• As human beings, we have the capacity to awaken, cultivate, and live from the Divine.
• The Divine is alive in every life. This aliveness expands and develops through spiritual teachings, sacred practices, sacraments, and rituals.
• Expanding the Divine Spirit into the world brings healing and wholeness to individuals, families, communities, nations, and the natural world.
• Entheogenic sacraments experienced in relationship can accelerate the development of healing, wholeness, creativity, and engagement with the world.

Catherine hosts Integration Circles at Sacred Practices and brings 27 years of experience in transformational work. Her own journey began through Landmark Education, where she later served for several years as a Seminar Leader.

As a former professional ballet dancer, Catherine brought transformational coaching into the ballet world, supporting both students and professionals in developing greater awareness, freedom, and personal power.

After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Sciences, she collaborated with Lisa Marini to create an original transformational workshop integrating neuroscience and personal development. She was also honored to serve for several years on the leadership team for Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Weeklong Advanced Workshops, where she guided large groups through meditation, healing, and transformational processes.

Additionally, Catherine has traveled internationally as part of the core team for Being A Leader, a course led by Werner Erhard and designed to bring leadership development into universities worldwide.

Catherine is the founder and CEO of Greater Levels of Love, an ecosystem devoted to personal transformation, coach training, and retreat leadership. Through her 20-Session coaching process, Coaching Program, and retreat leadership pathways, she supports individuals in deep inner work and trains the next generation of transformational coaches.

Catherine has been honored to be part of Sacred Practices, holding Integration Circles for the plant medicine community. She has been part of this community since it began. She believes deeply in the power of this medicine to support healing, expansion, and meaningful change.

Channing McBride is a founding Minister in the Congregation for Sacred Practices and practiced medicine guiding for the last four years. He has assisted the Training for Ministers: Basics in both San Francisco and Washington, DC. He now offers medicine sacraments for Congregational members. Separate from his sacramental work, Channing has practiced professional bodywork for the last decade. He is an autodidact with a highly intuitive approach and combines several different modalities, tailoring each session to the individual needs of the client. This adds a special dimension to his sacramental work. Many clients experience his bodywork sessions as a journey through their own somatic emotional world emerging with both healing and a new perspective. Channing has studied with many great body workers such as Rick Gray, Adam Kahn, David Penner, and Trevor Getsla. Most recently he graduated from a training on the Tamura Method conducted by Wynn Tamura.

Emily Rasowsky is a multidisciplinary healer, musician, and healing tech company entrepreneur. With a rich experience supporting people healing from the effects of long-term stress, mystery illnesses, addiction, cancer, chronic conditions, and more, Emily has developed a 6-step system of consciousness evolution. This framework provides individuals and practitioners alike a way to track their progress along the transformational journey and accelerate trauma healing in the process. As Co-Founder and COO of Liber8, a healing tech company, she specializes in supporting the mental and emotional healing of cancer patients and the chronically ill while training and overseeing a team of 27 healing facilitators. She holds over 12+ certifications in the healing arts including breathwork, shamanic journey work, esoteric astrology, and animal communication. Prior to her work at Liber8, she was one of the first few members of Amazon Care, Amazon’s approach to healthcare. She is releasing a book covering her 6 step process later this year.

Jill serves as a lead trainer and faculty member for the Congregation’s Training of Ministers program where she teaches ceremonial leadership, relational facilitation, ethics, attunement, and integration work for emerging psychedelic ministers.

Her approach is rooted in the understanding that this work is about far more than the sacrament itself. Transformation does not come from peak experiences alone, but from learning how to stay present with what is revealed and integrate it into our lives in meaningful and sustainable ways. Her understanding of this work is shaped not only through training, but through years of personal searching, healing, and the ongoing practice of learning how to stay.

For more than a decade, Jill has worked with hundreds of journeyers from diverse backgrounds, many over the course of several years. In addition to her teaching and mentorship work, she facilitates one-on-one ceremonies as well as intimate group ceremonies and retreats in the Bay Area, Tahoe, TX, DC, and Jamaica. Her work is above all relational, bridging spiritual practice, trauma-informed care, and embodied integration. She draws from mindfulness traditions, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Relational Somatic Healing (RSH), and years of direct experience supporting people through grief, addiction recovery, spiritual crisis, relationship rupture, major life transitions, and the rich and nuanced path of becoming more fully themselves.

As a teacher and mentor, Jill is especially passionate about helping facilitators develop the capacity to truly be with people — not to fix, direct, or impose meaning onto their process, but to listen deeply, hold complexity, and remain attuned to what is actually unfolding in the moment. She believes the heart of this work is relational. Not formulaic. Not performative. Just the ongoing practice of presence, discernment, trust, integrity, and care.

Whether teaching/mentoring, leading retreats, or working one-on-one, her intention is the same: to help people become more authentic, embodied, connected to life, and capable of staying present for the full experience of what it is to be a human being right now.

Love Mercury is one of the Lead Facilitators and Trainers for Sacred Practice’s Minister in Training program. Her journey to self discovery began at an early age. She took her healing into her own hands and traveled around the world to study the ancient wisdom of folklore, prayers, Thai massage, and natural ways to heal the body. Her path organically grew into becoming a Holistic Health Practitioner where she launched four healing centers that she managed for over a decade. These healing centers specialized in women’s health and included offerings such as massage, meditation, spiritual counseling, ritual teaching, and empowering women to build better relationships with their bodies.

Feeling called to her Mexican ancestral heritage, Love’s life would be forever changed when she answered the call from Spirit and went on a spiritual pilgrimage to connect with her roots through visiting the lands of her Grandmothers. She travelled to France, Spain, and Mexico which eventually led her to to Peru and Columbia where she was introduced to the sacred plant medicines that helped heal her not only on a physical realm, but mentally, energetically, and spiritually.

When she returned from her travels, it was clear that she must continue on her healing journey and enrolled in the Hakomi Institute. After graduation, Love started her own coaching and counseling practice. She also began training at The Center for Consciousness Medicine and became a Psychedelic Guide to help accelerate her clients healing.

She is very excited to come on board at the Congregation for Sacred Practices as a lead Facilitator to help train new Ministers. She is impressed with the integrity and open hearted space that the Sacred Practices Founders have built and feels very mission aligned. She trusts that the right support is here for us all and that we are all being taken care of. She is very thankful for the sacred plant medicines who are our allies here to help support our reawakening.

Mark Haberstroh has been working psilocybin retreats for the last eight years. He was apart of the Congregation’s first cohort and has been a minister for 3 years. Having been an avid student of psychedelic history as well as psychedelic psychotherapy, he is eager to begin teaching the next generation of psychedelic ministers. Spiritual awakening has become an important part of personal and interpersonal development that Mark is passionate about sharing.

Mellie is a spiritual counselor and psychedelic guide in private practice for almost 10 years. As a lifelong learner, she is well-versed in a variety of healing traditions, approaches and philosophies, including Advaita Vedanta, mindfulness, Vipassana, inner child work, and Shamanic healing techniques.

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Pattering) and Hakomi are the main modalities that she applies when working with others in their healing and growth. Mellie believes that using Somatic Psychology techniques to address core limiting material that is held in the body is extremely effective in helping us transform these limitations and make the changes we desire in our lives.

Mellie is a recent faculty member who finds her calling as a teacher deeply nourishing and fulfilling. She loves helping ministers in training learn how to work with members in the realm of expanded states. She teaches the skill of “being with another” known as attunement. According to Mellie, attunement is deeply important: It is the heart of relational connection and it is at the root of all healing.

Paul Ryder, PhD, holds degrees from Harvard (AB Physics), Rutgers (MS Developmental and Social Psychology) and Pacifica Graduate Institute (MA and PhD Mythology and Depth Psychology). Before embarking on a healing practice, he worked both in corporate settings (Andersen Consulting, Xerox Learning Systems) and universities (Rutgers University, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University). His approach to deep pattern recognition, principle discovery, learning design, and strategy development has been employed by a wide range of clients, for the federal government (DoD, FBI, CIA, NSA) to New Economy icons such as Tom Peters and Fast Company. A startup veteran and member of the executive team at Ninth House Network, Ryder went on to found three businesses, RevoMetrix, LLC, RNM Global, and Kenneson, LLC.

In 2012, Paul turned his attention to bringing his business and leadership experience into a private coaching and healing practice. He has worked with clients all over the globe, employing the deep pattern recognition and principle discovery skills he learned in his corporate and academic work, and adding the healing skills of somatic psychotherapy, plant medicine work, and executive coaching.

Dr. Paul Ryder continues to teach Leadership and Organizational Behavior in the Executive MBA program at San Francisco State University.

Pierre Bouchard is a Lead Facilitator and Trainer at Sacred Practices, Licensed Professional Counselor with a private practice in Boulder, and Licensed Minister. He is also a former professional vinyl DJ.

With extensive training in Hakomi and other somatic modalities, Pierre brings a deeply embodied approach to trauma healing. His work bridges the therapeutic and spiritual realms, honoring both psychological healing and transpersonal experiences. A graduate of Naropa University’s Contemplative Psychotherapy program, Pierre has extensive experience with expanded states work, leading individual and group sessions, and maintaining a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy practice.

His interest in expanded states began through a meditation practice started in adolescence. As a licensed minister, Pierre facilitates psychedelic work within ceremonial containers, recognizing that much of this work transcends traditional therapeutic frameworks and calls for approaches rooted in animistic and shamanic traditions. He is currently studying with Josh Schrei, host of The Emerald podcast, deepening his understanding of mythic consciousness and animistic perspectives.

Pierre has guest lectured at numerous psychedelic training programs including Elemental Psychedelics, Naropa University’s Psychedelic Assisted Therapy certificate program, The Psychedelic Research and Training Institute in Fort Collins, and SoundMind in Philadelphia. He has been featured on recent podcasts including Psychedelics Today, The Vital Point, and has presented extensively on his three-axis model for psychedelic work, which maps personal, spiritual, and relational dimensions of healing.