About Keith W. Fiveson
He comes to this work not as someone who studied suffering from the outside, but as someone who has lived it from within, as a veteran, as a survivor, as a person who had to find his own way back and spent thirty years learning how to help others find theirs.
Keith W. Fiveson
M.Div. · PATP · U.S. Army Veteran
Interfaith Minister · 30+ Years
Keith Fiveson has spent his life working with complex systems, first in the external world, then in the internal one. His early career was in technology: building internet infrastructure, IP protocol systems, and early virtual reality models alongside some of the largest organizations in the field. He understood networks, how they fail, how they self-organize, how information moves through them and gets lost.
In 1994, he began a second education, one that ran parallel to the first and eventually surpassed it in depth. He came to this work first as a client, then as a student: yoga, psychology, somatic work, depth therapy, and the slow, rigorous study of the human nervous system as its own kind of architecture. The same mind that had mapped external networks turned toward the interior one, with the same precision, and far more personal stakes.
His yoga practice runs deep enough to have roots in lineage. Swami Satchidanandaone of the twentieth century's most revered spiritual teachers, gave Keith his sacred Sanskrit name: Shunyata. Emptiness. Not the emptiness of absence, but the boundless open ground from which everything arises. It is a name that has quietly shaped everything that followed.
"Shunyata, the open ground from which everything arises."
Sacred Sanskrit name given by Swami Satchidananda
He comes to this work not as someone who studied suffering from the outside, but as someone who has lived it from within, as a U.S. Army veteran who carried trauma home from service, and as a person who had to find his own way back through the very tools he now offers. That combination, systems thinking, depth of practice, and lived knowledge, is what makes this practice different.
His certification as a Psychedelic Assisted Therapy Provider (PATP) reflects a commitment to healing's frontier, the recognition that some wounds live below language, in the wordless territories of the body and the unconscious, and that reaching them sometimes requires something more than conventional talk. He brings to that work everything he has: somatic training, IFS-informed parts work, and the hard-won empathy of someone who has been on the healing path for over 30 years, first as a client, then as a guide.
For those for whom the word "spiritual" opens a door rather than closes one: Keith also holds a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) and is ordained as an Interfaith Ministercarrying no single tradition's answers, meeting each person within their own. He is the author of "The Mindfulness Experience" and "Return of the Exiled Child", and serves as a Healthcare Ambassador for the Heroic Hearts Project, advocating for veterans' access to ethical psychedelic-assisted care.
A clear boundary around the work
Coaching, preparation, and integration support
Keith offers contemplative coaching, mindfulness and somatic practices, IFS-informed parts work, recovery support, and psychedelic preparation and integration support. These services are designed to build self-understanding, resilience, regulation skills, and meaningful change.
This practice is not licensed psychotherapy, medical treatment, medication management, or crisis care. Keith does not diagnose, prescribe, provide medication or dosing, or replace an appropriately licensed clinician. When clinical or medical care is needed, coaching can be considered as an addition to that care and coordinated with the client's providers when appropriate.
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Formation & Experience
Two careers, one life. The external world of systems and networks, and the internal world of the human nervous system, studied with equal rigor.
return to the breath
At the frontier of what healing can be.
We are living in a moment of genuine possibility for people who have carried pain that conventional approaches couldn't reach. Psychedelic assisted therapy, when offered with ethical rigor, skilled preparation, and deep relational safety, is opening doors that have long been closed.
Keith's PATP certification doesn't stand alone. It emerged from rigorous training through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI) and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and it is held within his M.Div. formation, his somatic and IFS-informed training, his years of trauma work, and his lived knowledge as a veteran and survivor. He brings the full weight of that formation to every session, before, during, and in the integration that follows.
This work is especially meaningful for those who have served, for those in existential crisis, and for those for whom healing has always felt just out of reach. It is not a shortcut. It is a doorway, held open by someone who has walked through his own.
"Healing is not a destination, it is a homecoming. The most profound journeys return us to what was always already whole."
Keith W. Fiveson, M.Div., PATP
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The person behind the practice
Keith lives what he teaches. His mindfulness life coaching draws on the same practices he has carried for thirty years, stress regulation, trauma work, somatic awareness, and the slow return to what is real. The breath practices, the somatic work, the return to stillness, these are not things he does with clients. They are the center of his own life, carried through thirty years of showing up on the mat, in the chair, and in the harder interior work that no credential can certify.
"The work only asks that you show up. Everything else follows."
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When theology becomes therapy.
The questions at the heart of great suffering, Why did this happen? Who am I now? Is there anything worth returning to?are not primarily psychological questions. They are theological ones. Keith's M.Div. training gives him the formation to hold those questions with both intellectual rigor and pastoral tenderness, meeting each person within their own spiritual story rather than importing someone else's framework onto it.
"Never instead of…
Always in addition to."
No tradition is displaced. No prior healing work is invalidated. Whatever path brought you here is honored, and this work stands alongside it.
