We walked through the fields that were once rows of lush agriculture crops, now returned to wild nature. Our little band of voyagers set on reaching the cacao fields under the dense jungle canopy. The only crop left from a once thriving farm. It felt like a scene out of Jurassic Park. That wild and powerful land felt so connected to the universe, like i…

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And then they would mention the drums. The incessant and rhythmic banging all throughout the night from which one could not escape.

Voodoo was the national religion. And at night, they said, you could hear the drums from almost anywhere in the country. All night, every night.

Something about that detail lodged itself in my youthful imagination and would not let go. What was happening in those temples? What sort of spiritual forces were they conjuring up?

For months before the trip, I tried to prepare myself. I read what I could about voodoo, its African roots, its syncretic blend with Catholicism, its role in Haitian identity and resistance. None of it helped to quell my concerns. Seen through the lens of my midwestern, Judeo-Christian upbringing, the religion remained mysterious to me in a way that felt less like wonder and more like dread. The word voodoo had only one connotation in the culture I’d grown up in, and it was not a gentle one.

So I fixated on the drums.

If I hear those drums at night, I told myself, over and over, I am going to lose it completely.

I didn’t say this to anyone. I carried this quiet terror through months of preparation meetings with the doctors and nurses from my school, through packing lists and travel vaccines, right up to the morning we boarded the plane from Miami to Port-au-Prince.

The airport was small and nearly empty. We waited for our many bags of luggage and medical supplies in quiet anticipation that felt all too still. We had been told many times: follow the group, stay close, do not go with anyone you don’t know. In the safety of the airport baggage claim these warnings seemed excessive.

Then, as we stepped through the exit doors, we came face to face with the large crowd that was awaiting our arrival.

I can still see it, a thousand eyes staring back at us full of yearning and desperation. Before I could process any of it, the crowd surged. Hands reached for our medical supplies. Voices rose in Creole and broken English, pleading, insisting. Armed guards arrived, guns drawn, forcing their way through.

In the middle of it all, a man with no legs was pushing himself toward me on a skateboard, his eyes meeting mine, his hand reaching for the bag on my shoulder. Eyes pleading, demanding for help.

I can’t do anything for you, I said to him in my mind, my heart cracking open.

I kept walking. One step at a time. Following the person in front of me.

We made it to the bus.

The drive to Grand Goâve took three hours, winding up into the mountains. The smell of burnt trash and poverty penetrating my consciousness. The poverty was total and visible in every direction. I was getting my first real education in how much of the world actually lives, and it was dismantling something in me that had been constructed in the suburbs of the American Midwest.

And underneath all of it: still the question. Would I hear the drums tonight?

Our compound was walled, guarded. We unpacked. We found our bunks. As night fell, I climbed to the rooftop and stood there listening.

Music blasted from multiple locations in the village below. The sounds of engines, voices, dogs, life. I strained to hear beneath it all, searching for that particular pulse I was so certain would undo me.

Nothing.

Not that night. Not the next night. Not any night during those ten days in Grand Goâve.

I went home changed in more ways than I can count. But I went home without ever hearing the drums.

The following year, I returned.

I was sixteen now. A year older, a year larger. Haiti was no longer a mystery to me, it was a place I had been, a place I loved, a place whose people had gotten inside me, expanding my heart and mind. My second trip began with a completely different quality of presence. I wasn’t bracing for anything. I was arriving in a place I had known before.

And every night, I heard the drums.

They were loud. Insistent. Beautiful and strange and alive in the dark. My nervous system received them without alarm. I would stand on the rooftop and listen as the drumbeat would meld with the music of the night.

Near the end of that second trip, I was on the rooftop with a friend who had been with me the year before. I mentioned, almost offhandedly, that I hadn’t heard the drums at all during our first visit.

He looked at me.

“What do you mean? They were drumming every single night. They were so loud. You didn’t hear them?”

I hadn’t heard them once.

I have turned that moment over in my mind many times in the years since. Was it neurological? The brain’s capacity to filter out what the nervous system is not prepared to receive? Was it something stranger than that? I don’t know. I no longer need to.

When I returned without the fear, the drums were simply part of the music.

The most repeated command in all of scripture is not “be good” or “be holy” or “work harder.” It is be not afraid. In one form or another, that instruction appears three hundred and sixty-five times. The great theologian Paul Tillich called fear “the anxiety of non-being” — the shadow we mistake for the substance of things. The Psalmist cried “yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” not because the valley was safe, but because something else is present that transcends all worry.

Every wisdom tradition says some version of this. The Bhagavad Gita instructs Arjuna to fight without fear, not because the battle isn’t real, but because fear destroys the capacity to act rightly within it.

Fear, it turns out, is not only a warning system for what is dangerous.

It is a filter that determines what we are capable of perceiving.

I am writing this for myself as much as for anyone reading it. Fear has been a companion of mine for most of my life, sometimes quiet, sometimes roaring. The fear of not being enough. The fear of being too much. The fear of the drums. The fear of silence. The fear of what is waiting in the dark wood, and the fear of what happens if nothing is waiting there at all.

I have noticed, slowly and with great difficulty, that the fears themselves are rarely the problem. It is the posture fear puts me in, the listening-for-the-worst, the bracing, the elaborate architecture of anticipation, that actually cuts me off from life. From the music that is unfolding.

What I am learning, still, is that presence is the cure for fear in a way that knowledge and preparation never are. My fifteen-year-old self read everything he could find about voodoo and it only deepened the imaginative terror. My sixteen-year-old self arrived already inside the experience, and the drums were beautiful.

This is not a call to recklessness. Fear has kept me alive and out of harm’s way more than once. But there is a particular kind of pervasive worry, the preemptive, anticipatory, imaginative fear that constructs its catastrophe in the mind, that I am increasingly convinced is the most costly thing I carry.

The path is open before us all. The music of our lives is unfolding.

Be not afraid.

I enrolled in his fencing club and walked onto the strip thinking my physical superiority would carry me. The club itself was a beautiful tapestry of ages, housing fencers from 8 years old to their early 80s. In an early bout, I hooked up to the electronic scoring machine against an 81-year-old gentleman. My immediate, naive instinct was to take it easy on him.

I was wrong. He proceeded to completely wipe the floor with me.

At first, I launched a gentle lunge, expecting my youth and speed to easily bypass and overpower him. In a flash, he parried my blade and smacked me across my mesh face mask. Bewildered, I tried again, pushing harder. Same result. Parry, riposte, strike. Each time I attacked, his response felt heavier, more deliberate. Soon, the sheer friction of his steel blade hitting my mask created the sharp scent of burning metal drifting into my nostrils.

Amidst the fury of my attacks, the flashing lights of the scoreboard and the smell of sparks, his calm and deliberate voice has stayed with me to this day. Each time he deflected my brute force and smacked my mask with his blade, he would calmly say, “Try another way.”

I would lunge again, only to be dispersed. “Try another way.”

Again and again. Lunge.

Whack!

“Try another way.”

My ego believed that if a door didn’t open, I just needed to kick it harder. But this master was showing me that my speed was just a predictable rhythm he could read, and my strength was an anchor he could use against me. He wasn’t beating me with muscle. He was beating me with presence, timing, and a lifetime of yielded energy.

Saber fencing is often referred to as “physical chess.” The target is everything above the waist, governed by Right of Way. Whoever initiates the proper attack holds the right to score. But to earn that right, one must be in harmony with the moment, the way a surfer works with a wave instead of resisting it. If your attack is clumsy or forced, the defender parries, and the right shifts instantly.

The disciples had fished all night. Nothing. Then a voice from the shore: cast your nets on the other side. The catch was so large they couldn’t haul it in. The water hadn’t changed. The fish hadn’t moved. Only the angle did.

How often do we encounter a barrier and respond by simply pushing harder with the same failed approach? We burn our own steel. We create sparks and exhaustion. And something wiser, more patient than us quietly parries the effort and waits.

The master across from me was not my enemy. He was information.

I was in my mid-20s, all muscle and momentum. And an 81-year-old man with a blade taught me that force and power are not the same thing.

He never once lunged harder than he needed to.

He didn’t have to.

Whatever door you have been kicking –

Try another way.

The opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy as interpreted by the poet David Whyte: In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost. He goes on to say in his own words: “How do you know you are on your path? Because it disappears — that’s how you know. How do you know that you are really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you are going. That’s how you know. Everything you have leant on for your identity has gone.”

“O me, O Life… of the questions of these recurring” cries Whitman. The ego longs for identity. It seeks bittersweet comfort in its walls. But the soul longs to be free. It desires no walls, no chains that keep it confined in place. And yet, here we are in these human bodies. Infinite soul having a human experience. In western culture, the ingredients of that human experience are felt in the confinement of social structures and labels, so that we can easily sort people and put them in safe and structured places in our minds.

And what do we do when we enter the dark forest and find the true way is wholly lost? There is instruction. Some of this instruction comes from the Native Americans of the northwest forest. It has been relayed and distilled into this poem by David Wagoner:

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.

Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost.

Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.

All my actor training was really an exercise in listening. Standing still. Treating each moment as a powerful stranger — asking permission to know it and be known. Everything was revealed on the rising and falling of the breath. In all the doing and trying, in all the perfectionistic performance, it was so easy to lose the line. The answer from my mentors and teachers was always the same: stand still. Breathe. “The lines are on the breath.”

The forest has been around me the whole time. Even as an actor standing on the stage, searching for lines, grasping for what needed to be said. The answer is to pause, stand still. Listen. Breathe. This has become one of the greatest lessons life has ever taught me. And now I need it just as much as ever. Nearly 40 years old. Just moved back into my parents’ house. With my family. Where old rhythms rise and fall, perhaps to be known and released. The forest is all around me. It breathes. Listen.

And from this stillness, John O’Donohue:

For a New Beginning

In out of the way places of the heart, where your thoughts never think to wander, this beginning has been quietly forming, Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire, Feeling the emptiness growing inside you, Noticing how you willed yourself on, Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispered, Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, Wondering would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled, And out you stepped onto new ground, Your eyes young again with energy and dream, A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear You can trust the promise of this opening; Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure; Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; Soon you will be home in a new rhythm, For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I stand upon the precipice of a new beginning. Each moment pregnant with possibility. As a butterfly wriggles and yearns its way out of the chrysalis, my soul feels ready to emerge. Desire, emptiness, willing myself on, still unable to leave what I had outgrown. I have felt all of these things. I have played with the seduction of safety while hearing the waves of turmoil rise and relent. I have wondered, “Will I always live like this?”I have prayed for courage and have received opportunities to kindle courage. And now from this place of new beginning I step out onto new ground, eyes young again with energy and dream, stepping into the faith that the path of plenitude will open before me.

The destination is not yet clear but I will trust the promise of this opening. I will submit to the unfurling of myself into the grace of beginning that is at one with my heart’s desire. Awakening my spirit to adventure, holding nothing back, learning to find ease in risk. I trust that I will soon be at home in a new rhythm. My soul senses the world that awaits me.

We were doing infield drills. Ground balls were being hit to each successive team member waiting for their turn, “clear your hands, look at the ball.” And he kept repeating this phrase like a mantra: be quick, but don’t hurry.

It has never left me. And there has never been a more fitting moment for those words than right now.

Even back then, I felt like I was in a hurry.

I used to joke that I’d need to live to be four hundred years old to make a dent in the lives I wanted to live. I wanted to be a world-class concert pianist. A poet. An actor and filmmaker in the tradition of Brando and Scorsese. A builder of things. A wanderer of the world’s most beautiful and remote places. A man who spoke seven languages, lived on a deserted island and knew the song of every bird in the forest.

I never felt like I had enough time. And in all that hurry, I never felt okay. I always felt like I needed to be somewhere else, doing something else, becoming someone else, as if the life directly in front of me were a waiting room and my real life was about to begin just around the corner.

And yet. There have also been moments of deep flow. Moments where time dissolves entirely, where I am so fully inside the present that past and future cease to exist. Pure focus. Pure aliveness. The fleeting and the infinite, meeting in a handshake.

It feels like a contradiction. It is a contradiction. And I am making my peace with that.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes,” ring the words of my favorite poet, Walt Whitman

I feel these contradictions even now, writing this. The ache of wanting to seize the moment and never let it go. The pull of a dozen unlived lives, all tugging simultaneously at my chest. I contain multitudes. And so, I suspect, do you.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who run Stanford University’s Life Design Lab, offer their students a thought experiment. Imagine you are placed inside a particle accelerator and fired toward the end of it. By the time you reach it, you are traveling at 99.9% the speed of light, and at that velocity, you experience the multiverse. You can live as many lives as you want, simultaneously. The astronaut. The ballerina. The poet. The builder. You know all of them at once.

Then they ask: how many of those lives would you actually want to live?

The average answer is seven or eight.

Their argument, to my great reassurance, is that we actually can live seven or eight lives within a single lifetime. That reinvention is not a young person’s luxury. That the raw material for a different life is available to us at almost any age, and that it begins not with a dramatic gesture, but with a shift in how we see what is possible.

I have spent a great deal of time recently grieving the potentials I believe I have squandered. Regretting roads not taken. Measuring myself against some imagined version of who I should have become by now. The strange thing is that from the outside, people see me as flourishing. But the voice on the inside has been ruthless.

That voice is being forgiven.

Because the truth is this: the potential is not behind me. It is here. In this moment. It has always been here. The visions we carry in our mind’s eye, of the lives we sense we are capable of living, are not taunts. They are invitations.

A few years ago, I had an experience that changed the architecture of how I understand time.

Through the use of plant medicine, in a ceremony in the Brazilian jungle, I was given a felt sense of what eternity is. Not as a concept, but as felt experience. And what surprised me most was that it did not create apathy. It did not make this brief human life feel small or inconsequential. Quite the opposite.

It made it feel urgent.

William Blake wrote: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

I did not fully understand that line until I felt, for one extraordinary night, what eternity actually is. And I understood in a way I cannot entirely put into words that what we do here matters. That this brief, bewildering, improbable life is not a footnote. It is the whole story.

So: I am trying to learn to be quick without hurrying.

To move with intention rather than anxiety. To choose, fully, consciously, without the paralysis of regret or the vertigo of infinite possibility, and then to live that choice as completely as I can.

Goethe said it in his poetic brevity:

“Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.”

Brief. And yet endless.

We contain multitudes. We will not live all of them. But we will live some of them, if we choose, and if we move, and if we stop waiting for the life we want to begin somewhere other than here.

Say what needs to be said.

Do what needs to be done.

In this life. Right now.

Be quick.

But don’t hurry.

I understood it cognitively then, but now it lives deeply within my bones. The lessons the horses taught still live deep within me.

We had about 130 head of horses on that ranch. Majestic, soulful, powerful, and yet gentle creatures. They were extraordinary teachers, if one was quiet enough to pay attention. Periodically, we would bring in new horses and introduce them to the herd. Whenever they were introduced, every single time and without exception, the testing would begin.

They would be kicked, bitten, pushed around. It seemed ritualistic, it seemed brutal. It was hard to watch.

There was one horse I will never forget. He was small in stature, not much bigger than a pony. And when we would bring the horses in from the fields, he would come in covered in deep bite marks. Therefore, we named him Chip. You could watch it happen in real time out in the pasture: the bigger horses would crowd him, nip at him, push him to the edges. It went on for a couple of weeks. Long enough that I started to wonder if Chip would ever find his footing.

Then one day, something shifted.

I watched one of the biggest horses in the herd, a powerful animal we called Big Red, move in to bully Chip the way he always did. And this time, Chip turned around and delivered one of the most decisive kicks I have ever witnessed. The sound of it carried across the field. Big Red looked genuinely shocked; and that shock wave reverberated through the rest of the herd. Everyone took notice.

And that was it.

From that day forward, no horse ever challenged Chip again. He moved through the herd differently after that. Even though he was one of the smallest animals among them, he carried himself like one of the tallest. Something in him had changed, like he finally remembered who he really was. He had declared, without a word, I will no longer be pushed around.

That was over twenty years ago. Chip is likely long gone. But his lesson has never left me.

I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. His story is not unlike my own. The long stretch of enduring. The slow accumulation of enough. The moment when the cost of staying small finally outweighs the fear of being seen.

That day, that moment, Chip made a decision. He finally stopped overriding something that was already true. His nature reasserted itself. And when it did, the whole herd reorganized around that new reality.

I’ve been feeling something similar stir in myself. A quiet, unhurried resolve that isn’t about fighting anyone, it’s simply about no longer pretending to be smaller than I am. It’s about letting what’s true step forward and take up its rightful space. After all, it is not about the life that I want to live, it is about the life that wants to live in me.

I would be willing to bet you know the feeling I’m describing. The long stretch. The accumulated weight. The moment something finally says: enough.

When that moment comes, and I know it will, I hope you will join me in the spirit of Chip.

Turn around. Draw the line.

Then walk forward like you own the field.

Picture a circus elephant. Six tons of muscle, sinew and raw biological force: an animal capable of uploading trees, toppling walls, of reshaping the physical world with a single, deliberate movement. Yet, in the quiet hours between performances, this creature stands perfectly still, one leg tethered to a small wooden stake in the ground by a rope that, if tested, would snap like a thread.

It doesn’t test it. It hasn’t tried in years. It most likely never will.

This practice has been documented for centuries across South and Southeast Asian elephant training traditions. When the elephant is young, small and terrified and newly taken from the wild, trainers chain its leg to a heavy stake driven deep into the ground. The baby elephant pulls. It’s strains. It rages for hours, sometimes days, with everything it has. And every time, the chain holds.

The lesson is encoded at the deepest levels of its nervous system: struggle is useless. There is no point in trying.

The elephant stops trying. And gradually, nature does its magic and the elephant grows. It’s body becomes large and strong, a being possessing an absolute force that rivals every other creature on the planet. The chain that once held it by necessity now holds it by memory alone. Trainers have documented that a fully grown adult elephant, capable of uploading trees, will stand compliant when tethered by a simple rope to a flimsy stake. The physical constraint of infancy has become a psychological one in maturity.

The prison that once had walls made of iron now has walls made entirely of memory. Of early defeat. Of a story rehearsed so many times it became distinguishable from truth.

The elephant isn’t stupid or flawed. The elephant is me, it is us.

II. The Science of the Cage

What the elephant trainers discovered empirically over centuries, a young psychologist named Martin Seligman proved in a laboratory in 1967, and in doing so, accidentally mapped the architecture of human suffering.

Seligman wasn’t looking for it. He was working with dogs at the University of Pennsylvania, studying classical conditioning. Three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. The first group was simply harnessed and released, no shocks, no stress. The second group received electric shocks they could stop by pressing a lever. The third group received the exact same shocks as the second group, identical in timing and intensity, but their lever did nothing. Their shocks subsided only when their paired dog in group 2 pressed its lever. To the third group, relief was completely random, completely outside their control.

In a second phase of the experiment, all three groups were placed in a shuttle box, a chamber divided by a low barrier they could easily jump. The shocks came again. The dogs in the first and second groups quickly figured it out and left to safety. However, the third group, the ones who had learned that their actions were meaningless, laid down on the floor and took the shocks. They whimpered. They accepted the pain. They didn’t try.

The barrier was low. The exit was obvious. And yet, they did not try.

Seligman recognized this phenomenon over and over and called it learned helplessness. This is a condition in which an organism, having experienced uncontrollable adversity, loses the capacity to recognize or act on opportunities for escape, even when those opportunities become real and available. Fifty years of subsequent research has confirmed and deepened these findings. Later neuroscience revealed that passivity in response to uncontrollable threat is actually the default response. What is learned, and what can be lost, is the belief in one’s own agency. The brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, when functioning, detects controllability and suppresses that passive default. Learned helplessness, in a real sense, is a shutdown of the circuitry of agency.

In human subjects, the phenomenon replicated exactly. People exposed to inescapable loud noise, where button-pressing changed nothing, later failed to use a simple lever to stop noise in an entirely different task, long after the conditions had changed and control was genuinely available. The body was free. But the mind remained in the original cage.

Seligman also found something that redirected the rest of his career: roughly one in three subjects never broke. One and three dogs never laid down. One and three humans, no matter what they were subjected to, kept looking for the way out. They were, by every external measure, in the same situation. But something in their relationship to obstacles (what Seligman would later call explanatory style) made them constitutionally resistant to the lesson of helplessness.

He became so fascinated by the subjects that he left the study of pathology entirely and developed a new term called learned optimism. In doing so, he became the founder of positive psychology and these outliers became the subject.

III. The Human Inheritance

Human beings, like baby elephants, are born without a single limiting belief. We arrive in this world wanting, yearning, reaching: creatures of pure and unconditioned potential, having not yet learned that we were too much, or not enough, or that certain dreams and desires belonged to other kinds of people.

We had to learn all of that. We were taught it, sometimes cruelly, sometimes with the best intentions in the world, sometimes by people who were only repeating what had been taught to them. A parent’s fearful warning. A teachers offhand dismissal. A first failure that arrived before we had the armor to contextualize it. An early heartbreak. A community that had a very fixed, very small vision of what we were allowed to become.

The chain was real then. We were genuinely small. The stake was fixed in the ground.

But here is the horror and the miracle, wrapped together in the same fact: you are not small anymore. You have been growing for years, decades, in ways you cannot fully perceive from inside the cage of the mind. And the cage that once required steel walls now requires only your continued belief in them. You are, right now, a being of extraordinary capacity pressing gently against a rope that could have snapped years ago, never quite summoning the courage to discover what happens when you really pull.

What this looks like in a life:

• The career you don’t pursue because you once tried and we’re told no

• The conversation you don’t have because a version of it went badly at age 9

• The love you don’t fully give or receive because early experiences taught you it comes with a hidden cost

• The version of yourself you don’t inhabit because you absorbed, early on, that it was too much… or not enough

• The creative work you don’t make because you’re still waiting for the permission that will never arrive

None of these are character flaws. They are adaptive responses that outlived their usefulness. They are Seligman’s dogs lying on the floor of the shuttle box, taking the shocks because their nervous system, drawing on real past experience, has concluded that trying is a waste of time.

The conclusion was once correct but not any longer. However, the nervous system does not regularly check for updates.

IV. The Cure Is Not What You Think

Seligman tried everything to help the conditioned dogs recover their agency. He demonstrated the escape route. He called to them from the other side of the barrier. He offered rewards. He removed the shocks entirely and let them sit in peace on the safe side. None of it worked.

What finally worked was this: he physically picked them up and moved their legs through the motions of escape, again and again, until they had experienced the new reality enough times that the mind began to accept it. The insight had to be embodied before it could be believed. Being shown or coaxed through the door was insufficient, the body had to move through it.

Think about what happens when exercising. You might imagine the body that you want, strong and capable, but this does not come from thinking about lifting weights. It does not come from reading about progressive overload or watching videos, or planning the perfect program. It comes from going and lifting weights that are slightly heavier than you think you can handle. The growth is in the micro tears and on the days when you do the work when you don’t want to or think you can’t. The gains live in the going, not knowing. You never know until you go. In every test is evidence against the story your old self once told.

The same mechanism governs every invisible chain. We do not think our way out of learned helplessness, we must act. The dogs did not recover through insight, they recovered when their bodies were physically moved through the exit until the nervous system registered that it was real, that it was possible, that the cage is not what they thought it was.

This will feel like the old fear at first. It will feel like a warning signal, but it is the sound of new neural pathways being written. That feeling of danger is actually the feeling of becoming free.

V. What We Can Do Now

Not tomorrow. Not when conditions improve. Not when you feel ready, because readiness is itself a false ceiling, a learned response, a story the conditioned mind tells to stay safe within the cage. Here, concretely, is what the science and the lived experience both point towards:

1. Name one chain out loud.

Write it down, say it to someone you trust, bring it to light outside the privacy of your own mind. Limiting beliefs feed on silence and in the sense that they are simply objective reality. The moment you name the belief as a belief creates the first crack in the chain. Seligman’s research showed that identifying your explanatory style, is the necessary first step towards revising it. I have a “fears list” in my phone. Every time a fear or negative thought comes up I write it down. Then, once per month, I meet with my mentor and say them outloud. He then does something I had not experience up until then, he thanks me. He acknowledges the courage that it took to name them out loud to another person. There is no trying to fix or reason away the fears. They are brought to the light of day and in that light they are dissolved.

2. Take one action the belief says you cannot take.

Not the whole terrifying leap. Take one step beyond your condition ceiling. We need one embodied experience of exceeding the limit to begin rewriting the neural model. One rep, that is all. One conversation. One submission. One pull on the rope. The evidence has to be physical and personal, not conceptual.

3. Find someone who is already free.

In Seligman’s resilience research, the subjects who never succumb to helplessness were not extraordinary people, they had simply never been conditioned into the belief that their actions were meaningless. Their visible, embodied freedom is not a taunt. It is proof of what is possible. See people who are living the life your soul is asking for, not to compare yourself to them, but to let your nervous system register that the exit is real and that people walk through it.

4. Expect the fear and move through it anyway.

The goal is not the elimination of fear. Fear is information, not instruction. It tells you that what you’re doing is unfamiliar, that you are operating outside your conditioned range, that new territory is being mapped. That is precisely where you want to be. The fear is the sound of the program updating.

5. Understand that the consequences are larger than you.

Every time you genuinely break a limit you change what the people watching you believe as possible. Children, friends, strangers who follow your work: they are calibrating their own sense of possibility partly against what they see you attempt. The generational transmission of limitation is real. So is the generational transmission of courage. You are not just liberating yourself. You are becoming proof of what is possible.

VI. The Final Word

I’m writing this to be published into the world for others to read. But I am, most importantly, writing it for myself.

I have spent years as an actor and a storyteller learning how to embody other people’s truth, to inhabit their certainty, their grief, their courage, their hunger. I am only now, at the edge of something I don’t yet have a name for, beginning the harder and more necessary work of embodying my own. I know what the conditioned walls feel like from the inside. I know the strange comfort and the excruciating pain of a limit that I stop fighting. I know what it is like to feel a soul pressing outward against the walls of a life that no longer fits.

But I also know what it felt like, the last time I pulled hard enough to find out what happens. The stake snapped like a twig. I stumbled forward into open space. The stumbling felt like flying.

You are powerful beyond anything your current belief system has been willing to let you see. The chain was real. It held you when you were small, for good reason. But that was then, and you are not small anymore, and the stake is loosening. It is now time, past time, to find out what you were always capable of.

Pull.

“What have I gotten myself into?” I thought the deeper we traveled into the jungle.

The call to come here had arrived several weeks earlier while living in Spain. A feminine voice kept calling to me in moments of silence: “Come to me, I want to make you into a man…” as images of the Brazilian jungle flashed before my mind’s eye.

I had heard voices before. This one was undeniably clear.

The pull towards this place had been building for years. In Chicago, I had met a friend who had been living in Brazil for many years. He would tell me of the experiences of Ayahuasca. He would tell me how he would spend days with the indigenous peoples of Brazil, mixing this brew along with them and through its power would merge with nature. I was enthralled. My head filled with his stories. But stories are not the actual experience. Nothing could have prepared me for that.

The Toyota rolled to a stop in front of a wooden gate inscribed with the title: “Instituto de Almas Livres” – Institute of Free Souls.

“Do you have everything?” asked Victor, my driver.

Yoga mat. Blankets. Bug spray. An extra set of clothes in case I shit myself… Check, check, check, check.

“Yes,” I said.

He gave me a knowing smile, turned the car around, and drove away into the night. I watched the red tail lights of the little Toyota until they vanished into the black of the jungle.

No turning back now.

I pushed the little door open and walked inside.

—

As I walked towards the central structure of the Institute, an open circular structure with a roof and a little room on the back, a young man in white approached me. His bearing was gentle and warm. Thank God.

“Hello, welcome.” He said in english. “Is this your first time with the medicine?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Wonderful. It’s going to be amazing.” He pressed his palms together at his heart. “May God be gentle with you and show you what you need to see.” He bowed and walked past me into the woods to gather more supplies.

I made my way into the circular structure where people had already placed their yoga mats around the central fire. My stomach was already churning. I was nervous and I had no idea what was about to happen. I had no idea how the medicine would affect me, the thought of purging and possibly shitting myself was a terror my ego would not let go.

After introductions, prayers and instructions by the shaman, some in English, some in Portuguese, the ceremony began. One of the women came around to administer Hapeh to each of us - ceremonial fine ground tobacco that is blown deep into the nostrils that delivers a jolt of nicotine to the receiver, both stimulating and grounding. Then, one at a time, we were asked to come up to the altar where the shaman was pouring the medicine into little cups. Eventually, it was my turn. Here we go.

I walked toward the altar. The shaman staring deep into my soul through the thickest glasses I had ever seen.

“May God show you what you need to know,” he said as he handed me my first cup of Ayahuasca, the highly viscous liquid shimmering a purple hue against the light of the fire.

I took it in my hands, held it to my heart and tried to utter a prayer that I can’t remember. It was all feeling at that point.

The smell almost made me gag before it reached my lips. The taste was even worse.

I went back to my mat, sat down and waited, doing everything I could to keep this caustic liquid down long enough for it to do its work.

—

About forty-five minutes later, it began.

No human language has evolved fully enough to describe what happened next. The structures of my ordinary consciousness… the narrator, the name, the carefully maintained story of who I am and what I fear… all began to come apart. The layers of my ego began to melt like ice in a warm spring breeze. What remained when those facades fell away was not nothing. It was everything. Pure observation. Pure awareness.

All night it felt like I was plugged into the current of existence. There were moments of expansion so complete that the word boundary became meaningless. Time had no meaning. It was like I had drank eternity from a cup.

I was shown what I had asked to see. Energy was not a metaphor. The body truly does keep the score — not just from this lifetime, but from a lineage that stretches back generations, waiting for the right moment to be felt and released.

That medicine wrung me out like a soaked rag. There were moments I expanded beyond fear, beyond time, beyond the shame that had bound parts of my soul. There were also moments of shock, dread, and raw confrontation. Then, there were moments I felt I needed to confront… issues I thought I would inevitably be shamed for… but in the light of the medicine, those issues were dissolved into utter grace. Grace… a word I had heard ad nauseum in religious settings… now, a truly felt experience.

I saw that death is not an ending, but a transition.

Everything is energy. Energy is everything. It is never destroyed — only transformed.

There were times when I was boundless, all constraints were dissolved. There were times when I was on my mat looking up at the heavens, fully connected with God. There were times I seemed to be somewhere above this earth – watching this small, luminous blue orb floating in a sea of space, impossibly precious, impossibly fragile. There were times I was in the presence of something ancient and immense: beings made of stars and stillness, glowing in blue and indigo and green hues, perfectly at peace. An image of what it is like to be eternal.

—

What is this? What is any of this… this life, this body, the mechanics of it all? Who am I? What am I in the context of all these things?

Those questions had been with me since I was old enough to ask them. I asked them as a child lying in the dark. I asked them in every church and every classroom that promised an answer but delivered only doctrine instead. I asked them on planes, in majestic nature and concrete cities, at 3 am in conversations in which I was half awake but still ever curious.

That night I was given answers.

In one evening, my conscious mind was dismantled and given a language beyond words. Patterns. Geometry. An underlying operating system of reality.

The universe is not silent. It sings. Every particle, every quark participates in a song that is always playing, if only we are willing to listen.

And I... I get to dance amidst this celestial symphony.

—

This experience did not give me conclusions. Quite the opposite — each answer opened the door to ten more questions, and I have been living with those questions ever since. Three years later, I am still unpacking it. Still sitting with what I saw. Still learning what it means to carry unanswerable questions.

This process has not been easy. Far from it. The medicine did not hand me peace and then send me home. It handed me myself — all of it, the ancient grief, the fear, and the shame that bound me to an unlived life. It made me excruciatingly aware. The years since that night have required more courage, more patience, more willingness to sit with discomfort than anything that came before.

Despite tasting eternity, this medicine gave me an intense urgency to live this life fully with every part of my being. This life is not a rehearsal. It is astonishingly, almost excruciatingly, short — a candle flame in the night. We are here for such a brief and bewildering moment. And the whole of existence, the song beneath everything, the current that runs through every living thing, it is not somewhere “out there.” It is here. It has always been here. It is available to us right now, in this breath, in this moment, if we are willing to be still enough to feel it.

For now, that is enough.

When the tow truck driver arrived, he didn’t exactly greet me like I was checking into the Four Seasons. He was gruff. Cold. Direct. Short sentences. One-word answers.

All we needed to do was get the car to the shop, I told myself.

I followed his instructions and took one conscious breath after another. Don’t abandon the moment. Breathe. Stay present. You are safe. All is well.

Once the car was loaded, we got into the cab of the truck and pulled away. We drove in silence for a few minutes. The warmth of the cab began to soften the space between us.

“Are you working tomorrow?” I asked.

The forecast for the next day was a high of negative two degrees.

“Every day,” he said. “Bills. Bills. They follow you everywhere.”

I asked how long he’d been driving.

Twenty years.

I asked what he’d seen in that time.

He told me stories—chaotic, disturbing ones. Twisted metal. Dead bodies. People who had taken their own lives behind the wheel of a car.

Each word landed heavily. A sobering reminder of how much suffering moves quietly through the world.

Then he began to talk about his mother.

When she died, had to take her to the morgue himself.

“These are the things they don’t tell you,” he said.

“Mothers are special. They carry us in their bodies for nine months. We’re a part of them.”

I asked how long it had been.

Ten years.

“I wish I could call her,” he said. “Just to hear her voice one more time.”

A lump formed in my throat.

We talked about family.

About healing.

About forgiveness.

Then he said something that struck me.

“After the healing happens,” he said, “you can finally enjoy your parents.”

I thought about my own path toward healing. The work it took. The time. The tears. How, once forgiveness arrived, I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner—while knowing I couldn’t have. It takes the time it takes.

As we spoke, I looked out the window.

In the middle of Lincoln Park, a bald eagle flew above us.

In Chicago.

I pointed it out. We shared a moment of quiet astonishment—something neither of us expected to see. This powerful bird soaring over the city, seemingly untouched by the human drama unfolding below.

Goosebumps spread through my body.

Life doesn’t reveal itself to force.

It reveals itself to attention.

When we plant a seed, we don’t yell at it for not being a tree yet. It unfolds in its own time—eventually becoming what it was meant to be while never losing its essence along the way.

I am grateful for the flat.

I am grateful for the souls I encountered because of it.

And I am grateful I could call my mother.

Every moment, every breath of this life is precious.

Life magically unfolds when we meet it with attention and presence.

Media as Medicine

Most of us underestimate the power of the media we consume.

Images, sounds, stories, and language do not simply entertain us—they shape our nervous systems, our sense of identity, and our understanding of what it means to be human. Media tells us what is normal, what is desirable, what is possible, and—often subtly—what we should fear.

Over time, it becomes a kind of psychological diet.

Some media nourishes. Much of it numbs. Some of it fragments our attention and separates us from ourselves, from one another, and from the living world we belong to. Very little of it asks us to slow down, to feel, or to remember who we are beneath the noise.

The idea of media as medicine arises from this observation.

Medicine, at its root, is anything that restores balance, vitality, and coherence. It does not always feel good in the moment. It does not always offer easy answers. But it supports healing—individually and collectively—by addressing causes rather than symptoms.

The media I seek to create is rooted in this understanding.

My life has been guided by a persistent question: What is going on here?
What is this experience we call life? What does it mean to be human? Why do we suffer? Why do we long for connection, meaning, beauty, and truth? And how might we live more vital, integrated, honest, and expansive lives within the seeming constraints of being human?

That question has led me down many paths.

I’ve studied psychology and biology in an attempt to understand behavior, emotion, and the nervous system. I’ve explored neuroscience to better grasp perception, attention, and consciousness. I’ve spent time with religious traditions and Eastern philosophies that point toward transcendence, surrender, and compassion. I’ve practiced meditation and somatic disciplines that bring awareness back into the body. I’ve learned from indigenous cultures that understands humans as inseparable from the land, the elements, and one another. I’ve also had experiences with the intentional and reverent use of plant medicines and shamanism that revealed just how thin the veil is between what we think we are and what we actually might be.

None of these paths offered a final answer.

What they did offer was a deeper appreciation for mystery—and a growing clarity that healing does not come from domination, accumulation, or performance. It comes from integration. From truth. From reconnection.

And yet, I grew up inside a cultural narrative that told a different story.

Like many people, I absorbed the idea that worth is measured externally. That value is proven through productivity, success, and monetary wealth. That safety, freedom, and even love are conditional upon achievement. I learned—quietly but thoroughly—that to live the life I wanted, I needed to become financially rich. That my significance as a human being could be tallied in numbers.

Almost three years ago, I was walking under a full moon on a night pilgrimage from Trancoso to Arraial d’Ajuda in Bahia, Brazil. I was walking with strangers, silence, sand, and moonlight. At one point, a woman I had just met turned to me and asked, “Bradley, what is the deepest desire of your heart?”

The question stopped me.

I remember looking up at the moon, as if it might answer for me. What came to mind immediately was not love, service, or truth—but money. Becoming rich. Financial freedom. Security. Proof.

And yet, at that moment, my bank account was moving steadily in the opposite direction. The identity I had built—one tied to future success—felt hollow. The gap between who I thought I needed to be and who I actually was had never felt wider.

That moment didn’t condemn me. It clarified something.

I realized how deeply I had confused worth with monetary wealth. How thoroughly I had outsourced my sense of value to systems that do not measure aliveness, kindness, integrity, or coherence. And how many of us are quietly living under the same spell. It is the spell of forgetting our Divinity, that we are made of the very same thing as the stars.

The work I am committed to now—through film, sound, writing, and performance—is an attempt to respond to that realization.

Media as medicine is not about preaching or persuading. It is about creating experiences that help people feel themselves again. That invite presence instead of dissociation. That make space for grief, forgiveness, curiosity, and wonder. That remind us we belong—to our Souls, to our bodies, to one another, and to the planet that sustains us.

I believe the stories we tell and the images we circulate matter deeply. I believe media can either deepen separation or support remembrance. It can either exploit our attention or help restore it. It can either anesthetize us or awaken something essential.

The game I am in is a long one.

It is not about virality or domination of attention. It is about coherence. About telling the truth as clearly as I can, in forms that invite reflection rather than reaction. About contributing to a world where people are more connected to themselves, more compassionate toward one another, and more reverent toward the Earth.

This space is where I will share essays, reflections, podcasts, videos and process notes from that ongoing inquiry. Not conclusions. Not answers. But honest explorations.

If you’re here, I suspect you’re asking some version of the same questions.

And perhaps, together, we can remember what it means to be human.