Personal, one-on-one coaching: a guided series in the disciplines of the heart, self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and the four immeasurable qualities of mind, held within a scientific spiritual container.
Each session is held one-on-one online, alongside your own ketamine-assisted work, where a widened state of openness meets practices built to outlast the session.
spīrāreLatinto breathe · breath · essence
Spirituality is an exploration of our deepest essential desire.
The word descends from the Latin spīrāre, to breathe: the breath, the essence, the animating life within. Practical spirituality is the skillful transformation of that inner essence, the disciplined turning of desire toward what it most truly seeks.
The medicine opens a door. The practices teach you to hold spacious, healing heartfulness open for life.
Each session names a discipline and the principles that organize it. The previews below outline those principles. They do not unfold them. The unfolding is the work we do together, in sequence, over the full series, where each practice is taught, practiced, and carried into the days between.
Ketamine works differently from most medicines of the mind. Rather than slowly adjusting the chemistry of mood, it acts on the brain's glutamate system, the principal signaling pathway for learning and change. In the hours and days that follow a session, the brain enters a heightened state of neuroplasticity: synapses form more readily, old patterns loosen their grip, and the architecture of habit becomes, for a time, unusually willing to be revised.
This is the neuroplastic window. It is not the experience itself but what the experience leaves open behind it, a span of days in which the mind is more able than usual to lay down new ways of feeling, relating, and being.
Why this pairs with spiritual work
Transformation has always been the aim of contemplative practice: a real change in how the heart is disposed. Ordinarily that change is slow, because it works against the grain of long-set patterns. The neuroplastic window meets the practice halfway. When self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and the immeasurable qualities of mind are practiced inside that opening, they do not merely move through you. They have the chance to take root in the very wiring that holds them.
The medicine opens the soil. The practice plants what will grow there.
The practices that enact each principle are taught within the series.
How each principle is practiced is held for the full sequence.
The graduated method for each is taught session by session.
Self-compassion makes self-forgiveness bearable. Self-forgiveness frees the heart enough to turn outward. The four immeasurable qualities of mind carry that turning into the whole field of your relationships. Taken alone, each helps. Taken in sequence, they build something that holds.
One-on-one and online, we set intention and orient to the practice before any session, so the openness has somewhere to land.
The medicine loosens habitual defenses. Self-directed warmth and release often arrive with less resistance than usual.
What opened is named, returned to, and rehearsed, so it becomes a discipline you keep rather than a state you visited.
The same three disciplines run through preparation, session, and integration, giving the whole arc one spine.
A neuroscientist who has dedicated his career to the science of spirituality, and who translates that science into personal, contemplative care.
Dr. Ferguson is Founding Director of the Neurospirituality Lab at Mass General Brigham, where his research maps the brain circuits underlying self-transcendence, mystical experience, and the practices that change a human heart. He is among the few individuals to have held dual faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School, a rare standing at the meeting place of rigorous neuroscience and the contemplative traditions.
What he studies in the laboratory, he also teaches and practices.
This series is where that work becomes personal: the science of compassion and forgiveness, taught one-on-one, in the service of your own transformation.
The principles, in your pocket, between sessions.
SoulSignal carries the work of the series into ordinary days. It listens for where you are, matches you to a practice that meets the moment, and keeps the disciplines of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and the immeasurable qualities of mind close at hand, so what opens in coaching has somewhere to continue. The companion app is free, and it deepens the series rather than replacing it.
Now available for iPhone from the Apple App Store.
Download on the App StoreIf the disciplines outlined here speak to where you are, the full sequence is where they are taught, practiced, and carried home, in personal coaching met online, session by session.
Email Dr. Michael Ferguson, PhD, to schedule a free consultation.
mferguson@bwh.harvard.edu