A facilitator shaped by lived experience.

In July 2008, Nate was in a car accident that should have killed him. He and his brother were both in the vehicle. He spent the next week in the ICU in a medically induced coma, and when he came out, he had a traumatic brain injury and a long, uncertain road ahead.

The TBI didn't announce itself in obvious ways. It expressed itself in the small, grinding dailiness of a life that felt just slightly off. Brain fog so thick some mornings he couldn't finish a sentence. Memory that dropped things without warning. Emotional responses that didn't match — anger that came too fast, sadness too slow, numbness that settled in and stayed. At his lowest point, he lost the ability to read. For someone who loved books, that loss was specific and heavy.

He wasn't incapacitated. He kept going — raised his two sons, stayed in his marriage, held things together. That's part of what made it so exhausting. From the outside, nothing looked especially broken. But he knew the distance between who he'd been and who he was moving through those years, and the gap didn't close. He tried counseling. Neurofeedback. Supplements. Meditation. Exercise. Each required effort and self-honesty. Some helped at the margins. None of them gave him a simple answer.

Before this work became professional, it was personal. Nate had to learn what it meant to live through a changed body, a changed mind, and a changed sense of identity. That kind of loss is not always visible, but it can ask a person to rebuild their relationship with themselves from the ground up.

Athletics became one of the places he practiced that rebuilding. Training, pushing limits, and returning to effort taught him something he still carries into this work: resilience is not a slogan. It is often quiet, repetitive, uncomfortable, and deeply human.

Fifteen years is a long time to manage. It's long enough to start believing that management is the best available option — that this is just what life is now, and you build around it.

Eventually, he tried psilocybin.

He doesn't have a dramatic story about it. What he has is this: an experience that created room for reflection, meaning, and reconnection. Not all at once, not in a single session, and not in a way he would describe as a cure. But there was enough clarity to give him something real to keep working with.

The decision to become a licensed facilitator came from a straightforward place: he had found a process that mattered to him after a very long time of searching, and he wanted to help other people approach it safely, legally, and with care. Particularly people who have lived through loss, transition, injury, grief, or years of carrying more than they let on.