Christian Shappee is the founder and initiator of the Gay Integration Circle. He leverages his background as a former pastor to help the integration process translate profound plant medicine insights into grounded, everyday life. He specializes in personal transformation by bridging the gap between spiritual states and embodied community connection.
About
My work is rooted in Ayahuasca integration, personal transformation, and helping people bring the insights of ceremony into grounded, embodied life.
Before walking the medicine path, I spent years in service as a pastor. My life was shaped by faith, community, devotion, and the sincere desire to help others find meaning and connection. That chapter also brought me to one of the most defining thresholds of my life: the moment I had to come out as gay and leave behind the religious community I had once called home.
That experience broke open many questions around identity, belonging, truth, shame, faith, family, sexuality, and the cost of becoming honest with oneself. It was painful, but it also became a doorway into deeper integrity. I know what it means to lose a world in order to find yourself.
My background also includes over ten years in design and construction, where I learned to see beyond what was already there and help bring new forms into the physical spaces people inhabit. For many years, I worked with homes. Over time, that same way of seeing turned inward: toward the architecture of the heart, the body, the mind, and the deeper patterns that shape a life.
My journey with Ayahuasca and master plants opened a profound process of healing, remembrance, and reconnection. This path has included many ceremonies with indigenous shamans, six months of one-to-one integration mentorship, and deep mentorship within the Ayahuasca Integration Association’s Sacred Integration community.
Through this work, I came to understand that ceremony can open the door, but integration is where the medicine becomes life.
Today, I bring together my experience as a former pastor, my creative background, my personal healing journey, and my training in Ayahuasca integration to support others walking the medicine path. My work is not about giving people answers. It is about helping them listen more deeply to what the medicine, the body, and the heart are already revealing.
I support people who are preparing for Ayahuasca, integrating after ceremony, or seeking grounded support as they reconnect with their gifts, service, identity, faith, sexuality, and deeper sense of self.
If you are walking through a threshold in your life, preparing for ceremony, or integrating what the medicine has shown you, I would be honored to walk beside you.
Specialties
How Christian works
Christian meets you where you are and walks alongside your integration with care and presence.
Reviews
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About this kind of work
Working with an integration coach
An integration coach walks with you in the weeks and months after ceremony. Their job is not to interpret your visions, but to help you turn what the medicine showed you into how you actually live — small choices, honest conversations, a practice that survives the ordinary week.
Most coaching happens on video calls, one to four times a month, with practical support in between. Expect the work to be less about revelation and more about consistency: what you eat, how you rest, who you tell the truth to, and how you protect the field that ceremony opened.
Everyone listed on this site has been reviewed by the Alliance and is in ongoing relationship with the community. If you are unsure whether Christian Shappee is the right fit, most first conversations are free — use them to feel the fit, ask what a real engagement looks like, and trust your own sense of the room.
Working with Christian
Christian is part of the Ayahuasca Integration Alliance — a small, deliberately curated community of coaches, facilitators, therapists, bodyworkers, and teachers we know personally and would send our own family to. Being listed here is not paid, not automated, and not permanent. Each practitioner is in ongoing relationship with the Alliance and holds a standard of practice we can stand behind: real training, real supervision, transparent boundaries, aftercare that actually exists, and a track record measured in years rather than testimonials.
Most sessions with Christian start with a free introductory call — a chance to feel the fit before any commitment is made. Come to that call with the question you actually have, not the polished version. Notice how Christian listens. Notice whether they ask about your body, your sleep, and your relationships, or whether they jump straight to interpretation. That first conversation is information, and it is yours.
What integration support looks like in practice
Integration is not the analysis of visions. It is the slow, unglamorous work of turning what the medicine showed you into how you actually live — your Tuesday, your relationships, your work, your rest, your body. A good integration coach does not tell you what your ceremony meant. They help you notice what has changed since you got home, hold you to the small choices, and name the drift before it becomes a story.
The first three months after ceremony are the sensitive window. What happens in that window shapes the long-term outcome more than the ceremony itself. If you are inside that window, weekly or fortnightly sessions are usually more useful than monthly ones — not because more is better, but because the pattern of returning is what keeps integration alive.
How to prepare for a first session
You do not need to arrive with a plan. It helps to arrive with honesty: where you are on the path, what you have already done, what you are quietly worried about, and what you are hoping might be different in six months. If you have a specific ceremony or experience you want to work with, note the date and the container — that is usually enough. Christian will hold the rest.
Bring a pen and a page. Notice the difference between what you say out loud and what you were preparing to say. Most useful integration work happens in the gap between those two, and a good practitioner will keep gently pointing at that gap until you learn to see it yourself.
A note on cost and access
Ayahuasca integration is skilled work and it is not free. If cost is a barrier, say so. Many AIA practitioners, Christian included, hold a small number of sliding-scale spots for people who genuinely cannot access the full fee. The Alliance also runs ongoing integration circles that are free or low-cost for anyone who applies.
Whatever you choose, do not integrate alone. The people who metabolise ceremony well almost always have at least one steady relationship with someone who knows the terrain — a coach, a therapist, a circle, a mentor. Solo integration is possible; it is also slower, more confusing, and often more expensive in the end.
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