The Great Work of Growing Whole [Collage]
Doug Van Houten
I help leaders and organizations hold spiritual depth and institutional reality together: thinking clearly, building coherently, and staying close to why the work matters.
I work in adult transformation, helping organizations create the conditions for it and building the systems that hold it. Over twenty years I've become a fluent translator between worlds that rarely speak to each other: the scholarly and the sacred, the visionary and the operational, the ancient and the modern.
Your vision is outrunning the structure.
Your program has heart but no spine.
The people doing the work can't talk to the people funding it.
A leadership transition arrives with no one to navigate it.
The training exists but participants leave unchanged.
These are the problems I work on.
Retreat centers and residential learning communities
Spiritual, contemplative, and wisdom-based nonprofits
University departments and academic programs
Foundations and funders
Founders building new containers for human development
Psychedelic and plant medicine organizations
My clients are organizations doing work at the intersection of learning, transformation, and meaning. They have vision and complexity… and something that isn't quite holding.
The leaders who find me are usually executive directors, founders, or program directors. You know something isn't holding, and you need someone who can come in, get oriented fast, and help build what will last.
Services
Program & Curriculum Architecture
Your program has heart but the design isn't holding it. I build the structure: sequence, pedagogy, ethical framework, and assessment, so the experience actually delivers what it promises. Certificate programs, practitioner training, and continuing education are a particular strength.
Leadership Transition Support
A founder is leaving. A director is departing. The handoff is happening with no one to navigate it. I help organizations move through transition without losing what you've built.
Facilitation of High-Stakes Gatherings
Board retreats, leadership offsites, community reckonings, strategic planning sessions. I design and hold the container so the conversation goes where it needs to go.
Hiring Process Design & Management
From role scoping through onboarding. I help you find someone who actually fits — not just on paper, but in the room where your work happens.
Spiritual Literacy & Psycho-Spiritual Work
When psychedelic experience exceeds clinical categories, practitioners need more than a protocol. I help you develop the frameworks to recognize, hold, and respond to spiritual dimensions of this work without pathologizing or over-spiritualizing them.
Organizational Assessment & Strategic Consulting
Something isn't working and you're not sure what. I come in, talk to your people, find the thread, and tell you honestly what you're looking at — then help you do something about it.
Psychedelic Field Consulting
The psychedelic field is building fast and not always collaboratively or strategically. I work with training programs, research centers, and emerging organizations on the structural and ethical infrastructure this moment requires. → See my full psychedelics work here
What Others Say
Meet Frederica
Transformation has been the through-line of my professional life. Not just lifestyle tweaks or values shifts, but rather the kind of change that reorganizes a person's entire cosmology. I have spent my career building and strengthening the containers where that kind of change happens.
I grew up between worlds — Belgian by origin, American by upbringing, Flemish-speaking at home and English-speaking everywhere else. That early experience of living across registers turned out to be preparation. I'm trained as an eco-theologian, ethicist, and scholar of contemplative and transformative practice. I hold dual master's degrees from Yale, in the School of the Environment and the Divinity School, and an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth in religion and environmental science. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines; I have lived and worked across 35 countries, speak four languages, and have spent my career moving between worlds that don't customarily talk to each other: the scholarly and the sacred, the institutional and the contemplative, the boardroom and the temple. Translation is my native mode.
Before moving fully into organizational work I spent five years teaching at the University of Washington and Seattle University, where I designed and taught courses on sustainability, environmental justice, ethics, and world religions. The classroom was where I first understood that the container matters as much as the content.
My professional home has been at organizations doing serious human development work: United Religions Initiative, Spiritual Directors International, the Synthesis Institute, and Esalen Institute. In each of them, the work was the same — take something with genuine vision and make it sturdy enough to last, building the programs, the ethics infrastructure, the people systems, and the governance so the work can survive leadership transitions or hard seasons. I have also spent years working in the emerging field of psychedelics and entheogens, helping organizations in this space build the ethical frameworks, spiritual literacy, and program coherence that this work demands and deserves.
The most meaningful work in the world fails or gets corrupted when the institutions doing it are structurally unsound. My contribution is making those institutions sturdy enough to deliver on their promise.
Outside of work I'm usually in the mountains, rowing, biking, open-water swimming, or engaging in Type 2 fun of some kind. I live in Seattle with my partner, our two children and an intentional tangle of chosen family and friends.