Lara Howenstine:

During this same period, I undertook a guided psychedelic-assisted therapy session combining MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT—an experience I can only call an initiation.

In the MDMA state, the boundary between the living and the dead grew permeable. I found myself in communion with those I had lost, speaking to them, surfacing what had gone unresolved, offering love and gratitude, and releasing layers of grief that had long been held in my body.

The 5-MeO-DMT portion demanded something far more harrowing. I took eleven doses of the medicine. Each one was a death. The first ten were unbearable—pure, unrelenting fear. Each time, I was forced to take that final breath, stripped of everything, brought to the raw, wordless core of what it means not to want to disappear. There was no easing into it. Each repetition offered no comfort, only the same terrifying threshold.

On the eleventh, I stopped fighting. I surrendered…and death changed. It was no longer an ending but a passage into something luminous, a dissolution of self into everything at once. What arose was awe: pure, wordless, and overwhelming. And beneath it, the feeling of home. More familiar than anything I had ever known. As if I had always belonged there and had simply forgotten.

In the weeks that followed, my fibromyalgia symptoms resolved. My body finally released what my spirit had been holding since my mother's death. And I emerged carrying something I had not expected: not just a personal peace with death, but a felt understanding of the collective human fear of dying. That fear is not only personal. It lives in the body, but it also lives collectively in the way our culture distances itself from death, rushes past grief, and leaves the dying to face the threshold largely alone. I understand now where that fear lives, what it costs us, and what becomes possible when we release it. I believe that experience was not metaphor. It was a direct revelation of what death actually is, not an ending, but a return home.

These experiences now inform every aspect of my work. They allow me to sit with death not as an ending, but as a sacred passage to be met with presence, reverence, and love.

Beyond my end-of-life doula and midwife training, I have studied the ancient practice of shamanic dowsing and Reiki under my spiritual and intuitive mentor, Marya Badiei. I am also a hereditary medium—a channel between the living and those who have passed. Through shamanic dowsing, I am able to communicate with people in comatose states, receiving and conveying what cannot otherwise be spoken. Throughout the active dying process, I am in constant communion with the spirit world through shamanic dowsing. The spirits guide the experience and let me know in real time what the person needs, whether that's deeper Reiki healing, rebalancing the chakras, clearing or healing of the space, or tending to a shift in the energetic field. This ongoing dialogue means my care is never static; it responds, moment by moment, to what the dying person and the space actually need. I am not working alone at the threshold. I am working in partnership with something much larger.

I am here to create an experience where death is genuinely, spiritually safe, not just managed or overseen. Where the dying and their families can exhale, drop their fear, and trust that what is happening is a sacred and natural passage, not a failure or a tragedy.

Through Space Attunement™, I create an environment that makes this possible—a held, protected container where everyone in the room, including the one who is dying, can be fully present instead of watching from a distance or bracing against it. Everyone is actually in it together at the threshold.

I work with the dying and their loved ones to ensure that nothing is left to chance and nothing goes unsaid. Together we clarify wishes—who they want present, what music they want to hear, what their last meal should be, what the space should feel like as the end approaches. I help families understand what to expect, so that nothing feels frightening or mysterious. And for those without family or loved ones, I make sure they are never alone—held always by my presence.

I sit vigil. I hold space. I hold hands. I am there to ensure that every person I serve feels held, seen, and accompanied—all the way to the threshold. At the moment of death, I close the chakras, guiding the soul's transition and honoring the threshold that has just been crossed. Afterward, I continue supporting the family through the immediate grief. And for those who choose it, I prepare the body with tenderness and care—washing, anointing, dressing, and readying for a home funeral if that is what the family wishes.

Love into Light is not a concept I just arrived at. It is something I lived—through seventeen losses, through my mother's peaceful crossing, through the harrowing and luminous initiation that showed me what death actually is.

Love is what we bring to the threshold. Light is what waits on the other side. This work is the bridge between them.

At the heart of this work are two disciplines I keep returning to: presence and listening. Presence is the willingness to slow down, show up fully, and let what is actually happening matter. Listening means paying attention not just to people, but to spaces, to what a room holds, to what a person or a moment needs. This work isn’t possible without both.

My greatest gift is the ability to merge my spirituality, my intuition, and my love in service of this work. I believe that how we die matters. I believe that death, met with intention and presence, can be one of the most profound experiences of a human life—not only for the person leaving, but for everyone gathered around them.