In 1994 I had been working in early childhood education for many years, and I knew it was time to leave. Not because I didn’t like little kids any more, but because I had been doing the same thing for too long, and there was nothing more to learn there, or at least nothing more that I was going to learn. I dithered for ages between training in therapy or going into some kind of writing school. I was a member of a dream interpretation group under the great Montague Ullman, and I felt very at home with the world of symbol and imagery. My bedtime reading was C.G. Jung rather than Jack Reacher, and on this rather flimsy evidence, I enrolled in a two-year social work course at NYU.

 NYU and me were not a good match. They seemed very invested in teaching us how to think “inside the box,” as it were, whereas my thinking was so naturally, outside the box that I often had trouble finding it. At least I had trouble finding their box. I spent a lot of my time in the splendid NYU library, looking up old alchemical texts or facsimile editions of the more abstruse books by William Blake. One kind teacher there probably saved me from myself by letting me do multiple independent studies.

 I was rather limping to the end of the two-year course, when at the beginning of my last semester I got a call from an old friend who had been my boss in a job where I did business writing for an audiovisual company (yes, really, even though all I knew about audiovisuals was how to turn on the radio). She told me that she had left that field, become a priest, and was now running a needle exchange in the Bronx, would I like to come join? I immediately said no, I was not going to travel an hour and a half every day to the Bronx from Brooklyn, and besides, I was still in school.

 Eventually though, as she kept pestering me, sanity won out. For nearly two years money had all been going out, and here was someone offering money to come in, without all the trial and tribulation of a job interview. I, finally, gracefully accepted, and spent many happy years at New York Harm Reduction Educators, first there in the Bronx, and later in East Harlem. My favorite time was when I did streetside counseling next to the mobile needle exchange van, wherever it might be parked. This was rather like setting up shop on any old street corner and asking random people tell me your deepest, deepest thoughts, dreams, fears and feelings. It was amazing, and allowed me to see a world I had never imagined.

 The needle exchange taught me all about the harm reduction approach to drugs. Quite naturally, if you are there to give someone fresh needles you can’t also tell them they must not be using them. You can, though, show them how to use drugs more safely, and look into the life that brought them to this point. The people there were perfectly normal people who were part of throwaway generations in throwaway neighborhoods, where the local schools mainly taught them how to fight and the only job training program was about selling drugs. 

 After a while, having taken the postgraduate classes to give me the august title of Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I started a little private practice in the evenings. The natural place to begin was with harm reduction, and most of my clients those days had either a drug or an alcohol problem. A few years into that I took on a man who had taken the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine to help him get off heroin. Here my jagged career path and my interest in dreams, the inner world, and so on, met up again. The imagery of the dream and the imagery of the trip are blood brothers, and I felt their kinship deeply. I took on more people who had done ibogaine, and then the rest of the hallucinogenic crew, like psilocybin, ayahuasca and bufo, and I rather luckily rode the wave of interest in those drugs that grew and grew in the noughties and teens of this century, and has yet to crest.

 I wandered away from NYHRE, worked at a succession of places remarkably like it, and then returned in 2016, part time. Collaborating with my friend and colleague Dimitri Mugianis, we started a holistic health program in their new, fancier building on 126 Street, and brought in volunteers who offered yoga, reiki, acupuncture, massage, and a bevy of other holistic offerings. We even had a theatre class. My office was decorated like an indigenous hut, with bamboo garden fencing round the walls, a shower curtain depicting tree tops on the ceiling, and a little light show machine to make things more trippy. Very few therapy sessions were conducted without a rattle. Every week Dimitri and I ran a drum circle group where everyone danced, shouted, shook rattles and sang. It was massive fun, and I would say the only group “intervention” in the whole of NYC that offered the same level of pleasure as a hit of dope.

I finally got too old to travel up to Harlem all the time so I finally left NYHRE, and then post-Covid, I also left my private practice office in the City, and am now working out of my house via zoom and Facetime. Dimitri and I continue to work together, doing a psychedelic support group via zoom. Thank you technology! Now about half the people I see do, or have done, a psychedelic, and among them, many are talking about the issues that brought them to psychedelics as much as the experiences themselves. Basically, everyone I see is beset by life, its tribulations and puzzles. In fact, everybody I know is beset by life.

The majority of people do the “going inside” of internal family systems therapy or clean language with me, and explore those inner realms that in some way were calling to me back in 1994. It seems to me that there is more to therapy than eradicating bad symptoms, and that anxiety, depression and so forth are not just signs of a disorganized brain, but of people grappling, as best they may, with the human condition. We are not only looking to cheer up or to calm down, we are looking for meaning in our lives, and richness in our day-to-day experience. To get through “the dark night of the soul” is one thing; to have that be the corridor to some kind of “hero’s journey,” is another. I’m just glad to be part of any of that with a lot of people.