lineage, not opportunism. People who have done their own healing work. People who understand that this isn’t about optimization or disruption—it’s about remembering something humanity has always known and nearly lost.
I want the movement to grow without losing what makes it sacred.
And I want Sweetgrass to have been a small, steady part of that. A bridge between the business world and the healing world. Strategic clarity in service of organizations doing the real work.
If I can help even a handful of centers reach the people who need them most—if I can help protect this work from being swallowed by extraction and commodification—then the years in the wilderness will have been worth it.
The path forward isn’t about me becoming successful in the way I used to measure it. It’s about staying aligned with Source, serving the healing of others, and living simply enough that I can keep saying yes to what matters and no to what doesn’t.
This is the work now. And I’m grateful to walk it with organizations who understand what we’re protecting and why it’s worth fighting for.
Let's Talk
A Critical Moment for Healing
The psychedelic space is entering a new chapter.
Whether we would like it or not, these medicines are moving from the underground to the mainstream. The collective pain that humanity is facing is real. The levels of isolation, anxiety, trauma, and disconnection we are witnessing show that people are searching for paths back to themselves. These plants and fungi are not a trend. They are part of a lineage of healing that has supported human beings for thousands of years.
As this movement grows, there will be misunderstandings, pushback, and individuals and entities that try to commodify the sacred. There will be people who approach this work without respect for where these lineages come from. There will be voices who try to stop progress because it challenges the systems that benefit from people remaining unwell and disconnected.
I want to be a voice that holds both innovation and tradition. A bridge between worlds. My intention is to help shape a future where access increases but integrity is not lost. A future where healing is not rushed, where people are supported through their integration, and where this work remains anchored in service to the collective good rather than personal gain.
Psychedelics are becoming mainstream. The question is how they will arrive and who will steward that arrival. I believe the world is in need of this medicine and this wisdom now more than ever. Our role is to ensure that what comes next stays rooted in respect, responsibility, and care for both the people and the medicines.