Michael Ian
Kirsch
I am a spiritual mentor working with individuals who are serious about their inner life. Those who have arrived at the threshold of genuine transformation and want a trusted presence to walk beside them through it.
From a young age, I felt a relentless pull toward the truth of my own experience — a drive that often led me to seek answers outside the structures around me. By fifteen, I was already exploring the expanded states of consciousness that would eventually become a pillar of my work. At twenty-one, I traveled to India to live in an ashram and study the sacred roots of music. For the following decade, I lived the raw, uncharted life of a touring musician.
These weren't just formative years; they were my first initiations. I was learning how to navigate the unseen, how to devotionally commit to a craft, and how to listen to the quiet, persistent calling of the soul.
At thirty-three, I found myself at a defining crossroads. I had walked away from my career as a musician to pursue a graduate degree in psychology and spirituality at Columbia University. I had a genuine desire to be of service — but deep in my bones, something was off.
I had completed my master's degree and was hesitantly filling out applications for doctorate programs when I received an invitation to an Ayahuasca ceremony. I had nearly twenty years of exploratory experience with psychedelics, but had yet to have a truly intentional journey. I intuitively felt that this medicine would provide the clarity I needed, so I accepted.
That first ceremony was revelatory. It stripped away the noise of every external influence, allowing me to see that the path I was on was not my own. By the end of the night, I knew I had to walk away from academia and reclaim the authority of my own experience.
From that night forward, I began applying a single, unwavering directive to my life. If my heart wasn't in it, I said no, regardless of the cost. I realized that anything built out of alignment with my truth would eventually fall apart or leave me empty.
In practice, this meant walking a path that had yet to be paved — letting go of certainty, surrendering control, and placing my faith in the unseen. It meant turning inward, recognizing that the answers I sought could only come from within.
Fiercely devoted to this path of reclamation, I withdrew from the world to rebuild myself from the ground up. I dismantled the conditioned patterns ingrained into my psyche and leaned into my deepest fears to unearth the treasures buried beneath my traumas. I sat with medicines to heal the wounds standing in the way of my creative expression. I worked with mentors who mirrored the parts of myself I could not yet see, and trained with teachers who showed me how to be of service with integrity.
As I navigated this interior landscape, I immersed myself in the lineage of the masters — musicians and artists, philosophers and poets, saints and sages. My curriculum was self-directed, born out of the questions that were alive for me in each moment. More than the knowledge they carried, it was the lives they had lived that reached me. They had followed their own calling with devotion and without compromise. In that I found the courage to continue following mine.
It was out of this reclamation that a new form of service emerged. In 2020, I co-founded a psychedelic therapy practice, and have since sat for hundreds of individuals on their medicine journeys, facilitated group ceremonies, and guided the process of preparation and integration with the depth and care the work demands. In time, I began mentoring therapists and practitioners — passing on not only the teachings that were handed down to me, but the knowing that comes from doing the work itself.
And I returned to music — not as I had lived it before, hiding in the shadows rather than standing fully in my own light, but as a complete expression of who I am. In 2026, under the name Sun Lion, I am releasing Monomyth — a full-length album that is the manifestation of a lifetime spent answering the calling of my soul, and walking the path that this work is now built upon.
My journey is far from complete. But after forty years of life, and decades of devotion to my truth, I recognize that it is time to step into a deeper level of service. It is my honor to walk alongside those who are ready to begin.
Michael
The people I work with come from different backgrounds and different circumstances. What they share is not a particular kind of pain or a particular level of achievement. It is a quality of readiness.
They sense there is more — more depth, more meaning, more of who they actually are — and they are willing to do what it takes to find it. They take their inner life seriously. They are done living on the surface. They are looking for someone who will meet them at the depth they are genuinely ready for.
Some are navigating a significant transition — in identity, in relationship, in purpose. Some are sitting with questions that nothing in their outer life has managed to answer. Some have had experiences — through medicine work, through loss, through the quiet persistence of their own soul — that have opened something they are ready to explore with genuine depth and care.
What they all share is this — they are ready to go deeper. And they know it.