About Me

Yeshua Adonai

Personal Story Summary

600+ Words (2+ mins read)

My name is Yeshua Adonai, and my story is one of thresholds. I’ve lived through war, silence, revelation, and collapse, and emerged with a devotion not to answers, but to presence. I walk with others because I’ve had to find my own way through the dark. What I offer is not theory. It’s lived.

I’m a psychedelic guide and transformational coach, trained not only by mentors and modalities, but by the unrelenting demands of my own path. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, I spent my early life navigating shame, spiritual fear, and the longing to be seen. As a Marine and diplomat, I served in combat zones and intelligence roles, surviving war, espionage, and moral injury. These experiences cracked me open. They also seeded the questions that would shape my life.

A spontaneous spiritual awakening in Berlin in 2007 initiated me into a path I didn’t expect. With no prior knowledge of energy medicine or mysticism, I entered a state of pure love, out-of-body awareness, and inner knowing. That moment became the seed of everything to come. Over time, I’ve studied esoteric traditions, energy healing, and trauma-informed facilitation, all while walking beside partners through terminal diagnoses and near-death experiences.

I changed my name after leaving public service, not to become someone new, but to return to who I’ve always been. Yeshua to remember I am whole. Adonai to remain in devotion. Choosing a name was a reclamation of identity, a way of placing a stake in the ground for the life I now live.

Since 2013, I’ve walked the path of sacred medicine. I’ve supported hundreds of journeys with psilocybin and MDMA, trained under Indigenous wisdom keepers, and cultivated a space where clients feel safe, seen, and deeply held. My work centers on guiding personal and relational breakthroughs. I specialize in 1:1 and couples facilitation, with relationships that often last years, rooted in care, trust, and soul-level transformation.

But I don’t serve from perfection. I serve from practice. I’ve been shaped by profound loss, existential growth, and the fire of becoming. What grounds me isn’t what I know, but my willingness to stay, to listen, and to meet each person with reverence. My calling is to evoke what is already alive in you, to walk beside you, not ahead.

My Journey Home

5,000+ Words (20+ mins read)

What happens when a life is forged in paradox, sacred and brutal, holy and human? The smell of gunpowder. The silence of meditation. The tenderness of grief. The wild joy of unexplainable love. These moments don’t belong together, but somehow, they live in me. You could say I’ve lived a hundred lives inside this one. War zones, spiritual awakenings, wilderness pilgrimages, betrayals, and rebirths, not one of them linear, all of them formative. My story is not one of straight lines. It is a story of spirals, of unraveling, burning, breaking, and becoming. It is a return to the sacred, again and again, through silence, through ceremony, through the tender rituals of remembrance. I’ve lived through war and silence, revelation and collapse, and emerged not with answers, but with presence. These extremes, of chaos and stillness, of losing and listening, have become the ground from which I guide others. My ability to hold steady, to listen deeply, and to meet people in their most vulnerable spaces was forged not in theory, but in the crucible of lived experience. I am here not as a master, but as one who has walked through many thresholds, and learned to listen in the dark.

I support others because I’ve had to guide myself through terrain where no map could help. My life has been forged in paradox: visionary and grounded, spiritual and strategic, tender and relentless. Each phase, boy, soldier, seeker, leader, has stripped me down to something more essential. More honest. More human.

And what remains is a deep devotion: to truth, to care, to the sacred unfolding that lives in every life that dares to remember itself.

My Origins and Early Formation

We begin not with clarity, but with ache. I came into the world searching, for safety, for meaning, for a love that didn’t need to be earned. Before I could articulate it, I was already in inquiry. Already reaching for something deeper, even when I couldn’t name it.

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, where love came with conditions, and silence was a survival strategy. I grew up shaped by shame, spiritual fear, and the sense that I had to earn my worth. As a child, my name was changed more than once, always by others. Reclaiming my identity would become a central theme of my life.

Some of my earliest longings were spiritual. As a child, I would ask my parents if we could 'deep talk', hungry for meaning, for connection, for something real beneath the surface. In adolescence, I experienced sexual abuse that seeded a painful sense of shame. In response, I turned to prayer and early spiritual practices, seeking peace in the midst of internal chaos. I spent over a year painting a labyrinth on my ceiling, an intricate symbol of my yearning to understand the spiritual path.

Each summer, my father and grandfather took me backpacking, seeding in me a love for the wild that would echo through every phase of my life. Nature became my first sanctuary, where I learned to listen with reverence and dwell in the stillness beneath the noise. That early intimacy with the land continues to inform my presence as a guide: attuned, grounded, and alive to the unseen. Just as nature invites stillness, reflection, and trust in the unseen unfolding, I support others in returning to that same quiet wisdom within themselves,where healing begins not in effort, but in surrender. To this day, the natural world is where I source energy, draw wisdom, and return in devotion.

The Battlefield Within: War, Collapse, and the Seeds of Inquiry

Where some seek purpose in service, I found paradox. The battlefield didn’t just mark my body, it fractured the illusion of certainty. What I thought was strength began to unravel into moral confusion, deep questioning, and the beginning of a new kind of leadership rooted in truth rather than obedience.

I served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2003 to 2011, where I was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait. Later, I joined the U.S. Department of State, where I worked in diplomatic security and intelligence operations. I’ve held top-secret clearance, led teams in combat zones, and operated inside the shadowy layers of international diplomacy and espionage.

But the weight of that world, and the moral contradictions within it, eventually broke me open. I faced the invisible wounds of cPTSD, moral injury, existential crisis, paranoia, and hypervigilance. I began to question: What does it really mean to serve?

That question led me into a different kind of leadership.

Returning from deployment in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, I was spiritually disoriented. After witnessing dozens of deaths, surviving countless vehicle bombs, rocket attacks, and firefights, something inside me fractured. At just 20 years old, I had believed I was solid, but war dismantled that illusion. I began a relentless quest for truth, not just to make sense of the horrors I had lived through, but to understand why the world is as it is, and how to live a life of integrity within it.

I immersed myself in moral inquiry. That early reckoning with right and wrong became the foundation for the ethical depth I now bring into every sacred space I hold, anchoring my work in discernment, humility, and deep respect for the autonomy of those I serve. I studied world religions, combed sacred texts, and covered the walls of my barracks with hundreds of quotes, attempting to 'organize morality' into something livable. I wanted to make sense of good and evil, to discern how to serve something deeper than obedience. That season marked the beginning of my lifelong devotion to inner alignment, truth-seeking, and a life of service not shaped by duty alone, but by love.

Life Behind the Wire: Security, Suspicion, and the Fracture of Trust

In the world of embassies and espionage, I learned that even a smile might be a strategy. This was not just a job, it became a way of seeing. One that kept me safe, but also alone. What kept me alive also closed me off. Years later, I’d have to unlearn what service had trained into my nervous system.

As a Marine Security Guard and Detachment Commander, I was stationed at U.S. Embassies in St. Petersburg, Russia; Berlin, Germany; and Nicosia, Cyprus. In these roles, I led teams of Marines responsible for protecting hundreds of U.S. citizens, diplomats, and critical infrastructure, often under real and repeated threat.

This period shaped how I perceived the world. In Russia, I was told that two out of every three people who approached me were likely spies. I learned to assume every interaction could be a trap. Constant alertness became a way of life, replacing trust with strategy and connection with caution. What kept me alive also kept me alone.

Strategic thinking became second nature, but so did isolation, internalized suspicion, and the inability to exhale. I didn’t yet know that these coping strategies would follow me, long after I left the embassies behind. But before they would unravel, something else broke through, something unexplainable that changed everything. I carried these survival strategies into every environment that followed, even when the threat was long gone. Years later, I would come to understand that my hypervigilance, once a tool of protection, had become a wall that kept love and connection out. It took deep healing and spiritual awakening to begin releasing what I had once believed was essential to stay alive. But the very presence I had learned through adversity would become one of my greatest gifts, allowing me to hold grounded, attuned space for others navigating their own internal thresholds.

Awakening in Berlin: A Portal to the Infinite

Amid the pressure and paranoia of diplomatic service, an unexpected awakening cracked open everything I thought I knew. While stationed in Berlin in 2007, I experienced a spontaneous spiritual event that defied explanation. I was in a state of extreme sleep deprivation, at peace internally, and had just encountered the woman who would later become my wife, a powerful soul with a deep, cultivated spiritual presence. It was as if her field catalyzed something dormant within me.

With no prior exposure to meditation, energy healing, or New Age frameworks, I was launched into a state of expanded awareness. Energy surged through my hands and heart. I felt pure, unconditional love radiate through every cell of my being. I knew myself as whole, complete, timeless, and one with all of life.

I could close my eyes and be transported across landscapes in vivid detail, journeying inward and outward beyond space and time. Out-of-body experiences became frequent. I had no language for what was happening, yet I knew these truths deeply, not through belief, but through direct revelation. I had tapped into a persistent, embodied state of unitary consciousness that changed everything.

That moment became the seed of my path as a mystic, a healer, and a guide. It led me to study esoteric lineages and energy healing modalities. Eventually, it prepared me to support that same woman, my former wife, through multiple near-death experiences and terminal stage four cancer diagnoses. Though I wouldn’t formally study spiritual practice until later, something opened in me that never closed again. That embodied remembrance became the North Star of my devotion, continually drawing me back to that state of deep love and wholeness, and inspiring my life-long search for ways to help others return there too.

Naming the Path: Yeshua Adonai as Devotion and Becoming

As I transitioned out of the military and government service, I made a symbolic decision to change my name, planting a stake in the ground to become more than what I had been shaped by. I entered a season of stillness, devoting nearly a year to deep meditation and silence, listening inward, refining my mindfulness, and learning to dwell in presence. It was a gesture of becoming, of choosing peace over performance, truth over fear. It marked the beginning of a life that felt more aligned, more real, more whole.

The decision also came from a deeper place. Throughout my life, my name had been changed multiple times, by adoption, by parents, by circumstance. In the military, your name is often replaced by rank, title, or call sign. Identity becomes utilitarian. I grew up feeling my name belonged more to others than to myself.

Choosing a new name for myself was an act of reclamation. My name is Yeshua Adonai. Yeshua reminds me that I am already whole, already enough. Adonai calls me to remain in devotion, to evolve with humility and love. Together, they hold the paradox I now live by: to be both human and holy. To ground, and to grow. To reclaim my birthright, not just for myself, but as a reminder of what lives in all of us beneath the forgetting.

Rebuilding from Within: Social Impact and the Search for Soul

After leaving government and military service, I struggled to reintegrate into a world that no longer made sense. I didn’t know how to fit into society, how to trust it, or how to live authentically within it. Yet through that rupture emerged a new calling, to contribute to the creation of a more just, caring, peaceful, and harmonious world.

I transitioned into social entrepreneurship, dedicating the last 15 years to this vision. I’ve led organizations and initiatives across public, private, and nonprofit sectors, focused on mental health innovation, sustainability, food systems, justice reform, and technology for social impact. My work is not only informed by study, but by direct application. I've helped executives shift culture, communities transform narratives, and movements reimagine what sustainable futures can look and feel like. These lived experiences, combined with my formal education and spiritual training, continue to guide the way I serve and shape the sacred spaces I hold. In this work, I’ve also bridged Indigenous ways of being into boardrooms and strategic conversations with Fortune 100 executives, inviting leaders to question how they think, how they lead, and what it means to embody innovation not just as progress, but as soul-aligned transformation. These dialogues have often brought them to their edges, where real growth begins.

Throughout it all, I was also navigating a deep identity crisis, driven by an unrelenting desire to understand the true nature of who I am. Beneath every title and transformation lived a deeper inquiry: to know soul as self.

Into the Wilderness: Solitude, Grief, and Inner Knowing

In 2015, following my divorce, I chose to walk across California along the Pacific Crest Trail, spending five months in wilderness solitude. It became a pilgrimage of healing and spiritual reorientation. The silence, the vastness, and the land itself became my teachers. That long walk helped me deepen my relationship with presence, grief, and resilience. It became a path not only of personal healing, but of remembering how to guide others through inner wilderness, where the terrain is uncertain, but the truth is waiting beneath every step. It wasn’t just a trek, it was a ceremony of remembering who I was beneath the roles and wounds.

That calling drew me, as it always had, into spiritual communities, pattern-seeking, and deep self-inquiry. From a young age, I had been wired for reflection, driven by a hunger for truth and meaning. Over time, this evolved into a lifelong commitment to self-awareness and devotional service, continually turning inward to remember what is essential and true.

Though the teachers, practices, environments, and lineages have shifted throughout my life, one current has remained steady: a longing to live from the deepest part of me. This impulse, part yearning, part devotion, has carried me through every threshold and shaped the lens through which I’ve studied, practiced, and served.

This devotion to depth, living not just from the surface, but from the roots, became the throughline of all my work. It is also a return to the sacred, through self-inquiry, reverence for life, and honoring the unseen threads that connect us to something greater. To peel back what had been projected onto me by culture, religion, and conditioning, and to reclaim something essential, authentic, and alive.

Root Systems: Wisdom Traditions, Technology & Sacred Design

I earned a Bachelor of Science in Sustainability Management from DeVry University and pursued a Master of Science in Biomimicry for Social Innovation at Arizona State University. Though I stepped away near completion, I translated that study into a consultancy, helping executives and government leaders apply biomimicry and regenerative design to leadership, culture, and systems thinking.

My worldview has also been shaped by the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, Thích Nhất Hạnh, G.I. Gurdjieff, Rudolf Steiner, and Buckminster Fuller. I’m equally passionate about leveraging technology to support personal and spiritual development. During my time in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was actively involved in the Consciousness Hacking and Transformative Technology movements, exploring how tools, data, and innovation can accelerate insight, integration, and inner coherence. These teachers, alongside frameworks in trauma healing, systems design, and sacred leadership, continue to inform the way I listen, lead, and serve. 

Thresholds of Healing: Medicine Work and the Return to Wholeness

The medicines found me when nothing else did. They became another sacred doorway, a ceremony of return when I had forgotten the way. When I could no longer fix or force my way through, psychedelics cracked me open. What I met wasn’t escape, but invitation. They brought me face to face with myself, and taught me how to meet others in the same way: with presence, reverence, and trust in what is unfolding.

In 2013, I began a deep path of healing and awakening through psychedelic medicines. Living with treatment-resistant depression, severe anxiety, and the scars of war, I found in psychedelics not escape, but entry. They taught me how to feel, how to forgive, how to return.

Since 2022, I’ve served as a full-time psychedelic guide, facilitating hundreds of intentional journeys with psilocybin and MDMA. My training includes guidance from carriers of Indigenous wisdom (Shipibo, Mazatec, Andean), clinical practitioners, and spiritual teachers. I hold my work within a framework of harm reduction, trauma-informed care, sacred ritual, and spiritual companionship, integrating traditional reverence with modern sensibilities.

These journeys have never been theoretical. They’ve been initiations, sacred, unspoken rites that cannot be taught, only endured and embodied. And while I may never fully understand their mystery, I’ve come to revere what they’ve opened in me,and in those I serve. I’ve experienced over 100 guided ceremonies myself, exorcism, devotion, ego death, and rebirth. I’ve learned to breathe at the eye of the hurricane, cultivating the capacity to remain grounded, calm, and attuned in the midst of chaos. This lived experience has shaped the essential qualities I bring to the ceremonial space: emotional regulation, deep presence, intuitive care, and unwavering commitment to safety, especially in the most intense and vulnerable moments of ceremony.

Clients often say they feel safe in my presence, not because I promise answers, but because I offer steadiness, clarity, and care when the unknown arrives. It’s in those spaces that transformation becomes possible. This bridges the work I’ve done within myself to the sacred responsibility of guiding others, calm in the storm, present in the threshold.

The Work I Offer: Guiding Personal and Relational Breakthroughs

As a psychedelic guide and transformational coach, my role centers on stewarding breakthroughs, guiding individuals and couples through the profound, often nonlinear process of shedding old identities and embodying deeper truths. My primary focus is on 1:1 and couples facilitation, where the work is deeply personal, relational, and anchored in long-term transformation.

My commitment to clients is substantial and often lasts many months or even years. I walk beside them through multiple chapters of their becoming, holding sacred space through initiations, transitions, and integrations. This work is never transactional, it’s relational, rooted in trust, presence, and soul-level partnership.

I support others through the sacred process of becoming, especially those navigating death, grief, reinvention, and soul calling. My role is not to direct or prescribe, but to evoke the inner agency, truth, and wisdom already within each person. I serve as a mirror, a witness, and a companion, trusting their pace, their knowing, and their path. In these moments, I bring presence that is steady, care that is attuned, and a trustworthiness forged through my own lived experience. These relationships reflect the qualities I’ve cultivated over a lifetime of transformation: trauma-informed presence, attuned listening, and the ability to hold and regulate energy in heightened states. Clients often describe feeling deeply met and safe in my presence, able to surrender into the work, knowing they are held without judgment and guided with unwavering attention.

The People I Walk With

The people I walk with are often navigating profound transitions, grief, reinvention, identity shifts, spiritual emergence, or the unraveling of old roles. They are seekers of truth, carriers of responsibility, and people who feel called to live with deeper alignment and purpose. Many are visionaries, space holders, or quiet leaders, longing to be met in the places they’ve long held for others.

I don’t offer a map. I offer a compass. And I walk with you, not ahead of you, as you remember your way home. My work is grounded in care, ethics, humility, and presence, qualities forged through a lifetime of adversity, spiritual inquiry, and inner transformation. Clients feel safe in this space not because I provide answers, but because I offer a steady mirror, a sacred pause, and a devotion to walking with them toward the truth already stirring within.

If you're wondering whether this work is right for you, you might find clarity on the About You page, where I speak more directly to the kinds of people I walk with.

Through It All: The Heart That Remains

This isn’t the story of a man who figured it all out. It’s the story of a man who let himself unravel, rebuild, and reimagine what it means to live with integrity. A man who learned how to listen through pain and presence. A man who trusted that love could be chosen even when faith faltered.

I’ve experienced profound loss, of marriage, of family, of community. These experiences have shaped in me a relational empathy that cannot be taught, only lived. They have taught me how to hold space for others in their own unraveling, not with judgment, but with presence, tenderness, and unwavering care. I’ve faced defamation of character, misunderstanding, and betrayal, not from strangers, but from those I once called allies. As I’ve stepped more fully into my truth, I’ve come to see that it often invites discomfort in others. The more I embody who I truly am, the more life has asked me to deepen in my knowing of that truth, independent of validation or approval.

These moments taught me that transformation doesn’t come through certainty, but through willingness, willingness to stay, to feel, to be reshaped by what life reveals.

Final Reflection: Becoming as Devotion

I don’t serve from perfection. I serve from presence, guided by a devotion to truth, care, and humility. I’ve been shaped by thresholds most wouldn’t choose, and emerged not polished, but present. In the end, my work is a practice in becoming: a quiet vow to meet others as I continue to meet myself.

I serve from practice. I am fallible, growing, learning, deepening in my caring, consciousness, and consideration. I continue to break from automatic behaviors and return to presence, moment by moment. I allow myself to be reborn again and again, not as an act of performance, but as a path of awakening. From the scars and sacredness of this journey, I’ve learned to hold space with reverence, humility, and integrity. I meet each person as they are and honor the sacred responsibility of being trusted in their most vulnerable thresholds.

And in those moments, when someone dares to feel it all, to meet their own soul in silence, I am there. Not as a savior, but as a steady presence. A mirror. A companion. Walking the spiral beside them, bearing witness to their return.

Not another mountain to climb. A life made sacred by the spiral of return.

I’ve come to know the cost of becoming. It is the price of letting go, of surrendering to the unfolding of what is yet to be. Becoming is not ambition; it is devotion. A commitment to live aligned with truth, even when it asks everything. Again and again, I meet life not with control, but with reverence for what is still becoming in me.

Maybe all I’ve done is keep saying yes to the child who once asked for deep talk, and is still listening.

Personal Highlights

influences that inform my thinking & being

Professional Highlights

Visionary initiatives BEFORE life as a FULL-TIME psychedelic guide

How to Begin

If you’re feeling called to explore this work, I invite you to book a complimentary 20-minute Discovery Call. During our conversation, I’ll share insights into my approach and answer any questions you may have. As part of this call, you’ll also receive a comprehensive harm reduction and education package, including key resources, preparation guidance, and tools to help you navigate your path with clarity and intention, whether you choose to work with me or not.

This is an opportunity to gain deeper insight into safe and intentional psychedelic work, explore how this process might support your life, and take the first step toward meaningful transformation in this unique way.

If any of this resonates, I invite you to explore more. You can read about my journey in greater depth on my about me page, review offerings, or browse testimonials to learn more.

Whatever path you’re on, I honor your search. Life is precious, and every moment is an invitation to step closer to who we are meant to be.

…

From My Heart to Yours,

Yeshua Adonai

Psychedelic Guide

aboutyeshua.com