I came home tired, full, elated, and more of myself than when I left. As a dear friend once put it, with my “soul battery on full”.

I want to write about what’s actually happening at gatherings like this. In part because most people misunderstand them, often dismissed as unconscious hedonism. And in part because the transformative power of dance, music, and human connection deserves to be realized by more people.

I believe that what modern culture knows as the rave is, in fact, one of the oldest continuous human spiritual technologies. We’ve simply changed its name and stopped calling it what it is: collective transcendence.

All photos, except with the author pictured, are courtesy of Devo Frohne.

For most of human history, when a people wanted to celebrate, or needed to grieve, or mark the change of a season, or pass something on to the young, they gathered. They may have lit a fire. They moved. Drums, rattles, instruments, and voices kept a beat, and everyone danced. It is one of the most well-documented human behaviours from time immemorial.

Ecstatic collective dance appears in nearly every culture that has ever existed, on every inhabited continent, across the entire span of recorded time. The San of the Kalahari dance for hours to enter a healing trance. Sufi dervishes whirl until the self merges with something greater. Congregations across the American South shake, sway, and cry out. The details differ enormously, but the underlying technology is identical: rhythm, repetition, community, and sustained movement, done long enough to loosen the threads of the imaginary, separate self.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim gave this experience a name over a century ago. He called it “collective effervescence”: the electric sense of something larger than yourself that arises when a group moves and feels as one. He argued it was the very origin of religion. Bodies gathered and moved together, generating a feeling so charged that early humans could only explain it by pointing to the divine.

For most of human history, we had regular access to this. It was woven into the calendar. The harvest dance. The funeral rite. The seasonal festival. It wasn’t odd or infrequent, it was integral to everyday life. Then, gradually, much of the modern world culturally ostracized or banned it entirely.

The historian Barbara Ehrenreich traces this arc in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Her central point is that ecstatic communal celebration is not some foreign or “savage” import into Western culture, it is native to it. Medieval Christianity, she argues, was once effectively a danced religion, its calendar full of festivals, processions, and revelry, with roots reaching all the way back to the Greek worship of Dionysus.

Then came the long suppression. During the Reformation, Protestant reformers came to see games, dancing, and every form of collective pleasure as hedonistic and ungodly. Carnival, the great annual release valve of medieval life, was criminalized. What had once been sacred was now apparently sinful or primitive.

As Europe stamped out its traditions of collective joy, it saw the historical rise of what people at the time called melancholy, and what we would now call depression. She doesn’t claim one simply caused the other, but she asks a question worth sitting with: what happens to a species wired for communal ecstasy when you take away nearly every occasion it once had to experience it?

This suppression didn’t stop at home. As European powers colonized the world, they carried this aversion to joy with them, banning the drumming and dancing of enslaved Africans, outlawing the ceremonial dances of Indigenous peoples, treating ecstatic rituals everywhere as something to be corrected and suppressed.

This is why, even now, a grown adult dancing with total abandon can read to us as slightly embarrassing, or unhinged, or juvenile. This judgment is not natural, it is conditional. It is an installed belief.

Behaviours that are inherent and integral to a species and culture can only be suppressed for so long before they re-emerge. And so it returns, as these things always do, wearing new clothes and in a slightly updated form. The drums become a wall of speakers. The shaman becomes a DJ reading the energy of the dance floor, deciding when to build tension and when to release it. The tribe becomes a field of strangers who will, at least for a time, treat each other like family. The trance state that a San healer enters through hours of rhythmic movement is the same one a person finds on the dance floor at four in the morning, perhaps aided by MDMA or mushrooms or ketamine, past self-consciousness, arms open, no longer entirely sure where they end and everyone else begins.

We call it a party. Our ancestors would have recognized it as ceremony.

Leaving Friends Club and returning to my one-bedroom apartment, alone, I felt a great sadness settle in. The sadness reminded me why so many of us are depressed and unwell: we live in a culture that has largely forgotten how to gather and be together. That neither encourages nor makes space for the simple yet ancient things: to dance regularly, to move our animal bodies, and to support each other. The chance to practice being in community with 350 people was one of that weekend’s great gifts. It reminded me how far our default arrangement has drifted from what humans actually need.

The hyper-individualist life most of us lead would have been unthinkable for nearly all of human history. For hundreds of thousands of years, to be cast out of the group was a death sentence. We evolved shoulder to shoulder, sleeping in close quarters, raising children collectively, eating from the same fire. And now, in the span of a few generations, we’ve built a world where a person can live alone, eat alone, commute alone, scroll alone, and die alone having been profoundly isolated in the middle of a city of millions. We have engineered a level of isolation our nervous systems are not equipped for nor prefer. It’s no wonder we feel so unwell, because we were never meant to do this by ourselves.

Which brings me back to something I keep circling. That weekend in the mountains was an experience no previous member of my family line could likely have ever dreamed of. They fought and worked through blood, sweat, and toil to survive. Whatever leisure they found was squeezed into the margins of lives organized almost entirely around necessity. The idea of travelling to a remote place for four days for no reason other than to dance, to feel, and celebrate would have been unthinkable to them. Not because they wouldn’t have loved it like I do, but because it was so far outside the realm of possibilities in the face of the need to simply survive.

I am the first in my entire family line with the time, the safety, the means, and the permission to do something like this. That is no small thing. It is the accumulated result of generations of relatives I will never meet, absorbing hardships so that someone downstream might have a life with freedom in it. They worked and struggled and died and survived and brought me to this unspeakable moment. So now when I dance, I dance for them too.

I try to remember that I am not only dancing for myself. My great-great-great-grandparents did not get to lose themselves in a field of speakers at four in the morning, surrounded by strangers turned friends. But some part of them is in this body of mine, and this body was out there on that earthen dance floor, shimmering with gratitude, entirely alive.

The author in the bucket hat and (most of) his Friends Club crew.

To those that might call this hedonism or escapism: we are not running from anything. We are recovering something. After centuries of being told to sit down, be quiet, and behave, we are the ones who finally get to dance again. We are not following anyone else’s idea of acceptable fun, joy, or connection any longer. We will determine that for ourselves now, alongside the people we love.

So let’s fucking dance already. Find the room, the field, the kitchen at noon, the wedding where everyone is still seated while the music plays. Find the others who will move alongside you without giving a shit about what looks cool. You don’t need a mountain valley or a four-day festival, though I highly recommend both when you can manage it. All you need is your own animal body, a beat, and the willingness to enjoy your own existence.

This is one of the oldest things we know how to do. Our ancestors did it for millennia before the impulse was suppressed, and somewhere in you, it is still alive. May it always be.

All you need to do to bring it back is start moving.

Inner Healing Intelligence. Inner Healer. Self-Healing Capacity. These terms have become well-known in psychedelic medicine work and therapy, and for good reason. They point to something fundamental and true: there lives an innate wisdom and capacity for healing inside each of us, without exception.

If you fell and scraped your knee on the sidewalk, you might clean the wound, apply an antiseptic, and cover it with a bandage. Then you would step back and allow your body’s natural healing process to unfold on its own without needing to direct it. Your body knows how to close the wound and grow new skin, just as it knows how to breathe, digest food, and perform countless other functions. In most cases, interfering with these processes only slows them down or prevents them altogether.

A seed offers us the same lesson. Each one already contains the whole plant it will eventually become, encoded with instructions it does not need to be taught or receive from outside of itself. All that it requires are the right conditions: sunlight, water, good soil. A skilled gardener recognizes and tends to these conditions. They don’t dig up the seed every few days to inspect its progress or instruct it on how to grow. That would only disrupt what the seed already knows how to do.

The limits of this self-healing capacity do not stop at the body, but extend to the psyche as well.

Carl Rogers, who brought us person-centered therapy, spent his life spreading the understanding that every person, given the right conditions, moves toward health and self-actualization. He called it “the actualizing tendency”, the same force that pulls a plant toward light. His work guided therapists to set down the role of expert and instead prioritize offering an authentic quality of presence: safety, warmth, honesty, and an “unconditional positive regard” for each client. Aided by these conditions, people don’t need to be directed or coerced toward wholeness. They do that themselves.

Psychedelic work has inherited this understanding and built upon it. Stanislav Grof, one of the godfathers of the modern psychedelic movement, spent more than fifty years watching the psyche heal itself in non-ordinary states, first through his clinical work conducting thousands of LSD therapy sessions and later through breathwork. What he consistently observed is that the mind doesn’t surface its wounds at random. Given enough safety, it brings forward exactly what is most charged and ripe for processing and repair in an order it chooses on its own. Grof called this the “inner radar”. He described the psychedelics themselves as “non-specific amplifiers”, turning up the volume on whatever lies latent within us.

This changes what some may first assume a guide, coach, or therapist is for. The task becomes smaller and requires greater discernment at the same time: keep the person safe, stay close and attuned, and trust the unfolding process even when you don’t know where it’s going. Grof was clear on this. You support whatever rises whether or not you understand it. The understanding, when it comes, comes later, and it belongs to the client first and the guide second.

When research and therapeutic access to the psychedelic medicines was shut down in the 1970s thanks to Nixon and The War on Drugs, Grof and his wife Christina went looking for another way in. They found that fast, rhythmic breathing, evocative music, and a carefully-held space could access the same depths without drugs. They named the practice “holotropic”, from the Greek for moving toward wholeness. The name itself carries the entire understanding, that the healing impulse was never derived from the psychoactive plant or chemical alone. It was and is always innate to each person, just waiting for right conditions for it to come most alive.

The contemporary model for psychedelic-assisted therapy has built its method on this same foundation. Therapists are trained to follow rather than lead, to trust that a person’s own inner healing intelligence will move toward what needs tending if they stay close while staying out of the way. The discipline is in the restraint.

Any seasoned therapist, facilitator, or guide knows that an insight a person reaches on their own takes root in a way that a borrowed or imposed insight never will. What someone is told, they can forget. What they discover, they tend to keep. When a guide rushes in with an interpretation, however elegant, they risk replacing the person’s intrinsic knowing with something that belongs to someone else. Instead, the guide’s steady presence and careful questions allow a person’s own experience to unfold, led by the wisdom already present in them.

Restraint is good technique. It’s also an ethical obligation. A person in an expanded state is unusually open. The ordinary defences soften. Suggestion lands deeper, meaning attaches faster, and the presence of the guide grows large in a way that can feel authoritative. That openness is part of what makes healing, but also harm, possible. A guide who imposes their own beliefs, their own interpretations, their own unfinished business, can lead a client or participant to a place of disempowerment. This is a form of harm that most guides or therapists aren't even aware of as a possibility, because it is not the acute, obvious form of harm like touching someone sexually. It’s the kind of harm that even the most well-meaning person can unintentionally cause.

And of course, if we could reach this healing or self-actualization completely on our own, there would be little need for guides, trip sitters, therapists, or traditional healers, but our human nervous system does not restore itself in a vacuum. A dysregulated system settles in the presence of a steady one. We borrow each other’s calm before we can find our own, the same way an infant learns to regulate by resting against a parent who is already at peace. This is what attunement offers: the safety of another human being who is present, unhurried, and unafraid of what is rising. As Licensed Clinical Social Worker and psychedelic educator Meghan Kennedy observes, “Attunement with another, knowing that another human is there, provides safety — allowing one’s inner healing intelligence to activate. Whatever wants to then come up is allowed to happen.”

So to sit with another person through a psychedelic or transformative experience is, before anything else, to attune to them. To be fully present. The work is to build what an infant needs and an adult never outgrows: a holding environment reliable and open enough that a person can let go inside of it. As sun and water and soil draw a seed into bloom, this kind of attention draws out what is already waiting inside a person. Over time, they begin to find the source on their own. It stays with them after the session ends and the medicine has worn off.

None of this is new. Long before Western psychology gave it language, traditional healers understood that the medicine works through the conditions the helper stewards. In many lineages, the work begins with the helper’s own preparation and initiation: the diet, solitude, the discipline of clearing out oneself so that what passes through the channel is clean. As Shipibo curandero Jose Lopez Sanchez has said, “If you’re going to provide and share the medicine, which is sacred to us, you have to do so with a clean heart, with a spirit that’s aligned. We can’t share medicine if we’re caught in the turmoil of anger, envy, revenge, hate, or sadness.”

We weed our own garden first so that other plants can grow. Whatever we have not faced in ourselves does not stay hidden, it leaks into the field as impatience, as the need to fix, to impose solutions, the pull to be admired, as a discomfort with grief or rage or silence that makes us try to manage what should be left alone. Learning to tell what is ours from what belongs to the person in our care is a capacity that deepens only with experience, training, and time.

Transformation is not something we can force on another person, or do for them. What we can do is offer a space of care where each person is met as they are. By tending to safety, trust, and attunement, by staying in right relationship with the people who trust us, we help midwife each person toward their own wholeness.

When I returned to university at thirty-five to study anti-oppressive social work, part of retraining to practice psychedelic-assisted care skilfully and ethically, one lesson outlasted all the others: each person is the expert in their own life. Anytime I catch myself feeling certain that I know what someone needs in order to get "better," or to suffer less, I take that certainty as a signal. That is the moment to step back, to take care not to get in the way, and to become curious again about what assumptions I might be making and all that I still don't know. To return to what Zen teacher Shunryū Suzuki might call “beginner’s mind”.

What I learned in those classrooms has stayed with me wherever I go. The trust we extend to a person in the depths of a psychedelic journey is the same trust we might extend to anyone we meet anywhere, and to ourselves. To believe that every person carries the power and wisdom for their own becoming, and to make room for it, is one of the most essential and simple gifts we can offer each other.

A seed carries the whole of what it can become, and asks only for the right conditions to grow into it. So do we. Held with care, we move toward the wholeness that was ours from the very beginning.

If something here calls to you, and you feel ready to continue this work in yourself, you can find a way in at Enfold. It’s one of the places I help hold that door open.

“Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about other people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.”

• Stephen Mitchell translation, pg. 9

I couldn’t put my finger on it then and likely never will, but something in that text awoke something in me. It was the catalyst for what has become a lifelong fascination with Eastern philosophy and contemplative traditions, and eventually, of a daily commitment to meditation. I can’t imagine who I’d be without it.

About a decade passed. My childhood unfolded the way many do: playing sports, doing alright in school, getting into mischief with friends, and (perhaps less commonly) becoming curious about practices and substances that could modulate my conscious experience. And eventually, finding my way to meditation.

I was living in Waterloo, Ontario at the time, a mid-sized city just over an hour west of Toronto, when I spotted a notice on a community bulletin board for beginner meditation classes. My interest piqued, and for some reason my mind drew an instant connection between that flyer and the Tao Te Ching I’d found as a boy. Something stirred in me again, as if to call me toward the next step on the path.

I signed up for the next class, excited to start meditating. (Yes, the nerdiness of that sentence is not lost on me.) There were maybe ten of us, led by an elderly man, bald and soft-spoken. The style was simple and traditional: mindfulness of the breath. This is the most basic form of Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, apparently the original method taught by the Buddha. We were instructed to notice the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nostrils or upper lip. When awareness strayed, we noticed that too, and gently returned to the breath.

I recall recognizing, for the first time, how scattered and squirrelly the mind was. I'd simply never sat still long enough to notice. That was the first discovery: "It's kind of crazy in here." The second came near the end of the session. It was more subtle, almost easy to miss: There was a gap between the thoughts and whatever it was that was noticing them.

Beyond that, there were no internal fireworks. No dramatic flashes of insight. But there was, without a doubt, a quiet certainty: “This is it.” In those twenty or so minutes, I knew with unshakeable clarity that this practice, this sitting silently and following the breath without expectation, would be a cornerstone of my life. It felt as though coming into alignment with the flow and wisdom of life itself wouldn’t be accomplished through more activity alone. It would come through becoming still and simply observing. I once heard the curandera Paula Andrea Patiño Arias say that “the Universe speaks in silence.” That’s as close as I’ve come to naming what landed in me that day.

The class ended. I went home. I got up and went to work the next day. I was in my early twenties, working a construction job I didn’t much enjoy. Frankly, I hated it. There were no miraculous changes to my mind or behaviour. But the usual aggravations, tools malfunctioning, material deliveries running late, just weren’t fazing me the way they used to. The guy I worked alongside had a not-so-charming tendency to shout and scream in frustration, which would usually agitate me. That day, his adult tantrums produced little more than mild bemusement. I knew these irritations would pass, just like thoughts and the in-flow and out-flow of the breath.

A part of me wishes I could tell you that everything changed after that first class. A monastic pilgrimage to India, Thailand, or Nepal, maybe, and a wholesale re-evaluation of my priorities. But it didn’t, at least not at first. The truth is I spent almost the entire following decade of my twenties perilously self-medicating depression and anxiety with alcohol and drugs. I held it together just enough to build a relatively respectable career as a television producer and maintain some close friendships and relationships, but underneath ran a constant undercurrent of chaos and anxiety fuelled by drugs and alcohol. I’ll leave the bulk of that story for another time, but I’ll share this much: Meditation was an anchor to safety and sanity when everything inside and outside of me felt hopeless and unmanageable. It was a refuge I could return to in the midst of any circumstance.

When I gave up alcohol at twenty-nine, meditation was one of several practices that helped me rediscover who I was beneath everything the drinking had veiled. I did it the same way I’d been taught nearly a decade earlier: sitting quietly, observing the breath. I started small. Ten-minute sits. Then twenty, once in the morning and once in the evening. Eventually sitting in my first ten-day silent retreat. Slowly I noticed something. There was more room between stimulus and response, especially in social situations. Like life had slowed down, just a touch. Of course, it wasn’t life that had slowed, it was me. I was becoming calmer, more present, better able to choose how I met a given moment instead of simply reacting. And I don’t mean slower in a dull sense. On the contrary, I was more attuned, effective, and energetic. Meditation was drawing the signal up out of the noise, and the result was a more energized, more emotionally regulated human being.

This is one of the most essential promises of meditation: that we become less fused with the contents of experience (emotions, feelings, sensations) and more identified as the inclusive awareness of it all. It doesn’t mean we become lobotomized automatons, but that we’re less beholden to emotions, especially the afflictive ones: anger, sadness, desire, fear, despair. We develop more choice over what we attend to, because we come to understand that these states are happening, but they aren’t who we are.

Practically speaking, this shows up as far more choice over how, and how much, we let the circumstances of our lives affect us. Instead of snapping at someone who's irritated you, you notice what's happening sooner and choose your response. You're less governed by impulse and more by presence. Imagine someone throws you a ball. The awareness cultivated through meditation slows that ball down as it comes toward you. Suddenly there's time: to catch it cleanly, to step out of its path, and to decide whether you throw it back at all.

The deepest promise is subtler still: a loosening of the grip of the finite self that takes it all so personally, the “me” that might otherwise spend a lifetime defending against every assault, insult, and ache of an ordinary human existence. The feelings still come, but we take them less personally. Nothing to cling to. Nothing to push away. It’s all coming and going in the spacious awareness that is who and what you really are.

So what does my practice look like these days? It’s not especially rigorous, but it’s mine. Most mornings it’s a 30-minute sit, first thing. (Technically the sixth thing, after making the bed, drinking a glass of water, using the toilet, brushing my teeth, and putting on clothes.) On a good day I add another ten to twenty minutes in the afternoon or evening. I attend at least one silent meditation retreat each year, usually about three days in length.

It isn’t perfect, but it works. Some days I let thoughts talk me out of sitting as long as I intend to. Some evenings all I can muster is dinner and the soft glow of a Netflix stream. I’m no saint or ardent yogi, just another human doing his best. Life happens. Work beckons. Laziness and lethargy sometimes win the day.

But the practice remains at the center of things. A lighthouse and a refuge, always there, always guiding me back to what is true. It brings me home, again and again, to a steadiness and quiet joy that was never really missing, only obscured. And from that clearer view, I can meet myself and the people around me with a little more dignity and presence.

You don’t need a mountain or a monastery or a decade of rigorous searching to begin. You just need a few quiet minutes, a breath to follow, and the willingness to be open to whatever arises. That’s the whole practice, in a nutshell. It sounds simple, but the benefits are profound.

The Universe speaks in silence, after all. What might it be waiting to tell you?

If you’d like help with your own practice, you can find a number of my guided meditations on the Insight Timer app here for free. I’m also delighted to offer meditation coaching support.

Here is a non-exhaustive exploration of some important things I’ve learned about responsibly being there for others through these potentially life-changing experiences.

Before I go any further, I would like to first name that my experiences, training, and work have taken place largely within a Western context. I have had the privilege of learning from elders and experts across a multiplicity of traditions, some of them non-Western, but the bulk of my training as a psychedelic guide is informed by Western perspectives. I am profoundly grateful to the Indigenous Peoples and communities that have stewarded and safeguarded the rich and varied traditions of plant medicine from colonialism and erasure throughout history, and for the impact and influence they have had on my own life and journey. Those of us who have the ability to work with these medicines today in the modern world owe our life’s work, and often our own well-being, to the wisdom and sacrifices of Indigenous Peoples.

I was fortunate to have my first psychedelic experience in my late teens. I’m 40 now. The impact then was immeasurable. Until that night, it was as if I’d been living in a walled courtyard. Consuming 3.5 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms was like handing me a ladder. From there I could see well beyond the confines of my personal mind, across a vast horizon that seemed to have no limitations. They assured me that there was something much larger than myself behind it all, that I was fundamentally a part of it, and that it was infinitely loving and safe. They gave me a glimpse of extraordinary states of consciousness I’d faintly heard of through Eastern philosophy and Buddhism. It showed me how arcane and nefarious it was to call these medicines “drugs” and make them illegal. They also showed me, with great tenderness, that deep down I did not completely love myself.

These were only a handful of the realizations offered then. Together, they sparked a fascination for what’s possible for the human mind through self-inquiry, the methodical exploration of consciousness, and the intentional use of psychoactive substances.

That curiosity led to further exploration and study. Eastern traditions. Indigenous perspectives. Western psychology. Drug policy. Anti-oppressive social work. End-of-life care. Facilitator trainings. And — surprise! — more experimentation with psychedelic and plant medicines.

When I first realized I could translate these experiences into helping others by becoming a guide, I imagined the work in lofty, transcendent terms. What a privilege it would be to help people enter states that radically shifted their perspectives and dissolved deep psychological pain, and thereby help change a world sliding backwards into ignorance and tyranny. Those moments do happen. But there is so much more to the work than that.

The ceremony space at Enfold, a transformational retreat center in British Columbia I have worked at for two years.

One of the immediate lessons upon embarking on this vocation was how psychologically demanding it is. You’ll witness extremely heavy material emerging. Repressed traumas. Existential terror. Messy emotional purges. Regression into infantile states. Remaining grounded and composed while another person moves through these harrowing states demands a fortitude of spirit, steadiness, and non-attachment that gets tested in the fire over and over again. I’ve supported survivors of childhood sexual abuse, refugees from conflict regions, a survivor of the Nova Music Festival attack in Israel by Hamas, and these are just a few that come to mind out of hundreds of examples I could draw upon. These are not exceptions to the norm. You must be able to remain in the center while the person you’re caring for ventures through unpredictable terrain. It’s not for everyone.

Cultivating sincere compassion, care, and unconditional positive regard for every person who comes through the door, while also maintaining healthy boundaries, is an ongoing practice. So is tending to yourself with enough care that you do not slowly empty out. This is something I’ve had to learn the hard way. Self-care routines and regularly stepping back from this work need to happen. The nervous system of even the most seasoned therapist, clinician, and guide has its limits, and they will be overrun by work that is too frequent and too intense.

Over the years, I’ve encountered some guides who solely provide the psychedelic experience itself. They offer little preparation and scarce or non-existent aftercare support. There are some limited exceptions to this, but I personally believe that simply providing access to a powerful psychedelic experience is not enough. Without a proper container, the experience can be destabilizing or even re-traumatizing. Access without careful screening, preparation, and integration support is unethical.

In the preparation phase, it’s essential to deeply understand each person’s unique psyche, emotional landscape, existential orientation, and intentions. Knowing where their edges are, what specific fears or complexes they’re working with, is key to creating a ceremonial space that feels safe enough for their process to unfold organically. The foundation of this stage and everything that comes after is built upon authentic trust between guide and participant.

As guides, we must also be self-aware and humble enough to recognize when, in the screening or preparation phase, someone’s needs or condition are beyond the scope of what we can responsibly hold, and to point them toward more appropriate support whenever possible.

The integration period afterward the psychedelic journey is dynamic for each person. For some, the acute integration phase lasts only weeks. For others, months, years, or a lifetime. The psychedelic realm cracks open vast potential, radical perspectives, seismic emotional shifts. Really landing and rooting those revelations into a sustainable life takes patience and skill. Psychedelics are extraordinarily powerful tools that require immense care, integrity, and wisdom in how they are facilitated. They are not, on their own, a cure for anything. They can crack open profound healing and growth. That is just the beginning. The real work happens in folding those experiences into the texture of an actual life, and into one’s own community. As a guide, you’re responsible for helping those in your care identify what they need and what's available to them when they return to ordinary life.

The psychedelic community still has a long way to go in supporting this process, especially inside a world whose conditions so often work directly against the existence of healthy communities.

A post-ceremony integration circle at Holos in Costa Rica during a retreat I co-hosted in 2023.

Let me be unequivocal: no guide or person practicing in this space is beyond reproach. Not the most respected. Not the eldest. Not you. Not me. We are all learning, with our own unique shadows and blind spots. Honest peer relationships, supervision, and an ongoing commitment to one’s own inner work and learning are required to do this work ethically.

The work invites a particular kind of inflation. You hold space for people in the most vulnerable states they will ever knowingly enter. They look at you with a trust that can be intoxicating if you’re not careful. The stakes are high, the territory is non-ordinary, and the cultural framework that would normally hold a professional accountable barely exists in this field yet. The only real correction available is the one you and your peers actively build into the practice.

Peer supervision is not optional. Honest self-reflection is not optional. Being genuinely open to constructive criticism from the people around you and elders is not optional. These are the structures that keep the work clean.

There is another dimension of this work that no training can ever prepare you for. It emerges from one's own inner work and accumulates through experience. A felt sense that something is shifting in the room before anything visible confirms it. A pull toward stillness when every protocol says to intervene. A quiet knowing arriving below the level of thought that this person needs something other than what was planned. Or some intangible signal that you are not meant to support this particular person in session.

Call it intuition, attunement, or somatic intelligence. Whatever the name, it is real, and learning to trust it is part of becoming a skilled guide. For many of us, that learning arrives the hard way, by dismissing it as irrational and living with the consequences of not listening the first time it tries to signal something important.

This path is steeped in paradox. Simultaneously cosmic and mundane. Rapturous and humble. Numinous, and requiring meticulous attention to logistical details. While psychedelics can part the curtains of one’s consciousness, the real craft is in showing up wholeheartedly for the person in front of you.

There have been many moments of doubt. More than a few occasions wondering if I am up for the responsibility, energy, and hard work this role demands. The work has stretched me in ways I did not know were possible.

And yet, witnessing the healing and transformation in those I have walked alongside makes all the sacrifices worth it. For those with the calling and aptitude for it, I can think of no more meaningful path than this one.

As psychedelic guides, we are midwives to rebirth. We help shed old skins and habitual patterns so that something more honest, integrated, and up-to-date can emerge. Birth can be messy and painful, and never as simple as we’d like. Helping people navigate that complexity with tenderness and equanimity is perhaps the greatest challenge and gift of this craft. It will change you in ways that no other life path will.

At its most essential, this work shows me, again and again, how little I, or any of us, actually know. How much humility, courage, and continuous learning is required to practice openness, curiosity, and radical compassion. For other people’s journeys. For the depths these medicines reveal. And for one’s own never-ending cycle of growth, death, and rebirth as a human being.

Just over a year ago, an elderly man that I’d been supporting as a hospice volunteer passed away. It wasn’t sudden, and he did so relatively peacefully. I don’t often talk about my experiences in this space because I don’t particularly want to invite recognition (that’s not why I do it), but in the wake of his passing I am left considering how we in the West relate to death and dying mostly by ignoring it, and how that impairs our experience of living.

It’s a trip that we’ll all take one day, but many of us spend hardly any time preparing for the journey, like having a flight booked well in advance but waiting until a few hours before departure to begin packing our bags.

In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche writes: "When involved in worldly things, you never think of death's approach; quick it comes like thunder crashing round your head." Many of us unthinkingly assume we'll receive some kind of advance notice before our departure, but the sober truth is that it could come at any time. You cannot predict the arrival of a thunderclap until you hear it.

Every person who has ever lived has also died, and every single one of us will die someday too. And while most of you reading this will be fortunate to live into old age, some of you won’t. This isn’t meant to frighten anyone, only to insist on the truth of our mortality so that we may enter into more conscious relationship with it. Even for those of us who may live many more years, that time may pass more quickly than we imagine.

My first memory is from the age of three, when my little sister was born. Jumping ahead to today, at the age of 40, in some ways it feels like no time has passed at all. All those years, gone in the blink of an eye. The only thing I have to show for them is my present state of mind. Of course, I have memories from different points and events throughout my life, but they are completely intangible, nothing more than wisps of memory.

And yet, what I carry from those 37 years is not nothing. It is everything. Every moment of love offered and received, every hard conversation, every reconciliation, every small act of courage or kindness or presence. These are the things that become a life. Into something that, when the moment of death inevitably arrives, will either feel like it was enough, or won't. That reckoning is coming for all of us. The only question is whether we meet it having lived deliberately, or having simply been carried along.

My point is this: if you think you have a lot of time left to enter into meaningful relationship with your life and eventual death, those 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years will pass before you know it. Don’t delay this exploration for some other time. Everyone thinks they have more time.

Consider reading a book on the theme of death and mortality. Talk to a loved one, with their consent, about how they feel about dying. Talk to a therapist, an elder, a spiritual care provider. Reflect on how, if given the choice, you would like the circumstances of your death to look. What might you regret not doing more of, or less of? What can you start doing now to prepare your mind for that moment?

Engaging in these practices while we’re still healthy can help reduce the suffering some experience when the transition begins, and deepen our appreciation for the life we still have yet to live.

What is found now is found then. The process of dying can be the catalyst for great personal change and even spiritual revelation, but it can also surface profound feelings of regret, anger, and resentment. In their final months and days, many people are confronted by the things they regret not remedying sooner. Grudges held too long. Amends not made. Words left unsaid. Apologies not offered. Forgiveness withheld. All of these remnants can act as a great weight upon the dying person. Are there steps you can begin taking now to help lessen that burden?

I initially entered hospice volunteering because I thought I was in a good position to help. I’d had some experiences with expanded states of consciousness that had offered a glimpse into the stages of dying, and afforded me a wider perspective. I’d long been fascinated by the mysteries of living and dying and whatever beyond may await us, thinking that doing this work would help me learn more. I imagined that if I were dying, I’d really appreciate someone offering to help me navigate that passage.

What I didn’t realize was how much it would change me in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It’s helped me to become more patient, a little less self-interested, and to reorient away from what I once thought was most important: success, achievement, recognition, accomplishment. Those things mean far less to someone who is about to leave every single thing behind. Their possessions, their achievements, their loved ones, even their ideas and memories. Considering all this helps me live more intimately with life and what I believe is truly important. “Will this matter when I am dying?” is something I try to ask myself when I’m in conflict with myself or someone else. It helps.

With all of this in mind, I've created a 15-minute death contemplation meditation below, "A Journey Through Dying," to help us enter into a more conscious and meaningful relationship with death, and ultimately, with life itself.

Take good care, friends.

I “come to” after blacking out with five hours gone, no memory of where they went, and I’m standing in my parents’ home with her phone in my hand. I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t know how I got her phone. I just know that she’s out there somewhere, on some kind of trip, and I can feel the shape of what it is even if I can’t name it; something celebratory, something ritualistic, something that has the feel of a threshold being crossed. And I have the one object that should connect me to her, but I can’t reach her

I wake up in bed in my apartment. It’s 3 am. I’ve been dreaming.

But barely. The dream is a symbolic replay of something that happened late last year that, for some reason, excluded me. It didn’t feel like she fought for me to be there, or that my presence, as her partner at the time, mattered. It felt, simply, like I wasn’t chosen.

I've been doing a kind of Jungian analysis of the dream, sitting with it the way you'd sit with an honest letter from someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Because I know there's more going on beneath the hurt than I'm consciously aware of. There almost always is. She was and is a good person who loved me. The dream isn't really about her. This is what I've learned:

The blackout wasn’t random imagery. In Jungian terms, a blackout represents a dissociation of consciousness, a place where the psyche simply went dark because it was overwhelmed by what was happening in real time. The dream was marking a gap. Not just in our former relationship, but in my experience of the event itself. A part of me still doesn’t know how that could have happened, because some part of me couldn’t afford to be present for it.

And I “came to”, not in my own home, not in the life I’ve built as an adult, but at my parents’. When the ego is overwhelmed, the psyche retreats to the earliest ground. Back to the beginning. Back to the foundational place.

Holding her phone and still unable to reach her. Having the means of connection but not the connection itself.

That’s the wound, right there, in symbolic form.

Here’s what I know about myself that the dream was pointing toward: My core wound is a fear of abandonment. It isn’t rooted in dramatic neglect, it’s quieter than that.

When I was just nine weeks old, I required surgery for a hernia. I don’t have a conceptual memory of it, but I’ve thought about what that must have felt like in a tiny, defenseless body that was relying on another to feel safe: cold lights, strange sounds, strange smells, antiseptic, sterile air, nothing biologically familiar. The mask, the anesthetic gas, the losing of consciousness. The prolonged separation from the people whose smell and touch and heartbeat were the entire world. Not to mention waking into pain that no one adequately managed, because in 1986 medicine had not yet accepted that a body and mind this this young was indeed capable of feeling it.

I can’t even read the preceding paragraph without breaking into tears. That sweet little guy would have been so scared and disoriented, registering everything in that alien environment as an existential threat.

At nine weeks old, you have no words, no context, no object permanence developed enough to know your mother is coming back. To that little body, she is simply gone.

The imprint from a trauma like that is left in the body before language exists. Before a self exists that could narrate it or contextualize or argue with it. It becomes the lens through which everything else is perceived. It becomes the shaky foundation the nervous system builds its house on: I cannot depend on the people I love because they will eventually leave. Not a belief, but a deeply stored body memory.

The psyche, in its strange fidelity to what it knows, tends to recreate the original conditions of its wounding because it’s still trying to resolve something it never understood. My exclusion from the weekend away wasn’t just a rupture in our relationship. For my nervous system, it was the little guy in surgery again. It was: “I am alone, unimportant, and no one is fighting for me.”

“Nobody loves me.”

That’s what made it so destabilizing. That’s how ordinary disappointments can feel like annihilation.

I think this is true for a lot of us. The situations that flatten us usually aren’t proportional to what’s actually happening. They’re proportional to what they remind us of. “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical”, they say. We’re not overreacting. We’re reacting to the present moment sitting on top of every other moment it resembles, all the way down to the bottom.

The dream placed me at my parents’ home for a reason. It was showing me where the thread leads back to.

The Jungian answer to what do I do with this won’t be found by thinking about it. Understanding the wound is necessary, but understanding alone doesn’t reach the place where it lives. The wound is pre-verbal. The healing has to be largely pre-verbal too. Somatic processing. Safe, therapeutic work with psychedelic medicines. Dance. Breathwork. The body remembering and releasing. Active imagination, not visualization, but a process that leads to a genuine, felt encounter with the infant who was alone and exposed in the operating room. The practice of returning, again and again until it sticks, to that visceral place and not abandoning yourself there.

And just as important: being in reparative relationship. Being genuinely witnessed by another person, over time, without repeating the original wound. The nervous system slowly beginning to update its model of what’s possible or likely to happen. With both oneself and another safe person consistently showing that little guy he is safe now, he will not be abandoned. He is loved and cared for. And in the moments when things go sideways relationally, establishing boundaries and actions that show the inner child that there are limits to how you’ll allow him/yourself to be treated, you’ll protect him now, and the firm, loving, protective actions you will take when those limits are violated.

Because this is the profound paradox at the heart of healing: the wound was created in relationship, and it is in relationship, the kind that stays, that it is slowly, tenderly, unmade.

What I want to say, and mean completely, is that this woman gave me some of the most fully alive moments I have ever known. Deep laughs and playful silliness. The way we'd sometimes look at each other and just dissolve into tenderness. Our shared skepticism toward the modern world and society, laughing about the absurdity of it all while talking about how we’d escape to a more sane life. The adventures, the experiences, the electric sense that what was happening was rare and precious. A passion I have not experienced in that way with anyone else. A depth of care and love between us that was real, deep, and mutual. She loved me in the ways she knew how, and those ways were extraordinary. The relationship wasn't a mistake. I don't regret a moment of it. It was, in many ways, a masterclass in what's possible in how good it can feel to be truly seen by another person, to move through the world alongside them. I will always carry that, and her, in my heart.

If you’re somehow reading this, please know that I’m not trying to assign blame, because there are many ways that I let you down too. This was just one important piece in a deeply loving and tender relationship that I’m profoundly grateful for. The awareness that this pain has unearthed is an incredible gift. I’ll always care for you.

I’m writing this because I think a lot of people are walking around with pre-verbal software running in the background (I will be left, I am not worth staying for, closeness is a threat, etc.), with it superimposed on their adult lives without even knowing it. Confused by the gap between what they know intellectually and what their body insists is still true.

The dream showed me something I thought I’d moved past. That’s what dreams do. They don’t let us skip anything.

The choice now isn’t about what should or could have happened differently in those moments some months ago. The past is the past. It’s more important and empowering than that.

The choice now is:

Will I allow this experience to shrink me? To close my heart from the full spectrum of life?

or

Will I see it for the gift it is, and use it to bring me closer to the wound still asking for my love, to heal the places that keep me from meeting myself, others, and life wholeheartedly? So I can live with the heart of a lion.

Onward, with love and gratitude.

Most of us have been taught, in ways subtle and not, to treat pain like bad weather. Pull your collar up. Brace against it. Wait it out. This shouldn’t be happening. Get back to the good stuff as soon as possible.

The Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen teaches something different.

Its name translates simply as giving and receiving. At its heart, it inverts everything we think we know about how to treat suffering. Instead of turning away from pain, instead of trying to manufacture calm, we do the opposite: we breathe in pain, and we breathe out relief.

I know how that might sound. Stay with me.

Buried inside this counterintuition is an ancient practice that works. When we stop bracing against pain and instead turn toward it, when we meet it with courage and awareness, we begin to orient ourselves differently. Pain and discomfort stop being an obstacle to be avoided; they become a doorway.

And on the other side of that doorway is a discovery we quietly hunger for: that whatever we’re carrying is not abnormal, or a sign of failure or personal defect, and not “wrong”. It’s also the recognition that we’re not carrying it alone. Someone right now is holding the same weight. The same fear. The same unnamed anxiety keeping you awake again at 2 am. Tonglen makes that ache universal, and therefore fortifying to the spirit.

The practice begins with yourself. It moves outward to someone you love. And then, if you can hang, it opens to everyone, everywhere, who is suffering.

Now more than ever, the world needs more love-warriors who have trained in the fire.

We are united and strengthened by our pain. We are not ground asunder, but lifted up.

Buddhism speaks of the interconnected web of all life. Tonglen takes that from the realm of theory and into the real world.

I recorded the session below for you. It’s ten minutes. All you need is a willingness to stay with the discomfort and, in turn, be forged by it.

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