Awakening the Navigator

Where meditation meets psychedelic medicine — with a crew committed to going all the way.

We provide a training ground and community for guides, healers, and practitioners ready to navigate deeper and paddle together.

You're doing the work — ceremonies, retreats, trainings, 1:1 sessions. You desire a daily spiritual practice and a community that supports it. You're working with psychedelics intentionally, inside facilitated ceremonies and guided processes, not experimenting alone. But you've felt the limitation of fragmented training: powerful experiences followed by ordinary life, with nothing holding the two together. The connective tissue is missing.

You're realizing that true contentment won't come from another weekend training or another psychedelic experience. Contentment is our fundamental nature as Awareness — stabilized through daily practice as a permanent trait, not a temporal state. You're ready to train that attention in order to live the life you were born to live.

What you're looking for is a consistent community — people you can train with, grow with, and be genuinely held by over time. Not a certification program. Not another weekend event. A place where practice develops continuously across body, mind, and spirit through real community, real accountability, and real depth.

We cannot do this alone. If your life is moving toward healing — this community is built for you.

“Navigating life — and especially psychedelic space — without a trained mind is like white water rafting without a paddle.”

-Ryan McCarter

Who finds their home here?

  • Psychedelic guides and facilitators

  • Therapists and trauma-informed practitioners

  • Somatic and embodied practitioners

  • Movement and dance practitioners

  • Breathwork facilitators

  • Sound healers and musicians

  • Energy workers and subtle body practitioners

  • Ceremonialists and ancestral healing practitioners

  • Nature-based and earth-based practitioners

  • Those rebuilding sacred community — land, agriculture, and village life

  • Death doulas and grief workers

  • Sexuality and intimacy practitioners

  • Spiritual care providers and chaplains

  • Elder healers stepping into fuller service

  • Coaches, educators, and community builders who support this work

Foundational Mind Training

We offer a 12-week training to learn the Elephant Path — an Indo-Tibetan mind-training system for stabilizing attention. Without stable attention, we can't meet our experience with enough steadiness to love our parts back into wholeness, nor step into more advanced practices.

Meet your paddle

Learn the Elephant Path, an Indo-Tibetan mind-training system.

1. Navigate Psychedelics with Stability

This training cultivates Samatha (calm-staying), your stable attention, so you can:

✅ Calm-stay with traumatic energy until it resolves.
✅ Calm-stay with healing energy until it integrates.

2. Cultivate Subtle Awareness & Perception

This training sharpens your awareness to:

✅ Enhance attunement and perceive the subtle layers of experience.
✅ Develop abilities others may label "shamanic," but which become natural.

3. Unlock the Power of Undistracted Focus

Sustained attention is key to manifesting your visions.

✅ Stay present with tasks until completion.
✅ Free yourself from distraction and mental agitation.

Training Structure

Awakening the Navigator 12-Week Foundational Mind Training

  • 2.5 hours of pre-recorded videos teaching the 9 Stages of the Elephant Path

  • 12 weeks of twice-weekly guided meditation sessions and group discussions on Zoom that take you through the 9 stages of the Elephant Path while creating a group field of safety, coherence, and connection

  • "Awakening the Navigator" Teaching AI - your 24/7 teaching assistant trained on all training content to answer questions anytime between Zoom sessions

  • Next start date: Tuesday, July 28th 2026

  • Weekly Meditation Times: Tuesdays & Fridays @7am PT

    • Each session is one hour and includes a 5-minute check-in, 35 minute meditation, and 20 minutes of community building, sharing, and Q&A

  • "I’ve been participating in the Awakening the Navigator program for the last three months and I’m finding it profoundly helpful in how I relate to my experiences, and how I can hold space for my clients. I’m finding a new depth to my meditation practice after decades of other systems."

    - Alexander

  • “Ryan illuminates the path of Awareness with a seamless elegance. Highly recommended. Grateful for his gifts! 🙏🩵🙏”

    - Chris

  • “Hey folks!.. I did this with Ryan and it really took my own meditation to a new level and gave me some great skills to share with clients. It’s also a really great way to be in community and build a practice together that benefits all of us. Also, Ryan’s level of experience and depth with this practice is very evident and he holds a great space for learning and sharing. I really recommend checking it out!”

    - H.R.

  • “I have been a long time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and this training took my own meditation practice to a new level and gave me additional skills that I was not able to do on my own. There is something to be said about making a commitment to show up and connect with each twice-weekly live meditation.  These group sessions are the glue that resources us to be in community and build a practice together that enriches everyone involved.”

     - Bella

  • “The well thought out organization, The well thought out organization, skillful guiding, sense of mastery and confidence help to create a container of trust and safety. When Ryan speaks there is an expression of the qualities of friendship, support and care that he has for others. He has a commitment to his students and to the larger world to be there for others and to be present. Through his teachings and way of being in the world, he has helped me discover another aspect of my own unfolding.”

    - Pamela

A Year of the Heart

Our ongoing practice container for committed practitioners

After the Foundational 12-Week Mind-Training, navigators may apply to enter a year-long practice container — integrating meditative alchemy and psychedelic medicines to open the heart. Two sessions each week. In-person group medicine journeys woven throughout— followed by integration and community weaving that brings the group's collective intelligence back into the work.

We dedicate ourselves to opening the heart: meeting our wounded parts with an awareness so refined, so attuned, that they feel called to step into the light. This is not a curriculum you move through. It is a community you grow inside of. Learn more.

Let’s Chat

If this lights you up, book a call — let's explore your desire and see if it's a match.

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