I’ve been interested in altered states of consciousness, psychology, and personal transformation for most of my life.
As a kid, I was fascinated by dreams and found myself naturally experimenting with lucid dreaming. When I was 16, I had a near-death experience after a snowboarding accident. The experience completely shifted the way I looked at life and brought up a lot of questions about death, consciousness, spirituality, and what it means to be human.
At the time, I didn’t really have a framework for what had happened. I felt confused and destabilized by parts of the experience, and I spent years trying to understand it. Looking back, I would now describe much of that period as a spiritual emergence process.
That search eventually led me to study transpersonal psychology, breathwork, psychedelics, somatic psychology, and clinical mental health counseling.
About Kyle Buller
HOW I GOT INTO THIS WORK
After my near-death experience, I started questioning a lot of things and became deeply interested in consciousness, life, death, and the kinds of experiences that can completely shift the way we understand ourselves and the world.
A few years later, I had a profound psilocybin experience where I felt like I was reliving parts of my near-death experience. I remember coming away from it with a question that stayed with me:
How could I ingest something that came from the earth and have an experience that felt so much like dying?
That question sent me further down the path.
I went on to study transpersonal psychology, where I became immersed in psychedelics, breathwork, shamanism, and different approaches to understanding non-ordinary states of consciousness. A big part of that time was also personal. I was trying to make sense of my own experiences and understand what integration actually looked like beyond simply having another extraordinary experience.
For my undergraduate capstone, I created a 16-week course exploring the work of Stanislav Grof, psychedelics, and breathwork. Looking back, that project was probably the beginning of my interest in education and creating programs that could help people better understand these experiences.
After graduating, I began working with at-risk teenagers in a hospital diversion program and later at a residential program supporting people experiencing early-episode psychosis. Those experiences exposed me to a very different side of altered states and psychological crisis, and they pushed me to think more carefully about the line between transformation, distress, mental health, and spiritual experience.
From there, I pursued graduate training in clinical mental health counseling with an emphasis in somatic psychology, which brought the body much more directly into how I understood healing, trauma, and integration.
In 2016, Joe Moore and I started Psychedelics Today. What began as a podcast grew into a much larger education platform and eventually led to Vital Psychedelic Training.
Alongside that work, I continued studying and facilitating breathwork and exploring the relationship between the body, psyche, altered states, and integration.
What started as a very personal attempt to understand my own experiences gradually became the work I’ve spent much of my adult life doing.
Background
Psychology, somatics, breathwork, and psychedelic education.
I’ve spent many years studying, practicing, teaching, and interviewing people across these areas.
Education: M.S. Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Somatic Psychology — Prescott College
Education: B.A. Transpersonal Psychology — Burlington College
Breathwork Training: Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork — study and practice since 2010
Psychedelic Training: Training in psychedelic integration, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy
Leadership: Co-founder, Psychedelics Today · Co-founder, Vital Psychedelic Training