Founder & Team
Emma Bragdon: Founder and Co-Executive Director
Before graduate school, Emma trained with leading bio-energetic and neo-Reichian therapists in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her advanced training in breathwork, bodywork, and energy work became central to her approach. In the 1980s, she facilitated community breathwork groups sponsored by her graduate program.
Emma volunteered with the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN) for seven years, editing their journal and newsletter and coordinating two invited conferences at Esalen Institute attended by Stanislav Grof, MD and Christina Grof, founders of SEN. These gatherings inspired her PhD dissertation, How to Support Someone in Spiritual Emergency, and launched a lifelong specialization in this field.
By 1988, she was licensed as a Marriage, Family, and Child Therapist and had earned her PhD in Transpersonal Psychology, focusing her practice on Spiritual Emergency. She continues to coach clients worldwide and consult with organizations on identifying and skillfully managing spiritual emergency.
From 2001–2012, Emma traveled widely for field research, focusing on Spiritist Community Centers and Spiritist Psychiatric Hospitals in Brazil—an effective, more than 120-year-old model of integrative care serving all economic levels, with well-developed protocols for recognizing and managing spiritual emergency. In 2012, the President of the Spiritist Psychiatric Hospital in Goiânia, Brazil asked Emma to serve as their “ambassador” to non-Brazilians; she has since facilitated seminars for health professionals to visit and learn directly from Brazilian psychiatrists and spiritual healers.
Andy Johns: Co-Executive Director
That professional success came with a cost. Workaholism and unprocessed childhood trauma contributed to years of psychological and spiritual struggle that culminated in addiction and burnout. A series of spiritual awakenings catalyzed a long healing journey—one shaped in part by the death of his mother from mental illness when he was ten—ultimately reorienting his life toward service, meaning, and inner transformation.
Today, Andy writes about mental health, spirituality, and personal transformation, and coaches people navigating spiritual awakening, spiritual crisis, and major identity shifts. He brings a lived-experience lens to the challenges of integrating non-ordinary states with everyday life, and he’s committed to bringing spiritually informed care into modern mental health systems. He holds a diploma in Jungian Dream Analysis from the Jung Centre of Ireland and serves as Treasurer on the board of Heroic Hearts Project, supporting veterans and spouses accessing psychedelic-assisted therapy for PTSD. He intends to go to graduate school for Transpersonal Psychology, but for now his focus is building IMHU.
Dr. Tracy King is an Apprentice Facilitator of IMHU’s Spiritual Emergence Coach Practicum training in the UK & Europe. She is a multifaceted Clinical Psychologist, Yoga and Meditation Teacher, and Energy Healer. With a profound understanding of spiritual emergence emerging from trauma, neurodivergence, perceived states of psychosis, as well as difficulties in integration following psychedelic experiences and kundalini awakening.
Dr. Lorna Busch is an Apprentice Facilitator of IMHU’s Spiritual Emergence Coach Practicum training in the USA. She is a Clinical Psychologist, also doing Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy near Rochester, NY. She has a profound understanding of spiritual emergence emerging from her personal history as well as psychedelic experiences and kundalini awakening.
Wilde contributes to IMHU’s mission through the cultivation of meaningful community engagement. Wilde is also a Grof® Breathwork facilitator and provides transpersonal coaching based in British Columbia. His practice centers on helping integrate insights and create meaning from experiences in non-ordinary states of consciousness, supporting both healing and personal transformation.
Josh has been involved with IMHU for over two years as both a volunteer and a paid consultant. He is the owner/operator of a Seattle-based consulting company called Technology Consultants, Inc. He is also the full time director of research and analyst relations for Acronis, a global provider of cyber and data protection solutions. At Acronis, he has been trained on data privacy, sovereignty, and control processes and procedures at a global level.
Tehseen was a part-time academic advisor to IMHU from 2022-May, 2024. He conducted an evaluation of IMHU, built an archive of resources, and helped with updating and creating courses. Tehseen brought expertise in psychedelic science and therapy, and psychiatric survivor and peer support movements. He is a critical social scientist by training, with a PhD from the University of Bristol (UK) and has worked at Johns Hopkins University (USA), University of East London (UK), Durham University (UK) and is currently based at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). We hope to bring him back soon.