About

About An Empathic Society

An Empathic Society is a California nonprofit and a 501(c)(3) public charity. Our mission is to inspire and help facilitate the elevation of consciousness by spreading knowledge and healing, through practices people can bring into everyday life: yoga, breathwork, meditation, self-reflective writing, peer support, and integration circles for people processing plant medicine experiences. Our gatherings are online and open to everyone.

Doug Finkelstein

Founder. Hosts the Full Moon Ceremonies and takes every consultation call.

Doug's own path runs through breathwork, meditation, and plant medicine ceremony. What it taught him is that the experience is the easier half. The harder, more important half is integration: bringing what you found back into an ordinary week. He started An Empathic Society so nobody has to do that part alone.

He also spent three years building and hosting an online community of about 250 people exploring consciousness and plant medicine, with no safety incidents.

A call with Doug is unhurried and practical. He listens first, asks a few good questions, and helps you find a next step that fits where you are. No agenda.

Mychal Prieto

Yoga and breathwork guide for the Full Moon Ceremonies.

Mychal began yoga at 18 and meditation at 21, "not as fitness tools, but as doorways." After more than 13 years of practice, he's a yoga teacher, meditation guide, and breathwork facilitator in Los Angeles, and teaches Power and Yin at Inner Dimension Yoga.

He trained in Holistic Yoga Flow with Travis Eliot and Lauren Eckstrom, and for the past five years has studied shamanism with Indigenous wisdom keepers, weaving sound, movement, and breath into everything he guides.

He and Doug have led gatherings together before. As Mychal puts it, he teaches "from a path of life experiences."