Exploring Psychedelics, Inner Healing, and Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy - Part 1

Part 1: The Path Within – A Life Guided by Inner Wisdom and Spiritual Healing

Monica Grey, LCSW, LMT

Meet Monica Grey – a licensed clinical social worker, massage therapist, and certified Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapist who has been guiding clients through transformational healing for nearly three decades. In this first part of our interview, Monica shares her personal journey into spirituality and psychedelic exploration, revealing how her early curiosity shaped the foundation of her therapeutic approach today.

• Interviewer: Monica, your work integrates psychotherapy with a spiritual framework. Can you share what first sparked your interest in inner healing and psychedelics?

• Monica Grey: “I first became interested in psychedelics in the 1970’s. I was a college student, interested in eastern religions, a practicing meditator and seeker of higher truths. Meditation was my first doorway into the inner realm, where I was able to connect with a deeper part of myself, and experience a sense of peace, that was beyond my everyday experience.”

• Interviewer: How did those early practices influence how you saw the world?

  
  

  • Monica: “In meditation, I was able to touch on, what I felt was, a spiritual brilliance that felt beyond this world… It became clearer to me, that this external world, with its dazzle, and drama, was not the ultimate experience.”

• Interviewer: What role did psychedelics play in deepening that perspective?

  
  

  • Monica: “As I dabbled in psychedelics, mostly for spiritual exploration, it became clearer that our stories, our experiences, and the challenges we find ourselves in, are part of a deeper process… I continued along my journey to explore, and re-experience, the messages that I had received, in my inner journeys with psychedelics.”

    
    

• Interviewer: How does this spiritual worldview shape your work as a therapist?

• Monica: “My basic belief in life as a spiritual experience has helped, and my premise that people are first, ‘spiritual beings having a human experience,’ is the cornerstone of my life, and my practice.”

• Interviewer: That’s powerful. How do you view human suffering through this lens?

• Monica: “We are not our stories. We are the beings experiencing these stories… Psychedelics have taught me that we are spiritual in nature. Our life on this planet, although physically limited, is eternal… But that is an existential question everyone must explore for themselves.”