Course Description

This course integrates wisdom from multiple traditions—Western philosophical ethics, post-modern relational approaches, indigenous plant medicine protocols, and developmental psychology—to create a comprehensive understanding of aligned relationships across consciousness states. Rather than privileging any single ethical system, students learn to evaluate and navigate various frameworks, creating an authentic ethical compass that they can live and apply with integrity.

Central to the curriculum is the development of practical skills for ethical decision-making in difficult encounters. Students engage with case studies through experiential exercises and small group discussions. The course emphasizes the development of personal ethical frameworks that integrate professional standards with individual values and spiritual understanding. Students examine their own relationship to power, authority, and healing while developing codes of ethics that can guide their practice across diverse contexts. Special attention is given to cultural humility and the respectful integration of indigenous wisdom without appropriation.

By course completion, students possess sophisticated tools for navigating the ethical landscape of work in non-ordinary states of consciousness, including frameworks for consent and boundary management, skills for developmental attunement, and personal ethical codes that honor relational integrity and difference. This foundation prepares practitioners to relationally engage with the ethical sophistication required by this profound and transformative work, ensuring that the expansion of consciousness serves sacred transformation rather than harm.

The course format combines theoretical exploration with practical application through live synchronous sessions and small group case discussions, creating a learning community that models the aligned relationships students will cultivate in their professional practice.

Learning Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

  1. Evaluate and apply multiple ethical frameworks (Western philosophical, post-modern, and indigenous) to complex relational dilemmas arising in professional work with expanded states of consciousness.
  2. Analyze and navigate power dynamics, consent processes, and boundary considerations specific to relationships that include a non-ordinary state of consciousness.
  3. Integrate developmental theory to assess ethical dilemmas, reasoning capacity and relational approaches while maintaining proportionate developmental attunement.
  4. Demonstrate proficiency in perspective-taking and applying a variety of ethical frameworks as methodologies for ethical inquiry and decision-making in ambiguous or unprecedented situations.
  5. Evaluate and address the ontological and epistemological challenges inherent in working with diverse perspectives and worldviews as well as companioning individuals as they challenge their own values and belief systems and methods of meaning-making across varieties of states of consciousness.
  6. Design and articulate comprehensive personal and professional codes of ethics that integrate course frameworks and address the unique challenges of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
  7. Apply culturally responsive approaches to relational ethics honor indigenous wisdom traditions while maintaining cultural boundaries.
  8. Critically assess case studies and real-world scenarios to identify ethical considerations, potential harm, and aligned responses.

Format
15-week, 8-module online course with eight live synchronous class sessions and six small group discussion meetings.

Spring 2027 Schedule  

Every other Wednesday beginning February 3, 2027 from 1:30 - 4 PM PT/ 4:30 - 7 PM ET

Tuition

The 3-unit Spring Semester is $1800, with a $50 discount for payment in full.

Earn the full Relational Ethics Certificate (10 units: both intensives + both full-semester courses) for a bundled rate of $6000.

Application

This course requires a brief application, with the exception of CSP ministers and students. Expect a response within two weeks of applying.

CSP Ministry Students and Ministers: Select a Pricing Option to Enroll


Meet Your Instructor

Andi Chatburn, DO, MA, HEC-C (they/she) is a Hospice and Palliative Care physician, bioethicist, and ordained ceremonialist. With over 25 years of experience facilitating spiritual ritual and ceremony, Dr. Chatburn accompanies people at the threshold of life's most profound transitions. An apprentice to death since childhood, Andi brings an intimate understanding of the relational nature of being human within an animate ecosystem of life. Through their own surrender to mystery, they know spiritual transformation affects entire ecosystems of relationships with both human and more than human relations.

Throughout a decade-long career at Providence Health and Services, Chatburn served as Senior Director for Ethics at Providence Health in Washington and Montana, where they chaired and led over a dozen ethics committees and taught ethics to interdisciplinary groups of healthcare professionals, spanning topics from pediatric ethics to end-of-life care. Their academic experience includes Clinical Instructor positions in Biomedical Ethics at Washington State University's Elson S. Floyd School of Medicine, Pacific Northwest University School of Osteopathic Medicine, and the University of Washington/Gonzaga School of Medicine. Andi also served as a spiritual director for fellow healthcare executives through Leadership Formation, and as a board member and instructor for Providence's Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Program for healthcare chaplains.

Dr. Chatburn completed a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine and Master of Arts in Bioethics from Kansas City University (2010), holds a certificate in Spiritual Direction from the Companioning Center (2022), and holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy with an emphasis in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion from California Institute for Integral Studies (2026). This unique combination brings unprecedented interdisciplinary depth to bioethics education and practice.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Andi finds restoration through dancing, swimming in wild waters, and wandering in nature's fierce embrace.