Background
I hold an M.A. in Psychedelics and Consciousness Studies from the University of Ottawa, and before that an interdisciplinary undergraduate background in psychology, philosophy, and religious studies at McGill. I am also a certified yoga and breathwork teacher, which matters here mainly because a good deal of what helps during a difficult experience is somatic rather than conceptual.
Alongside the academic work I have spent years with people actually going through these experiences, preparing for them, sitting with them, and making sense of them afterwards. Most of what is practical on this site came from that rather than from the literature. The literature is good at what happens on average across a trial population. It is much weaker on what to do at hour three when someone is frightened.
The Psygaia Framework
My research concerns a pattern that turns up constantly in psychedelic experience and gets explained away more often than it gets explained: people reliably come out of these states reporting a changed relationship to the living world. It shows up across substances, across settings, and across people with no prior interest in ecology.
The Psygaia Framework is an attempt to account for that properly, drawing on enactive cognitive science, biosemiotics, and systems ecology rather than treating it as a pleasant side effect. That argument lives at psygaia.org, which is where the theoretical work belongs. On this site it stays in the background, and surfaces mainly on the nature page.
What I write here
I write and maintain the whole of How to Use Psychedelics: the twelve substance guides, the practice guides on preparation, navigation and integration, the research library, and the three tools.
The editorial standard is set out on the about page. In short: dose figures are reference ranges from published research rather than recommendations, thin evidence gets named as thin, and every study summary links the original paper so you can check my reading of it.
What this background does not cover
I am not a physician, a psychiatrist, or a pharmacist, and nothing here is medical advice. The questions that most need a clinician are exactly the ones this site sends to one: whether a psychedelic is safe alongside your medication, what to do about an SSRI you are already taking, and whether a personal or family psychiatric history changes the picture. The interaction checker is a reference tool for orienting yourself before that conversation, not a substitute for it.
I am also not a lawyer. The law page describes how the legal landscape currently sits and how quickly it is moving. It does not tell you what is safe to do where you live.
Contact
Corrections, questions, and disagreements are all welcome at hello@psygaia.org. If you are pointing at an error, naming the page and the sentence makes it much faster to fix. Anything touching safety, dosing, or interactions gets handled first.