About PRATI
Join our mailing list for updates on new trainings, events, and offerings from PRATI.
Purpose
Restoring Connection to the Sacred: Self, Community, Nature, and Spirit.
Vision
PRATI imagines a world where people flourish and thrive in right relationship with the natural world.
Mission
Through psychedelic medicine, PRATI nurtures a new approach to mental health, and illuminates a pathway for individual and planetary healing. We do so by expanding professional capacity for transformational care, restoring a relational paradigm of health and healing, and conducting clinically relevant research.
Trainers
Our training team brings together a diverse range of professional disciplines, clinical expertise, and lived experiences. We are connected by our desire to heal people, our professions, and the planet with the support of psychedelic medicines. With a strong foundation in education, clinical practice, and research, each team member is deeply dedicated to advancing this vital work.
Our Team
prati founder
Scott Shannon, MD
prati Origins
Inspired by their deeply positive experience with Phase III MDMA-assisted therapy research, the owners of Wholeness Center began discussing the idea of adding a specialized psychedelic research arm to the clinic in late 2018. A few months later, Scott Shannon and Jason Sienknecht explored developing a ketamine training program for professionals. Soon after, Scott convened a meeting of interested colleagues both within and beyond Wholeness Center. The project quickly took on a community flavor, with more than a dozen passionate clinicians contributing ideas and energy. Out of this collective spirit, PRATI (Psychedelic Research and Training Institute) was formally created to advance cutting-edge research and clinical education.
Scott supported PRATI’s legal incorporation, formal naming, and establishment of its financial infrastructure. Robert Colbert provided key guidance on tax and accounting matters, ensuring a solid foundation for growth. PRATI’s first educational event took place in August 2019, when the small founding team—Scott Shannon, Jason Sienknecht, Chris Pateros and Naveen Thomas—hosted and trained the clinical group from Usona. That October, the full PRATI team gathered for a local experiential retreat that deepened their sense of shared mission.
Feeling ready to expand, the group scheduled its first formal training for February 2020. The course quickly filled, confirming the strong interest and need for this work. Though the COVID-19 pandemic caused temporary delays, in-person experiential trainings resumed by the summer of 2020. Stephen Thomas began as PRATI’s A/V expert and DJ (“ST Frequency”) for its now-legendary dance gatherings, soon evolving into his current role as Training Director. Chris Pateros contributed significantly to early operations, while Jason Sienknecht led curriculum development.
In the fall of 2020, Jamie Harvie became PRATI’s first formal Executive Director, bringing structure, operational clarity, and refined organizational roles. Under his leadership, PRATI reaffirmed its commitment to the sacred and to operating as an aligned nonprofit. This renewed vision—honoring self, community, nature, and spirit—resonated deeply with the faculty and staff. Since then, PRATI has thrived and grown, sustained by strong word-of-mouth and the profound beauty of its experiential trainings. These events now have a national reputation for the quality of the sacred container that is formed. We routinely recruit faculty from our alumni who align with our mission and vision as we continue to diversify. Today, under the leadership of Wilhelmina De Castro, PRATI continues to evolve—balancing heart, mind, and soul in service of a transformative mission: to help reawaken our collective connection to the sacred.
prati Team
Wilhelmina De Castro, LCSW, Executive Director
German Ascani, MD, MS Lead Psychiatric Consultant
Founding Team Member Jason Sienknecht, LPC, CAS
Stephanie Thomas, PharmD, NTP, CGP, Event Coordinator
Founding Team Member Stephen Thomas, LCSW, Foundations in Psychedelic Medicine Training Director
Mark Booth, IT Specialist
Founding Team Member Christine Pateros, MA, RN, End-of-Life PAT Training Director
Foundations in Psychedelic Medicine Team
Shannon Darling, PMHNP
Arsalan Azam, MD
Kylie House, MD
End of Life & Existential Distress Team
Darren Fisher, RN, BSN
Carmen Amezcua, MD
Mary Cosimano, LMSW
Meghan Fagundes, Ph.D.
Arsalan Azam, MD
Charlotte Charfen, MD
Board of Directors
Lia Mix, MS, MFT
Joe Tafur, MD
Janis Phelps, PhD
Andrew Weil, MD
Kwasi Adusei, DNP, PMHNP-BC
IN DEPTH
PRATI is built upon a unitary mental model—that of Wholeness. This concept is reflected in our design and philosophy; our mission, vision, and purpose; our work and our community. Wholeness is a relational model which reflects a deep truth: we are interconnected and interdependent beings. Wholeness derives from a worldview known by many names across time and traditions, including but not limited to: non-duality, complexity science, systems thinking, interbeing, indigenous wisdom and deep ecology.
While we remain unique individuals, we are also innately bound to each other and to the web of life. From this awareness, we believe that psychedelic medicines enable us to access the Wholeness within us and, in doing, heal our wounds of separation by revealing our true nature.
As such, we believe psychedelic medicine fits naturally within a living system model of health and a holistic medicine framework.
The Living System Model of Health Diagram
Sudak, N.; Harvie J. “Integrative Strategies for Planetary Health”. Integrative Medicine 5th Ed., edited by Rakel, D., Minichiello, V. (ed), Elsevier Press, 2022, p 887
Also known as integrative medicine, this medical approach acknowledges the interconnection of mind, body, and spirit. It embraces complexity science, which illuminates the innate ability of all living systems to heal, adapt, and evolve. Mental health—an inner state of Wholeness— represents a balance in this ecology of body-mind-spirit. We believe psychedelic medicines are one of our most powerful tools to support spiritual healing and, in turn, whole-person healing.
From this holistic context, PRATI’s purpose arises: To Restore Connection to the Sacred: Self, Community, Nature, and Spirit. Below, we explain these concepts and how they guide our work.
Self
Psychedelic medicines have the ability to uncover our Wholeness by removing the veil of our constructed, separate self. We create this ego-bound self as a means of survival, to cope and function in a less-than-perfect world. We cling to it dearly and falsely believe it to be the entirety of who we are. This results in a painful separation from one another, our planet, and our true nature. Psychedelic medicines quiet this false self through their action on the default mode network, enhancing interconnectivity among diverse areas of the brain. With these barriers removed, we can experience our psyche in its Wholeness and touch the truth of our unity with life and the cosmos. Our taste of the whole psyche illuminates the truth of our Wholeness and charts a path toward greater personal and planetary healing.
Community
Science establishes that humans are wired for connection. In turn, psychedelic medicines anchor this understanding as a profoundly felt knowing. This truth sits in contrast to our flawed societal systems (the spheres of interaction where we work, live, and play) built on false beliefs in an oppositional hierarchy of human value and “othering.” The result of this tension is a pressing desire to realign and transform our human-made systems so that they foster connection, diversity, equity, dignity, and our shared humanity—to restore balance so that our outer world may become a reflection of a healed inner world. This reimagining, reconnecting, and redesigning of Whole Community is as vital a part of our work as that of Whole Person, Whole Self.
Nature
Our false identity as a separate self disconnects us from our true nature. From this illusion, we believe we are independent and isolated—merely self. We lose sight of the fact that we are interwoven with the natural world, our bodies more non-human cells than human, part of a living planet upon whose gifts—air, water, food, shelter, clothing—we depend for our very existence. Psychedelic medicines increase nature-relatedness, a sense of being one with nature rather than separate from it. In this experience, unity with all life becomes a revealed truth that can’t be reversed or ignored. As such, it drives an urgency to restore our connection with a living planet and heal humanity’s broken relationship with the natural world of which we are a part. The insight of Whole Nature is no less essential than Whole Self in our work. It is merely one layer of our ecology and our Wholeness.
Spirit
Psychedelic medicines help us expand consciousness to touch the ineffable—something greater than ourselves, a larger whole. Studies into mystical experiences evoked by psychedelics have shown this revelation can be deeply transformative, providing lasting relief from psychospiritual distress and prompting profound, beneficial changes in mood, behavior, and personality. It is a gift of the medicines. We use the term Spirit to describe the ineffable. Some may prefer the terms consciousness, love, god, the great mystery, or oneness. This awareness is bound with the lessons, teachings, and wisdom of not only psychedelic medicines but of the universe itself. Put simply, Spirit is the source of Wholeness that the medicines help us return to. It is central to the healing power of our work, despite our imperfect attempts to grasp and define it. Therein lies its beauty.