Carson Kivari, MA, RCC

Registered Clinical Counsellor
Vancouver BC
Over my combined 17 years of education and practice I’ve enjoyed the privileged passion of learning the patterns of our nervous systems. Old traumatic residue is carried as a ‘body memory,’ long detached from the original source of pain. …And so despite your best self-care, you may experience anxiety and numbness like a mysterious poltergeist in your house. “Why do you haunt me still?” Working with me means answering the hero’s call to explore dark caves and deep oceans, releasing traumatic stress through a shared journey into the brain and body. If you are human, it is certain you have felt the pain of abandonment, rejection and betrayal. This being the case, it is my goal to guide you from the pain of aloneness to the relief of connection and the astonishing realization that you were never broken in the first place. Perhaps to our shared delight, the great medicines of our ancestors are now more readily available to support the healing journey. While trauma-informed counselling resonates deeply with me, the sacred plants and psychedelic compounds at our hands may offer one of the most direct and sincere means of releasing old pain known on earth. Myself and my clinical team would be glad to explore your appropriateness for psychedelic medicine, as well as to help plan and integrate trips.
Here in the present I direct a clinical team in Downtown Vancouver. Something must have gone right, because my career and life quest are aligned. I have the joy of supporting others to rid themselves of shame and grief, witnessing souls come back online. “How the hell did I end up here?” I regularly ask myself. Raised in a secular household that split up when I was 10, I was adrift in a world with no road map. I had no language for my emotions and fewer means of expressing them. As a teen I fell into patterns of escape with drugs and alcohol until one day I attempted to numb my pain with seven grams of the Psilocybe cubensis mushroom: Not a smart plan. An ego death beset me that shook me to my roots. I had lost the innocent privilege of ignorance to the nature of reality. I had seen that I would die and was confronted with the mystery of consciousness. Despite attempts to go back to how things were before there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. An obsession with Tibetan Buddhism led me to university and a new focus on psychodynamic psychology and western meditation practices. I lost connection with plant medicines but developed a specialty in working with military trauma, eventually carrying my expertise with PTSD to found a clinic working with civilians. The plants were not done with me, however, as I learned from a man named Dr. Gabor Mate one evening at a MAPS fundraiser. This peculiar and intense man motivated my trip to Ecuador to drink Ayahausca in the Amazon Basin. Over the following years, Ayahuasca and Iboga would show me radical forms of healing I could only have imagined. …And so in 2021, how can I do anything but champion the psychospiritual healing our Earth offers us through its superconscious plants? I have no choice but to give myself to the healing of myself and others, and of endless playfulness with the great conscious unity that is the cosmos pretending to play distinct and separate roles.