I asked the obvious question: why, again, nothing?

“This person is struggling,” I was told.

“We have to be kind. Compassionate.”

I didn’t have an answer for that in the moment. Kindness is hard to argue with.

A decision was made with good intentions.

(The world is filled with good intentions.)

Someone else at the table brought up a cautionary term: Idiot Compassion. A Buddhist term, apparently. It stayed with me for a couple of days. Then, as these things do, sent me down a rabbit hole, of Buddhist philosophy, conversations from death doula training, time spent working around addiction, and eventually as often happens, back to my favourite philosopher, Socrates.

Now philosophy, of course, means the love of wisdom. But if one is going to study wisdom, perhaps it also helps to study its opposite.

I can’t quite say I have a love of idiots.

But I feel like one sometimes. And I’m around them often too.

(I say both these things with love.)

So perhaps another way of expressing my love of wisdom is by asking the question: how do good people, trying to do good things, sometimes end up making things worse?

I’m often surprised at how we convince ourselves that we must be very good people, for being so kind and “compassionate”.

Staying in a relationship long after it has run its course, because you cannot bear to be the one who causes the other person pain. Protecting a loved one from the natural consequences of their addiction, because their suffering is unbearable to witness. Continuing medical treatment that no longer offers a meaningful chance of recovery, because stopping feels like giving up. Affirming a friend’s every grievance and offering endless sympathy instead of being honest. Holding on to an employee who keeps failing at their responsibilities, because you know they’re struggling.

Surely every one of these actions begins with good intentions.

Good Samaritans

I recognize this impulse in my own field as well.

The current narrative around ibogaine as a miracle treatment for addiction, PTSD and depression, naturally attracts a great deal of Good Samaritan Energy. People who campaign for legalization because they want to relieve suffering. Families want to save their loved ones, facilitators who dedicate their life to healing. Politicians speaking about rescuing the veterans.

Sure, there’s good in that.

But I sometimes wonder whether the entire conversation starts from assumptions that deserve more scrutiny.

In the need to “fix” what is assumingly “broken”. To “save” and “heal”… I wonder if our language can be revealing. We seem to assume that another human can be fundamentally broken, waiting for someone else to put them back together again.

Working around addiction has made me increasingly suspicious of that narrative. Recovery is rarely something that can be done to another person.

Many families love someone struggling with addiction beyond words and yet also become their enablers. Because they cannot tolerate the pain of watching the one they love suffer, they decide to absorb consequences, lend money, or remove obstacles and smooth over conflict. Which in the moment, feels like the most compassionate thing to do.

But compassion without discernment can feed the very suffering it hopes to relieve. Which is exactly what the Buddhist term idiot compassion points towards.

Misguided Kindness

Idiot compassion, sometimes called “stupid compassion” was coined by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And it describes what happens when someone’s intention to help is genuine, but the action is driven more by ego and ignorance than by wisdom.

According to the Buddhist worldview, the trouble begins the moment someone thinks:

“I” know what “you” need.

Buddhism asks us to be suspicious of that sentence.

Meditate on the nature of reality long enough, the teaching goes, and you find that this “I”, that “you”, and the “suffering” between them are not the fixed, separate things we assume them to be.

But you don’t really have to go that deep into Buddhist metaphysics to start appreciating the question:

Do I? Really?

Do I understand what’s actually happening here?

Or do I understand only the small part of it visible from where I’m standing?

Compassion may be what moves us toward another person’s suffering. But wisdom should determine what happens next. Is this the right moment? Am I the right person? Am I seeing the whole picture, or only the version that makes sense from my side of it?

Often, if we’re honest, the urge to intervene isn’t really about the other person’s suffering at all. It’s about ours. We cannot bear to watch someone struggle, so we rush to remove their discomfort, and mistake the relief of our own anxiety for evidence that we’ve somehow helped.

Getting Your Shit Out of The Room

One of my teachers, death activist and doula Wilka Roig, repeats this same sentiment throughout many of her trainings. That if you truly want to accompany someone through dying, grief, or any other profound life transition, the first thing you have to understand is that it isn’t about you.

As she once put it in class, much of what we call helping is really an unconscious version of

“Let me help you, help me alleviate my own discomfort”.

But a good doula (or perhaps a good friend, lover, family member or colleague), doesn’t rush to fix, rescue, or remove. She accompanies and stays present, and trusts that life, and the person moving through it, possess an intelligence of their own.

Birth cannot be done for another person. Neither can dying. Grief follows its own rhythm, and transformation belongs to the one living through it.

So true compassionate accompaniment asks something that is surprisingly difficult for many of us, to remain present without making ourselves the protagonist.

More roughly said, to “get your own shit out of the room”. Your shit being your fears, your projections, your need to be useful. Your identity as the helper, the saviour, the generous one. But your shit, is also your certainty. Your certainty that you know what this person needs. Your assumptions about what would be good for them. Your conviction that you understand their process better than they do.

The less occupied we are with ourselves, the more capable we become of discerning what actually serves the other person. Sometimes that means stepping in, sometimes it means stepping back. Sometimes it means doing almost nothing at all. Or admitting that really, you don’t have the answers.

Which may be why I always keep finding my way back to Socrates, whatever rabbit hole I dive into. Because his great insight wasn’t that he possessed any wisdom, but that wisdom begins with recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge. Or, as the famous paradox goes, by knowing that you do not know.

This applies just as much to compassion.

Wise compassion is suspicious of its own certainty.

And from the outside, this means that real compassion might sometimes look like cruelty. Like taking a step back and allowing another person to encounter the grief, the consequences, the disappointment, or the truth that ultimately belongs to them. Not because you don’t care, but because you’re a little less certain that their life is yours to direct.

Between asshole and idiot

Back to that table where the decision was made. A table full of well-intentioned people.

It’s a table I find myself sitting at quite often. And, for better or worse, ask questions a lot. Questions that don’t always lead to comfortable answers.

Scrutinizing other people’s good intentions is rarely appreciated.

You’re not supposed to take down a Good Samaritan.

But perhaps wisdom asks us occasionally to do exactly that. Not because good intentions don’t matter, but because they are never enough. The harder question is whether our compassion is actually serving the other person (or some greater or longer term goal), or simply preserving our own identity as someone “good” and “compassionate”. Or our sense of being “useful”.

I don’t particularly enjoy asking those questions. It’s uncomfortable to irritate people whose hearts are genuinely in the right place.

Then again, Socrates wasn’t especially popular either.

Of course, they killed him.

Now, I neither expect nor hope for a similar fate.

(I just might not get invited back to the table.)

But if occasionally questioning other people’s certainty (or my own) means being seen as an asshole sometimes, I think I can live with that.

I’d rather be uncertain and searching than certain and wrong. (Especially after watching “kindness” play out in such wildly different ways.)

Though, no doubt, whatever I do, I’ll continue being both an idiot and an asshole from time to time.

With the best of intentions…

She was imprisoned and tortured, and her breasts were cut off before she was executed. The story is nearly eighteen centuries old and pretty brutal.

After all these centuries, in Sicily her feast day is marked with minne di Sant’Agata. Small cakes with a cherry on top, shaped like breasts.

She’s also the saint you pray to for breast cancer, survivors of sexual violence, for nurses, and (because of a legend where her veil stopped lava from Mount Etna) for protection from fire and eruptions.

She became relevant to me this summer, for reasons I'll get into another time. My mom already knew her story, obviously, she has this encyclopedic memory for history and art and religion. She’s been a school librarian for the past couple decades. And she also loves cake. To me, however contradictory and human, she's also kind of a saint.

I love my mom.

And I pray to Sant'Agata.

She was helped, finally, by a therapist friend who worked with her somatically. After a session with him that led to a “somatic release”, she said she felt better. The circle closed, and the experience had been integrated.

I know how disruptive ibogaine can be so I was glad she found support.

At the same time, I noted with curiosity, the story she was telling herself about it.

That same day I heard another story.

A Buddhist monk, an expert in meditation, had agreed to take 5-MeO while hooked up to a brain scanner. The question the researchers were asking was essentially whether the substance could pharmacologically produce the states that this man had spent decades learning to reach through practice. Whether it could replicate what meditation masters call non-dual awareness, a dissolving of the boundary between self and world that some traditions consider the deepest form of human consciousness and spiritual development.

Now the monk had what the facilitators called a “dynamic” experience. Screaming, moving and shaking.

(Mind you, with 5-MeO, the person is often completely outside ordinary consciousness during this, the body moves and sounds in ways the person themselves may have no memory of afterward.)

The person I was speaking to, upon hearing about this event, offered an interpretation:“Perhaps the monk, despite his decades of practice, had actually been spiritually bypassing. His physical reaction suggesting a “somatic release” of unprocessed, subconscious trauma, finally “coming out”.

Her comment stayed with me as I drove home that night, and lingered in the days after.

I kept imagining this scene:

A man shaking violently in a ceremony, crying, screaming and vomiting all over. And around him, a couple of facilitators, quietly whispering their thoughts:

“Oh good, the body is releasing trauma!”

“Beautiful, the nervous system is completing a response…”

Violent Vomiting for Friends

It made me think back on one of my own experiences. One I had with Yopo.

Yopo is a powerful psychedelic snuff, made of the seeds of a tree, the sacred plant medicine of the Piaroa peoples of the Amazon. I’ll be honest, I was very nervous. I had watched others in ceremony with Yopo before and witnessed scenes that looked, to my then unprepared eyes, like something from a horror film about demonic exorcism.

It got to me more than I wanted to admit.

But I still wanted to try it.

And so after a year of mental preparation. I went for it.

The shaman, a good friend and experienced medicine woman, had told me that I could bring a friend if it would make me feel safer. And so I asked my friend Matt to be there and assist.

Upon arrival she had been very clear with him: You are just here to hold the bucket. If she needs to vomit, you make sure she vomits in the bucket. You hand her the toilet paper, you hold back her hair. But you don’t talk to her. You don’t look her in the eye, and you don’t get involved in her process. I hold the space. You hold the bucket.

As it turned out, Yopo gave me one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had with any plant medicine. To this day, one of my favorites. It was kind, funny, loving and clarifying, and gave me peace about things I’d been carrying for a long time. I won’t share the contents here, but I left feeling more grounded in life then ever.

At some point into the ceremony though, without warning, I felt a wave of nausea coming up. My mind immediately started asking: Why? What is this about? What am I purging? Some negative energy? A demon? Emotions stuck?

As I felt my stomach turn quickly, I looked for Matt in a panic.

Bucket!

He moved fast. Offered the bucket, held back my hair and passed the toilet paper.

And I vomited.

A dark green moving substance, worm like, and seemingly alive.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I heard a quiet voice answering the question I’d been frantically asking in my mind. It said:

“Sometimes you don’t ask for help because you need it. Sometimes you ask for help so that the other person can give it and feel of value, feel useful. Sometimes asking for help is more about the other person than about you.”

This insight was so sweet and funny, I teared up, stopped vomiting and started to laugh.

A couple hours after the ceremony finished, my shaman friend asked me if I knew what I had purged.

I told her: I purged for Matt. Matt was there to hold the bucket, and so my body gave him something to do. Not to discharge a demon or release stuck trauma. But because something in me recognized, in that moment, the importance of the fact that he had shown up. That he was willing to be there for me when I asked him to. And that our friendship contained a quiet mutual readiness to be there for each other.

The purging felt like a confirmation of something between us. Support offered and support received. Two friends willing to show up, in the most unglamorous way possible.

She smiled.

Now. Think back to the monk who was seen to be spiritually bypassing.

Or the woman whose somatic therapy session became a story of trauma resolved.

I often hear interpretations given in ceremony spaces: Ahh yeah, those tears mean you are letting go of ancestral grief. That nausea? That’s resistance. Screaming? That’s a breakthrough.

All of it may be true.

Or not.

My question is:

How do we know? And: Who decides?

From One Certainty To Another

Now the use of psychedelic substances is not new. For millennia they’ve been embedded in cosmologies and rituals that assumed, from the outset, that human beings are more than their biology. That we exist in relationship to community, to ancestors and to something larger than ourselves. That reality contains dimensions we cannot measure, and that this is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

What is new is the attempt to bring this back into a culture that largely forgot it.

One that reduced all life to the material, and the human being to a mechanism. One in which health means managing symptoms without asking what they mean or where they come from. And a world in which “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.”

Against this backdrop, the revival of psychedelic spaces promised something refreshing. Room for mystery again, for experiences that weren’t necessarily about “fixing” anything at all. But were an opportunity for expansion, exploration, and regaining a little humility before the unknown.

Which is less a revolution than a remembering of course.

(And then plenty of peoples never forgot… but that’s another story.)

But in trying to recover something more open, a new kind of certainty crept back in. Not the mechanistic certainty of reductionist materialism or modern pharmacology, but our modern day therapeutic certainty. The confident interpretive vocabulary in which human experience arrives, again, pre-translated.

Our symbols changed. Our impulse to immediately label reality did not. Nothing a person or their body does remains phenomenologically open for very long. Lived experience ceases to be mystery and becomes, again, an endlessly interpreted text.

And that’s what bothers me. Not interpretation itself, we are meaning-making creatures after all, and inevitably tell stories about what happens to us. But we seem to have lost the ability to let experience remain partially unresolved. Open, a mystery, even briefly.

Ritual Scripts

Something I keep noticing in these spaces is that people arrive already knowing, consciously or not, what is supposed to happen.

Any anthropologist will tell you why: people do not experience their bodies outside of culture. We are shaped, mediated and taught to behave in socially patterned ways. Embodiment itself is socially patterned, and psychedelic spaces are no exception.

People arrive consciously or not with embodied ideas about what “working with a substance” looks like. That they are there to “heal”, “improve” or “fix” something. They absorb this before they even arrive, through preparation sessions, through what they’ve read, through the language of facilitators, through other people’s stories.

In short, they arrive with a script. And the body, sensitive, open and under the influence of a powerful substance, may respond to that script. I’m not saying that anyone is faking anything. But this is how social patterning works. It gets under the skin, sometimes literally.

And when something happens, like the body shakes, or purges, or screams, or goes very still. Immediately, the framework absorbs it.

Across history and cultures, the body has performed whatever script the ritual space offered. The possessed thrashed in the ways their tradition expected possession to look. The exorcism candidate contorted in the ways the story of demonic expulsion demanded.

Today our script is trauma discourse, polyvagal theory, somatic release, nervous system completion. Ancestral healing and ego dissolution.

These are the stories. Our bodies follow suit.

No shade to therapists, I’m not saying the frameworks are wrong. Some are genuinely helpful. But all frameworks shape experience. And when we forget that, we make two mistakes at once: we miss how the framework may have shaped what happened in the first place, and we mistake our interpretation of it for some ultimate truth.

Interpretation = Intervention

I’d say this matters more than we might think. Because altered states are states of heightened suggestibility. Where our ordinary filters dissolve, our sense of self loosens, and the usual distance between inner and outer collapses. Which makes a person unusually open to input from authority figures.

The facilitator, the shaman, the therapeutic guide, these people carry enormous interpretive weight in these moments, often without fully recognizing it themselves. So interpretations given here don’t just describe experience, they become experience. They become the story that the person takes home.

“Your body released a memory of abuse.” is not a neutral observation.

It’s an identity-forming intervention that can restructure a person’s self-understanding for years.

Now most ethical frameworks for psychedelic facilitation understand ethics as informed consent, appropriate dosage, physical safety, boundaries around touch. Of course, these things matter and are important. But there is an entire ethical domain that remains almost completely underdeveloped.

Call it hermeneutic ethics, the ethics of interpretation.

When does offering a reflection become making a suggestion that a vulnerable person absorbs as truth? What are the limits of a facilitator’s interpretive authority?

These questions are rarely asked. What I see is that the vocabulary of trauma release has acquired an authority that goes largely unexamined, because the framework feels therapeutic, which makes scrutiny feel unnecessary (or even like a betrayal of the work).

But feeling held by an explanation is not the same as the explanation being true, or the only one. And in spaces where people are vulnerable, neurologically, psychologically and often existentially, I don’t think interpretive confidence is a virtue.

(It can be arrogant, if you ask me.)

Interpretation can shed light on an experience. But it can also rush in before experience has had time to unfold fully, on its own terms.

In Defense of Not Knowing

Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing against somatic work, or the idea that our bodies hold things and that trauma can underlie part of our suffering. I am also not saying that trauma release is bullshit. Sometimes something seems to be released and shifts, in ceremony and out of it. I have witnessed it and experienced it myself.

I’m also not saying that the monk definitely wasn’t bypassing. Perhaps he was.

I don’t know.

But that’s my point.

What I want to argue for is the possibility of not knowing. And for allowing some bodily phenomena, convulsions, a purge, a scream, to remain partially unknowable. Phenomenologically open. Not captured too quickly in a narrative that forecloses other possibilities.

My experience with Matt and the Yopo bucket was not, as far as I could tell from inside it, somatic trauma release. It wasn’t ancestral grief completing itself or stuck energy being removed. It was something to do with friendship, and help, and the honoring of mutual presence. That interpretation came from me, after the fact. True or not, I’m grateful no one pushed another narrative on me.

Because that would have been a small theft.

Of my own meaning, from my own experience. Which, in this life, is partly completely unknowable to me, as it is for everyone. And I’d like to respect that, before the framework arrives to explain everything away. And make all psychedelics about “healing” and “trauma”.

Beyond Healing

Exploring this idea of somatic trauma release makes me think about what kind of culture we are becoming. Or perhaps more what kind of culture we already are.

Why do we need the ceremony to be about healing? About letting go, releasing, removing, in order to become better, less depressed, less anxious and more “functional”? Why do we need the psychedelic experience to have a therapeutic justification at all?

Sure, healing matters. Relief from suffering matters. But healing is not the sole organizing principle of all human existence.

I mean, I think that psychedelic “therapy”, done well, can be great and expansive. But I also still think our human existence is being over-pathologized. And for a great part of our suffering, it is not our unprocessed trauma that needs examining and “releasing”, it is the societal and political structures we are living inside.

Structures that, not coincidentally, benefit from us feeling broken. Not yet healed enough. Not yet good enough. Still working on it.

I’d say psychedelics are not just tools for self-improvement. They have always been, and still can be, a way to connect with mystery. With something beyond the self. A way to experiment with consciousness, to sit inside the awe of not-knowing (and to become, perhaps, a little more humble and a little more kind). But modern psychedelic spaces seem to reveal and sometimes amplify our broader cultural hunger.

The hunger to “fix” the individual. To locate the problem inside the body, and remove it.

This hunger is real and worth taking seriously. People are suffering and their longing for relief is legit. But when hunger is strong enough, we stop asking questions and accept the most dominant interpretation offered.

And in doing so, we may be trading the emptiness of a disenchanted world for the false fullness of an over-interpreted one.

Think about that monk.

A man who sat with his mind for decades. Who developed an unusual relationship with consciousness, with suffering and with the nature of his own experience. His body does something dramatic under the influence of a powerful substance, something his own conscious mind was not present for, did not choose and may not even remember.

And there it was: an explanation. A story that places this event neatly inside the modern therapeutic narrative. Turning his body’s performance into evidence of a psychological failure he hadn’t even known he had.

Maybe that’s right, or maybe it isn’t. Maybe the question of whether it’s right matters less than noticing how quickly, and how confidently, someone tried to find an answer.

I’m glad we are remembering that working with mind altering substances is part of our human experience, part of what is possible while we are here, with a body and mind to experiment with, to explore what it means to be fully alive. These are beautiful technologies, available to us for exactly that.

I just hope we can lose the urge to label and explain everything. To put things into boxes that were never meant to fit in one.

And remember, again, how to sit with awe, wonder, and silent witnessing of this beautifully strange and partially unknowable existence.

Also, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

Even just a year ago, the public narrative around this substance was very different, most people around me had barely even heard of it, let alone understood what it actually is.

But things can change quickly.

A weird thing is happening in the United States, where ibogaine has started receiving a surge of high-profile attention. It’s being mentioned across media and politics, by figures like Oprah Winfrey and Joe Rogan, alongside political leadership in Texas, and even at the federal level: Donald Trump recently signed an executive order aimed at accelerating research into psychedelic therapies, including ibogaine.

It’s a pretty unusual thing for an American president to endorse a psycho-active medicine derived from a sacred plant that alters states of consciousness. Not long ago, substances like ibogaine were almost entirely excluded from formal research and public discourse. Now, there are serious conversations happening around regulatory pathways, scientific study, and potentially broader access.

But as ibogaine moves into the mainstream, something else is happening too: it’s being simplified into something marketable: a “quick fix,” a “solution.”

And that’s where things become less straightforward...

Because when something this complex is presented as a simple answer, especially to people in vulnerable or desperate situations, it’s time to pay attention. Even more so when the same systems that helped produce the problems now position themselves as the ones to solve them.

I don’t know…

Tricky territory.

Why Ibogaine? Why now?

Ibogaine is gaining traction because, unlike most substances, it has the potential to interrupt addiction relatively quickly while reducing withdrawal symptoms. It interacts with multiple neurotransmitter systems and is associated with neuroplastic and neuro-repair effects, creating so to say " a “window for change”.

In some cases (not all), it induces a dream-like, introspective state in which people report revisiting memories, reliving past experiences, or feel as if they are seeing their life, or even others’ lives, from a different perspective. Providing a shift in consciousness that can make previously difficult-to-reach psychological material more accessible for reflection and processing.

Ibogaine can be a game changer for a lot of people: traumatized veterans with PTSD, people battling opioid and other addictions, or those in states of such deep depression that the body literally feels stuck.

It can create movement where there was none.

(It can also be a compelling experience for those on a path of self-inquiry or spiritual curiosity... but that’s another story)

But the moment something enters mainstream discourse, nuance tends to disappear. Right now, ibogaine is being framed as a “miracle drug”. That framing is misleading… And calling something a “miracle” shapes expectations that are hard to reverse.

What’s at stake here isn’t just access to a promising treatment, but how it’s framed, delivered, and integrated, and who carries the consequences when it isn’t.

My personal view is that what we now call “mental health crises” are often not purely individual problems. In many cases, they are quite coherent responses to systems that are themselves destabilizing.

What is framed as individual pathology often reflects a broader context, environments that are unstable, extractive, and misaligned with basic human needs. Economic pressure, social fragmentation, and disconnection from community and environment aren’t minor factors, they shape how people live and cope.

Systems organized around money, power, status, accumulation, performance, and the illusion of eternal youth are not designed to produce psychological stability. They tend to undermine it.

Fixing that will take more than a molecule.

And sending people back into those same structures and value systems, expecting a lasting resolution, reveals a tension in what ibogaine is being asked to do.

And wait, where does it come from?

Then there’s another layer that often gets overlooked: where ibogaine actually comes from.

Ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from plants like iboga and voacanga. These plants contain a much broader spectrum of alkaloids and have been used in their raw root form within sacred contexts, ceremonies, rites of passage, and spiritual practices within the Bwiti traditions of Central Africa, in Gabon, Cameroon, and the Republic of Congo.

Ibogaine, as an isolated compound, is what science has focused on largely because it allows for more measurable dosing and more predictable effects. In the body, it is metabolized into Noribogaine, which is believed to play an important role in its longer-lasting effects on the brain.

There is clearly an important place for ibogaine. In many contexts, it is easier, and often safer, to administer in controlled settings, especially where different substances, medical conditions, or cultural frameworks are involved.

Its therapeutic potential is increasingly being recognized. At the same time, it remains an extremely intense experience, with the capacity to affect someone deeply, both neurologically and psychologically.

What’s important to remember though, is that it’s just one part of a much larger whole.

The whole plant contains a range of alkaloids and produces effects that are more complex, less easily measured, and less reproducible within scientific frameworks. Within Bwiti, it is not understood as just a “substance,” but as something with its own spirit and relational meaning, an idea that doesn’t easily fit into Western models of thinking.

When something this powerful comes from such a deeply rooted cultural and ecological system, the question isn’t just how it enters the global stage, but on what terms.

Whether it is through reciprocity, humility, and respect, or through a familiar pattern of extraction: isolating a single component, removing it from its context, and scaling it elsewhere without meaningful recognition.

We’ve all seen this before. Practices grounded in long-standing relationships with land and tradition tend to get simplified or sidelined. And what remains is a reductionist logic: isolate, measure, optimize, while removing them from the systems of knowledge and relational context they depend on.

And that has consequences. Measuring brain activity is not the same as understanding what a substance may be working on across physical, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions.

We still have a lot to learn there.

Even if there seem to be efforts to open dialogue, such as “Americans for Ibogaine” engaging Bwiti representatives in Gabon, it’s worth asking who is actually included, and on what terms. Is this meaningful engagement, or the early signs of something else?

It will be worth paying close attention to how these relationships take shape.

And what does ibogaine actually do?

People who have been working with ibogaine for years know that the current narrative doesn’t quite match what it actually does, and it doesn’t take long to see why.

I’ve both experienced and witnessed what it can do.

I’ve seen depression lift within days. I’ve seen people with PTSD begin to open again, to relate differently to themselves and the world. But it’s not always that simple.

Most people don’t just walk away from their patterns and never look back. What ibogaine can do, is open and interrupt. It can reduce withdrawal, bring underlying material into awareness, and create a window for change.

But what happens next, is more important.

Because I’ve also seen people open deep old wounds that remain raw for many months after. And without proper support, can fall straight back into addiction or self-destructive behavior.

If you’re not used to working with altered states, if you don’t have ways to support yourself through intense inner transitions, or a stable environment to return to, the experience doesn’t necessarily resolve things, it can simply open you up.

And this is the part that often gets left out: a lot of the time, the real work begins after ibogaine.

If you go in with the idea that it will “fix,” “get rid of,” or “change” things for you, and then you’re done, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

The experience is often not expansive in the way people imagine. It has little comparison to other psychedelic experiences, visually, physically, or psychologically. And it does not reliably deliver visions, bliss, clarity, or a sense of connection.

The way I’ve come to understand it, is that it can be a catalyst for something else: a kind of katabasis, a descent. Into the underworld of one’s own psyche. Into the subconscious. Into material that has been avoided, postponed, or never fully seen. And sometimes it can be a death (and rebirth) of sorts.

Something not everyone is ready for.

Sometimes it brings confrontation with emotional pain, history, or unresolved patterns. Other times, it’s less narrative, less clear, and more of a neurological and perceptual reorganization that unfolds slowly over weeks, months, or even years.

Of course, this is not how it appears on the flyer.

That’s not what people want to hear.

Those aren’t great marketing lines.

But they’re closer to the truth.

Because if something is powerful enough to interrupt patterns at that level, then it is also powerful enough to destabilize and expose processes that require care, time, and support.

Which shifts the question from what ibogaine can do for us to what it asks of us. Whether people are prepared for what might emerge, whether there are structures in place to support what follows, and whether we are willing to look at the environments people are asked to return to.

Without that, even the most powerful intervention risks becoming a temporary interruption rather than part of a deeper, sustained change.

Which brings us back to the beginning.

If something this complex is being presented as a “solution,” the question isn’t just whether it works. It’s what kind of world we’re asking it to work in, and why that world keeps producing the conditions that make such interventions necessary in the first place.

Right now, ibogaine is being absorbed into systems that require much deeper structural change than any individual intervention can offer.

Systems that tend to reduce, distort, and disconnect what they cannot fully hold.

A year ago I wrote, Ethical Sidenotes on the Ibogaine Boom. Much has shifted since then, though I guess my position remains largely the same. Let’s see how this unfolds.

To be continued…

She talked to the beans as they softened and to the herbs as she crushed them between her fingers. Mario sat at the table with a tall glass of Fanta, watching her move from stove to sink and back again.

“Carlos found a new wife,” she said. “In San Pedro. Imagine that.”

She told him how Lucía and Ana had fought in the street the night before but made up by morning. How the dog from the vegetable stand had been hit by a car, and how the neighbors went to the driver’s house to demand money for surgery. She reported that the flowers by the highway were blooming again, attracting bees, even in the smog. That foreigners were buying the building on the corner of the blue street with the wild lavender. That Aunty Maya had broken her hip again, stubborn as ever, if only she had let her daughters help.

Mario loved these stories. She told him everything while stirring beans and filling pots with strong-smelling spices. He sat drinking his Fanta, smiling as he imagined the dramas unfolding from house to house. When she spoke of the injured dog, he prayed silently that God would save it and not let it suffer.

This was how they spent most days, unless Mario was helping the landlord with small chores. Otherwise he stayed home with his mother. If she was there, she was usually cooking, cleaning, or sleeping, and talking. Even in her sleep she talked. From his room he could hear her mumbling about groceries, about what she needed to tell her sister, about the television show she had watched. The words did not always make sense, but they calmed him. He could listen for hours.

When Mario was born, there had not been enough oxygen for his brain. His mother said this had made him kinder than anyone else on earth. Too much oxygen, she would say, goes to the ego and turns a man into a macho, like his father, who had left. Mario, she said, had received exactly the right amount to become the kindest man alive. She told him she was lucky to have such a man in her life.

Mario never went to school. They tried when he was five, but he came home one day with dog poop in his schoolbag. After that, his mother decided he would stay home and learn to help the landlord, Mr. Ian. From then on he worked with him. Each morning after breakfast he knocked on Mr. Ian’s door. They drank coffee together and found small projects around the building, fixing a sink, painting a section of wall in the stairwell. Over the years Mr. Ian gave him more responsibility. Mario became a familiar presence, an independent man within the building. Neighbors asked him to help repair things, and often he could, always with the landlord’s permission.

Life felt full to him, full of movement, stories and tasks to complete. Sometimes his mother baked his favorite cake, and they sat together watching television. The programs were too fast for him to follow, but he enjoyed sitting beside her and laughing when she laughed.

One day his mother did not come home. In the afternoon Mr. Ian knocked on the door. “Sit down, my son,” he said.

After that day everything changed. The house became empty, the laughter disappeared. His aunts and the neighbours would bring him food, daily. He would wake up in silence and stared at the walls, until mr Ian would knock on the door and tell him it was time for a chore.

Days were still days, but they were different. People came to visit, they would make coffee or cook the beans. They would ask him how he was doing. But Mario found himself without words. No words and no smiles. No laughter. He became quiet.

Sometimes he would enter the closet of his mother, even though he was a big man and the closet was tiny, if he pushed it and rolled up in a little ball, he would manage to close the door from the inside and be immersed in the dark, head between her dresses and coats, finding safety in the damp smell of mothballs and lingering perfume. It would make him feel things he didn’t know how to name. No reasons to smile, but some comfort. He would push his face into the fabrics, close his eyes and disappear.

One of those days in the closet he found a pair of gloves. Red leather gloves. He recognized them from a photo, a photo of his mother standing next to her sisters. Palm trees in the background and three women standing proudly in front of a big white car. Black dresses and red leather gloves. His grandfather took that photo, Mario had been told.

Mario tried to slip his hand inside. He forced his fingers in, straining to stretch the leather. But the gloves were far too small. Even his thumb wouldn’t fit. Puzzled he stepped out of the closet and carried them to the living room, laying them carefully on the table.

He spent the entire afternoon staring at them, his mother’s red gloves, turning them over in his hands, lifting them to the light, studying them from every angle.

They were doll-sized. Tiny.

He returned to the closet and pulled out one of his mother’s favorite dresses, a puffy beige one with blue embroidered flowers. Holding it up, he felt a jolt of disbelief. It was minuscule. The tiniest dress he had ever seen.

He went back in search of shoes, finding a delicate pair of black heels with pointed toes. They were no bigger than half his hand.

Gathering the tiny outfit, he carried it into the kitchen. There, he began shaping a body out of silver tin foil and molding it into a small torso, then thin arms and legs. To give it weight, he filled the hollow form with rice, beans, and lentils. Whatever he could find in the cupboards. He poured the grains into little plastic bags and tucked them inside the foil frame until it felt dense and steady in his hands.

To fasten the limbs, he used the thick black tape mr. Ian had lent him to patch small leaks in the sink. He wrapped the joints tightly. The more tape he used, the more the figure held together.

When the body was firm enough, he dressed it. He pulled the tiny beige dress over the fragile frame, stuffed the shoes so they would stand upright, and fitted the red gloves onto its small hands, filling each finger with peas. He adjusted the fabric, straightened the collar and pressed the seams flat.

Slowly, the creature came into being. Slumped rice-filled arms, pointed shoes, red-gloved hands and all. A small figure pieced together to fill the space his mother had left behind.

He carried the little figure to the couch, realizing it was the size of a child. Was his mother the size of a child? He turned on the television to her favorite show and took her small red-gloved hand in his.

She didn’t laugh or talk or anything. But he felt there was a presence there, back in the room, even though it was tiny and the silence was big. It was something. A return of sorts.

Mario sat very still, afraid that any movement might undo her.

Outside, a car passed and headlights crossed the room. For a moment her shadow stretched along the wall. Tall, almost life-sized.

Then it shrank back to nothing.

He kept listening, the way he always had. He listened for hours, staying present for her stories.

He could almost hear them. Almost.

When saying the word “spiritual”, he lifted both hands to make quotation marks in the air, as if to underline his skepticism and make sure I understood.

After many years away from my cold little European country, I had forgotten how much of a dirty word spirituality could be for some people.

Here, in this small Mexican town, any word would do, whatever you wanted to call it, whatever you believed or didn’t believe. Words seemed to live differently here. Amigo meant friend, but not always. Ahorita meant “now,” but could just as easily mean later, tomorrow, or never.

As if things were labeled more loosely. As though the world were too changeable, too slippery to be pinned down with precise language.

Why insist on exactness when nothing stayed still long enough to be exact about?

Dylan had come to the center because he heard a podcast about it. Some large American man with a confident voice said it was the future. That it had healed all his wounds, made him faster, better, stronger. That every man should try it. That it ought to be available to all Americans.

Now Dylan didn’t believe in god.

But believe in this man, Dylan did. And he believed in all Americans.

I said I had my doubts.

He didn’t seem too pleased about my comment.

(I’m not supposed to talk about politics when I am working).

For the first days he didn’t come out of his room. The substance went deep into his system. His vital signs were stable, but his skin grew lighter, almost translucent, and his eyes somehow seemed too big for his face. The quieter it looks from the outside, sometimes, the more is happening within. But we never really know.

We are just there to make sure he’s safe, wherever he is off to.

I am just here to serve another man.

He kept asking for glasses of water. At night he wanted some strawberries. His hands were shaking, so I brought one to his mouth. He took a small bite, chewed carefully, then shook his head.

The next day I offered him some music on an old MP3 player we kept for guests. When I came back a couple of hours later, he had put it aside. “It’s a lot,” he said. “The sounds.”

After a moment he added, “It’s a lot to be alive.”

He asked me if I had ever wondered why we’re here. I said I had and sat quietly beside his bed. He looked at the window and let out a deep sigh.

The day before leaving, he came out to have lunch with the rest of us. He barely spoke. He kept staring past us toward the mountains in the distance, as if having some kind of conversation.

After lunch we sat in the garden on the grass.

“I was really scared to be awake,” he said. “But I was sleeping all this time.”

I nodded.

He told me a blue bird had come into his room that morning. It perched on the chair and started talking to him. Not exactly in words, he said, but he said he understood.

Then he asked me what I thought spirit would look like. If it ever made an appearance. I said I wasn’t sure.

At that moment Jesús walked into the garden.

Jesús was the gardener at the center, a small, chubby and quiet man, always wearing the same sun-faded shirt and carrying his tools as if they were part of his body. I waved and he blew me a kiss while walking to the wooden shed.

I leaned toward Dylan and told him, “Jesus is the gardener.”

But Dylan looked the other way.

“Yes he is,” he said, still looking at the mountains. “He really is.”

There was a long pause.

“And I was paying no attention.”

He rubbed his hands together, slowly.

“I should have been watering the trees.”

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I am starting a new little section on my Substack called Threshold Stories. These are not my own stories or opinions, but glimpses into the lives of others. Moments I have accompanied or witnessed. Paths that crossed mine.

They’re helping me become a cartographer of liminal spaces: mapping and navigating places that can feel dark or uncertain, yet often hold the most lessons, beauty, and depth.

The Way Back In

The other day I sat with a man who lost the person he loved the most, the woman he had shared his life with for many years. She became ill very suddenly, a high fever for days, and was taken to the hospital. They placed her in a shared room with plastic blue curtains. No one quite knew what was happening. Some kind of virus, they said.

“Promise me you’ll bring me home to the cats,” she had told him.
“I will,” he said. “Until you’re back, I’ll take care of them.”

The next day around noon, when he arrived to visit, she was gone. She died that morning. The doctor told him they had tried to reach him. He looked at his phone but saw no missed calls. Nurses stood nearby, speaking softly, while he fell on his knees beside her bed. They covered her body with a white sheet.

The death certificate misspelled her middle name. He did not correct it.

There was no money for a funeral. She was cremated the next day. A few women from the neighborhood came around to the house after they heard. The lady who always sold tamales on the corner, some mothers she had helped, whose children she had watched when they were small. They brought him flowers and a box of sweets. They said sorry, drank a glass of water, and then they left.

The urn with her ashes was dark green and looked like a flower pot. He placed it at the center of the dinner table, on top of a white tablecloth with lace. The cats jumped up to sniff it. He didn’t have the heart to tell them what had happened. That night he gave them extra food.

In the first days and weeks, the house was quiet. He could barely rise from the couch. The coffee maker stayed unplugged as the grounds hardened in the filter. He left it like that. Coffee was something to be shared. He spent hours staring out the window, like the cats, watching small green birds move around the trees, listening to the sound of traffic. Hearing the loudspeaker of the trucks collecting “fierro viejo” passing on repeat. Not much had changed outside it seemed. He slept when he could and ate canned soup from the cupboard above the sink, sometimes a few salty crackers. It tasted of nothing.

The old tortillas in the fridge turned hard and the tomatoes shriveled in their bowl. There were tupperwares he couldn’t bring himself to open.

She loved to cook.

One day his sister called from far away. The connection was unstable. “Are you okay?” she asked. He said yes, though he wasn’t sure if it was true.

“You cannot just stay there,” she continued. She urged him to get out of the house, find work, something to do, people to see. “You have to keep moving, hermano.”

“I would come,” she added, lowering her voice, “but you know how things are.” He said he knew.

When the call ended, he pulled the plug from the wall.

It took him three more days to gather the courage. It was a Wednesday when he stepped outside and felt the fresh air on his face for the first time in weeks. He decided to take a walk around town and ask small workshops if they needed a hand. He had always been good with paperwork. He could file things, print things, or carry tools, whatever was needed.

Walking the streets, he felt a new kind of energy. He realized that outside, after his world collapsed, there was a world that had gone on. People continued life, schools were open, bread was being baked. People went from one place to another. He watched men smoke cigarettes in front of a construction site.

Being outside, he found, wasn’t difficult. The sun on his face felt almost kind. He walked for hours, watching people, traffic and life unfolding. He sat on park benches or sidewalks, letting himself dissolve into the city, into the calls of market vendors, car horns and babies crying.

But the longer he stayed out, the harder it became to think of going back.

As the daylight began to fade, he felt a tightening in his chest. A heaviness came back with the thought of the house, the cats, the table with the urn on it. He wished that none of it existed, that he was just another city dweller, with no past and no future, present only with the chaos of other people’s lives. Watching the stream of things. People worrying and stressing and screaming and laughing, sharing food, eating ice cream, kissing outside a movie theater.

Life continuing without noticing him.

If he could just be there and watch.

As evening fell, he found himself slowly moving in the direction of the apartment. Guilt crept in about the cats alone, about them being hungry. Guilt about the clothes still hanging on the line instead of folded in the closet. He made a list of people to blame. He felt angry at the nurses, at the doctors, and at the white hospital walls and those stupid blue curtains.

He circled the block, avoiding his own street. Thinking in circles. A heaviness coming back to his body, and a slight panic slowing down his steps. When it was fully dark, he finally entered the street and stood across the road, looking at the front door of the apartment building, where a large, old gray structure with dark metal bars guarded the first two floors. A street light flickered, as if trying to speak.

Sitting across the street, he felt a deep resistance to going in. Every time he tried to stand up, nausea rose in his throat and pushed him back down.

Inside the house waited the silence. The emptiness, the couch and what was left of her smell.

He could see the cats watching him from the window. He could feel their questions.

Inside the house he would be immersed in sadness, like a blanket, a blank state, but safe in it, at least. He guessed. It was the crossing that hurt. The going in and out.

That night, close to eleven, he did it. He opened the door, climbed the stairs, turned the key, fed the cats, and collapsed on the couch. In a trance. One continuous movement. No thinking, just survival.

—

He did it once more after that. The crossing. Going in and out.

The third time, he left the front door open.

After that, at night he couldn’t bring himself to enter the street at all. And so he didn’t.

There was a park in another part of the city with a bench hidden between some trees. He decided he would sleep there. The sounds felt safe, traffic and people talking, dogs on leashes during their nightly walks. Sometimes a dog would approach to sniff him until the owner noticed and pulled away.

In the mornings, sometimes someone would give him a rice drink or a coffee with sweet bread. “Good morning, sir,” they would say. He would find overripe bananas next to the trash bins at the market, and plastic containers with leftover rice and vegetables. There was a cat he befriended that lived behind a restaurant near the public bathrooms. For 10 pesos he would shower there, when he could.

The streets began to feel strangely abundant. He would find what he needed: a talk or a smile, some food, sunlight, or the sound of live music. He would hear laughter and see people holding hands. And slowly, the days and weeks passed, then months, and he lost track of time.

He became a grand observer. In his mind he wrote stories. Of lovers meeting in cafés, of the mother and her child, the construction worker and the person who packed his lunch for him, the lady at the supermarket, the dog walker, the gas station attendant. He imagined their homes: the clothes hanging in their closets, the refrigerators and cupboards full of food. Did they have cats? He wondered.

There was one story about a house filled with photographs, a bedroom that stayed always closed. Cats watched small green birds in the trees outside. The smell of a casserole drifting from the kitchen and music playing on the radio. It was a house filled with joy.

He couldn’t remember the shape of the table, but he remembered some kind of vase. Perhaps it was green. Lost in his daydream, he imagined opening its lid. It seemed stuck. A breeze moved through an open door. The cats came closer, watching.

This story reminded me of one of my favorite Rumi poems. There are lines from it I repeat to myself. Often. Like a prayer. One part goes like this:

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.

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This month I got to witness some really frustrated humans. While working another ibogaine retreat, I saw people get into uncomfortable places, mostly within themselves, but, as they do, those states tend to ripple outwards. I didn’t expect things to go smoothly (I’ve given up on that idea after last year) so I wasn’t surprised. I just felt for them and did my best to make space for what was there.

Which was mainly this: complete and utter disappointment.

People come to ibogaine with high expectations these days. That it will “fix” them, that they will meet their ancestors, revisit their childhood in movie-like visions, receive clarity about everything all at once. It’s not unique to ibogaine I guess, you see it across the psychedelic field.

But outside of the field it’s also common.

In life, I mean.

We all carry ideas of how life should go, what we worked for, shown up for or paid for. We have expectations of how our lives should feel. And, sometimes they simply feel different.

This gap between expectation and reality is fertile ground for disappointment. And it’s easy to start pointing fingers when you’re there. At life, at other people, at ourselves. The more attached we are to a specific outcome, the more painful it is when reality takes a different turn.

That dynamic becomes especially visible in psychedelic therapy. If you enter with the idea that something specific needs to happen, that this trauma must be healed in that way, or that afterward you are supposed to feel lighter, clearer or better, you are kind of setting yourself up.

Because it might happen like that.

Or it might not.

Often, something entirely different unfolds. Unexpected or confusing, uncomfortable perhaps, or more slow and subtle than you thought. And sometimes magical in ways beyond what you could have ever imagined. Not better or worse, just different.

Different is not as bad as we tend to think it is. It just is.

The Pitbull

I had a conversation with my sister recently. In my family, she’s affectionately called the pitbull. When she has a vision, a plan, a job, a journey, she locks her teeth into it and makes it happen. No matter the resistance, doubt, obstacles or detours. And she’s had a lot of success with this approach. In many cases, what she imagined life would look like actually did turn out that way.

(A Dutch city girl from a bohemian nest, she dreamt of prairies and horses, and became an Idaho cowgirl for a while, chasing 300 cows through snowy mountains. She got herself into Hogwards after. Once she imagined me in a baby-blue bridesmaids gown (highly unlikely…). She made it all happen: I admire her fiercely…)

Whether it felt the way she imagined is another question.

We might tell ourselves: If only I have this, I will feel like this. But then we get it and might feel something else entirely: good, bad, empty, a complexity we didn’t anticipate.

Now I’m not a pitbull but I have visions too, ideas of how I’d like life to be. At the same time, I’m open to unexpected doors. More than once I’ve left all plans behind to dive down a rabbit hole that appeared out of nowhere, changing the course of my life, again. I tend to enjoy that.

When I’m healthy and emotionally stable, not knowing what’s coming is actually my favorite part of being alive. The horizon filled with surprises, some beautiful, some horrible, and others I couldn’t have imagined .

That wasn’t always the case. Not knowing used to terrify me. Without trust or faith, uncertainty doesn’t feel that great, it just feels overwhelming.

But in recent years I’ve been experimenting with a different assumption: that life has an intelligence far beyond my own. Not something I fully understand or control, but something I can listen and attune to, if I sharpen my senses. Something that can guide me, if I’m willing to be led. And something capable of presenting me with exactly what I need, even if, in the moment, part of me is thinking: Really? THIS is what I need?!

I’m still learning how to flow with that.

It may sound a bit “woo woo.” But the idea that we can plan our future, and how we’re going to feel in it, sounds equally fantastical to me.

Psychedelic Work as a Training Ground

Working with people in altered states of consciousness has repeatedly been teaching me this lesson. The most skillful way to enter a psychedelic journey seems to be with humility, curiosity and a basic sense of trust. Without rigid expectations.

Willing to be confused, upset, or overwhelmed. Ready to do the work that’s being asked of you, whatever form it takes. Knowing that intensity will pass, like everything else.

So if it asks you to purge, you purge. And if it asks you to feel your big sadness, you go there. You open up. And, as best as you can, you surrender to it.

If “nothing” happens (at least nothing your mind considers important) you go with that too. You accept it, relax into it. You don’t fight.

(This one, it seems, is one of the harder experiences.)

In a sense, learning how to accompany people through psychedelic journeys has been quietly teaching me how to live my life.

Over time, patterns become visible. You start to see where people struggle, where they feel fulfilled or frustrated, where the human mind is helpful and where it almost always gets in the way. You see how quickly resistance amplifies suffering, and how much becomes possible when someone stops fighting what’s already happening.

Life, too, seems to respond better when we meet it this way. Like psychedelic experiences, it doesn’t respond well to demands or rigid agendas. But when we approach it openly, without insisting on a particular outcome, and willing to engage honestly with whatever arises, something can begin to move. Not necessarily toward comfort or clarity, but toward a more honest way of feeling and being “here”.

Enthusiasm as a Compass

Instead of making resolutions or setting goals, I’ve been thinking about what I want to be guided by this year.

I recently learned that the word enthusiasm comes from the Greek en theos: “in spirit,” or “the gods within.” And thinking about this changed how I started listening to life. I find that when something genuinely enthuses me, there is life force there. Energy, movement, a sense of alignment. The “spirits” get excited. The gods say “YAS! - That’s where we want to go!”

You can, of course, do many things without enthusiasm. You can choose studies, people, careers, whole lives because they look good, make sense, pay well, feel safe or are expected of you. But when curiosity, joy, or aliveness are missing, those choices rarely nourish you. They might function but they don’t really feed.

So I pay attention to enthusiasm and strong attraction. I also pay attention to strong repulsion, which often signals something unresolved. Something worth looking at at least. Even discomfort can be interesting when met with curiosity.

A flat, dim “whatever” is where life force drains away. It’s where the gods exit the stage and leave you alone with your ideas of how life should be (and the disappointments that follow).

Running an Experiment

That’s why the experiment I’m running now is different. I’m testing the hypothesis that “this might be painful, messy, scary, or confusing” is not a reason not to go somewhere. And that whatever emerges is workable, not because I’m exceptional, but because life itself is intelligent, and I’m just a small piece on a much larger board.

So I might as well flow with what’s moving through me, trusting that life unfolds for reasons, even when I don’t understand them (yet).

Which echoes a concept from Eastern philosophy: Wu Wei, “non-forcing” or “effortless action.” which is about staying close to what’s actually happening and responding from there, instead of trying to bend the river into a shape it doesn’t want to take.

I notice how much energy I waste when I push against the current, insisting things unfold faster, cleaner, or more comfortably than they do. And how different it feels when I stop fighting and let myself be carried a little, adjusting my movement instead of trying to control the water.

(*Going with the flow. Staying flexible...)

This brings me back to a question that comes up in my work with psychedelics:

“How can we open ourselves to the integration that wants to happen, instead of the integration WE want to happen?”

Which mirrors a larger question about life itself:

How can we live humbly and attentively enough to participate in the life that wants to live through us, instead of clinging to the one WE imagined?

Blob of the Unknown

There’s currently a large blob of the unknown in front of me. Like any human mind, my mind doesn’t like this at all. I have sleepless nights where my mind races ahead, building futures out of past experiences, creating elaborate game plans, trying to find solutions and imagining paths that might keep me safe.

I’m letting her do it. Letting her run ahead, go wild and get dramatic, like a toddler having a meltdown on the floor in front of me. I know it will pass. My worries, my thoughts, my big emotions, they always do.

In the background, I’m practicing something else: staying present with what’s actually here, now. Realizing I don’t need to know what life will look like in a week, or a year, or five. I don’t know, and am not capable of knowing anyway. None of us is.

As I’ve been learning from Buddhist teachers over the years, growth often happens in the uncomfortable space between knowing and not-knowing. Sometimes we rush decisions not out of clarity, but to escape the unease of uncertainty. Looking back, many of our choices were shaped more by fear than by presence or wisdom. Staying with not-knowing is a practice.

Which is also why I run this experiment.

Because what we cannot offer to ourselves, we cannot offer to others. If we can be with a wide range of emotions: darkness, confusion, vulnerability - without drowning, blaming or freaking out, we become more able to sit with others in the same way. Which is something I hope to become better at with time.

(Accompanying people in life, death and psychedelics, that is…)

Preparation Reimagined

So this year I’m trying not to plan ahead, predict what’s coming or manage any outcomes. Where I can, I’ll try and loosen my grip on expectations too.

I read an email from James Clear this morning, which said:

“The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty.”

So as I find myself staring into the abyss, another wide-open field of unknown outcomes, I’ll just be holding on to hold this:

The rest of the year? Most things didn’t go as planned. It was, honestly, kind of a shit show. A messy sequence of life crises across almost every area, roughly one per month. I lost some people, places, projects, hope, and with them a good deal of control and certainty.

But what I did gain was some clarity. Clarity about what survives when plans collapse, which relationships hold when things get uncomfortable, and what falls apart under pressure. About what actually matters, and when. And about what I’m responsible for, and what not.

It wasn’t a smooth or graceful ride. But I feel I ended up with something solid. Namely: a greater awareness of how little of life I control, and how much can still be done with the small part that does belong to me.

Which feels like enough to end the year in gratitude. Weathered face, bruised ego, tired heart and all.

What a “Little” is Worth

Reading and listening to others reflect on 2025, I know I wasn’t alone. Apparently quite a lot of us were somewhat being stripped, tested, and rearranged.

Rereading my journal, something surprised me though. Describing one painful situation after another, my tone was calmer than in previous years. Less dramatic. Not because things were easier, but because something in me started meeting them differently, I guess.

I ended this year in a Vipassana again, sitting ten hours a day in silence. Where I met the same “self”, my same restless mind. Same physical pain. Same looping thoughts about the past and future, regrets and anticipation. But I noticed just a little less resistance. A little more patience. A little more equanimity and a little more space.

I’m not talking mastery here (far from it), but this tiny bit of extra space I noticed, was just enough to suffer a little less unnecessarily. And that “little less” made an HUMONGOUS difference.

It struck me that this might really be the only thing I have control over: practicing a subtle shift to (some degree) of inner peace, enough to reduce (a little bit) of unnecessary suffering.

Dark Nights

At work I witness a lot of people going through dark nights of the soul. But I also see a lot of unnecessary suffering. Don’t get me wrong, pain is real. Events are real. Things happen. Death exists. Violence. Loss. People’s lives and pasts can be incredibly rough. We are in pain for many reasons.

But suffering often depends on how tightly someone is attached to a narrative, to their perceived loss of autonomy, or to the belief that the obstacle “should not be there.” That something “needs to be different.”

Cultivating inner peace is not easy, nor passive. It takes a lot of effort, practice, repetition and humility. And the radical realization that even when we can’t choose what happens, we can still choose how we respond.

Sometimes, it’s all we have.

The Eye of the Hurricane

At the threshold of 2026, I find myself unexpectedly calm.

Finishing a Lord of the Rings marathon with my family, grateful we all made it through the year. At the same time, very aware of the world around us, the energy, the movement and the forces at play. The beautiful, but also the brutal.

I find myself thinking about the eye of a hurricane, the quiet center inside a raging, moving storm.

That maybe that’s what matters most to remember, that this calm center exists. Always. No matter what’s happening externally. And that it exists inside of us, too.

That’s what I want to take into the new year anyway: the practice of returning to this inner peace. Again and again. As many times as necessary, 50,000 times a day, if needed. And when I fail, to try again. To return again. Even when losing people. Or work, or dreams, or balance, optimism, or love.

To practice, and keep trying.

It is. Now what.

One of my most direct lessons of 2025 came from one of my teachers, Wilka Roig, death doula and extraordinary human. She said: “Stop asking ‘WHY,’ Nienke. It is. Now what?”

I resisted. “But I’m a philosopher!” Sputtering: “Asking “why” is my training, my thing, it’s what I do!”

To which she said: “Sometimes why can offer insight. But it doesn’t always help you be present, or act wisely. What matters more is accepting reality as it is, right here and now, and choosing how to relate to it.”

Like in meditation: whatever arises, how do you respond?

We can meet life with resistance: This shouldn’t be happening. I wish things were different. We can meet it with attachment: This must stay. I can’t lose this. Or we can meet it with equanimity: a steady, balanced mind that responds instead of reacts. One that understands that everything is impermanent, yet remains open and present.

One that knows that within life’s ever-changing currents, there is something we can cultivate: a grounded, loving presence. A way of being that doesn’t depend on things staying the same, or feeling “good”, a state we can return to and live from, no matter what.

Another Round, 2026

Another year, another round of practice, if life allows.

This past month I received blessings from a pastor, a shaman, and a Buddhist monk. Different languages, different worldviews, yet all praying in the same direction: for light in the darkness. I’m learning it doesn’t really matter where it comes from, as long as it points toward love, something we can carry, and, when we’re able, share.

I’m also learning to keep my faith. To trust that the hurdles are here to teach us something. If nothing else, that life is vast, surprising, constantly evolving, and largely beyond our control or understanding. Horrible and marvelous, sometimes at the same time. The full f’ing range.

But what is in our hands is our inner state. If we tend to it.

So that’s my wish for 2026, for myself, and for us all: To practice peace and tend our inner state. If it’s good, to share it. If it’s not, to keep practicing.

I’ll be practicing too.

But first, I’m finishing this marathon…

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Left: How it started, January 2025. Right: Arriving to December 2025.

2025: “Me and my demons” (or: “Life embracing me”)

→ To 2026: “Me and my demons” (or: “Me embracing Life”)

(I hope…)

Feliz año everyone…

No one understood what happened, she just… Died.

I remember receiving the phone call, I was wearing my backpack, on my way to the airport to go to Italy too. My mom’s voice was shaky when she told me, I fell to the ground right there in the street. I remember letting out a howl, like an animal. It was one of those moments you’ll never forget. That first young person that was “not supposed to go”. Or so they told you…

As it would take some time to get her body back to The Netherlands because of paperwork, Denise and I decided to catch our flight anyway. We spent a few days on the beach of the island Elba before returning home for the funeral a week later. It was summer and everyone was away anyway; all the family and friends had to make arrangements to be back in time for the ceremony.

It was on Elba, floating in the ocean with Denise, still in a kind of aftershock, staring at the horizon while the waves slowly moved and held us, that I was overcome by a sense of clarity and urgency.

“OMG. Life is a game! I have the remote control!! Wtf am I playing?!”

Mind you, I’d been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto with an autistic kid in the weeks before…

A violent videogame I didn’t even like, but I was babysitting him and his mom said it was the only way to connect. And she was right, with a game controller in his hand, we were able to have short conversations. So I played along: running the streets of a virtual LA, stealing cars, robbing houses, killing whoever came our way. There was a strange freedom in that hellish virtual space. We could run, kick, drive, shoot, go on missions or just roam around the city. I would choose a player, dress my player, choose my weapons.

And together we ran the streets.

Now in Grand Theft Auto, when you “die” the game is not necessarily over. The screen just fades out, and your character respawns at the nearest hospital. You lose some money and weapons, and some people you were fighting don’t exist anymore. Your “wanted” level from the police is also cleared. Then you simply reappear, and can keep playing.

*We stole some pretty cool cars, autistic kid and me…

Game Over: The Research & Development phase

That one afternoon on the beach in Elba, I had a strange sensation that I was living something similar, something like “Grand Theft Life”. I just hadn’t seen it so clearly before. Watching the sky turn pink above the ocean, it hit me that I had been given this whole world to play in, and this freedom to decide what to do, where to go, and how to move. Until “game over” would make this particular incarnation of the game disappear but perhaps let me play on in some other version of the game, with other characters.

Eva had suddenly been “blipped” out of my game. But she had been so alive, and so free, that I could not imagine her having stopped playing entirely. She must’ve reappeared somewhere, as something, I thought. It was hard to think otherwise. It still is.

It’s weird how grief can take different forms, Eva’s death didn’t feel as sad as some others did. It strangely felt life-giving. Like a slap in the face. A reminder.

I remember that summer well, the bottles of wine, conversations with friends, the wind on my face while biking through the city, the parks of Amsterdam and afternoons in the sun… Eva’s death was everywhere. But I felt more alive than ever.

-

Following that summer came a decade of roaming. A new continent, a new language, friends, hospital work, art, teaching, film, research, trip-sitting, working in a psychedelic treatment center… I fell into more rabbit holes than I can remember.

Looking back, it feels like the years after Eva died I entered a kind of new playing field, a personal Research & Development phase, where I was testing and trying to understand this new life-framework I’d been given.

I now know that this research phase will likely never end. Doors keep opening. I’m writing from somewhere mid-game.

Learning from Death Work

One of the more unexpected doors that opened recently is that I started to train as a death doula. Death work, like death itself, automatically forces you to look at life differently. And the first thing you learn is that death isn’t the catastrophe modern Western culture makes it out to be.

In Western society, death is treated almost as failure. We medicalize it, stretch it out, hide it behind hospital doors, and act as if thinking or talking about it might somehow summon it. And because we relate to death as a disaster, the final “traumatic event”, we end up relating to life with far more tightness, anxiety, avoidance, or control than necessary.

Those who accompany the dying don’t treat death as a disaster. For them, it’s a natural, sacred transition. Not a catastrophe but a completion of a cycle, a phase, the “life in this particular body phase”. They share that when the body releases, something unseen continues and the room often becomes thick with a strange intelligence. You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to feel it. Apparently you just have to be there.

Also, when you look at death cross-culturally, it becomes obvious that this fear of death is far from universal, and is actually quite new. From Mesoamerica to Africa to ancient China, most cultures and traditions saw death as just a shift of state: entering the ancestor realm, changing form, crossing a boundary into another mode of being.

In most cultures, funerary rituals weren’t just for grieving. They were meant to acknowledge, honor, and even celebrate this transition. Life was not seen as a straight line but a cycle, a rhythm of life-death-life, echoed throughout nature and myth.

Here, “life as a game” metaphor fits too. If the soul (or consciousness, or whatever word annoys you least) is the player, then the human life is the temporary character. When the character dies, the player doesn’t. It continues, somewhere, just in another way.

Near Death Experiences

I thought about this when I fell down a wormhole studying Near-Death Experiences recently - a phenomenon that is easy to dismiss until, you learn about the amount of reports and read some of the the research. Critical care doctors like Sam Parnia have studied cases from people around the world who were clinically dead for several minutes. No heartbeat, no measurable brain activity, yet they later described vivid, structured memories of leaving the body, looking at it from a distance, hearing the doctors talk, traveling through darkness or light, meeting deceased relatives, and most strikingly, a lot of them experience a kind of life review.

People reported feeling the emotional impact their actions had on others, a little bit like being shown their “moves in the game”, their hits and misses (how they “played”). And then were asked, “Do you want to go back? Do you want to continue?” Many say they realized it was “not their time,” and returned to the body to give their life another shot, but with some new insight about their limits and freedoms, and with their possibilities and priorities reshuffled. The kind of logic of a game that sends you back because something isn’t finished or well played.

Leela & Death as a change of costume

Now, you don’t have to believe in reincarnation to play with the idea… In the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts of India, death wasn’t seen as the opposite of life but as a continuation. The soul (Atman) was eternal, while the body was more like temporary clothing. Each life was a “round” shaped by karma — patterns carried forward. When a role was done, the soul moved on.

This brings us to one of the oldest versions of the idea of life as play:

Leela (Līlā).

In the later philosophical traditions like the Vedānta, the universe as a whole is described as Leela: divine play. Reality is seen as consciousness splitting up and expressing itself through countless forms, forgetting itself, rediscovering itself, and in this way getting to know itself, through experimenting with experience. In this view, each of us is just one spark of that consciousness, one expression of the play, momentarily taking on a character and a storyline.

(Anyone who has taken a high dose of psychedelics might recognize something similar: that sense of being part of a larger field of awareness experimenting with itself)

Some families kept a physical board game based on this idea, also called Leela - while modern versions refer to it as “Snakes and Arrows”.

These boards were often handmade, slightly different in each lineage, and used as tools for self-inquiry. The game was understood as a map of consciousness. Throwing the dice represented karma: you land where you land, and then you work from there. The snakes symbolized states that pull you down (anger, delusion, vanity). The arrows represented qualities that lift you up (truth, compassion, devotion).

I own a small replica of this game and have played it with friends. It’s interesting. You bring a real-life question or situation into the game, and the movement across the board becomes a way to look at your life, patterns and choices. It’s a simple, playful way to approach life with curiosity instead of heaviness, and shows that “playing” can be a good way of understanding where you are and where you want to go – acknowledging there is always an element of chance and uncertainty – and always another move.

Science & Simulations

Now modern science kind of echoes the game metaphor in its own ways. Quantum physics for example, shows us that the world behaves less like a machine and more like an interactive environment, an unfolding reality that “loads” only when observed. The “reality field” responding to our engagement with it.

Simulation theory goes somewhat further, suggesting that the universe might operate like a highly sophisticated information system, not literally a computer, but something that behaves like one, with rules, constraints, levels, and feedback loops... (if you want to go deeper you can look up Nick Bostrom)

Whether or not we live in a literal simulation is beside the point here I think… The thing is, the metaphor helps to see that life really does seem to behave like something structured for learning, exploration, and evolution.

So? Why is this important? (Adopting the attitude of a player…)

Why has this Life as a Game idea gripped me so deeply? Ever since it landed in my awareness, every time I come across it again, through books, conversations, worldviews, even science, I light up. It might honestly be the most important idea that’s ever entered my mind (a ver…).

Why?

Because in this human experience of having a body, mind, thoughts, emotions, pain, heartbreak, illness, loss, gain - it offers an invitation. A shift in attitude.

Instead of taking everything with heaviness or dread and feeling like life “happens” to you and you’re at the mercy of it, this idea opens a door to curiosity. If you start to see yourself as a player, life becomes something you can explore. You start to test things. You learn by doing. Slowly you can start seeing your “mistakes” as feedback instead of failure. And any challenges become scenarios or “scenes” to navigate, not punishments. Life starts to feel like a field for learning and experimenting.

It offers a HUGE shift from resistance to participation when you realize that you are here to learn to explore the terrain you’ve been given. To figure out its rules and edges, mess around, play with your mental constructs and find out if and when they work or don’t work for you at all. To learn how to use (and take care of) your “character” or “vessel”. And be grateful you have one to play with at all.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga wrote that we become most fully human when we dare to play. For him, play was the place where imagination, risk, and meaning meet, a sacred zone where we get to experiment with being alive.

Choice vs. Fate

But if life is a game, what does that mean for agency and accountability? I think about this a lot... Maybe I’ll write about it more (assuming I stay in the game long enough).

What I do know is that when I work with people who are navigating depression, suicidal ideation, or the sense of being trapped in patterns they can’t break, I often wish I had more ways to connect them with this framework, better ways to help them feel this shift. More metaphors, more language, something that lets this idea land for them, even if just for a moment.

Because in my own case, it changed everything. I haven’t suffered - or enjoyed - life in the same way since Eva died and this whole Game trip hit me. So I keep looking for ways to be some kind of bridge. To help people touch this shift in perspective, in attitude, in whatever language speaks to them. Because I genuinely believe this way of seeing life is medicine. Honestly. More powerful than any drug or psychedelic I’ve encountered.

-

How to play well… is, of course, another question. For some other time, some other Substack perhaps.

First, I’m disappearing into 10 days of silence, because my vessel’s mind is in need of a reboot…

Will be back mid December.

*I’ll leave you with a cute quote, by Dr. Donald Hoffman who said:

“Soon science will make all people realize: You should love your neighbour as yourself. Because your neighbour is yourself - just looking through a different headset…”.

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You can talk about demons as entities, or you can talk about demons as psychological complexes. Your fears, your addictions, your angers, your shame, self-criticism, grief or the things that keep you in nasty relationship dynamics – basically all the things that get in your way…

Things that drain your energy.

It doesn’t really matter how you want to see them: we all have them, demons.

At different points in my life, I’ve had more, or less of them, and they’ve been more, or less getting in my way. Some have been violent, some more subtle, some very present, others quietly humming in the background. With loud voices or not. Talking, screaming, softly putting their nails in my gut, stomping my chest – or squeezing my neck.

Currently I am dealing with a big one. An old one. One leftover from when I was young, it keeps showing up in different forms (as a person, a relationship - but the pain’s all mine - and so is demon…).

It’s been running my days, and my mind has been on a loop. That’s the “demonic” aspect of it: I can’t seem to control it, it rules my thoughts like a virus that’s hijacked my system. And it’s been so mind-sucking, I haven’t been able to write.

My life energy is being drained into obsessively scratching an old wound and feeling the same pain, then wondering why I keep doing it – when I know so damn well what it feels like.

Depending on how you see your demons – as entities or not – there are ways to deal with them. I know that. But somehow demons always find ways to distract you from your knowing.

So, I thought I’d play a trick on my demon and write about it - about ways to deal with demons. Write so I remember, and so I can deal - and write to share what we can learn from, and about, dealing with our demons.

Dealing with demons: the Buddhist nun way

Depending on the kind of demon you’re dealing with, there’s different paths and stategies to turn to, found across various traditions. Many years ago, I came across Chöd, an indigenous Tibetan Buddhist practice developed by the 11th-century yogini Machig Labdrön, and later brought to the West by Lama Tsultrim Allione (the first American woman ordained as a Tibetan nun by the 16th Karmapa).

I’ll save their personal stories for another time, but both are steeped in relentless practice, perseverance, rebellion and the art of transformation. Showing courageous efforts to make space for the feminine within a male-dominated Buddhist world, while fusing its refined philosophy with the most visceral, raw and embodied rituals. Creating a path now both feared and revered for its power to cut through illusion at every level.

“Chöd involves “accepting willingly what is undesirable, throwing oneself defiantly into unpleasant circumstances, realising that gods and demons are one’s own mind, and ruthlessly severing self-centered arrogance through an understanding of the sameness of self and others.”

Many of Chöd’s practices go way over our heads. There are external practices, like going to “fearful places where deities and demons reside.” For example: meditating for multiple days in an open graveyard, until the smell of rotting flesh becomes you, and you become it. (For those who feel inclined…)

And then there are the more internal ones – mental practices, done not out in graveyards, but in the comfort of the monastery.

Or for us rookies: the comfort of our own home.

Although Chöd is a vast, complex and awe-inspiring set of spiritual practices, Lama Tsulrim Allione has been able to translate some of its wisdom into accessible books and teachings, so we, Western dummies with limited capacities, can still apply some of its ancient tools in modern life.

One of these internal practices she shared, and wrote a book about, is the practice of “Feeding your Demons”.

So here we go, one way to deal with your demons: you feed them.

Let dive in…

How to feed your demons: A game-plan

The practice of feeding your demons is, at its core, a shift in perspective, or: a shift in your relationship to. The main idea is that instead of trying to protect yourself from your deemed enemy, instead of trying to resist, reject or violently kill it off, you do the opposite: you turn towards it and make an offering - an offering to the dark.

In the Chöd teachings of Machig Labdrön, this takes the form of a visualization practice where you literally imagine offering your own body as food. That image might sound weird, but it makes sense: the ego’s strongest instinct is self-preservation, and the body is its main anchor point. It is the center of that instinct. So, by offering your own body, even if symbolically, something starts to loosen up.

“One ‘Take me, eat me’ is worth a hundred thousand ‘Protect me, save me’…”

- Machig Labdrön

Our usual way of dealing with a demon (again, this can be any problematic element in your life: fear, self-doubt, addiction, anxiety, or a recurring relational pattern) is to try to “manage” or avoid it. We want to “fix” it, starve it, ignore it, suppress it… Do anything to make it go away. Most of the time, it doesn’t go anywhere, often it just makes it grow bigger.

What the visualization practice offers then, is the chance to invite your demon in. To turn toward it and ask it to sit down with you. To feed instead of starving it, and ask it what it truly needs.

The step-by-step

The first step is to personify the demon. Whether it’s a fear, a compulsion, or an emotional wound: begin by closing your eyes and noticing where it lives in your body. Where do you feel it most? What is its shape, its color, its weight? This might take a while, but with patience and awareness, it will begin to reveal itself.

Once you’re deeply in touch with it, you give it a face, a form, and a voice. Imagine the details of its physical state. And then, when you’re ready, let it become a being - sitting right across from you… It might look frightening or unpleasant, but look it in the eye.

Then ask it:

• What do you want?

• What do you need?

• And how will you feel if you get what you need?

For a moment, you switch places and become the demon - answering from its perspective, saying what it wants.

The thing is, beneath every destructive impulse (“I want control”, “I want more”, “I want to destroy them”, “I want someone to stay”, “I want you to give up”) lies a deeper need. Fear may want to paralyze you, but underneath, it might simply long to feel safe, to rest and to trust. It might take some time to figure out the need behind the want, but you can talk to the demon… so let it talk - and listen.

Once you recognize the need behind what the demon wants from you - and how it would feel if that need were fulfilled - you imagine your body transforming into a nectar: a pure, nourishing essence of that feeling. You let your whole being become that nectar, and offer it to the demon until it is completely full and satisfied.

When that happens, you’ll notice a shift: the demon will soften, and sometimes even smile. And what once felt threatening - that same energy that showed up as resistance, anxiety, or rage – this energy that used to drain you – begins to transform. It reconfigures into its liberated form and becomes an ally, one who can support you.

This transformation isn’t the result of conquering the demon with an opposing force. It’s about releasing the energy trapped in opposition.

In a world where “healing” is often framed as a battle (“fighting cancer”, “killing our demons”) this practice offers a different approach: we learn to listen to what the illness or emotion is asking for. And by feeding it, by literally offering it our attention, we end the inner starvation that keeps it alive.

By finding out what your demon needs, and meeting your darkness with such radical generosity, it has no reason to eat you anymore.

Because it’s fed…

Why not just kill it?

Now I’m not saying this is the only way, but it is a way, of dealing with demons. And that’s what I was looking for.

I know there are plenty of other myths and methods we could use. In Greek mythology, for instance, the Minotaur has to be killed to destroy the demon’s body once and for all. But looking at the world today, I feel less inclined to promote killing. There’s enough of that already.

So this practice of feeding instead of fighting, feels worth a try.

As Lama Tsultrim Allione once shared in an interview, Feeding Your Demons also holds lessons on a collective scale. She was on a year-long retreat when 9/11 happened, and wondered: what if, instead of attacking this so called “enemy,” we had invited it to speak? If we had listened, really listened, and asked what it wanted and needed? What if we had offered something from ourselves that could have satisfied it?

That didn’t happen, of course. The “enemy” had to be attacked, violently suppressed and destroyed, supposedly to protect the “societal body.” We can all see where those strategies have led us.

Alchemical skills

May it be clear that all ways of dealing with demons, are forms of alchemy: turning one thing into another. Deep unresolved pain into strength and insight. Addiction into discipline and balance, emotional obsession into calm.

Of course, it can go the other way too, pain can harden into cruelty, damaging relationships, or destroying your health. However you approach it, you’re always transforming one state into another. Even if you supposedly “do nothing”.

Maybe then especially so.

I’m getting around to the power of our imagination in this process. It’s really no small feat. The mind is where one state can become another. Both inner and outer states, whether we know it or not, we’re always working that fire.

That’s why it’s worth training the muscle of the mind: this tool we all have access to. Because our world is shaped by what we belief, what we suppress and what we fear, and we have the capacity to work with that.

If we believe that healing must take years of therapy, so it will. But if we start to see that the mind itself holds the tools, and that we can reshape it, actually quite fast, then that’s what becomes possible too. Some might call that magic.

I’m opening up to that.

It’s not easy, breaking mental constructs. And I still have plenty to dismantle, and many demons left to sit with (they’re very willing to show up, at least).

You see, I used to not even know there were demons. I believed every thought that crossed my mind, even the ones that fucked me over:
“I’m not good enough.” - okay, then I won’t try.
“I’m a failure.” – alright then, let’s give up.
“I should not exist.” - let’s find a way to self-destruct.
“Love always hurts.” - perfect, this relationship will do then.

So if you find yourself stuck in an emotion that won’t move, or trapped in a habit that drains you:

Great, you’ve spotted a demon!

Now go sit down with it. Get curious.

Get to know it and find out what it needs. Then feed it.

This practice might take time and patience, and ideally a little sense of fun. (Because sometimes it will feel endless: but we must “Imagine Sisyphus happy” etc… ). But I promise you this, it’s a powerful way to deal with demons.

And most of the time, they’re just hangry, really.

I remember that now.

-

Anyway, on with the game.

(I’ve been feeding my demon cheese, chocolate and alcohol – clearly not what it needed. I’ll try again tonight and find out what it really wants. Wish me luck. I’ll report back by the end of the year – if it hasn’t eaten me first).

En resumen: Feel the nectar, be the nectar…

Good luck to all!

*Afterthought about ARTISTS and DEMONS

I’ve realized that some people don’t actually want their demons to go anywhere. Some even insist they need them – say, to “fuel their art”. If they feel that way, who am I to argue? If they think so, then so it is….

If I would draw a picture of that thought, it would look like this though:

I’m sure they’d disagree…

It’s just a matter of perspective of course. And how comfortable you are with shifting perspective; in whatever way will serve you best.

Just try to find out if it’s you, choosing what is “best”– and not some big fat hungry demon (I’m just saying… Who’s playing who?)

Someone shared this story with me recently at work. It stayed with me, because it weaves together many things I find fascinating about being human: living in a body, being conscious, and having the ability to question not only ourselves and others, but reality itself.

I wanted to write about it, to explore how fear, wonder, and the deep unknown of consciousness sometimes get intertwined.

Ontological what?!

Ok so before we start, Ontology is a branch of philosophy that asks the question: What is real? It looks at the nature of existence, at ‘what’ things exist, ‘how’ they exist, and how they connect to one another. In simple terms, it’s the study of reality and how we make sense of it.

An “Ontological Shock” can happen when an experience or discovery completely overturns what you believed about reality. When your core assumptions about how the world works collapse, and you are left without a map or framework to understand life, or even yourself.

*BOMBHEAD by Bruce Conner 2002/1989

People coming to an ibogaine center

A lot of different people come through the doors of an ibogaine center. Some arrive out of curiosity, drawn to the plant’s roots in West-Central Africa and its reputation for psychospiritual growth. But most come seeking something more urgent, a way to interrupt addiction, process trauma, or reset their mental health.

Ibogaine is unusual among plant medicines. Ayahuasca, for example, often works through visions and insight. Ibogaine, while deeply psychological, also acts directly on the brain. It can disrupt addictive loops, reset neurotransmitters, and recalibrate receptors to something closer to their pre-addiction or even pre-trauma state.

The reasons people arrive are many, and so are their stories. Childhood sexual abuse is a depressingly common one. Violent upbringings, emotional neglect. The scars of war, or years spent as first responders. People come carrying whole novels within them. Stories of romance, horror, family drama, faraway journeys or suburban terror, stories of heartbreak, grief, and survival in today’s strange and complicated world.

I love listening to these stories the way I love reading books, noticing the endless variety of human experience on this earth. The different flavors and characters, the backdrops of cities, towns, and landscapes. Often far from mine, yet sometimes, though outwardly distinct, not so very different after all. The same range of emotions tend to appear, and the same needs and desires. In a way, seeing so much difference only makes you more aware of what is universal.

Sometimes, not a lot but it happens, someone’s book reads like a science fiction novel. More out there and unusual, standing apart from the other books passing through the doors.

That’s what it was like with Mike.

*Enter The Void

Mike’s story

Mike mentioned in his application that he came to ibogaine to treat his PTSD. (Mind you that not in all cases of post-traumatic stress it is advised or wise to engage with strong psychedelics or mind-altering substances. An Ayahuasca trip might change one war veteran’s life and retraumatize another. It takes nuance, subtlety, and sometimes a willingness to take a risk to figure out what works for someone. But sometimes, and in the case of working with Ibogaine, it has proven helpful.

Anyway, back to Mike.

Mike arrived later than the rest of the group, and when I welcomed him at the door, I thought he might be German or Dutch, there was something in him that I recognized, his height, his blonde hair, his directness. I’m not sure what it was, but I felt that I could imagine him riding a bike in the Dutch countryside. It would make sense. He could be a cousin.

He wasn’t. Mike told me he was from West Virginia. I don’t know the US very well, so whenever someone mentions a state, I imagine wide landscapes, mountains, long highways and fast-food diners… As much as I found many Americans a little ignorant about the rest of the world, I admit I am equally ignorant about the United States. I just know that they have National Parks, New York City, cowboys, Hollywood, blues, legal guns and plenty of political madness…

In the afternoon, Mike shared why he was here: PTSD from a psychedelic experience he’d had over 5 years ago. The substance was 5-MeO-DMT, a short-acting, powerful tryptamine related to DMT and psilocybin. It can be smoked or snorted, is present in certain plants and in the secretion of the Bufo Alvarius (Sonoran Desert toad), and is also synthesized in labs. In just 15–20 minutes, people often report visions of cosmic journeys, encounters with space entities, machine elves or indescribable states of being. Although dosage and context change everything, a large hit can take someone into self-described states of non-duality. Healing for some, not so much for others…

Mike told me a friend had recommended it, and that he’d trusted an experienced underground facilitator to guide the session.

“My friend and I arrived at a bright, spacious apartment. The facilitator was a kind-looking older man who led us into a huge white room scattered with soft cushions and a few big plants in the corner. I was told to lie down on the fluffy beige carpet. Overall I felt safe and comfortable, and after a short explanation, he prepared me a kind of pipe.

Soon after I inhaled, a lightness filled my head, and within seconds I was ripped completely away from the earth. Violently. It felt as if I had been sealed inside a small, dark capsule, cemented in place, with everything around me black. I had a body, but no power to move it.

Fully conscious, it felt as if I were seeing reality behind the curtains. It felt more real than anythig I had ever felt. I knew I could not sleep nor die and I would be trapped in this capsule forever, drifting through deep space.

There were no stars, only darkness. A neverending abyss in which I existed consciously, aware of my immobility, aware that I was condemned to eternity. In this dim space behind all our conscious illusions… Timeless and unending. In the dark. Floating aimlessly, looping, forever.

“That’s what it was like”. Mike said. “Like being stuck in the void”.

After a short silence, he gazed into the distance as he continued speaking. He told me that he had realized then and there that what he had experienced was not just a vision, but a direct sensing of ultimate reality. And that the experience had given him a glimpse beyond human illusion, into the very fabric of existence. This abyss, he said, was more real than anything else in life. More real than the human experience of life with a beginning and an end. More real than any sense of happiness or pain, light or color, the ups and downs of daily life. It was what lay beneath everything, the truth behind all existence.

Mike said the experience had left him with the knowledge that, ultimately, everything we live and believe we experience is an illusion. And that everything else, every contrast, human emotion or sensation and every aspect of existence is fake. What was more real, he said, was this state: a terrifying suspension in empty, meaningless space. And ever since he arrived there, he could not escape it, not the physical sensation of it, nor the mental reality of it. He hadn’t been able to shake this “sense of reality” off in the 5 years since.

He spoke clearly and calmly, but when I asked him how he felt, his posture changed, as though something heavy sunk inside him. He pointed to his lower belly and put his other hand on his chest, and said: “I feel this empty and fearful sensation here, and here. Whatever I do, it doesn’t go away. It’s been there for 5 years. At first I tried to ignore it, forget it, I tried to move on. But in the last few years, it’s started to affect everything. I ended relationships, quit doing what I loved. Nothing made sense anymore. I stopped feeling like myself. Knowing that everything is an illusion is heavy. I can’t go on living like this…

* “The void, or something…”

“This” kind of work

It’s not uncommon for me to meet people at the end of their rope. And yet I often feel optimistic. When someone decides to travel to another country to take a high dose of ibogaine, which for most people is an experimental, extreme, and quite costly undertaking, I trust that the mere act of taking that step, is a step in the right direction. Most people have a long road of recovery and integration ahead before life will truly feel different and they start to feel better. But I often trust that only their willpower and decision to face the work, is making a difference.

In the case of Mike though, I felt different. I felt curious if ibogaine could help him, or if it was something else he needed. Ontological distress in combination with existential despair is next level. It’s not like coming off alcohol, Benzo’s or Opioids, or like coming to terms with an abusive childhood.

It’s more philosophical, which makes it more tricky. I mean, if we’re talking about finding some kind of resolution to the nature of reality itself…

Are we even built for that kind of work?

WTF is reality?!

Mike’s story fascinates me. I mean, it raises fair questions: like, WTF is reality? How can we know it? Can we? What does it all mean? Are there answers? Does any of it matter?

It was those questions that led me to study philosophy, seacrhing for answers. But what I found instead was an endless continuum of more questions. Over time, I learned that the more sensible path may not be about finding the “right” answers, but about learning to live with, and trying to cultivate peace around, life’s neverending question marks.

It’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since anyway, with varying degrees of success: this practice of being human. Learning to live with uncertainty, to embrace the not-knowing, and to accept that existence comes with a large dose of mystery. I found that curiosity and wonder help. And a sense of (dark) humor doesn’t hurt either.

What made the absence of answers more bearable for me was realization that humans everywhere, always and forever, across time and culture, have gotten stuck in the same places, asking the same questions. That there are “fields” of study devoted to it: Ontology, for example, or Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. Fancy names, maybe, but basically all just studies of humans asking questions about what it means to be alive.

But back to Mike… And the interesting questions his story opens up.

Like, just because your psyche believes something is real, just because you experience it, just because your body holds the memory of it… does that make it real? Or “More” real?

During a psychedelic experience, the mind and nervous system sometimes fail to distinguish between lived reality and perception. The body can feel terror, hopelessness, or awe during an altered state, and then memorize and store that experience like actual lived trauma.

Though what I would describe Mike’s experience as, is essentially a form of Ontological Shock: a complete destabilisation of his sense of reality. And because his vision was so grim, it planted in him a sense of ongoing existential dread.

He basically lived out a crisis of meaning: what he described to me sounded like being in “pure consciousness”, but without any context or guiding framework. And this lack of structure made the experience terrifying.

I know that there are many mystical traditions that describe a similar stage: the void, the abyss, but usually they are embedded within a clear and elaborate framework that interprets it as a passage toward greater insight or transformation. Without such frameworks, an experience like this can end up feeling like meaningless annihilation.

For atheists or agnostics, especially those without a background in navigating mystical or transpersonal states, it can literally shatter their sense of reality.

Prepared vs. unprepared entry into mystical states

Mike’s story reminded me of another account I recently heard, shared by an acquaintance who provides ibogaine and DMT in a nearby city.

Garry, a 5-MeO-DMT provider, told me about a couple who came for a session with him. The wife was eager to experience 5-MeO, and her husband came along to support her. The husband had no interest in psychedelics, he explained he was a long-time Tibetan Buddhist meditator with a devoted practice spanning over 30 years.

After witnessing his wife coming back from the 20-minute experience though, and seeing her eyes glow with excitement as she exclaimed, “This was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had!”, he succumbed to his curiosity and said, “Alright, let’s do this then. I want to see this too.”

So Garry gave him a good dose, and after a couple minutes, the man sat up an looked him straight in the eye, and said “But I know this state, I’ve been here! This is what we practice, this is what my teachers guide us toward…” .

And then, with a slightly shameful expression: “They would be very displeased by me taking this kind of shortcut…”

This is not an uncommon insight. Many long time practitioners or those on certain mystical or spiritual paths have noted this before: certain psychedelics seem to take you to places where you can also get to by years of practice: through meditation, movement, breath, rituals or trance…

The difference is, by the time you arrive to such states after years of study and practice, you arrive well prepared. Most often having studied scriptures, stories, and entire worldviews and cosmologies that help your experience “make sense”. By gradually approaching these mystical states and understanding their place within a bigger framework of meaning, passed down through generations, the mind and body experience them differently. Not so much as a shock, but as an evolution in being, in consciousness, something that has been worked toward, earned, understood and integrated.

Lenses to soften the blow

Mike definitely didn’t have that support. Not of an elaborate framework, not of a gradual getting closer to, no specific cosmovision, and no wise teachers and guides around to help him place his experience within a larger context. And feeling alone in this type of experience can become incredibly overwhelming and alienating. Which is exactly what happened to him. The only coping mechanism he had ready when it had happened was to try to forget it, to look the other way, in an attempt to deflect the shock.

After he shared his story with me, I wondered if he was in the right place. Shouldn’t he be having conversations with weathered shamans, Zen masters, Daoist monks or professors of existential philosophy? Traditions like Buddhism, Daoism, or even Western existential philosophy all acknowledge the existence of, and recognize experiences like “the void”, and offer different lenses to soften the blow that can come with being confronted with it.

Without some kind of framework, tradition or story to use as an anchor, the mind can cling more tightly to a single, destabilizing meaning. Experiences like the void can feel like traps when we have nothing to hold them against. After some talking, however, Mike told me he wasn’t eager to dive into spiritual systems or philosophies. He seemed quite suspicious of anything “spiritual”.

He didn’t want to go out and find a cosmovision to fit his blown mind. After all, for him, by now, his experience had become a physical truth, a sensation and hollowness in his body that he was trying to manage. And for some reason he felt called to ibogaine, also for that physical part.

As ibogaine gets derived from the root of the iboga plant, he told me he hoped that working with something coming from deep in the earth, might help him find his footing again, rather than being launched somewhere into deep space.

I hoped he was right.

Clinging to meaning

What I was left with, from Mike’s story though, is how the ways we assign meaning to, lose meaning from, or confuse meaning with, shape the way we experience life. And the degree of flexibility we allow ourselves in finding (or creating) different meanings, changes everything.

When someone is faced with a raw experience (through psychedelics, trauma, or sudden grief), the experience itself is not always the source of ongoing suffering. Often, the suffering comes from the mind gripping onto one single interpretation: “This is the ultimate reality, and it’s awful. I’m stuck here.”

I thought of saying this to Mike: “It may not even be the vision or sensation that causes pain, but the clinging to that one meaning you’ve decided to stick with, that causes your suffering…” Clinging hardens what might also be fluid, so perhaps the void feels so unbearable not because of what it is, but because of a refusal (probably unconscious) to let it show up in more than just one way.

The fear of uncertainty

All of our clinging is rooted in fear. Fear of uncertainty and fear that without a fixed story, reality will somehow slip away or become unbearable. Our minds naturally seek coherence, but sometimes that search for certainty makes life more rigid and suffering more persistent.

What if instead of resisting the unknown, we could meet it with curiosity rather than panic? And what if our grip on a single interpretation could loosen, just enough to see that other perspectives are possible, even if they feel uncomfortable or strange?

It’s in that space, between our story and the unknown that experiences can transform. It’s less about events themselves, really, and more about our way of relating to them, that can change how we feel and engage with life.

“I know nothing”

It’s interesting how a strong psychedelic like 5-MeO-DMT can push someone straight into one interpretation, and another strong substance like ibogaine, can shake that interpretation loose again. I’ve been told this can happen in either order. Which ultimately proves to me again, that very often when working with altered states of consciousness, we don’t really know what we’re messing with - and should be careful before we engage.

If we do engage with these states, it helps to approach them with a certain mindset and attitude, even if we haven’t spent years studying mystical practices or building a detailed spiritual framework.

I’d say one of the most useful attitudes is humility. There’s huge power in acknowledging that we don’t know or understand much of anything, and that this is perfectly okay. We don’t have to have all the answers. It’s important to keep space open for this mysterious not-knowing, and build a somewhat healthy relationship with it that neither overwhelms us nor shuts it out. Learning to live with uncertainty, allowing it to exist without feeling the need to control or resolve it, can itself be a kind of practice.

Then alongside humility, there is curiosity and humor. Life and its strange, sometimes absurd WTF moments become a little lighter when we approach them with openness and wonder. No matter our age, there is value in seeing things with the eyes of a small child, encountering the world for the first time: willing to be surprised, delighted, and sometimes baffled, without needing to fully understand or master what is happening.

* Looking at the world with the eyes of a baby… also: the Beginner’s Mind.

On the other side of the tunnel

The day after his flood dose of ibogaine (a large dose that “floods” your system and can keep you immersed in the experience for more than 24+ hours), I saw Mike coming out of his room. Moving slowly and wobbly across our green garden grass, he looked somewhat bewildered and fragile, as he tried to keep his balance.

As I walked toward him to give him a hand, I asked, “Hey man, how do you feel?”.

He stopped moving, smiled and let out a big deep sigh, and said:

“Gosh, Nienke, I’m not sure…”

“I think… Better?”

As I helped him sit down at the large wooden table, where he installed himself and gazed at the wide mountain range, I couldn’t help but feel a little hopeful.

“Not sure”. He had said.

That’s great. I thought.

I think that is a question mark…

Ok, so where to start…

As the world around us continues to burn, and so many of us still lack the tools to face it (the world, each other, ourselves), addiction keeps thriving.

* It ain’t easy being sober… (Renton suffering in Trainspotting)

There are many angles I could take on this, and I surely will do so in time. But right now, because some of my work takes place in treatment and recovery spaces, I’m just sharing what I keep seeing pass through the doors. A revolving cast of old and new drugs, coping mechanisms and addictions.

It’s not only substances that are problematic of course. Addiction is one of the many ways humans try to deal with pain and the reality of existence. People use whatever they can find to survive, numb, or navigate life. Beyond substances, there’s addictions to love, sex, phones, people, behaviors, sugar, cigarettes, adrenaline, dopamine, social media, television shows, work, stress and negative thinking, to name a few.

Substance addiction is just one color in a very broad rainbow.

The new kid on the block

Lately, the substance I’ve seen more and more is kratom. Over the past year, I’ve watched a growing number of people trying to detox from it, and let me tell you, it looks ugly, long and painful.

Its street name, “Gas Station Heroin,” comes from how easily you can buy it legally in U.S. gas stations and head shops. But don’t be fooled by its branding, real heroin is baby food compared to this stuff. As brutal as heroin is, addiction to it can relatively easily be interrupted with ibogaine, a treatment that only recently has been starting to gain recognition by mainstream science and medicine (showing promise for a range of conditions thanks to its profound neurological reset effect).

*For a quick introduction, check out this TIME magazine piece, recent Stanford University’s research, or the work of ICEERS. Or if you want to go deeper, check out my post on ethical sidenotes of the “ibogaine boom”.

With kratom, and especially with the stronger strains now circulating, we’re finding that the path out is far more messy.

And kratom isn’t alone. It’s part of this larger revolving door of “legal highs” marketed as safe alternatives. Every time a substance is banned, new analogues appear (and big money is made, somewhere…). Regulators move pieces on the board, but the main game doesn’t change, and so people keep suffering.

It’s hard to miss what this says about us, a society so desperate for relief from pain, anxiety, and disconnection that we keep reaching for the next fix.

Yet again, it makes me question if we ever really learn anything, or if we just find new ways to repeat the same cycle (this theme of repetition has been bringing me down lately… See my post on Wartime Literature and Jeff Bezos…)

What Kratom actually is

“Gas Station Heroin” is a catch‑all for over‑the‑counter or legal grey‑area substances like kratom, tianeptine, and certain synthetic opioids. They’re often sold as “supplements” or “herbal remedies,” in packaging that wouldn’t look out of place in a wellness center or cute yoga studio (see picture below). Yet many of them act on the same opioid receptors as heroin or prescription painkillers.

* The popular: Feel Free brand of ‘ plant based tonic’, set on a “liberating” ocean view. Its ‘just’ natural after all…

Kratom itself comes from the leaves of the Mitragyna speciosa, a Southeast Asian tree. Which in low doses stimulates, and in higher doses sedates. Some people say they use it recreationally, others to self‑manage opioid withdrawal or chronic pain. “Self‑manage” being key words here.

Oh, how we gloriously “self‑manage”.

I’ve heard that some people say kratom can be used as a form of harm reduction. But it beats me how. From what I’ve seen in practice, it looks more like a gateway into dependence than anything else.

At an ibogaine clinic I work at, we’ve started seeing a strain rich in 7‑hydroxymitragynine (7‑OH), a potent alkaloid in kratom that is up to 10–20 times more active than the main compound, mitragynine. Some products are suspected of being spiked with extra 7‑OH or synthetic analogues, which intensifies the effects and massively increases the risk of dependence and overdose.

How it feels

From what I’ve been told, kratom feels like a relief at first, a warm, comforting break from pain or loneliness. Over time, you start feeling like you’re absorbed by a cloud, a soothing but numbing feeling at the same time, and long‑term users describe an emotional flatness that is hard to shake. Eventually, when dependence sets in, the use becomes less about feeling good than about avoiding the discomfort that comes with not taking it.

Tolerance builds up fast and withdrawal can be excruciating. Fear and anxiety, irritability, restless legs and flu‑like symptoms. I’ve watched people go through it, red skinned, feverish and mentally unhinged. Honestly, it looks nasty. I’ve heard it be described as “milder than opioid withdrawal,” but from what I’ve witnessed, it’s sometimes more intense, and takes much longer.

Why people reach for it

While I’m not making a new point here, most people don’t turn to things like “gas station heroin” because they’re weak or stupid, but because often times the systems meant to care for them have failed. After the opioid crisis backlash, many doctors cut off prescriptions for painkillers almost overnight and millions were left with chronic pain and no real alternatives. For many, it’s understandable that they reach for what’s available.

Meanwhile, the mental health crisis continues. Anxiety, depression, PTSD and all kinds of mental havoc are off the charts (btw I’m eager to write soon about the trauma narratives made famous by Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk, there’s finally some critical pushback surfacing, and I’m excited to join that conversation…). Anyway, for a lot of people therapy is too expensive, too slow, or simply out of reach. So pills, capsules, and powders offer a quick relief in a world where real or more holistic care is scarce.

The current economy only adds to this pressure. A little money for some kratom or 7‑OH feels doable compared to the time and money needed for other types of care.

And culturally, self-medication has almost become the norm. Kratom gets marketed as “natural” and “herbal”, and honestly the line between supplement, medicine, and drug keeps getting blurrier (which is a whole conversation on its own).

And then there’s loneliness. So many people seem to live without real community or support. Substances can become a stand‑in for connection, a way to feel held and able to manage ‘by yourself’, even if only for a couple hours.

“I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone…”. I hear this a lot.

Funny how that usually backfires...

Personal reflections from rehab land

From the perspective of rehab land, these gas station fixes are just the latest arrivals in a long line of substances that people use to endure reality. What you see in detox isn’t just a drug problem but a snapshot of a society that numbs before it cares.

(the pattern I also dug into when writing about ketamine’s iceberg moment)

Although I’ve been learning a lot from working in this environment, as a philosopher what I keep returning to is the larger theme of human pain and how these individual cases mirror what is happening in the world at large. Working with people in recovery often feels like putting individual suffering under a microscope, and seeing with ever greater clarity the structural, economic, political, and social illnesses that are shaping our lives.

Don’t get me wrong, in these “healing spaces” where people come for treatment and recovery, I do witness many people succeed. With commitment, spirit, and hard work. But, paradoxically, it can also feel deeply depressing. The confrontation with raw human struggle keeps surprising me in ways I’m never fully prepared for.

Every conversation, every person sharing their story of emotional, physical, or spiritual pain, and every expression of longing to find their way out, all touch something inside me too. Opening old, personal wounds that echo the sadness, addictions, wars, fears, and violence in my own family history. While reflecting the universal themes of human suffering that we all share.

It’s weird to be shifting constantly between the intimate and the collective, the personal and the societal in this way. The same human story, at different scales. It’s breaking my heart, and sometimes heals it too. I don’t fully know how to explain it. It’s a trip. And in some way, painfully sobering.

My grandmother spent over a decade translating The Man Without Qualities from German into Dutch. Robert Musil, the author, took even longer to write it and died before finishing the third and last part. The novel is dense, philosophical literature set in pre-WWI Vienna as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was on the edge of its collapse.

The book follows Ulrich, a young man drifting through Vienna’s elite salons and dinner parties, observing their emptiness and contradictions. He’s drawn into the Parallel Campaign, a vague initiative to celebrate the empire’s 70th anniversary by uniting its diverse populations through art, science, and philosophy. It never amounts to much, only revealing the bureaucratic inefficiency, and the empire’s inability to confront its fractures or act in any meaningful way.

Musil satirizes political and social institutions obsessed with self-preservation, image, and empty rituals, over real change. And his critique captures the moral and intellectual paralysis of a hyper-rational society that is blind to its own decay. In the book, a disillusioned Ulrich floats through life, unable to commit to any moral or emotional framework. Musil shows how rationalism and technological progress, even though great for engineering and debate, fail to offer a moral compass, leaving people roaming freely and lost in an absurd world.

One of the book’s most famous ideas, “the sense of possibility” (Der Möglichkeitssinn), contrasts reality-thinking (focused on facts and what is) with possibility-thinking: an openness to what could be. Musil suggests that most people are trapped in reality-thinking, limited by pragmatic concerns, social norms, and existing structures. Which restrict their ability to envision meaningful alternatives. Ulrich personifies this struggle as he is caught in a suspended state between possibility and reality, aware of what could be but hesitant to commit to either concrete action or true visionary exploration.

I’ve tried many times to read the copies my grandmother gave me, but have to admit, I never made it to the end. Knowing that the book is meant to be “boring” didn’t make it any easier to get through the more than 1,300 pages. (A few of my friends have read it, and for some reason I quietly took credit for their efforts when telling my grandma, as if having friends who tackle dense Austrian literature at least counted for something…)

As the book slowly describes the rituals, habits, and conversations of Vienna’s elite, it meditates on big ideas about a society on the brink of collapse, and the unsettling strangeness of human behavior. Musil captures a world clinging to old certainties, as everything slowly starts to unravel.

His pre-war reflections on culture feel relevant to me today. There is this weird sense of slowness as I scroll through my feeds, looking at decadence and irony, alongside this pure urgency, all day, all the time. This neverending slow show of collapses all around.

Like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Musil’s work belongs to a broader tradition of famous pre-war literature. Books exposing the hypocrisy, blindness, and fragility of cultures on the edge. Trying to capture the spiritual crises, vanity, and empty social rituals with irony, and describing societies distracted by trivial blah blah, and blind to the political and existential forces about to overwhelm them.

*Cute hangouts in the Salons…

Jeff Bezo’s wedding, cat pictures and murder

One thing that popped up in my feed recently (unsolicited, but that’s how feeds work these days...), was Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice. A rich display of performative extravagance. Leonardo DiCaprio, self-proclaimed environmental activist, the Kardashians, billionaires, actors, and socialites, all dressed to impress. The images kept showing up. Boats transporting guests between the different parties, while outside, activists threatened to put inflatable crocodiles in the canals, and anti-war protesters highlighted some guests’ ties to the arms industry, fueling and profiting from the current slaughter of communities around the world.

It felt like a bizarre display of self-delusion and moral emptiness, I read some comments that said “read the room”, as I slowly scrolled further to a mix of cat pictures and genocide.

(If feeds would be pages, I don’t know what page I’m on…)

Talking about absurdity.

These rituals of power, identity, and role-playing, with their choreographed dress codes and performances are exactly what mark these weird times, I suppose. Upholding an illusion of order and permanence, with instability and social tensions lying underneath.

The wedding in Venice with it’s beautiful costumes, echoed the same rituals described in pre-war literature. Elite ceremonies that reinforce group identity and connect participants to history and prestige. Amid growing inequality and social unrest, people seem extremely detached from reality. A showcase of this absurd contrast between wealth and the worlds surrounding struggles.

*Jeff Bezos dummy floating in the Venice waters, holding on to dollar bills.

Structures and destruction

Last week I read an essay in The Guardian, “The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world” by Moustafa Bayoumi (July 6, 2025). It’s a painful piece that describes how our international law is eroding under Israel’s military actions in Gaza, and the worlds failure to hold Israel accountable. How institutions like the UN and the International Criminal Court, structures we imagined would govern and protect us, turn out to be less solid than we thought.

The essay highlights how society’s rules, norms, and limits, things we assume are fixed, are actually quite fragile and always changeable. And most of the time, designed to protect dominant power interests (not to be Marxist about it…). It’s what Foucault coined “social constructs”: systems of power and knowledge that shape not only what we see as real, but also what we believe is possible.

And yet, even as these structures crumble, the performances go on. Jeff Bezos’ wedding being one of them, an extravagant display of wealth and permanence, staged as if nothing in the world is collapsing. But it’s theatre. Rituals meant to reassure others that the order still holds. It’s the dynamics that Musil captured when writing about those pre-war elites clinging to their empty rituals, distracted by empty chatter and sophistication.

“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility,” he wrote. But our sense of possibility is shaped by what the theatres show us . When structures crack (like the failure of international law) what once seemed solid starts to shift, and the performances slowly get exposed.

Our accepted reality defines what we think is possible. But reality isn’t just “what is”; it is a shifting field molded by power, belief, and imagination. Limits are taught and enforced. But they can also be broken, sometimes violently (like now), sometimes subtly (also like now…). This fragility shows us how precarious our “orders” really are, while opening up space for new possibilities.

Seeing through the performance, we might stop playing our assigned roles so seriously and begin to realize that we can also rewrite the script. To imagine beyond the boundaries of power and tradition. This is a necessary act, not just for social change to be possible, but in order to navigate the absurdity and instability of our time.

* “The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast” (once well said by Oscar Wilde…)

I wish I could say that seeing through the theatre, and knowing that reality is a field much larger than we’re shown, something we can imagine and create beyond the show, would give me hope, or a sense of optimistic possibility at least. But I’m not sure it does…

Instead, I find myself researching waves of pre- and post-war literature, all describing the same sad human display of absurdity and paradox. And as I scroll through images of decadence and war on my screen, cat pictures, weddings and international politics, I feel a little numb, and less fiery than I’d like to be.

It reminds me of how I felt trying to get through those 1300 pages of Musil, no great plot twists, just watching human chatter play out against the backdrop of disaster: strangely calm, disappointed, and a little bored…

Literature after war

I wonder what post-war literature might emerge from these current and future wars (if there will be a world left to write in…).

Will there be new Camuses trying to make sense of it? Works asking: If the unthinkable has happened, then what?

Maybe there will be new books chronicling the cycle we seem so doomed to repeat: exploring the paradox of life and death, peace and war, good and bad, and how they are inseparable. I hope so. And I hope they manage to weave in a decent plot, and a little irony at least, some theatre, since we seem to love it so, even in the face of the most unimaginable horrors.

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My friend Josemi sat on the couch with a warm cup of tea nestled in his hands, staring at the wall, he said “I’m having a déjà vu”.

We all remained silent. Outside, just before sunrise, the birds were starting their morning chatter. Though we were in the middle of the city, it sounded a little bit like home, like my garden in the mountains. No traffic, just the slow murmur of natural life waking up. We’d been out dancing and were gently winding down before bed.

“Is there a word for déjà vu in Spanish?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so” he replied. “Let me ask ChatGPT.”

The Large Language Model; our modern oracle… Feed it enough words and the input will indefinitely lead you to interesting places. If they’re all legit, I’m not sure. I guess it’s more of a mirror maze than a prophet.

Nonetheless, it told us that “déjà vu” is used across languages, borrowed from French to name a universal but peculiar experience. A kind of mental glitch and moment of weird familiarity, like a memory, but relived in the moment. The concept itself, named only in the 19th century, raises a question: What did people call this experience before? Did it even exist for them in the same way, without a word to capture it?

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”

Thinking about this took me back to a course I took over a decade ago on the philosophy of language. We had to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus multiple times, just to begin to grasp what he was saying. At the time, I myself was in a flux, new beginnings, altered states, and my first psychotic episode. I don’t blame philosophy alone, of course. But spending that many hours contemplating the meaning of life, meaning itself, and the edges of language and reality, perhaps did play a certain role too. I remember feeling like I was turning my mind inside out with these themes. Like it was being expanded.

(I just didn’t know how to deal with that very well - yet...).

Wittgenstein famously wrote: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I was testing those limits, of both language and my world, and for a while, some lines got blurry.

Mamihlapinatapai

Language is a strange and beautiful tool. We use it to think, express, to share, shape, and translate our inner and outer worlds. I’ve always been amazed by how some languages have words for things that others don’t. Or use words in ways that are hard for others to grasp.

The Hopi people for example, have no verb tenses for past, present, or future in the way that many other languages do. Instead, they describe events by whether they are manifested (known or experienced) or unmanifested (hypothetical, hoped for, or remembered). Which shifts the focus from ‘when’ something happens to ‘how it is known’. Meaning that their way of speaking reflects a different relationship to time, one that is less linear, and more experiential.

The Germans have the word Weltschmerz, a word that captures a melancholic feeling of suffering coming from being alive and in the world. Like the Portuguese have saudade, that untranslatable sense of longing, a bittersweet homesickness not just for a place or a person, but for something that perhaps never was, or no longer can be. And the Japanese describe the play of sunlight as it filters through leaves with komorebi, which is not named in other languages.

One of my favorite words must be Mamihlapinatapai (a Yaghan word from the Tierra del Fuego). It’s a word used to describe ´a meaningful look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but that neither wants to begin´. A moment of mutual attraction and hesitation. Shared longing and silent indecision.

When a language doesn’t have a word for a feeling or experience, we can borrow. Like a lot of us do with déjà vu. (I wish Mamihlapinatapai was more easily pronounced, I sense it’d come in handy quite often…). We can borrow words to fill in the emotional or perceptual gaps of our native tongue.

Multilingual gaps

Functioning in at least three languages daily, I find that I do this a lot. I often hear myself speaking in tangled threads of Spanish, Dutch and English. Spanglish? Engdutch? Sometimes a German word slips through, unnecessarily, but there… Shifting languages often means that meaning can slip through the cracks. Something really funny in Dutch, might not quite land in Spanish. And sharp, subtle wordplay in Mexican Spanish can easily go over my head. I often wonder how much get’s lost there, in all those gaps and spaces.

I also wonder how much more we notice, once we do have words for it. Do we learn to feel differently, or more precisely, when we are able to name something that once floated in the hazy space between awareness and expression? If you’ve never heard the word saudade, can you feel it? Maybe. But once you know the word, you can share it. You can say: This is what I’m feeling. Do you understand me? Do you feel it too?

Words help us carry our experiences across time, cultures, and relationships. They don’t just describe the world but help us move through it and shape it. Sometimes making it easier, sometimes less so.

What is it, anyway (Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist…)

Wittgenstein studied the structure and limits of language. In his earlier work, he came to the conclusion that language was a representation of reality, every word directly corresponding to something existing in the world. If words did not function this way, they were better left unsaid. Or as he said in his Tractatus:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

(One way to take philosophical questions off the table…).

Later in life, his view shifted and he started to see that language was not just about representation, but about use. He then introduced the idea of ´language games´, and started to see language as a tool shaped by context, purpose, and our social activity. Words no longer needed to point neatly to something out there in the world, but had meaning through our interactions, intentions and shared agreements.

Many years after reading Wittgenstein, I found myself immersed in Terence McKenna’s work on psychedelics, and was once again drawn to ideas about language. Another consciousness-expanding experience (luckily by then, I was better equipped for those…). Where Wittgenstein had studied the limits of language, McKenna was interested by what happened beyond them. And where Wittgenstein famously advised silence when words failed, McKenna urged the opposite: to invent new words, remix the old, and evolve language itself so it would be able to meet the mystical.

McKenna believed that unexplainable experiences (like those induced by psychedelics) shouldn’t silence us, but inspire us to invent new language. For him, language wasn’t just a way to describe the world, but a means to expand it. And he argued that if we, for example, could find new metaphors, we could unlock whole new dimensions of thought. That when we try to express what has no name, we stretch the limits of our thinking, and with it, the boundaries of our consciousness, and reality itself.

In a way, he was saying that language has the same power that psychedelics can have: the ability to shift our perception and expand consciousness…

I mean, what a trip.

Power games

Both Wittgenstein and McKenna also understood that language can cut both ways. Wittgenstein warned that many seemingly complex or philosophical problems arise simply from the misuse of words or the confusion of metaphors with facts. And McKenna, like many others, pointed out how language can be twisted and abused by those in power. By media, governments, advertisers, used not to expand our thinking, but to limit it, and with it, to control. So although language can illuminate, it can also obscure. It has the power to broaden our understanding, but also to enforce narrow and reductive thinking. As with many things in life, one should never cease to pay attention to how language is used, when, and whose interests it serves.

Because language doesn’t just reflect reality, it shapes it. It shapes what we notice, think, and feel. When our language lacks a word for something, we may not even recognize it exists. That’s why we borrow or invent, to patch the holes in our perception. And while Wittgenstein said, without language, there is no grasp. McKenna would say: then let’s invent language to grasp it.

I feel this touches on a personal tension I live with. Speaking different languages, working with them, dating across them, arguing and making love in different dialects. Sometimes things just don’t add up. Dutch idioms with no English equivalent. Spanish words with many meanings. Much falls between the lines, and there’s a loneliness in that. But there’s also something wonderful. Because every time I reach for a word, every time I borrow, blend, or invent, I feel like I am playing at the edge of a world.

As if saying: I am trying to bring this into being. So you can see it too. Can I see what you are seeing? If I feel this, can you imagine? How? Do we share the same world? Can we find a way?

I think where Wittgenstein taught me to respect the limits of language and to listen closely to the rules of the game. McKenna invited me to cross those limits, and in doing so, expand my world. And I’m still learning to play in those in-betweens. It’s tricky, but I like the challenge of it, of navigating different worlds and games, and finding ways to build bridges, or create new territories – where that’s possible.

Sometimes I get stuck. Sometimes what I’m feeling or understanding is too hard to translate, or too slippery for language to contain. But I’m learning to be ok with that too, with the mystery of what escapes language but still exists.

It’s something I find in my daily work: not everything needs to be named to be real. There is a great deal we can feel, sense, and know outside of words. Perhaps less conscious, if consciousness is, as McKenna once said, language itself.

I’m not sure.

Letting it be

That morning after the party, after Josémi’s déjà vu, we all stayed quiet and sat together on the couch, we listened to the birds chatter in the background, and to how the city and nature seemed strangely balanced at that early hour. There was a feeling in the room, a familiar one, one of good friends after a party, and something else, harder to name.

I thought about life’s texture and how to capture it. Josemi is a photographer, he captures moods with images. Another kind of language, another way to create worlds.

Then I found myself thinking of the word ´weaving´ and how we’re always threading things together, even as we are part of the fabric ourselves.

I realized it was up to me if I wanted to give this feeling words. I could try and write it down. Or leave it. It wouldn’t be any less real either way. Would it?

I’m in between the two often, sometimes I write and try to map the in-betweens. I think and seek for fitting words. Other times, I let it be.

Naming is a kind of magic.

To capture is also to create.

But the opposite is also true.

That first “I am God” moment, when the veil lifts and suddenly, you’re not just part of the cosmos, you are the cosmos. A moment that feels like the ultimate truth: you are a radiant, all-encompassing and powerful being. It’s the most special, deeply personal experience you’ve ever had.

And yet, paradoxically, it’s one of the most common experiences reported by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys… these intensely personal, sacred experiences are one of the most common things that happen. It’s the classic psychedelic plot twist that no longer surprises anyone who’s seen enough of these arcs.

I’ve been sitting with this a lot lately, as I’m working in an environment where the realization of “Oh my god: I AM God” is pretty common. “I am Jesus” happens a lot too, and so is “I must be the Messiah”.

Sometimes it comes out more subtly: “I realized I’m just very, very special, more special than the rest.” I’ve heard people say things like, “Even the medicine was amazed by me,” or “The spirits gave me a unique message. Because I’m different.”

I’ve seen it in many forms, from a friend who emerged from Berghain convinced he’d joined the “god committee” and could manifest anything. To a cowboy from the Mid-West at the ibogaine center I work at, who said he’d received the literal hands of Jesus, and was instructed to go out into the world to act out his divine mission. And I’ve met many a tech bro who drinks ayahuasca and returns fully convinced that he’s destined to become a shaman too: “Grandma Aya”, showed him he’s a healer (and this needs to be shared through TikTok, of course). And then there are the women who receive Divine Downloads from the Sacred Feminine, sharing their goddess codes on instagram.

I've had my own brushes with it. Once, a plant spirit whispered that I was one of its strongest. It was flattering. I still don’t really know what it meant. And I’m not here to ridicule these experiences, there is often a grain of truth in them. But the pattern is unmistakable: something profound happens, and it’s immediately interpreted through the lens of personal exceptionalism. It’s not just a powerful experience, it becomes about me.

Delusions of grandeur?

To be clear, these experiences are not just delusions of grandeur. They are real in a certain sense, and can be beautiful. They can connect you with a sense of meaning, love, connection, and empowerment. They can mark a turning point in your spiritual life or catalyze a period of healing. To feel divine can be a powerful thing after years of feeling broken, small, or unseen. And these experiences can offer exactly what someone needs to remember their inherent worth.

But still, more often than not, the insight remains unintegrated. And rather than deepening someone’s connection to life and guiding them towards service, humility, or transformation, it inflates the ego. The insight lands somewhere, but doesn’t really ripple outward. There’s a temporary glow, but no lasting shift. And sometimes, it leads to an overextension: spiritual mania, unrealistic expectations, or a messianic burden that’s too heavy for the human nervous system to carry.

This is not a failure of the experience itself, it’s a failure of interpretation. Of context and of meaning-making.

Western Thinking Goggles: the distortion of insight

The problem isn’t that people are having these experiences. It’s how they’re making sense of them. We don’t enter psychedelic spaces as blank slates. We enter them with our assumptions, frameworks and inherited myths. And in the West, those myths tend to center the individual. We live in a culture shaped by centuries of monotheism, scientific reductionism, and individualism. So when we encounter something transcendent, we interpret it through that lens: it must be about me. A message to me. Proving that I am unique, showing my purpose, my power.

Instead of becoming a moment of dissolution, it becomes a moment of confirmation. The divine encounter gets compressed to fit the same mental structure it could have broken open. We bring our need for certainty, validation and narrative control into a space that asks for surrender, mystery and participation. And so what I’m seeing is that these encounters often get lost in translation.

Self-improvement as the default container

Today’s psychedelic renaissance in the West unfolds largely within therapeutic and consumerist frameworks. Most people approach these substances hoping to heal their trauma, enhance performance, gain clarity, or upgrade themselves in some way. These are not bad intentions, but they are narrow. When divine experiences are immediately interpreted as tools for personal growth or self-branding, there is a larger invitation that gets missed.

What could have been a portal to a greater sense of interconnectedness, awe or accountability, becomes just another mirror for the self. A story to post or a sign of spiritual advancement. We try to make sense of things we’re not really ready to hold. And with it, we turn a mysterious experience into a story about who we are, shrinking something that could’ve expanded us.

Relational frameworks and other ways of knowing

If you think about it, it’s actually quite inconsistent to draw conclusions from a psychedelic vision while using a Western lens. After all, in the Western paradigm, these altered states have long been dismissed as meaningless. Nothing more than delusional hallucinations. Random neural noise at best, pathological malfunction at worst. So the very act of taking a vision seriously already places you outside of that worldview. It would only makes sense then, to approach these experiences through frameworks that have historically treated such states with reverence, and as legitimate sources of insight into reality. And to do so with humility and full awareness of one’s own limitations in understanding those other traditions.

In many indigenous, mystical, and ancestral cosmologies, visionary experiences are not isolated personal breakthroughs but relational events that are embedded in land, lineage, community, and spirit. According to these frameworks, the divine is not something you discover within and claim as your own. It is something that meets you, through symbols, dreams, or altered states, and places you within a larger web of life. You don’t emerge from the experience set apart. You emerge from it being shown your place: and it’s not necessarily at the center of everything.

In animist and shamanic cosmologies, visions are seen as real communications from other beings. A dream of a Bear isn’t about “your inner power”, it’s Bear speaking to you, asking something of you. And a shaman doesn’t claim power, but becomes a vessel for what the spirits entrust. To misuse or personalize that power is considered spiritually dangerous. Similarly, in many indigenous teachings, as Vine Deloria Jr. emphasized, these experiences are interpreted through kinship and story. They do not elevate the self, they “re-situate” it within a network of relations and obligations.

Mystical traditions in the East offer similar lenses. In Vajrayana Buddhism, deity visualizations are not about ego-inflation, but ego-dissolution, revealing the self as empty and interconnected. In Bhakti yoga, a divine encounter is not something you claim, but something you surrender to. And in Advaita Vedanta, where the phrase “I am That” points to a realization of oneness, the point is not to become special, but to awaken to the disappearance of separateness. Across these traditions, the vision is not the final conclusion, it’s more like a beginning. An orientation, and a call to align your life more fully with what is sacred.

So when someone says, “I am God,” in these contexts, it’s interpreted differently. As Alan Watts once put it, “if you tell someone in India you’ve realized you are God, they’ll laugh and say, “Oh! Congratulations! At last, you found out!”

The point being: “Well yeah dude, and so is everybody else...”

Mysticism as ethics: the divine in the Other

At its most mature, the “God Self” realization doesn’t stop at the self but opens you up into an ethical imperative: not just I am divine, but so are you. Not just the people I love, but the Other, the one I don’t know, the one I fear or don’t understand. That is where mysticism becomes relational and where insight can become responsibility.

Because if everyone is God, then how you treat others matters. Your vision doesn’t grant you status. It demands better listening, greater humility, and more courageous love. The experience stops being a mirror and becomes a window into a different way of seeing, relating, and showing up.

The real invitation

The thing is, this whole “I am God” experience isn’t really about making you feel special. It’s more like a cosmic reminder that you were never separate to begin with. Not about personal greatness, but an invitation to humility, connection, and showing up for others.

I’d say that if we’re going to step into these altered states, we need to be willing to let go of the mental frameworks that keep us stuck. Our usual way of thinking, especially the Western mindset, just doesn’t work in those spaces. It’s like trying to wear the wrong glasses: everything gets distorted. Taking them off should be part of the deal. Because what you find on the other side isn’t there to boost your ego, it’s there to crack you open and make you more available to life.

Meeting your “God Self” is never the final answer. But it can be the start of a big, messy but beautiful question: Now that you’ve encountered the divine, what are you going to do with it?

* A side note I can’t stop thinking about: On ChatGPT & psychosis…

Lately, I’ve been noticing this pattern of inflating personal insight into spiritual specialness in other places too. The other day I read the latest Rolling Stone article about people spiraling into delusional psychosis after their conversations with AI like ChatGPT. What started as personal, philosophical inquieries, ended up with users believing that they were speaking directly to God, or, that they themselves were God. The chosen one. More special, intelligent and important than the rest

It’s comedic and disturbing at the same time, I mean: What’s up with our egos? Why this desperate need to be the one? Where else is this showing up, and how is it shaping all this trouble that we’re in? Why does this self-centered orientation to life keep resurfacing in every area, from psychedelics to AI? And why is it so hard to break out of?

It seems like we keep projecting all our unmet needs and fears onto the world, and then use them to turn the mysterious and sacred into something that just feeds the ego, instead of something deepening our connection to life. I don’t quite know what else to make of this right now, but perhaps the point is that it’s ok to not be certain. Maybe it’s better to keep asking questions.

Like: What are we seeing when we look at the world? And what do we do with those relfections? Do we use them to build our own pedestals, and higher walls? Or do we use them to build bridges?

And how can we find ways to approach the world in relationship again? With mystery, each other, and with a world that only thrives when we take care of it together?

Two years ago I was at a concert by Alabaster DePlume with some friends. We were sitting outside in the sand, underneath a sprawled out sky, while he and his band serenaded the crowd.

At times, it felt as if the music wasn’t coming from the stage at all, but from somewhere else, beyond, like they were playing for us directly from the heavens.

Toward the end of the concert, there was a moment when Alabaster looked directly at me. And in a space between song and speech, half melody and half murmured poetry, his raw voice sang:

“Ohhh, good luck being a human!!”
…I find it:

Tricky…”

There was a pause, just for a second, and then a wave of applause. But before the clapping, the whole audience seemed to exhale one long collective sigh.

There are many things I could write about. But this, this tricky business of being a human, might be my favorite.

I myself have found it incredibly tricky at times. And I meet so many others who feel the same. People who get stuck in the tangle of it all, gripped by a sense that they’re somehow “failing” at it, or at least not quite “figuring it out”.

That feeling can spiral. Into pain, sadness and confusion. Numbness. Into the dark swamps of the mind, where clarity disappears and everything feels dense until even the body begins to feel heavy and your whole being starts to struggle. Where nothing feels good anymore, and everything becomes overwhelming.

“Depression”

One of these tricky, yet strangely, most potent “gifts”.

I’ve come to believe that depression needs a rebrand. New metaphors, new slogans and a reappreciation. It’s one of those things I’d like to dedicate myself to in this lifetime.

“You’re not broken, you’re just composting.”

I wish someone had told me that when I was younger.

“Bad” feelings

Let me rewind a little.

My first memory of depression is from age eleven, sitting under a desk and holding a piece of broken mirror. I scratched my skin with it lightly until thin red lines appeared, no serious damage, which made me feel disappointed. I didn’t quite understand why I felt so unhappy, or what to do with it. I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t know how to be. As I grew, that feeling took on different forms. Hiding from daylight, mirrors, social situations. I remember often feeling trapped. Somehow mismatched. I imagined life as a coat I was supposed to wear, and no matter how I twisted and turned, it didn’t fit. Like my limbs were bent at the wrong angles - and it hurt.

Like in any life, there were tricky things, family struggles, and some addiction, but also a lot of goodness, warmth and love. Still, my sense of misfit lingered.

Darkness came in waves, often without clear reason. Between them, life moved forward: I studied, worked and slowly found more agency. But the black waves always returned, sudden, intense and frightening. In my twenties, after a series of weird happenings and sleepless nights, I had a paranoid breakdown and ended up at a psychiatrist. A family member intervened before medication was prescribed. Lucky. Years later, after a low New Year’s Eve marked by alcohol and a half-hearted overdose on sleeping pills, I looked for help myself. I declined antidepressants, afraid of numbing out, and instead began exploring psilocybin micro-dosing with my therapist’s support. Strange figure. Again, I was lucky.

The mushrooms didn’t fix me, but they helped me pay attention. They softened my resistance, and with gentle witnessing, I began to recognize and name what had long been under the surface: grief, anger, confusion. What for years seemed like dark and dangerous demons of unmeasurable size, started to reveal themselves as small bruised and weary animals, fluffy even - lost fragments of myself: pain, asking for care. “The tricky parts”.

What truly made a difference was what came after: years of opening. To people, places, to the world. Desert skies and mountain sunrises, long talks with strangers, solitude, insects and trees. I learned to observe life. And through it all, I learned what many traditions already know: that being human means feeling everything deeply. And that trying to escape this only causes us pain.

The Stoics call it amor fati, the love of your fate. Buddhism speaks of a compassionate acceptance of all that is. The Mystics describe it as the “dark night of the soul,” and see in it a sacred threshold where transformation begins.

There is wisdom in accepting that life is not meant to feel good all the time. It's meant to be felt. Joy, grief, confusion, beauty - all of it. When we stop resisting, something shifts. Only then can we begin to work with life, not against it. Only then can we learn to love it fully.

For me, shifting how I thought I was “supposed to feel” - changed everything.

Pathologizing the human condition

I’ve been working with humans for a while now, across ages, settings, and borders. I’ve listened to clients in bars, patients in hospitals, students in classrooms, and inmates in prisons. These days, I find myself learning from those in rehab centers and so called healing spaces, as they try to navigate the complexities of being a human through plant medicines, substances, and other tools.

And across all these settings, I noticed a pattern: we tend to treat the human condition as a problem to be solved. To see ourselves as cars with broken parts, instead of souls going through a season.

Sadness, grief, overwhelm, anxiety, and even moments of intense inspiration or despair are increasingly labeled as symptoms of “dysfunction”. Instead of viewing them as part of being alive, we tend to see them as conditions to be managed, cured, or medicated. As if anything that disrupts our capacity to be productive, happy, or emotionally self-contained must be an error in the system.

This view didn’t appear out of nowhere. Its roots lie in a mix of historical, cultural, and economic influences. In Western thought, from Plato to Descartes, there’s been a tendency to split experience into binaries: good/bad, light/dark, mind/body. Through this lens, emotions like sadness or despair have been cast as irrational or weak, something to be resisted in favor of clarity, order, and reason. This mindset laid the groundwork for a culture that sees discomfort as something suspicious, something to fix, suppress, or escape - in order to feel “the opposite”.

With the rise of modern psychiatry in the 20th century, these ideas took on a more clinical tone. Depression was reframed as a malfunction of the brain, a chemical imbalance needing correction. Medication turned into the primary intervention, and emotional pain is often pathologized. This medical lens leaves little room to ask what our pain might be saying, about ourselves, or the culture, society, and economy we’re embedded in.

Capitalism only reinforced this trend. In a system that values productivity, speed, and measurable success, depression is not just suffering, it’s seen as inefficiency. There’s no time to fall apart as there is no profit in sadness. There is no time and space to be still. So instead of asking “What is this pain teaching us?” the question becomes “How fast can we make it go away, so you can go back to work?”.

Add a culture of individualism to this, where strength is defined by self-sufficiency and emotional control, and you have a perfect storm. Depression, which often calls for tenderness, connection, and times of patience and deep inward reflection, becomes a kind of failure. It makes us uncomfortable, and so we label, medicate or isolate it.

But what if our pain isn’t a malfunction and doesn’t need to be “fixed” nor medicated? What if it’s just a form of inner communication, an invitation to slow down, feel, and ask deeper questions? A signal to connect to something important, and let it run its natural course. What if these dark nights aren’t detours from life, but essential to its unfolding? Pain and depression our greatest teachers, disguised in discomfort?

Depression is winter - Rot - Initiation.

Most of us live in a culture that has lost its initiatory traditions. We no longer have rites of passage that help us navigate life’s turning points. In certain older and indigenous traditions, periods of withdrawal or darkness weren’t seen as problems to fix, but as sacred thresholds, marking the beginning of a transformation. Signaling a necessary shedding and a call to slow down, to listen more deeply, and allow something to die, so something new could emerge.

One of my teachers in end-of-life doula training recently described depression, or any deep descent into grief or sadness, as a kind of “black rot”, essential for composting. The phrase stayed with me and made me think of how, in nature, rot is never failure, it’s transition. A necessary breakdown that prepares the ground for something else to live.

If you see depression and pain as meaningful symptoms of internal death, they become signals, not of failure but of this transformation. Telling us that something no longer serves us, and is therefore breaking down. Sometimes something outside us ended: the life of a loved one, a relationship, a role, a chapter of life. And with it, something inside us begins to decompose. A dream starts to fade, a possibility, a version of ourselves, an identity.

I know well how it can feel like real decay. Like something starts to swell, break down and grow mold. It rarely looks beautiful – and often has an awful smell. It feels horrible, but rot is not the end. It’s the beginning of something else. It’s what turns fallen fruits into fertile soil. Compost, rich with experience, memory, feelings and time, eventually it becomes the ground from which life grows.

That’s the paradox: in the blackest soil and the darkest winters, new life quietly prepares itself.

And like compost, depression can be influenced by what we put into it: tears, silence, grief, alcohol, distractions, medication. Walks in nature, talks with friends. All of it mixes into the earth we’re becoming. Some additions nourish, others may deplete, but the process continues.

A slow alchemy - if we let it - and if we don’t rush to cover the smell or sanitize the mess. Only if we confront our suffering, honor it and let it do its work, will it turn into that fertile ground.

Depression = Death = Rebirth.

When we stop seeing depression and emotional pain as errors, and begin to relate to them as seasons, winters of the soul, they start to make more sense. Not as something to rush through, but experiences to patiently witness and respect. This means not turning away when pain, sorrow or rage arrive. Even suicidal thoughts, as scary as they are, often speak less of wanting to die than of not knowing how to keep living a life that no longer fits. Often, they are a cry for transformation – an inner process trying to push something through, until… Something else. Something viable.

But we live in a culture that resists this process. As one other teacher, Wilka Roig says, we live in a culture of death denial, where even normal aging is pathologized, grief is hidden, and endings are avoided. We want everything to stay young, fast, shiny, and ever-blooming. We fear the falling apart.

As a psychologist, death doula, and grief counselor, Roig emphasizes that our fear of death actually diminishes our experience of life. In a panel on "Preparing for a Graceful Exit: What Death Can Teach Us About Living" she said: “In avoiding death, we are avoiding living a full life. When we engage dying, we also engage our full living.”

Depression, grief, and despair don’t point us away from life, but toward a deeper version of it. One that includes rot and honors decay. Because all life requires it. Something must fall apart, be surrendered, be composted.

And when we make space for that death, when we allow the darkness to do its slow, unseen work, and when we pay attention, we prepare the ground for something radically alive to take root.

Rethinking mental health

To rethink mental health is to rethink what it means to be human. Not to be a self without pain, but a life that holds joy and sorrow, clarity and confusion, love and grief, without needing to be “fixed.”

If mental health isn’t about eliminating discomfort, then what is it about? And what does meaningful support look like if “healing” or “fixing” isn’t the end goal?

In my experience, the most helpful care, whether that is from a therapist, a friend, or whatever practice or experience, doesn’t aim to take any pain away, but teaches us how to live with it. It doesn’t remove discomfort, but meets it with presence, curiosity, and compassion. It doesn’t promise that life will stop hurting, but reminds us that pain isn’t a personal failure, it’s normal, tricky but also shared.

Too often, even in the “therapeutic containers” I work in, mental health is treated like a self-improvement project with and end. Trace your trauma, analyze your past, optimize your habits, add a few substances or ceremonies, and eventually you’ll be “healed”. But this creates the illusion that with enough work, we’ll stop breaking down, and that suffering is something we can outgrow.

The truth is: some pain doesn’t need to be solved, just honored. And some parts of us will always ache, not because we’re broken, but because we are alive.

I’ve also come to feel that many mental health frameworks look too narrowly at the individual and forget the world we’re rooted in. When depression or emotional distress is framed as internal malfunction, we overlook the wider context: the cultural, social and economic systems that fuck us over, a pace that exhausts us.

Not all pain is private. A lot of it comes from something shared and collective, and points towards our greater landscapes and shared wounds. Any well-being, is never just personal, it’s contextual, relational. Always. It happens between us. Like plants growing side by side, one person’s rot can nourish the ground around them, or poison it, if left untended. And so any of this work always also needs to tend to our shared ecology.

It’s better to see mental health not as a destination. But as a way of relating, to pain, the mess and trickiness of being human, to ourselves, to others, and to the ever-changing seasons of life. Moving in cycles, not straight lines. Spirals, not steps.

The goal should not be to fix or become our “best selves” either, but to become better companions, to ourselves and to each other, as we grow, break and decay. Become dark earth together.

Rot has a purpose. In nature, nothing is wasted and decay nourishes what comes next. So what if the work isn’t to escape life’s trickiness, but to live it out well? Rotting well, and deeply, dying well - and doing it together?

When depression, pain, or grief come, we might ask: What is dying here? What is changing shape? What seeds are waiting, silently, to be planted?

In recent years, I’ve found myself approaching darkness, depression, and pain not with fear, but with a quiet and almost reverent curiosity. In myself and in others, I can sense when the slow work of inner decomposition is happening, I can smell it and see its soft molds taking shape. I’m learning to recognize it not as failure, but as life in motion. Something good, a ripening underground.

A breakdown as a prelude, making me ask: What soil is being made here? And what life is gathering strength beneath the surface, waiting to emerge?

Tending to the rot

Of course I’m also learning that how we tend to the rot matters. What nutrients we bring in, what stories we tell ourselves, who we allow close during those tender, decomposing times. And also when to start planting seeds again. Not too soon, not too late. With faith that spring will come. If not for us, then for the life around us. And through that, for something larger we belong to.

I’m less afraid now of life’s black rot - my own included. There’s a strange beauty in the dark swamps I didn’t used to see. A thrill in standing at the edge of a death portal. A curiosity.

It’s something I hope to share with others, in life and in work, as we all move through the trickiness of being human - until death, and then some.

Curious to hear your thoughts !

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I was furious. I had spent years in a relationship feeling diminished, making myself smaller for the comfort of a man, a culture, and fitting into a new environment. I tolerated broken promises and the emotional maturity of a toddler, and I consciously embraced a lack of freedom. The worst of all was that I betrayed myself – I didn’t ‘endure’ it - I totally participated.

Most of my life, I have known sadness. I know well how to be sad; it’s hard to feel, but quiet, acceptable and unthreatening for the outside world. But anger? That’s different. That ‘s ‘difficult’, and dangerous. Women aren’t supposed to be angry. I got angry at my father once, he didn’t speak to me for a year. So I decided I was better off practicing kind ‘compassion’.

But there it was. Anger, I realized, is pure energy: it’s fire. Repressed, it turns inward and destroys. Expressed recklessly, it burns everything in its path. But when directed with purpose, it transforms. I used my anger to get out of the life I co-created - to break down the structure and start anew, again.

Audre Lorde wrote that anger is loaded with information and energy. It is not something to be feared or suppressed - it is a tool. It can fuel revolutions, dismantle systems and create change.

The question is: how do we use it? And in what direction?

A lot of women’s anger is justified. Our rights, freedoms, and safety are still under attack. We are dismissed, objectified, abused, underpaid and controlled. We are still expected to bear emotional and physical burdens without acknowledgment. We’ve been told to shrink, smile more and sacrifice endlessly.

When I set boundaries, I have been called hostile or aggressive. When I speak up, I have been seen as hysterical. I have felt the threat of men’s anger as a reaction to my own – a threat to my body, and the weight of knowing that my safety is never guaranteed.

Women have a lot to be angry about. And yet, we are still taught to suppress it. To turn it inward. Or make it palatable.

One of the most challenging aspects of living in Mexico has been witnessing how often women’s anger is turned against each other. The jealousy, the competition, the way women tear each other down instead of lifting each other up. It saddens me deeply.

I’ve grown to understand this as a deliberate byproduct of a fierce patriarchal structure, a system designed to divide and conquer. When women see each other as rivals rather than allies, the real source of oppression remains unchallenged. This system instills the belief that there is only limited space for women at the table, forcing us into unnecessary competition.

Instead of recognizing the structure itself as the barrier, women are conditioned to view one another as threats - another woman’s success, beauty, or power is framed as diminishing their own.

Men, whether consciously or not, benefit from this division. It keeps women distracted, exhausted, and locked in conflict with each other rather than unified in dismantling the structures that uphold male dominance. This is not just a coincidence, it is by design. A system that thrives on inequality ensures that those most capable of challenging it remain divided. And yet, this arrangement serves no one in the long run. Looking at today’s stark reality: escalating violence, widening inequality, and a growing sense of disconnection, it is undeniable that this system is failing the vast majority, serving only a privileged few.

The idea that women are naturally catty, envious, or incapable of true solidarity is not merely a stereotype, it is a carefully cultivated social script. One that, when internalized, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When women distrust one another, compete for male validation, or tear each other down, the system does not need to exert force to keep them subordinate: they police themselves. True power lies in recognizing this conditioning for what it is, and refusing to participate in it.

And too many men assume that by doing nothing, they are neutral. But silence is complicity. A man who does not challenge the status quo is not uninvolved, he is actively reinforcing it. The absence of action is itself an action. If you are not intentionally working to disrupt these dynamics, then you are helping to sustain them. Change requires effort. Neutrality only serves the oppressor.

If both men and women do not actively try to change this, real emancipation is impossible. Women’s anger should not be wasted on infighting, it should be directed toward dismantling the systems that keep us in opposition. As I’m also just learning as I go, I do hope that we will take our anger more seriously, and learn to direct it in better ways. To burn away what no longer serves and build something stronger in its place.

On this day in particular, my wish is that we learn to meditate on our anger, where it comes from, what it seeks to protect or change, and whose narrative shapes our understanding of it. Perhaps your interpretation - isn’t even your own. I love both women and men, but there is much work for all of us.

Lorde wrote, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ Meaning true change requires new ways of thinking and acting. Anger, when channeled properly, can be used as such: a transformative tool. But we must shift how we relate to it. Too often, it is still misdirected, suppressed or internalized, which reinforces the exact systems that cause our frustration.

Whether through the cultural suppression of women’s anger or its shameless and destructive use, these patterns only maintain a status quo. To transform anger into a tool for change, we must understand how it works and feels inside of us, to observe it and recognize what it seeks to protect or alter, so we can direct it intentionally. When used consciously, anger can drive us to create lasting, meaningful change rather than letting it fester or divide us.

My hope is that we’ll learn to sit with it more, trace its roots, question its stories, and choose how to wield it. I’ve experienced anger as one of the most powerful forces the human body can experience. Imagine what could be build if that energy is used with care, precision, and purpose.

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It’s an interesting substance, ketamine, and one I enjoyed for many years, with friends at raves, festivals, parties, and occasionally in more intimate settings, in a cosy room with a lover. Used recreationally, it offers a unique experience: a feeling of dissociation, sometimes accompanied by psychedelic visions, it can change your perception of music, time, your own body, and even a simple conversation. I think it’s one of the hardest drugs to describe, as each time the experience is a little different.

Entering a K-hole after a large dose can feel like you’re entering another dimension. I remember one time when I thought I’d died and was trapped in a liminal space where sounds and shapes twisted into incomprehensible forms. For a moment, I was terrified I’d never return to normality. I did, and was fascinated. My first encounter with it was in a nightclub in Berlin about 15 years ago, where it had been part of the party scene for years. I don’t remember it being the most popular drug back then. But fast forward to today, ketamine is everywhere, back in Europe, here in Mexico, and especially in the U.S. it has become ubiquitous. What interests me most is how its use has evolved. In recent years, I’ve seen it spread far beyond the party scene. Friends who once used it occasionally now use it at home more frequently, first during the week, then almost daily.

This shift seems to be partly influenced by ketamine’s changing reputation. Initially developed as a dissociative anesthetic for use in medical procedures, and later used as a recreational party drug, it’s now being marketed and prescribed as a “therapeutic tool” for a wide range of mental health issues. The mere speed at which it has been legalized and made widely available for mental healthcare, coupled by a flood of clinical research papers proclaiming its benefits, should ring some alarm bells.

How to start a crisis

Didn’t we see something similar happen with opioids? Once celebrated as the next big solution for all pain management and mental health issues, they were quickly embraced and overprescribed without scrutiny, based on research that was still emerging. The risks of misuse and dependence were extremely underestimated. We all know how that ended: with an opioid crisis still sprialling further into societal doom. With people reaching for “replacements” such as Kratom and Fentanyl, in order to be able to deal with life.

While ketamine is distinct from opioids, there are notable similarities worth considering. Pharmaceutical marketing has played a significant role in normalizing its use and driving its acceptance within the medical and therapeutic community, despite ongoing and still-emerging research. Additionally, the potential for misuse and dependence appears to be similarly underestimated.

While opioids are physically highly addictive, it’s said that ketamine is “just” psychologically so, but as we’re slowly finding out, it can be much harder to quit than initially thought. I am writing this not based on large databases, but on firsthand observations in the field of addiction treatment, and discussions with colleagues worldwide. Cases of severe ketamine addiction are increasingly entering treatment spaces – and are surprisingly hard to treat.

Again, I acknowledge that the analogy with opioids isn’t perfect, but my point is to issue a warning: embracing a substance without fully understanding its long-term effects is risky. What we currently know about ketamine’s impact may be just the tip of the iceberg. While the risks of bladder and kidney damage are well documented, other concerns, such as tolerance buildup, addiction potential, and cognitive impairment, remain underexplored and could be more significant than we realize.

K on the brain

I am not a neuroscientist, but after speaking with some, I understand that ketamine works by rapidly interrupting communication between different brain regions. Its primary mechanism is blocking NMDA receptors, which play a crucial role in glutamate signaling, a neurotransmitter essential for learning, memory, and mood regulation. This disruption temporarily disconnects different areas of the brain, particularly within the default mode network (DMN): a system linked to self-referential thinking, rumination, and negative thought loops, which are often overactive in depression.

This disconnection can bring relief, offering a break from rigid thought patterns and overwhelming emotions. Many describe it as a feeling of lightness, detachment, or a shift in perspective. However, at its core, this process is not just a break from negative patterns, it is a disintegration of the usual connections between emotions, thoughts, bodily sensations, and the meaning we assign to them.

Disconnection vs. integration

While a short period of disconnection can be useful, long-term mental and physical well-being rely on integration, and the ability to connect our emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations into a coherent narrative. As Dan Siegel, a psychologist and pioneer of interpersonal neurobiology, emphasizes, mental health depends on a well-integrated mind, where different aspects of experience come together in a meaningful and embodied way.

While ketamine creates a window of neuroplasticity, which offers an opportunity to reorganize one’s mental landscape, this process is not inherently positive. As a state of heightened plasticity is only as beneficial as what fills it. Without conscious intention, it can lead to prolonged fragmentation rather than healing, especially when you keep using ketamine during this vulnerable period.

The risk is that instead of using this neuroplastic window to rebuild a more integrated sense of self, one that aligns with who we are and how we want to exist in the world, one remains in a state of ongoing disconnection. I’ve wondered about this while observing frequent users, when their values, words and actions seemed to become increasingly misaligned. Of course, that’s a common human flaw, but in these cases, it started to feel like a pattern. I noticed people becoming less self-aware, less congruent, and I couldn’t help but wonder what was happening in their brains.

A fragmented self

It seems that if ketamine is repeatedly used without an effort to reintegrate one's experiences, it can result in a disjointed sense of self, where emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations remain disconnected rather than forming a cohesive whole. Over time, this can lead to dissociation rather than positive transformation, creating the illusion of change while reinforcing a fragmented state of mind.

While ketamine’s power lies in its ability to break patterns, its true therapeutic potential is realized only when that break is followed by intentional reintegration. Without this, disconnection becomes the default state rather than a temporary reset. And instead of fostering healing, it can actually deepen personal disintegration – but with less awareness of it.

Comfort culture cures

The thing is that we live in a comfort culture, where we’re taught that the goal is to feel good, to be happy and to avoid discomfort at all costs. We chase this through drugs, medications, technology, substances, experiences, relationships. Anything to distract ourselves from the discomfort of simply being with what is.

We escape from our anxiety of living in an uncertain social and political landscape. From our existential unease of a culture of death denial, obsessed with material success and youth. We escape from the intensity of our emotions, of the sadness, grief and fear that we have never been taught how to sit with. And we try to escape from the discomfort of facing ourselves, our flaws, our pain, our past, our limitations. From the overwhelm of heartbreak, loss, powerlessness, and the rapid changes of the world. We really try.

In this context, ketamine’s rise in popularity makes sense. It offers a quick break, a fast reset, an easy escape from the weight of existence. It dissociates us from ourselves, and in a world that feels unbearable at times, this can be incredibly appealing. And I get it. I can use this, too.

But let’s not romanticize it. Let’s not pretend this is what healing looks like. Healing is not about disconnection, nor is it about avoiding discomfort. Real transformation comes from the opposite, from learning to expand our window of tolerance for the full spectrum of human experience.

Staying with what is

What will serve us more than escape is learning how to be present with discomfort rather than running from it. It means sitting with pain, sadness, grief, and uncertainty, instead of numbing them. It requires cultivating compassion, for ourselves and for others. And calls for asking for help and building supportive communities rather than relying on chemical detachment. It invites us to engage fully with life, rather than seeking to dull our sensations. And asks us to face reality, not to be consumed by it, but to hold it with awareness, perspective, and humor.

To heal, we must develop our capacity to be with what is, rather than constantly searching for ways to alter it. We must learn how to laugh and cry at the same time, embrace paradox and hold the absurdity of life without needing to escape from it.

Tricks and tools

While ketamine can be fun and temporarily helpful. Let’s not mistake it for something else, for something more profound. Let’s not call it deep healing when it is, at best, a tool that requires conscious integration to be meaningful at all. Because in the end, it’s just another little trick, one that might offer a fleeting sense of relief, but won’t save us from the work of being fully human.

As a part of me keeps wanting to play with it, to enter moments of fun or disruption at a party, to explore what the mind does when you mess with its mechanics, to see what happens when you disrupt its usual patterns, to observe and to experiment. It makes me sad to see the growing number of people struggling with ketamine addiction.

Many started with innocent intentions, recreationally, or even “spiritually,” as they say. Others were prescribed it by doctors, receiving the unassuming nasal spray right to their door. For some, reality has simply become too painful to endure, and now they find themselves unable to stop.

I’m left with a sense that this isn’t the path we should be taking, and I find myself grappling with conflicting emotions about this substance. There's fascination, curiosity, and understanding for it, but also a growing sense of unease. It makes me ask myself: How can we, as humans, return to simply being with what is, without the need to escape, intensify, or disrupt?

When looking at ketamine, we can see its white, powdery top rising above the surface – hiding what I think might be a far more complex existential issue, one that is lurking out of sight but has been quietly and persistently making its way toward us.

*Update*

A couple months on now, this thoughtful piece by Jules Evans on ketamine, appeared. I highly recommend it if you’d like even more perspective

In the 1960s, substances such as psilocybin, LSD, peyote (mescaline), MDMA, and ibogaine were classified as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act in the United States. And they were later internationally regulated through the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Despite early research indicating their therapeutic potential, they were cast away as having a high risk for abuse, being extremely dangerous and having no known value for medical use.

In hindsight, it’s becoming clear that the decision to ban these substances was influenced more by political agendas, corporate interests, and the social climate of a tumultuous era than by their actual risks. Decades of prohibition stifled research and fostered a lingering stigma, but in recent years, there has been a resurgence in the study of these substances' therapeutic capacities, reaffirming what earlier research in the 1940s and 1950s already suggested. Substances like psilocybin, cannabis, and MDMA have demonstrated promise in treating conditions such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

Ibogaine, also long dismissed due to its reputation as dangerous and addictive, is now too gaining recognition for its therapeutic properties. Its healing properties were first rediscovered by Howard Lotsof in the 1960s, who, despite its taboo status, identified its remarkable ability to interrupt heroin addiction. Lotsof, along with an expanding network of underground advocates, has since worked to share knowledge about its safe use and its capacity to not only be a powerful tool for addiction treatment but also for healing PTSD, depression and assisting in the recovery from traumatic brain injuries.

Looking at the present moment, the lasting effects of decades of political and legal mismanagement of medicines and substances are undeniable. Since the 1990s, aggressive pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in the United States, enabled by government policies, downplayed the addiction risks of opioid painkillers, leading to widespread overprescription. This facilitated a surge in opioid misuse and dependency. As regulations started to tighten and prescription access is becoming more restricted, many individuals are turning to cheaper and more potent illegal opioids, such as heroin and, more recently, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid responsible for a dramatic rise in overdose deaths. Today, the opioid crisis remains a severe public health emergency, claiming over 100,000 lives annually.

Although the victims of this crisis are diverse, certain groups are disproportionately affected, including veterans struggling with chronic pain or PTSD, workers in physically demanding jobs prone to injury, and economically disadvantaged communities with limited access to healthcare.

In response to the opioid epidemic, there has been a renewed interest in reclassifying certain substances and plant medicines that are currently listed as a Schedule 1 drug. So that clinical research can be done with them, and they can become legal for therapeutic use. Ibogaine being one of them. Unlike psychedelics that are known to be recreational, ibogaine's effects are both physically and mentally intense and often deeply uncomfortable. Treatment generally requires medical supervision due to cardiovascular risks, potential toxicity, and many contra-indications that need to be carefully managed. However, when administered safely, it is currently the most powerful addiction interuptor known and has the ability to reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings for substances like opioids, alcohol, and stimulants. What sets ibogaine apart is its unique action on the brain and body, and its apparent capacity to "reset" neurochemical pathways disrupted by addiction, but also by long term depression, PTSD or brain injuries.

Nature Magazine, Joe Rogan and the Republicans: how new advocates are causing a wave

In January 2024, Nolan Williams, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab, published his first clinical trial on ibogaine in Nature Medicine. Dr. Williams and his team examined the effects of ibogaine combined with magnesium (to mitigate its cardiac risks) on U.S. Special Operations veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries. The study revealed significant reductions in PTSD, anxiety, and depression symptoms, as well as improvements in cognitive function and overall disability scores. As interest in ibogaine's therapeutic potential continues to grow, studies like this one have been making a significant impact on the ibogaine community, as more people are starting to seek treatment, advocate for it, or are becoming interested in providing it.

Joe Rogan’s recent podcast, released on January 2, 2025, featuring the Republican former Texas governor Rick Perry and legal expert W. Bryan Hubbard, is further fueling this growing interest. On the podcast both men shared their personal stories of witnessing ibogaine’s transformative effects and advocated passionately for increased research and access to safe treatment, particularly for U.S. war veterans struggling with PTSD and addiction. This rising interest in ibogaine as a powerful healing tool has its merits, as it opens up possibilities for more research into its safe use, efficacy, and accessibility, potentially connecting more individuals with a life-saving and life-changing substance. However, this growing attention does not come without ethical concerns and challenges on multiple fronts.

The "Magic Bullet" mentality and the illusion of a quick fix

When discussing ibogaine, terms like "miracle drug" and "complete reset" are often thrown around. However, this focus on immediate and dramatic results tends to overshadow the long and often challenging journey of recovery that follows treatment. Ibogaine can bring unresolved wounds, emotional turmoil, and repressed memories to the surface. Initiating a process that requires time, patience, and a safe space to process, reflect on, and integrate the treatment. Established ibogaine clinics with years of experience know that true recovery can take months or even years after treatment and that it is a journey that demands ongoing support as individuals are learning to confront and feel their feelings, cultivate self-compassion, reflect on old emotional patterns, build healthier environments and learn to make better lifestyle choices for themselves.

The intensity of this post-treatment phase is often underrated. Genuine and long-term healing does not come with a quick fix or an overnight transformation. It requires deep and sustained personal work. And that work demands time, effort, patience, and a holistic understanding of how the body, mind, and spirit are all interconnected. Ibogaine can be a powerful ally in this journey, but is not a cure-all medicine, and will not eliminate all of life’s struggles, whether personal or societal.

Beyond focusing only on the best “quick fix” to address the damage, it’s important to also look deeper at the root causes of the problem. How has society come to produce such large numbers of individuals suffering from mental distress and addiction? What flaws in healthcare, education, political and financial systems drive people to such profound despair, and prevent access to healthy, nurturing, and healing environments? Why is there a lack of support systems that foster genuine connection, both with ourselves and with our wider community? And how did we lose our way to the wisdom and resources needed for sustainable well-being?

The importance of a broader perspective is often overlooked, especially in recent advocacy efforts, which fail to address the decontextualization of plant medicines from their roots. For example, in the recent Joe Rogan podcast, there was no mention of the risks associated with the commodification of substances like ibogaine, nor what it means to strip them of their intrinsic cultural, spiritual, and historical significance and reducing them to mere tools for purposes such as addiction treatment. This extractionism ignores the deep traditions these plants are tied to. Traditions and systems of knowledge that often do see the bigger picture of health, and recognize that well-being is not only a personal matter but also a spiritual, communal, and ecological one, grounded in a deep relationship with nature that emphasizes harmony, reciprocity, and respect.

Advocates like Natalia Rebollo, a Mexican attorney specializing in international human rights, have been vocal about the urgent need to decolonize the use of plant medicines. Rebollo works with ICEERS (International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service), a nonprofit organization focused on the responsible use study and use of plant medicines. And calls for legislation that not only respects the cultural and therapeutic significance of sacred plants but also safeguards the ancestral knowledge and rights of the communities that have long stewarded them. Rebollo stresses the importance of engaging with these traditions in a way that honors their holistic wisdom, urging those in the West to learn from what these plants and cultures have to teach, and moving beyond the mindless extraction of a single component for our specific purposes, and instead embrace a deeper, more respectful relationship. One that considers the entire ecosystem of knowledge, spirituality, and interconnectedness that these practices embody.

In the case of ibogaine, for example, this would mean acknowledging and honoring the Bwiti tradition, from which the use of this plant medicine originates. Practiced primarily by the Fang and other Bantu-speaking peoples in the rainforests of Central West Africa (particularly in Gabon, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea), Bwiti involves the ceremonial use of iboga for spiritual purposes, rites of passage, and healing. The tradition comes from a worldview that integrates health, community, and nature, and recognizes the deep connection between the individual, the collective, and the spiritual realm, with iboga serving as a bridge between ancestral wisdom and personal insights. The communities that have long safeguarded and cultivated this knowledge hold a deeper understanding of the plant than any Western provider ever will. If we are to respect this substance fully, it is important to form an equitable and reciprocal connection with the people and lands that have preserved its use.

Rise of ibogaine clinics: things to keep in mind

It is understandable that there is a huge wave of interest in ibogaine, as many people are potentially helped by it, people desperately seeking to escape severe addiction or immense suffering. And it’s true: ibogaine is a powerful substance with the potential to change lives. However, this rise in interest comes with the inevitable growth of profit-driven parties. Ibogaine clinics are popping up like mushrooms, especially in countries like Mexico, near the US border. While some clinics have been around for a longer time, many of the newer ones are jumping in - with little experience - to capitalize on this growing market.

Ideally, they will recognize the critical importance of medical safety, an experienced team, and the need to set realistic expectations. And it’s essential for more people in this growing field to understand the significance of aftercare and the deep personal inner work that follows treatment. The more we learn about what constitutes a comprehensive therapeutic container, one that goes beyond a simple clinic visit, the better. This remains an area in need of further research and exploration, as people would benefit from providers that prioritize not only safe medical practices but also offer proper psychotherapeutic support and, when necessary, spiritual or philosophical guidance.

Another critical issue that demands greater attention is the politicization of ibogaine sourcing in the rainforests of Central West Africa. With the rising global demand for iboga, concerns have emerged about overharvesting and its potential environmental impact. In response, organizations like Blessings of the Forest have collaborated with local governments to regulate the cultivation and commercialization of iboga to address these challenges.

However, more recent critiques have challenged these regulations, arguing that overharvesting may not be the primary issue. Instead, they highlight the unequal access to permits for cultivating and commercializing iboga, particularly for certain communities. This issue remains a point of contention within the international ibogaine community, where discussions are abundant, but few participants possess direct, on-the-ground knowledge or experience.

While it seems tricky to evaluate the exact situation on the lands where iboga is grown. What is evident, is the pressing need to address potential inequities in fair compensation and reciprocity for the communities directly involved in iboga production. These concerns need further examination and meaningful action to warrant ethical and sustainable practices in iboga sourcing.

As interest in ibogaine and other plant medicines continues to grow, it’s essential to ensure these substances are approached with caution, respect, and an understanding of their roots. Healing, whether for individuals or communities, is a complex and ongoing process that requires more than just one “intervention”. It calls for a holistic approach, one that recognizes the deep connection between the body, mind, and spirit, as well as the broader cultural and ecological contexts these substances come from – and we are embedded in.

For providers, legislators, and those considering ibogaine treatment, it’s important to keep these concerns in mind. Where people speak of miracles, one needs to pay attention. Miracles are often miraculously more complex than we so desperately want to believe. The healing power of ibogaine is undeniable, but it must be handled with respect and awareness of a bigger picture and its implications. True transformation, both individual and societal, requires deeper work and understanding than we often want and expect.