Welcome to the Healing Tent
Erica Siegal and Her Passion for Mental Health and Hospitality
“My relationship to passion is a constant refinement on helping people, helping people connect to their spiritual sense of self, to their inner child, to their inner healer, to all of those things — and how to do that in a way that can be impactful and transformative. That's kind of been a thread for me my whole life.” — Erica Siegal
On her first day at her first job out of college — at a hotel she’s long dreamed of working at — Erica Siegal sits in her car in front of the front door, excited about all the lives she’s about to change. This day was a long time coming.
“I was always cooking when I was younger,” she tells me while brushing a piece of her shoulder-length brown hair from under her maroon hat. “I thought I would go into restaurants and hospitality.”
She glances in her rearview mirror, checks her hair, and smooths down the front of her suit. When she’s finally ready, Siegal exits her car, walks in the door, and makes eye contact with everyone there. Only no one looks back. It’s as if everyone, including her new co-workers, are sleepwalking.
“This is awful,” she thinks. “This isn’t the type of hospitality I envisioned.”
Her dream of making people’s lives better through food and hospitality is crushed. Her rose-colored glasses now have cracks, and she wonders what she’s gotten herself into.
Faced with disillusionment, Siegal had a choice: give up her passion for helping people because the first attempt at it didn’t feel right, or pivot the more smaller passion to save the big one. As always, she decided on the latter, keeping a fire for her purpose ablaze while changing the way she fulfilled it.
Now a psychedelic researcher, psychotherapist, clinician, and social entrepreneur, Siegal’s journey is a testament to the irony that a passion is more likely to sustain itself when you allow for specifics to change as you get older and learn new things — and as the world changes around you.
Rather than stay in a job that she found unfulfilling, she went back to school to get her Master’s in social work at the University of Southern California. Passion Pivot No. 1.
Around the same time, she also started working in community mental health in South Central Los Angeles, working with dual diagnosis and lockdown facilities. Though the work was fulfilling, she faced the harsh reality of a broken system, feeling its weight internally.
“The depths of some things will eat you alive,” she says, a somber look on her face. “A teacher of mine once said, ‘You can take a sick fish out of a poisoned river and heal the fish, but if you put it back in a poisoned river, it’s just going to get sick again.’”
“We need to start looking at cleaning the river, not cleaning the fish,” she adds.
Passion Pivot No 2. Still, she knew she couldn’t do it alone, and she also knew if she stayed there for long, she would get bogged down in the brokenness of the system. So after graduating, she picked up her things and moved to Santa Cruz, drawn to its open-minded community and the music scene that she had always loved.
Once again looking for ways to help, she started volunteering at music festivals as part of their medical and harm reduction team to create safe spaces at music festivals. Her job? To be the person at the medical tent that people could go to if they were having a drug experience — negative or positive.
She did this almost a decade, at times attending 15 or 20 festivals a year, including Burning Man, Envision Festival, and my personal favorite, Lightning in a Bottle.
“It really was like hospitality and mental health together in this beautiful overlap,” she says, recounting the experience. She has always loved the transformative power of festivals — which she says resonate with so many people because of our ancestral knowledge that we are supposed to be dancing, singing, and vibrating together as a community.
Every night brought on a bunch of experiences, from beautiful and transformational ones where festival goers felt they were connecting to God, to all-out crises — drug overdoses, sexual assaults, and even death.
Siegal was there for all of it, wanting to be the safe place for people experiencing what she says were often regressed state archetypes and working through prior traumatic experiences. She found the work incredibly rewarding.
“There was this one guy who didn’t remember coming into medical,” she recalls. She was hanging out with him until he got cleared to leave. But when he woke up, he looked around at everyone around him covered in the typical foil blankets used at festivals and thought he had died.
“He woke up and everyone in medical was covered in a plastic sheet,” he says. “And so he drew the connection and thought he was in a morgue.”
When he saw Siegal, he thought he had made her up as a figment of his imagination to help him get through the experience. “He kept being like, ‘Wow, this is so impressive that I’ve created you.’” Siegal assured him that he was not, in fact, dead — and that he would get to fulfill his dreams of seeing his dog again and telling his mom that he loved her (but not tonight — it was 2 a.m. after all).
Siegal found the work of helping people through vulnerable, transformative experiences incredibly fulfilling. But still, it was exhausting. “It was just like being in an emergency room,” Siegal says. “It was basically like being a psychedelic candy striper.” She was on the road for almost a third of a year and at a festival almost every other weekend. As anyone who has ever been to a festival knows, they’re not the best place to get a great night of sleep. And then, there were the fatalities. As they would anyone who has a heart, these got to her.
“I was like, “I hope nobody dies this weekend,’” she says. “You can only do that for so long before experiencing moral injury.”
Time for Passion Pivot No 3. During this time, Siegal finished her clinical license and became a Licensed California Social Worker. She also worked with Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) for five years on their MDMA-assisted psychotherapy clinical trials for PTSD. But while she thought the work was important and brought the lens of somebody with a lot of lived experience in psychedelic crises to the work, she learned she wasn’t a clinical research person.
“I’m not a cross T’s, dot I’s, follow the protocol type of person,” she says. “I’m way too humanistic.”
When she started to dread approaching her next festival, she knew it was time to step back. “It is a lesson to learn when you start becoming burned out and how to stop yourself and take the rest you need,” she says. Our systems are not built to do this forever. So she took time off to get trained in burnout recovery to help herself and to help others experiencing similar feelings. No 4.
Six months later, with her certification in hand and a reinvigorated sense of purpose, Siegal established her clinical practice, NEST Harm Reduction and Consulting, offering psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, risk/harm reduction education, and on-site festival support. This venture allowed her to pursue the helping work she loves, with a crucial addition — prioritizing her own well-being. She also launched SHINE Collective, a non-profit aimed at supporting survivors of psychedelic harm.
While she continues to participate in select events, her primary focus has shifted towards her clinical practice, educational initiatives, and private gatherings. For Passion Pivot No 5, she even acquired property north of Los Angeles for retreats centered on community, trauma healing, and overcoming burnout. This may seem overwhelming, but for Siegal, it's infinitely less stressful than manning the medical tent at the largest music festivals in the world.
“I’m 41,” she says. Her smile makes me smile. “I don’t have it in me to chase the 25-year-old naked hippies anymore.”
Still, her fire for helping people rages on, and each pivot turned out not so much to be a change as a new foundation to build on and bring together in her current work.
“I like mushing the walls between hospitality and mental health,” she says. “The more we can create safe-feeling containers for people to be vulnerable in, the more they’ll be able to replicate that in their home lives.”
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Siegal’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
1. One Lesson: It’s Normal for Our Specific Passions to Shift During Our Lives, Even if Our Overarching Passion or Purpose Stays Constant
While some people, such as pickleball icon Steve Paranto or wellness pioneer Dr. Edythe Heus, discover their passions early and pursue them with unwavering focus, many others experience a more fluid journey. Erica Siegal’s story shows how passions can evolve and adapt over time, reflecting personal growth and changing circumstances. It’s a reminder that it’s perfectly normal for our interests and passions to shift as we navigate through different stages of our lives.
2. One Exercise: Identifying and Responding to Passion Burnout
Intense commitments, such as Siegal’s dedication to supporting people through profound and sometimes traumatic experiences, can offer fulfillment but can also be emotionally and physically taxing. Recognizing the early signs of burnout, including fatigue, lethargy, diminished enthusiasm and more is essential to sustain your passion over the long term. Learn to monitor your energy and enthusiasm levels and cultivate the honesty to acknowledge when it’s time to recalibrate your approach. Making a shift doesn’t mean giving up on your passion; rather, it’s about adjusting your engagement to protect your well-being and sustain your ability to make a difference.
3. One Curiosity: Exploring the Human Stories Within the Medical Tents
I’ve seen the striped medical tents in a tucked away corner at past music festivals but have never stopped by. Now that I’ve met Siegal and have a sense of the demanding yet rewarding nature of the work, I’m more curious than ever about the people who choose to be there. At the next festival opportunity, I’ll make sure to stop by, say hi, and learn more about their stories and unique experiences.
It's so beautiful when you see your reflection in somebody elses's life. We are diverse but the patterns are constant like sacred geometry. Lightning in a Bottle was my favorite festival too!