Syre Saniyah, Ph.D

I came to this work through my own body's insistence and through a lifetime of moving through the world in a body that systems were not built for. As a Black, queer, transgender man, I learned early that healing is not neutral. The body holds not only personal history, but ancestral memory, collective wounds, and the residue of systems that have sought to disconnect us from our bodies, our pleasure, and our power.

My path has moved through liberation psychology, somatic sexology, psychedelic medicine, and ancestral energy work, each becoming part of a larger devotion to embodied and collective liberation. I hold a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology and have been a psychologist in private practice since 2010. For nearly 20 years I have accompanied people through healing, transformation, and becoming.

Over time, my own journey called me beyond what could be reached through words alone and more deeply into the wisdom of the body, altered states, energy, touch, ritual, and Eros. That calling led me into psychedelic medicine, into the study of Sexological Bodywork and Sex Doula work at the Amina Institute, and into Kemetic Energy Medicine and other ancestral approaches to working with life force.

It also gave birth to Liberation Reiki, my own evolving practice of energy work rooted in the understanding that our energetic bodies are shaped by culture, history, identity, and power, and that tending to them can be part of our liberation.

My work has also carried me into teaching and mentorship. I am deeply invested in cultivating spaces where embodiment, identity, power, liberation, and the sacred are not treated as peripheral to healing, but as essential to it. That commitment has led me to teach and present in conferences and training programs on liberation-centered approaches to psychedelic facilitation and the creation of affirming, culturally responsive care for queer, trans, and BIPOC communities. Most recently, I presented Psychedelics for Black Trans Liberation at the WPATH World Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. I now bring these threads together in my role as Training Director of the Psychedelic Facilitation Training Program at Memoru Center for Visionary Healing Arts.

My relationship with the body has also been deeply shaped by yoga, ritual, and sacred movement, with roots in the African-centered tradition of Kemetic Yoga and continued exploration through Hatha, Yin, Tantra, Kundalini, and primal and intuitive movement practices. I have learned to approach the body as sacred ground. These traditions have taught me that embodiment itself can be an act of devotion.

The body is not something to transcend. It is a divine vessel through which we encounter the sacred.

But credentials are only one part of what I bring into the room.

I bring a deep reverence for the intelligence of the body. I believe pleasure can be a site of knowing, Eros a source of vitality, and consensual touch a pathway into deeper relationship with ourselves. I believe our bodies can teach us what we desire, where our boundaries live, what safety feels like, and what becomes possible when we no longer have to abandon ourselves in order to belong.

My work is particularly devoted to those whose bodies, genders, sexualities, desires, and ways of loving have been marginalized, controlled, pathologized, or told they were too much. I am interested not only in helping people heal what has hurt, but in helping them discover what becomes possible beyond survival.

To the body as sacred ground.

To pleasure as birthright.

To desire as embodied knowing.

To Eros as liberation.