About Mariya Garnet

I am a mother, artist, immigrant, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), and someone who spent a long time not knowing that I mattered.

I work online across Ontario with people navigating complex trauma, childhood emotional neglect, and the particular exhaustion of functioning well while feeling nothing inside. My training includes ceremonial work in the Peruvian Amazon and postgraduate studies in Expressive Arts Therapy at the CREATE Institute in Toronto. CRPO# 22667.

I understand what it means to grow up feeling invisible. To learn early that your needs were too much, that you had to earn your place, that love was conditional on being easy, good, or small. I carried that story in my body for years before I found a way to set it down.

That is what brought me to this work: not an academic interest in healing, but a need for it. What I found, slowly and through many languages, is that the body knows the way home. We just have to learn to listen to it.

Born in the Soviet Union and raised in Ukraine, I immigrated to Canada at 18 to pursue filmmaking and media arts. I was building a career I loved, and carrying something I did not have words for yet: not quite belonging, working hard to be seen and never fully believing I was.

At 25, an encounter with ayahuasca stopped me in my tracks. I felt something in my body loosen that I had not known was held. I left my career, sold what I had, and moved to the Peruvian Amazon. What I thought would take six months took nine years.

I apprenticed with master curanderos Enrrique Santiago Paredes Melendez and Reyna Luz Edery in Peruvian Vegetalismo, the Amazon's plant medicine tradition. It was not only ceremony. I was learning how healing happens: not through insight or willpower alone, but in the body, in the space beneath language.

In 2012, I co-founded Canto Luz Centre for Research and Cultural Preservation in the Amazon. In 2017, I returned to Canada to start my family and bring what I had learned to more people.

When I came back, I went to school to translate what I knew into ethical, supervised, clinical practice, completing postgraduate studies in Expressive Arts Therapy at the CREATE Institute in Toronto.

I have practised within traditional Amazonian plant medicine since 2009, alongside my clinical training.

Clinical training gives that knowledge a rigorous, ethical container, so what I offer is both careful and grounded. Today I practise as a psychotherapist, facilitate workshops, speak at conferences on psychedelic integration and expressive arts, and mentor practitioners at the intersection of traditional and contemporary healing.