Sprout
Elephant Gate · April 2026

The ground in your garden
is soft.

An ecosystem for psychedelic aftercare. An interactive journal for the weeks and months after, and a vetted circle of practitioners to hold it.

Anonymous by design

Caring Practitioners Circle PBC

The moment we are in

Psychedelic care is at scale.
Aftercare is not.

1,500+
ketamine clinics in the US1
440+
psychedelic retreat locations identified globally2
3 states
with legal psilocybin therapy by end of 20263

The experiences are at scale. The infrastructure for what happens after is not.

Why now

Three catalysts converge
inside eighteen months.

April 18, 2026
Federal executive order on psychedelics. Priority Vouchers, federal Right to Try, $50M through ARPA-H matching state programs.
August 1, 2026
Louisiana SB 43 takes effect. State-sanctioned psychedelic-assisted therapy pilot. Our anchor clinic operates inside it from day one.
Next eighteen months
A second wave of approved compounds. Compass COMP360 and others move toward FDA decisions. More clinics, more people, more work that needs somewhere to go.
Today
No integration layer exists for any of it. Clinics are being built. The software that holds the work after is not.
The gap

Most people walk out and navigate
the rest alone.

People arrive, open, and go home. The integration period, where change is anchored or lost, is largely unaddressed.

Therapist-led
$100 to $300 per hour.
Wellness apps
Not designed for this population. No clinical specificity.
Nothing
The most common option.

Clinically-informed. Anonymous. Participant-owned. No integration ecosystem for this field holds all three at once.

What we are building

One ecosystem.
Two layers that hold each other.

Mina's Garden

An interactive journal. Anonymous and free to participants, following HIPAA standards. A place to write, and literacy for finding a practitioner who fits.

Caring Practitioners Circle

A vetted directory of clinicians. A network of practitioners a person can reach when the work asks for a human.

CPC PBC runs the journal. CPC LLC runs the circle. Ethics sits inside the PBC charter as a fiduciary obligation, not a marketing claim.

The journal

A journal, not a companion.
Connective tissue, not a replacement for people.

Five movements, not steps: Arriving, Feeling, Making Sense, Tending, What Remains. One question at a time, at the person's pace. When the work asks for a human, the journal says so.

  • Free. No account. A handle carried across devices.
  • Voice chosen by the person.
  • Somatic tagging travels with each entry. The body is part of the thread.
  • The Psyche Map surfaces themes as a living landscape, not a dashboard.
  • Handoff to a CPC practitioner when a moment calls for one.
Mina's Garden · Present
Something brought you here. You do not need to have it figured out yet.

What has been present for you since your experience?
I keep having the same image surface. I do not know what it means.
You do not have to name it yet.

If it helps, notice where your attention goes when it surfaces. Jot down what you see.
Scripted. The working build runs entries, reflections, somatic tagging, and the Psyche Map through the Five Movements schema.
The core differentiator

Not another chat module.
Visualizations of what is actually moving.

Entries feed two views of the same material: what keeps appearing, and how it is shifting. Together, they form the Psyche Map.

By theme
Mina's Garden theme map: themes rendered as a constellation of connected nodes
What keeps surfacing, in a person's own language. No preset taxonomy.
By time
Mina's Garden time map: themes shown as density across nine weeks
The same themes, week by week. Thickness is frequency, not intensity.
  • Themes surface from the person's own entries. No preset framework. No diagnosis.
  • Somatic tags ride along. The body is part of the map.
  • Nothing gamified. Nothing scored. The map is a mirror, not a metric.

Mina's Garden treats the person as someone already making meaning, and gives them a way to see it.

Values written as product

What Mina's Garden
will not become.

  • Not a companion.
    Connective tissue between a person, their practitioner, and their own memory. Not a relationship.
  • Not over-personified.
    No "Mina thinks." No "Mina noticed." The map is a surface, not an entity with a voice.
  • Not gamified.
    No streaks. No progress rings. No insights earned. Integration is not a game.
  • Not extractive.
    The data belongs to the participant. The practitioner and the organization see only what the participant opts to share.
  • Not fast where speed causes harm.
    The interface moves at the pace of the work. No streaks. No nudges. No snap transitions.
Governance, as designed

The field's biggest risk
is not regulation. It is trust.

Recent failures in this field have been trust failures. Trial misconduct. Clinic-site violations. Companies that promised safety and delivered extraction.

The answer is structural, not promissory. CPC PBC is forming to run Mina's Garden, in partnership with CPC LLC. Safety, ethics, and data stewardship sit inside the PBC charter as fiduciary obligations, not policies.

Two entities · one partnership

Caring Practitioners Circle

CPC PBC runs Mina's Garden. CPC LLC holds the practitioner network. A partnership binds them. An external ethics council sits outside the cap table, to be named on PBC formation.

Technical architecture

Anonymous by design.

Private information is filtered out before Mina gives a response. The platform does not hold identifiable data it could lose. No honeypot to breach, subpoena, or sell. Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Cloudflare Worker proxy, Anthropic API with BAA in process.

HIPAA-compliant AI layer Shipped, pre-audit

Anthropic API, BAA in process, routed through a Cloudflare Worker that strips headers and enforces zero retention. The provider does not retain the conversation. Does not train on it.

Anonymous authentication Shipped, pre-audit

No signup. UUID identity on first visit. A handle, not a name. Argon2id-hashed passphrase plus rotating recovery codes across devices. No email, no phone, no real-world identifier anywhere. WebAuthn passkeys scheduled next.

Client-side PII redaction Shipped, pre-audit

Names, locations, and similar tokens are replaced client-side before transmission, not after storage. Defense in depth: the storage layer assumes residual quasi-identifiers remain in first-person text.

Separated data architecture Shipped, pre-audit

Identity and entry content in separate tables, joined only by anonymous UUID. Entries coarsened to a week bucket, not a wall-clock timestamp. In a breach, an attacker finds redacted fragments with no path back to a person.

Abuse prevention without identity In progress

IP rate limiting, per-session token budgets, device fingerprinting, human verification at identity creation. None collect real-world identity. Independent security review scheduled before wider release.

A person can use Mina's Garden for months, across devices, with continuity. The platform genuinely does not know who they are.

Clinically-informed safety

Some moments need a person,
not a screen.

Built for integration, not acute care. When a small set of signals appears, the journal steps back and routes the person toward someone who can help. Classifier-triggered, modality-diverse, acuity-routed. The pattern major AI providers have converged on.

When the journal steps aside
  • Active suicidality
  • Prodromal psychosis
  • Active mania
  • Severe dissociation
  • Spiritual emergency
  • Active psychedelic experience (the journal is built for after, not during)

When these surface, the journal does not engage or attempt to soothe. It surfaces the routing layer plainly and stays out of the way.

Where it routes

CPC · clinician handoff

Non-acute distress that calls for a human. Drawn from themes, not intake forms.

Fireside Project · peer support

62-FIRESIDE (623-473-7433), call or text, 11am to 11pm Pacific. During or after a psychedelic experience.

988 · Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

Call, text, or chat. 24/7. 240+ languages. Clinical crisis.

911 · medical emergency

Immediate medical or safety threat.

Does not validate psychotic content. Does not act as a confidant in crisis. A pointer toward people who can help, not a replacement for them.

Caring Practitioners Circle

When the work asks for a person,
the journal steps back.

CPC is a vetted directory of clinicians who do this work with care. A curated network a person can reach when the work asks for a human, drawn from themes rather than intake forms.

An inner circle of thirty founding clinicians anchors the network today. New members are invited or accepted in by application, with vetting kept tight as the directory grows.

SZ
Sarah Zoghbi
LPC · Fluence trainer · MAPS / Lykos trained
KAPIntegrationTrauma
New Orleans, LA

"Therapy as a space to slow down, breathe, and reconnect."

CPC member
AY
Alon Yizhak
MT-BC · Naropa-trained
Music therapyMindfulnessTranspersonal
New Orleans, LA

"Sound and silence as portals back into the body."

CPC member
AB
Anne Bethune
LCSW · LSCSW · Polaris Insight Center trained
KAPTrauma / PTSDGrief
Kansas City, MO

"I invite clients to set a flexible and meaningful intention."

CPC member

Three of the inner circle. The directory grows by application, vetting held tight. Value is who is in it, not how many.

The landscape

Other tools do one piece.
Mina's Garden holds the combination.

Platform Psych-specific Anonymous Visualizations Practitioner handoff Ethics in charter HIPAA / BAA
Fireside ProjectCrisis / peer
MindleapMarketplace
Nue LifeAt-home KAP
Journey ClinicalKAP platform
General AI toolsChatGPT, etc.
Mina's GardenIntegration ecosystem In build (CPC)On formation (PBC)In audit
The founding team

Small. Clinically-informed.
Already in the work.

Michael VanderWaal, LCSW

Clinical architect · Founder · CEO
Eight years clinical. Five in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.
Licensed in MO, MI, KS, LA, FL
Trained through Journey Clinical, CIIS, Polaris Insight Center
Co-founder, New Orleans anchor KAP clinic (summer 2026) with Kennedi Barker, NP, and Dr. Josh
Founder, Caring Practitioners Circle (2024)
Director of People, NOLA AI (three years inside an AI company)

Ehren Abbott

CTO · Founder
AI systems architect. Primary technical builder of Mina's Garden.
Designed and shipped UUID-based anonymous authentication (Argon2id passphrase, rotating recovery codes)
Built the client-side PII redaction layer and zero-retention Cloudflare Worker proxy
Stood up the Supabase-backed Five Movements data model and the Psyche Map visualization API
Background in AI safety and responsible deployment

Clinical depth and technical depth, same founding team. The clinician sets the standard. The engineer builds the system that holds it.

Why this team

The product is being built by the person it is for.

Most teams have one or two of these. This one has them in the same room.

  • A practicing clinician.
    LCSW, eight years clinical, five in KAP, holding sessions today. The product follows the work.
  • Five-state licensure, Louisiana included.
    Cleared to practice inside the state-sanctioned pilot launching August 2026.
  • An anchor clinic, co-founded.
    Opening in New Orleans, summer 2026, with Kennedi Barker, NP and Dr. Josh. First deployment is not hypothetical.
  • A practitioner network already forming.
    CPC exists. The handoff target is real, vetted relationship by relationship.
  • Three years inside an AI company.
    Director of People at NOLA AI. Knows what AI can and cannot do, what to refuse, what to build with care.
  • A structure that restrains itself.
    PBC charter binding ethics, safety, and stewardship as fiduciary obligations. Not a marketing claim. A legal one.
The ask

$150,000.
Six months of focused build,
with Pink Elephant alongside.

Close the engineering gap. Harden the platform to a clinically-informed standard. Formalize the PBC. Ship the first real install. Pink Elephant's operational support runs the same six months on distribution and scale.

Engineering, formalized

Ehren Abbott's co-founder time under equity, vesting, and IP assignment. The most urgent gap.

Product to production-grade

Infrastructure, authentication, storage separation. The multi-tenant foundation the anchor install runs on.

HIPAA compliance

Third-party audit, BAA legal work, independent security review before the first install.

Founder time, protected

Clinical oversight, product direction, network stewardship, held away from the pressure to bill hours elsewhere.

PBC formation

Delaware entity setup. Charter with ethics in-clause. Ethics council structure. IP assignment between CPC LLC and CPC PBC.

Anchor clinic install

Integration with the New Orleans site's intake and session workflow. First real deployment.

Out the other side by Demo Day  ·  a production-grade HIPAA-compliant product live at one clinic, a formed PBC, a vesting CTO, a named ethics council, a distribution path tested with Pink Elephant.

The field will keep producing experiences.
What people do with them shapes what happens next.

Right now, most are doing it alone.

A place to write, a circle to reach, a charter that keeps both honest.

Mina's Garden

vanderlcsw@gmail.com  ·  vanderlcsw.com

A project of Caring Practitioners Circle PBC, in partnership with Caring Practitioners Circle LLC.

Free for participants  ·  Anonymous by design  ·  Built in stewardship

1 Grand View Research, US Ketamine Clinics Market, 2024.  ·  2 Neitzke-Spruill et al., PLOS One, May 2025, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0321648.  ·  3 Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico (launching Dec 2026 per NM DOH).