Meet the Founder
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist • Consciousness Facilitator • Psychedelic Psychotherapist
The clinical path taught her how to hold others. The ceremonial path taught her how to hold herself. She built PGN so practitioners wouldn’t have to walk between those worlds alone.
The Path
Ashley Carmen spent eight years as a licensed psychotherapist working in clinical settings — treating addiction recovery, severe trauma, and the kind of emotional pain that conventional pharmaceutical approaches often fail to reach. She held space inside the system. She followed the protocols. And she watched the same patients cycle through the same doors.
Something was missing. Not in her training, but in the paradigm itself.
“I didn’t leave clinical work because it failed. I left because I found something that went deeper — and I couldn’t unsee it.”
Ashley completed specialized MDMA-assisted psychotherapy training through MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and psilocybin guide training through the School of Consciousness Medicine, informed by the Mazatec traditions of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico. These experiences didn’t replace her clinical knowledge — they transformed how she understood what healing actually requires.
Plant medicine also reopened a door she thought she’d closed for good. Raised Latina in the San Francisco Bay Area by a Mexican family steeped in strict Roman Catholicism, Ashley had completed every sacrament: then turned away from the Church entirely. Sitting with a curandera whose altar held Catholic saints beside indigenous offerings, she found her way back to faith on her own terms. Not obedience. Sovereignty.
That arc; inherited tradition, rejection, reencounter, sovereign reclamation; is the same one she sees in every practitioner who walks between the clinical and the ceremonial. It’s the tension PGN was built to hold.
Why PGN Exists
The psychedelic renaissance is producing more trained practitioners every year. But training alone doesn’t prepare anyone for what happens when a session goes sideways, when attraction surfaces in the container, or when the weight of holding others starts to erode the person doing the holding.
Ashley founded Psychedelic Guide Network in 2022 because she saw a gap that no one was filling: practitioners finishing their training programs and stepping into practice without peer support, without ethical infrastructure, and without a community that understands the specific complexity of this work.
“We have plenty of training programs. We have almost no peer support. That’s the gap PGN exists to close.”
PGN is not another certification factory. It’s an ethics-first community — built on Kylea Taylor’s InnerEthics® framework — where practitioners learn to hold themselves accountable through genuine peer relationship, not top-down compliance.
Background
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with eight years of clinical practice treating addiction, trauma, and complex emotional challenges.
Specialized training in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy through the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Trained through the School of Consciousness Medicine, informed by the Mazatec traditions of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico.
PGN’s ethics curriculum is built on Kylea Taylor’s InnerEthics® model — the leading relational ethics framework for psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Ashley sits in ceremony, attends immersions, hosts circles, and speaks at conferences. She is not writing from the sidelines: she is doing the work.
Created the Wisdom Circles program: biweekly peer consultation groups where practitioners develop ethical clarity through real case presentations.
The Team Behind PGN
InnerEthics® Founder & Advisor
Kylea Taylor, LMFT is internationally recognized author, educator, and ethicist, who for more than 30 years has specialized in ethical practice with extraordinary states of consciousness. She is the founder of InnerEthics®, the relational ethics framework at the heart of every PGN course. A former Senior Trainer in the pioneering Grof Transpersonal Training program, Kylea brings a rare depth of clinical and experiential knowledge to the work. Her books on ethical awareness and peer consultation for psychedelic practitioners remain foundational texts in the field. She advises PGN on curriculum integrity and the continued evolution of the InnerEthics® model.
Strategic Advisor
Mike Bledsoe brings over a decade of experience building digital platforms, online education systems, and creator-driven businesses. A U.S. Navy veteran turned entrepreneur, he has launched multiple companies and hosted long-running podcasts at the intersection of human performance, consciousness, and personal development. Mike advises PGN on technology infrastructure, AI-powered content systems, and the operational architecture that allows a small team to deliver world-class practitioner education at scale.
What Drives the Work
Rules don’t prevent harm: self-awareness does. PGN teaches practitioners to develop embodied virtues through peer accountability, not top-down compliance. Perfection isn’t expected. Commitment to evolution is.
Transference and ceremony can exist in the same conversation. Ashley’s work bridges the clinical and ceremonial traditions: not by choosing one over the other, but by honoring the intelligence in both.
If we scale access without scaling integrity, we haven’t transformed the paradigm: we’ve industrialized it. Every PGN offering is built to deepen practice, not just distribute credentials.
You cannot ethically hold others if you can’t be vulnerable with your peers. PGN’s Wisdom Circles are built on the premise that being seen; honestly, by people who understand the work; is not optional.
The Vision
PGN exists to build the ethics infrastructure the psychedelic field needs: not as a gatekeeper, but as a grounded midwife for practitioners doing the hardest work of their careers.
That means self-paced ethics training built on a real framework, not another set of generic guidelines. It means live peer consultation circles where practitioners present actual cases and develop clarity through relationship, not isolation. And it means a community where the clinical, the ceremonial, and the deeply personal can all exist in the same room.
Ashley’s vision is a field where practitioners don’t just complete their training and hope for the best. Where ethical development is an ongoing practice: supported by peers, grounded in self-awareness, and held with the same reverence we bring to the medicine itself.
“The safest space you can offer another is the one you’ve already created within yourself.”
Start Here
Whether you’re newly trained and unsure of your next step, or a seasoned practitioner carrying the weight of this work alone. PGN was built for where you are right now.
