Consciousness Coaching
Exploring and integrating expanded, subtle, and everyday modes of consciousness
Opening the Field of Consciousness
Have you ever had a moment that revealed consciousness as richer than you'd imagined? Perhaps thoughts fell away, and what remained was vast and luminous. Maybe, you stood in nature and sensed a deep unity with the world. Or perhaps you became lucid in a dream and realized you could fly.
Consciousness is our most intimate reality—and yet the greatest mystery we know.
Most of the time, we inhabit a specific band of this spectrum. Ordinary waking consciousness lets us navigate daily life, but it's just one way of being aware among other possibilities.
Consciousness contains multitudes.
Dreams open nightly doorways into inner worlds. Psychedelic and visionary experiences can unveil vast architectures of meaning and interconnection. Meditation can enter absorption, where awareness gathers into unbroken stillness and joy suffuses experience. Flow states merge action and awareness into effortless presence. Travel expands awareness through encounter.
And woven through them all is something subtler—the imaginal dimension of consciousness, where imagination bridges matter and psyche, shaping how depth, meaning, and beauty reveal themselves within every state.
This work is an invitation into that wider territory: exploring the many dimensions through which consciousness knows itself, and allowing that exploration to reshape the way life moves through you.
This work blends phenomenological precision with deep care for well-being, embodiment, and integration—so that what is glimpsed as possibility becomes grounded as presence.
What’s Consciousness Coaching?
Consciousness Coaching is a way of exploring the spectrum of human consciousness in the service of flourishing and meaning. It brings curiosity, discernment, and care to how we enter, navigate, and integrate different modes of experience—ordinary, subtle, and expanded.
The orientation of this work is toward expanding awareness: a widening of perspective and softening of rigid concepts; greater sensitivity to subtle emotional, bodily, and relational cues; an increased capacity for reflection and compassion; a deeper attunement to meaning, beauty, and interconnection; and a more creative, flexible responsiveness to life as it unfolds.
Doorways
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Consciousness Coaching integrates exploration across the spectrum of consciousness — everyday, subtle, and expanded —within an ongoing coaching relationship that grounds discovery in embodiment and daily life.
It draws on the same approach as my core coaching work, yet approaches it through the lens of consciousness exploration. In principle, it includes everything offered in developmental coaching — clarity, emotional depth, relational integration — but with an emphasis on how awareness shifts, expands, and reveals deeper layers of meaning.
What it involves:
Exploring within the broader context of personal growth, meaning, and life direction
Discerning which practices and experiences genuinely serve your unfolding at this phase of life
Supporting meaningful experiences (such as retreats, travel, wilderness solos, and psychedelic journeys) with thoughful preparation and integration when relevant
Cultivating imaginal, intuitive, and energetic capacities that enrich perception
Working with dreams and active imagination as gateways to inner guidance
Engaging in experiential practices (such as imaginal journeying) to deepen exploration
Translating expanded awareness into embodied action, creative expression, and relational coherence
Navigating the identity and worldview shifts that accompany deep transformation
For whom:
For those drawn to the mystery and potential of consciousness itself. Suitable for practitioners exploring meditation, psychedelics, or imaginal work, as well as anyone navigating spontaneous openings or cultivating expanded awareness.
Format:
Typically a 6-month container with regular sessions.
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This work is a focused expression of consciousness coaching, centered on the threshold moments that arise through transformative experiences. Here, preparation and integration are treated as essential stages of unfoldment: the ways we deepen, stabilize, and express shifts in consciousness.
While often associated with psychedelic journeys, the same principles apply to many depth practices: vision fasts, wilderness solos, intensive reathwork, silent or dark retreats, travel, rites of passage, and other initiatory experiences. I support clients in exploring a range of safe, accessible modalities. This is an especially valuable orientation given the delicate and legally complex nature of psychedelics.
We begin by clarifying intentions that arise from presence and cultivating the inner and outer conditions that allow experience to unfold safely. Afterward, we attend to what continues to move through your life: integrating insights, recognizing emerging capacities, and grounding transformation in daily being.
For whom
For anyone preparing for, or integrating, threshold experiences of any kind: psychedelic, contemplative, travel, or wilderness-based. Especially valuable for those wanting an attuned relational field in which their experience can take root and deepen.
Format:
Sessions can occur before or after experiences, or as part of an ongoing coaching container.
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The imaginal realm is a dimension of experience speaks through images, symbols, meaning, and resonance.
Imaginal journeying involves consciously entering this dimension and participating with what spontaneously emerges. It takes many different forms, such as guided, music-supported, breathwork, shamanic, and nature-based journeys.
Imaginal work offers access to a way of knowing that has been central to human transformation across cultures and throughout history.
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Dreams are one of the most accessible altered states we experience regularly, yet few people learn to work with them consciously. This offering provides guidance for engaging with dreams as sources of wisdom and creative inspiration.
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If you're drawn to consciousness exploration but unsure where to begin, or if you've had experiences that feel incomplete or confusing, this offering provides space to explore what might serve your development most deeply.
Together, we explore your relationship with non-ordinary and subtle states of consciousness, what's currently surfacing in your life, and how different approaches might support your unfolding.
What it can involve:
Exploring your history with consciousness exploration (if any) and what's drawing you to this work
Understanding your intentions and what transformation you're sensing
Discerning which approaches and modalities might serve your current edge
Exploring legal microdosing approaches
Addressing any concerns and questions
Creating stabilizing practices
Creating a potential path forward
For whom:
Anyone curious about expanded states work but unsure where to start.
Those who've had experiences elsewhere and want perspective on integration needs.
People considering intensive practices who want guidance.
Also valuable for those who've had confusing or challenging experiences and need orientation.
Format:
Single 60-minute session, either in-person or online. Can be repeated if ongoing support is needed. No commitment to further work required.
Deeply Expanded States
An altered state of consciousness temporarily suspends the familiar patterns through which we navigate ordinary reality.
A deeply expanded state goes further: it is an altered state experienced as profoundly meaningful, opening layers of connection, insight, and wholeness.
In such states, boundaries may soften or dissolve. Time can slow or fall away altogether. Emotion and sensation flow more freely, revealing deeper currents of love, awe, or peace. The world can appear luminous and richly significant; ordinary things shining with an almost sacred immediacy.
Many describe a sense of coming home to something timeless within themselves. Others feel renewed—grateful, creative, and grounded in the beauty of existence.
When approached with discernment and care, expanded states can become powerful catalysts for unfoldment by allowing these openings to gradually reshape perception, embodiment, and the way we live.
Travel and Threshold Journeys
Travel has always changed consciousness.
A backpacking trip. A month walking an ancient pilgrimage route. Days or weeks in the wilderness. Following an inexplicable pull toward a place you've never been. The strange intimacy of being genuinely lost where you can't read the signs.
When you travel this way, the scaffolding of the known falls away — your roles, routines, even the language that once shaped your thought. What remains is raw awareness meeting the unfamiliar. Something shifts in how you see. The world reveals itself differently.
You return home with more than a collection of experiences. Something essential changed.
This work offers a container for travel as consciousness exploration — where movement through the world becomes a doorway into expansion, and the journey continues to unfold within you.
How This Work Unfolds
Imagine a moment when familiar boundaries completely dissolve. Insight floods in; love feels boundless—and then, as always, the ordinary world returns.
Experiences end. The real question is how they live on.
What transforms us is the world that holds those experiences—the meanings, relationships, and practices that allow them to reshape how we live.
In this work, we create the inner and outer conditions where consciousness exploration gains depth and purpose. Across cultures, people have always known that profound experiences need a holding world: rituals, relationships, and shared meaning that let insight become a way of life.
The same presence that reveals itself in a moment of transcendence is what meets your child’s gaze, writes an email, or sits quietly at the end of a long day.
Through ongoing relationship, inquiry, and embodied practice, life itself becomes the path—a way of being that is whole, creative, and deeply responsive.
The Science and Philosophy of Consciousness Exploration
Contemporary research in neuroscience and cognitive science continues to illuminate how shifts in awareness can reshape the brain. Practices such as meditation and psychedelic experiences—and, more preliminarily, work with dreams and imagination—have been linked to increased neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to rewire itself through attention and experience.
Across studies, a pattern emerges: greater functional integration within the brain—less rigid separation between networks, more fluid communication, and improved global efficiency. These physiological changes mirror what people report subjectively: greater emotional range, psychological flexibility, and a renewed sense of meaning.
While neuroscience can map the correlates of consciousness, we cannot yet explain consciousness itself.
That mystery is part of what this work honours. Empirical findings help us understand the mechanisms of change; contemplative and phenomenological perspectives remind us that transformation is also relational, contextual, and irreducibly human.
Working together
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I’m Marcel, an Aletheia Coaching practitioner and certified psychedelic practitioner through the Psychedelic Coaching Institute (Third Wave). This work arises from nearly 15 years of immersion in contemplative, imaginal, somatic, and relational traditions.
My own path with expanded states has revealed both their unique potential and their real challenges. They’ve opened me to profound beauty and insight, and at times confronted me with experiences that humbled me to the core. What I’ve learned is that the real transformation doesn’t come from peak states themselves, but from carefully weaving their gifts into daily life.
In a cultural moment where psychedelics and ecstatic states are often hyped or oversimplified, I aim to steward these tools with depth, discernment, and ethical grounding. My role is to hold a safe, skillful container where your own intelligence and wholeness can unfold through the doorway of expanded states.
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1) Consciousness coaching
A coaching engagement combining developmental coaching and expanded states work.Scope: developmental coaching, preparation, and integration
Cadence: bi-weekly (weekly in month one if helpful)
Timeframe: 6 months
Good for: deep transformational work, sustained integration
2) Experience-centred package
A short arc built around a specific experience (e.g., retreat, vision quest, legal psychedelic experience).Scope: preparation and integration
Format: by arrangement
Good for: focused support before and after a defined event
3) Guided journeys
A tailored arrangement where the experience itself (imaginal journeying, dreamwork sessions, breathwork, nature-based solo/quest) is guided, with preparation and integration woven in.Scope: preparation, guided experience (psychedelics excluded), and integration
Format: single session, series, or half/full-day immersion
Good for: bespoke depth work
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Consciousness Coaching: AU $500/month (2 × 60-minute sessions). Fortnighly payment available.
Preparation & Integration: AU $250/session
Consultation & Education: AU $250/session
Each coaching session lasts approximately one hour.
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Online via Zoom (available globally)
In-person in Sydney:
Freshwater Wellness Centre (Northern Beaches)
Public locations around Manly, if appropriate
Other locations might be possible by arrangement
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Exploring consciousness can touch subtle, sometimes tender layers of experience. This work unfolds in a spirit of care, respect, and discernment.
We move at the pace that feels right for you. Some pathways invite profound openness; others require grounding and stability first. Safety, embodiment, and consent are the foundation for any exploration we undertake together.
I hold this work within clear ethical boundaries. It is never about forcing or promoting any particular state, but about cultivating the awareness and relational support that allow genuine transformation to occur in ways that are sustainable and life-giving.
This approach recognises that consciousness work exists within broader social, cultural, and legal contexts. We respect those boundaries, working only with methods and modalities that are safe, responsible, and lawful.
Disclaimer
This work supports conscious, ethical exploration of subtle and expanded states of consciousness through various modalities.
Regading psychedelic substances: I maintain a neutral educational stance, neither encouraging nor promoting their use. I do not condone illegal activity of any kind. Where our work touches psychedelic experiences, I offer preparation and integration support for journeys you independently choose to undertake in contexts where doing so is legal and appropriately supported. Guidance around microdosing is limited to legal substances.
All offerings serve educational and developmental purposes. They are not medical, psychological, or psychiatric treatment, nor do they substitute for professional healthcare. I do not provide crisis intervention. If you're navigating acute mental health challenges, please work with qualified healthcare professionals.
You remain fully responsible for your own choices, safety, and compliance with applicable laws.
Ready to start your journey?
To start your journey, schedule an exploratory conversation using the form below. There's no cost. Just a space to connect, ask questions, and sense what might be supportive.
