Collaborative Team
Christine Pateros, MA, RN, Co-founder
Chris Pateros is the co-founder of Ela Healing and has been in the healing arts as a clinician since the 1980s. After “dying” in the Amazon jungle in 2011 in her own life-affirming psychedelic journey, Chris’ course as a healer was transformed from clinical nurse and clinical drug researcher to shamanic energy healing practitioner and psychedelic nurse therapist. She has served clients globally in her private healing practice since 2007. She has practiced ketamine-assisted treatment since early 2019 having been mentored by Phil Wolfson, MD and Julane Andries, LMFT through the Ketamine Training Center. Chris is co-founding member of Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI) serving as lead faculty (ritual & ceremony) as well as medical team RN for Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy clinician trainings. Chris is also faculty for Polaris Insight Center Ketamine and Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Trainings as well as for other private clinical entities. Chris teaches globally and is sponsored by the Theosophical Society in America. She is an author and contributor to Quest Journal. She is a member of the American Holistic Nurses Association and an initiate of the Qero indigenous medicine people of the Peruvian Andes. She is an Ecopsychologist academically trained at Naropa University.
Returning to heart and to roots in nature, Chris as a life-long learner has been a student of many healers, sages, visionaries and spiritual leaders including Tenzin Gyatso — HH the 14th Dalai Lama, shamanic healer, medical anthropologist and psychologist Alberto Villoldo, PhD, Qui Gong Master Yang Yang, PhD, shamanic practitioner and Earthkeeper Sandra Ingerman, LMFT, poet, psychoanalyst, post-trauma specialist and activist Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, master visionary artists and authors and activists Alex and Allyson Grey, Andean mystical teacher, practitioner and author Joan Parisi Wilcox and many Andean Qero mystics as well as plant-centric Amazonian Shipibo medicine people.
Chris bridges healing between the western and indigenous worlds as a global spiritual guide, ceremonialist, ketamine-assisted nurse therapist, an artist, author, healer, teacher and presenter, Chris grounds herself in ecocentric ritual, ceremony and practices. Chris’ calling, seeking and mystical soul-seeing has awakened her spirit to support others to own and share their potent gifts in the world by guiding groups and circles in embodied conscious living and dying practices as well as sacred art creation. Internationally, she guides shamanic energy and earth practices through workshops, presentations and private client work.
Chris maintains her private practice in ketamine-assisted therapy and shamanic living and healing, serving clients exploring soul healing, awakened living and dying, existential death work and expansion of consciousness. Chris believes that death in all forms is truly the greatest teacher. Her life’s flourishing practices include painting portals, feeling the essence of animals, places, people and the land channeling through her to the canvas and paper while colors transmute into form. Part of her flourishing life includes spending precious time with her daughters. Chris lives gratefully immersed in nature in Boulder, Colorado at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Darren Fisher, RN, Co-founder
Darren is the co-founder of Ela Healing has a Bachelors degree in Psychology with a concentration in Buddhist psychology and a second Bachelors degree in Nursing. He has spent years studying and practicing meditation in Asia and has facilitated meditation groups in the U.S. A nurse for the past 15 years, with the last 9 years in hospice nursing, he attended the Psychedelic Research And Training Institute’s (PRATI) Ketamine and Psychedelic Medicine program after learning about the positive role psychedelics have played in end of life care. Interested in the many benefits of group work, he has created and co-facilitated group KAT retreats focused on healing and spiritual deepening. He enjoys teaching with an experiential focus. Darren is a musician and enjoys curating and creating sound experiences to support clients in their psychedelic experience.
Darren blends the approaches of psychedelic medicine and meditation practices to support clients accessing and building connection to their own inner wisdom, resilience, and healing through entering into deeper relationship with parts of themselves that they may have lost touch with.
German Ascani, MD MS
German Ascani brings with him a broad range of clinical expertise having worked extensively over a decade in public and community mental health systems. He has experience in primary care and specialty clinics providing psychiatric consultation to serve diverse clinical populations across the full spectrum of mental health and illness. His care philosophy prioritizes a health and wellness approach focusing on patient autonomy, shared decision-making and a healing intention. He employs evidence-based and interdisciplinary approaches to mental health treatments. He combines the best of modern psychiatry with integrative practices that offer improvements in mental health outcomes often with less side effects than conventional psychotropic medication. He is experienced in the latest clinical treatment tools such as Ketamine for refractory conditions. German has particular interests in the potential for psychological, emotional and spiritual healing that new and emerging psychedelic medicines bring to the mental health field. He supports the safe use of these powerful transformative tools to open up a process of deep exploration, self-reflection and lasting growth.
German is a board certified psychiatrist and a graduate of the University of California Davis School of Medicine. He completed his general psychiatric training at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California. He has a Masters of Science in Physiology from Georgetown University and a BA in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He has collaborated in the latest published research on Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
He also presently serves as co-faculty and medical lead for PRATI (Psychedelic Research and Training Institute) for their KAP trainings for mental health professionals. He is research therapist for the MAPS phase 3 research trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD in Fort Collins. (MAPS)
Prior to moving to Colorado, Dr. Ascani lived in California and founded Evolve Mind Wellness, a treatment center in Sonoma County, offering ketamine-assisted therapies for refractory depression, trauma, and other psychological disorders.
German is a native of Argentina and is bilingual in Spanish and English and also speaks French. He is a soccer enthusiast and has played competitively for many years as well as coached youth teams. When not at work he likes to spend time with family traveling, camping, hiking and snowboarding.
Shannon Darling, PMHNP
I specialize in women, children, and adolescent psychiatry. I came into the mental health field and specifically integrative psychiatry because I recognized the gap in mental health care in overall wellbeing of patients that I worked with in the acute care setting. My background is in acute care nursing, the last 9 years in women and infant services. I am a Colorado native. I love being outdoors with my kids, olympic weightlifting, mountain biking, and all the things to do with Colorado outdoor life. I am particularly passionate about women’s health. I believe in building therapeutic relationships and providing holistic tools to foster healing to meet individual’s needs.