Maria-Paula Almiron, CPsych, FPsych

As a young psychologist, I had mentors who guided me generously and set me on paths I would have otherwise not walked. They left me with a legacy of knowledge and ethics that continues to serve me to date. My earliest encounters with trauma were in the Dutch asylum-seeking service with displaced refugees from the Balkan’s war. I spent my formative years in the UK maximum-security hospitals with forensic inpatients. My clinical career progressed thereafter through public and private healthcare systems. As a psychologist, I engaged with individuals and systems across the extreme ends of privilege and exclusion and relied on my shared humanity to maintain heart-availability and relatability. My current clinical practice is situated at the junction of science and spirituality. The work that I do relies on years of formal education and on practices I gathered away from the Western paradigm. Pilgrimage, silence, prayer, contemplation, service, are some of the practices that shaped the present version of me. As it is often the case, my journey with visionary plants started with my own transformation. I have been myself in ethical relationship with all the medicines that I facilitate for others. My strength is in my reverence for ritual and ceremony that I hold within for the mountain, desert, jungle, temple, or city psychonaut.