BIOGRAPHY
Within a month of starting college, I had unraveled psychologically, and was forced to take a leave of absence. My gracious aunt and uncle let me stay and work on their small farm in New Hampshire while I attempted to stitch myself back together. After months of depression and hundreds of pages of fruitless and obsessive journaling, I was shoveling horse manure one day when I noticed that—just for a brief moment—my busy mind was shockingly clear and present.
Intrigued, I began to read about Buddhism, and discovered a local meditation group affiliated with the Kwan Um School of Zen. I attended a dharma talk with Zen Master Bon Haeng, and I was spellbound by the way his answers to my questions seemed to emerge from a place beyond conceptual dualities. After returning to college, I committed myself to Zen practice at the Cambridge Zen Center.
A few years later, I felt disillusioned with my undergraduate studies and took another leave of absence to stay for three months at Musangsa Temple in South Korea under the guidance of Zen Master Dae Bong. My job was to sweep the temple grounds.
This retreat was simultaneously the most psychologically torturous and illuminating experience of my life up to that point. During all those hours of sitting, I fell apart to a state of almost childlike regression, but by the end of the retreat, I felt a newfound sense of confidence in and reverence for the unknowing silence before thinking and concepts.
After I finally graduated from Harvard with a degree in comparative literature, my life took some unexpected detours. I felt inspired by some art coursework to pursue a fine arts career, so I worked as a project manager for an installation artist in Boston, and then as a moldmaker and welder for a bronze sculpture foundry in the historically Amish community of Kalona, Iowa.
In my own art practice, I grew increasingly interested in social practice art, and eventually realized that art was just one possible vehicle for my deeper passion: facilitating transformative experiences for people.
I realized that practicing as a psychotherapist would offer a more direct expression of this passion, so I left Iowa for Massachusetts and completed my Master of Social Work (MSW) at Smith College School for Social Work.
I focused my studies on psychodynamic theory, narrative therapy, and social justice. I interned at Asian Counseling and Referral Service (Seattle) and the PTSD Outpatient Clinic in the Puget Sound VA (Tacoma), where I was trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as well as trauma-focused therapies like Prolonged Exposure (PE).
After graduating from Smith, I settled in Corvallis, Oregon, and offered mindfulness-based group and individual therapy, first at Benton County Health Department and later at Oregon State University, where I specialized in working with student veterans. Around that time, things in my personal life began to blossom. I fell in love, got married, and became a stepfather to an amazing little girl.
I was the happiest I’d ever been, and yet, my spiritual practice felt stagnant. I had been meditating for many years and attended multiple retreats in various Buddhist lineages, but awakening still felt like a fairy tale rather than a lived experience.
Everything started to change when I began a series of experiments combining psychedelics with meditation. I would frame each journey with a strong spiritual intention, and then actively weave my psychedelic experiences into my daily meditation practices.
I began to taste in a persistent and daily way phenomenological aspects of awakening I had heard for so many years from my Buddhist teachers, but had never directly known. The nature of the self as a mind-generated construct in consciousness began to become obvious, and increasingly accessible in every moment. I also experienced profound moments of lasting psychological healing from old childhood wounds, including the trauma of growing up in a transphobic and homophobic culture. I was able to finally embrace long-repressed parts of my being and enter into a more expansive relationship with sexuality and gender. This process culminated in my coming out as queer and nonbinary. Over time, I started changing my name and pronouns from Mark Drummond Davis (he/him) to Mira Archaea Funk (she/her). Funk is a German family name on my mother’s side.
Enthralled by the potential of psychedelics as an accelerator of healing and awakening, I concluded that offering psychedelic integration would be the deepest realization of my passion for facilitating transformative experiences. I have since trained in psychedelic facilitation and integration with InnerTrek.
Having suffered for so many years from the tyranny of my own thoughts and the burden of my own self-concept, nothing feels more meaningful to me than to support others in recognizing the boundless and unified field of awareness in which all thoughts and self arise.