Ashley Carmen, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist · Consciousness Facilitator · Psychedelic Psychotherapist
The clinical path taught her how to hold others. The ceremonial path taught her how to hold herself. What she built next started with a handful of guides in her living room.
A Living Room in Austin
There was a lot happening in the medicine community that I couldn’t unsee. Guides dating their clients. Flirting with them. Partying with them. Dual relationships everyone was politely pretending not to notice.
Most of it could have been mitigated if those guides had been in peer consultation, talking about it out loud with someone. They weren’t.
So I invited a handful of practitioners I knew were actively guiding to my house, and I taught them peer consultation. Right there in my living room. People heard about it. They asked for an online version. We built one. That was over 30 Wisdom Circles ago.
Before any of that, I spent eight years as a licensed psychotherapist working in clinical settings: treating addiction recovery, severe trauma, and the kind of pain that conventional pharmaceutical approaches often fail to reach. I held space inside the system. I followed the protocols. And I watched the same patients cycle through the same doors.
Something was missing. Not in my training, but in the paradigm itself.
“I didn’t leave clinical work because it failed. I left because I found something that went deeper, and I couldn’t unsee it.”
I completed specialized MDMA-assisted psychotherapy training through MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and psilocybin guide training through the School of Consciousness Medicine, informed by the Mazatec traditions of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico. These experiences didn’t replace my clinical knowledge. They transformed how I understood what healing actually requires.
Plant medicine also reopened a door I thought I’d closed for good. Raised Latina in the San Francisco Bay Area by a Mexican family steeped in strict Roman Catholicism, I had completed every sacrament, then turned away from the Church entirely. Sitting with a curandera whose altar held Catholic saints beside indigenous offerings, I found my way back to faith on my own terms. Not obedience. Sovereignty.
That arc, inherited tradition, rejection, reencounter, sovereign reclamation, is the same one I see in every practitioner who walks between the clinical and the ceremonial. It’s the tension PGN was built to hold.
The Field Is Growing.
The Support Isn’t.
The psychedelic renaissance is producing more trained practitioners every year. But training alone doesn’t prepare anyone for what happens when a session goes sideways, when attraction surfaces in the container, or when the weight of holding others starts to erode the person doing the holding.
I founded Psychedelic Guide Network in 2022 because I saw a gap no one was filling: practitioners finishing their training programs and stepping into practice without peer support, without ethical infrastructure, and without a community that understands the specific complexity of this work.
“We have plenty of training programs. We have almost no peer support. That’s the gap PGN exists to close.”
PGN is not another certification factory. It’s an ethics-first practice, built on Kylea Taylor’s InnerEthics® framework, where practitioners learn to hold themselves accountable through genuine peer relationship, not top-down compliance.
Training & Credentials
Master’s in Clinical Psychology
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with eight years of clinical practice treating addiction, trauma, and complex emotional challenges.
MAPS MDMA Training
Specialized training in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy through the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Psilocybin Guide Training
Trained through the School of Consciousness Medicine, informed by the Mazatec traditions of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico.
InnerEthics® Partnership
PGN’s ethics curriculum is built on Kylea Taylor’s InnerEthics® model, the leading relational ethics framework for psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Active Practitioner
Ashley sits in ceremony, attends immersions, hosts circles, and speaks at conferences. She is not writing from the sidelines: she is doing the work.
Community Builder
Created the Wisdom Circles program: biweekly peer consultation groups where practitioners develop ethical clarity through real case presentations.
Built With Purpose
Kylea Taylor, MS, LMFT
InnerEthics® Founder & Advisor
Kylea Taylor, LMFT is internationally recognized author, educator, and ethicist, who for more than 30 years has specialized in ethical practice with extraordinary states of consciousness. She is the founder of InnerEthics®, the relational ethics framework at the heart of every PGN course. A former Senior Trainer in the pioneering Grof Transpersonal Training program, Kylea brings a rare depth of clinical and experiential knowledge to the work. Her books on ethical awareness and peer consultation for psychedelic practitioners remain foundational texts in the field. She advises PGN on curriculum integrity and the continued evolution of the InnerEthics® model.
Mike Bledsoe
Strategic Advisor
Mike Bledsoe brings over a decade of experience building digital platforms, online education systems, and creator-driven businesses. A U.S. Navy veteran turned entrepreneur, he has launched multiple companies and hosted long-running podcasts at the intersection of human performance, consciousness, and personal development. Mike advises PGN on technology infrastructure, AI-powered content systems, and the operational architecture that allows a small team to deliver world-class practitioner education at scale.
Core Convictions
Ethics Must Be Embodied, Not Enforced
Rules don’t prevent harm: self-awareness does. PGN teaches practitioners to develop embodied virtues through peer accountability, not top-down compliance. Perfection isn’t expected. Commitment to evolution is.
The Clinical and Spiritual Are Not Opposites
Transference and ceremony can exist in the same conversation. Ashley’s work bridges the clinical and ceremonial traditions: not by choosing one over the other, but by honoring the intelligence in both.
Scaling Requires Depth
If we scale access without scaling integrity, we haven’t transformed the paradigm: we’ve industrialized it. Every PGN offering is built to deepen practice, not just distribute credentials.
Vulnerability Is a Professional Requirement
You cannot ethically hold others if you can’t be vulnerable with your peers. PGN’s Wisdom Circles are built on the premise that being seen, honestly, by people who understand the work, is not optional.
What PGN Is Building
PGN exists to build the ethics infrastructure the psychedelic field needs: not as a gatekeeper, but as a grounded midwife for practitioners doing the hardest work of their careers.
That means self-paced ethics training built on a real framework, not another set of generic guidelines. It means live peer consultation circles where practitioners present actual cases and develop clarity through relationship, not isolation. And it means a community where the clinical, the ceremonial, and the deeply personal can all exist in the same room.
Ashley’s vision is a field where practitioners don’t just complete their training and hope for the best. Where ethical development is an ongoing practice: supported by peers, grounded in self-awareness, and held with the same reverence we bring to the medicine itself.
“The safest space you can offer another is the one you’ve already created within yourself.”
Find Your Place in the Work
Whether you’re newly trained and unsure of your next step, or a seasoned practitioner carrying the weight of this work alone, start the same way every guide in this community started: by naming what you’re actually carrying.