“I Can Now Say That I Feel Lighter Than I Have in Decades.”
ABOUT MICHAEL TIERNO
I wasn't always someone who believed in this work. For most of my life, I was committed to physicalism and materialism. If science hadn't confirmed it, I dismissed it. Expanded states, plant medicine, mystical experience? I would have written it all off without a second thought.
Then I went to Peru. And everything changed.
My heart cracked open in ways I had no language for. I saw clearly, perhaps for the first time, how I had been living, driven by fear, armored by judgment, starved of genuine gratitude. I saw that life wasn't the complicated, threatening maze I'd made it into. And I recognized something that billions of people across millennia have known: there is far more to this existence than what rational thought alone can reach.
AFTER EXPANDED STATES
That first journey didn't just shift my perspective; it initiated a complete reorientation of my life. I felt, in my bones, that I am not separate from nature but an inseparable part of it. I reconnected with the power of the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine within me, and began cultivating those energies in myself and others. Most profoundly, I recognized that the wisdom I was accessing had been there all along, buried under decades of modern conditioning, just outside awareness.
I am now convinced this wisdom lives in every human being, waiting to be rediscovered.
MY PREPARATION FOR THIS WORK
The most important preparation I have done for this work is the work I have done on myself. That is not a modest disclaimer. It is the actual foundation. Over five years in a men's process group, years of individual therapy, and more than a decade of my own expanded state experiences have taught me more about what happens in these containers than any training program alone could have. I learn the most from the inside out.
I hold a graduate degree in social psychology, which is the study of how groups shape individual thinking, how beliefs and attitudes form and change, and how people's behavior shifts inside different relational and social contexts. That lens is directly useful in this work. Expanded states do not happen in a vacuum. They happen inside a container, a relationship, and a set of expectations and group dynamics. Understanding those forces helps me work with them rather than around them.
My formal training includes a year-long program at the School of Conscious Medicine, focused on facilitation skills, preparation and integration methods, and trauma-informed practice, all applied specifically to working with expanded states. I have studied under Marcela Patigozo, an indigenous medicine woman from Peru: I participated in ceremonies she led, apprenticed with her, and collaborated with her on retreats. I have worked with several other medicine people, both indigenous and not, in various capacities. For the past two years, I have been an active member of the Wisdom Circles at the Psychedelic Guide Network, a professional peer consultation community for guides who take ethical practice seriously.
What I discovered through all of it surprised me: I'm not here to transform you. I'm here to help you remember who you already are.
MY WORK TODAY
I work with clients one-on-one in expanded states, with full preparation before and structured integration after every session. I also offer standalone integration sessions for people who have had expanded state experiences elsewhere and are trying to understand what those experiences mean for their lives.
Together with my dear friend and collaborator Yoni Havana, I co-lead our four-day retreat program for people committed to showing up more fully in every area of life.
I am co-founder of the Universal Awareness Fellowship, a nonprofit spiritual organization that holds these retreat programs and the ongoing community that surrounds them. UAF exists to support healing, rites of passage, and long-term integration in community, including providing supported-rate access for people who otherwise could not participate.
If any of this resonates, I'd love to connect.
