Today we’d like to introduce you to Miranda Vires.
Hi Miranda, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My story really begins at the place I thought would end me.
Long before this work had a name, I was a kid who sensed there was more to consciousness than what we’d been taught. I was 14 the first time I took LSD – far too young to understand what I was touching, but old enough to feel, deep in my bones, that there was something real there. Something beyond the fear-based stories. Something that could change how we see ourselves, each other, and the world.
But I was young, and eventually I let the world talk me out of what I knew. I absorbed the message that being curious about consciousness made me reckless. Dangerous. A bad influence. So I turned away from that knowing and tried to follow the “right” path.
For years, I did what I was told. I trusted the systems we’re taught to trust – took the medications, accepted the diagnoses, kept trying to be okay in the ways I was supposed to be okay. But inside, I was drowning. Anxiety, depression, trauma, a chronic disconnection from my own body, and a heaviness I didn’t yet have words for. The harder I tried to fit the mold, the further I got from myself.
Eventually, I hit rock bottom – and I don’t mean that poetically. I reached a point where I wasn’t sure I could keep myself alive, convinced in that distorted place that my children might be better off without me.
That was the moment something larger than me moved through. I can only call it a great mystery. It wasn’t loud or dramatic. It was a quiet truth that came from somewhere deeper than my fear: that the ways I’d been taught to heal weren’t healing me, that there had to be another way – a more natural way, one that honored the body, the nervous system, the soul, and the intelligence we already carry – and that if I found it, I was meant to share it.
That became the beginning of my path.
I started rebuilding from the inside out – mindfulness, self-compassion, nutrition, movement, nervous system work, breathwork, and eventually sacred medicine. In 2017, I traveled to Colombia and sat in ceremony with Yagé for the first time. It showed me how disconnected I’d become, and how much of my life I’d spent trying to suppress the very things that were asking to be felt.
But the medicine wasn’t the answer. It was the beginning. The deeper lesson came when I experienced, firsthand, what happens when someone opens that deeply and doesn’t have the right support afterward. A psychedelic experience can be profound – but without integration, people are left alone trying to make sense of life-changing material. That realization shaped everything I do now.
So I studied: somatics, trauma training, psychedelic science, psychology, breathwork, energy work, and the art of holding safe, grounded space for people in deep transformation. I kept learning from the medicines themselves and from the Indigenous traditions that have carried them for generations. What began as my own survival slowly became my life’s work.
Today I’m the founder of The Emerging Soul and Embodied Psychedelic Integration, where I support individuals and couples through psychedelic preparation and integration, somatic healing, nervous system work, emotional processing, and relationship repair. I’ve now walked alongside hundreds of people through some of the most vulnerable, honest, and transformative moments of their lives.
The irony isn’t lost on me. As a teenager I was called a bad influence for being drawn to altered states. Now the very thing I was taught to be ashamed of has become part of my purpose – not because I think psychedelics are a magic fix (I don’t), but because I know they’re powerful tools, and powerful tools require preparation, respect, support, and integration.
What I know now is this: I was never here to fit inside the systems that almost took me out. I was here to remember another way, live my way back into it, and help others do the same.
That’s how I got here – through collapse, surrender, mystery, study, ceremony, devotion, and the long, honest work of coming home to myself.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, it has not been a smooth road. Not even close.
A lot of my work was born from the places where life broke me open. I have walked through depression, anxiety, trauma, chronic illness, years of feeling disconnected from my own body, and the exhaustion of trying to heal inside systems that often felt too rushed, too clinical, or too disconnected from the whole human being sitting in front of them.
One of the hardest parts was learning to trust myself again.
For a long time, I believed other people knew more about my body, my pain, my mind, and my healing than I did. I handed my authority away because that is what many of us are taught to do. It took years, and honestly a lot of suffering, to realize that my body had been speaking the whole time. I just had to learn how to listen.
There were also seasons where I felt deeply alone. When I began moving toward holistic healing, somatic work, and psychedelic integration, this field was not as widely understood as it is becoming now. People had opinions. People had judgments. There was stigma, misunderstanding, and a lot of projection. I had to build enough inner stability to keep walking the path even when other people could not understand it yet.
Another struggle was learning the difference between opening and being held. I had powerful experiences with sacred medicine, but I also learned firsthand that a profound experience is not the same as integration. You can touch truth in a ceremony or journey and still come home to the same nervous system, the same relationships, the same patterns, and the same life. Without support, that can be disorienting. That lesson became one of the foundations of my work.
Building a business in this field has also required a lot of courage. I am speaking about things many people still whisper about. I am working in spaces where there is both deep healing and real responsibility. I have had to learn how to hold my ground, keep strong ethics, honor the sacred, respect the science, and stay rooted in safety while building something that does not fit neatly into a traditional box.
And then there is the personal side. I am a mother, a wife, a human being with my own body, my own healing, my own limits, and my own life happening behind the scenes. I have had to learn that being a guide does not mean being invincible. It means staying honest. It means continuing to do my own work. It means knowing that my humanity is not a weakness in this work. It is part of what allows me to meet others with real compassion.
So no, the road has not been smooth.
But I do not think smooth roads make the kind of practitioner I wanted to become. The struggle gave me depth. It gave me discernment. It taught me what it feels like to be dismissed, rushed, misunderstood, unsupported, and afraid. And because I know those places so intimately, I am very intentional about creating spaces where people do not have to move through their own transformation alone.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
At the simplest level, I hold space for people in the most vulnerable, honest moments of their lives, and I teach other practitioners to do the same without abandoning themselves in the process. That work lives across a few distinct places.
The Emerging Soul is my somatic and wellness sanctuary in Muskegon, Michigan. This is the body-based, nervous-system side of what I do. In session I weave somatic therapy, energy work like Reiki and Healing Touch, breathwork, and sound and vibroacoustic therapy. It isn’t a fixed protocol. It’s woven in real time based on what someone’s nervous system is actually asking for. It’s where people come to land when they’ve read the books, done the talk therapy, tried the protocols, and the same patterns keep showing up because the body has been asking for something the mind can’t give it. I also offer embodied coaching and mentorship there, in person across West Michigan and virtually anywhere.
Embody Psychedelic Integration is the psychedelic side of my practice, and it’s what I’m probably best known for. I work as a facilitator and an integration specialist. I’ve personally sat with hundreds of humans navigating psilocybin for healing, preparing them, guiding the journey itself, and walking with them through the integration afterward. That last part is the piece most people skip. Everyone is talking about the medicine right now. Far fewer are talking about what happens after someone opens that deeply and goes home. A psychedelic experience can be profound and still fragment you if no one helps you weave it into a life. I learned that the hard way. In 2018 I sat in a retreat that broke me. Not the way medicine breaks you when it’s held well, but the way it breaks you when the room doesn’t know how to hold what comes up. I came home re-traumatized and didn’t understand it for a long time. That experience is the reason I do this work the way I do.
I also support ZiruYai, an ancestral medicine retreat in Putumayo, Colombia, working alongside indigenous taitas who have carried these traditions for generations. My role there is preparation and integration, helping people arrive ready and, just as importantly, helping them make sense of what moved through them once they’re home. Staying in relationship with those lineages, rather than extracting from them, matters deeply to me.
The thing I’m most proud of grew directly out of that 2018 room. I developed a methodology called Radical Space Holding, the practice of staying present with intensity, vulnerability and rupture without fixing, controlling or overriding the person in front of you. I teach it to practitioners, including coaches, therapists, facilitators, breathworkers and plant medicine guides, in small three-day immersions, and I’ve adapted the same work for committed couples through Radical Partnership. Both are intentionally tiny, seven practitioners and four couples, because this kind of depth doesn’t survive scale.
One choice I’m especially proud of: Radical Space Holding doesn’t hand out a certification. The world doesn’t need more certified practitioners. It needs practitioners who have actually embodied what the certification claims to mean. I wasn’t willing to hand someone a piece of paper and let their future clients become the practice ground for work they hadn’t lived yet.
What sets me apart is probably two things. The first is that I’ve done, and keep doing, my own work. I’m not guiding anyone through something I haven’t walked myself, including the collapse that started all of it. The second is that I’m willing to name what most of this field won’t: the harm that hides inside good intentions, urgency disguised as care, the fixing reflex disguised as help, consent treated as a form you sign once instead of a living thing you track the whole way through. Most practitioners who cause harm aren’t careless people. They’re caring people who moved too fast. I built my work to interrupt exactly that moment.
If there’s a single thread through all of it, it’s this: you are not a project to be fixed. You’re a human being whose body already holds the wisdom. My job is to be present and discerning enough to help you hear it, and to never become one more room that does harm in the name of help.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Every part of the journey is an opportunity to learn, expand or rest. I wish I knew that my personal work would become my business work, and my business work would become my personal work.
Pricing:
- Free Alignment sessions
- The Emerging Soul Sanctuary – Sessions start at 66 usd
- 1:1 mentorship, psychedelic prep/integration begins at 555 usd
- Medicine work begins at 1500 usd
- Trainings & Immersions start at 888 usd
Contact Info:
- Website: embodypsychedelicintegration.com | theemergingsoul.com | radicalspaceholding.com | radicalpartnership.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/miranda.lynn.vires/
- Other: https://substack.com/@mirandavires
