Tending the Field
The Ecology of Ethics
A concise, substantive exploration of ethical formation in psychedelic practice, created for practitioners seeking something deeper than rules and more useful than abstraction.
This is not an exhaustive training about ethics. It is an invitation into a new perspective on ethics.
Harm rarely begins where it becomes visible.
Most conversations about ethics begin after something has already happened. A boundary has been crossed. Trust has been broken. Harm has become recognizable.
Tending the Field begins earlier.
It asks what conditions make ethical action more or less possible in the first place. What allows care to deepen? What causes discernment to narrow? What allows ethical drift to begin long before harm becomes visible?
Harm does not emerge in isolation. It develops within internal, relational, and systemic conditions that shape what we notice, what we justify, what we overlook, and how we participate.
Learning to recognize and tend those conditions is the beginning of ethical formation.
A Different Approach to Ethics
Rules, professional standards, and systems of accountability matter. But they cannot create ethical practitioners on their own.
Ethical practice also depends on capacities that cannot be secured through compliance: awareness, restraint, discernment, responsiveness, and the willingness to recognize our own participation in the conditions around us.
Tending the Field approaches ethics as an ongoing process of formation. It develops ethical perception: the capacity to recognize the conditions shaping what becomes possible before those conditions become consequences.
This work moves across three interconnected dimensions:
The Internal Field
Perception, motivation, capacity, regulation, and the conditions we carry into relationship.
The Relational Field
Power, trust, vulnerability, influence, and what moves between people.
The Systemic Field
Institutional norms, cultural values, incentives, and what communities reward, permit, or ignore.
Ethical action does not arise from any one of these fields in isolation. It emerges through the relationships among them.
Begin with Where Harm Begins
Where Harm Begins is a complimentary introductory workshop and the doorway into Tending the Field.
Through embodied reflection, shared inquiry, and a relational case study, participants explore a foundational question:
Where does harm begin?
Most ethics conversations focus on the moment harm becomes visible. This workshop invites participants to look further upstream and begin recognizing the conditions that quietly shape perception, power, relationship, and ethical possibility.
Participants receive an experiential introduction to ethical perception: the capacity to notice what is already present before conditions become consequences.
Where Harm Begins does not attempt to deliver the entire Tending the Field framework. It offers a first experience of the way we will practice seeing together.
The Tending the Field Training
Tending the Field is rooted in yogic philosophy, particularly the ethical teachings of the Yoga Sutras: the yamas and niyamas. Rather than approaching these teachings as a fixed moral code, the training engages them as living practices of relationship, restraint, responsibility, and discernment.
These teachings are brought into conversation with contemporary understandings of power, trauma, group dynamics, and harm reduction, creating a framework for examining not only individual conduct, but the relational and systemic conditions in which ethical practice either takes root or begins to erode.
Tending the Field is a six-session experiential training designed to cultivate ethical perception and strengthen the internal and relational capacities that ethical practice requires. Each live session is approximately 3 hours.
Before each session, participants read selected chapters from the complete digital course edition of Tending the Field: The Ecology of Ethics, creating a shared foundation for our work together.
Each live session moves between embodied practice, shared inquiry, applied reflection, and integration through:
Guided embodied and reflective practices
Conversation and shared inquiry
Experiential exercises
Real-life situations and case studies
Each session is accompanied by a reflection guide to support continued observation and integration between gatherings.
The purpose is not simply to learn a new ethical model. It is to develop a different way of seeing and a deeper capacity to participate in the living systems around us with care, discernment, and integrity.
This is not a training in finding the correct answer to every ethical dilemma. Participants practice slowing the movement toward certainty, remaining relational inside complexity, and recognizing the conditions shaping perception before deciding how to respond.
Capacities We Cultivate
Tending the Field is not organized around mastering the correct response to every ethical dilemma. It is designed to strengthen the capacities that make ethical participation more possible across changing circumstances.
Throughout the training, participants practice:
Recognizing the early conditions of ethical drift before harm becomes visible
Examining how power, legitimacy, urgency, depletion, and projection shape perception and relationship
Distinguishing intention from impact and aspiration from ethical capacity
Developing restraint without withdrawing from care or responsibility
Noticing their own participation within internal, relational, and systemic fields
Remaining responsive when certainty is unavailable
Approaching ethics as an ongoing practice of stewardship rather than a fixed identity
The aim is not ethical perfection. It is greater awareness, discernment, responsiveness, and capacity for course correction.
Inside the Six-Session Training
SESSION ONE | Ethics as Conditions
Participants move beyond ethics as rules, compliance, or good intentions and begin examining the conditions that make discernment more or less available. Through shared inquiry and applied scenarios, they practice recognizing how harm develops gradually and how ethical pacing can interrupt drift before collapse.
SESSION TWO | Power + Ethical Restraint
This session explores power as relational influence: something that emerges wherever trust, attention, dependency, or authority accumulates. Participants examine how power reshapes perception and practice restraint as the capacity to slow down before care becomes intrusion or influence becomes overreach.
SESSION THREE | The Yamas
The yamas are approached as living relational diagnostics rather than moral commandments. Participants explore non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, the regulation of energy and influence, and non-grasping as ways of recognizing depletion, extraction, attachment, and the erosion of restraint within relationship.
SESSION FOUR | The Niyamas
The niyamas turn attention toward the inner field that enters every relationship. Participants examine clarity, sufficiency, sustained effort, self-study, humility, and surrender as stabilizing conditions that help discernment remain available when depletion, certainty, urgency, or identity begin shaping perception.
SESSION FIVE | Ethical Drift + Group Dynamics
Ethical collapse is rarely individual alone. This session examines how belonging, idealization, dependency, silence, and collective normalization shape what groups can perceive, question, and tolerate. Participants practice recognizing how entire relational systems can gradually reorganize around conditions that erode ethical awareness.
SESSION SIX | Stress Tests + Integration
The final session brings the framework into layered situations involving urgency, exhaustion, attachment, blurred boundaries, and collective rupture. Participants examine what remains available when ethical discernment is placed under pressure and integrate tending the field as an ongoing practice of stewardship rather than an ethical achievement.
HOW THE SERIES WORKS
Tending the Field: The Ecology of Ethics unfolds across six live, three-hour sessions held over three months.
Each cohort is intentionally limited to six to ten participants, creating enough breadth for meaningful dialogue while preserving the intimacy necessary for honest reflection and relational learning.
The next cohort will begin once a minimum of six participants has committed. Expressing interest reserves a provisional place and does not require payment. Once the cohort has formed, participants will receive the confirmed start date, complete schedule, and payment information. Registration is finalized upon payment.
The cohort will meet on the second and fourth Monday of each month from 5:00–8:00 p.m. Mountain Time, for approximately 18 hours of live learning together.
Between sessions, participants will engage with assigned readings from Tending the Field and complete guided reflection practices designed to deepen and integrate the material. Plan for approximately two hours of independent study between gatherings.
The full training includes:
• Six live, facilitated workshops
• Approximately 18 hours of live instruction, discussion, and practice
• Assigned readings from Tending the Field
• Guided reflection and integration between sessions
• A sustained learning cohort of six to ten participants
INVESTMENT
Standard tuition for The Ecology of Ethics is $1,597.
The first cohort is being offered at an inaugural rate of $1,097 in recognition of the participants who will help bring this training into its first live expression. Participants who pay in full will receive an additional $100 savings, bringing the pay-in-full rate to $997.
Tuition includes:
• Six live, three-hour workshops
• Approximately 18 hours of facilitated learning
• The Tending the Field manuscript
• Guided reflection and integration materials
• Participation in an intentionally small cohort of six to ten people
Flexible financing is available through Affirm. Financing eligibility, payment amounts, interest rates, and repayment terms are determined by Affirm.
No payment is required to join the next cohort. Once a minimum of six participants has committed and the dates are confirmed, you will receive the complete schedule and payment information. Registration is finalized upon payment.