Meet the Founders

Before I could even speak, my mother was taken from me. She was just 26. I was seven months old. She died of asthma—something so treatable, so preventable. And yet, I can’t help but feel that it happened because western medicine doesn’t truly care about Black women’s bodies.

Her death cracked the world wide open—long before I had words to name the grief. And though I didn’t understand it at the time, her absence shaped everything that came after.

When she passed, it was my grandmother who caught me. Afro-Costa Rican. Rooted. Brave. Unapologetic. Fierce. She raised me—alongside my uncle—through the earliest years of my life. Her home was a sanctuary of care, rhythm, and resilience. And let’s be real—she was an original city girl before that was even a thing. Sharp tongue, soft heart, and always ten steps ahead with a pot on the stove and a plan in her head.

My father couldn’t care for me then. Grief and addiction had turned his world upside down. He was barely holding himself, let alone a baby.

My grandmother became the anchor. She believed in the healing power of plants—in prayers whispered over teas and roots, healing through hands in soil and pots on the stove. She didn’t call it holistic wellness. She just knew how to care for what hurt.

From her, I learned that healing lives in kitchens, in gardens, in the quiet hush of ordinary moments. She made me proud to be Afro-Latina—to carry the rhythm of the Caribbean and the resilience of the diaspora.

Music, Memory & Medicine

When I was nine, my father got sober. He sent for us to come live with him in Maine.

We were still grieving—each of us carrying a silence the other couldn’t translate. He was barely 30 when the world unraveled beneath him, trying to raise a daughter with hands still trembling from loss. And I was growing up in a world that barely saw me, searching for pieces of myself in his grief—and in my own.

Music became our medicine. Loud speakers echoing through the apartment, filling the spaces where words failed us. That was how we healed—through rhythm, through sound.

To this day, I thank him for my eclectic taste: for the soul, the rock, the funk, the roots. For the soundtrack that held our sorrow. For the songs that helped raise me.

He also introduced me to psychedelics. He didn’t pathologize them—he normalized them. Plant medicine wasn’t strange or forbidden. It was just part of the conversation. That early exposure planted seeds I didn’t even realize were growing.

 Return to the Self

When I was finally ready to sit with it all, I turned to psychedelics—not as an escape, but as a way back to myself.

Psychedelics cracked me open. They made room for the grief I’d carried in silence. They helped me forgive—and see—my father. Not just as the man who struggled, but as someone doing the best he could while carrying his own pain.

They helped me see my mother—not just as someone I lost, but as someone whose presence still lives within me.
They reminded me that healing is not about erasing the hurt, but honoring what it made possible.

They connected me back to my grandmother’s hands, to her teas, her prayers, her bold and unwavering medicine.

They helped me reclaim parts of myself I didn’t even know I’d buried—and discover parts I never knew existed.

The Hood Healer

Psychedelics showed me that I am a healer.
Not in the way textbooks define it, but in the way my people have always known.

I like to call myself a hood healer—because my roots are on the block and in the botanica, in ancestral knowing and everyday survival. My healing is loud. It’s tender. It’s real. And it lives at the intersection of grief, grit, and grace.

And they showed me something else:
That this kind of healing—this remembrance, this return—is something our people deserve.
Especially melanated folks, who have carried so much pain in silence.
This medicine isn’t just about me—it’s about us.
And we deserve to heal out loud.

 Duality and Degrees

I spent the first part of my childhood in Boston, and the rest in Portland, Maine.

Boston gave me culture, community, and an early sense of belonging.
Maine showed me what it meant to be “the only.”

I like to say I earned a dual degree—one in survival, and one in white supremacy.
Not because I wanted it, but because I had no choice.

I became fluent in code-switching.
I learned how to navigate between worlds.
And I also learned how to return to myself.

Even in exclusion, there were accomplices—teachers, neighbors, unexpected kin—who made space. Who opened doors. Who reminded me that even in places not built for us, there are people brave enough to make room.

Some of them helped usher me into the psychedelic space—not to escape, but to return.
To gather tools, knowledge, and healing so I could bring them back to my people.

Because what good is medicine if it doesn’t make its way home?

Mothering as Ceremony

Now, I’m a mother too.

Raising a Black boy who will one day become a Black man is a sacred responsibility and a daily reckoning.

I mother with the memory of my own mother’s absence.
With the rituals my grandmother passed down—her hands, her herbs, her fierce devotion.
With the compassion I found in my father’s story—his fall, his fight, his rise.
And with the clarity psychedelics returned to me—the parts they helped me reclaim, the peace they helped me find, and the purpose they revealed in it all.

I mother with one eye on the ancestors and one hand in my son’s—because I know this world wasn’t built to protect him.
But I will do everything in my power to prepare him, pour into him, and protect his light.

 Why I Do This Work

This is why I do the work I do now.

The Entheogen Melanin Collective wasn’t born from theory—it was born from survival. From memory. From the urgency to heal.

We are not just creating spaces for psychedelic healing—we are creating spaces where Black and melanated people don’t have to shrink, don’t have to explain, and don’t have to ask permission to feel.

Spaces where survival is honored, but healing is expected.
Where resilience is a given, but restoration is the goal.
Where stories like mine aren’t hidden—they’re centered.

Because reclaiming these medicines… reclaiming ourselves… isn’t just about wellness.
It’s about justice.
It’s about memory.
And it’s about making sure our communities are not just remembered—
but restored.

I was born in small-town Massachusetts to one of the only interracial couples in town. My mother was 17. My father was 21. And though they tried to make it work, life was complicated—mental health struggles, addiction, poverty, racial identity—all of it. By the time I turned one, they had separated.

My father’s disconnection from his own Blackness ran deep. He had been estranged from his father—my grandfather, Pops—since childhood. That estrangement bled into my life too.

Then, one snowy November day when I was four, a letter arrived.
Inside was a photo: a dark-skinned man in a turban, sitting on a camel in the middle of a desert. On the back, he’d written:

“My Dear Grandson, this is your Grandfather writing to you from Cairo. Do you know where that is? I heard that you are 4 now. We have not met yet, but I look forward to meeting you soon. Until we meet, remember always to follow your dreams.”

I was full of questions.
Where did he get a camel? Why is he darker than Dad and me? What do I call him?
(We settled on Pops.)

I didn’t understand what he meant about dreams until much later.

Meeting My People

A year later, my Dad took me down to Maryland to meet Pops and the rest of the Fox family—my Black family—for the first time.

It was a meeting that would shape me in ways I wouldn’t understand for decades.

Pops became my first mentor. He showed me how to see myself and the world with clearer eyes. But the distance—emotional, physical, cultural—meant I didn’t get to stay close. I didn’t get the everyday lessons, the haircare talks, the family stories. I stayed hovering between belonging and isolation.

I grew up biracial, queer, ADHD, and racially ambiguous in a small white town. Too Black for some, not Black enough for others. I had access to both sides of my lineage—and still, I felt like a ghost.

There was love, yes. But also ignorance. Jokes, innuendos, microaggressions from people I called family, neighbors, even friends. My existence was a puzzle I didn’t know how to put together.

Rhythm as a Refuge

There were bright spots—tiny lifelines.

My dad taught me to move to the rhythm. Music, dance, hip-hop, soul, blues—these became my first language of belonging. Concerts. Car rides. Hot sauce and BBQ. FUBU and Biggie and Afrofuturism. Somehow, I was being rooted without even knowing it.

I was drawn to things I couldn’t explain.
Things that stirred something ancestral in me.
Things that felt like home.

But I still felt disconnected. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know how to claim space.

By the time I was 18, I was numb.
Tired of translating myself.
Tired of existing in fragments.
And ready to end it all.

Mushrooms Cracked Me Open

Then mushrooms came knocking.

They didn’t just hit—they healed.
They didn’t just open my mind—they broke through my shell.

They showed me that I wasn’t broken. That I belonged. That I was connected to something bigger than the pain. That I had purpose.

That trip saved my life.

And from that moment forward, I made a commitment to keep that spark alive. To find out who I really was—not just for me, but for the generations before and after me.

A Return to Lineage

At 29, I reconnected with my Aunty—my dad’s half-sister, biracial like me. She’s a fierce artist and unapologetically Black. She gave me the language and tools to begin embracing my cultural identity. She shared what it meant to show up in Black spaces with care and accountability.

Her mentorship helped me confront the internalized racism I’d been carrying. It gave me permission to claim what had always been mine.

Then came the trip that changed everything.

My dad and I sat with mushrooms together. We unpacked years of generational trauma. He heard me. I heard him. We cried. We released. We healed.

It was medicine—not just in the psychedelic sense, but in the ancestral sense. It was a ritual. A reckoning. A rebirth.

Identity as Liberation

With every ceremony, every breath, every uncomfortable conversation—I came home to myself.

I stopped asking for permission to belong.
I started showing up whole.
I realized my story wasn’t shameful—it was sacred.

This healing didn’t erase my past. It honored it.
It made space for me to be—fully, freely, without apology.

I stopped feeling like a ghost.
And started becoming a guide.

 Why I Do This Work

My reclamation prepared me for the moment I met Imani.
For the birth of EMC.
For the dream my grandfather planted in a letter when I was four.

We met at a predominantly white psychedelic event—and while the conversations were interesting, the absence was louder. The lack of Blackness. The lack of cultural safety. The lack of us.

But we also realized—this wasn’t just about psychedelics.
It was about everything.
About grief. Ancestry. Identity. Family. Belonging. Justice.

Because everything is connected.
And all of us deserve healing.

That’s why we created EMC.
Not to diversify white-led spaces—but to build something of our own.

Who I Am Now

I am a storyteller.
A spiritual educator.
A professional people herder.
A cultural bridge.
A space-holder.
A survivor.
A mirror.
A mosaic of ancestors, prayers, and purpose.