Psychedelics & Plant Medicine
The Great Work of Growing Whole [Collage]
Doug Van Houten
Psychedelic experiences are, at their core, encounters with the sacred.
They are also increasingly clinical, institutional, and in need of the same organizational rigor that serious human development work has always required. I work at that intersection.
I came to this field through meaning-making and wisdom traditions, not through clinical or scientific frameworks. I directed the Psychedelic Practitioner Core Training at Synthesis Institute, a 13-month professional training program serving 300+ learners across concurrent global cohorts. I currently serve on the Ethics Committee of Gather Well Psychedelics and as Trustee of Ligare, a society exploring the intersection of Christian theology and psychedelic practice. I am also one of 60 experts contributing to the EPEE Project, developing practical guidelines for clinicians encountering spiritual, mystical, and psychedelic experiences in their patients.
My particular contribution to this field is translation. I am trained as an eco-theologian and scholar of religion at Yale and Dartmouth. I have spent two decades studying how ancient wisdom traditions hold experiences that Western clinical frameworks struggle to categorize. I understand what gets lost when a psychedelic experience is processed through a purely biomedical lens, and I know how to help organizations develop the conceptual and ethical frameworks to hold these experiences responsibly, without prescribing belief, without drifting into woo, and without flattening the depth that makes this work matter.
Clinicians are typically trained as deep materialists. That training serves them well until the person in front of them has an experience that exceeds its categories. I help organizations and practitioners develop what I call spiritual literacy: the capacity to recognize, hold, and respond to spiritual and meaning-laden dimensions of psychedelic experience without pathologizing or over-spiritualizing them.
In this space, I can help with:
Training program design, curriculum architecture, and ethics integration
Governance, ethics committee development, and code of conduct design
Spiritual literacy frameworks for clinical and non-clinical teams
Organizational assessment for programs navigating growth, transition, or field scrutiny
Faculty development and supervision systems
Gathering and convening design at the intersection of science, spirituality, and practice
What Others Say
Meet Frederica
Transformation has been the through-line of my professional life. Less so 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. After Dartmouth I joined the Peace Corps in the Philippines, doing community development and environmental education on Olango Island. 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. Build the programs, the ethics infrastructure, the people systems, the governance, so the work can survive its best year, its most charismatic leader, its hardest season. 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.
Media
Guest discussion on the architecture, ethics, and evolution of psychedelic practitioner training programs.
Conversation on working responsibly as healer and guide in the emerging psychedelic landscape.
ReMind Conference Panel Speaker
Panel speaker: “Psychedelic Retreats and Wellness Centers: Insider Strategies for Success” — exploring sustainable infrastructure and standards in psychedelic programming.