Hello, experiencers! Professionally, I’m D. Brian Lee, but please call me Brian. Here is a little background about my weird and wonderful path to helping people with their extraordinary experiences.
When I was 12, I saw a UFO dancing in the sky while delivering newspapers in my hometown in Iowa. This event kicked off my interest in weird things. A few years later, my whole family watched a UFO tracking us on a country road one night. Around that time, my father shared with me his story about a close encounter with a strange aerial object that happened when he was a young man.
I read all the UFO books I could get my hands on as a teenager, which led to becoming interested in other mysteries, such as paranormal phenomena, the possibility of an afterlife, and reincarnation. When I was 17, my grandfather became terminally ill and had a classic near death experience in the hospital, where he watched the staff work on him while clinically dead and out of body. After he was revived, he was eager to go back to the place he had a glimpse of during that experience. He died soon after and I was happy for his ability to go in peace. That was the beginning of my losing my fear of death.
In my twenties I got into everything “New Age”, which included taking a class in psychic development at a spiritualist church in Connecticut. It was quite fun, and helped me learn to trust intuition and other non-sensory ways of knowing. I gave several accurate readings to people where I saw things that I could not have guessed, such as a classmate’s summer home on a lake in Croatia, or another person’s boyhood home near pineapple farms on a Caribbean island, both of which seemd to me like wildly random images. I also received some accurate readings from strangers, such as the one that predicted the name of my graduate school advisor and mentor.
I would go through periods of intense interest in all things anomalous and weird, followed by ignoring such things for long periods while I was coping with the challenges of daily life. Occasional unusual experiences throughout my life had been packed away for years until I experienced my first regression hypnosis and plant medicine journey a few years ago. Wow! Dots connected all over the place. Personality traits, synchronicities, peculiar memories, and certain habitual mental patterns started making a lot more sense.
Like so many people, my spouse and I became aware of the potential of psychedelics for “regular people” through the book and documentary series “How to Change Your Mind”. We saw how people like us were experiencing extraordinary things like spiritual awakening, loss of the fear of death, and improved mental health. Thus our journey began in earnest to see what this was all about. We have found vibrant communities of fellow journeyers with whom we have had many wonderful experiences and connections.
For many years I worked with performing artists, helping singers and instrumentalists prepare for auditions, learn repertoire and roles, and refine career goals. Along with performance coaching, I owned an IT consulting business. A few years ago, I began to reduce my client list until finally closing the performing arts studio to make room for a new kind of coaching – helping people to integrate their unusual experiences. Psychedelics, meditation, research in esoteric subjects, and my training in Internal Family Systems (IFS) have been hugely helpful to both my personal growth and my work with clients. Working with people who have encountered anomalous phenomena and/or expanded states of consciousness is fascinating and rewarding to me.
My formal education includes degrees in music, education, and instructional design. I have worked extensively in those fields and in IT consulting. I have training in IFS-informed coaching, including Coaching With IFS 2: Deepening into Internal Family Systems through the Institute for Healing and Awakening with Guthrie Sayen and Barti Bourgault, and Moxie School’s The Art of Transformation with Heather Smith. I am also a Master Certified Professional Coach.
My home base is Potomac, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. I work with clients both in-person in Maryland, and online.