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Back in February, sitting with Dr. Ayahuasca, I received a very direct instruction: take the month of August off.

I was pretty ok with the idea aside from the fact that I’d never done it before and wasn’t sure what my clients would think. But I had six months to plan and (because they’re frickin’ incredible) my clients were all amazingly supportive. The instruction also surfaced something I hadn’t noticed. In thirty years of working, I had never taken a full month off.

I can’t tell you how freeing it was. Waking up more than two mornings in a row and getting to choose everything about my day. Technically, I choose most of my days now. But as a coach and facilitator, I make commitments to my clients, and those commitments get kept. So if it’s ever within your power, take some real time off. Not a long weekend. A true reset.

I did zero client work in August. But the medicine wasn’t giving me a vacation. It was creating space to close down old energy so something new could move in. I shut down the spiritual community I had launched in 2022. I closed our old sacred medicine church and officially launched Hampui Ministries.

Then came the surprise: a reminder that I have always wanted to document my coaching philosophy.

Two years ago, while writing my book Healing with Psychedelics, I realized the thesis behind my coaching work made perfect sense to me and to almost no one else. It was fifteen bullets in a Canva project. Those fifteen statements are powerful medicine if you can understand them.

But I was probably the only one who could.

Everything came together the day before my sabbatical began. I was on an introduction call with a potential client. They walked me through everything they had already tried, then asked, very directly: why would your approach be any different?

I knew the answer. I just couldn’t say it in a way that was simple enough for anyone but me to understand.

So, with some extra time on my hands, and because writing rarely feels like work to me, I started documenting my thoughts and processes. What I assumed would be a blog post turned into what I now call My Tiny Book of Healing.

Having been through the full book production process once before, I knew what I didn’t want this time: developmental editors, copy editors, designers. So I did this project on my own, with Claude as my writing assistant. The AI helped me draft, but the ideas are 100% mine. And because Claude learned my style from the first 100,000 words I wrote, the book most definitely reads in my voice.

If you’ve ever wondered why you might be stuck in your healing process, below is a summary of some of the core concepts. They’re my greatest hits. If you want to go deeper, I’ve put the full book on Amazon for $0.99.

You can read it in an afternoon, and whether you stop at the summary or download the whole thing, I hope something here pushes a button or tips over one of your sacred cows.

If you do take the time to read it, please let me know if it was helpful. If so, I may put some more effort into cleaning up and improving the copywriting and design.

Thank you for sticking around!

Love,
Gv

For over ten years now, two types of people have come to me, carrying what looks, on the surface, like two different kinds of pain. I call the first group sufferers — people whose pain is visible, sometimes diagnosed: depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, autoimmune disorders, addiction, grief, and so on. They know they’re struggling. I call the second group achievers — people whose suffering has been so well rewarded by the world that it’s nearly invisible, even to them. They’ve built successful lives yet still can’t relax into them, much less enjoy them.

Sufferers want to heal. Achievers want to grow. I’ve come to believe those are two different words for the same journey.

My Tiny Book of Healing is my attempt to describe what that journey actually is. If I had to compress an entire philosophy into a single sentence, it would be this: healing is the progressive replacement of illusion with Truth.

We Forgot What We Are

My understanding of being human starts with a paradox: we are 100 percent human and 100 percent Divine, not split between the two but both completely, at the same time. Being human means having a body that ages, a mind that thinks, an ego that acts like a slave driver, compares itself to everyone else, and holds fears that convince us we’re separate from the people around us. None of that is evidence that something has gone wrong. It’s simply what being human feels like from the inside.

Underneath all of it, though, I believe there’s something else — call it Divine nature, consciousness, spirit, soul, or simply your deepest self. The name matters less than the fact that most of us have forgotten it’s there. We identify so completely with our thoughts, our history, our career, and our relationships that we mistake those things for our identity. That forgetting is where suffering begins, and it isn’t unique to people with hard lives. I’ve worked with people who had every advantage, yet quietly suffered every day, and people who survived genuinely horrific childhoods and found real and lasting peace. Trauma matters. It just isn’t the whole story.

Illusion and Truth

An illusion, as I use the word, isn’t something imaginary. It’s anything that obscures the truth of who we actually are — a false story about ourselves, another person, or the world, one we’ve usually lived with so long we mistake it for reality. Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up beliefs we never consciously chose: I have to earn love. I’m not enough. I’m responsible for everyone else’s happiness. We inherited them from parents, culture, and painful experiences, and the people who handed them to us were usually doing the best they could with what they had, even though that can be nearly impossible to believe, much less embody.

I sometimes call the accumulation of all this heavy energy — a word I use for trauma, shame, fear, resentment, and every conditioned way of seeing ourselves that isn’t actually true. The easiest way I know to picture it is a windshield covered in mud after a long drive through a storm. The world outside hasn’t gotten darker. Your windshield has. Healing doesn’t create the light. It cleans the glass, one layer at a time, and it happens through almost anything that helps us see more clearly — therapy, meditation, honest relationships, sacred medicine, prayer, silence. None of those tools are the destination any more than doing a handstand in yoga is the goal. They’re just different ways of helping us recognize what’s already true.

How do you know a belief is illusion rather than truth? I look at the fruit it produces. Truth moves us toward love, peace, joy, freedom, and harmony, even when the path there is uncomfortable. Illusion moves us toward suffering, fear, and separation, even when it feels safe. That’s the whole test.

Healing Is Progressive

Healing doesn’t happen all at once, and I don’t think it’s supposed to. We uncover illusion layer by layer, and every truth we embody tends to reveal another one waiting underneath it. That’s not failure — that’s the actual process. Most of the evidence that healing is working isn’t dramatic. It’s what I call micro-healing: you don’t react to your partner the way you used to, you recover from disappointment a little faster, and you say no without over-explaining yourself. String enough of those moments together and you get what I call meso-healing — you look back over months or years and realize you genuinely enjoy your life more, not because it became perfect, but because you did.

One trap worth naming here: human beings have a remarkable ability to focus on the one percent of life that isn’t working while forgetting the ninety-nine percent that is. Not unlike the pea under the mattress in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” — one small discomfort that, left unexamined, can eventually feel like the entire bed. Healing doesn’t always remove the pea. What it restores is perspective: the reminder that one difficult relationship or one hard season doesn’t define your whole existence.

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Spirituality Is Self-Knowledge

I don’t think spirituality requires religion, a guru, or a particular set of practices. My definition of spirituality is, quite simply, self-knowledge. Psychology helps us understand the human part of ourselves. Spirituality is the attempt to understand the Divine part. You can meditate for years, read every book, and still be collecting knowledge rather than living wisdom — I’ve watched people explain their patterns in perfect psychological detail while making the exact same choices for decades. Real change happens when knowledge becomes embodied: not understood, but lived, tested, and finally known in the body the way you know how to ride a bicycle.

The simplest spiritual practice I know is to study your own suffering. The next time you’re upset — your partner did something you didn’t want, someone’s sitting too long at a green light — get curious instead of reactive. What am I wanting to be different right now? What am I trying to control? Your closest relationships will teach you more about yourself than a thousand hours of reading.

And I want to say clearly: I believe the purpose of life is to enjoy it. If God is love, peace, and joy, I have a hard time believing we were put here primarily to suffer. Having a million dollars isn’t the problem. Needing a million dollars to feel okay is. The things themselves — money, sex, success, pleasure — are neutral. Suffering comes from our attachment to them, not from the things.

You Are Not Separate

One of the deepest teachings I’ve come to trust is that we are not separate — not from God, however you understand that word, and not from each other. Underneath our apparent differences, there’s one reality wearing infinite disguises. But believing that intellectually doesn’t do much good on its own; walking around saying “we’re all one” while your actual life is falling apart is its own kind of bypass. Absolute truth doesn’t erase relative truth. It’s easy to say we’re all just God’s love until you really need to use the bathroom. Your mortgage still comes due, and your partner still deserves an apology.

What changes as this becomes more real is your relationship with control. Most of us spend enormous energy trying to be CEO of the universe — managing, anticipating, and worrying our way through life because some part of us doesn’t trust that we’ll be taken care of. Learning to trust GUS — God, Universe, Spirit, whatever language works for you — happens the same way learning to trust a person does: one small experiment at a time adds one marble to the jar. You test a belief, gather evidence, and slowly your nervous system relaxes into something it couldn’t previously believe. As your marble jar fills, your suffering naturally, almost without effort, dissipates.

All of this points toward the same destination, which I’ve come to call right relationship — with yourself, with other people, with reality as it actually is, and with whatever you understand God to be. That’s not more knowledge to collect. It’s a practice of embodied wisdom: trusting instead of controlling, releasing judgment without releasing your own boundaries, seeing people clearly instead of resenting them for the awareness they don’t yet have.

Freedom Is What Remains

For a long time I might have said love is what remains when we heal. I don’t think that’s quite right anymore. What remains is freedom. Not the absence of difficulty — we’re still human, and grief, anger, and fear are still going to show up — but freedom from those experiences running our entire lives. As we clean up what we’re carrying, our emotional set point rises: the peaks get higher, the valleys get shallower, and both pass more quickly. Forgiveness is probably the single most powerful tool I know for this work, and it works in both directions — we can forgive the people who hurt us without saying what they did was fine, and we can forgive ourselves for the years we spent feeling lost and hurting ourselves.

Every True Path Seeks the Same Thing

I’m not interested in arguing about which healing modality is best — therapy, coaching, meditation, medicine, faith, all of it. No single modality is sacred. Only your freedom is. The question I keep coming back to, for any practice or teacher, is simple: is your life getting better? Are you becoming more peaceful, less reactive, more capable of loving the people around you? If yes, keep going. If you’ve worked seriously at something for a long time with no real movement, it’s worth asking whether it’s still the right path.

Psychedelics happen to be one of the paths I know best, and I believe they can accelerate this process dramatically — helping us see in a few hours what might otherwise take years. But a psychedelic experience is an opportunity, not a guarantee. I often tell people to think of the ceremony as maybe twenty percent of the work and everything afterward as the other eighty. Integration helps us understand what happened. Activation asks us to actually do something about it — usually something small, like one honest conversation. Insight that never touches an ordinary Tuesday isn’t healing. It’s just an interesting story.

Your Life Is the Experiment

I don’t need you to believe anything I’ve described here. In fact, I hope you don’t — not because I doubt it, but because believing me would just replace one set of beliefs with another, and that’s not the same as getting closer to Truth. What I’d ask instead is that you run the experiment yourself. Tell the truth when you’d normally hide it. Establish a boundary you’ve been afraid to set. Take the afternoon off and see if the world keeps turning. Then pay attention: does it make your life a little easier to live? Are you a little more peaceful, a little more free?

If the answer is yes, keep walking. That’s the whole method. Not becoming someone else, not collecting more spiritual knowledge, not chasing another breakthrough — just the slow, ordinary, daily work of replacing illusion with Truth, one layer at a time, until what’s underneath finally gets to live.

A Note for the Atheists in the Room

If the word God makes you want to put this book down, I understand, and I’d ask you to stay a little longer anyway. I’m not asking you to believe in anything supernatural, join a religion, or change what you think happens when we die. Wherever I write God or GUS, swap in nature, chance, consciousness, the universe, spirit, or nothing at all — the label matters far less to me than what it’s pointing at. What I am asking is that you consider something I believe is true no matter what you believe about a higher power: you are already worshiping something. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense that something is currently organizing your attention, your choices, and your nervous system around itself — your work, your image of yourself, being right, being needed, the approval of people whose opinion you don’t even respect. Whatever it is, you’ve built your days around protecting it, and you feel it in your body when it’s threatened. That’s worship (or addiction), whether you ever use the word or not.

So the choice was never whether to worship. It was only ever what. You can organize your life, your attention, and your reactions around peace, love, and joy, or you can keep organizing them around pain, suffering, control, and anger — and plenty of people do, for years, without ever noticing they’re doing it. Both are available to you in the same ordinary moments: how you respond when someone cuts you off, what you say to your partner tonight, whether you keep replaying the thing you can’t change or finally let it go. You don’t need to believe in God to make that choice well. You just need to notice you’re already making it, every day, and start making it on purpose.

In Conclusion

I wrote My Tiny Book of Healing for two reasons. First, many prospective clients wanted to know more about my process before they started working with me. Second, many of my current and former clients wanted an easy reference to continue doing their work on their own, or after they stopped working with me altogether. I wrote this little book to be read in about three hours. Most of the chapters can stand alone in their own right, but they also build on one another. If you’re curious how this actually shows up in my coaching and medicine practice, that’s what the Afterword is for.

This book is the roadmap I have used to free myself, and the same one I use with my clients. If you’d like a little more freedom in your life, please jump in; the water’s warm. And always remember, you’re perfect, and you’re right on time, and the path is wiser than the traveler.

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A few weeks ago I went to see The Invite with with Seth Rogan, Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but first, I would highly recommend you see it, and second, it absolutely shook something loose in my inner world. That night around 3:30 AM, I woke up from a powerful dream and deep in a very unexpected process. I lay there patiently while the electricity flowed through my system, and after about fifteen minutes, the downloads started to come.

I won’t go into all the details, but after about 90 minutes, the summary that arrived was:

I did not think my way to those lines. They arrived the way True things usually arrive. All at once, fully formed, and about twenty years later than I would have liked.

Then came the inventory.

Every time I picked up a task nobody handed me. Every time I answered a question nobody asked. Every time I noticed someone struggling and felt a small, urgent pull to fix it before they’d said a word about wanting it fixed. I had always filed those moments under generosity. I was a helper. That was the story, and I had two decades of evidence to support it.

The evidence was real. The story was incomplete.

Because underneath a lot of that helping was a much simpler transaction. If I was needed, I was wanted. If I was wanted, I was allowed to be here. Helping wasn’t only something I did for people. It was how I paid rent on my own existence.

And going one step deeper, I could look back over the past thirty years of my life and see how I’d often used food and alcohol to numb the discomfort, while at the same time, using sex and love to desperately try and fill the unfillable hole in my soul.

Which leaves an uncomfortable question.

What if my caretaking was never entirely about them? What if it was also about regulating me?

Care Is Not Caretaking

Care is a response to a request. Caretaking is a response to my own discomfort.

That distinction sounds small, but it truly changes everything.

When someone asks for help, the exchange is clean. They have named a need. They have opted in. Whatever I bring, they invited. I can be useful, honest, even confrontational, because they handed me the door key. This goes for my coaching work, my medicine work, and even in my friendships.

But when nobody asks, I’m operating on assumption. I’ve decided what they need. I’ve decided they can’t get there without me. I’ve decided my read of their life is more accurate than theirs.

That isn’t service. That’s an unrequested opinion with a helpful face on it.

Our culture doesn’t make this easy to see, because we’ve built an entire moral vocabulary around the unrequested version. We call it selflessness, professionalism, and good customer service. We praise the person who gives until there’s nothing left, and we rarely ask the follow-up question, which is whether any of it actually helped. Self-sacrifice gets applause. Discernment gets called cold.

It looks like generosity but it’s often anxiety with a to-do list.

Care is an act of love. Caretaking is usually an attempt to manage suffering I find uncomfortable to watch.

Not maliciously. Well, almost never maliciously. It comes from a tender place, which is exactly what makes it so hard to catch. But watching someone struggle creates a sensation in my body, and stepping in makes that sensation stop. If I’m honest about the sequencing, the relief is mine first. Theirs is a hoped-for side effect.

There’s a short set of questions I’ve learned to run when the pull shows up.

Am I actually helping? Or am I relieving my own discomfort at watching this?

Am I trying to control an outcome that isn’t mine? Do I need them to need me?

Did anyone actually ask for my help?

I don’t always like the answers. But the questions have never once been a waste of time.

Because what I learned after a few years in Alanon is the famous last words of every codependent are, “I was just trying to help.”

The Hidden Payoff of Being Needed

People don’t become caretakers because they’re unusually generous. They become caretakers because somewhere early on they learned a rule.

I matter when I’m useful.

That rule doesn’t get taught in words. It gets absorbed. It’s the kid who learns to read the room before entering it. The one who tracks a parent’s mood like weather. The one who figures out that being easy, being competent, being the one who handles things buys a little safety in a house where safety was inconsistent.

That child is not being generous. That child is surviving.

And the strategy works, which is the problem. It works well enough that it never gets updated. Thirty years later, you’re the person everyone calls, and you can’t remember choosing that, and you’d feel strange if the calls stopped. Even more dangerous is when no one even has to call because everyone knows your unrequested support is just around the corner.

I don’t know exactly where mine began. Maybe it was shaped in childhood. Maybe it was handed to me through generations before I got here. Maybe it reaches further back than this lifetime. I’ve held all three explanations at different points, and I’ve stopped needing to settle it.

The origin matters less than the recognition. Once I could see the pattern, I no longer had to keep living inside it.

This is also why the standard advice fails.

Set better boundaries. Learn to say no. Stop people-pleasing. All accurate. All useless on their own, because they treat as a behavior something that is actually an identity.

If being needed is how you’ve proven you deserve to exist, then stepping back isn’t rest. It’s a threat. Saying no doesn’t feel like a boundary, it feels like a withdrawal from the account that keeps you real. That’s why people who intellectually understand all of this still find themselves, at 11pm, solving a problem for someone who never mentioned having one.

You’re not failing at boundaries. You’re defending an identity.

That takes longer, and it deserves more compassion than a listicle.

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You Can’t Push a Rope

I was an entrepreneur in residence for an early-stage startup accelerator for a number of years, and we had a phrase for this:

You can’t push a rope.

Pull one and it works, because something on the other end has chosen to move with you. Push one and it collapses in your hands. There’s no participation, so there’s no transfer of force. All the effort stays with you.

That’s the whole dynamic.

You can’t force a customer to buy. You can’t force an employee to care. You can’t force a market to be ready. You can’t force a spouse into a conversation they’ve decided not to have. And no amount of wisdom, love, or effort will move a person who hasn’t decided they want to move.

Healing is participatory or it isn’t happening. It’s a partnership, not a rescue. You can walk beside someone who is already walking. You cannot carry someone toward a destination they’ve never chosen, and if you try, you’ll only injure yourself doing it.

I learned this most expensively on social media.

For years I believed that when someone stated a challenge or complained about a problem in their post, it opened up a gate for me to name it or offer advice. Someone would post something clearly tangled, clearly painful, clearly a few inches from an insight I thought I could hand them. So I’d hand it to them. And it never once landed the way I imagined.

It took me an embarrassing number of these to understand what I was actually watching. People weren’t asking. They were off-gassing. Releasing a little pressure, not requesting an intervention. And there’s a real difference between a person venting and a person ready, which is that a ready person asks.

Wisdom offered before it’s requested is usually experienced as criticism. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Truth without invitation lands as judgment, because the person receiving it never agreed to be evaluated.

So now, for my own health and peace and freedom, I don’t insert myself where I haven’t been asked.

Not every problem I can see is mine to solve.

That’s a simple sentence. It took me two decades and a lot of pushed rope to be able to say it.

The Silent Contract

Where this gets expensive is in the relationships that last.

Every partnership goes through seasons. Business, marriage, friendship, family. There are stretches where one person is better resourced than the other. More money, more energy, more bandwidth, more capacity to hold things. That asymmetry is normal and it’s temporary, and picking up some slack during it is one of the good things humans do for each other.

The trouble starts when nobody says anything about it.

Because slack that gets picked up quietly tends to stay picked up. It stops being a season and becomes an arrangement. Nobody negotiated it. Nobody agreed to it. One person simply started carrying more and the other person, quite reasonably, adjusted to a world where that was true.

Then comes resentment. Resentment is the interest payment on a contract nobody signed. Or as they say in twelve-step rooms, “Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

And the resentful party is almost always genuinely confused about it, because from the inside it feels like being taken advantage of. It rarely feels like what it usually is, which is the natural consequence of assuming a responsibility instead of discussing one.

The repair is unglamorous. You ask.

Would it be supportive if I helped with this?

That’s it. One sentence. It does something that no amount of silent heroism can do, which is preserve the other person’s agency. It lets them say yes. It lets them say no. It lets them say not yet, or say what would actually help more, which is frequently something you’d never have guessed.

It converts caretaking into collaboration.

There’s a second cost here, and it’s the one I underestimated the longest.

Sometimes we don’t withhold help. We withhold the truth.

When someone invites my perspective and I tell them something hard, I’m actually serving them. When I swallow that same truth because I’m afraid of how they’ll react to me, I’ve stopped serving them entirely. I’m managing my own exposure.

On the surface it looks like kindness. Underneath, it’s usually fear.

Fear of rejection. Fear of conflict. Fear of being the reason someone feels bad. Fear that if I stop being easy, they won’t need me anymore.

So I say the softer version, and they don’t get the information, and I carry the discomfort I spared them. Now I’m holding the emotional weight for both of us, and I’ve told myself a story where that makes me the good one.

The same logic runs through the doing.

If I keep solving problems you never asked me to solve, I take from you the chance to discover you could have solved them. A child doesn’t learn to tie their shoes if someone else always kneels down first. Adults are not meaningfully different. Competence is built through experience, not through rescue.

Uninvited caretaking creates two casualties. The helper who carries too much, and the person who never gets to find out how much they could carry. I suspect this could be one reason why we have a large number of toddlers running around in adult bodies. No one forced them to fix their own shit!

Which brings me to a distinction I now think about constantly.

There is a difference between being responsible to someone and being responsible for them.

The first one is love. The second one is control wearing love’s coat.

The Three Jobs

I had to learn a harder version of this in the early years of my medicine work.

Early in my facilitation career, when someone had a beautiful process, I took the credit. Not out loud. I’m not sure I would have admitted it under direct questioning. But something in me straightened up and thought I did that. And when someone had a difficult process, or a flat one, or no process at all, that same something went looking for what I’d done wrong.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Those two beliefs are not separable. You don’t get to own the miracles and disown the disappointments. If my ego wants the credit, it has already signed for the blame. That’s not a spiritual principle, it’s cosmic reciprocity.

And the real cost isn’t the guilt. It’s the dependency.

If my internal state is being regulated by someone else’s external state, I have quietly surrendered my freedom. I am now emotionally leveraged on outcomes I don’t control, which means I will suffer, and the timing of that suffering will be decided by other people.

What eventually got me out of it was sorting the work into three jobs.

1. Mine. Show up prepared. Tell the truth. Be present. Bring compassion. Hold the container with integrity. Do my best, every time, including the times nobody would notice if I didn’t.

2. Theirs. Decide whether they’re willing to hear it. Whether they’ll apply it. Whether they want to change. That’s their sovereignty and it isn’t mine to lobby for.

3. God’s. Everything neither of us controls. Call it grace, the psyche, Inner Healing Intelligence, life unfolding. The name doesn’t matter much. The category does.

The suffering starts the moment I take on a job from the second or third column.

Almost everything painful I’ve experienced in this work traces back to that. I’ve tried to do their job by wanting someone’s healing more than they did. I’ve tried to offer just the right dose or stack of medicines to achieve the result I thought they needed. I’ve tried to do God’s job by needing a specific outcome from a specific ceremony. Both feel like devotion from the inside. Both are just a very sincere form of overreach.

So the questions I ask myself now are much smaller than they used to be.

Was I honest? Was I present? Did I act with integrity? Did I bring everything I had to give?

If those are yes, my work is complete. The outcome was never on my ledger.

None of this is about facilitation, incidentally. It’s about parenting, managing, teaching, coaching, marriage, and every other arrangement where one person’s wellbeing appears to depend on another person’s competence. The facilitator creates conditions. The healing is not ours to manufacture. That’s true of every helper who ever lived.

We can help. We cannot guarantee healing.

The Other Ditch

I want to name the failure mode on the opposite side, because I’ve watched people drive straight into it with this exact essay in hand.

Sovereignty language makes a very comfortable hiding place.

They didn’t ask can be an honest boundary. It can also be a way to avoid a conversation you owe someone. Not my responsibility can be clarity, or it can be abandonment with better branding. If this framework is mostly relieving you of things you find inconvenient, that’s worth a closer look.

If someone is in genuine danger, or unable to care for themselves, or has asked you in advance to intervene when they can’t ask in the moment, you step in. That isn’t caretaking. That’s what the agreement was for.

And not asking for help is not the same as not wanting to be reached for. Plenty of people have never learned that asking is available to them. You can go toward someone without taking over their life. You can say, “I’ve noticed something, and I’d like to tell you about it, if you want to hear it.” That’s not an intrusion. That’s an offer, and offers can be declined, which is what makes them offers.

So I don’t hold this as a rule. I hold it as a principle.

Respect another person’s sovereignty unless there’s consent or a real safety concern.

That’s harder to weaponize, and closer to true.

Love Without Ownership

I still care about people. If anything, I care more than I used to, because I’m no longer spending most of my attention managing how much I’m needed.

What changed is that I stopped confusing love with responsibility.

If someone asks for my help, they get all of it. I’ll tell them the truth even when the truth is difficult to metabolize, even when it lands like an earthquake in their system, because that’s precisely what they invited me to do. Invitation makes hard things possible.

When there’s no invitation, I’ve learned that the most loving thing I can offer is usually trust. Trust that this person is capable of living their own life. Trust that they’ll learn what they’re here to learn. Trust that when they’re ready, they’ll reach out and take hold of the other end of the rope.

Suffering is rarely the enemy. Usually it’s the curriculum. And I’ve stopped believing I was appointed to grade it.

The freedom in this isn’t in carrying more people. It’s in carrying only what was ever mine to carry.

Which brings me back to those three lines, and to the one that took the longest to understand.

To be wanted was to be worthy of existing.

I don’t need to be needed anymore in order to be here.

That turned out to be the entire thing.

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Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

I’ve met people who have spent twenty years working on themselves, often with little to show for their efforts. They’ve read the books, spent thousands of hours on therapist couches, attended countless retreats, and studied with the “world’s best” coaches and teachers. They’ve meditated, optimized their diet, morning routine, cold plunge, and sauna schedule. They journal faithfully, regulate their vagus nerve, and excitedly try every new modality they can find. Others have given their lives to yoga, breathwork, prayer, or personal development.

They have all been incredibly busy.

And yet if you look closely, many are still having the same argument with their spouse. Still drawn to the same unhealthy relationships. Still avoiding the same conversation they’ve been avoiding for a decade. Still carrying the same shame that brought them to healing in the first place. They’ve been moving for years without going anywhere.

Full disclosure: This is what my journey looked like for the first ten years on my healing path. I became a spiritual tourist and collector of all things esoteric — both experiences and knowledge.

One of the great dangers in the healing world is how easy it is to mistake movement for progress. Healing is an industry now, and industries are built to be consumed. There’s always another book, another retreat, another ceremony, another supplement, another practice, another coach, another podcast. None of that is inherently bad, and a fair amount of it genuinely improved my own life. But it all shares one convenient feature. You can consume it indefinitely without ever asking the only question that matters.

Is my life actually getting better?

Not, did I have an amazing experience. Not, did I cry. Not, did I see God, or lose my ego, or touch the infinite. Those experiences can be beautiful, and occasionally they have the potential to redirect an entire life. They can also become entertainment with better branding, or an identity, or a story we tell ourselves about how hard we’re working. When it happens in psychedelics, I refer to it as “experiential journeying”.

The older I get, the less interested I am in extraordinary experiences and the more interested I am in ordinary lives that are quietly improving. Is this person more honest than they were? More capable of loving and being loved? Do they show up differently in their marriage, their friendships, their work? Are they suffering less because they’ve learned to relate to life differently, or because they’ve found a more efficient way to manage their discomfort? Those questions tell me more than any count of ceremonies attended or visions received.

Because there is a real difference between helping someone and standing beside them while they actually heal and change. The two are related, and one often leads to the other, but they are not the same thing. Understanding that has changed the way I think about psychedelics, and about every other path that promises transformation.

Helping vs. Healing

Before we can ask whether something is working, we have to ask what we actually mean by healing.

It’s a word we use constantly and define almost never. Therapists talk about healing. Churches talk about healing. Physicians, coaches, yoga teachers, and psychedelic facilitators all promise it. They frequently mean entirely different things.

Helping temporarily reduces suffering. Two of my favorite examples of helping are singing bowls or cacao ceremonies. Both can make you feel spectacular. They might even allow you to drift off into some new and unfamiliar mystical space that feels like something really cool just happened. But they’re sort of like spiritual aspirin. They work for about four hours (if you’re lucky), and then you have to get another hit to keep feeling groovy.

On the other hand, healing resolves the cause of your suffering, not just temporarily alleviating the symptoms. Sometimes these can happen in the same afternoon, and sometimes they happen a decade apart. The amazing thing about healing is that when it happens, you don’t actually have to try to adjust your mood or behavior anymore. With the core belief transformed or eliminated, your life simply starts to feel different, easier, and with an inch more peace and harmony.

Someone breaks their leg. Pain medication helps. A cast helps. Crutches help. All of it reduces pain and lets the person function, yet none of it knits the bone back together. The healing happens underneath while everything else makes life survivable. Emotional and spiritual healing tends to work the same way.

There are seasons when helping is precisely what’s needed. If someone can’t sleep, can’t get out of bed, or is simply trying to survive the week, stabilization isn’t failure. It’s compassion. I’ve seen medication save lives. I’ve seen ketamine interrupt a spiral that had nowhere good to go but down. I’ve seen therapy hold a marriage together long enough for the real work to start. I’ve seen community carry people through seasons they could not have survived alone.

All of that is helping, and helping matters.

The trouble starts when we mistake helping for the finish line. Spend years managing symptoms without ever truly addressing what produced them, and you may end up more comfortable without being any more free. That’s not an argument against medication, therapy, or any other form of self-care. It’s simply a question about function. Is this a bridge, or has it quietly become your destination? And even more sinister, has it become a new addiction?

At some point, most of us have to ask something harder. Why do I keep ending up here? Why does this pattern keep repeating? Why do I keep choosing the same relationships, carrying the same fear, fighting the same battle in a different uniform?

Those questions rarely answer themselves quickly, and they shouldn’t be rushed. But they point past symptom management toward something else.

Healing isn’t primarily about feeling better. It’s about coming into alignment with what’s true. Sometimes that feels wonderful. Often it doesn’t. Discovering your marriage is built on resentment doesn’t feel like healing. Admitting you’re an addict doesn’t feel like healing. Realizing you’ve spent thirty years wearing a life someone else picked out for you doesn’t feel like healing either. And yet those moments are frequently where transformation actually begins, because truth disrupts the stories we’ve built around ourselves. It asks us to release what’s familiar, even when the familiar is what’s hurting us.

The truth is that, by default, our nervous systems will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. Helping gives us the strength to face that hell. Healing is what happens when we decide to walk through it.

Stabilization or Transformation?

One of the hardest things to discern in any healing process is the difference between something falling apart and something being rebuilt. From the outside, they look nearly identical.

A person comes home from a powerful journey and can’t sleep. They’re questioning their career, their marriage, their beliefs, the whole direction of their life. They cry more than usual, pull back from friends, feel the floor go soft underneath them. One observer sees a mental health crisis. Another sees the beginning of profound healing. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other, and frequently it’s both at once.

Stanislav Grof spent decades on this question and gave us the continuum of spiritual emergency and spiritual emergence. At one end, the experience overwhelms a person’s ability to function. At the other, the same process becomes an opening for extraordinary growth. What separates them usually isn’t the experience itself. It’s whether the person has the capacity and the support to metabolize it.

That word has become important to me. Our bodies metabolize food; our hearts and minds have to metabolize difficult experience. Insight has to become understanding, understanding has to become action, and action has to become a way of living. Skip that and even the most gorgeous revelation just sits there, undigested.

It’s also worth refusing to romanticize suffering. Not every powerful journey is an awakening. Some people are having a genuine psychiatric emergency and need medical attention today. Some have unresolved trauma that requires skilled therapeutic support. Some are simply overwhelmed because they walked into something enormous without preparation and walked back out without integration. Discernment matters, and so does humility.

I’ve worked with clients whose lives were upside down for months after ceremony. Meet them during that stretch, and you’d probably conclude the medicine had harmed them. They couldn’t make sense of anything. Their identity was dissolving, and the life they’d carefully assembled no longer fit. I’ve also watched many of those same people come out the other side, not because anyone fixed them and not because they suppressed what they were feeling, but because they stayed with it long enough for something new to form. They tend to describe those months not as the worst thing that ever happened to them, but as the start of the most honest chapter of their lives.

The problem is that we rarely know which season we’re in while we’re in it. Which is why I do not recommend walking this path alone. Whether your support comes from a physician, a therapist, a spiritual mentor, a trusted community, or an experienced maestro, healing happens in relationship. The goal was never to avoid every difficult season. It’s to have wise people nearby who can help you tell the difference between needing more stability, needing more support, and needing the courage to keep walking.

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Mystical Experiences Are Cheap

The great misconception in the psychedelic world is that profound experiences produce profound change. Sometimes they do. Frequently they don’t. As Ram Dass frequently reminded us, “The problem with getting high is that you have to come down.”

I’ve sat with people who described complete ego dissolution. They’ve spoken with God, merged with the universe, relived their birth, met their ancestors, and witnessed beauty they couldn’t find language for.

Then they went home and kept lying to their spouse. Or drinking. Or avoiding the one conversation that would change everything. Or blaming their parents for a life they themselves have been running for thirty years.

The experience was real. I won’t argue with that. But the transformation never happened.

To go one step further, so many people today profess the profound benefits of integration. But here’s the rub. So many people sit with coaches and in integration circles attempting to understand their experiences, but they never activate the changes in their life that would bring about the transformation they seek. Faith without works is dead.

And I’m not diminishing mystical experience. Some of the most meaningful moments of my life came that way, and they expanded my sense of what’s real in ways I couldn’t have engineered. But an experience, however extraordinary, is still just an experience. The medicine wears off. The visions fade. The emotions settle. And you’re left with a much less glamorous question: now what?

There’s a progression here that people constantly skip. Experience leads to insight. Insight invites action. Repeated action becomes transformation. Drop any link, and the chain doesn’t hold. You can have incredible experiences and gain no insight. You can gain real insight and change nothing about how you behave. You can change your behavior for six weeks without ever letting it become the foundation of a different life. Transformation happens when truth gets embodied, and not before.

Jed McKenna draws a distinction I’ve never been able to shake, between having awakening experiences and actually waking up. The first can happen on a Tuesday afternoon. The second may take the rest of your life. A mystical experience is something that happens to you. Waking up is something you live, an ongoing willingness to stop pretending, stop negotiating with reality, and trade the comforting story for what you already know to be true. Waking up is truly the process of becoming self-sovereign. Of releasing our toddler-esque ways and truly becoming a human adult.

That’s considerably less photogenic than dissolving into infinite love. It’s also considerably harder.

Psychedelia, social media, and spirituality at large have built a culture around the spectacular story. The impossible vision, the miraculous healing. We rarely celebrate the person who went home, apologized to their family, quit drinking, ended the relationship everyone knew was over, started telling the truth, and rebuilt their life slowly across the following five years. I’d argue that’s the greater miracle, because the point of the journey was never the journey. It was the life waiting on the other side of it.

Truth Is What Heals

Ever noticed how life keeps handing you the same lesson until you finally learn it? The names change. The jobs change. Occasionally the city changes. And somehow the same argument keeps happening, the same relationship keeps ending the same way, the same over-responsibility and validation-seeking patterns pop up, the same fear keeps showing up in a new costume.

For years I thought life was happening to me. Now I am 100 percent confident it was happening for me. Not because suffering is noble or necessary, but because suffering has an uncanny talent for pointing directly at whatever we’ve refused to look at.

Which is why I don’t think healing is mainly about feeling better. I think it’s about becoming more truthful, and I’ve watched those two arrive in the opposite order more often than not.

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy avoiding uncomfortable truths. We stay in relationships years after we know they’re finished. We stay in careers that are quietly draining the life out of us. We blame our parents while carefully declining to examine our own choices. We chase success when what we want is peace, and approval when what we’re missing is self-worth.

None of those realizations feel good. Most of them feel terrible. But notice what’s actually happening. The truth didn’t create the suffering. It exposed it.

You find termites in the walls of your house. The termites didn’t arrive the day you noticed them; they’d been eating the place for years. Your discovery didn’t cause the problem; it revealed one that was already there. Truth tends to work this way, and it’s part of why psychedelics can feel so disruptive. They’re remarkably good at showing us what we’ve become expert at hiding from ourselves. Not because the medicine is punishing us. Because you cannot heal what you refuse to see. This is the bottom-right quadrant of Johari’s Window — where our unknown, unknowns live.

So I’ve stopped asking whether a practice makes someone feel better and started asking whether it helps them live more honestly. Does it make them more accountable? More willing to admit they were wrong? More able to love without needing to control? Those are harder questions than “did it work,” and considerably more useful.

Truth always has a direction, and it needs no defense. It pulls toward integrity, toward responsibility, toward healthier relationships, toward a life that increasingly resembles what you know deep down to be real, peaceful, harmonious, and easy. That doesn’t make the walk pleasant. Sometimes the truth costs you the exact life you spent decades building (at least it did for me). Sometimes healing starts with a divorce, or leaving a career, or grieving a version of yourself that can’t survive contact with reality. Those moments almost never feel like healing while you’re inside them. Looking back, they’re usually the ones that set you free.

And truth isn’t the opposite of compassion. Truth is compassion when held with care, because only the truth can get us out of the lives we’ve accidentally built on top of fear.

Why We Resist Healing

If healing is movement toward truth, why do so many of us fight it so hard?

Because truth almost always asks us to give something up. Sometimes a belief. Sometimes a relationship. Sometimes an identity we spent decades constructing, or the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are. For me, truth has recently been cleaning up decades of my past. Pictures, papers, knick-knacks, spiritual charms, crystals, memorabilia, and even some people. I thought it all meant something, but in truth, it was all just more shit masquerading as something it was not.

Suffering, for all its misery, is familiar. It’s predictable. We know how to move inside it, and we know who we are there. Freedom is unfamiliar. It asks us to become someone we haven’t been. That’s why real transformation feels so risky. We’re not adjusting our behavior. We’re changing ourselves.

There’s an old story about how hunters trap monkeys. They put fruit inside a small cage with an opening just big enough for an empty hand. The monkey reaches in, grabs the mango, and now its fist is too large to pull back out. It screams and pulls and fights, and the entire time freedom is one decision away. Let go.

Whether the story is literally true is beside the point. The metaphor survived because it describes something painfully human. We are all holding on to our precious mango. For one person it’s being right. For another it’s control, or status, or approval, or money, or certainty, or being needed, or being the victim, or being the hero. Whatever it is, we’re convinced we can’t release it because we believe it’s protecting us. What we rarely consider is that the thing in our fist may be the thing holding us in place, and even more shocking is that there’s a giant mango tree right behind us. If we could just let go of the one in our hand and turn around, the truth is there is an unlimited supply just out of sight.

I’ve certainly found this to be true in my life. For years, I manufactured situations where I was needed because being needed made me feel wanted, and if I was wanted, then maybe I’d earned the right to exist. I didn’t know I was doing it. I definitely didn’t set out to build a life on that premise. But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and the painful part wasn’t finding the pattern. It was recognizing how much of my identity was resting on it.

Healing didn’t ask me to become a different person overnight. It asked me to loosen my grip, and then to do it again the next day. That’s usually what truth does. It rarely demands dramatic change all at once. It just keeps inviting us to stop clinging to what isn’t serving us.

This is part of what makes psychedelics so powerful. They’re uncannily good at revealing our tight grip on our own private mangos. Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s devastating. Sometimes it’s the identity you’ve defended your entire adult life. But the medicine doesn’t force anyone to let go, and neither does life. We can tighten our grip and keep suffering, or we can gamble that what’s left after we open our hand is more amazing than whatever we were clutching.

That choice doesn’t get made once. It gets made every day. Healing isn’t a single breakthrough. It’s a thousand small surrenders. There’s a fabled quote that supposedly was written inside the bathroom stall of an alcohol treatment center that says, “I’ve never let go of anything that didn’t have claw marks on it.” Not only do I resonate with this, but once I learned how to retract my claws, life got a lot easier. When you realize that this day, this hour, this car, this partner, this house, represent only a tiny piece of your overall existence, everything gets put into scale, and it becomes a lot easier to let go.

The Treadmill or the Trail?

A few years ago I realized I’d become addicted to self-improvement. Not because I wanted to be a better person, but because it gave me permission to postpone becoming one. One day I said to my teacher, “I am trying.” His response, which felt like a punch in the gut, was, “A lot of people die trying.”

There was always another teacher, another ceremony, another insight waiting just ahead. I was perpetually preparing for the life I wanted. I just wasn’t living it.

It’s an easy trap, because the culture applauds the preparation and integration. Reading feels productive. Podcasts feel productive. Workshops, coaches, retreats, journaling, meditation, the perfect morning routine — all of it feels like forward motion. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it’s just motion.

The hard question isn’t whether you’re doing the work. It’s whether the work is changing you. Not your beliefs. Not your vocabulary. Not the story you tell about yourself. Your life. Is your marriage healthier than it was five years ago? Do you have more peace? Do the people closest to you experience someone easier to trust?

A treadmill will make you sweat. It’ll strengthen your heart and build your endurance. Run ten thousand miles on it, and you’re standing exactly where you started. A trail is different. It’s slower and less predictable. Sometimes you climb, sometimes you stop to catch your breath, and sometimes you’re fairly sure you’ve lost the path. But when you turn around, you can see how far you’ve come.

Healing is a lot like a winding trail. It changes the landscape of your life, the way you love, the way you speak, the way you decide, the way you handle money and conflict and failure. It changes what you tolerate and what you pursue, and eventually who you are.

So consider letting go of your need to evaluate a modality by how profound your experience feels. Try evaluating it by the life it helps you build afterward. Does it lead toward more truth, more freedom, more responsibility, more love? If it does, I don’t much care whether it arrived through psychotherapy, meditation, church, ceremony, or a long walk in the woods. Truth has never belonged to one tradition. Neither has healing.

The five psychedelic trailheads from my previous article are simply different places to start. Some people begin in a therapist’s office, some in a research study, some through recreation that turned into something they didn’t expect, some in prayer, some sitting in ceremony with a maestro. The trailheads differ. The destination doesn’t. Every honest path eventually asks for the same thing: be a little more honest, a little more humble, a little more responsible, a little more willing to release what no longer serves you, a little more aligned with what’s real.

That rarely happens all at once. It happens over years, one difficult conversation and one act of courage at a time.

So the measure is simpler than we make it. Not how many ceremonies I’ve attended. Not how many mystical experiences I’ve collected. Not how much I know.

Is my life objectively getting better?

If the answer is yes, keep walking. Your mind may not always know what you need next, but if you’re becoming more truthful, more loving, more free, and more fully yourself, there’s a decent chance your soul already does.

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I recently saw a post encouraging someone who was stepping away from psychedelics — because of harm inflicted on them — to publicly name the people who harmed them.

I usually spend a fair amount of time thinking through what I write, and I try to keep it fairly high-level. But this feels important, and it’s short, sweet, and to the point (hence the rather haphazard post you’re reading now).

I have also had this conversation with a number of people in the industry, so I thought I’d write my thoughts here and keep them for some future justice warrior. I have most definitely been in this situation before, and making the wrong decision caused me a great deal of suffering. I won’t make that mistake again.

Modern culture demands we call out those doing harm in psychedelia because that’s “the right thing to do.” Many Indigenous teachings would say instead: “It’s none of my business how someone else serves their medicine.”

Modern culture has adopted a relative system of right and wrong — killing a cockroach is fine, killing a butterfly is not. Indigenous teachings rely on cosmic law: the consequences of one’s actions aren’t up to humans. God takes care of that.

Whenever someone tells me it’s “my responsibility” to out some bad apple in psychedelics, I walk the other way. That is most definitely not my responsibility. I spent years carrying the responsibility of others, and it made me miserable. I’d say 90% of modern culture is so deeply codependent that most people have no idea where their responsibility starts and stops.

My responsibility is to do my part, and to do the best I can. That’s it. If someone asked me directly, “What do you think of John Smith?” It is most definitely my responsibility to tell the truth. But I don’t owe the world a list of harmful practitioners.

The hard part of this equation: when someone down the road gets hurt by John Smith, the Universe put them in that position to learn a lesson — to experience the consequences of one of their own past actions. For sure, John Smith will likely face the consequences of his actions in this lifetime or a future one. But the beautiful part of truly trusting the Universe is that I don’t have to hold any of that responsibility.

It’s hard to accept that God’s love for us can sometimes be painful. Natural disasters and loss of life can feel like punishment. In reality, they’re just the consequences of past action. Events like these can release lifetimes' worth of heavy imprints carried by past karma.

I once heard a spiritual teacher talk about "blue babies"; babies born with a bluish tint to their skin, often due to a lack of oxygen. Historically, these babies didn't have a high chance of survival (that's considerably different now). This teacher shared that when a baby comes into the world like this and only lives ten or twenty minutes, it's one of the most excruciating experiences a parent can go through. Yet for the soul of that baby, it's an incredible gift because they came in carrying such a heavy load of karma that it was washed away almost instantly. For the soul, a gift. For the parents, a tragedy.

When you can truly drop into the experience that the world is a curriculum for the soul, every moment becomes a choice — skip class, or show up and learn the hard lesson.

When you realize that everything we experience, beautiful and painful, is just another chance to wake up and be free, you start to see even the most painful things as tough love in disguise.

And when that’s hard to accept, remember this: the Universe may be far too big to understand, but it’s always fair. Sacred reciprocity reigns supreme, and the gifts and hard lessons we receive are always just.

And one final note. If we hold sacred reciprocity and cosmic fairness in one hand, it's incredibly important that we hold human compassion and love in the other. When a natural disaster strikes or we experience the loss of a loved one, it's also our sacred responsibility to keep our hearts open. This is one of the most difficult paradoxes of walking the spiritual path. Accepting this truth, and grieving deeply, are both part of being human — they go hand in hand. Closing ourselves off to vulnerability also shuts off our capacity for joy.

And if you’re ever in doubt what you should do, slow down and listen to your body. This simple teaching offered by my maestro guides nearly every decision I make.

If it’s a yes, proceed.
If it’s a no, stop.
If it’s a maybe, stop.

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Three weeks after an ayahuasca ceremony, a participant can’t sleep. They’re crying every day. Their marriage suddenly feels dishonest. The career they’ve spent fifteen years building no longer makes sense. Friends say they don’t seem like themselves. Their family wonders if something has gone wrong. The participant wonders the same thing.

“What should I do?”

It’s a simple question, but the answer depends entirely on who you ask. A clinician may wonder if this is an adverse reaction that needs monitoring. A therapist may recognize buried emotional material surfacing and start helping them integrate it. A spiritually minded facilitator may see the unraveling as the beginning of an awakening. An Indigenous maestro may just smile and say, “The medicine is still working.”

Who’s right? Maybe all of them. Maybe none.

The deeper I’ve gone into this work, the more I’ve noticed that people (especially facilitators, protelitizers, and harm-reduction zealots) in the psychedelic community are often having completely different conversations while using the same words. We talk about healing, safety, trauma, integration, and transformation as if everyone means the same thing. They don’t. Each practitioner is working from a different set of assumptions about what healing is, how it happens, and what role they’re supposed to play in it.

That’s why one participant calls an experience life-changing while another calls the same approach reckless. It’s why a clinician, a therapist, a spiritual guide, and a maestro can hear the exact same story and recommend four completely different paths forward. They’re not just disagreeing about treatment — they’re starting from completely different cosmologies.

I’ve found it useful to think of psychedelic use as five distinct trailheads: recreational, clinical, therapeutic, spiritual, and Indigenous. All of them can lead to real insight. All of them can help people. All of them come with their own strengths, blind spots, and assumptions.

In this article, I’m not going to try to convince you that one trailhead is better than the others. But I will try to help you understand the path you’re on before you take your first step. Because one of the biggest sources of confusion — and disappointment — in psychedelic work isn’t the medicine itself. It’s walking onto one trail while expecting it to behave like another.

Five Trailheads, Not Five Boxes

Before we get into it: every trailhead here is a generalization. Real people rarely fit neatly into categories.

I think Rolland Griffiths is a wonderful example of a researcher who started out committed to scientific objectivity and ended up muddling their own waters and came to believe psychedelics reveal a genuine spiritual dimension of experience. I’ve worked alongside therapists who came in believing they were the primary experts in the room, only to discover their knowledge was inferior to the wisdom of the substances they were using and the innate healing intelligence already held by their clients—MAPS calls this Inner Healing Intelligence, and Indigenous practitioners would likely recognize the same idea in different language. Plenty of spiritually minded facilitators build psychological tools into their work, and plenty of Indigenous maestros understand the human mind deeply, even without Western vocabulary for it.

The longer people walk this path, the more these worlds overlap. And this is all well and good until two paths disagree and a practitioner must choose one over the other.

What separates the trailheads isn’t that one group is compassionate and another careless, or that one has the truth and the others don’t. It’s that each starts from a different assumption about the root of healing, what the facilitator’s role is, how progress gets recognized, and what you’re actually agreeing to when you enter the container.

Understanding those assumptions matters; not because one trailhead is right and the others wrong, but because most of the friction in this space comes from judging one trailhead by another’s expectations.

So before choosing a guide, ask the simpler question first: what kind of path am I actually stepping onto?

Trailhead One: Recreational

For most people, this is where it starts. Someone hands them a mushroom at a concert. A friend brings LSD on a camping trip. They share MDMA with a partner at a festival, or spend an evening laughing with close friends. The goal isn’t healing or enlightenment. Usually, the focus is more closely aligned with joy, curiosity, connection, novelty, or just a good story.

Recreational use gets dismissed as shallow or irresponsible. Sometimes it is. But that judgment misses something. Plenty of people get their first glimpse of something larger than themselves while doing nothing more than listening to music with friends. A recreational journey can dissolve someone’s fear of death, reveal a sense of interconnectedness, or spark a curiosity that eventually leads them to therapy, spirituality, or Indigenous medicine. A lot of lifelong seekers stumbled onto this path by accident. This mountaineering instructor even began healing his chest-down paralysis with a dose of mushrooms and the String Cheese Incident.

This trailhead also asks the least of you. Little preparation, no formal integration, no overarching philosophy to explain what happened. The experience stands on its own—whether it becomes a funny story, a treasured memory, or the start of something deeper depends almost entirely on what you do afterward.

That freedom is both the strength and the limit. Without expectations or frameworks, recreational use can produce real moments of wonder. But without guidance or integration, even a profound realization can fade into just another remarkable night.

I’ve met people who genuinely encountered the sacred dancing barefoot at a festival. I’ve also met people who spent decades chasing bigger and bigger experiences without letting any of them actually change how they live. The recreational trailhead shows that insight can show up almost anywhere. Whether it turns into lasting transformation is a question no substance answers on its own.

Trailhead Two: Clinical

The clinical trailhead starts with a different question: not “what experience do I want?” but “can psychedelics safely and effectively treat this condition?”

The goal is healing, but it’s approached through the scientific method. Researchers define who can participate, standardize protocols, measure outcomes with validated scales, and often track physiological data through fMRI or EEG. Everything is built to reduce bias so the results can be trusted and applied more broadly.

That rigor is the clinical trailhead’s greatest strength. Without it, we’d have far less quantitative data about how psychedelics affect depression, PTSD, addiction, or end-of-life anxiety. Clinical research is what’s moved psychedelics from the cultural fringe toward mainstream medicine. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, as this trailhead is highly connected to corporatization and capitalism.

One surprising thing about clinical work: the participant has to fit the study, not the other way around. Every study has inclusion and exclusion criteria, such as age, diagnosis, medications, psychiatric history, and so on. Once you’re in, everyone follows roughly the same protocol, because consistency is what makes the data mean anything. If every participant got a different style of preparation or support, you’d never know what actually caused the outcome.

Researchers also work hard to keep their own beliefs out of it. Whether a researcher privately holds spiritual convictions about the medicine is beside the point inside the study; their job is to observe what can be measured and replicated, not confirm a worldview. That doesn’t mean clinicians ignore the mystical side of these experiences; some of the field’s most respected researchers have written about it at length. It just takes a back seat to observation and discipline within the container.

If you value evidence, structure, legality, and clearly defined protocols, this is a solid place to start. It answers an important question: can these medicines reliably help people, and under what conditions?

Trailhead Three: Therapeutic

The therapeutic trailhead shares the clinical goal of healing but gets there differently. Instead of “does this work across a population,” it asks: “what does this individual need to heal?” There is also a shift in focus from the body to the mind.

Here, the medicine isn’t the treatment; it’s a catalyst inside an existing therapeutic relationship. Sometimes the participant has already spent months or years with the same therapist, building trust and a shared language for their struggles. That language could come in the form of any of the commonly understood and taught therapeutic modalities. Then, with a primary modality serving as the framework, psychedelics become a tool for reaching places talk therapy alone can’t touch.

A therapist might use the medicine to deepen parts work through Internal Family Systems, surface implicit memory through somatic approaches like Hakomi, process trauma, or help a client feel emotions they’ve long defended against. The medicine opens the door; the therapist’s training often shapes what happens once it’s open.

That’s the trailhead’s biggest strength. Unlike recreational use, where insight can fade fast, therapy gives you an ongoing container to turn the experience into lasting change. The hard conversations continue after the medicine wears off. New behaviors get practiced. Old patterns get challenged. Healing becomes a process rather than a single event.

One subtlety: every therapist sees the journey through the lens of their training. An IFS therapist notices protectors, exiles, and Self-energy. A somatic therapist tracks sensation in the body. Someone trained in attachment theory watches for relational wounds. None of these are wrong; they’re just different maps of the same territory.

The therapeutic trailhead assumes psychological understanding is one of the main roads to healing. Thoughts, emotions, behavior, relationships, and nervous system regulation become the language for interpreting the journey. For a lot of people, that’s exactly the bridge they need—mystery honored, but grounded in a relationship built on trust and accountability.

Still, the medicine has a way of surfacing experiences that don’t fit neatly into psychological models: mystical states, encounters with the sacred, identity shifts that stretch past the edges of conventional therapy. Good therapists notice this and stay curious rather than forcing everything into a familiar frame. That humility might be the trailhead’s real gift: the longer therapists work with these medicines, the more they learn their training, while invaluable, isn’t always the deepest wisdom in the room.

Looking for safe and sustainable transformation? Consider going deeper…

Trailhead Four: Spiritual

The spiritual trailhead starts from a different place than clinical or therapeutic work. Psychedelics aren’t primarily a treatment or a therapeutic tool; they’re a way of deepening your relationship with the sacred. Healing still matters, but it’s treated as a byproduct of awakening rather than the destination itself: come into greater alignment with truth, God, your true nature, the sacred (pick the word of your choosing), and your life starts to heal on its own.

Unlike the Indigenous trailhead, though, the medicine usually isn’t the path itself; it deepens an existing spiritual tradition. One facilitator interprets the experience through Christ, another through Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Yoga, Kabbalah, Wicca, or some blend gathered over a lifetime of seeking. The journey becomes a doorway into a larger framework that helps both facilitator and participant make sense of what’s unfolding.

What’s beautiful here is the openness to mystery. Questions that might feel out of place in a clinical setting, like what is consciousness, is there a soul, can we experience God directly, are no longer distractions from healing; they become central to it.

Spiritual facilitators often sit between Western psychology and Indigenous ceremony: they’ll borrow preparation practices from psychotherapy, emphasize informed consent, encourage integration, and keep professional boundaries, while also holding space for prayer, meditation, ritual, or energy work. In many ways, this trailhead bridges the psychological language of the West with the more expansive spiritual territory that many participants begin to encounter.

Maybe the biggest surprise for newcomers: spiritual facilitators often care less about what happened during the journey than about who you’re becoming because of it. A beautiful vision or an experience of unity might be meaningful, but it’s rarely the destination. The real question is whether it changes how you live. Are you becoming more honest, more loving, more forgiving, more aligned with what you know to be true?

The spiritual trailhead shifts the center of gravity from symptom reduction toward transformation. Psychological healing is welcome, but it’s understood as one expression of something deeper: a life lived in closer relationship with the sacred. For a lot of people, this feels like coming home and offers enough structure to make sense of extraordinary experiences, yet saving space for mystery and grace.

Trailhead Five: Indigenous

Sadly, at least in modern psychedelic use, this is probably the most misunderstood trailhead. Especially considering it’s the oldest and best understood by practitioners who have used these substances for millennia. From the outside, it looks a lot like the spiritual trailhead—prayer, ceremony, sacred songs, reverence for the medicine. But underneath, the assumption about where healing comes from is completely different.

In recreational, clinical, therapeutic, and spiritual approaches, the medicine deepens an existing framework: science, psychotherapy, a spiritual tradition. Within an Indigenous lineage, the medicine is the framework.

At first glance, this might feel like a mere shift in syntax. Yet, having studied deeply within an Indigenous lineage for the past five years, it is only in the past year that I have barely started to develop a relationship with the medicine and to understand how it works. The medicine isn’t a chemical acting on the brain, or even a catalyst for insight; it’s understood as an intelligent teacher you enter into relationship with. The maestro’s job isn’t to explain the medicine but to spend years, often decades, learning to listen to it.

This is the biggest surprise for people entering an authentic ceremony for the first time. Many arrive expecting the facilitator to act like a therapist—discussing childhood memories, setting treatment goals, processing emotions in real time, or explaining every vision. Instead, they often find something much more subtle: the maestro watches, listens, sings, prays, waits. When they step in, it’s usually because the medicine is asking them to, not because they’ve decided what’s psychologically useful. That can feel reassuring and unsettling at the same time.

In Western traditions, a facilitator’s authority comes from education and clinical training. In an Indigenous lineage, it comes from apprenticeship, ceremony, discipline, and a living relationship with the medicine cultivated over years under elder maestros. So the participant is trusting something bigger than one practitioner—a lineage that’s refined its understanding of healing across generations of ceremony.

The view of illness is different, too. Emotional wounds and trauma are recognized, but Indigenous traditions tend to see the person as one inseparable whole: body, mind, spirit, relationships, community, and one’s relationship with the unseen. Not separate problems needing separate treatments, but expressions of a single life either in harmony or out of it. From here, healing looks more like purification than symptom reduction: the medicine reveals what no longer belongs, what’s been avoided, what’s out of alignment. Sometimes that’s joyful. Sometimes it’s brutal.

This is where newcomers get confused. Imagine someone whose life unravels after ceremony. This could include identity shifting, relationships suddenly feeling false, career feeling empty, old grief surfacing hard. If you’re expecting symptom relief, it looks like something went badly wrong. An experienced Indigenous practitioner may see the same process differently; not because suffering is good or should be romanticized, but because real healing sometimes means dismantling patterns built over decades. The medicine isn’t just changing how someone feels. It may be changing how they live and who they are.

That’s never an excuse for misconduct, and difficult doesn’t automatically mean healing. Authentic lineages are grounded in discipline, humility, and accountability, not the absence of it. But it does mean you should know what you’re choosing. An Indigenous ceremony isn’t psychotherapy with sacred plants, clinical research in the jungle, or a spiritual retreat in an exotic setting. It’s an invitation into a relationship with the medicine, the lineage, the maestros, and a way of understanding healing refined over generations.

That invitation isn’t for everyone. It asks for a different kind of trust and humility, and a willingness to accept that your mind may not know what you need, but your soul already does.

Choosing Your Trailhead

You might be wondering which trailhead is the “right” one. I don’t think there’s a universal answer. The better question is: which assumptions about healing am I willing to embrace?

Each trailhead asks something different of you. Recreational asks if you’re open to exploration. Clinical asks if you trust the scientific process. Therapeutic asks if you’re willing to enter a healing relationship with a trained professional. Spiritual asks if you’re open to viewing your experience through the lens of the sacred. Indigenous asks if you’re willing to embrace a relationship with the medicine itself and the lineage behind it.

None of these questions are better than the others; they just require different kinds of trust.

The most common mistake I see is people choosing one trailhead and expecting it to behave like another. Someone enters an Indigenous ceremony expecting psychotherapy and leaves disappointed that no one processed their childhood with them or held their hand after the ceremony. Someone enters a clinical study hoping for a mystical initiation and gets frustrated by the structure and lack of personalization. Someone wanting deep trauma work chooses a recreational setting and finds no one equipped to help when hard material surfaces. Usually, the disappointment isn’t about the practitioner’s quality but about a mismatch between expectations and the chosen container.

That’s why I’d spend as much time choosing your guide as you can. So many of the people I’ve worked with spent more time evaluating their most recent TV purchase than they did their facilitator. Work through trusted referrals rather than internet searches alone. Talk to your facilitator or therapist before committing. Ask how they understand healing. Notice not just what your mind thinks but what your body feels in their presence. Ask yourself: do you feel safe, do you feel seen, do you trust them to guide you when things get unfamiliar?

It’s also fine to meet yourself where you are. Years in psychotherapy and trust in that process? The therapeutic trailhead is a natural next step. Need legality and evidence? Clinical gives you that structure. Already rooted in a spiritual practice? A spiritually oriented facilitator will feel like an extension of it. And if you feel drawn to an Indigenous lineage after real discernment, know you’re stepping into a very different way of understanding healing. Just go slowly, learn about the lineage, and let trust build rather than assuming it should be immediate.

People’s trailheads change over time, too. Very few people know where the journey will lead when they start. A recreational experience sparks curiosity. Therapy opens a door to spirituality. Spiritual practice inspires a pilgrimage to Peru. Others find that the clinical or therapeutic trailhead is exactly where they belong, permanently. There’s no hierarchy to climb here, just one honest question worth returning to: is the path I’m walking making me more truthful, more loving, more free, more fully alive? If yes, keep walking. If not, walk the other way.

A Special Note for Facilitators

Most facilitator training programs available today teach a mixed-modality approach. They offer some clinical evidence, then a set of tools such as somatic work, psychotherapy, or parts work, and often several frameworks for interpreting the journey, ranging from religious and philosophical systems to tarot and astrology.

I have personal experience with this kind of training. The teacher I chose for my yoga teacher training pulled content from many different lineages, and it was beautiful for me. It helped me understand the material from many directions at once. As a self-proclaimed expert generalist, this was deeply satisfying to my psychological structure (read ego): more knowledge meant a stronger practice meant more benefit.

But the reality of this work is that you can only combine methodologies for so long. At some point, many practitioners will have to choose. The problem arises when two modalities offer different answers to the same question. When a client presents with a certain kind of experience, the therapeutic way of handling it can be vastly different from the Indigenous way. And when you are the practitioner in that moment, with a head full of knowledge and not yet enough wisdom to know which answer is right, both you and your client are at risk.

I cannot require any practitioner to choose a path, and I will not try. I state this now only so you can recognize the wall when you hit it. If you continue deep enough into this work, this moment will come, and you will need to make a decision.

Closing Thoughts

No two trailheads are alike. Each carries its own assumptions about healing, safety, authority, and transformation—and those assumptions shape everything from how a facilitator prepares you to how they respond when things get hard. That doesn’t make one universally right. It means choosing a facilitator is also choosing a philosophy of healing, and the more you trust that philosophy going in, the more likely you’ll find a path that actually fits where you are.

I’ve watched people find real healing through every one of these trailheads. I’ve also watched people get frustrated because they expected one to behave like another; wanted therapy but chose ceremony, wanted awakening but entered a clinical study, wanted symptom relief and ended up questioning everything about their life instead. More often than not, the medicine wasn’t the problem. The expectations were.

Which brings up a question sitting underneath all five trailheads: they all claim to help people heal, but they don’t all mean the same thing by “healing.” Is it feeling better? Reducing symptoms? Processing trauma? Awakening to the sacred? Or something underneath all of those?

That’s where we’ll go in the next essay. Because understanding the trailhead is only the beginning. Eventually, every sincere seeker has to wrestle with a harder question: not which path they’re on, but whether that path is actually leading them toward a life that’s more truthful, more aligned, and more free.

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Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

I haven’t written much lately because, once again, I’ve been pretty deep in my own process. Ten nights of medicine in the past month and a half, and I finally feel like I’m finally touching down. It has been profoundly deep, challenging, and amazing work, and if you’re called to truly change and heal, my team and I are here to help.

I spent fifteen years as a wedding DJ before I ever sat in an ayahuasca ceremony. I could never have imagined what kind of difference that experience would eventually make for the journeys and lives of my clients. Different jobs, same core skill, it turns out: read the room, don’t force anything, and know when to get out of the way and let the thing that’s actually happening happen. I didn’t know that lesson would end up being the whole curriculum.

I had no idea when I decided to go to Peru for the second time, seven years after my first experience and having spent the previous five years sitting with another currendero, that my whole life was going to change in the span of seventeen days. I thought I was signing up for just another experience while helping a dear friend co-organize their retreat. I wanted the downloads, the visions, the things I could share with friends over dinner, and, of course, to feel better. What I’ve received instead, over the past five years of sitting with this lineage, has been something slower, less photogenic, and a lot more work than I bargained for: a set of commitments. Not rules exactly, more like load-bearing walls. Things you build a life around because without them, the whole structure comes down the first time it gets tested.

I’ve spent the last stretch of time putting some of those commitments into writing, partly for myself and partly for the people who are now walking through the door of the ministry I run. What follows is what actually stuck, the parts of this tradition that reorganized how I think about healing, God, other people, and my own stubborn need to be in control of outcomes I was never in control of to begin with.

Yep, I just said the “G” word. If you haven’t already clicked away, I’d like to offer some wonderful words from David Foster Wallace.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

But if the word God truly does bother you that much, and you can’t seem to disconnect it from the concept of religion, I’d suggest a couple of options: consider reaching out. Maybe we could work together to heal that wound. Or simply stop reading. Just know that I feel for you. Religion caused a tremendous amount of damage to me and my life back in my twenties. Fortunately, I’ve learned the Truth.

1. Healing isn’t something that gets done to you.

I used to think healing was a thing that happened to me, in the way weather happens to you. You sit in ceremony, you receive the medicine, something shifts, and you walk out changed. What this lineage corrected in me is the idea that transformation can be delivered by anyone else, including a minister, a Maestro, the Doctors, or even God. Healing starts with the unglamorous work of looking at yourself honestly and being willing to live differently once you’ve seen what’s there.

This was a harder pill than it sounds. It’s much more comfortable to believe someone or something else is going to do the heavy lifting for you. What I learned instead is that ceremony, teachers, and tradition can hand you clarity, but they can’t hand you the willingness to act on it. That part has to come from inside your own chest, freely, every single day, or it doesn’t happen at all.

I also had to let go of the idea that healing gets measured in dramatic moments. It’s not the size of the experience in the room. It’s whether my daily life, months later, actually reflects more truth, more compassion, more discernment than it used to. That’s a much slower scoreboard, and a much more honest one.

2. My relationship with God can’t be outsourced.

I came up in cultures that love an intermediary. A priest, a guru, a facilitator who’s supposedly closer to the source than you are. This structure was wonderful because I could abdicate much of my responsibility to someone else. This tradition asks something less comfortable of me: cultivate the relationship yourself, through prayer, ceremony, self-examination, and just paying attention to your own life. Nobody else can do that work by proxy, no matter how many robes they’re wearing.

What surprised me is how much this reframed the role of teachers in my life. A good Maestro, a good minister, isn’t there to hand you a finished theology. They’re there to point you back toward your own sincere search. I stopped expecting anyone, including myself in my role as a facilitator, to have the final word on what God is. That’s not humility as a performance. It’s an actual admission that I don’t get to finish that conversation for anyone, including myself.

It also freed me from a kind of spiritual competitiveness I didn’t realize I was carrying, the quiet comparison of whose understanding of God is more evolved. Everyone’s walking their own timeline. My job is to stay faithful to mine, not to grade anyone else’s. The beautiful part of this is that once you realize your own path, you can stop paying attention to everyone else’s.

I notice this most in the moments right after a ceremony, when people want a tidy summary of what they were shown, as if I’m supposed to translate it into doctrine on the spot. I used to try. Now I mostly hand the question back. Not because I’m withholding wisdom, but because the honest answer is that my own understanding of God has changed shape more than once in the last decade, and I have no reason to believe it’s done changing. Handing someone a fixed answer would be a kind of theft, even if it felt generous in the moment.

3. Reciprocity isn’t a vibe. It’s cosmic law.

The word that reorganized my thinking more than any other is Ayni, an Andean concept that is loosely translated as “sacred reciprocity” or “today for you, tomorrow for me.” Loosely, because the English version makes it sound optional, like a nice way to live if you can manage it. In the lineage I’ve come up in, it’s closer to a law than a suggestion. Every thought, word, and action has weight, and that weight goes somewhere. It doesn’t vanish because you didn’t watch it land.

I used to think of consequences as things that happened to bad people, or at least to careless ones. What Ayni taught me is more uncomfortable than that. Consequence isn’t a punishment system; it’s more like going to school. It applies to nice people having a bad week just as evenly as it applies to anyone else. The comfort in this, once you stop resisting it, is that it also means generosity isn’t wasted, integrity isn’t wasted, showing up honestly for people isn’t wasted, even when nobody’s keeping score that you can see.

This is also where a lot of Western wellness culture and this tradition part ways for me. There’s a strain of spiritual self-improvement that treats healing as a purely internal, private transaction between you and your own nervous system. Ayni doesn’t let you off that easy. It insists that how you treat the people around you, how you treat your own body, how you treat the land you’re standing on, all of it is part of the same ledger. You don’t get to have a beautiful inner life and a messy set of relationships and call the project finished.

The other tricky thing I would offer about ayni is that it runs both ways. It’s easy to think of the law of attraction as whatever good I do in the world, I’ll get that back tenfold. While I’m not sure I have enough information to stand by the mathematical formula, what I do know is that when I’ve also caused harm—to myself or others, and in this lifetime or one prior to this—all that energy will eventually return to me. This might feel like an easy scale to balance when we look at the life we’re living in now, but going back a few thousand years has opened my eyes to a very different mathematical formula.

4. Trusting myself doesn’t mean I’m always right.

For a long time, I confused self-trust with certainty. I thought the goal was to get to a place where I always knew the right call. What this lineage actually asks is smaller and more sustainable: take responsibility for your own decisions, stay teachable, and have the humility to learn from the ones that go sideways.

The same recalibration applies to trusting God. It doesn’t mean expecting life to bend toward what I want. It means trusting that there’s a wisdom operating past the edge of what I can currently see, even in the stretches where I can’t locate the point of what’s happening to me. I’ve had to sit with plenty of circumstances for which I never got a satisfying explanation. This tradition doesn’t promise you’ll get one. It promises the invitation toward growth stays open regardless.

What I’ve noticed is that this kind of trust is active, not passive. It shows up as courageous action and honest self-reflection, not as a comfortable feeling of certainty I get to sit back and enjoy. Some days, trust looks like doing the hard, honest thing even when you don’t know how it’ll turn out. That’s the actual practice, not the warm-up for it.

5. “My best” changes shape, and that’s allowed.

I spent years measuring myself against a version of “my best” that never moved, regardless of how much sleep I’d gotten or what else was happening in my life. This lineage corrected that math. My best on a good week and my best during a hard season are not the same amount, and holding myself to the good-week standard on a hard-season day was never integrity. It was just punishment dressed up as a standard.

What actually matters, as far as I can tell, is showing up with sincerity and using what I’ve got that day, not chasing a fixed bar that ignores circumstance. That’s a relief, but it’s not a loophole. Doing my best still means acting with integrity when it’s inconvenient and staying honest when nobody’s watching; it just means I stop treating an off day as evidence of moral failure.

The other piece I had to absorb is what happens after a mistake. Shame wants you to disappear. This tradition wants you to look at what happened, take responsibility, make repairs where you can, and keep moving. The past is the past; now it’s time to move on. Every sincere effort, even the clumsy ones, apparently still counts for something. I didn’t expect that to be as freeing as it turned out to be.

6. Letting go of the outcome is not the same as not caring.

This one took me the longest to actually live, as opposed to just being able to explain it to a client. For years, I confused surrender with passivity. I thought if I really trusted the process, I’d stop having preferences, stop hoping for particular outcomes, stop caring how things turned out. That’s not what this tradition teaches, and honestly, thank God, because it seems I’m constitutionally incapable of not caring how things turn out.

What I’ve come to understand instead is a much more precise, almost contractual idea: you do your part completely, and then you release your grip on the part that was never yours to control in the first place. Show up prepared. Act with integrity. Say the honest thing instead of the strategic thing. And then, once that’s done, let the results be what they’re going to be, instead of white-knuckling the outcome like you can manifest it into shape through sheer anxiety and strength of will.

I’ve watched this distinction save people, myself included, from a very particular kind of suffering. The suffering that comes not from things going wrong, but from believing you were supposed to be able to prevent them from going wrong. Letting go of the outcome doesn’t mean you stop showing up. It means you stop punishing yourself for not being the CEO of the Universe.

After suffering pretty hard for six nights of medicine earlier this year, something I learned in my last trip to Peru was that “strength” in the medicine actually looked like complete and total surrender. My ability to allow the Doctor to do his work while I lay there quietly breathing and praying for harmony in my body. One of the biggest outcomes of this learning is that if I have something in my life today, I deserve to have it. If I don’t have it, I can ask for it and then do my part to be ready to receive it if or when it comes. Today, I have more than I need, work less than I did in the 25 years I spent in corporate life, and haven’t had to manipulate, cajole, convince, or work harder to get it. Ayhi is quite literally a merit-based system, and the results are profound when you start playing by the rules.

7. Suffering isn’t the assignment.

I was recently listening to a podcast where the host was chastizing himself for drinking a single glass of wine and how it completely messed up his world for three days. While I’m no longer a drinker, the level and commitment towards optimization instead of enjoyment I see in many healing cultures today is bordering on ridiculous. I also want to flag this one given how much of the broader culture around this work has gotten weirdly attached to catharsis as proof of legitimacy. If you didn’t cry, if you didn’t purge, if you didn’t have the hard night, some corners of this world will quietly suggest you didn’t really do the work.

This lineage doesn’t teach that. It teaches that life includes real seasons of difficulty, and difficulty can absolutely be a teacher, but the point of the whole exercise was never suffering for its own sake. Quite frankly, it’s to live a sweet and easy life, and when we’ve done our work, this is how your medicine work can be as well. The point was always joy, freedom, gratitude, the capacity to actually enjoy the life you’ve been given instead of treating it as an obstacle course you have to earn your way through. Enjoyment isn’t the reward for finishing the healing. It’s part of the healing.

That’s probably the piece of this tradition I love the most, but I still have to relearn the most often, because my nervous system, like a lot of people’s, carries a low-grade suspicion of anything that feels too easy. But the medicine, and the lineage that carries it, keeps handing me the same quiet correction: you’re allowed to enjoy this. You were always allowed to enjoy this. Waiting until every problem is solved before you let yourself feel good just guarantees you never get there.

8. Nobody else can live my life, including me pretending otherwise.

There’s a temptation, when you find a tradition or a teacher that genuinely helps you, to hand over the keys. I understand the appeal. It’s exhausting to be the one responsible for your own life, and it’s tempting to find a Maestro, a coach, a therapist, a partner, a minister, a book, a plant, anything that will finally tell you what to do so you can stop carrying the weight of deciding for yourself.

This lineage is stubborn about refusing that handoff. Self-sovereignty isn’t independence from God or separation from other people. It’s the willingness to think, discern, choose, and act in accordance with your own sincere relationship with whatever you understand God to be. Guidance gets received with gratitude. Conscience doesn’t get surrendered to anyone, no matter how wise they seem.

I’ve had to say this plainly to people who come to me wanting a guru, because the honest answer is that I’m not one, and neither is anyone else worth listening to. My job is to hold a space where your own knowing can surface, not to replace it with mine. There’s no shortage of people happy to be your guru if you’re looking for one. This tradition asks something less flattering of its facilitators: stay useful, stay humble, and get out of the way.

This is one of the more countercultural pieces of the whole framework, at least measured against a lot of the psychedelic facilitation world I’ve watched develop over the last decade. Charisma sells. A confident teacher with certification and a clear answer to everything is a more attractive product than a facilitator who keeps passing the question back to you. But confidence isn’t the same thing as competence, and a teacher’s certainty is not evidence that they’re right; it’s just evidence that they’re certain. I’d rather build a ministry full of people who trust their own discernment than one full of people who’ve outsourced it to me.

9. Ceremony isn’t a performance, and it isn’t owed to you on your terms.

I came in expecting ceremony to work a certain way, on a certain schedule, delivering a certain kind of experience if I showed up and did it right. What I learned is that ceremony is a gift entrusted to the ministry, not a service you’re purchasing the outcome of. The Doctors reveal what already exists within you. They’re not obligated to perform on request, and treating ceremony like entertainment or an escape hatch from your actual life misunderstands what it’s for.

The activation (i.e., everything that comes after the ceremony) matters more than I initially wanted it to. Following the guidance the ministry sets isn’t bureaucracy for its own sake; it protects the safety and integrity of the work for everyone in the room, not just you. And whatever shows up once you’re in it, peace or discomfort, clarity or a long stretch of nothing much, the first move is to receive it as information about yourself, not as a verdict on the people or the world around you.

I think about this every time someone tells me they want a “powerful” ceremony, by which they usually mean intense. I wanted that too, once. But intensity was never the actual metric. Honesty was. A few of the most useful nights I’ve had in this medicine were quiet and almost boring. Some of the flashiest ones may have been the most difficult and taught me nothing I couldn’t have learned watching television.

10. Community isn’t agreement. It’s how you treat people you disagree with.

I used to think a healthy spiritual community meant everyone more or less seeing things the same way. What this lineage taught me is closer to the opposite. Every person is walking their own path on their own timeline, and the strength of a community isn’t found in consensus; it’s found in how people treat each other across disagreement.

That means honesty, dignity, and confidentiality toward everyone who walks through the door, not just the ones I click with. It means offering support without trying to control, rescue, or manage someone else’s process, which is a harder habit to break than I expected, especially for those of us wired Midwest nice, dyed-in-the-wool codependents. And it means fairness gets measured by consistency and respect, not by whether every outcome happens to land in my favor.

The part I underestimated is how much my own attitude shapes whether other people feel safe enough to ask honest questions and grow without fear of ridicule. Community health isn’t an abstract policy question. It’s built one interaction at a time, mostly by people deciding not to manipulate or judge each other in moments when it would have been easy to.

I’ve also had to sit with the uncomfortable truth that not every disagreement resolves into reconciliation, and this tradition doesn’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes the loving move is a boundary, not a bridge. I used to treat any distance between another human and me as a personal failure I needed to fix. Now I understand that a healthy community includes people who simply need space from each other, and that this isn’t a breakdown of the community, it’s a feature of a mature one.

11. Walking my own path means I stop comparing my mile marker to anyone else’s.

The last lesson, and maybe the one that ties the rest together, is that my journey doesn’t have to resemble anyone else’s to be legitimate. I spent a lot of years treating comparison as useful information, as if it would tell me whether I was behind or ahead. It mostly just made me miserable and slower.

What this tradition asks instead is to remain teachable for the long haul, to keep welcoming the discomfort of learning something new about myself well past the point where I expected to have it figured out. When I lose my way, and I have, more than once, the instruction isn’t to punish myself out of the detour. It’s to return to the path with honesty and renewed faith, which is a much more forgiving instruction than the one I used to give myself.

Life Today

This journey was never about becoming someone else, some more evolved, more enlightened version of a person I’ll apparently meet eventually if I do the work correctly. It’s about remembering who I already am underneath all the strategies I built to avoid finding out. Everything else, the ceremonies, the commitments, and the eleven milemarkers mentioned above, is just scaffolding for that one, ongoing act of remembering.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be finished learning from this tradition, and I’ve stopped expecting to be. What I have now, instead of a finish line, is a set of commitments I keep returning to, the way you return to a compass rather than a map. It’s less dramatic than the download I originally showed up hoping for. It’s also, fifteen years and a few hundred ceremonies later, more useful than anything I could have manifested on my own.

Our Doctors know everything about me, and they know exactly the order and speed in which I am ready to heal. It’s very common to just want to be done with it. To have it all fixed in one ceremony. But in reality, that’s often more harmful than helpful. If we were a car tire, the medicine lets out a little air at a time, giving us the opportunity to fill back up with new, clean, fresh air. If the medicine released all the air at once, we wouldn’t be able to keep moving to the next filling station. Little by little, bit by bit, piece by piece, we get to replace the dirty air that causes us suffering with new air that lets us enjoy our lives.

Practically speaking, I will tell you this. The healing and growth I’ve experienced today (and especially in the last twelve months) took far more time, strength, and effort than I ever imagined. But the prize inside is being able to live an amazing life. Just two years ago, I can remember a walk in the park where it felt like everything in life was wonderful, yet just a few hours later, everything had turned 180 degrees, and I felt crappy again. These moments were showing me what was possible, but I still had more work to do. At the time, I thought, “For God’s sake, how much more do I have to clean?” Little did I know at that time that I hadn’t even gotten to the big stuff yet.

But today, as I write this article, I can’t remember the last day I would label “hard.” And I sleep better today than I have in twenty years. While I have no doubt that something may arise in the future that will challenge this new sense of ease, today I get to celebrate that my life is pretty wonderful. The process was not fast and has required a deeper commitment to learning and living the Truth than I could have ever imagined, but the juice is most definitely worth the squeeze.

The path is wiser than the traveler, and you’re perfect and right on time!

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Healing is a lot easier with a safe and well-worn roadmap!

Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

There’s a moment that frequently repeats itself in group psychedelic work, and once you witness it in real time, you can’t go back.

The first time it really landed for me was during a group journey, when I played “Snowden’s Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops. After the ceremony closed and sharing began, one person said, “Oh my God, that song made me want to crawl out of my skin.” Another person in the same circle said, “I don’t understand that at all, that song made me feel empowered, like I could do anything.” To one person, the song was expansive. To another, nearly painful. One individual’s body and soul opened wide; another’s body tightened, breath shortened, an urge to escape crept in alongside a silent desire to cry out, “Make it stop.”

Same room. Same song. Same moment. Two entirely different realities.

In a one-on-one session, this is relatively simple to navigate. If the client expresses discomfort, you can adjust, change the music, lower the volume, or remove the stimulus. Private work can be highly responsive to the individual. But in a group setting, that’s simply not possible. Prior to the work I’m doing today, I was a DJ for fifteen years and logged about 500 wedding dances. Just because one person hates the Chicken Dance doesn’t mean I’m not going to play it. For that matter, just because I hate the Chicken Dance doesn’t mean it might not totally make the night of an eight-year-old (or someone drunk enough to act like one). Yet if I change the song for one person, I could interrupt something meaningful for another. If I try to optimize the experience for everyone, I end up chasing an impossible standard where no one is ever challenged, and nothing ever disrupts the room’s emotional baseline.

In all honesty, this is one of the biggest gaps I see in Western facilitation today. The lack of musical/energetic and sensitivity/education, combined with the learned (and increasingly legalized and demanded) pressure to never “lead” or “influence” a journeyer, has created a space where the touching and releasing of deeper, darker emotions has been quietly abandoned. The number of blasé playlists I’ve encountered, replete from start to finish with ethereal tones, shamanic flutes, and East Forest tunes, is staggering. For a group of humans so intent on dealing with shadow work, that sonic palette is wonderful for anyone who wants to float above their lower-frequency emotions, but it abandons the possibility of actually feeling and healing the dark stuff that truly disrupts our everyday peace, joy, and freedom.

The topic underneath the topic that I’d like to explore isn’t which way is correct, or even which one should be prioritized. The question is: why is everyone so afraid of a big reaction, and what is actually happening beneath the reaction itself? Why does one nervous system interpret the same input as safe, while another reads it as threatening? Why does one person open, while another contracts? If our instinct is to immediately remove whatever is causing discomfort, we may miss the very thing the experience is trying to show us. The music isn’t the problem; it’s a magnifying glass pointed at a deeper process, likely one tied to stored memories the person may not even consciously recall. What arises in that moment, fear, anxiety, resistance, is not random. It’s patterned. It’s familiar. It’s something the person has encountered before, in different forms, across different contexts, or even different lifetimes. And here, in this altered state, it’s finally surfacing.

So as facilitators, do we adjust the environment to remove the discomfort? Or do we get curious about what the discomfort is pointing to? That decision, often made in subtle, almost unconscious ways, can shape the entire trajectory of the experience. Yet increasingly, across social, therapeutic, spiritual, and psychedelic spaces, there’s been a clear trend over the past decade: when discomfort arises, rather than taking personal responsibility, we reach for comfort.

The intention is understandable. Most people don’t want to see someone suffer, much less suffer themselves. No one wants to feel responsible for another person’s distress (enter: “Good customer service”, people-pleasing, codependence, and Midwest Nice). But in our effort to reduce discomfort, we may also be reducing the opportunity for something deeper to unfold. What if the very thing we’re trying to remove is the thing that needs to be felt?

That’s what I’d like to explore.

Trigger Warning

As we navigate this slippery slope (and one that will no doubt ruffle some feathers and call my commitment to trauma-informed care into question), I want to name a distinction that keeps getting blurred in modern healing spaces: safety and comfort are not the same thing.

Safety is about containment. It’s about creating an environment where a person is not at risk of harm, physically, psychologically, or relationally. It includes clear boundaries, informed consent, appropriate preparation, and the presence of someone capable of responding when things get intense. Comfort is about ease, the absence of friction, the smoothing out of anything that feels unpleasant, confronting, or destabilizing. These two ideas often get conflated, and when they do, the true potential for healing disappears or slows to a crawl. This is often why individuals are coming to psychedelics in desperation after decades of psychotherapy or other spiritual practices.

Healing becomes a complicated architecture of trigger warnings and accommodations. The goal subtly moves from supporting the process to managing the experience. Facilitators step into a place of responsibility, rarely for their own actions but for their clients’ perceived outcomes and feelings. They move from holding space to a place of control, and often from helping someone sit with and move through discomfort to trying to remove it altogether.

My perspective, and where I’ll stand in this essay, is that the role of the facilitator is not to remove discomfort or impose it, but to help the client stay in relationship with it. That distinction matters because when comfort becomes the overriding goal, avoidance begins to masquerade as care. Interventions happen too quickly. Stimuli get removed before they can be understood, processed, and released. The nervous system is protected but not challenged, and over time, instead of building capacity, we reinforce fragility. The intention is good (it almost always is), but the outcome is often the opposite of what healing requires. Healing doesn’t ask us to be comfortable. It asks us to be present. And when a client approaches me seeking healing, my responsibility to truth supersedes their desire for comfort, though never their safety.

Ready to go deeper? Check out the PsychedelicIQ Starter Kit.

The Spectrum of Discomfort

If we’re going to talk about discomfort as a doorway to healing, we should get more precise, because not all discomfort is useful and not all intensity leads to growth (and because I don’t want the comment section to turn into a bloodbath). One of the most common mistakes in both therapeutic and spiritual spaces is collapsing all forms of discomfort into a single category: either something to be avoided entirely or pushed through at all costs. Both are incomplete, and both do real damage.

A more accurate way to understand discomfort is to view it as a spectrum with at least three distinct experiences: constructive discomfort, overwhelm, and avoidance.

Constructive discomfort is where most meaningful healing happens. This is the edge, the place where something feels uncomfortable but not unmanageable. There’s activation, but also awareness. A person may feel fear, grief, or tension and still be present enough to observe it, stay with it, and move through it. In trauma theory, this is often described as operating near the edge of the Window of Tolerance, where the nervous system is activated but not to the point of shutdown or dissociation. In that zone, the system can process, integrate, and reorganize. From a spiritual perspective, this is where deeper patterns surface, buried trauma, memories, ego, and vanity rising up. In Eastern traditions, these are often referred to as samskaras or sankaras, imprints of past experience that live in the body and mind. They can show up as guilt, fear, shame, or anger, anything lower than 200 on Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness. Their appearance is not a problem; it’s an opportunity.

On the other end of the spectrum is overwhelm. This is what happens when intensity exceeds a person’s capacity to stay present and the system begins to shut down or fragment. This can look like dissociation, pain, panic, confusion, or a complete loss of orientation. In psychedelic work, this might show up as forgetting large chunks of a journey (though it’s worth noting that missing time can also represent merging with unitive consciousness, so context matters). It can also show up as severe physical and psychological distress, frequently from taking a dose higher than someone is able to psychologically metabolize, and resulting in hours of discomfort not at all resembling a psychedelic experience. This is where skilled support becomes essential, not to remove all discomfort, but to help the person return to a state where they can relate to what’s arising. Without that support, overwhelm can reinforce the very patterns the work is meant to resolve, and in the worst case, retraumatize the journeyer.

And then there is avoidance, the least obvious and most culturally reinforced of the three. Avoidance doesn’t always look like running away. It can look like subtle distraction, reaching for comfort too quickly, changing the music, moving or dancing or drumming, going outside, redirecting attention, or reframing before something has actually been felt. In many modern healing environments, avoidance is often mistaken for care. When discomfort is consistently interrupted before it can be experienced and released, the underlying pattern remains untouched. The body, mind, and spirit never learn that it can stay with intensity and survive it. The emotional charge goes back underground, often resurfacing later in victim mentality, whether that’s in an argument with a partner or getting disproportionately angry in traffic. This avoidance pattern is the direct opposite of personal responsibility and self-sovereignty.

Over time, it creates a kind of fragility and overreaction to ordinary reality. The goal is not to eliminate discomfort but to calibrate it, to recognize when someone is at the edge of growth, slipping into overwhelm, or bypassing the experience entirely. Without that distinction, clients end up protected from the very experiences that could help them grow, or pushed into states they aren’t ready to process. Neither is healing. The work is in learning how to walk the tightrope. As Byron Katie is fond of saying, “When you argue with reality, you lose. But only 100% of the time.”

The Avoidance Trap

The tendency to avoid discomfort isn’t limited to psychedelic spaces; it’s a broader cultural pattern that shows up in education, therapy, and in how we relate to ourselves daily. When I was going through my somatic psychotherapy training, I remember the amount of time and resources devoted to accommodations. Working in student triads, many students in our Level 2 training were unwilling to participate as a student-client due to the student-therapist not having the requisite training to “handle” their trauma. In a private conversation with a cohort member, they shared an insight I haven’t been able to shake: “There’s a good chance that 50% of the people in this training will never feel safe, anywhere, or with anyone.” The fact that these are the future therapists being certified to go out into the world and heal others feels deeply misaligned to me.

This is not a new phenomenon, and one might accuse me of sounding like a Boomer right now (in reality, I’m just a latch-key Xennial with a high tolerance for pain and an inability to keep my mouth shut). But there has been a noticeable shift toward prioritizing emotional ease as a primary goal. On college campuses, students are offered designated spaces to decompress after receiving difficult feedback. In therapeutic environments, there’s often a strong emphasis on regulation, safety, and stabilization, sometimes to the point where deeper emotional activation is rarely approached. In spiritual communities, language around “high vibration” and “positive energy” can subtly discourage engagement with anger, grief, or fear. None of these are inherently problematic. The issue is not that these tools exist; it’s the frequency and dependence with which they’re used and what gets normalized in the process.

When comfort becomes the default response to discomfort, the nervous system loses the opportunity to learn that it can experience intensity without collapsing. Emotional resilience is not developed through the absence of challenge but through the ability to stay present within it. This isn’t just philosophical; it’s well-established in psychology. One of the most effective approaches for treating anxiety is exposure-based work, where rather than avoiding the stimulus that triggers fear, the individual is gradually and safely brought into contact with it. Over time, the nervous system learns that the feared experience is survivable and capacity increases. (Sidenote: there’s a wonderful story about this in Episode 740 of This American Life.)

In his work on modern culture, Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, points to a similar dynamic. When individuals are consistently protected from psychological discomfort, they don’t become stronger; they become more sensitive. The threshold for what feels overwhelming decreases. This doesn’t mean throwing people into overwhelming experiences and expecting them to adapt. It means being discerning, because there is a real difference between supporting someone through discomfort and shielding them from it entirely, a difference between regulation and avoidance, between care and control.

When these distinctions are lost, healing environments begin to prioritize emotional smoothness over emotional truth. Discomfort starts to be treated as a problem to solve rather than a signal to understand. Anger becomes something to calm down. Grief becomes something to move through quickly. Fear becomes something to reframe. But what if these experiences aren’t obstacles? What if they’re information?

From a somatic perspective, these emotions often carry stored energy, unprocessed experiences that have not yet been integrated. From a psychological perspective, they are learned patterns that continue to shape perception and behavior. From a spiritual perspective, they are imprints that continue to arise until they are fully felt and released. Regardless of the framework, the pattern is the same: what one resists persists, and what is consistently interrupted cannot complete. This is the deeper cost of a comfort-first approach. It doesn’t just reduce discomfort in the moment; it delays resolution. And once you start to see this pattern, it becomes difficult to ignore. Nowhere does it become more consequential than in psychedelic work, where the entire process depends on a person’s ability to stay present with what arises. Carrying a comfort-first mindset into those spaces doesn’t just limit the experience. It fundamentally changes it.

Control vs. Trust in Psychedelic Work

If this cultural pattern is subtle in everyday life, it becomes amplified in psychedelic work, where we are not just working with thoughts or behaviors but with expanded states of consciousness where perception is heightened, defenses are lowered, and suppressed material can surface with remarkable intensity. And when that happens, the question becomes unavoidable: who (or what) is in control?

In many modern psychedelic frameworks, especially those influenced by therapeutic or trauma-informed models, the facilitator is positioned as the central authority. They guide, interpret, and intervene. The medicine becomes a tool, and the experience becomes something to manage. This type of experience comes naturally to those of us who spent years in therapy. But beneath this approach lies an unspoken assumption: that the facilitator knows what should happen, and that if something uncomfortable or unexpected arises, it can be managed, softened, or corrected.

This is where control and responsibility creep into the space, and it shows up in surprisingly subtle ways. This unlearning process has been a significant part of my own work over the past six months, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. A playlist is carefully curated to avoid triggery tracks. Music is changed quickly when discomfort arises. Language is introduced to steer the experience in a particular direction. Interventions happen not because the client is overwhelmed, but because the experience is no longer comfortable or predictable. Over time, this creates a style of facilitation that prioritizes smoothness over truth, and the journey becomes something to optimize rather than something to encounter.

Most of us who do this work know that psychedelics don’t respond well to control. The more we try to manage the experience, the more we risk interfering with the very process we’re trying to support. Because at its core, psychedelic work is not something we do to a person. It is something that unfolds within them.

From an Indigenous perspective, these experiences are approached very differently. The medicine is not a tool; it is an intelligence, approached with respect, relationship, and trust. The facilitator is not the primary agent of change but a steward of the space in which the medicine works. There is far less emphasis on controlling the content of the experience and far more emphasis on allowing the process to unfold as it needs to. This does not mean there is no structure or responsibility; it means the structure is in service of the process, not the other way around. And it rests on something often missing in modern adaptations of this work: a deep, earned relationship with the medicine itself. Without that relationship, the language of trust becomes superficial, borrowed without being embodied. Facilitators may attempt to replicate the appearance of Indigenous practice without the foundation that makes it safe. Trust without relationship is not wisdom. It’s imitation.

The tension between control and trust is not something to be resolved but something to be navigated, because the facilitator holds a genuinely paradoxical role. They are responsible for safety but not in control of the process. They are there to intervene when necessary but not to shape the experience according to their own framework. This is where over-functioning often emerges, sometimes from a lack of trust in the medicine or the client, but more often from one’s identity, the unconscious belief that we are the ones who understand what’s happening and therefore should guide it. And sometimes it comes from our own discomfort with not knowing, not controlling, and from the fear that a client might have a difficult experience that becomes a black mark on our reputation and referral network. So we step in. We adjust, guide, interpret, comfort, soothe, and manage. And in doing so, we may unintentionally interrupt something already in motion, or worse, shut down the very process that would free our client from bondage they’ve carried for decades, that neither of us even knew was there.

When a person is in an expanded state, what arises is not random. It is patterned and specific, often the exact material that needs to be seen, felt, and released. Discomfort, in this context, is not an error in the system. It is the signal. A facilitator not trained in how to support someone through intensity may default to control because it feels safer, but control is not the same as safety.

A more grounded approach looks like this: create the conditions for safety and trust, then get out of the way without abandoning the client. Remain present, attuned, and responsive. Step in when someone is overwhelmed or requests assistance. Step back when the process is unfolding. Do not impose meaning or direct outcomes. Support the client in staying in relationship with what is arising, and trust that, given the right conditions, the process knows where to go. This requires restraint, awareness, and a willingness not to be the center of the experience. In this work, the facilitator is not the one doing the healing. They are merely the ones responsible for creating the container and keeping it intact.

Empowered Responsibility and the Edge of Healing

If there is a thread running through everything we’ve explored, it’s this: healing is not something that can be handed to someone. It is something that must be entered into, and that requires strength, vulnerability, and responsibility, not total unbounded responsibility without structure, and not reckless autonomy, but something more grounded and more demanding. Empowered responsibility with safety built in.

This is the middle path between over-control and abandonment. On one end, the facilitator takes too much responsibility, guiding the experience and becoming the perceived source of insight or healing, and the client receives the familiar reinforcement that the answers exist outside of them. On the other end, responsibility is dropped entirely, and the language of “trust the medicine” becomes an excuse for lack of structure, preparation, or skill, leaving the client to navigate intensity without adequate support. Neither leads to sovereignty.

True healing requires that the client be an active participant in their own process, and this begins before the experience even starts. In my work, I provide simple and clear boundaries around dosing: small, medium, and large ranges, each grounded in experience, safety, and my direct relationship with the medicine. Within that container, the client chooses all by themselves. And that simple choice is so much more difficult than most people expect because they’ve grown accustomed to someone “prescribing” the right path to their healing. Yet if I tell someone how much to take and the experience becomes overwhelming, the responsibility is immediately externalized: “You told me to take this.” When a client learns to listen to themselves (their intuition, spirit, God, or whatever you want to call it) and makes an informed choice within a held structure, they are not just receiving an experience. They are creating and responsible for it, and that changes how they relate to everything that follows.

This is not about setting people up for struggle. It is about setting them up for ownership, because ownership is what allows learning to occur. If every difficult moment is managed, softened, or redirected by someone else, the client never has the opportunity to discover their own capacity. They never learn they can move through something rather than around it, and without that learning, there is never any permanent shift in strength and capacity.

This is where the conversation becomes developmental. Many people have not been taught how to relate to discomfort, consequence, or responsibility in a mature way, not because they are incapable, but because the environments they’ve been in have never required it. So when they enter psychedelic work, there can be an unconscious expectation that someone else will guide, fix, or resolve what arises, similar to the experience most people have had with conventional medicine. But that expectation is precisely what needs to change, because the deeper aim of this work is not just relief. It is maturation, the movement from dependency to self-sufficiency and sovereignty, from reactivity to presence, from avoidance to capacity. That cannot be outsourced. The facilitator can support it. The medicine can catalyze it. But the client has to step into it.

This is why discomfort plays such a central role, not as something to endure for its own sake, but as the edge where growth becomes possible. It is the moment where old patterns surface and new responses become available, where something familiar can finally be met in a different way. Remove that edge too quickly and you remove the opportunity. Avoid it entirely and you delay the process. Overwhelm the system and you shut it down. When you meet that edge with the right balance of support and responsibility, the person begins to trust themselves. They stayed with something difficult. They felt intensity without being consumed by it. They moved through something that once felt immovable. That is where healing becomes real, not as an idea or a single moment, but as a shift in capacity. Clarity. Agency. Self-trust. The ability to navigate not just the medicine, but life itself.

Which brings us back to the original question. When discomfort arises, what do we do with it? Do we remove it? Control it? Or do we learn how to stay in relationship with it? Because the answer to that question doesn’t just shape a single ceremony. It shapes the kind of person someone becomes on the other side of it. If the goal of this work is not just to feel better but to become more capable, more grounded, and more self-sovereign, then the path forward becomes clear.

For those imbued with or obligated to “do no harm,” this may be a difficult concept to accept. Changing one’s relationship to suffering and developing an understanding that, at a cosmic level, when we zoom out far enough, all suffering is actually healing, is a hard pill to swallow. Accepting that someone’s life journey may get pretty f’ing dark and difficult before it gets better can be very uncomfortable without the proper training and support.

In the end, the question is not how to make an experience more comfortable. The question is whether we are willing to stay present long enough for the discomfort to transform itself into a newfound freedom and happiness.

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Healing is a lot easier with a safe and well-worn roadmap!

Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

If you read the first part of this series, you know where I am coming from. I got sober in 2007, and for 15 years built a life in AA that I am genuinely grateful for, and eventually arrived at a place where I knew the program had taken me as far as it was designed to go. Psychedelic healing was not a rebellion against recovery. It was a continuation of it, and one I walked alongside for seven more years until all the fear and shame from the rhetoric had finally been purged from my body.

This second piece is less personal and more practical. It is for people in recovery, or people who have come from recovery, who are seriously considering working with psychedelics and want to approach that honestly, safely, and with the same rigor the program taught them to bring to everything else in their lives.

I will not try to talk you into anything. That is not the point. The point is that if you are going to do this work, you deserve clear-eyed guidance rather than either evangelical enthusiasm or reflexive condemnation.

Let’s start with a few things worth getting honest about before we go any further.

Not Everyone Is Ready

The most important thing I can say at the start of this conversation is also the least exciting: not everyone who wants to work with psychedelics is ready to do so.

If you are currently in active addiction, or if you are struggling to stay sober day to day, psychedelics are probably not the next right move. These medicines are not shortcuts. They do not do the work for you. They amplify whatever is already present, and if what is present is unmanaged chaos, that is what will be amplified. Having a profound mystical experience while your life is structurally unstable is not transformation. It is destabilization.

There is no universal timeline, but I can offer what I know from my own experience and from working with others. I did not sit with psychedelics until I had seven years of solid sobriety behind me. I had done substantial work in therapy. I had a meditation practice. My nervous system was not in constant crisis. That foundation was not incidental. It was the reason the work could actually land.

I would encourage anyone coming from a recovery background to have at least one year of solid sobriety before seriously considering this path. More is not worse. The more stable your foundation, the more you will be able to receive from the experience and integrate afterward.

This is not a hard and fast rule (there is no one ‘right way’ to psychedelic). In fact, for those struggling with opioid addiction, medicines such as iboga can have profound healing effects that no other program or plant on this earth has been able to deliver. This plant also comes with some of the highest risks or mortality when mixed with other substances, so if you’re not yet sober, my suggestion would be to get your ass to a treatment center, get some clean time under your belt, and if psychedelics are the path you’re choosing, being 100% honest with your facilitator. Take their direction and listen closely, because your life may depend on it…literally.

The Honesty Test

One of the most important things recovery ever taught me is the difference between what I want to be true and what is actually true. That same discernment applies directly here.

Before you take any action, ask yourself this honestly: if you told your sponsor what you were considering, what would happen in your body?

If the answer is shame or fear of disapproval, that is important information. It does not necessarily mean you are wrong to consider this path. But it does mean there is something worth examining. Shame is one of the fastest routes back to the kind of hiding that makes us sick.

Real healing requires real honesty. If you are concealing your exploration of psychedelics from your sponsor or your support network, you are already moving in a direction that is incompatible with what you are trying to do. The program called this rigorous honesty. Sacred medicine work demands exactly the same thing.

If the reason you are hiding it is that your sponsor would shut the conversation down immediately, without listening, and without any willingness to engage, that is also worth examining. A sponsor’s job is not to control your healing. It is to help you stay honest with yourself.

Ready to go deeper? Check out the PsychedelicIQ Starter Kit.

The Doctor’s Note Double Standard

Here is something I have watched play out more times than I can count, and it deserves to be named directly.

Many people in Twelve Step recovery will accept a prescription medication without a second thought if a physician has signed off on it. I have worked with clients who were long-term AA members and who tried ketamine infusions for treatment-resistant depression because a psychiatrist recommended it. They did not consider this a threat to their sobriety. A doctor had prescribed it. That made it medicine.

Those same people, in some cases, have declined to sit with ayahuasca or mushrooms in a ceremonial context because they believed it was recreational. No prescription. No clinical setting. No white coat in the room. The authority that society and the program had trained them to accept was not present, so everything after that should be invalidated.

I understand the instinct. When something is medically sanctioned, it comes with a sense of legitimacy that a ceremony in the jungle does not. The problem is that this logic is neither consistent nor particularly well-reasoned.

Ketamine, for all the good it can do, is not a classic psychedelic. It carries a genuine risk of physical dependency. It is dissociative rather than psychedelic in the classical sense, meaning it does not produce the kind of non-ordinary awareness that allows for deep emotional processing in the way that mushrooms or ayahuasca do. People leave ketamine infusions feeling temporarily relieved. They rarely leave with the kind of lasting insight and cleansing that comes from ceremonial plant medicine work.

This is not a criticism of ketamine. It is an observation about a double standard that is worth examining carefully.

The research on psilocybin and ayahuasca is rigorous and growing. Johns Hopkins University, one of the most respected medical institutions in the world, has published peer-reviewed studies showing that psilocybin produces significant and lasting reductions in depression and anxiety, often after a single guided session. Their research on psilocybin for alcohol use disorder specifically showed that participants dramatically reduced their drinking, with some achieving full abstinence, well after the study period ended. NYU has published similar findings.

MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) has been conducting clinical trials on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD for years. The results have been compelling enough that the FDA designated it a Breakthrough Therapy.

None of this research is fringe. It is being conducted at major universities, published in peer-reviewed journals, and taken seriously by medical institutions worldwide.

The distinction between “prescribed in a clinic” and “held ceremonially in a trusted container” is a cultural comfort, not a scientific or spiritual one. What actually matters is preparation, intention, guidance, and integration. A sacred, well-held ceremony with an experienced facilitator and a clear intention is no less legitimate than a clinical infusion. In many cases, it is more so.

What Bill Wilson Actually Did

If you are going to have this conversation with people in the program, it helps to know your history.

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, took his last drink in 1934. He took his first psychedelic in 1956, more than two decades into sobriety. He worked extensively with LSD under the guidance of researchers, believing it could help alcoholics access the kind of profound spiritual experience that had been central to his own recovery.

He never restarted his sobriety date. He never considered himself to have relapsed. He died sober by every measure he would have used to define that word.

The AA leadership of his time was not pleased. The controversy his LSD use ignited has echoed through the rooms ever since. But the fact remains: the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous used psychedelics as a healing tool in long-term sobriety and believed in their potential to transform suffering.

If that conversation comes up with your sponsor or your home group, here is a simple line of reasoning that tends to cut through the noise:

Did Bill Wilson take LSD? Yes. Did he die sober? Yes. Did he restart his sobriety date after doing so? No. If the founder of this program used a psychedelic for healing purposes and did not consider it a relapse, what is the actual argument for why doing the same today would end your sobriety?

That question does not have a tidy answer if someone has been treating sobriety as a doctrine rather than engaging with it as a living spiritual practice.

Sadly, I have used this simple logic test with many people in the program, and it never ends in favor of psychedelics. For many, Bill W. has become the Jesus Christ of AA, a man with faults, but they were all resolved, having founded this miraculous program that saved their lives. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but it’s not in alignment with reality. And as Byron Katie is fond of saying, “When you argue with reality, you will lose. But only 100% of the time.”

How to Talk to Your Sponsor

In twelve-step work, it’s generally accepted best practice to tell your sponsor everything. This is the one person in your life that you can be 100% honest with, without judgment. And if you are seriously considering working with psychedelics, I would strongly encourage you not to hide it.

Here is why. Not because the program requires full disclosure of every decision you make. But because concealment is corrosive. These little untruths create shame, and shame grows in the dark. This situation creates exactly the kind of internal split that the steps were designed to heal (and honestly, why a significant number of people could probably get sober just from doing 4, 5, 8 & 9). If you are approaching this work with the intention of going deeper into honesty, beginning with deception is the wrong foundation.

When you have this conversation, come prepared. Know what you want to say. Be clear that you are not abandoning your recovery; you are expanding it. Be clear that you have done your research. Be clear about your intention and your plan for integration.

And then listen.

Your sponsor may surprise you. I have seen sponsors respond to this conversation with openness, curiosity, and even relief, especially when a sponsee has years of solid sobriety and has clearly thought it through carefully. Not every old-timer is as rigid as the culture sometimes suggests.

If your sponsor shuts the conversation down without any willingness to engage, that is information too. It may be time to find additional or different support, inside or outside the program: a therapist knowledgeable about psychedelic-assisted healing, a mentor who works in this space, a second sponsor who has already engaged in this work, or a community that can hold the integration work alongside you.

The program does not have a monopoly on your healing. It is a tool. Use it well, and let other tools do what it cannot. And if you can’t find an answer in AA, consider looking for support in other programs such as Psychedelics in Recovery.

What Not to Say in Meetings

This one is straightforward.

AA’s Fifth Tradition states that each group has but one primary purpose: to carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. That message is about sobriety. Your psychedelic healing work is not part of that message, and it does not belong in a formal AA meeting.

This is not censorship. It is respect for the container.

A newcomer sitting in that room is there because they are struggling with alcohol. They do not need to hear about your ceremony in the jungle. They are not in a position to metabolize or contextualize that information, and the possibility that it could plant the wrong idea in the wrong mind is real. The program taught me to think about this, to ask whether my behavior might give a newcomer permission to do something before they are ready for it.

So keep it out of the meeting. That boundary is worth holding.

Outside of meetings, in private conversation with someone you trust and who is genuinely curious, that is a different story. The program constantly reminds me of attraction rather than promotion. If someone asks, I share honestly. If someone is clearly suffering and I have a close enough relationship with them to have a real conversation, I may open the door. Once. I do not push.

Your life is your testimony. Let people see the change. Let them come to you. Remember, attraction rather than promotion.

Confrontational vs. Escapist

Not all substances are the same, and that distinction matters deeply in recovery.

The substances that most of us in recovery were misusing are what I would call escapist: alcohol, opiates, stimulants, and cannabis, in most cases. Their primary function, for us, was to get us out of our own experience. To numb, to avoid, to quiet something we did not know how to face.

Classical psychedelics (psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD, mescaline), when held in a therapeutic or ceremonial container, tend to operate in the opposite direction. They do not numb. They illuminate. They bring forward what has been pushed down. They make it harder, not easier, to avoid what is true.

This is why the recreational-versus-healing distinction matters so much. Psychedelics can be misused. Any powerful tool can become an avoidance strategy if intention is absent. Chasing experiences, jumping from ceremony to ceremony, using the expansion to avoid the integration. These are patterns I have seen, and they have the same flavor as any other addictive behavior: more, more, more, without the willingness to sit with what the experience is actually asking of you.

The litmus test I use for myself is simple: do I have a clear intention? If the answer is no, I do not sit. The experience without intention is not healing work. It is entertainment at its best and destabilizing at its worst.

A clear intention does not have to be complicated. It might be: I want to understand why I keep shutting down in relationships. Or: I want to metabolize the grief I have been carrying about my father. Or: I want to understand what is underneath the anxiety I have lived with my whole life. Specific. Honest. Something you genuinely want to look at, not something you think sounds spiritually impressive. For a deeper exploration into intention setting, consider grabbing a copy of Healing with Psychedelics.

Integration Is Not Optional

This is the piece that gets skipped most often and matters most.

An experience with psychedelics is not healing in itself. It is an opening. What you do with that opening, in the days, weeks, and months that follow, is the actual work.

Integration means sitting with what came up. Journaling. Talking it through with your sponsor, a trusted guide, or therapist. Letting the insights metabolize slowly rather than racing to the next experience. It means changing behavior where the experience revealed that change is needed. Reconnecting with people. Being honest about what you saw.

Without integration, a profound psychedelic experience becomes just another story you tell about yourself. With integration, it becomes a genuine shift.

I would not sit with any medicine today without having a clear integration plan. That means a therapist or guide I can process with. Time set aside in the days afterward for quiet and reflection. No major stressors or social obligations immediately following a ceremony. And an honest willingness to act on what I learn, even when that is uncomfortable.

The program calls this “working it.” The same principle applies here.

The Bottom Line

Tradition Three of AA states that the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Whatever path your healing takes, that door remains open to you. Other members may have opinions about your sobriety date, your choices, and your path. You are not obligated to make your healing legible to everyone in the room.

Here is what I know with certainty, built from years of my own experience and from working with others: true healing happens from the inside out. When the underlying wound is addressed, the behavior driven by that wound changes. Not because we are working hard to suppress it. Because the need that created it is gone.

Sobriety interrupts the pattern. Psychedelic healing, when approached with honesty, preparation, and genuine intention, can address the wound underneath the pattern. These are not competing paths. They are sequential ones.

The program gave me the foundation. Plant medicine gave me the freedom to actually build something on it.

If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got. That was true about alcohol. It is just as true about healing.

You have already proven you can do hard things. This is just the next one.

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Healing is a lot easier with a roadmap!

Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

There is a version of this story where I tell you that sobriety fixed everything. That was the day I walked into a church basement, took a seat in a folding chair, and admitted I was powerless over alcohol, my life snapped into focus and stayed that way.

That version would be a lie.

The real truth is far more complicated, more human, and (I hope) more useful.

Sobriety saved my life. That much is beyond question. But it took me years of honest reflection, finding my true self, experiencing deep grief, releasing over a decade of guilt and shame, and an entirely different category of healing to understand that sobriety and wholeness are not the same thing. One removes a substance. The other restores a person.

This is the first part of a two-part series on psychedelics and recovery. This piece is personal. It is about what brought me to Twelve Step recovery, what the program gave me, and what it could not. The second part is practical: how to actually navigate psychedelic healing if you are in or have come from a recovery community.

Both pieces are written with enormous respect for Alcoholics Anonymous and what it offers. If you came here looking for an attack on the program, you are in the wrong place. But if you are someone who has done the work, accumulated years of sobriety, and still sense that something deeper is unresolved, you are exactly who I am writing for.

One of the most interesting aspects of “the rooms” is that we celebrate people for their years, but we don’t pay much attention to how happy and free they are. I’ve met multiple people with 30+ years of sobriety who receive cheers and accolades sharing their story in front of a room full of newcomers, but some of those people are miserable inside.

If you’re one of those people, please know you’re not alone, and there are other paths to walk (with or without the program) that can bring you to a deeper place of peace, joy, and freedom.

How I Got Here

My childhood was not catastrophic by any clinical measure, but it was not gentle either.

I grew up in a small town in Central Nebraska, roughly 3,500 people, the kind of place where everyone knows your business before you do. At fourteen, I was outed as gay. In the mid-nineties, in rural Midwest America, that was not a footnote. It shaped everything about my life and led me into some really challenging and dark places that I’m only just seeing now (as a 48-year-old).

I was lucky enough to find an exit. I became a foreign exchange student and spent a year living just south of Brussels, Belgium. I went from a town where I was a target to a city where no one cared who I was, what I was, or what I drank. In Belgium, if you could crawl onto a barstool, you could order a beer. So I did.

That year was the beginning of a fifteen-year career as an alcoholic.

When I returned to the States, the drinking continued. What started as an escape became a habit, and a habit became an identity. I was not someone who occasionally drank too much. I was someone who organized his entire life around the next opportunity to check out. Consequences accumulated slowly, then all at once.

My second DUI was the moment the illusion cracked. The county court system made it clear, with the kind of clarity that only legal trouble and the prospect of jail time can provide, that my options were narrowing. I spent 21 days behind bars and around $10,000 navigating the aftermath. That was just the beginning of what it cost me.

I got sober in 2007. I walked into Alcoholics Anonymous not because I was spiritually curious or because I had read something compelling about the twelve-step process. I walked in because I was out of options.

What the Program Gave Me

I want to be unambiguous about this: I would not be here without AA.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The program, the people in it, and Connie (God rest her soul), the sponsor who guided me through my first years of sobriety, kept me alive during a period when I was genuinely at risk of not surviving. I owe an enormous debt to that community, and I carry it with me.

In early sobriety, everything intensifies. When the numbing stops, the feelings do not wait politely in line. I still tell my clients today, “When you stop drinking (or engaging in your addiction of choice), you immediately start to feel better. You feel anger better, fear better, resentment better, sadness better… it all starts to intensify. Anger comes first, usually. Then grief. Then a kind of raw, bewildering clarity: the experience of seeing your life without the filter you have been using for years. It is not comfortable, but it is most definitely necessary and part of the process.

My sponsor at the time modeled steadiness in a way I had never witnessed. She did not rescue me. She did not abandon me. She simply showed up, consistently, and helped me look honestly at myself without drowning in shame. For that matter, she may have been the first non-codependent human I had ever worked with. She told me the truth, no matter how difficult it was for my people-pleasing mind to hear. For someone who had spent fifteen years avoiding his own reflection, that was revolutionary.

The steps worked on me in real ways. The moral inventory. The amends. The practice of rigorous honesty. These were not abstract spiritual exercises. They were practical tools for rebuilding a life that had become structurally unsound. I repaired relationships. I developed accountability. I learned what it meant to take responsibility without collapsing into self-punishment. To be perfectly clear and candid, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the honesty required in 12-step work has been the most important gift in all the healing work with psychedelics. When we keep our secrets covered, they cannot be healed. If secrets are your friend, psychedelics will likely feel very uncomfortable for a while.

In 2012, I found therapy. Later that year, I found yoga. By 2013, I had become a certified yoga teacher and met my first teacher who worked in the shamanic tradition. My inner world was expanding in ways the program had prepared me for, even if it could not take me there on its own.

For several years before the world shut down in 2020, I was still attending two to three weekly meetings. The program was a consistent part of my life. I remained in contact with sponsors and continued to work with people new to recovery.

I am telling you this because what comes next is not ingratitude. It is honesty. And honesty, as any good sponsor will tell you, is the whole point.

Healing is a lot easier with a roadmap!

Stability Is Not the Same as Healing

Several years into sobriety, my life looked dramatically different from the outside. I was not drinking. I had a wonderful and steady job where owners and employees counted on me to lead and advise. I had relationships that were not built on chaos. I was in therapy. I had a yoga practice. My nervous system was softening.

And yet there was a layer underneath all of that stability that sobriety alone had not reached.

The compulsion to drink had disappeared, and I hadn’t had a drink for seven years—nor did I crave one. But the underlying tension had not gone anywhere: the subtle bracing in my chest, the low hum of anxiety, the stories about unworthiness I had carried since adolescence. They had simply gone underground.

AA is extraordinarily effective at interrupting destructive behavior. It creates community, accountability, and structure at the exact moment when someone’s life has lost all three. The steps offer a powerful framework for self-examination and behavioral change. I will not minimize any of that.

But the program is not a trauma-resolution model. It does not directly address what is stored in the nervous system and the deeper parts of our shadow and soul. It does not teach somatic regulation. It was not designed to facilitate the kind of deep emotional processing that can only happen when the brain is allowed to access material the conscious, rational mind has been keeping locked away. And let’s be honest, the program is designed around a whole bunch of sick people helping other sick people. This isn’t a flaw; it’s simply reality. We’re all doing the best we can in the program, but we’re also transferring all our dysfunctional behavior to our sponsees, whether we like it or not.

That is not a flaw in AA’s design. It is simply the boundary of its scope.

The program was built for stabilization. Stabilization is not the same as healing. For some people, stabilization is enough. For others, there is more work to be done in the territory the program was never intended to cover. I am one of those others.

The Sponsor Who Changed Everything

In 2023, my sponsor of ten years asked me to meet him for coffee. He had more than thirty-five years of sobriety. He was thoughtful, measured, and deeply respected in the rooms. Not a rigid or performative man, but a genuinely sincere one. This man meant more to me than my biological father. I still remember the moment when I first felt love sitting across from him at a pizza joint. I can’t remember the words he spoke, but for the first time in my life, my heart opened just enough to understand what real, unconditional human love felt like. I can’t thank him enough for this gift because it is still one of the most potent moments of healing in my entire life.

He also carried a lifelong depression that had never fully lifted.

As a teenager, he had attempted suicide. He survived, but the heaviness followed him into adulthood and stayed there through decades of sobriety. He had tried nearly every conventional intervention available: antidepressants, holistic approaches, lifestyle changes, and even electroconvulsive therapy. Nothing produced lasting relief.

What made him extraordinary was that he had watched my evolution over the years without judgment. When I began exploring psychedelic healing, he did not shame me or try to redirect my path. He asked thoughtful questions. He wanted to make sure I was not deceiving myself. He wanted to know if my life was getting better or unraveling.

It was getting better. And he could see it.

After seven years of walking beside me on my psychedelic path, that morning at coffee, I assumed he had called me there to issue a quiet warning. I had recently been speaking more openly about psychedelic healing in recovery spaces, and I was expecting a gentle slap on the wrist based on the time-honored traditions of the program.

Instead, he told me he had been reading the research. He had been watching my growth for years. He said that for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt something he could only describe as hope.

He was ready to try.

He wanted to speak with his sponsor and therapist one more time. He was approaching this the way he had approached everything in recovery: carefully, with accountability and intention.

Four days later, I received a phone call.

He had taken his own life.

He did not die because psychedelics failed him. He died before he ever had the chance to try. The fear of losing his sobriety date, the fear of being judged by a community he had served for more than three decades — that fear weighed more heavily than the possibility of healing.

I have carried that with me every day since, and it is the reason I choose not to keep this work a secret anymore.

When a recovery culture becomes so rigid that someone would rather die than risk their day count, something has gone profoundly wrong. Sobriety is sacred. But life is more sacred. To do this, I still practice “attraction rather than promotion” in all my coaching and medicine work, but when someone is attracted, I am no longer keeping any of this a secret.

Twelve-step work has saved millions of lives, but if psychedelics can save a few more, then who am I to not tell the truth?

Addiction Is a Symptom, Not a Disease

Here is something the rooms rarely say plainly: alcoholism is not a disease. It is a symptom.

AA has long taught that alcoholism is a disease, chronic, progressive, and incurable. That framing was genuinely helpful when it emerged. It removed moral condemnation from people who were suffering and replaced judgment with something closer to compassion. For that, it deserves credit. On top of that, treating alcoholism like cancer and meetings like chemotherapy gave sponsors a lot of ground to stand on while they told their sponsees that their disease was always in the parking lot doing pushups. This dogma and controlled works wonders for newcomers in sobriety. It keeps people scared and in the rooms…right where they need to be.

Without this firm direction and black-and-white mentality, I would have probably never gotten sober. I didn’t have the strength for controlled drinking, so doing it the only “right way” worked wonderfully for me, and for many others in the program.

But the disease model also has a ceiling. If addiction is a disease that cannot be cured, only managed, then the best anyone can hope for is lifelong vigilance. White-knuckling. Staying away from the first drink. Holding the line forever. The program’s literature reflects this: many members genuinely believe that if they stop attending meetings and working their program, they will inevitably return to active addiction.

That belief is not in the Big Book. It is in the rooms. This is a message carried by the people, not the program.

The research tells a different story. Dr. Gabor Maté, one of the most respected voices in addiction medicine, has spent decades making the case that addiction is a response to trauma, not a defect in character or a disease of the brain in isolation. His work, along with the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences study, demonstrates what many of us who have sat in recovery rooms have quietly suspected: the roots of addiction are almost always in pain that was never processed.

The ACE study, one of the largest investigations of childhood trauma and its lifelong effects ever conducted, found a direct, dose-dependent relationship between adverse childhood experiences and addiction. The more trauma, the higher the likelihood of substance misuse. Not because those people were defective. Because their nervous systems had learned to use substances as a survival strategy in the absence of any safer option.

Bessel van der Kolk, whose decades of research on trauma and the body are summarized in his landmark book “The Body Keeps the Score,” makes a related point: trauma is not a story we tell ourselves. It is a physiological state. It lives in the body as chronic tension, hypervigilance, or shutdown. Talking about it helps. Understanding it intellectually helps. But neither fully resolves it. For that, you need to address the body itself.

This is where traditional recovery models reach their limits and where other modalities, including psychedelic healing, begin to offer something the steps alone cannot provide.

If addiction is a symptom, then healing the underlying wound changes the equation entirely. When the nervous system is regulated, when old trauma has been metabolized, when the body no longer lives in a state of chronic threat, the compulsion that drove the drinking loses its fuel. Not suppressed. Not managed. Resolved.

I have experienced this. I have watched it happen in others. When the underlying trauma and need disappear, the behavior disappears with it. Not because someone is white-knuckling. Because they are free from the heavy energy that they spent so many years suppressing with addictive behavior.

The reason so many long-term sober people believe they must keep attending meetings or they will drink again is not that the Big Book tells them so. It is because the culture of the rooms, earnest, human, and sometimes fear-driven, has made an identity out of powerlessness. And powerlessness, once internalized as a permanent truth rather than an early-stage description, becomes its own ceiling. Again, this is not an inherent fault of the individual; this is a cultural aspect of the program. For so many years, I was just another fish that didn’t know I was wet.

The Lid on the Jar

There is an old experiment involving fleas in a glass jar. Fleas are remarkable jumpers. In an open environment, they can leap many times the height of any container (roughly 36 inches). But when a lid is placed on the jar for several days, they adapt. They hit the ceiling, adjust, and begin jumping only as high as the lid allows.

When the lid is finally removed, they do not escape. They keep jumping to the height where the barrier once was. What’s even wilder is that their offspring inherit this trait and also do the same (insert epigenetic trauma here).

This is what can happen in long-term recovery when stabilization is treated as the final destination.

The slogans, the guardrails, the warnings. They are lifesaving in early sobriety. They create structure in a moment of genuine chaos. I would not trade them for anything and still use them for early-stage coaching and medicine clients. But a tool designed for one stage of a journey can become an obstacle in another. We all must start with discipline, but eventually that discipline must fall away for self-awareness and for living a freer, more peaceful life.

AA speaks of a “spiritual experience of the educational variety.” For many members, spirituality means a shift in thinking: less resentment, more gratitude, better behavior. That is real and meaningful growth.

But there is another category of spiritual experience that is harder to describe and impossible to reason your way into. Direct. Embodied. The kind that does not happen in the mind but in the whole body and soul. Not an adjustment in perspective, but an encounter with something that cannot be fully articulated afterward. This is the ineffable experience often offered by sacred medicine work.

Many recovery spaces are quietly uncomfortable with this kind of experience. Meditation is tolerated. Mysticism is often pathologized. Psychedelics are treated as relapse by definition.

The implicit message is: everything you need is within these walls, unless it’s delivered by a doctor or other licensed professional.

For some people, that is true. For others, it is the lid.

Sobriety Cleared the Fog

I want to close this first piece by saying something with zero reservation.

The program worked. It built a foundation strong enough to stand on, strong enough to support everything that came after it. The steps taught me honesty. The community taught me that I did not have to heal alone. My sponsor showed me what love and steadiness look like in a human life.

None of what followed would have been possible without that foundation.

But a foundation is not a ceiling. And sobriety, as profound as it is, is the beginning of healing. Not its end.

The fog lifts when we stop drinking. What we find underneath it is the real work: the wounds that were driving the drinking in the first place, the stored grief, the chronic tension, the parts of ourselves we have never been safe enough to look at directly.

That work requires tools that the program was never designed to provide.

In Part Two of this series, I will talk practically about what those tools look like, how to approach them with honesty and discernment, and how to navigate the recovery community while doing so.

The goal is not to leave the program behind. The goal is to let it do what it was built to do, and then keep going.

Stay tuned. In part two of this series, I will offer some very practical steps if you’ve got one foot firmly planted in the program but would like to dip your toe into psychedelic waters.

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Ready to go deeper? Check out the PsychedelicIQ Starter Kit.

Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

Most people come into psychedelic work with a simple and understandable hope: something is wrong, and this will fix it. If they can just have the right experience, take the right dose, work with the perfect facilitator, say the right prayer, or finally access the thing they’ve been circling for years, then the suffering will loosen its grip. The story is rarely framed as greed or impatience. It usually sounds more like exhaustion. I’m tired of carrying this. I just want to feel better. This is when desperation exceeds discernment, and this can be a dangerous place to stand.

This belief makes perfect sense in a Western, achievement-oriented culture. We are trained to solve problems, optimize systems, and complete tasks. When something isn’t working, we apply effort, strategy, and determination until it does. So when psychedelics enter the picture, many people unconsciously treat them the same way: as a powerful intervention that, if done correctly, should resolve the issue once and for all.

But healing does not follow the same rules as productivity.

I’ve been doing this work for over two decades. I’ve sat Vipassana, spent 15 years in 12-step rooms, studied Advaita Vedanta with an Indian Swami, completed my 200-hour yoga teacher training, spent months traipsing through India and Peru, and worked with many different medicines in many different contexts with sincere intentions and a willingness to go wherever the work asked me to go. And despite that depth of engagement, I’m still cleaning up my insides. What changed in recent years wasn’t that the work suddenly became easy or complete, but that real progress began to emerge once I started cleaning up the outside of my life as well. Relationships, boundaries, habits, work alignment, and releasing codependence—these things mattered far more than I wanted to admit early on.

Comparing this with the way many of my first-time clients perceive psychedelic healing may requires a humbling reframe.

Psychedelics were never meant to be a single decisive event that carries the entire burden of healing. They were meant to be part of a longer process, a practice rather than a performance. If I treat them like something I have to do perfectly, I unknowingly load one experience with impossible expectations. But when I began relating to them as a practice, the pressure softened, and the work became more honest, more sustainable, and paradoxically, more effective.

This distinction matters because so much unnecessary suffering comes from misunderstanding what psychedelics are actually good at. A single experience can absolutely open doors, reveal truths, and release energy that has been frozen for years. But for most people, especially those carrying decades of accumulated stress, trauma, and adaptation, that first opening is not the end of the journey. It is only the beginning of a new relationship with yourself and the medicine.

This article is my plea for you to let go of the fantasy of the perfect journey and to consider what becomes possible when we approach this work as something we practice over time, rather than something we need to get right in one attempt.

The Myth of the Psychedelic Perfect

Once someone decides to explore psychedelics for healing, a subtle shift often happens beneath the surface. What started as skepticism morphs into curiosity or hope, but then quietly turns into performance. Not a “Hey, look at me” kind of performance. More like the Super Bowl of healing. The question is no longer What wants to emerge? but How do I do this right? How deep should I go? How much should I take? What is the perfect playlist? How do I make sure this works?

This is the myth of the psychedelic perfect.

It’s the belief that if you can just get the conditions exactly right, the experience will deliver everything you’ve been carrying and resolve it in one decisive moment. The perfect dose. The perfect container. The perfect insight. The perfect release. This mindset rarely comes from arrogance. It comes from desperation mixed with hope. People are tired of suffering, and they don’t want to waste an opportunity that feels rare, powerful, or expensive.

But perfectionism is still control, even when it’s dressed up as sincerity.

Expectations, especially unconscious or unexamined ones, quietly shape the experience before the medicine ever enters the body. When someone walks into a journey believing this has to work, the nervous system is already braced. There is pressure to produce insight, pressure to surrender correctly, pressure to emerge transformed. Ironically, that pressure is often the very thing that prevents safety, trust, and genuine letting go.

Psychedelic experiences are highly sensitive to the internal state of the person taking them. They amplify what is present. When control and performance are present, those qualities get amplified too. Instead of softening into the experience, the mind stays busy evaluating, tracking progress, and silently judging whether enough is happening. The journey becomes something to monitor rather than something to enter.

This is where disappointment often begins.

Someone has a meaningful experience, but not the one they imagined. They see insight, but it doesn’t erase the pain. They feel openness, but it doesn’t last. They touch something real, but it doesn’t resolve everything at once. Rather than honoring what actually occurred, the mind compares it to an idealized version of what should have happened.

And when the experience doesn’t live up to that fantasy, the blame usually turns inward.

It worked for other people. Why didn’t it work for me?

This question can be devastating. It quietly reinforces the idea that something is wrong with the person rather than with the expectation itself. In reality, nothing has gone wrong. The medicine did what it could do in that moment. What failed was the assumption that decades of stored material could be metabolized in a single event.

Most people who arrive at psychedelic work are not carrying a single unresolved memory. They are carrying years of adaptation. Patterns that formed slowly in response to environments that required them to contract, perform, stay alert, or stay quiet. These patterns live in the nervous system, the body, and the relational field. They don’t dissolve all at once, no matter how profound the experience.

Healing is not an extraction process where you pull out the bad parts and keep the good ones. It is a reorganization process. It unfolds over time through repeated contact, integration, and lived change. Psychedelics can initiate that process powerfully, but they cannot complete it in one sitting (or even a few) for most people.

Letting go of the psychedelic perfect does not mean lowering your standards or settling for less. It means releasing the impossible burden placed on a single experience. It means allowing the medicine to meet you where you actually are, rather than where you think you should be by now.

When this shift happens, something important relaxes. The work becomes less about achievement and more about relationship. Less about extracting value and more about listening. And from that place, real practice can begin.

Healing is a lot easier with a roadmap!

Goals Are Finite, Intentions Are Infinite

Most people don’t come into psychedelic healing work because they’re curious philosophers or spiritual explorers. They come because something in their life hurts, isn’t working, or feels unsustainable. There is a problem to solve. A symptom to manage. A pattern they want to stop repeating. And if they could just resolve that one thing, or maybe a small handful of things, then life would finally feel okay.

This orientation is deeply shaped by Western culture, where progress is measured by outcomes and success is defined by completion. We make lists. We set targets. We check boxes. That mindset works well for logistics, behavior change, and external achievements. But when it’s carried into healing work, it quietly sets people up for frustration.

The reason is simple: goals are finite.

Lose the weight. Stop drinking. Pay off the debt. Fix the relationship. Manage the anxiety. Each of these has an endpoint. Once you’ve achieved it, the task is technically complete. And while these goals can be meaningful and worthwhile, they are a fragile foundation for deep, long-term healing. On top of that, misalignments like these all happen for a reason. There is heavy energy on the inside causing maladaptive patterns on the outside. “Fixing” these from the outside-in is just another game of whack-a-mole, no different than yo-yo dieting.

When someone enters psychedelic work with a goal-oriented mindset, the experience itself becomes instrumentalized. The journey is no longer something to be in relationship with; it becomes a means to an end. Did it work? Did I fix the thing? Did I get what I came for? This framing pulls attention toward evaluation rather than presence, toward extraction rather than listening. The medicine experience becomes a test. If the goal isn’t resolved afterward, the session is judged as incomplete or insufficient. And because goals are finite, the pressure to accomplish them often gets front-loaded onto a single journey. This has to work. I don’t want to do this again. I need this to be done.

Intentions operate differently.

An intention does not have a finish line. It doesn’t get completed or crossed off. Instead, it creates an ongoing relationship with the work. A simple example: to love myself more. There is no moment when that task is finished. No certificate of completion. You can always love yourself more honestly, more gently, more consistently. You can always notice another layer of heaviness ready to be released.

This is what makes intentions infinite.

When someone enters psychedelic work with an intention rather than a goal, the entire orientation shifts. The experience no longer has to carry the full burden of resolution. The pressure softens. There is room for partial insight, gradual change, and unfinished business. What matters is not whether the problem is solved, but whether the relationship with oneself is deepening.

This shift is subtle but profound. It moves the work from achievement to practice.

With intentions, progress is not measured by dramatic breakthroughs alone. It’s measured by how someone treats themselves afterward. By whether they listen more closely to their body. By whether they make different choices in their relationships. By whether they are willing to meet themselves with more honesty and less force.

Most of us who grew up in moderns cultures bring a strong “can-do” attitude into psychedelic work. We want to optimize the experience, maximize the insight, and get the most value possible. That drive is not wrong. But when it’s aimed at healing, it often becomes counterproductive. Healing doesn’t respond well to force. It responds to safety, repetition, and sincerity over time.

Thinking in terms of intention rather than goals removes the fantasy that everything must be accomplished in one session. It spreads responsibility across time instead of front-loading it onto a single experience. And it naturally supports the idea of psychedelics as a practice—something you return to thoughtfully, not something you try to perfect in one attempt.

For those genuinely interested in long-term, sustainable healing, this shift may be one of the most important moves they ever make.

Acute vs. Chronic Healing—What Psychedelics Are Actually Treating

A useful way to understand why most psychedelic healing does not resolve itself in a single experience is to borrow a familiar framework from Western medicine: the difference between acute and chronic conditions.

If you break your leg, the path forward is relatively clear. You go to the doctor. The bone is set. You wear a cast. You might do some physical therapy. Over time, the injury heals. Once it does, you don’t keep returning to the orthopedist every month for the rest of your life. The problem was acute. It required a targeted intervention followed by a period of integration and rehabilitation.

There are situations in psychedelic work that resemble this model.

If someone experiences a specific, identifiable traumatic event (a car accident, a sudden loss, a single overwhelming incident), it is entirely possible that one or two well-held psychedelic experiences could be enough to release the stored energy associated with that event. The nervous system completes something that was interrupted. The body discharges what it could not process at the time. In those cases, the medicine acts like a precise intervention.

But this is not how most people arrive at psychedelic work.

Most people did not get here because of one broken bone. They got here because of a lifetime of adaptations. Years or decades spent navigating environments that required them to stay vigilant, perform, suppress emotion, tolerate misalignment, or disconnect from their own needs. Over time, these adaptations become embedded. They live not just in memory, but in posture, breath, sleep, relationships, and identity.

This is chronic territory.

Chronic conditions do not resolve through a single intervention, no matter how powerful that intervention is. They require pacing, repetition, and ongoing reorganization. Psychedelics can play a critical role here, but only when we understand what they are actually treating. They are not erasing a single wound. They are helping unwind patterns that were built slowly, layer by layer. And if we compare a doctor’s intervention to a psychedelic experience, then there is a lot of at-home physical therapy required to direct and maintain the healing. Without this, muscles may tighten to the point they’re unusable.

This distinction is reflected in how clinical research approaches psychedelic therapy. In studies exploring MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, participants do not receive one dose and go home cured. They frequently engage in multiple full-dose sessions, supported by preparation and integration, precisely because the condition being treated is complex and long-standing. Similarly, psilocybin studies for depression often show meaningful reductions in symptoms after a first session, but the research design still includes multiple sessions to support more stable change.

This matters because early improvement can be misleading.

Many people feel better after an initial psychedelic experience (the post-psychedelic afterglow). Mood lifts. Perspective widens. Hope returns. These changes are real and meaningful, but they are not the same thing as completion (if there is such a thing). Without changes in daily life, the nervous system often reverts to familiar patterns. The environment that shaped the original suffering is still in place.

This is where the fish tank metaphor becomes useful.

Imagine your internal world as a tank of water. Over years of stress, neglect, or misalignment, that water becomes cloudy. Psychedelics act like a powerful filter. They can clear the water dramatically, sometimes in a single pass. But if the conditions that dirtied the water in the first place remain unchanged, the tank doesn’t stay clean. The same inputs produce the same outcome. The filter itself, no matter how effective, cannot overcome a constant influx of pollution.

This is the cycle many people find themselves trapped in: clean the water, return to a life that keeps polluting it, feel worse again, and then seek another experience to clean it once more. Over time, this can start to feel like failure, when in reality it is simply a misunderstanding of the scale of the work.

Chronic healing asks something different.

It asks for changes outside the ceremony as much as insight within it. It asks for nervous system regulation, relational honesty, and lifestyle alignment. Psychedelics can reveal what needs to shift, but they cannot make those shifts for you. When used as part of a practice rather than as a cure, they support gradual, sustainable reorganization rather than dramatic but temporary relief.

Understanding whether you are dealing with an acute wound or a chronic pattern is one of the most important discernments in psychedelic work. It sets expectations appropriately, reduces self-blame, and makes room for a kind of progress that is slower, steadier, and far more likely to last.

Psychedelic Practice vs. Psychedelic Bypass

At this point, it’s important to name a concern that often arises whenever we talk about psychedelic practice: the fear that it implies habitual or excessive use. That fear is valid. Psychedelics are powerful tools, and when they’re used unconsciously or compulsively, they can absolutely become a form of bypass. When one becomes desirous of the expanded state, this is when trouble begins brewing. Whatever goes up must come down. This is the yo-yo analogy all over again.

Practice does not mean frequency.

Psychedelic bypass happens when the medicine is used to escape rather than confront. When the goal becomes peak states, ecstatic release, or identity reinforcement, the work subtly turns away from integration and toward transcendence as an end in itself. The experience may feel profound, but little changes afterward. Relationships remain strained. Boundaries remain porous. Daily life remains misaligned.

In these cases, the medicine isn’t clearing heaviness. It’s temporarily lifting someone above it.

That lift can feel liberating at first, especially for people who have spent years feeling constricted or numb. But when the return to baseline feels intolerable, the nervous system begins to crave the altered state itself. Over time, this creates a new form of attachment. The high becomes the refuge. The unintegrated material remains.

This is not healing. It’s avoidance with a better interior decorator.

A psychedelic practice looks very different.

Practice is defined less by how often someone takes medicine and more by how they relate to what the medicine shows them. It is characterized by restraint, discernment, and respect for timing. Sometimes the most skillful move is not another journey, but a pause. A period of integration. A willingness to live the insights that have already been received.

In my experience, most psychedelic harm doesn’t come from the medicines themselves. It comes from people going too far, too fast, or too high before their system is ready to integrate what’s being revealed. When the pace outstrips the nervous system’s capacity, destabilization follows. Confusion increases. Grounding decreases.

This is why slower, step-by-step progress is often safer and more effective.

A sustainable psychedelic practice adapts to where someone is, not where they think they should be. It honors the difference between curiosity and compulsion, between openness and pressure. It recognizes that insight without integration is incomplete, and that embodiment takes time.

This is also where context and support matter.

For some people, professionally facilitated solo work makes sense early on. It offers safety, containment, and personalized guidance. For others, group work becomes appropriate later, once there is familiarity with the inner terrain and the effects of the medicine. True group work, however, is not simply taking psychedelics with friends. It still requires skilled facilitation, clear agreements, and an emphasis on integration rather than spectacle.

Cost is a real consideration here. Not everyone can afford multiple one-on-one sessions, and they shouldn’t have to. A well-paced path often involves a mix of experiences: guided work, supported group spaces, and long stretches of integration in between. This is where integration circles, coaches, churches, or intentional communities can provide continuity without encouraging overuse.

Ultimately, a psychedelic practice is not about doing more. It’s about doing what’s appropriate. It’s about doing the next journey once you’ve integrated the one before.

When psychedelics are used in this way, something important changes. The work becomes less dramatic, but more durable. The nervous system stabilizes. The internal water stays cleaner for longer. Life begins to feel more livable, not just more interesting.

Letting go of psychedelic perfect doesn’t mean giving up on healing. It means choosing a path that actually supports it—one that unfolds over time, respects the limits of the system, and invites lasting change rather than temporary escape.

Choosing a Path That Actually Lasts

If you’re a newcomer to this work, letting go of the fantasy of the perfect psychedelic journey can feel disorienting at first. That fantasy offers something very seductive: the promise that relief, clarity, and freedom are just one well-executed experience away. When you’ve been carrying pain for a long time, it’s natural to want an ending. A finish line. A moment where the work is finally done.

But healing rarely unfolds that way.

For most people, the deeper work is not about arriving at a single transformative peak. It’s about entering into a relationship with the medicine, with the nervous system, and with life as it actually is. That relationship asks for patience rather than urgency, honesty rather than performance, and consistency rather than intensity.

Psychedelic practice does not mean endless ceremonies or habitual use. It means discernment. It means knowing when an experience is genuinely supportive and when the work is to pause, integrate, and live what has already been revealed. It means respecting the pace at which the system can reorganize without becoming overwhelmed or destabilized.

When this orientation shifts, something important softens. Healing becomes less about extracting insight and more about embodiment. Less about dramatic breakthroughs and more about quiet, cumulative change. The nervous system stabilizes. Relationships become clearer. Boundaries strengthen. Life begins to feel more livable, not because everything is perfect, but because there is less internal friction.

This is why sustainable healing often looks unremarkable from the outside. It doesn’t always come with fireworks or grand revelations. It shows up in subtler ways: better sleep, cleaner choices, more honest conversations, a growing capacity to stay present with discomfort rather than flee from it. These changes may not be glamorous, but they last.

An invitation I make to many of my coaching and psychedelic clients is to create a “Proof Journal.” This is a place where the micro moments of healing can be documented. One day you may not react so strongly to your partner, your kids, or to being cut off in traffic. In that moment you notice the shift, but then you either dismiss it or just forget about it. Rather than letting this win slip by, I would invite you to document these tiny victories in a special journal. Then, when things get rough or you start to second-guess all the effort you’ve put into your healing, go back and read this journal. These are the moments our minds trick us and minimize our progress. Your Proof Journal is the perfect way to tell your mind to go pound sand.

If you are early in this work, it’s worth remembering that you are not behind. If you are years in and still finding layers to address, you are not failing. You are participating in a process that unfolds over time, one that cannot be rushed without cost.

Psychedelics can be powerful allies in that process when they are approached with respect and realism. Not as a silver bullet. Not as something to perfect. But as part of a broader practice of tending to your life, cleaning up what can be cleaned up, and allowing the rest to unfold in its own time.

There is no finish line here. And that, paradoxically, is what makes real freedom possible.

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Welcome to 2026! Are you ready? If your 2025 was anything like mine, some sweet and easy healing feels like it couldn’t come soon enough. As we flip the last page on the calendar, there’s always a subtle pressure to summarize, optimize, and package wisdom into something neat. A “top ten.” A checklist for next year. Something to show what we’ve learned or demonstrate a clean arc of progress from the prior 12 months.

Unfortunately, healing doesn’t usually work or look like that.

Real healing is messy, circular, sometimes humiliating, and often excruciatingly slow. It unfolds in spirals, not ladders. I think I’ve learned my lesson, only to discover a deeper version waiting on my next trip up the spiral or around the sun—often delivered through relationship, conflict, grief, or a medicine experience that refuses to cooperate with my plans.

Still, patterns emerge. So I decided to go back through my writing from this past year and offer y’all something in your inbox to help soften the blow into the new year.

Over the past year, I published my first book and wrote a ton about psychedelics, trust, discernment, leadership, healing culture, money, power, nervous systems, and the difference between transformation and performance. My essays aren’t theoretical. They are born from watching people (including me) get freer—and watching others get stuck while using all the right language.

Consider what follows to be less of a highlight reel and more of a distillation. Ten hard-won truths that kept showing up again and again, no matter the topic. Consider this less a “best of” list and more a field guide for navigating 2026 without losing your mind or your soul.

1. Truth without trust feels like violence

This may be the most important thing I’ve learned, and the one most often ignored.

Insight on its own is not healing, and not everyone is really ready to hear the truth. Truth does not automatically liberate, and it should most definitely be used with care. When delivered without safety, timing, and relationship, truth can fracture a psyche instead of freeing it.

I’ve encountered people who received technically “accurate” insights during psychedelic journeys or spiritual conversations that left them incredibly unstable. Not because the insight was wrong, but because the psyche or nervous system wasn’t ready to receive it. I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of information and have also made the mistake of offering truth to those who weren’t ready or didn’t ask for it. #lessonslearned #saynotocodependence

Truth requires consent and a stable container.

Trust is that container. Trust in the medicine. Trust in the facilitator. Trust in the relationship. Trust in one’s own capacity to metabolize what’s revealed.

Without trust, truth feels like an invasion. With trust, the same truth becomes medicine.

This is why going slow matters. Why discernment matters. Why not every realization needs to be shared immediately, publicly, or at all.

2. Healing is selfish, and that’s why it works

One of the great lies of modern healing culture is that healing should make you nicer, more agreeable, and easier to be around. Poppycock!

Real healing often does the opposite—at least at first.

Healing begins as a profoundly selfish act. It requires attention turned inward, boundaries drawn outward, and a willingness to prioritize truth over harmony. This is not narcissism. It’s honesty.

When healing is done well, it eventually benefits everyone around you. Your relationships improve. Your capacity for intimacy deepens. Your generosity becomes cleaner because it’s no longer driven by conditionality, guilt or approval-seeking.

When healing is done poorly, it becomes a bypass: spiritual identities, performative compassion, boundaries that become walls, or subtle acts of control disguised as “being evolved.”

The paradox is simple: healing that starts selfishly ends collectively. Healing that pretends to be selfless often stays stuck.

3. Psychedelics don’t heal people; relationships do

I often say that we are harmed in relationship, therefore we must heal in relationship. This is uncomfortable for a psychedelic culture obsessed with molecules, protocols, and dosing charts.

Psychedelics are not magic bullets. They don’t heal in isolation. They function within a relational field: your relationship with the medicine, your body, your history, your expectations, the facilitator, and the larger context holding the experience.

Without trust, psychedelics struggle to work the way people hope they will. The nervous system stays guarded. Control stays online. The “gates” remain closed.

This is why some people have repeated journeys that feel blocked, tense, or disappointing despite increasing doses. They’re trying to force an opening instead of building trust.

Relationship first. Medicine second.

4. If someone thinks they should be a guide, they probably shouldn’t be

This one ruffles feathers, which usually indicates we’re touching something real.

The desire to guide often arises before the capacity to guide. And desire originates from ego. Ego wants meaning, authority, and validation. Wisdom wants seasoning, humility, and time.

The most grounded facilitators I know never rushed toward the role. They were pulled into it after years of sitting with their own wounds, doing their own work, making mistakes, integrating difficult experiences, and being thoroughly humbled by the gravity of the content we’re required to hold. They also maintain trusted relationships with peer groups, teachers, maestros, or supervisors.

Guiding is not about knowledge, charisma, or insight. It’s about regulation, restraint, and the ability not to make someone else’s process about you.

When the motivation to guide comes from needing to be seen, needing to heal, or feel special, there is internal work that still needs to be done. The hard truth of this work is that whatever heavy energy we carry within ourselves is passed on to our clients. It can be incredibly subtle and even unconscious, but there’s no way around it.

5. Bottom-up healing beats top-down management

You cannot think your way out of a nervous system wound. Trying to “understand” how it all works is a fool’s errand. The consciousness we are tapping into with these powerful medicines operates far above our own level of consciousness, and the tools that our “Doctors” use to heal will never (and I mean NEVER) be understood by human minds measured by fMRI machines.

This is where so many intelligent, educated, and articulate people get stuck. They understand their patterns intellectually. They can explain their trauma eloquently. They can quote frameworks and philosophies.

And their body is still constantly braced for the other shoe to drop—what Brené Brown refers to as “foreboding joy.”

Healing that stays in the head becomes management, not transformation. Regulation precedes insight. Safety precedes surrender.

Bottom-up approaches—those that involve the body, breath, sensation, and nervous system—create the conditions for real change. Without them, insight floats above the very systems that need healing most.

Healing is a lot easier with a roadmap!

6. More medicine is often the wrong answer

When something isn’t working, the default response for Western minds is escalation: higher doses, stronger substances, more intensity or frequency.

This is usually a mistake.

A great deal of harm in psychedelic work doesn’t come from the medicine itself. It comes from forcing an opening before trust and readiness are established. Control tightens. Fear increases. The system resists harder.

The hard-earned truth that I have learned over the years is that when the medicine has given me an instruction that I haven’t yet followed or a task that I have yet to complete, more medicine will only create more pressure and discomfort.

Sometimes the wisest move is not more medicine, but less. More preparation. More relationship. More activation. More time. As was often repeated in the 12-step rooms, “You can’t think yourself into right action, but you can act yourself into right thinking.”

Healing with psychedelics is not a breakthrough sport. It’s the practice of listening, then doing. Without the doing, you’re just turning in circles trying to convince yourself you’re still moving.

7. Performative healing is still unhealed

There is a version of healing that looks impressive from the outside but hollow from the inside.

It uses the right language. It posts the right quotes. It speaks fluently about sovereignty, trauma, and integration.

And it leaves people more judgmental, more certain, and more spiritually armored than before.

Real healing tends to make people softer, not sharper. More curious, not more convinced. Less interested in proving how healed they are.

If healing increases superiority, something’s off.

8. Discernment matters more than access

In a world of endless courses, retreats, and healers-for-hire, access is no longer the problem. Discernment is.

One of the hardest-won truths on my path was learning to never seek healing from someone operating at a lower level of emotional or relational maturity than you. Titles, followers, and aesthetics are poor indicators of embodiment.

Harm can happen in a healing journey, and healing can happen in a harmful journey. These experiences are most definitely the most difficult to unpack and integrate, so do your best to avoid them.

Look for people who have what you want in their lives—not materially, but relationally. How do they handle conflict? Accountability? Power?

If you don’t know how someone actually lives, be cautious about letting them guide your inner world.

9. Money, power, and medicine all amplify what’s underneath

None of these make you better. They usually just make you louder.

Money amplifies values. Power amplifies integrity (or its absence). Psychedelics are just showing you what’s inside and amplifying whatever is unresolved.

Giving, leading, or facilitating from fear, guilt, shame, or control carries that energetic signature forward. It may still do material good, but it often perpetuates subtle forms of dependency or distortion.

Clean power feels different. It doesn’t need to convince, cajole, collude, or manipulate. Find clean-burning, rather than dirty-burning, power.

10. Freedom isn’t happiness; it’s independence from conditions

This may be the most countercultural idea of all.

Happiness that depends on circumstances is fragile. It can be taken, lost, or disrupted.

Freedom is different. It’s the ability to remain rooted even as conditions change. To stay open when comfort disappears. To be honest when approval is at risk.

Earlier this year, a dear friend recommended that I read Spiritual Enlightenment, the Damnedest Thing: Book One of The Enlightenment Trilogy. This book and the next two in the series reaffirmed much of what I have been feeling for the last five years. So much of the “spiritual healing” that we encounter today is all bullshit. I would be ok if we called it “spiritual helping,” but not healing.

Most of what I experienced the first fifteen years of my spiritual path helped me, and it also made me feel good, but it didn’t heal much of anything. It was a series of semi-ecstatic experiences whose effects disappeared within hours or days.

I understand if this feels harsh, but it’s true. If you’re willing to zoom out far enough and look at the success rate of most spiritual teachers, gurus, coaches, or programs, you can see that it looks a lot like the blind leading the blind. One Pretendenanda repeating what one of their teachers said, all in the name of healing, yet never creating sustainable change.

If you’re looking for a direct, no-BS approach to changing your life, pick up a copy of this book (or the second or third in the series). Prepare for a bit of discomfort, but do your best to keep an open mind. What the author is stating could change your life forever.

And just remember, healing isn’t about feeling good all the time. It’s about becoming less hookable and less governed by fear, fantasy, and illusion.

The quiet through-line

If there is a single thread running through all of this and the one thing that is guides my medicine and coaching practice, it’s this:

The truth needs no defense.

Healing that moves you toward truth may involve short-term discomfort, but it always reduces long-term suffering if you’re willing to accept it. Healing that avoids truth often feels good for a while, but it perpetuates illusion and creates deeper confusion and problems later.

As we move into 2026, my hope is not that more people pursue healing, but that more people pursue honest healing. The kind that doesn’t sell itself well. The kind that doesn’t perform nicely online. The kind that quietly makes relationships cleaner, boundaries clearer, and power less intoxicating.

That kind of healing doesn’t make headlines.

What it does is turns human toddlers walking around in adult bodies into real-life adults.

And honestly, that is the medicine we all need right now.

Happy New Year, friends! May your 2026 be sweet and easy!

Love,
Gv

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What a beautiful 🎁 you all have given me. Substack just told me I've crossed the 1,000-subscriber mark. I do my best to write about my experience in a way that might benefit one or two of you. I’m so blessed that a few of you have decided to stick around for the gooey stuff that’s coming up for me today! 😂

I grew up in Nebraska, which means I spent most of my formative years marinated in what some colloquially refer to as “Midwest nice.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s the cultural habit of being polite, agreeable, and conflict-avoidant at almost any cost. You don’t want to rock the boat. You don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. You smile, you nod, you say “it’s fine” when it isn’t, and you swallow your truth for the sake of keeping the peace.

On the surface, Midwest nice looks like kindness. Underneath, it’s just fear wearing a friendly face.

From a young age, many of us were trained that being a good person meant keeping other people happy. Don’t upset your parents. Don’t challenge authority. Don’t make a scene. If there’s tension in the room, smooth it over. If someone’s uncomfortable, fix it. That training doesn’t just disappear when we grow up. It follows us into our adult relationships, our workplaces, our spirituality, and our ideas about what love and freedom actually look like.

What I’ve noticed in my coaching and medicine work is that this pattern is definitely not limited to the Midwest. I see it constantly in clients who grew up far from cornfields and county fairs. I’ve spent enough time around West Coast spiritual communities to know that Midwest nice has migrated west, put on yoga pants, placed a soft hand over its heart, learned the language of “compassion,” and started calling itself “being high-vibration.” The flavor changes, but the mechanism stays the same.

We confuse niceness with kindness and compliance with love. Instead of meeting tension with honesty, we manage it with people-pleasing. We learn how to read the room, anticipate needs, and subtly shape ourselves to be acceptable. It a ritual learned over decades that therapists refer to as hypervigilance. Over time, that survival strategy hardens into a personality and makes it nearly impossible to trust others or ourselves.

This is where suffering quietly takes root.

When you’re trained to keep everyone else comfortable, you lose touch with your own internal authority. You don’t learn how to speak up clearly. You don’t learn how to tolerate disapproval. You don’t learn how to stay present in discomfort—yours or someone else’s. And so you begin outsourcing your sense of safety and worth to other people’s reactions.

That early conditioning is the soil from which people-pleasing and codependence grow. It’s also the same soil that feeds another, more culturally celebrated illusion: the belief that if we can just get enough—enough money, enough control, enough approval, enough love—we’ll finally be at peace.

As a little Christmas gift, I’m going to use this essay to explore those two illusions. Not as moral failures, but as developmental ones. Two deeply normalized patterns that keep adults emotionally young, spiritually stuck, and quietly exhausted. I’m delivering this extra early on X-Mas eve for any of you girding your loins as you travel to spend time with your family this holiday season. Our “first family” is where it starts, but if you look really closely, it’s now showing up in all your “second family” relationships. This includes your workplace, your friend groups, and your spiritual communities.

To get your attention, I called them the two greatest “sins” of modern culture—not because they make us bad people, but because they keep us from growing up. In reality, I don’t actually believe in sin, or for that matter, right and wrong. When you view the whole human experience as education, you see that these are only skills we only need to improve upon, and our awareness of these patterns is only for our learning. Hold any discomfort with grace and compassion.

Sin #1: Codependence Disguised as Kindness

If Midwest nice is the training ground, codependence is the graduation ceremony.

Codependence, at its core, is the belief that if you’re okay, I’m okay. It’s the subtle but powerful assumption that our emotional stability depends on someone else’s mood, approval, or comfort. When they’re happy, we relax. When they’re upset, we scramble. When they’re suffering, we feel compelled to fix it.

This pattern is often praised, not questioned. We often call it empathy or being supportive. We call it being a good friend, partner, or child. But beneath the language of care is a quieter truth: we’re trying to regulate our own nervous systems by managing other people’s experiences.

After a decade in twelve-step recovery, I had an opportunity to spend a couple of years in Al-Anon (the sister program for friends and family of addicts). This program targets codependency, and it was probably when I actually started to become a human adult (albeit in my late thirties). But here’s the reality. The deeper I’ve gone into my coaching and medicine practice, the deeper I’ve realized how people-pleasing, achievement, competition, and professionalism are all tricky little disguises for codependence. Each time I take people to Peru, I realize a new layer of professionalism that needs to be ripped away because it’s all just an attempt at control.

Most codependence doesn’t look dramatic. It looks responsible. It looks mature. It looks like the adult daughter who calls her mother three times a week, not because she wants to, but because “Mom gets anxious if I don’t.” It looks like the partner who monitors their spouse’s mood before deciding whether to bring up an important conversation. It looks like the friend who always picks up the phone at 2 AM, even when exhausted, because “what if they really need me?”

The problem isn’t kindness. The problem is interference. And each time we do this two things happen: first, we abandon ourselves (which, by now, you should realize is not a super great way to take care of yourself) and second, we actually impede the healing process of those we’re caretaking for. The hard truth is that our interference is slowing, if not completely halting, their healing process.

Consider this scenario: Your sister calls, upset about her job. She’s been passed over for a promotion again. A genuinely kind response might be: “That sounds really frustrating. How are you feeling about it?” But the codependent response jumps immediately to: “Have you talked to HR? Maybe I can call my friend who works there. Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out together.”

Notice the difference. The first response creates space for her experience. The second immediately moves to manage it.

When we insert ourselves into someone else’s process without invitation, we interrupt something essential. We assume fragility where there may be strength. We assume incapacity where there may be learning. We assume that discomfort is a problem to be solved rather than a teacher doing its job.

Much of what we call “helping” is actually an attempt to relieve our own anxiety. Someone else’s pain makes us uncomfortable, so we rush to soothe it. Someone else’s struggle triggers our fear of conflict or abandonment, so we step in prematurely. This isn’t generosity. It’s self-protection wearing virtue’s mask.

As psychologist Harriet Lerner writes in The Dance of Intimacy, “We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.”

Over time, codependence creates a quiet erosion of agency on both sides. The person being helped doesn’t build their own capacity, and the helper never learns how to tolerate discomfort without acting. Both remain emotionally underdeveloped, locked in what we could call “emotional fusion” or enmeshment, unable to distinguish where one person’s feelings end and the other’s begin.

People-Pleasing: The Behavioral Expression

People-pleasing is codependence expressed through behavior. It’s the habit of shaping yourself to be palatable in order to secure connection. You learn what gets rewarded and what gets punished, and you adjust accordingly. You don’t speak your truth; you manage impressions. You don’t ask directly; you hint. You don’t risk conflict; you absorb resentment.

I once worked with a client who described a typical holiday dinner: She’d arrive early to help cook (though no one asked), bring gifts carefully selected to please each family member (spending money she didn’t have), laugh at jokes that weren’t funny, avoid topics that might cause tension, and leave feeling completely drained. When I asked what she actually wanted from these gatherings, she went silent. She’d never considered the question, much less would ever choose not to attend. Yikes! What a revelation. No doing something that causes us to suffer.

From the outside, this looks like harmony. From the inside, it’s f’ing exhausting.

The tragedy is that codependence promises connection but delivers distance. When relationships are built on managing rather than sharing truth, intimacy becomes impossible. No one is authentically known. Everyone is performing. And beneath the surface, resentment quietly accumulates like compound interest on an emotional debt that will eventually come due. Hint: One of my favorite mantras from Brené is “Choose discomfort over resentment.” This single phrase has spared me from so much suffering over the last decade that I would really encourage you to try it with your family/holidy time.

When Boundaries Replace Adulthood

In recent years, the language of boundaries has become mainstream. For many people, especially those who grew up without emotional safety, learning they’re allowed to say no (or that “no” can actually be a complete sentence) is genuinely liberating. Boundaries can interrupt cycles of abuse, enmeshment, and self-betrayal.

But like many medicines, boundaries can become a bypass. When a boundary becomes a wall instead of a gate, it’s being misused.

I recently listened to an Oprah podcast where adults in their thirties discussed going no contact with their parents. What struck me wasn’t their desire for respect, which was entirely valid. It was how often no contact appeared to replace rather than follow an adult conversation.

In many stories, the core complaint wasn’t severe abuse or ongoing harm. It was that the parent didn’t behave the way the adult child wanted. The pain was real. The frustration was understandable. But what was missing was what I call a moment of authorship. The primary reason is that most of these adult humans are really just toddlers walking around in adult bodies.

There was rarely a point where the adult child said, plainly and directly: “Mom, when you comment on my weight every time we talk, it damages our relationship. I need you to stop doing that if we’re going to stay connected.” There was no invitation for the parent to respond consciously. Instead, the relationship was exited, often abruptly, under the banner of self-protection, and even worse, in an email or text message.

This isn’t adulthood. It’s avoidance wearing empowerment’s costume. Sadly, it’s also an outcome of shitty social media, bad therapists, and even worse spiritual teachers.

True boundaries are not silent. They are spoken. They require clarity, presence, and a willingness to tolerate discomfort. When you state a boundary honestly, you risk disappointment, anger, or the other person choosing not to meet you where you are.

And that risk is precisely what many people are still avoiding.

I say this without judgment, because I’ve lived it. There was a phase where going no contact with certain family members felt like freedom. It brought relief, space, and a sense of control I hadn’t felt before.

But it didn’t make me grow up. I was just kicking the can down the road rather than picking it up and dealing with it.

What it actually did was postpone the emotional maturity required to renegotiate relationships as an adult. I didn’t learn how to speak plainly. I didn’t learn how to stay regulated while someone else was disappointed. I didn’t learn how to hold my ground without withdrawing my love.

Those are adult capacities, and they only develop through intentional practice.

To be clear, there are situations where no contact is necessary and wise—ongoing abuse, addiction without accountability, chronic violations after clear boundaries have been stated. No one is obligated to stay in harm’s way to prove maturity.

But we need to be honest about how often “boundaries” are being used to avoid the very conversation that would catalyze growth.

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Sin #2: Confusing External Freedom with Internal Freedom

The second great sin of modern culture is the belief that money, power, control, and access will eventually deliver peace and relieve me of the day-to-day suffering and malaise that I experience. This belief is so normalized it’s rarely questioned. Of course, more resources mean more freedom. Of course, more options mean less stress. Of course, if we just get enough, everything will finally settle. By all means, money won’t buy you happiness, but it sure does buy much-needed food and shelter.

And temporarily, it works.

External freedom offers real relief. Money reduces certain stressors. Control creates predictability. Power opens doors. A nice vacation, a good meal, a promotion—these can all produce momentary ease. The nervous system relaxes. For a moment, we feel okay.

The problem isn’t that external freedom is fake. It’s that it’s conditional. And our brains have become master seamstresses by continually stitching together these moments of relief into an expertly crafted quilt of delusion.

External freedom depends on circumstances cooperating. It requires the market to behave, relationships to remain stable, health to hold steady. The moment something shifts—money tightens, relationships strain, control is lost—the sense of freedom evaporates. What we thought was peace reveals itself as management.

Internal freedom is fundamentally different.

Internal freedom doesn’t require the world to be a certain way. It doesn’t depend on having enough money, affirmation, or control. It’s the capacity to remain grounded in uncertainty, disappointment, or lack. It’s not numbness or detachment. It’s resilience without armor.

Viktor Frankl, writing from his experience in concentration camps, captured this distinction perfectly: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

When we confuse external freedom for internal freedom, we begin using external strategies to meet internal needs. We don’t just pursue success—we need it. We don’t just enjoy relationships—we depend on them to feel whole.

The Transaction Trap

This confusion creates what I call transactional relating. If money, power, or approval are required for peace, then relationships become tools for regulation. We give strategically. We perform. We use our intelligence, generosity, or resources to secure safety and belonging.

This isn’t manipulation in the obvious sense. It’s often subtle and socially rewarded. We call it networking. We call it being strategic. We call it emotional intelligence. But underneath lies an unspoken contract: If I do this for you, I will get to feel okay.

I have worked with many powerful and competent leaders who realized they’d been using their wealth to manage every relationship in their lives. They pay for dinners, gave lavish gifts, offered opportunities—all genuinely generous acts. But when they examined their motivations, they discovered fear underneath: fear that without these offerings, people wouldn’t stay. Their money had become emotional currency, and every relationship had become a transaction they couldn’t afford to lose.

One of my teachers once said, “Having money is never the issue; needing money is where suffering comes from.” The same could be said for love, power, or control. You can have all of these and remain free. But the moment your peace depends on them, freedom disappears.

This is why the endless pursuit of “enough” never resolves suffering. The goalpost always moves. A million isn’t enough. Then five. Then ten. More recognition. More certainty. The system can’t deliver what it promises because it’s addressing the wrong problem.

Internal freedom isn’t achieved through accumulation. It’s cultivated through reducing dependency. Net-net: You can either continually create more or need less. The former is exhausting, the latter is being able to receive more and work less…truly heaven on earth.

Altered States, Avoided Action, and the Illusion of Healing

These patterns show up vividly in modern spiritual and psychedelic culture. Many seekers aren’t actually on a path of growing up or waking up, but pursuing what could best be described as collecting altered states. The assumption—usually unconscious—is that if the experience is profound enough, transformation will somehow handle itself.

Altered states can be profound. They can open perception, soften defenses, and reveal previously inaccessible truths. But altered states don’t create transformation. They create information.

This is where people get stuck.

Integration is making sense of what happened in an experience. Most people stop there. They journal insights. They analyze symbolism. They understand themselves better.

Activation is what comes next—and it’s where healing either begins or stalls.

Activation is changing your life based on what you’ve seen. It’s having the conversation you’ve been avoiding. It’s leaving the relationship that’s out of integrity. It’s cleaning up finances, habits, and patterns that no longer align. Activation isn’t mystical. It’s practical. And it requires each of us to become a human adult, leaving our childish ways behind.

Here’s a concrete example: A client had a powerful ayahuasca experience where she clearly saw how her people-pleasing was rooted in childhood trauma. She understood the pattern completely. She journaled extensively. She felt she’d “healed” something profound.

Six months later, she was still saying yes when she meant no, still avoiding difficult conversations with her partner, still exhausted from managing everyone’s emotions. The insight was real. The healing was not. Because healing requires action, and action requires facing the exact discomfort the pattern was designed to avoid.

When activation doesn’t happen, pressure builds. Each experience adds clarity. Each insight sharpens awareness. And when nothing changes externally, that clarity becomes uncomfortable. The psyche feels congested. People describe feeling blocked or like “the medicine stopped working,” or it didn’t work at all.

And the sad part is that most of those therapists, guides, and spiritual teachers are in cahoots. They’re (mostly) unconsciously colluding with their clients while watching them wander around in the swamp of despair.

Returning to altered states without activating prior insights doesn’t resolve tension—it compounds it. Truth piles up behind a closed door. And instead of opening the door, many assume they need another ceremony, a stronger dose, a different facilitator.

Pro Tip: If you’re not genuinely interested in taking action and changing your life, please continue showing up for your weekly therapy sessions and leave the psychedelics alone. The extreme discomfort I’ve witnessed from individuals with a truckload of truth piled up waiting to be hauled to the dump is enormous. That discomfort will stay just as long as their actions are out of alignment and their lives are out of integrity. Fix the integrity and alignment problem, and the pressure will decrease all on its own.

The medicine isn’t failing you. Avoidance is.

Growing Up Is the Way Out

At their core, these two sins aren’t moral failures. They’re developmental arrests.

Codependence keeps us managing other people’s emotions instead of taking responsibility for our own. Confusing external freedom with internal freedom keeps us chasing comfort instead of cultivating resilience. Together, these patterns allow us to remain emotionally young while wearing adulthood’s costume.

We become skilled at being nice, keeping peace, accumulating resources, knowledge, and insights. And all the while, something essential remains untouched.

For years, I collected experiences and knowledge. I voraciously read self-help and spiritual books and listened to spiritual teachers, all while spinning around in circles. All that knowledge doesn’t hold a candle to the wisdom of direct experience. If you’re still hoarding knowledge and not listening to yourself, progress will be almost non-existent.

Real healing doesn’t come from fixing others, avoiding discomfort, or collecting peak experiences. It comes from learning to stay present when things are uncomfortable. From speaking plainly without demanding agreement. From allowing others the dignity of their own path.

Internal freedom is not glamorous. It doesn’t announce itself with success or status. It often begins quietly, in boredom and stillness—when distractions fall away and we’re left with ourselves. It starts the moment we start running away from our discomfort. That moment can feel like something’s wrong. In reality, it’s often the first sign something is finally right.

Growing up means trading performance for integrity. Transaction for relationship. Control for trust.

It means no longer asking, “How do I keep everyone happy?” or “How do I get enough?” and instead asking, “What is true, and am I willing to live it?”

That question doesn’t promise comfort. But it does promise freedom.

And unlike the freedom offered by money, approval, or altered states, this freedom doesn’t disappear when conditions change.

It stays. Not because life becomes easy—but because you finally meet it as an adult.

A Practice for Growing Up

To close, I’ll offer a practice I use extensively in my coaching work. As part of my DEEP Inner Work process, my clients and I create experiments—just like scientists would. When an uncomfortable relationship pattern surfaces in coaching, we examine what’s being triggered and clarify what we actually want from the relationship. Then we co-create an experiment designed to move toward that truth.

Here’s how it works: Say your friend asks you to go out for drinks the night before you’re leaving for a long drive to visit family. You don’t want to go—you need rest, you need to prepare, you need space. In the past, you might have said yes anyway, then resented them or yourself. Or made up an elaborate excuse. This time, we craft clear and compassionate language to communicate your actual need.

“I appreciate the invitation, but I need tomorrow evening to prepare for my trip. Let’s connect when I’m back.”

Simple. Direct. True.

Before running the experiment, we document our hypothesis: How will they react? What fallout might occur? Will they be angry? Will they withdraw? Will the friendship survive this tiny act of honesty? We write it all down—our fears, predictions, and catastrophic fantasies.

Then we run the experiment.

What I’ve witnessed over the last decade is remarkable: our predictions are wrong almost 80% of the time. And not just wrong—wrong in our favor. The friend usually says, “No problem, have a great trip!” The parent often responds with unexpected understanding. The partner frequently appreciates the clarity.

Each time reality proves kinder than our fear predicted, I ask that my clients document their results in what I call a “Proof Journal.” This journal becomes a living record that our minds lie to us, that our catastrophic predictions rarely materialize, that people are generally more resilient and reasonable than we imagine.

The next time doubt creeps in—they’ll hate me, they’ll leave, I’ll be abandoned—we return to the Proof Journal. Page after page of evidence that discomfort passes, that relationships survive honesty, that boundaries create connection rather than destroying it. This tangible proof often quiets the ego long enough to tolerate those crucial moments of discomfort.

One essential note: when beginning this work, we create experiments that honor our nervous system’s current capacity. It’s wiser to practice small boundaries with coworkers or acquaintances than to immediately confront your parents with decades of accumulated truth. Start with, “I can’t make drinks tonight” before attempting, “Mom, if you comment on my weight again, I won’t be coming to Christmas.”

The intent of each experiment is to gradually widen your window of tolerance, slowly strengthening your nervous system’s capacity for discomfort. If your experiment is too intense, it can retraumatize rather than heal. Growth happens at the edge of comfort, not in the depths of overwhelm.

So this holiday season, as you navigate family dinners and office parties, as you feel the familiar pull to please and perform, perhaps you’ll remember this: Every uncomfortable truth you speak, every boundary you hold, every moment you choose authenticity over approval is an experiment in growing up.

And maybe—just maybe—2026 becomes the year you finally say F-U to Midwest nice and hello to actual human adulthood.

Happy holidays,
Gv

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Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

Recently, I was offered a powerful truth in a medicine journey that poked at the very nature of who I think I am (or thought I was). Whether that truth is ultimately True for me remains to be seen. I’ve come to discover that revelations like this are not meant to be immediately accepted or rejected; they are meant to percolate within us, wrestled with, and slowly metabolized. Trying to “understand” points in the direction of a process that feels “strong and hard.” Watching and waiting has been much more “sweet and easy.” What matters most, looking back, is not the content of the message itself, but the conditions under which it arrived.

Had this message been delivered during my early years with this medicine or maestro, before deep trust had been established, I would have likely experienced it as a profound betrayal. It would have created ontological shock: a rupture in my sense of self, safety, and meaning so severe that I likely would have fled from the medicine entirely. Not because the truth was wrong, but because I would not yet have had the internal strength or relational capacity to hold it.

What’s different now is not my toughness or spiritual maturity. What’s different is trust.

I have been sitting with this teacher and this lineage for nearly five years. This message was not new to them. They had known it long before it was shared with me. And that matters. A true teacher does not rush to expose what a student cannot yet survive. Timing is part of the teaching. Relationship is part of the medicine.

In a previous article, a reader commented, “A true teacher won’t collude with the illusion that’s killing you, even if exposing it hurts,” and continued, “Liberation always starts with someone refusing to play along with your favorite lie. Trust is what lets the blow rearrange instead of destroy.“

That last sentence hit me square in the chest and encouraged me to slow down and go inside.

Truth does not arrive in a vacuum. It comes through people, through relationship, through timing, and through trust. When trust is absent, even a Universal truth can feel violent. When trust is present, the same truth becomes medicine. This is why we don’t shoot the messenger—not because messengers are infallible, but because without trust, we lose access to the very truths that might set us free.

Trust as the Foundation of Psychedelic Work

If there is a single variable that determines whether psychedelic work becomes healing or destabilizing, it is not dosage, substance, music, or even intention. I genuinely believe trust in the facilitator, in the medicine, and over time, in oneself, is the key to deep healing. This is also why MDMA is such a powerful precursor to classic psychedelics.

Without trust, the nervous system contracts. It scans for threats. It interprets intensity as danger rather than information. In this state, even benevolent experiences can feel invasive or overwhelming. With trust, however, the same intensity is experienced as meaningful. The system softens. Surrender becomes possible. The psyche allows itself to be rearranged rather than defended.

Trust is not a secondary component of psychedelic work. It is the primary container. The medicine works through the conditions we provide. When trust is absent, truth feels like an attack, and defense mechanisms rush in to preserve identity and safety. This is not weakness; it is biology. The nervous system (and the soul) is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

While I can’t confirm this with certainty, I suspect many individuals who feel harmed by psychedelics came into contact with truth they were not yet prepared to receive. Because they didn’t trust the medicine or facilitator, that truth created rupture rather than healing. Psychedelics do not exist to comfort our preferred narratives. They exist to reveal truth. And truth, by its very nature, is often inconvenient.

When trust is present, however, truth can still hurt but doesn’t threaten annihilation. There is enough internal and relational safety for the psyche to stay open. The material can move. The system can reorganize. What might otherwise become trauma becomes transformation.

Trust in the facilitator allows the relational field to hold difficult material without collapse. Trust in the medicine allows us to believe that what is being revealed is not random or malicious. And trust in ourselves allows us to remain present with the process even when clarity doesn’t arrive immediately.

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of psychedelic work: clarity is not always immediate, and resolution is not always the goal. Sometimes the work is simply learning how to stay present with uncertainty without fleeing or projecting. That capacity comes from trust built slowly, over time. The work is staying out of the past or the future and remembering that everything is perfect here in the present moment.

The Cost of Speed: Going Too Far, Too Fast

One of the most misunderstood risks in psychedelic work has nothing to do with conventional danger. It is speed. More specifically, it is the cultural obsession with intensity and optimization without regard for the system that must absorb what is revealed.

Western culture is conditioned to equate transformation with breakthrough. Rather than spending years in therapy preparing, we rush to Peru hoping a few nights of ayahuasca will wipe away decades of trauma. We chase peak experiences, ego death, and dramatic catharsis as if depth can be measured by how much ground is covered in a single session. This mirrors our approach to productivity, success, and even healing itself. Faster is better. More is better. Harder must be truer.

But the psyche doesn’t work this way. Neither does the nervous system. And neither does true medicine.

When insight arrives faster than the system can reorganize, something fractures. This is ontological shock. It occurs when revelation destabilizes one’s sense of identity before there is enough internal safety to hold the impact. The result is not awakening; it is dysregulation.

Ontological shock doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it appears as persistent anxiety, spiritual confusion, or a sense that “something is wrong.” Other times it manifests as depression, dissociation, or an obsessive need to make sense of the experience through story or blame. The common thread is the same: the system received more than it could metabolize. As Carl Jung reminds us, “Beware of unearned wisdom.”

This is not a failure of the medicine. It is a mismatch between revelation and capacity.

Psychedelics are accelerants. They compress insight, emotion, and meaning into condensed periods. That compression can be profoundly healing when the container is strong enough. But when trust, pacing, and relational grounding are absent, acceleration becomes destabilization.

Going slow is not avoidance. It is calibration.

When psychedelic work unfolds gradually over years, with appropriate integration support, the nervous system has space to adapt. Insights can settle. Identity can reorganize. The psyche can test what was revealed against lived experience rather than being forced to accept or reject it all at once. This is how truth becomes embodied rather than merely known.

Unfortunately, many seekers are encouraged to override this wisdom. They are told to “trust the medicine” while being pushed toward higher doses or faster timelines. Trust becomes confused with surrender. But surrender without safety is not surrender at all. It’s collapse.

True trust doesn’t demand that we overwhelm ourselves. It allows us to listen for pacing. It respects the difference between readiness and desire. And it understands that the medicine’s intelligence includes restraint as much as revelation.

When people experience long-term difficulties after psychedelic work, speed is almost always part of the story. The medicine moved faster than their nervous system could follow. There was not enough time, support, or trust to integrate what emerged. Should we blame the medicine, or should we ask ourselves what our part was in the unfolding?

Slowness creates resilience. It allows trust to deepen in the facilitator, the medicine, and one’s own capacity to stay present with what arises. Over time, this trust expands the system’s ability to receive truth without fragmentation.

The question is never “How much did you take?” but “How much could you hold?”

Healing is not a race to the summit. It is a gradual acclimatization to altitude. Move too quickly, and you risk collapse, no matter how strong your intentions. Move with patience and respect for your own limits, and the same terrain becomes navigable.

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Post-Psychedelic Difficulties and the Mislabeling of Harm

As psychedelic work becomes more visible, so do stories of people who feel harmed or destabilized. These experiences deserve to be taken seriously. Dismissing suffering helps no one. But taking suffering seriously requires discernment. Many individuals who struggle long after a journey are not suffering because the medicine broke them. They are suffering because their systems were unable to metabolize what they were given.

In every client I’ve worked with, there is a direct correlation between suffering and lack of acceptance. As Byron Katie says, “When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”

Psychedelics show us what is already present within our systems: memories, ego, vanity, trauma, beliefs, emotions, and spiritual truths. They do not implant foreign material into the psyche. When that content arrives faster than the mind can integrate, it creates overload. Without adequate support, the psyche does what it always does in moments of overwhelm: it goes on the defensive.

This is where long-term dysregulation begins.

Post-psychedelic difficulties often manifest as anxiety, depression, dissociation, or spiritual confusion. The mind scrambles for meaning and safety. When integration support is lacking, the easiest place for that distress to land is outside the self, often taking the form of blaming a facilitator or the medicine itself.

Projection is not a moral failure. It is a survival strategy.

When someone cannot hold the truth they encountered, the psyche looks for a cause. The facilitator becomes a convenient target, not necessarily because of wrongdoing, but because they were present. They become the symbol of the rupture.

This is uncomfortable territory we must be willing to name: not all stories of harm are stories of harm caused.

To say this is not to deny that unethical facilitators exist. They do. Psychological manipulation, spiritual coercion, and abuse of power are never acceptable and must be addressed directly. I make no excuses for facilitators who exploit vulnerability.

But there is another phenomenon unfolding alongside these real concerns: a growing tendency to attribute any difficult outcome to facilitator failure or the medicine, without examining readiness, pacing, or capacity. In these cases, the medicine did exactly what it does: it told the truth.

And truth, when received without trust, can feel indistinguishable from harm.

Much of the psychedelic harm reduction conversation is being led by those who have been “harmed.” This discourse often carries a particular energetic signature infused with mistrust and urgency. The message is not simply “this was difficult,” but “this must be stopped.” The nervous system, still dysregulated years after the experience, continues attempting to regain control by warning others.

When fear becomes the foundation of education, it transmits that fear forward. It teaches people to brace rather than relate. And it can actually increase the likelihood of destabilizing experiences by undermining the very trust that makes psychedelic work safe.

What I have learned is this: the truth needs no defense.

When people argue with what the medicine revealed, suffering is prolonged. The work doesn’t move forward until the system is ready to turn toward the material rather than away from it. Integration is not about deciding whether the experience was good or bad. It is about learning how to stay in relationship with what emerged.

This is why blaming the facilitator (or cognitive behavioral therapy) rarely brings relief. Even when a guide made mistakes, projection freezes the work at the moment of rupture. Healing resumes only when responsibility and curiosity return to the individual.

None of this means people should endure unsafe conditions. Discernment cuts both ways. But we must differentiate between harm caused by abuse and distress caused by unintegrated truth. Conflating the two serves neither seekers nor facilitators.

The medicine is not interested in your comfort. It is interested in coherence. It reveals what is misaligned, hidden, and unresolved. When that revelation outpaces capacity, the result is not failure but a call for more trust, time, and better containment.

Discernment and Listening to the Body

By this point, the question often becomes practical: How do I know who to trust? In an ideal world, every seeker would have time to build a long-term relationship with a facilitator rooted in consistency and mutual discernment. But many people come to this work carrying urgency or suffering.

This is precisely why we need to prioritize discernment over desperation.

When long-term relationship is not possible, I encourage what I call “trust by proxy.” Find someone trusted by someone you trust. Not someone who promises outcomes or salvation, but someone whose presence has been tested over time by people you respect. This is not a guarantee of safety, but it is a meaningful place to begin.

Trust by proxy does not mean outsourcing your intuition or ignoring red flags because someone else had a good experience. Not every facilitator is right for every client, and not every client is right for every facilitator. Resonance matters. Capacity matters. Timing matters.

The most reliable harm-reduction tool you have is not your intellect or your fear; it is your body.

The body holds multiple intelligences. The mind analyzes. The heart senses relational safety. The belly knows when something is off long before language catches up. When these intelligences are practiced together, discernment becomes embodied rather than theoretical.

Learning to listen to the body takes practice, especially for those trained to override sensation in favor of cognition. But the body is a far more honest narrator than the mind when it comes to safety and readiness. It doesn’t speak in conclusions; it speaks in signals.

“Don’t shoot the messenger” is not a call for blind trust. It is an invitation to slow down, to differentiate between the message and the delivery system, and to take responsibility for pacing and readiness. The facilitator is not the truth. The medicine is not the enemy. And difficult experiences are not automatically evidence of harm.

Trust allows truth to be received without fragmentation. Trust allows revelation to become relationship rather than rupture. And when trust is present, earned slowly and held in the body, the medicine gives exactly what the system is capable of receiving.

The work does not require bravery so much as honesty. Not speed, but patience. Not certainty, but discernment. When we move this way, we stop shooting messengers and start listening for what is actually being asked of us. And that is where healing begins.

Epilogue

To connect a couple of dots for anyone curious, I still don’t fully understand the message I received on my journey. What I can tell you is that the medicine was divinely intelligent enough to offer it at just the right time, with just the right support. For context, I have been sitting within this lineage since 2021, and my maestro has known this truth was coming for years. It was only on this journey that Dr. Ayahuasca decided I was ready.

We were sitting with seven nights of medicine over twenty days. The first four journeys were in the mountains, the last three in the jungle. The medicine offered me this message on the first night in the jungle. Looking back, I understand why. Had I been closer to an airport, I might have bought a plane ticket home the next morning. Being two hours by boat from civilization forced me to sit with my feelings, albeit uncomfortably, for four more days. I also had two more nights of medicine and support from my team to sand off the edges of this wisdom before returning to civilization, plus another few days of solitude and support in Cusco before returning home.

Now, having been home for almost a month, I can confidently say I am happier and freer than ever before. Life’s challenges and responsibilities haven’t disappeared, but my ability to see them for what they are has increased exponentially. My connection with my own medicine has strengthened, and my clients are receiving more powerful healing than ever before.

What I have come to understand is that when we think of attachments, we like to think of things like cars, houses, jobs, or partners. Those are potential attachments, but there are layers we don’t even understand because they’ve always been there. There are fundamental parts of our personality that we accept as truth. We’re like fish swimming around without knowing we’re wet. The closer you come to real Truth, the more tightly affixed those attachments become. In my case, this one felt like it was super-glued onto my being in such a way that I was mistaking it for truth. And removing anything that’s been super-glued isn’t fun and leaves a bit of a mess.

The final, and probably the most important, note I will offer is that I asked for this hundreds of times. I have prayed to God and the medicine to show me the Truth. When the time was right, I got exactly what I asked for. So in closing, be careful what you ask for, because the medicine might just give it to you.

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Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, please help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

First off, I want to welcome all the new subscribers. I have so much gratitude for each of you who takes the time to read my content. It was only a few short years ago that I was writing marketing content and measuring click-throughs, so it boggles my mind and warms the cockles of my heart to know that my writing has helped some of you navigate your own healing journey. As a thank you, I’m hosting an online PsychedelicIQ Salon on Wednesday, December 10th at 7:00 pm for all my paid subscribers. Since this is the first time I’m doing this online, we’re just going to be in the grateful flow together. There will be time for discussion, support, and Q&A. If you’d like to join, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Hopefully, this will be the first of many.

For those who’ve been with me longer, you may have noticed I’ve been quiet for a few weeks. It was unplanned—more instruction than choice. I just returned from my annual pilgrimage in Peru, acting as a bridge for clients, studying with my teachers, and doing my own work. I had every intention of writing down there, but the medicine had a different agenda. After my first night of ayahuasca, I was specifically told to put all my work down and focus on me…and good Lord, did I get what I asked for.

Most of my content comes from personal experience, typically written from a facilitator’s perspective to help seekers better prepare for and metabolize their psychedelic experiences. As I wrote about in Healing with Psychedelics, I’m not a fan of trip reports. I’ve read many and listened to thousands, yet not a single one has ever reflected my personal experiences. I’ve never even had two psychedelic experiences that were the same, so why would yours resemble mine?

But something I’ve learned from my coaching clients (and frankly, where I believe many therapists miss the boat) is that self-disclosure can often be incredibly helpful for others on their journey. So many times, my clients have thanked me for sharing my experiences in medicine because it helps them remember that they’re not alone, and that I’m still very much in my process and still doing some very uncomfortable work. All of this to say, you’re not alone, any well-qualified facilitator is still doing their own work. Consider asking them about their process and see what happens.

But each of us is also 100% unique. We all have different karma, trauma, and lived experiences, so we’ll all have different processes for healing and waking up. Comparing my experiences to yours will only cause suffering. Trust me, I’ve spent four years comparing my experience to that of my maestro, and it’s only shown me how much people-pleasing and striving I still need to clean up.

Today, I’m stepping back from the facilitator perspective to share my process as a seeker. Sitting with ayahuasca seven times in twenty days taught me a lot. Much has yet to fully metabolize, so I’ll keep those parts to myself. But some learnings may be helpful to you on your path, so I’ll stay out of the trip report territory and focus on useful insights. Writing helps me process, so I’m sharing that process with you.

Additionally, I imagine a fair number of people reading my content come less from Indigenous traditions and more from clinical, therapeutic, and more generalized spiritual paths. I encounter many professing a desire to “honor the Indigenous carriers of this medicine” who have never actually worked within an Indigenous tradition.

Parts of what you’ll read below may stretch far outside of typical clinical and therapeutic boundaries, and depending on your current mental model, some of what you might read could even elicit a “He’s lost it!” That’s ok; we’re just walking different trailheads. But if you’re interested in how the Indigenous perceive this medicine, this post might offer a tiny taste of what to expect when you’re ready to step outside the safety of the therapist's office.

The Physical Body As A Manifestation Of Memories

Yesterday I came across a few attack articles by a psychotherapist attempting to debunk the work of Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, and Bessel van der Kolk. The gist: their work isn’t properly backed by research, making it pseudoscientific and therefore useless. From the author: “Collectively, these men have pushed a narrative that centers personal responsibility for chronic illness and promoted interventions that are not strongly evidence-based with the implication that they will prevent or even cure illness.”

In Healing with Psychedelics, I also wrote an unprovable chapter called “How and Why Psychedelics Heal“ where I offer an analogy comparing our body, mind, and spirit to a fish tank full of dirty water, with psychedelics acting as a high-powered filter. The cleaner our water, the better we feel. I quote all three authors mentioned above in that chapter. Can any of this be proven? Absolutely not—we don’t yet possess subtle enough instrumentation to measure energy at these levels. Throwing double-blind studies aside, let me share part of my Peru journey and let you decide for yourself.

After eight days in the Sacred Valley, our group headed to Machu Picchu. As the climate got colder and elevation changed, my sinuses began acting up—a twice-yearly occurrence for as long as I can remember. Having been a smoker for fifteen years, I know sinus infections and bronchitis well. What starts with sneezing quickly turns into serious sinus drainage and, if not addressed promptly, often into a chest infection. This time felt no different, and I worried I hadn’t brought my suitcase full of meds.

Days later, on our return train, I was sniffling and sneezing, and my nose was so sensitive that even a whiff of cologne was excruciating. My teacher offered that this had nothing to do with temperature but was caused by memories needing to be cleansed from my body. His suggestion: Ask the Doctors to cleanse these memories. I had no clue what memories—I was unaware of any deep karmic pattern of nasal congestion—so I went into ceremony with an open mind and a prayer for help.

Halfway through the ceremony, Doctor Ayahuasca began showing me all the times I had used my nose to ingest illicit drugs from age 21 until I got sober at 30. One by one, the Doctor showed me all the people and places where I had allowed this heavy energy to enter my body. After an hour of cleansing and a good purge, the ceremony closed and I went to my room.

The next morning, all symptoms had disappeared. The recovery that usually takes weeks, lubricated by allergy meds, Sudafed, and Mucinex, was complete. It was like I had never been sick. These sinus issues had plagued me for decades, and never once was healing so instantaneous.

For another example, my right foot has always been prone to cold for as long as I can remember. Walking, in a sleeping bag, even resting in bed—my left foot never bothers me, but my right always seems to run 10 degrees colder. During our final jungle ceremony, I asked for help from one of my maestros. I received a specific explanation and instructions to release this energy. Within minutes, my foot warmed, and I haven’t noticed the imbalance since.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. The question I pose is: “Does science need to prove something works for people to heal?” Is trauma really compressed energy stored in the body? Do you need scientific proof? No medical doctor or fMRI could measure what happened those nights or why my sinuses healed in twelve hours versus fourteen days, or why my foot went from freezing to normal in minutes. As I’ve frequently offered, in scientific materialism, you have to “See it to believe it.” But in spiritual work, “You have to believe it to see it.”

Looking for safe and sustainable transformation? Consider going deeper…

A Lived Experience of Wetiko

How many of you have experienced nearly spontaneous guilt, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, or depression? Like one minute you’re watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the next, without provocation and with no external changes, you’re in a torturous spiral of rumination that won’t stop.

I’ve been doing my work for nearly twenty years, and while this happens far less frequently now, there have been times in the past six months when I’ve spiraled without apparent cause. I now better understand this presumed missing “cause.” The reason isn’t recognizable by outside circumstances but rather an insidious low hum of mierde waiting for me to drop my guard.

Paul Levy has written extensively on Wetiko. He offers an excellent primer in this shorter article:

A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.

Further:

Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity. It is a disease of the soul, and being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and “in-forms” the underlying field of consciousness. Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think they have the disease and we don’t, in seeing them as separate we have fallen under the spell of the virus ourselves.

For years, I thought all this fear and rumination were “me.” Clearly, I was thinking the thoughts, so they must be mine. While I’ve known about Wetiko for years, and my teachers often speak of the “mierde” forever waiting to attack us, I've never had the experience or consciousness to truly understand that much of this is not actually me, but something else…until now.

It clicked one day while driving between temples in the Sacred Valley. The day was relatively typical, aside from some scheduling challenges and the knowledge that we’d sit in medicine that evening. But what happened, simply sitting in the van, was exponentially more insidious than the outer world should have caused.

Simple frustrations opened the door to a massive spiral, morphing into waves of frustration, jealousy, and feelings of disrespect. As Levy states, “Wetiko feeds off of polarization and fear—and terror—of ‘the other.’” The moment I chose to “other” the people in our group, the mierde found its way in. Because I was trying to be a good professional host, I kept my mouth shut, thinking, “I’ll just ask the medicine to help me tonight.” With each minute of secrecy, the pot boiled, my inner world suffered, and—I didn’t realize till later—others began feeling my simmering thoughts within their system.

This continued until my teacher asked our group, just before medicine, if anyone had felt uncomfortable throughout the day. I diplomatically expressed my discomfort. Knowing the discomfort was mine—that while triggered by others’ behavior, it wasn’t their fault for pressing my buttons but mine for having buttons to press—I owned being the source of the discomfort that had negatively impacted our group’s energy. Having cleared the air, we dropped into medicine, and I had one of the most powerful (and uncomfortable) experiences with Dr. Ayahuasca I’ve ever had.

Here’s what I learned:

• Many heavy thoughts and ruminations I experience aren’t actually mine, but heavy energy attacking me and using me as a conduit to perpetuate itself.

• The moment thinking knocks me off center, these heavier energies enter my consciousness. If I’m not vigilant, my mind allows them in, and they expand exponentially.

• Low-frequency emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, greed, and shame open the door. It’s my responsibility to clean these from my system.

• This mierde is incredibly smart and tricky. It convinces me to keep thoughts and feelings secret, then feeds on this secrecy, causing suffering within me and others.

• The fastest way to release this energy is by addressing it head-on with honesty. As Levy writes, “Like a vampire that can’t stand the light of day, the wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined. However, in seeing how it covertly operates through our own consciousness, we take away its seeming independence, autonomy, and power over us, while at the same time empowering ourselves.”

One of healing’s most difficult aspects for many is honesty. We feel guilt and shame for past actions, combined with childhood harm from others, growing up without knowing who’s safe or unsafe. When vulnerable in our pasts, we got hurt. So we armor up and keep secrets. This secrecy is how wetiko thrives and precisely causes our suffering.

Fortunately, my healing journey started in 12-Step rooms where honesty, openness, and willingness were foundational principles. Starting with Step 5: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs,” we recovering alcoholics shared all our resentments, fears, sexual misconduct, and harms with our sponsor. This was the first step in softening my ego and clearing the wreckage of my past. Without developing a deep sense of safety around honesty’s value, my healing journey would have ended in flames long ago. This practice of honesty and having a safe mentor, therapist, or teacher to share everything with has allowed me a safer passage into deeper awareness levels. If you’re on this journey without a safe person to be honest with, I would recommend finding that person before you go too deep and lose your way.

The Western Concept of “Dosing” Might Be Ridiculous

Over three weeks, I sat seven times with ayahuasca. All medicine came from the same batch, brewed by the same teacher. Each ceremony I drank three cups. Yet every night was entirely different. If we apply allopathic medicine principles, I ingested roughly the same amount of chakruna and ayahuasca each night, so why wasn’t my experience the same?

This is where clinical and therapeutic Western psychedelic trailheads often miss the point. My third night went from relatively normal to “OMG what the f*ck is happening” in a split second. One moment exploring consciousness, the next—for two hours—all I could do was breathe, pray, and surrender to God. Same dose every night before and after, but in this moment, the Doctors knew I was ready and needed something different.

I can’t assume everyone serving medicine has my teachers’ connection to the medicine, so your results may vary. But if you think you’re in charge of the experience (as seeker or facilitator), you’re likely mistaken. These medicines are in control, and you’ll unlikely ever truly understand how they work.

The Deeper I Go, The Less I Understand

While sitting our second night in the Sacred Valley, I noticed scratching sounds coming from outside the maloka just above my head. At first, I thought it was an animal. When the sound returned in the same maloka on the fourth night, I knew something was up. And I was the only person hearing it.

After twelve days in the mountains, we flew to the jungle for our final week and three nights of medicine. Upon settling into my cabin, I again heard the same scratching on my front porch. I was completely sober, yet could still hear it.

Remembering my van experience and that honesty was my fastest path to reducing suffering, I spoke to my maestros for help. They said they’d clear this energy during the medicine that evening. That worked for a few days. On our last jungle day, before our final medicine night, the scratching returned, and I know it was caused by yet another momentary opening of jealous and judgmental thoughts. I blew my body and cleared the space with tobacco, then sought my teachers’ assistance again.

They gave instructions and said this was another learning experience. I began to understand that my sensitivity level was growing. I was seeing and hearing things in and out of medicine I couldn’t have perceived before this trip. An interesting development that made me think, “Be careful what you ask for.”

That night in ceremony, I asked Dr. Ayahuasca what was causing this. I received a clear message that I’d left an energetic door open to someone in my life whom I’d previously sat in medicine with. I asked the doctors to close this door and cut any energetic cords with this person. That was over a week ago; the scratching hasn’t returned.

To connect a couple dots, this type of energy and experience is happening far more often than you may know or experience. Just because you can’t see or hear it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. This is also why I expect so many clinicians and therapists working with psychedelics will become unexplainably ill in the coming years. Without help and protection, many (including myself) have no idea what kind of energy is waiting to attack our consciousness.

When You Don’t Know What To Do, Don’t Do Anything At All

One of my favorite Zen teachings involves a self-important man visiting a Zen master, demanding enlightenment teachings. The master welcomed him, suggesting they talk over tea, but as he poured, he continued filling the man’s cup until it overflowed onto the table and his robes. Outraged, the visitor shouted to stop. The master calmly explained that, like the overflowing cup, the man’s mind was already too full of knowledge, assumptions, and certainty to receive anything new, instructing him to return only when he had an empty, open mind.

I spent much of my life “learning” how to psychedelic. I published about 100,000 words earlier this year in an attempt to share what I’d learned. A valiant effort and practical primer for newcomers. But on my fifth ceremony, something happened that flipped my teacup completely upside down. The information presented was the most destabilizing I’d ever experienced.

This information was so contrary to everything I knew about myself that the disorientation, confusion, guilt, shame, and fear lasted multiple days. Thankfully, I received the support needed to get past the most difficult hump, yet confusion remains about what to do with this information and what may come next. Unlike most of my past experiences, this journey could take years to fully metabolize.

As I write today, my conscious mind can’t fathom how the information could be accurate. At least for today, the lesson is to simply stay present. If I look toward the future and try forecasting my life a year from now, my wheels spin like I’m about to run off a cliff. Yet when I ask, “How do you feel in this moment?” the answer is almost always, “Wonderful. Everything in my life is great.”

My first AA sponsor used to say, “With one foot in the past, and one foot in the future, you’re pissing all over the present.” My beloved psychedelic teacher Elliot Isenberg frequently reminds me that there are six completely useless human emotions: guilt, shame, regret, resentment, blame, and worry. If I evaluate my past with this new information, I encounter guilt, shame, and regret. Looking to the future, all I feel is worry. But when firmly rooted in the present, everything is perfectly fine.

Last month, I wrote about a “Look but don’t touch list.” This journey definitely touched something I was afraid to even look at. This is likely what happens when people experience severe post-psychedelic difficulties and ontological shock. Carl Jung warned, “Beware of unearned wisdom.” I’ve been sitting with my maestro for nearly five years, and he’s known about this uncomfortable truth for some time. But the medicine knew I wasn’t ready until now.

Had this happened years ago, I’d be running around like a chicken with my head cut off—trying to understand, prove, disprove, manipulate, or fix something. Today, the medicine has gifted me the strength to say, “I don’t have the foggiest idea what to do, so I’m not going to do anything at all.” In my book, I recommend that the bigger the experience, the longer you must wait before making life changes. This definitely requires at least 90 days of quiet time and no changes to see how things unfold.

I have no doubt I’m still deep in this process with the Doctors still working with me. As Steve Jobs said, “You can never connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.” Because I have zero consciousness of what’s happening, I know I’m still looking forward. With enough trust and patience, when I can start connecting the dots looking backwards, things will begin to make sense.

For a few closing remarks on this type of process, or if you’re in one yourself and seeking relief or support, please scroll to the end of the article for some additional context and helpful integration tips.

Psychedelic Practice vs. Psychedelic Perfect

I recently heard Derek Haswell, co-founder of the meditation app Happier, discussing the difference between the healing path and the waking-up path. This is an essential distinction for psychedelic work. It reminds me of a favorite yoga teacher who encouraged us to try new things, push ourselves gradually, and when we fell over, she’d gleefully remark, “That’s why it’s a yoga practice, not a yoga perfect.”

Some people reading my content may be suffering from uncomfortable symptoms you’d like to alleviate, choosing psychedelics as medicine to help. If so, you’re currently walking the healing path. Others may be living relatively healthy, positive lives, yet still using psychedelics to go deeper. Provided you’re not just chasing peak experiences, you may be on the waking-up path.

What’s fascinating about sacred medicine, versus many other practices, is that it can offer both simultaneously. First, we heal and cleanse, then, with more freedom and clarity in body, mind, and spirit, the medicine gives us a healthy dose of truth. That truth may uncover long-forgotten memories from this lifetime or even past lifetimes. These memories are now ready to be healed, cleansed, and processed…rinse and repeat.

Personally, I’ve chosen the path of waking up. Healing is a byproduct (maybe a requirement) of that path. This post, vastly more personal than most of my content, shows that after a decade working with these substances, I haven’t even scratched the surface. Yes, I’ve cleaned up much of my past—physically and psychologically—but there’s still so much more to unpack.

If you have acute symptoms to heal, you might try MDMA or mushrooms in a controlled setting and hope for the best. If you’re new to this work, you’re likely going into your journey with a “psychedelic perfect” mental model. Imagining a magic pill, you might assume one journey will heal all symptoms, and you’ll walk out newly born, never needing another therapy session. I’ve had discussions with people who say, “Why would anyone ever need to take ayahuasca more than once?” This is like saying, “I’m going to read one psychology book and heal all my trauma.” The reality: we’re not ready to receive all the information we want right now.

As my consciousness grows and I clean up my insides, I’m able to receive more and see more clearly. If healing is your goal, do your work and move on. Just don’t think it’ll happen in one journey. What you think may be a single experience could turn into a lifelong practice using these powerful substances to truly heal and change your life in amazing ways you never dreamed possible. But if waking up to Truth is what you’re after, plan on a long journey, and I’d highly suggest finding a teacher who already knows the way. It’s incredibly easy to get lost and disoriented trying this work alone.

Additional Thoughts For When Your Life Gets Turned Upside Down

If you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance you’re waiting for me to reveal the cliffhanger that flipped my teacup upside down. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint. That’s not happening yet, and I’m going to explain why in a way that might be useful if you’re going through your own paradigm-shifting experience.

• First things first: No one online can help me through this process. The support or validation I might crave to feel seen is pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. If I shared details, 50% of readers would offer heartfelt support, the other 50% would disagree. Posting for sympathy is not how we heal, and for heaven’s sake, the really important stuff needs to stay off Instagram.

• Second, and most importantly: It’s none of your business. I don’t say that confrontationally, but from a place of safety. If you’re signing up for an experience that could initiate profound transformation, you need your care team already in place. While I’ve chosen my maestro as my primary provider, many in Western care models will have therapists, coaches, and spiritual directors. If you’re planning your first psychedelic experience, I strongly encourage having this team in place before your journey, so you’re not starting from scratch in a place of confusion.

• Share from scars, not wounds: I recommend this to all my clients. As I mentioned, I’m still in process and likely will be for some time. If I shared details now, I’d be sharing from an open wound—that’s never helpful for you or me. I’m giving myself time to integrate and heal. Then maybe I’ll share more.

• The 90/10 rule: My teacher offered helpful context: “You’ve cleaned up 90% of your life, and that is amazing. This process is bringing awareness to help you clean up the remaining 10%.” I remember yearly reviews where my manager would offer nine things I was doing right and one needing improvement. I’d leave obsessed with that one thing I was “doing wrong.” When I put this process into the context of my whole life, I’m just fine. What seems huge right now will right-size itself with time and trust.

• Context is everything: When I see something wrong in my life, I want to run out and fix it. Find an expert who knows my problem, pay for coaching, get fixed right up. Two critical reminders I’d like to leave for myself right now: First, nothing is actually broken—it only feels that way because you’re in the messy middle. Second, it’s crucial to discern which information you listen to right now. That Instagram reel where someone “knows exactly what you’re going through”? Horrible idea to reach out. I’m in a deeply pliable state, so sticking to advice from my care team is essential. If they can’t help, they’ll help me find someone who can.

• Trust and patience: These are the core values I’m embodying during this experience. The medicine rarely makes instant changes. Usually, it brings awareness to a misalignment, then begins a process of cleansing and change. Once started, it’s our responsibility to do the integration work to fold those changes into our lives. I trust my teachers and this medicine. When I stop and think about it, I’ve been working with my team for nearly five years, and my life has gotten exponentially better based on their guidance. Just because I don’t understand what’s happening in this moment doesn’t mean God doesn’t still have my best interests in mind.

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I’ve been practicing yoga for more than two decades, and as a bit of a purist, I have strong feelings about music in a yoga class. I’ve also been a DJ for more than fifteen years, so I’m very sensitive to vibration and just how powerful music is in making someone feel a certain way. I can walk into a yoga studio and feel the frequency of a playlist before I even unroll my mat.

This is why a run-of-the-mill yoga classes can be a minefield for me.

Many young teachers use music as a form of self-expression. They want to create a vibe, to bring emotion or energy to the room, and I appreciate the intention. But often, the playlist is rough. A fast pop song or a thumping beat drops in the middle of class, jolting me straight out of my body. Other times, it’s an 80s ballad or a dance track that feels more like a nightclub than a temple.

My own style of yoga is quieter. The music, if there is any, belongs in the background: soft, subtle, supporting the breath rather than competing with it. (P.S. If you’re a yoga teacher reading this, a few quick suggestions: 1) If you have to raise your voice to offer direction, your music is too loud, 2) Create the playlist for your clients, not for your entertainment, and 3) Decide what your intention for the class is, then build a playlist to supports that intention.)

Depending on my spiritual fitness that day, one of two things happens.

Sometimes I get caught. My mind fixates on the playlist, frustration builds, and my practice becomes a silent argument with the teacher. I leave more tense than when I arrived, and I blame the teacher.

Other times, I watch the same frustration arise and I laugh. I see my preference, my judgment, my ego insisting that I know how yoga should be done. I watch it all, and realize, this too is yoga. The path I choose is highly correlated to the level of spirutal fitness I have when I walked into the room.

But let’s me be clear. Discernment—that is knowing what feels right for our body, mind, and spirit—is essential. But when discernment turns into judgment, we’ve lost the plot.

The work of healing is knowing what’s right for us without letting what’s wrong disturb our center. It’s learning to stay balanced no matter what playlist life throws at us.

Two Ways Through Discomfort

In life, we always have two options when something feels uncomfortable.

Option one: if you have a choice, don’t do it. Walk away. There’s no prize for staying in environments that consistently dysregulate you. On top of that, if no one has told you to start enjoying your life more, let me be the first. Stop pondering the meaning of life and just start enjoying what you’re doing every day.

Option two: if you don’t have a choice—parenting, partnership, work, or simply being human—the work is to learn how to enjoy it. Not by pretending it’s pleasant, but by expanding your capacity to meet it.

That expansion, not the elimination of discomfort, is what true spiritual growth is about.

Most people get stuck because they don’t know which option applies. They tolerate toxicity because they think it makes them spiritual. Or they run from minor discomfort and call it self-care. The difference is simple: toxicity diminishes you over time. Discomfort, met with presence, expands you. Just because someone tells you the truth, doesn’t make them unsafe. It may make you uncomfrotable, but when you can see that the discomfort is already inside of you, you can recognize your lack of acceptance.

As Byron Katie was fond of saying, “When you argue with reality you lose, but only 100% of the time.”

You Can’t Heal If You’re Always Safe

Unless we start speaking the truth in spiritual and psychedelic spaces, some people may never heal.

So many modern healing circles and therapy practices have confused safety with growth. We hold our hands over our hearts, whisper our truths using our best NPR voice, and call it transformation. But you know what, I spent a decade in those circles and never changed. Why? Because no one ever asks me to stretch, and the perception of safety was more important than honesty.

Safety is sacred. But comfort as a goal is paralysis. When we outsource our regulation to the world, we stop developing the capacity to regulate ourselves.

Over time, people become so accustomed to having every nervous-system need met that they never learn to expand their tolerance. They mistake the absence of discomfort for healing, when it’s often avoidance dressed as spirituality.

This isn’t about forcing anyone into harm. It’s about recognizing that the nervous system, like a muscle, needs resistance to grow stronger. A muscle that never lifts anything heavy doesn’t become strong—it atrophies.

Considering psychedelics for healing but don’t know where to start?

Time To Stop Running Out of The Briar Patch

Brené Brown once described a scenario in therapy as feeling like a turtle in a briar patch without a shell. She longed to get her shell back, to feel safe again. Her therapist told her, “Maybe you should just get out of the briar patch.”

That’s the therapeutic model: if it hurts, step back Take all the time you need to feel like you’re back in control. This works for a while, but I’ve worked with clients who’ve spent decades in therapy who still can’t figure out why they’re so uncomfrotable barely functioning in the world.

A spiritual path to growth offers a different invitation: do the inner work so you can stay in the briar patch and not be disturbed by the thorns.

You don’t rebuild the shell; you outgrow the need for it by developing reillisance. It may would woo woo, but until you decide to expand your consciouness and raise your vibration you’ll always feel like a victim in this mean and nasty world.

Real spiritual practice isn’t about changing the outer world to feel comfortable inside. It’s about strengthening your inner world so the outer no longer dictates your peace.

There’s an old saying: You can either cover the world in leather, or you can buy a pair of shoes.

That’s the work.

And before we move on, there’s a chance some of you might be saying, “This sound exactly like something a privileged white man would write.” If that’s you, let me just say that at this very moment I do have the privilege of working with clients and my teachers in Peru. Every single day I meet people who have far less than me, but are immensely happier. I do accept my privilege, and I’m also telling you that many cultures around the world have opted to be grateful for what they have, rather than being unhappy with what they dont.

The Difference Between Danger and the Perception of It

There’s a profound difference between not being safe and feeling unsafe.

If you can never find a safe place to stand, it’s not because safety never existed. It’s because your perception boundary hasn’t been stretched.

If that’s you, find someone you trust and work with them long enough to let them help you push past that edge. In my coaching practice, this comes in the form of mini experiements that test our deeply held beliefs around safety.

And if you can’t find anyone you trust, it may be time to examine whether the danger is external or perceptual.

Recently, a client told me about her Krav Maga training. She was afraid of being punched. Her instructor looked at her and said, “Then you need to get punched in the face.”

That’s how we release our fears—not by avoiding them, but by surviving them.

Many spiritual communities avoid this. They build safety but never build trust, and without trust, no one ever gets spiritually “punched.” I can spot one of these communities from a mile away the minute someone says something like “Anger is a low vibe emotion and doesn’t belong here.” #peaceout #bypass

The Shadow Side of Trauma-Informed Culture

I saw this dynamic vividly during my somatic-psychotherapy training.

The beginner course was a hands-on 200 hours of working with each other, often in triads, as we got to practice being a therapist, client, and observer. After level one, the advanced course was another 200 hours long, and many of the same students continued on. What struck me wasn’t the deepening intensity of the work. It was how much accommodation was required for a select portion of the cohort.

One afternoon, another facilitator said to me quietly, “There’s a percentage of people here who may never be able to feel safe anywhere.”

That sentence hit me hard and I’ve been pondering the imbalance of that equation for four years now. Why were so many adults, in a room designed for healing, unable to feel safe enough to function? And if scarier, if they couldn’t find stability in themselves, how could they ever help clients find it?

That’s when I began to see the shadow side of trauma-informed culture.

“Trauma-informed” began as a compassionate framework to prevent re-traumatization and create environments of safety. But when overextended, it becomes an ideology that prioritizes comfort over capacity. It risks turning the nervous system’s temporary need for gentleness into a lifelong identity of fragility.

I have started calling this the identity of accommodation—the unconscious expectation that everyone around me must adapt to my sensitivity. As one of the biggest self-proclaimed woo-woos around, I also believe that “wokeness” may have reached a tipping point. The degree of accomodation needed in every day life has reached massive proportions. And over time, this dynamic becomes self-reinforcing: the more others accommodate you, the smaller your world becomes.

To be clear, I’m not talking about common courtesy, physical disabilities, or serious mental health conditions that require accommodation. I’m talking about the subtle psychological habit of outsourcing resilience, of confusing “inclusive” with “immune from challenge.”

Our healing and spiritual communities often reinforce this loop. We teach people that if they feel unsafe, the environment is wrong, instead of helping them strengthen their system to hold more life.

Psychedelics as Truth-Tellers

This is one of the secret gifts of psychedelics. They are like a neutral third party that can lovingly punch your ego in the face. One thing I’ve found for those already sensitive to criticism (e.g., covert narcicissim or similar personality types), this neutral third party may be one of the only ways to break through their defense mechanisms.

The medicine doesn’t care about your stories. It doesn’t accommodate your preference for how awakening should feel. It shows you what’s true, even when—especially when—you’ve spent years building elaborate defenses against seeing it.

I’ve watched people dissolve their entire identity in four hours and emerge on the other side laughing at how seriously they took themselves. I’ve seen lifelong perfectionists meet their shadow and realize it was never the enemy. I’ve witnessed the tightly controlled finally surrender, and discover that falling apart was actually coming together.

But for that punch to become medicine, the setting must be truly safe, held by a facilitator who can support you through the impact and guide you back into integration. This is the paradox: you need genuine safety to do genuinely unsafe things to your ego.

The difference between a positive psychedelic experience and trauma is simple: one has a safe container, the other doesn’t. One has integration support, the other leaves you to make sense of the wreckage alone.

The ego hates being knocked down. It feels like death at first. But after a few rounds, you realize it’s not fatal. You stand back up, breathe, and say, “Yep, that hurt, but I feel clearer now.”

That’s growth. That’s nervous-system strength. That’s real safety.

And here’s what most people miss: the medicine doesn’t end when the ceremony does. The real work begins in the days and weeks after, when you try to bring that expanded state back into your contracted life. When you attempt to hold onto the truth you touched while your ego scrambles to rebuild its familiar walls.

That’s why integration is everything. Without it, psychedelics become just another peak experience you can’t sustain—spiritual tourism instead of transformation.

The Gift of Honest Teachers

We need teachers who can hold both compassion and confrontation. Not those who coddle us, and not those who wound us, but those who love us enough to mirror our blind spots and stay with us through the discomfort.

When you ask for truth and your teacher gives it to you, and that truth stings, they’re not attacking you. They’re revealing where heavy energy and attachment still hide within your body, mind, and spirit.

The best teachers I’ve had were never the gentlest. They were the ones who refused to pretend they couldn’t see my bullshit. The ones who called me out when I was spiritually bypassing. The ones who loved me enough to let me be angry at them for telling me what I needed to hear. Then, when I was ready, give me a big hug, say I still love you, and thank me for doing my work.

What a gift it can be to spend time with people who disrupt our inner peace. They are mirrors showing us where our work still lies.

A Different Way to Live

These days, I’ve stopped trying to figure out the meaning of life. Instead, I focus on enjoying the life that’s here—bad playlists and all.

I wake up each day and try to meet whatever the universe gives me with gratitude. Some days I succeed. Some days I fail. But either way, I keep showing up.

Because the path isn’t about finding safety. It’s about finding strength.

It’s not about protecting your heart from pain. It’s about expanding your heart until it can hold both pain and joy at once.

Vulnerability and joy are two sides of the same coin. If we refuse to feel discomfort, we also close ourselves to delight.

So maybe the next stage of of your healing journey isn’t about softer spaces.

Maybe it’s about braver ones.

Spaces where we can be held and challenged in the same breath. Where facilitators know the difference between supporting someone through difficulty and rescuing them from it. Where we learn that our capacity is far greater than our comfort zone led us to believe.

So stop asking yourself whether you should or shouldn’t get hit.

Start trying to find the right person—or the right medicine—to punch you right in the face.

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In the age of optimization, even healing has become a performance. We use devices to track our moods, measure our steps, quantify our mindfulness, and ingest Stoic wisdom like morning vitamins to manage our minds. Everywhere, the message is the same: if you can measure it, you can manage it. And if you just manage your mind, you can master your life. Control your thoughts. Regulate your emotions. Reframe the story. In some ways, I agree with the approach, but when we detach it from real healing, the best management team in the world cannot prevent the modern-day bankruptcy of the soul. Beneath the discipline of self-management lies a quieter truth—you may not be healing, you’re just rehearsing for the next disaster.

Modern culture celebrates control because it fears chaos. And yet, the deeper work of healing is precisely the opposite: it is a surrender to the parts of ourselves that cannot be managed into submission. When we mistake composure for wholeness, we build walls (aka “boundaries”) around our wounds. We use intellect to defend against intimacy and vulnerability. We look at deep emotion as pathology and feelings as failure. We’re not actually healing our pain; we’re optimizing around it.

This is the paradox of modern healing culture. The very tools that help us function—from cognitive behavioral therapy to modern-day Stoicism—also reinforce the illusion that our safety lies in mastery. Both teach us to regulate the mind from the top down, to override what feels chaotic or uncontrollable. And while these methods are powerful for stability, they often become scaffolding for an ego that refuses to soften.

But what if deep healing isn’t about becoming more efficient at managing the self, but actually needing less management? Or, for that matter, reducing self (not Self) altogether. What if the mind doesn’t need another operating system, but a humbler role within a larger, wiser organism?

Beneath the surface of our cognitive strategies lives a deeper intelligence—somatic, emotional, and spiritual—that cannot be accessed through control. This is where true healing begins: in the body, in relationship, in surrender. It’s the difference between rehearsing aliveness and actually living it.

I spent the better part of 25 years becoming one of the best self-managers around. If you asked nicely, I could probably build a great spreadsheet to help you measure just how much progress you’re making in therapy. A dear friend of mine could even offer a Jira template to help you track and manage your entire life. What I’ve learned after doing some real work on myself for the past eighteen years is that it’s all sorta bullshit. Don’t misunderstand me, doing all those things eventually got me where I am today. But don’t let the experts tell you that you have to do them. You can skip all the understanding, metrics, and rigor if you’d like, and just go straight to the good stuff.

In this essay, I’ll explore why top-down approaches to healing—like CBT, modern Stoicism, and the broader culture of self-optimization—often keep us trapped in cycles of management, while bottom-up methods rooted in embodiment, emotion, and presence offer something far more radical: true integration. This will no doubt ruffle the feathers of some of my dear therapy brethren. That is not my intention. In fact, I love therapy. I was an avid consumer for many years. I unwound many of the untrue thoughts I’d been carrying around. But today, I very frequently tell my clients, “If you’re not getting pissed off or crying in therapy, you may be doing it wrong.”

So I’d like to share my perspective of how many of these paths can “help” but don’t actually “heal.” I’ll also touch on how these frameworks shape our approach to psychedelics, leadership, and the pursuit of wholeness, and why the mind alone was never meant to be in charge of the healing process.

Traditional Wisdom vs. Modern Control

First of all, I’ll come right out and say it: I’m no Stoicism expert or practitioner, but I have done enough research, seen enough LinkedIn posts, and watched enough Ryan Holiday videos to understand that when the Stoic philosophers first walked the streets of Athens, they weren’t trying to become more productive. They weren’t biohacking their way to peace, building morning routines for mental efficiency, or devising an operating system to run their startup. Stoicism, as Zeno, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius taught it (and I have tried to understand it), was a philosophy of virtue; a way of aligning one’s inner world with the natural order of life. It was about living in harmony with nature, not controlling it. It was about cultivating wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance, not about building mental models solely on resilience.

The original Stoics never taught that emotions were the enemy. They believed destructive emotions arose from false judgments and from misunderstanding what is within our control and what is not. But their goal wasn’t emotional numbing; it was clarity. One Stoic principle, often attributed to Marcus Aurelius, is, “If it is endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.” But he wasn’t advocating suppression; he was pointing toward discernment, an awareness that most suffering is born of resistance to reality itself.

Fast forward two thousand years, and Stoicism has been repackaged into a self-help philosophy for high achievers. The wisdom that once called for humility has been co-opted into a toolkit for control. Today, Modern Stoicism has become a kind of spiritual performance enhancer and a cognitive framework for suppressing emotion in favor of logic, discipline, and detachment. It’s not about living in harmony with nature anymore; it’s about optimizing your nervous system to outperform it.

And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with self-discipline or perspective-taking, this modern translation of Stoicism has become a form of disconnection. In the name of strength, many practitioners learn to override their own emotional truth. They replace inner curiosity with intellectual distance. The philosophy that once taught compassion for humanity has been refitted for productivity, turning vulnerability into liability.

Looking at this through a different lens, I also see Cognitive Behavioral Therapy operating from a similar premise. While incredibly advantageous for many people at a particular stage in their healing process, it teaches us to identify distorted thoughts, challenge false beliefs, and reframe negative narratives. In many ways, I think CBT is the psychological cousin of Modern Stoicism. Both offer a mental gym for strengthening cognitive control. Both rely on top-down regulation: the idea that the mind, through discipline and reasoning, can reshape our emotional experience. And for many people, that works…at least for a while.

CBT and Modern Stoicism are what I refer to as operating systems for the mind. They’re structured, efficient, and incredibly useful for navigating complex inner landscapes. They give us language, stability, and perspective when life feels chaotic. For someone stuck in anxiety, depression, or emotional reactivity, they can provide a much-needed sense of order and a way to rebuild trust in one’s own agency. In that sense, they’re sort of like taking aspirin. They don’t actually heal the underlying cause; they’re merely temporarily relieving us of the uncomfortable symptoms.

They’re not the whole medicine. Because both Stoicism and CBT are designed to strengthen the ego, not dismantle it. They build scaffolding for the self rather than inviting us into and beyond it. They reinforce the manager within us—the part that wants to stay safe, rational, and in control. This is why they’re brilliant for mental health but often contraindicated in spiritual and psychedelic healing. Psychedelics or spiritual philosophy, by nature, slowly (or rapidly with psychedelics) dissolve control. They invite us into non-ordinary states where the boundaries of the ego soften and dissolve. The very cognitive muscles that CBT and Stoicism strengthen are often the ones that resist the medicine’s deeper work.

When some people trained in these systems enter a psychedelic experience, they may unconsciously try to manage the journey. They attempt to reframe the fear, analyze the visions, or regulate the chaos. But psychedelics aren’t asking for analysis; they’re asking for surrender. The medicine doesn’t want your cognitive compliance; it wants your full participation. It wants the body to feel, the heart to open, and the mind to yield. If you try to control the process, you miss its purpose or, even worse, end up with an incredibly dysregulating, uncomfortable, or harmful experience to your psyche.

This is why top-down systems can become obstacles in spiritual and psychedelic work. They teach us to think our way out of pain rather than to feel our way through it. They help us manage discomfort rather than metabolize it. For those seeking deeper levels of healing, these frameworks can inadvertently reinforce the very structures that need to dissolve. They keep us busy polishing the armor rather than questioning why we needed armor in the first place.

This doesn’t mean CBT or Stoicism are wrong or bad. They’re simply incomplete. They’re amazing for functioning, not so much for freedom. They can stabilize the psyche but rarely open the heart. They can help us survive, but not necessarily awaken. And the delta between functioning and freedom, at least in this game, is everything. The mind may crave control, but the soul longs for connection. Healing begins not when the mind gets stronger, but when it finally learns to let go.

Looking for safe and sustainable transformation? Consider going deeper…

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Healing

Most of modern psychology and modern self-improvement is based on a simple but incomplete premise: if you can change the way you think, you can change the way you feel. This powerful and simple concept is the foundation of top-down healing. It assumes the mind is the master architect of human experience, and that through reason, willpower, and reframing, we can bring the unruly emotions and impulses of the body under control. It’s a comforting idea, especially for those who have spent a lifetime using control as a way to ensure safety and survival. But it’s also the very idea that keeps many people from truly healing.

These top-down approaches teach us how to identify maladaptive thoughts, challenge them, and replace them with more rational or productive ones. They help us suppress or regulate emotional overwhelm, allowing us to function in the world. But they rarely ask a deeper question: Why are these thoughts and emotions here in the first place? They help us manage symptoms, but not necessarily the source. They help but don’t heal.

For some, they’re life-saving…at least for a while. They create cognitive order where chaos once ruled. They teach people to trust themselves after years of internal confusion. But for others—especially those carrying trauma, complex grief, or chronic dysregulation, they’ve become another layer of control. The mind becomes both the manager and the prisoner of its own systems. The person learns to live within a narrow band of emotional safety, avoiding the full depth of their humanity in favor of stability. Healing, in this model, is synonymous with control.

Bottom-up healing takes a different route. It begins not with thoughts, but with sensation. It looks at what the body is trying to tell us when words fall short. It acknowledges that trauma isn’t always stored as narrative but as energy, memories, and emotions embedded in the body, mind, and spirit. Bottom-up modalities like somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), breathwork, or psychedelics don’t ask the mind to manage the body; they invite the whole system to lead the way home. They’re not about changing the story but about completing the experience that was never allowed to finish.

This is the paradox of true healing: it often looks less like control and more like chaos. Bottom-up work asks us to feel what we’ve spent our lives avoiding—to tremble, cry, shake, grieve, and release. It asks us to allow the intelligence of the body to equal that of the mind. It’s not a rational process; it’s an alchemical one. It doesn’t manage energy; it transmutes it.

One is managerial; the other is relational. Top-down methods strengthen the part of us that analyzes, plans, and protects. Bottom-up work strengthens the part that listens, trusts, and feels. One builds structure; the other builds capacity.

So which should you choose? (Because both are incredibly important and valuable) Maybe the more nuanced approach question is, “In which order should I choose them?” Capacity is the key. Top-down systems are effective when our inner world might feel unstable. They’re great for debugging our mental operating system. But when we’re carrying deep trauma or unprocessed pain, top-down approaches become like continually patching software when the underlying infrastructure is damaged. They can suppress symptoms, but they can’t repair a damaged hard drive. The only way to heal what’s held in the body is to meet it there—in the shaking, sweating, crying, breathing, embodied truth of it.

That’s why true bottom-up work often feels messy and nonlinear. It’s not about insight but integration. It’s about bringing the exiled parts of ourselves back into belonging. And paradoxically, once those parts are welcomed home, the mind begins to function more efficiently all on its own. I could offer countless examples of this in my own healing journey. I unsuccessfully attempted many times to control my thoughts for decades, but with a single medicine journey, the thoughts simply vanished. This is healing from the bottom up and the inside out. My thoughts quieted all on their own when the reactivity faded. My nervous system stabilized without my involvement. Because when there’s nothing left to manage, the energy that required management has been metabolized.

This is why people who do deep somatic, emotional, or spiritual work often seem calmer, more grounded, and more authentic; not because they’ve learned better techniques, but because they’ve stopped fighting themselves. Their nervous systems have reorganized around trust rather than control. They can move through life’s fluctuations without needing to control the outcome. They don’t have to stay in charge because their bodies know how to return to balance. One of my favorite quotes that directly addresses this concept comes from the Third Patriarch of Zen. The first line of this brief text states, “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” I’ll give you one guess where our preferences come from, and it’s not the body.

In psychedelic work, this distinction becomes even more pronounced. These medicines are often seen as non-specific amplifiers, magnifying whatever paradigm we bring to them. Those who rely on top-down tools often struggle; their cognitive control systems—honed through Stoicism, CBT, productivity culture, or other rigorous training programs designed to eliminate emotion—try to manage what can’t be managed. They attempt to analyze, interpret, or fix the experience. But psychedelics operate bottom-up: they bypass the intellect entirely, opening a dialogue with the subconscious, the body, and the soul. They invite surrender, not supervision.

As I wrote in Psychedelics Are Not Psychotherapy, “If you approach the medicine like a therapy session, you’ll likely stay in your head. If you approach it as a relationship—with reverence, trust, and openness—it will teach you through direct experience.” The same principle applies here. Psychedelics don’t care about your cognitive frameworks; they care about your capacity to feel and release the heavy memories, beliefs, trauma, ego, and vanity that are stored in your body, mind, and soul.

This is why top-down methods, though valuable, can also be contraindicated for psychedelic preparation or integration. They strengthen the ego’s defenses when what’s needed is ego relaxation. They reinforce the inner manager when what’s required is inner trust. They prepare us to cope with chaos instead of dissolve into it. And so, paradoxically, those who’ve built strong cognitive control mechanisms often have the hardest time letting go, and therefore struggle both in the experience and after it. The medicine often tries to show them a new way to live, but because so much energy and effort have been devoted to top-down training, the world may no longer make sense after a powerful psychedelic experience.

Bottom-up healing, on the other hand, teaches us to trust the process. It builds capacity for intensity. It allows emotion, energy, and insight to move through without getting stuck in the mind’s interpretations. It asks us to release control and listen to the body’s wisdom—to let the nervous system complete its cycles of fear, grief, and release. This is how healing becomes not a mental project but a living process.

In this light, the goal of healing is no longer mastery but relational intimacy. The point isn’t to control what we feel but to become fluent in feeling itself. When we learn to meet our inner world with curiosity instead of judgment, when we allow the tears or tremors instead of overriding them, we stop fighting our own biology. We stop optimizing our pain and start integrating it. And when that happens, the mind no longer needs to manage the heart—because they’ve finally remembered they belong to the same body.

Liberation Over Optimization

I’ve been sitting with medicine for a decade, and looking back, I can see why my early experiences were so challenging. My desperate need for control and safety overshadowed my soul’s ability to relent. I also see it with those I work with. Clients who have built their lives on discipline and mental toughness often find their first journeys disorienting or even terrifying. Their nervous systems are trained for output and control, not surrender. But once they begin to cultivate bottom-up capacity—through breathwork, movement, relational safety, or gentle psychedelics like MDMA—their experience begins to shift. They learn to trust the process. They stop trying to control it. And in that surrender, the healing finally begins.

This is the paradox: the moment we stop managing our inner world, it starts to heal itself. The body knows how to release. The psyche knows how to integrate. The soul knows how to return to balance. It’s the interference of control that interrupts this natural intelligence. As Lao Tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching, “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”

And this is not only true in psychedelic work—it’s true in leadership, relationships, and everyday life. People who lead from control create rigid and brittle systems; people who lead from capacity create resilient ones. The same applies internally. Control gives the illusion of safety, but capacity creates it. The more capacity we build, the less we need to control.

When people use psychedelics only to optimize their thinking, they miss the point. No doubt, psychedelics can help us be more creative and better problem solvers, but their true purpose is not to make us think better, but to make us feel more. Because when we feel better, we allow ourselves to begin living in the natural order of things. Our cravings and aversions slip away, and suffering fades.

The Indigenous use of psychedelics was never positioned as a cognitive tool but as an energetic catalyst. This psychedelic trailhead teaches us to let go, to open up, and to feel our belonging in the web of life. If we were to actually heal the trauma, transmute the heavy energy, and reconnect with humanity and the Earth, we wouldn’t need to think so hard, try so hard, or do so much to feel okay. Healing from the bottom up makes the top function naturally, without effort.

Ultimately, this is what the medicine reveals: that peace is not achieved through mastery but through relationship. The mind doesn’t need to control the process—it needs to trust it. The real work of healing is not about becoming better at managing reality; it’s about becoming more intimate with it. When we build capacity instead of control, life stops being something to handle and becomes something to hold.

For all our advances in technology, psychology, self-improvement, and even spiritual practice, we still cling to a central illusion: that the path to freedom is paved with control. We keep trying to think our way to peace, to optimize our way to wholeness. But true healing begins when the mind stops managing and starts listening. Speaking from experience, I am much happier when my mind isn’t racing and trying to solve the problems it has created on its own. This is also true for many of my clients. When the mind can finally trust what the body, the heart, and the spirit have known all along, we begin experiencing a sense of freedom we never thought possible.

Stoicism and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (just to name two) are brilliant systems for functioning in a complex world. They help us stabilize, self-regulate, and stay upright amid chaos. But they are, by design, ego-strengthening tools. They build the architecture of self, not the dissolution of it. And in the domain of deep healing work, these frameworks can quietly become barriers. The mind that knows how to manage may not know how to let go.

Liberation, that is, living a life with less suffering and conditions, is different. Liberation begins when we stop performing our healing and start participating in it. When we stop striving to transcend our humanity and start inhabiting it fully. Healing is not about rising above pain but moving through it with awareness, humility, and grace. It’s about learning to stay open in the face of what once made us close.

This is where true Stoicism and true spirituality meet—not in the rejection of emotion, but in the capacity to hold it without being ruled by it. That is virtue. That is wisdom. And it cannot be achieved through optimization; it can only be revealed through surrender.

Many authors and advocates have made Stoicism accessible to millions. Some may call it a public service, but sadly, I do not. The version we’re being exposed to is a curated slice, not the whole pie. Classical Stoicism is less about “winning the day” and more about liberating the soul. It calls us to transform—not just perform. And that, perhaps, is the invitation before all of us now: to stop managing our way toward freedom and to finally feel our way home.

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With the ever-expanding landscape of psychedelics, one thing I’ve noticed is that most Western seekers approach psychedelic work with the psychology of psychotherapy running quietly in the background of their consciousness. Many have been working with a therapist or counselor for years—even decades—and they have finely tuned expectations of a safe space to process emotions, a compassionate human who sits across from them and validates their pain, and a gradual unveiling of truth paced by their readiness, not the therapist. Many have come to expect understanding, empathy, and control.

But Indigenous and spiritual traditions were never designed to build up and provide comfort to “the self”—they were designed to dismantle it. These frameworks view the self not as the seat of healing but as the source of suffering. From the Buddhist concept of anatta (no-self), to the shamanic practice of dismemberment, to the nondual insight of Advaita Vedanta, the purpose is not to strengthen identity—it is to transcend it. The path is not self-improvement; it is self-erasure.

This is where the collision begins. The Western model teaches that safety comes from control. The spiritual model teaches that freedom begins where control ends. In therapy, the client leads, the practitioner follows, and progress is measured by how well one can manage life’s chaos. In Indigenous or mystical work, the teacher and medicine lead, the seeker follows, and healing begins when life’s chaos can no longer be managed.

What Western psychology calls “boundaries,” the medicine calls “walls.” What therapy calls “validation,” spirit calls “collusion.” What the ego calls “truth,” the soul often calls “defense.”

When these two paradigms meet, the results can be disorienting, dysregulating, and often very uncomfortable. The seeker expecting dialogue encounters silence. The one seeking empathy receives confrontation. The one hoping to be understood meets a mirror that refuses to reflect anything familiar.

Many ruptures in modern psychedelic spaces stem not from malice or malpractice, but from this misunderstanding. People come seeking a therapist and meet a teacher. They expect a conversation and receive initiation. They enter hoping to feel better, yet discover that the first step to healing is dying to who they believe themselves to be.

This isn’t therapy. It’s unmasking. A rite of passage that requires humility, trust, and surrender to something far older and wiser than the human mind. Until this distinction is understood, seekers will continue to mistake the medicine’s fire or the teacher’s honesty as harm, and facilitators will continue to mistake resistance for readiness. The truth is simple: you can’t heal what you refuse to let die.

The Western Model: Healing Through Strengthening the Self

Western psychotherapy is one of the most compassionate inventions of the modern world. It offers a structured way to explore the mind, integrate trauma, and bring unconscious material into conscious awareness. For many, therapy provides the first experience of being deeply witnessed without judgment—a sacred space to name what was once unspeakable.

The underlying assumption of most psychotherapeutic traditions is that we each possess a self that can be healed, understood, and improved. The goal is coherence: to become a functional, emotionally regulated human being capable of navigating relationships, careers, and daily life with greater awareness. The methods are designed to build and strengthen the ego (our sense of personal identity) so that we can better manage our inner world.

In practical terms, the Western model often looks like this:

Build ego → Strengthen defenses → Manage symptoms → Adapt better.

Many therapists work collaboratively with their clients to understand patterns, develop coping skills, and integrate painful experiences into a coherent narrative. Progress is measured by symptom reduction: less anxiety, less depression, fewer maladaptive behaviors. Over time, the client develops more effective boundaries, clearer communication, and a stronger sense of self-worth.

This approach is deeply valuable, especially for those whose early environments did not provide safety or stability. A healthy ego is not an enemy; it is a container that holds consciousness. Without that structure, the psyche can fragment under the intensity of unprocessed experience.

But there’s a hidden assumption woven into this framework: that the self you are building is real, and that the path to wholeness lies in self-improvement. In the Western model, the ego is both the tool and the goal. The entire process orbits around identity—your story, your wounds, your perspective. The therapist validates your experiences, honors your pace, and helps you adapt to life as it is.

This creates a healing environment rooted in safety, empathy, and control. The client determines what to share and when. The therapist follows, gently mirroring insights as they emerge. The relationship is boundaried, gentle, and professional, often guided by ethics that prevent the therapist from asserting authority or challenging the client too directly or quickly.

For people with trauma histories or fragile psyches, this structure is essential. It creates predictability in a world that once felt unsafe. It allows the client to rebuild trust, self-esteem, and agency. In many ways, Western therapy is a form of sacred reparenting and an act of deep repair for those who were never allowed to have a self in the first place.

Yet when this model becomes the lens through which all healing is viewed, it can also become a cage. The very mechanisms that protect the psyche—validation, pacing, control—can eventually prevent transformation. The ego learns how to appear self-aware while staying entirely intact. The narrative of “working on myself” can become the ego’s most sophisticated defense against true surrender.

In this paradigm, healing is often equated with feeling better; less pain, less confusion, less suffering. But from a spiritual perspective, real healing doesn’t necessarily feel good; it feels true. Western therapy helps you cope with your humanity. Indigenous and mystical traditions help you remember your divinity.

Neither approach is wrong—they simply serve different purposes. Therapy is designed to make life more manageable; spiritual work is designed to make life transparent. Therapy helps you live inside your story more skillfully; spiritual work helps you see that the story was never who you were. The challenge arises when a seeker who still needs ego strength enters a container designed for ego death. Without recognizing this difference, the very tools that once brought stability begin to fail. What once healed now hinders. The ego that was lovingly rebuilt in therapy becomes the armor that blocks awakening.

The Western model is the work of becoming a somebody. The spiritual path begins when you’re ready to become a nobody. Both are sacred stages of the same journey, but they are not the same medicine.

The Spiritual Model: Healing Through Dissolving the Self

Where Western psychotherapy builds the self, spiritual and Indigenous traditions aim to dissolve it. Their premise is radical by comparison: that suffering originates not from what happens to us, but from the illusion of the “me” to whom it happens. If the Western therapist asks, “Who are you?” the shaman, monk, or mystic asks, “Who is the one who’s asking?”

In these frameworks—Buddhism, Shamanism, Advaita Vedanta, and countless other Wisdom traditions—the goal is not psychological adaptation but spiritual liberation. Healing does not mean constructing a stronger identity; it means realizing that identity itself is the source of bondage. One aims at holding onto everything to feel safe. The other aims to let go of everything and live a liberated life free of restrictions.

From the Buddhist lens, the root of suffering is attachment—to our stories, relationships, identities, and opinions. The cure is anatta, the recognition of no-self. The practitioner’s job is not to comfort the ego, but to expose its unreality. Compassion in this context is not about soothing; it’s about awakening. It may arrive as silence instead of empathy, confrontation instead of reassurance.

Shamanic traditions express the same principle through different language. Before one can be reborn, one must be dismembered—symbolically torn apart so that what is false can die and what is true can emerge. The shaman is not a therapist but a guide through the underworld of consciousness, where the soul retrieves what was lost by facing what was hidden. The process is unpredictable because it’s directed by something greater than the human mind—the spirit of the medicine, the ancestors, or the intelligence of nature itself.

Advaita Vedanta takes this even further. Its central teaching—Tat Tvam Asi (“Thou art That”)—declares that the ultimate Self (Atman) and the Absolute (Brahman) are one. What we call the ego is simply the mind’s misunderstanding of this truth. The teacher’s role is to pierce through the illusion (maya) that there is a separate “you” at all. The goal is not self-regulation but self-realization—the direct experience of being pure awareness beyond body and identity.

Because of this, the methods differ profoundly from psychotherapy. The teacher does not mirror your narrative; they dismantle it. They don’t wait months for insight to arise; they deliver truth the moment it’s seen. They don’t co-regulate your emotions; they invite you to witness the one who feels them. In this paradigm, the guide’s task is not to make you comfortable—it’s to make you conscious.

A spiritual guide may say things a therapist never would:

• “Your suffering is a teacher, not a problem to solve.”

• “Your pain is real, but the ‘you’ who owns it is not.”

• “You are mistaking your story for your soul.”

This can feel like cruelty to the Western-conditioned mind, which equates compassion with validation. But in these traditions, compassion and confrontation are not opposites—they are partners. A true teacher won’t collude with the illusion that’s killing you, even if exposing it hurts.

In spiritual work, authority flows differently. The guide or elder holds hierarchical responsibility; they have walked further on the path and carry the wisdom of the lineage. The seeker gets to choose whether to surrender to this guidance, trusting that what is being dismantled is not the truth of who they are but the illusion they’ve mistaken for it. Without that surrender, the process can’t unfold.

And while therapy follows the client’s pace, spiritual work often moves at the speed of revelation. When the doorway opens, the medicine doesn’t ask if you’re ready; it simply shows you what you’ve been avoiding. Control becomes impossible; resistance becomes suffering. The only way through is surrender.

From this view, healing isn’t about integrating your story; it’s about seeing through it. It’s not about improving your life; it’s about awakening from the trance of separateness that defines it. The dismantling of the ego is not a side effect—it’s the point.

This path is not for everyone, nor should it be. Some souls need the gentle strengthening of therapy before they can face annihilation. But for those who are ready, the spiritual path offers a different kind of medicine—one that doesn’t fix the self, but frees you from ever needing one.

Looking for safe and sustainable transformation? Consider going deeper…

Seven Requirements for Spiritual or Indigenous Work

If Western psychotherapy asks for honesty, spiritual and Indigenous work asks for surrender. These frameworks don’t just heal the personality—they dismantle it. They demand qualities that most people were never taught to cultivate in a culture built on self-assertion and control. In traditional contexts, these qualities were trained through years of apprenticeship and ritual. Today, they are often expected overnight, without preparation.

Below, I’ve picked seven of the most essential qualities that have assisted me on my spiritual path. Without them, medicine experiences and mystical encounters can quickly become destabilizing, confrontational, or even harmful—not because the process is wrong, but because the psyche resists what it cannot yet hold.

1. Surrender to the Guide

In Indigenous and mystical traditions, hierarchy isn’t a power imbalance—it’s protection. The maestro’s authority exists to hold the container when the seeker’s identity begins to unravel. Surrender here does not mean blind obedience (and I would never condone intentional harm or unethical behavior); it means trust in the lineage and the medicine, the guide’s discernment, and the process itself.

Western conditioning teaches autonomy: I decide what happens, when it happens. Spiritual work requires the opposite: I release control so the deeper intelligence can move through me. Without surrender, the seeker clings to safety, steering away from the very transformation they came to find.

2. Tolerance for Ego Deconstruction

Spiritual initiation isn’t gentle. It strips away roles, masks, and stories until nothing familiar remains. This can feel like death—because, in a way, it is. The small self dies so that the larger Self can emerge.

To navigate this, one must be able to tolerate disorientation and loss of control without collapsing or blaming the process or the facilitator. The medicine will not strengthen your identity; it will question whether it ever existed. If your sense of self is still fragile, ego dissolution can feel like annihilation instead of liberation.

3. Trust in the Process

True healing unfolds on its own timeline. In Indigenous traditions, the medicine is not a substance—it is a spirit with its own intelligence. You don’t tell it what to do. You learn to listen.

This is where many Western seekers struggle. The mind wants a plan, measurable progress, and predictable outcomes. But the process is not linear. Sometimes the lesson is humility. Sometimes the medicine gives silence. Trust means letting go of the need to understand and allowing mystery to teach you directly.

4. Willingness to Be Seen

Most people come to healing work wanting to be seen—until it actually happens. To be truly seen by spirit or a teacher means having every pretense exposed. The false confidence, the hidden motives, the manipulative charm, the unhealed shame—all of it becomes visible.

The guide does not expose these parts to humiliate you but to liberate you from them. Yet for the defended ego, exposure feels like attack. The seeker who cannot tolerate being seen will project blame onto the guide or the process itself.

5. Capacity for Paradox and Mystery

Spiritual work operates in paradox: you must lose to find, die to live, empty to be filled. The Western mind, trained in logic and certainty, rebels against this. It wants clean answers and clear progress. But awakening doesn’t obey linear logic—it’s a spiral that circles back on itself until you realize that surrender, not comprehension, is the doorway to truth.

6. Humility

Humility is the antidote to spiritual inflation—the belief that insight equals superiority. Indigenous and mystical traditions remind us that awakening does not make one special; it makes one responsible. Humility keeps the heart open and the power clean. Without it, wisdom curdles into ego, and medicine becomes performance.

7. Non-Defensive Receptivity

The deeper you go, the less defensiveness can remain. True transformation happens when you can hear feedback or feel discomfort without rushing to defend, justify, or attack. Every defense protects an illusion. The faster you drop them, the faster truth can enter.

These seven qualities aren’t moral virtues; they’re energetic prerequisites. Without surrender, trust, humility, and tolerance for uncertainty, the spiritual path becomes a psychological battleground. With them, it becomes a sacred initiation—one that dismantles the false self not to destroy you, but to reveal what cannot be destroyed.

Where Frameworks Diverge Catastrophically

When Western psychology and Indigenous or spiritual frameworks collide, the rupture is almost inevitable. Both claim to heal—but they disagree entirely about what “healing” means, who leads the process, and what must be sacrificed to reach the goal. One seeks to strengthen identity; the other seeks to dissolve it. One treats the self as sacred; the other treats it as the illusion to be seen through.

To understand this divide, we must look at how differently these paradigms interpret the same concepts: self, ego, authority, pacing, ethics, and truth.

The Nature of Self

In Western psychotherapy, the self is something to know, accept, and integrate. The therapist helps you gather the fragmented parts of your psyche and build a coherent story about who you are. Healing means learning to live inside that story with more compassion.

In spiritual and Indigenous traditions, the self is precisely what must be transcended. As long as you identify with your story, you remain bound by it. The goal is to awaken from the dream of “I”—to see that the storyteller is as imaginary as the tale itself.

When these two views meet, the client often feels attacked. “You’re saying my story isn’t real?” The guide, from a spiritual lens, is simply saying: Your story is not who you are. The difference between those statements is subtle, but for the ego, it’s existential.

The Western seeker hears invalidation; the spiritual teacher speaks liberation. The ego interprets being seen through as being dismissed.

The Role of Ego

Therapy’s job is to strengthen the ego—to give it the resilience to manage life’s challenges. A solid ego is considered the hallmark of psychological health: the ability to think clearly, self-regulate, and navigate relationships.

Spiritual work sees things differently. The ego isn’t evil—it’s just not ultimate. It’s a tool, like a ladder: you climb it to reach awareness, then you let it go. If you cling to it, it becomes the prison. The purpose of medicine, meditation, or prayer is to soften the ego’s grip until you can experience life without the constant “I” in the center.

This is why psychedelic work rooted in Indigenous or mystical philosophy can feel violent to a Western-trained mind. The medicine isn’t trying to reinforce your coping mechanisms—it’s trying to reveal how those mechanisms are the suffering. When the ego starts to dissolve, the nervous system interprets it as danger. Panic, confusion, or rage may follow. What looks like a crisis to the ego is actually the beginning of freedom to the soul.

The Role of the Facilitator

In Western therapy, the practitioner is a mirror, not a master. The therapist follows the client’s lead, validating their experiences and offering insight when invited. The client is considered the expert on their own life. This model is rooted in equality, consent, and mutual respect.

In spiritual and Indigenous frameworks, the maestro holds authority. Their wisdom comes not from textbooks but from lived relationship with spirit, medicine, or tradition. They see what the seeker cannot—and sometimes what the seeker does not want to see. The hierarchy exists not to control, but to protect.

This can feel threatening to those conditioned by Western norms of autonomy. The modern seeker often wants guidance without surrender, transformation without hierarchy. But you can’t apprentice to a mystery and still insist on being in charge.

Pacing and Permission

Therapy unfolds at the client’s pace. The practitioner waits for readiness, introduces truths slowly, and works within the tolerance of the nervous system.

In Indigenous and mystical work, pacing belongs to the process, not the person. When spirit or medicine reveals something, it is because the time has come. Readiness is irrelevant. The lesson arrives, and your only choice is surrender or resistance.

This is why the spiritual path often feels disorienting. The teaching doesn’t wait for you to be comfortable—it waits for you to be available. A single ceremony may show you truths you’ve avoided for decades. The ego calls this unsafe; the soul calls it merciful.

Ethics and Hierarchy

Western therapy is governed by clinical ethics: neutrality, non-judgment, confidentiality, and clear boundaries. The therapist does not intervene in a client’s personal life or spiritual beliefs. This framework is built to protect the client’s autonomy.

Spiritual and Indigenous containers operate by different ethics—those of reciprocity, reverence, and relational accountability. The guide’s responsibility is not legal but spiritual. They answer to lineage, to nature, to the unseen. Their task is not to avoid discomfort but to serve truth, even when that truth might temporarily destabilize the seeker.

This doesn’t mean the spiritual model is above ethics—it simply follows a different compass. Where the therapist asks, “How can I ensure this person feels safe?” the spiritual guide asks, “How can I ensure this person meets reality as it is?”

Truth vs. Comfort

The final divergence is the most consequential. Western therapy prizes empathy and validation; it measures safety by comfort. Spiritual work measures safety by truth.

A teacher once told me, “If you want to feel better, go to therapy. If you want to be free, sit with the medicine.”

Freedom requires the death of every illusion the ego holds dear—including the illusion that you know who you are, what’s best for you, or how healing should unfold. The teacher’s confrontation isn’t cruelty—it’s mercy. The medicine’s chaos isn’t punishment—it’s purification.

But without the proper framework, this confrontation feels like betrayal. The seeker expects a therapist and meets a mirror that refuses to flatter. They interpret the unraveling as harm, when in fact it’s the first honest conversation their soul has ever had.

The tragedy isn’t that one model is wrong and the other right. It’s that we confuse them. Therapy builds the ego so life can be managed. Spiritual work dissolves it so life can be transcended. Both are necessary—but in the wrong sequence, they collide. The therapist helps you remember who you are. The mystic helps you forget. And between those two deaths—the psychological and the spiritual—you find what was never born and therefore can never die.

The Western Wound: Control, Comfort, and the Fear of Surrender

The Western mind has been trained to equate safety with control. From birth, we’re taught that mastery equals power—over our emotions, over our environment, over our outcomes. We praise “self-control” as maturity and “letting go” as weakness. But the spiritual path runs in the opposite direction. Where psychology teaches control, spirit teaches surrender. Where therapy soothes, the medicine provokes. Where the modern mind seeks to understand, the mystery asks to be trusted.

This obsession with control is not merely cultural; it’s existential. For centuries, Western thought has positioned the human being as separate from nature, spirit, and the divine—an individual self navigating a mechanistic universe. We built philosophies of mind that exalted autonomy, reason, and progress. In doing so, we exiled mystery, dependence, and humility. The unconscious was pathologized, death was medicalized, and spiritual surrender was replaced by self-optimization.

In this worldview, the therapist becomes a kind of priest of control. Their task is to help you regain mastery over your emotions and rewrite your narrative. It’s noble work—but it subtly reinforces the belief that peace comes from managing life more skillfully. The psyche learns to survive within its cage rather than question why the cage exists.

Spiritual and Indigenous traditions see it differently. They understand that true safety is not the absence of danger—it’s the presence of connection. You can’t control a river; you can only trust its current. In ceremony, this is what surrender means: releasing the need to steer, and allowing the current of consciousness to carry you where it will.

But to the Western-conditioned seeker, surrender feels like death. And in a sense, it is—the death of control, of narrative, of the illusion of separateness. When the medicine begins to dissolve the ego, the nervous system panics. It mistakes expansion for annihilation. The mind grasps for meaning, reaching for familiar tools—analysis, story, self-blame. Anything to stay in charge.

This is the Western wound: a nervous system addicted to control and a culture allergic to mystery. The same instincts that keep us safe in ordinary life make us suffer in spiritual work. The ego wants to supervise its own destruction, to negotiate its surrender. It’s like trying to choreograph your own drowning.

What makes this wound so insidious is that it often hides behind language that sounds evolved. We speak of “holding boundaries,” “honoring readiness,” and “respecting my truth.” These are important in therapeutic settings—but in spiritual contexts, they can become sophisticated defenses. Boundaries can be walls, readiness can be avoidance, and “my truth” can be a shield against The truth.

This is why Indigenous and mystical frameworks often feel abrasive to the modern psyche. They don’t accommodate the ego’s timeline. They don’t wait for you to feel safe before showing you what you’ve been avoiding. The medicine’s job is not to comfort your illusion—it’s to burn it away.

And yet, this burning is not violence. It’s mercy. Because until the ego’s grip is loosened, love cannot enter. The very control we use to avoid suffering is what perpetuates it. The moment of surrender—the one we fear most—is the doorway to freedom.

The irony is that therapy and spirituality ultimately seek the same thing: peace. But one path achieves it through mastery, and the other through mystery. The Western mind says, “When I understand, I will be free.” Spirit whispers, “When you stop trying to understand, you already are.”

The work of bridging these worlds begins with recognizing this wound—not judging it, but honoring it as the result of centuries of separation. Healing the Western psyche means remembering what Indigenous and mystical traditions never forgot: control is not safety, and surrender is not weakness.

Real safety arises when we remember that life itself is holding us. When the need to manage everything dissolves, something larger begins to breathe through us. The seeker stops steering, the river carries them, and the illusion of separateness begins to fade. What remains is not control, but communion—and that, at last, is freedom.

Integration: Bridging the Two Worlds

If Western psychotherapy and Indigenous or spiritual traditions seem to stand in opposition, the truth is that they are complementary halves of a larger whole. One builds the vessel; the other empties it. One heals the human; the other reveals the divine. True integration—both psychological and spiritual—requires honoring the strengths and limits of each.

The Western therapeutic model is a path of construction. It provides the scaffolding for a healthy ego, stable nervous system, and coherent self-narrative. Without these foundations, spiritual work can easily fragment into confusion or delusion. A person who hasn’t yet built internal stability can mistake trauma activation for awakening, or spiritual bypassing for enlightenment. Therapy helps create the ground from which authentic surrender can arise. You cannot dissolve what you have not yet built. As Ram Dass was fond of saying, “You have to become a somebody before you can become a nobody. If you invert the two, you’ll lose your ground.”

By contrast, the Indigenous and mystical path is a path of deconstruction. Once the ego has been made whole enough to survive its own death, the next step is to see through it. Here, the task shifts from integration to liberation. Instead of refining the self, we begin to release it. The personality becomes transparent, the stories lose gravity, and life begins to flow through us rather than around us.

This is why timing and discernment are everything. The tragedy of the modern psychedelic movement is that many seekers attempt to leap directly from trauma to transcendence without developing the ego strength required to hold what the medicine reveals. Others get stuck in endless therapeutic loops—constantly processing, never surrendering—because the self they’re healing has become an identity in itself.

Bridging these two paradigms means sequencing them wisely. Therapy is not obsolete, and spirituality is not superior—they serve different developmental stages. The progression might look like this:

1. Stabilize – Learn regulation, safety, and self-awareness through therapy or trauma work.

2. Strengthen – Build healthy boundaries, communication skills, and resilience.

3. Surrender – When the ego can stand on its own, allow it to dissolve.

4. Integrate – Learn to live from the awareness that remains when the self disappears.

When this progression is honored, both paths support each other. The therapist teaches the language of the heart; the shaman teaches the silence beneath it. The psychologist repairs your story; the mystic shows you it was never true. The work is not to choose one or the other, but to recognize when each is needed.

Integration also applies to facilitators. Those rooted in spiritual or Indigenous traditions must learn to recognize when a client’s ego isn’t ready to be chipped away. A nervous system in trauma cannot surrender—it can only collapse. Rigid or black-and-white thinking can ultimately lead to ontological shock. Conversely, therapists and coaches entering psychedelic spaces must learn to discern when validation has become enabling, when comfort has become collusion, and when it’s time to let truth do its work.

In practice, integration is not about blending methods but aligning intentions. The therapist asks, “How can I help this person function in the world?” The spiritual guide asks, “How can I help this person see beyond the world?” Integration asks, “How can both be true?”

The most skillful facilitators carry both lenses. They know how to speak to the mind while bowing to the mystery. They can offer psychological safety without extinguishing spiritual fire. They understand that awakening without grounding becomes dissociation, and grounding without awakening becomes stagnation.

Ultimately, the bridge between therapy and spirituality is embodiment. Awakening is meaningless if it cannot move through a regulated nervous system, love through a tender heart, and truth through a living body. Integration is not about choosing between being human and being divine; it’s remembering that we are both.

When the two worlds meet correctly, something miraculous happens. The therapist’s compassion and the shaman’s courage unite. The Western intellect kneels to the Indigenous spirit. And the seeker finally discovers that healing and awakening were never separate paths at all, but two movements of the same breath: the inhale of becoming and the exhale of returning home.

Conclusion: The Death That Heals

At its core, the tension between Western psychotherapy and Indigenous or spiritual traditions is not a conflict of methods but of metaphysics—two worldviews describing different dimensions of the same mystery. One believes the self can be healed; the other insists it must die. And both, in their own way, are right.

Western therapy is the art of becoming human again. It teaches safety, self-compassion, and the courage to feel. It helps us reclaim our voice after trauma and find coherence after chaos. These are holy acts. But the spiritual path begins where therapy ends—at the edge of identity itself. It asks a question therapy never can: Who is the one being healed?

For most people, the sequence matters. First, we build the self; then we outgrow it. A weak ego cannot surrender safely, and a strong ego will not surrender willingly. But once both strength and humility mature, the work shifts. Healing becomes less about repair and more about remembrance—the remembering of what was never broken in the first place.

This is why the true spiritual path can look like betrayal to the therapeutic mind. It does not seek to make you more comfortable; it seeks to make you more conscious. It exposes what you cling to, dismantles what you defend, and destroys the illusions that keep you safe but small. The medicine, the teacher, the mystery—all conspire toward the same end: your undoing.

Yet this undoing is not cruelty—it is grace. Because what dies is only the false self, the one built from fear, shame, and the need to control. What remains is vast, luminous, and free. The death that feels like destruction is, in truth, the birth of authenticity.

In the end, both therapy and spirituality are expressions of love. Therapy holds you while you learn to live; spirit holds you while you learn to die. And the complete human being must learn both arts.

The therapist helps you remember who you are.

The mystic helps you forget.

Between those two deaths—the psychological and the spiritual—you discover what was never born and can never die.

That is the paradox of real healing: it begins with becoming someone, and ends in realizing you were never anyone at all.

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We live in a culture obsessed with outcomes. From the time we are children, we are taught that our worth is measured by production: grades, achievements, promotions, possessions. We are rewarded for making things happen—hitting the metric, closing the deal, finishing the to-do list. Productivity is sold to us as the path to security, success, and even happiness.

But hidden in this story is a lie: if we just do enough or make enough happen, then we’ll finally feel at peace. Yet anyone who has ever reached the top of their mountain knows the dirty little secret—outcomes don’t guarantee contentment. You can check every box, buy every toy, win every award, and still feel restless and empty.

This is the story with well over half of my clients. Many of the entrepreneurs I work with have struggled their entire lives trying to build the “dream life” they were told would make them happy, only to find out after they crossed the proverbial finish line that not only were they still miserable, but they also created a whole new set of obsessions and complexities that they now had to manage. Instead of living a life of freedom, free of restriction, they built themselves a prison of their own making, complete with new conditions that are even more difficult to escape.

Healing doesn’t emerge from chasing more. Healing emerges from alignment. Gurdjieff knew this when he said, “You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”

Alignment vs. Outcome

Across the world’s wisdom traditions, healing is not about bending reality into shape. It’s not about manifesting every desire or reaching every milestone. Healing is about coming into right relationship—with ourselves, with others, with nature, and with the divine order of things.

• Outcomes are what the ego chases: recognition, control, certainty, security.

• Alignment is what the soul longs for: harmony, balance, and truth.

This is why psychedelics have become such powerful teachers in the modern world. While mushrooms, ayahuasca, or wachuma hold real healing intelligence, they rarely just “fix” us. Instead, they shine a light on where we are out of balance. They don’t deliver the final product; they reveal the blueprint.

And then comes the hard part: integration and activation. Once the medicine shows us where we are out of alignment, it becomes our daily work to bring our choices, relationships, and lifestyles back into harmony.

Ancient Maps of Alignment

Different cultures have expressed this truth in different ways, but they converge on the same principle: stop forcing life to meet the demands of your ego, and instead live in alignment with the greater flow of existence.

Dharma (India) – The Path of Sacred Duty

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: “You have the right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions.”

This is the essence of dharma: do what is yours to do, but release your grip on the outcome. Dharma is not ambition; it’s alignment with the role and responsibility life has placed before you.

• To act outside of dharma—even with great success—creates disharmony and suffering.

• To act within dharma, even in a humble role, brings peace.

The question is not, “What do I want to achieve?” but “What is mine to do in this moment?” The outcome belongs to God; the action belongs to us.

Wu Wei (Taoism) – Effortless Action

In Taoism, the principle of wu wei means “non-doing” or “effortless action.”

Wu wei doesn’t mean laziness—it means moving in harmony with the Tao, the natural order. Imagine a river: when you swim with the current, you move effortlessly. When you fight against it, you exhaust yourself.

• The sage acts effectively not by forcing but by attuning.

• Softness, receptivity, and yielding are considered more powerful than rigidity or control.

Wu wei teaches us that life flows best when we stop trying to bend it to our will and instead surrender to the current of existence.

Ayni (Andean Tradition) – Sacred Reciprocity

In the Andes, the Quechua word ayni means “sacred reciprocity.” Loosely translated, it means “today for you, tomorrow for me.”

Life is a continual exchange with Pachamama, the spirits, and the community of beings seen and unseen.

• When we give offerings, prayers, and gratitude, we restore balance and open ourselves to receive.

• To take without giving creates imbalance and illness.

• True power is not in forcing outcomes but in harmonizing energy through right relationship.

Ayni reminds us that alignment is relational: it’s not just inner harmony, but harmony with Earth, ancestors, plants, animals, and community. Similar to the Bible’s teaching of “we reap what we sow,” Ayni reminds us that we receive what we deserve: both the light and the dark. Take right action, receive the rewards. Cause harm, receive some cosmic retribution—maybe in this lifetime or the next.

The Shared Wisdom

Though these traditions arise from different continents, they converge on the same truth:

• Dharma: Do your duty, surrender the fruits.

• Wu wei: Flow with the Tao, don’t force.

• Ayni: Live in reciprocity, not domination.

All three warn us: forcing life to match our will leads to suffering. Aligning ourselves with the greater order brings peace, freedom, and abundance.

Healing with Psychedelics is the first substantial upgrade to ‘set and setting’ since 1961.

The Modern Contrast: Production and Control

Modern culture runs on the opposite assumption. We are taught:

• Productivity = worth.

• Hustle = safety.

• Control = success.

We extract resources from Earth, labor from people, and time from ourselves. We measure everything in numbers, quarterly outcomes, and growth curves. But this machine of production rarely produces peace. Instead, it leaves us exhausted, disconnected, and longing for something deeper.

This is why so many are turning back to psychedelics and ancient wisdom traditions. We sense that the solution won’t be found in more striving—it will be found in realignment.

Frequently, my entrepreneur clients come to me with fears that “psychedelics will turn me into something I don’t want to be” or “they’ll take my fire and drive to succeed.” In reality, the medicine never forces us to do anything; it only shows us the Truth. If you’re destined to make widgets, the medicine will not tell you to stop making widgets; it will only show you how to create widgets in a way that creates less suffering. Though if you learn that you’re not supposed to be making widgets, and you continue to do so, there’s a good chance your suffering will only increase with time. In these cases, you can’t unring the bell of wisdom.

The Illusion of Manifestation

And it’s not must late-stage capitalists who hold these beliefs and behaviors. Modern spirituality often adds another twist: manifestation. People are told they can “attract” the car, the partner, the money, the lifestyle they desire if they align their vibration.

There’s truth here—our thoughts and intentions do shape our lives. But manifestation culture is just another form of spiritual materialism: the same hunger for more, cloaked in sacred language.

The hidden assumption is: “I don’t have enough. If I can make the universe give me what I want, then I’ll finally feel whole.”

And while people can manifest their desires, the deeper question is:

• Are these the things our soul actually needs for growth, or just the cravings of our ego?

• Do they bring us into deeper alignment, or reinforce misalignment?

• By continually receiving the things we desire, are we actually slowing down our own healing process by not working with and releasing the craving?

Psychedelics expose this illusion. They don’t give us what we want; they give us what we need. They might plunge us into grief when we pray for joy, confront us with our shadow when we ask for healing, or dismantle our illusions when we crave visions of beauty.

The medicine is not a vending machine. It is a teacher.

The Paradox of Wealth and Abundance

It’s important to note: none of these wisdom traditions chastise wealth or abundance. In fact, abundance is often seen as a blessing that flows naturally from alignment.

• In India, the goddess Lakshmi represents prosperity, but she flows only to those in harmony with dharma.

• In Taoism, abundance is effortless, like a valley nourished by rivers.

• In the Andes, abundance comes through ayni—when we honor reciprocity with Earth and community.

The distinction is this: having abundance is not the problem. Needing abundance to feel whole is the problem.

When abundance arrives, it can be enjoyed as blessing. But when our identity depends on it, we descend into suffering. Alignment invites us to receive abundance with gratitude, not cling to it in desperation.

Psychedelics as Teachers of Alignment

This is where psychedelics have so much to offer in our modern world. They don’t just heal—they recalibrate. They show us how far we’ve wandered from our center and invite us back into alignment.

• Dr. Mushroom might reveal fear-based patterns in our relationships.

• Dr. Ayahuasca might expose our disconnection from ancestors or Earth.

• Dr. Wachuma might remind us of the sacredness of reciprocity and community.

They are like tuning forks, showing us the true pitch of our being. But the work doesn’t end in ceremony. It continues in Integration—digesting the insight—and Activation—embodying the change in daily life.

Living the Alignment Way

When we shift from outcome-driven living to alignment-centered living, something profound happens:

• Peace replaces striving.

• Enoughness replaces scarcity.

• Service replaces self-centered ambition.

And ironically, the outcomes we once chased often arise naturally—not because we forced them, but because alignment tends to generate its own form of abundance. Success, love, and prosperity become by-products of alignment, not the target.

The world’s wisdom traditions whisper the same truth: healing is not about what we achieve, but how we align. Dharma, wu wei, and ayni all point us back to the same center—our true nature, our natural rhythm, our sacred reciprocity with life.

In a culture obsessed with making things happen, this is radical: you are not here to produce your worth. You are here to live in harmony.

This is the invitation of psychedelics, of ceremony, of integration, and of life itself: to trust that freedom, healing, and joy will never be found in outcomes—but only in alignment.

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“I’m not trying to make you mad—I’m just not trying to make you comfortable.” At first glance, this statement might sound blunt, maybe even confrontational. But at its core, it points to something many of us were never taught: truth and comfort rarely walk hand in hand.

In the West, we’ve been conditioned to believe that our job is to keep the peace, to smooth the edges, to ensure everyone around us feels okay—even if that means betraying ourselves. The phrase “Midwest Nice” specifically points to this and describes the perceived friendly, polite, and helpful demeanor of people from the Midwest, often characterized by a strong aversion to confrontation, passive-aggressive communication, and a performance of politeness to avoid challenging conversations or direct criticism. Since we’re being honest here, this conditioning is essentially codependence, and it teaches us to prioritize comfort over authenticity. We learn that if someone is upset, it must mean we’ve done something wrong. Our lives become a balancing act of managing others’ emotions while neglecting our own.

The problem is that the comfort we’re seeking is always impermanent and will eventually metastasize into suffering.

Between my seventeen years in sobriety and therapy, ten years of medicine work, and the last five years of coaching, I have found that the single character trait of codependence is the root cause of 80 percent of my clients’ suffering. The unwillingness, or outright inability, to let someone be uncomfortable forces us to withhold our authenticity, which in turn generates suffering within us.

This tendency doesn’t stop at the workplace or in our families. It shows up powerfully in spiritual communities, where discomfort is often dismissed as “low vibration” or “out of alignment.” Instead of seeing discomfort as a natural part of growth, it gets avoided, silenced, or projected back onto the person who dared to name it. The result? Entire groups that confuse harmony with healing and mistake avoidance for maturity.

But the truth is this: discomfort isn’t the enemy. In fact, it may be the very teacher we need most. Growth, resilience, and spiritual depth are forged at the edge of what feels uncomfortable. The question isn’t whether discomfort will come—it will. The real question is whether we’ll meet it as a threat to be avoided or as an invitation to grow stronger.

The Comfort Trap

From an early age, most of us are taught that keeping others comfortable is a sign of goodness. We learn to soften our words, bite our tongues, and prioritize harmony over honesty. This is the essence of codependence: shaping ourselves around someone else’s reactions in order to avoid conflict. On the surface, it looks polite and even kind. But beneath the surface, it erodes authenticity and undermines growth.

In Western culture, comfort has become a kind of currency. We equate being agreeable with being lovable, and we mistake conflict avoidance for maturity. The result is generations of people who fear discomfort as if it were dangerous, rather than recognizing it as a natural part of human interaction. When someone feels uncomfortable, we assume blame, apologize excessively, or retreat into silence. In doing so, we reinforce the illusion that comfort is the highest value. At the same time, we’re abandoning ourselves and our authenticity in favor of holding someone else with the “kid gloves” they’ve grown to expect from their family and society at large.

Spiritual communities are not immune to this trap—in fact, they often magnify it. Here, discomfort is sometimes dressed in spiritual language: labeled as “low vibration,” “out of alignment,” or evidence that someone hasn’t done their work. Those who voice inconvenient truths are often told they are projecting, not “holding space,” or being judgmental. Instead of facing the friction that leads to growth, groups create an atmosphere where positivity becomes mandatory and honesty becomes taboo.

But avoiding discomfort comes at a cost. When truth is mistaken for harm, communities begin to rot from within. The very medicine that could catalyze healing—authentic expression—gets silenced. And when people are more committed to maintaining comfort than encountering truth, they forfeit the chance to deepen both individually and collectively.

The comfort trap doesn’t just rob us of honesty; it robs us of the strength that only emerges when we’re willing to face discomfort head-on. Going a step further, not being honest with those in our community is likely attenuating their healing. In fact, failing to hear the truth (so long as it’s been sincerely requested) actually does a disservice to sincere seekers of growth and change.

If you’re looking for a deeper exploration into psychedelic healing, check out
Healing with Psychedelics: A Step-by-Step Handbook to Safe and Sustainable Transformation

Building Nervous System Strength

If comfort is the trap, then nervous system strength is the key to freedom. Trauma science gives us a useful framework here: the window of tolerance. This is the range within which we can stay regulated while facing challenges. Inside this window, we can think clearly, feel deeply, and respond intentionally. Outside it, we either collapse into shutdown or escalate into reactivity. The challenge is that many of us were never taught how to widen this window, so our tolerance for discomfort remains narrow. The result? We avoid situations, conversations, or emotions that might push us beyond what feels safe.

But here’s the paradox: the very act of stretching our tolerance is what builds resilience. Just like muscles only grow stronger when they’re challenged, our nervous systems strengthen when we face discomfort, stay present, and recover. Think of it like leg day at the gym. Nobody enjoys the soreness that follows, but that temporary discomfort is the signal that growth is happening. Over time, the legs become stronger, more stable, and more capable of carrying us. The same is true with our inner capacity—discomfort is not a sign of failure; it’s the evidence of strengthening.

In the early 2020s, we saw the cultural rise of trigger warnings. These began as an attempt to create safer spaces, but in many cases they reinforced fragility instead of cultivating strength. While there’s wisdom in preparing someone for difficult material, the unintended consequence was a message: you can’t handle this. Rather than encouraging people to gently expand their window of tolerance, many communities ended up reinforcing the belief that discomfort must always be avoided.

While I am a fervent believer in psychotherapy, I’ve also found this to be a trap for many of my clients. With a desire for understanding and safety, they spend years, if not decades, in therapy, yet they never truly grow and expand their capacity to function in the world successfully. The therapist, focused on maintaining safety and nervous system regulation, fails to challenge the client’s nervous system and leaves them wading in an ever-expanding swamp of despair.

Ramana Maharshi, a Hindu sage and enlightened being, once said, “Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true Self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.” We can’t expect the world to remove every sharp edge, nor can we demand others constantly adjust to our sensitivities. What we can do is develop resilience—shoes strong enough to walk anywhere without being cut open by every stone on the path.

When we shift the focus from avoidance to strengthening, everything changes. Discomfort becomes our training ground, not a threat. Challenges stop being evidence of inadequacy and instead become opportunities to expand capacity. This is the heart of nervous system work and spiritual growth: to build such strength within that no matter what arises outside, we can meet it with presence, steadiness, and trust. As my maestro frequently teaches, “Don’t let this move you from your center.”

Discomfort as a Spiritual Practice

If nervous system strength is the foundation, then discomfort is the spiritual gym where that strength is built. Every genuine spiritual practice eventually brings us face-to-face with our limits. Meditation reveals the restlessness of the mind. Prayer brings us into contact with longing, doubt, or silence. Psychedelics often surface buried trauma or fear before they open into insight. Even simple practices like fasting, chanting, or sitting in community can ignite discomfort. Far from being obstacles, these moments are invitations.

Satsang, from the Sanskrit words sat (truth) and sanga (company), is a spiritual gathering where people come together in the company of “Truth” to discuss, reflect, and absorb spiritual wisdom. It can also refer to the spiritual practice of gathering with like-minded spiritual family on a path to uplift the mind while also removing obstacles to self-realization and liberation. Over the past decade, maintaining consistent engagement in the same spiritual community has been one of the most powerful teachers for widening my own window. While dealing with challenging biological family members may sometimes be too intense for our nervous systems, not running away from my spiritual family, even when things get hard or uncomfortable, has allowed me to examine my own triggers and work through them skillfully. This practice has offered me a deep path of learning, acceptance, and truth.

Discomfort, in these cases, is not a detour—it is the path itself. When we learn to stay present with agitation, shame, grief, or fear, we begin to transform our relationship with them. They stop being forces that overwhelm us and start becoming teachers that refine us. Like the soreness that tells us our muscles are growing, discomfort signals that something deeper is being strengthened in the body and the soul.

Unfortunately, many communities confuse comfort with spirituality. This is where the phenomenon of spiritual bypass enters. Instead of facing pain, people cling to positive thinking, high-vibration language, or external identities of being “enlightened.” While these strategies may offer temporary relief, they ultimately keep us fragile. Bypassing is like skipping leg day forever—avoiding the very training that would give us true stability.

The paradox of spiritual work is that growth rarely feels blissful in the moment. Sitting with discomfort might feel like sitting in fire. It can be raw, humbling, and profoundly unglamorous. But this is the very fire that burns away illusion and reveals truth. To bypass discomfort is to bypass transformation. To embrace it is to build the kind of resilience that allows us to hold both joy and sorrow, both ecstasy and grief, without collapsing.

When discomfort is honored as a sacred practice, it stops being something to fear. It becomes an initiation—proof that we are strengthening our nervous system and expanding our consciousness. Each time we sit with discomfort instead of fleeing from it, we step closer to freedom. And over time, we discover that the ability to hold what once triggered us is not just spiritual strength—it is spiritual maturity.

Closing

When we demand that the world keep us comfortable, we give away our power. We shrink our ability to meet truth, and we reinforce the illusion that safety lies outside ourselves. But when we accept discomfort as part of the journey, something shifts. We stop treating discomfort as a threat and begin to recognize it as a catalyst.

This is the paradox of growth: it doesn’t come wrapped in ease. It comes through stretching, through moments that challenge our nervous system, through the fire that burns away illusion. Whether in meditation, conversation, or community, discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is often a sign that something real is beginning to happen.

The invitation is simple, though never easy: stop asking the world to pad your every step. Put on your shoes. Build resilience. Strengthen your nervous system the way you would strengthen your muscles. Let discomfort teach you what safety, presence, and freedom actually feel like.

And considering the topic from the direction of delivering honesty, Ram Dass’ guru, Neem Karoli Baba, frequently instructed him to “love everyone and tell the truth.” To which Ram Dass replied, “The truth is, I don’t love everyone.” One of the deepest lessons I have learned over the past year is that if I can’t love someone, then perhaps I’m not yet in a place to tell the truth. If I’m speaking truth without compassion, there’s a good chance I’m just being an asshole.

In the end, the point is never to make others comfortable—or to stay comfortable ourselves. The point is to grow, to deepen, to expand. I’m not trying to make anyone mad. I’m just not here to make you comfortable. I’m here to speak my truth, and to let that truth do its work. Maybe, if you allow it, that work might just help set you free.

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Algorithms hate nuance and can’t monetize positivity. I don’t feed the machine with daily posts, so if this content speaks to you, help it reach someone else by commenting, restacking, or forwarding it to a friend.

In nearly every healing circle, therapy office, or spiritual community, the phrase "You're not broken" makes a frequent appearance. It's delivered as reassurance, often with the best of intentions. But if you've ever sat in the depths of depression, grief, or anxiety and heard those words, you've likely wanted to tell whoever is saying it to go pound sand. Instead of landing as comfort, these words can sometimes feel like dismissal—as if someone has looked at your suffering and decided it isn't real.

This is the tension at the heart of healing. Non-dual philosophy refers to the Atman—the unchanging, eternal self that no trauma can damage. It is the still point beneath the chaos. Yet our lived realities include wounded parts that absolutely do feel broken. Denying them doesn't heal them; it pushes them deeper into shadow.

The paradox is that both realities coexist. You are both broken and healed. You carry wounds that deserve compassion and attention, and you carry a core self untouched by suffering. Healing is not about erasing one truth in favor of the other. It is about embracing "both/and."

The paradox shows up everywhere:

• A parent may feel overwhelmed while knowing they are deeply devoted to their child

• You can feel imposter syndrome while knowing you bring real skills to the table

• You may feel angry with your partner while still holding love in the same breath

• You can experience profound peace in meditation one day and complete restlessness the next

Recognizing the paradox doesn't make discomfort disappear, but it makes it less frightening. It reminds us that contradiction is not failure—it's reality.

The Problem with "You're Not Broken"

For someone hurting deeply, "You're not broken" can be disorienting. Imagine sitting across from your therapist mid-panic attack, body shaking, and hearing them say those words. Or picture someone navigating unbearable grief being told they are whole. These assurances may hold metaphysical truth, but in lived experience they can land as denial.

The danger is oversimplifying a profoundly complex experience into a binary: broken or not broken. Our inner worlds are layered and contradictory. You can feel grief and gratitude in the same breath. Declaring that you are not broken erases the nuance.

I've noticed toxic positivity in those who cling to the phrase with fervor—especially in spiritual circles. In encouraging, many healing spaces unintentionally send the message that painful emotions are unwelcome. If you're sad or angry, the solution offered is often to "rise above." While reframing has value, it can become another way of running from what's real. What is resisted becomes entrenched.

This is spiritual bypass—using spiritual ideas to avoid confronting unresolved wounds. "You're not broken" becomes bypass if used to skip over grief without allowing those experiences to be integrated. Instead of healing, it creates shame: If I'm not broken, why do I feel so broken?

So what can we say instead? The answer lies in presence rather than platitude. When someone shares pain, the most healing response is often: "I see you. I hear how much this hurts." Validation doesn't reinforce brokenness; it honors the reality of the moment.

In my work with clients, I've seen the relief when people are given permission to own their brokenness without judgment. One woman, exhausted from years of therapy, told me she was tired of being told to "find the silver lining." When I simply said, "Yes, this is really hard, and I'm not here to take that away from you," she exhaled for the first time in weeks.

Acknowledging brokenness is not indulgence—it's the doorway to integration. The most powerful thing we can offer is not a slogan but steady presence. To say, "Yes, you hurt. And yes, you are more than your hurt." That is love, holding the fullness of the human experience.

Layers of the Self

Yogic philosophy gives us a framework in the concept of the Atman—the eternal self, pure awareness, untouched by trauma. If we use the ocean metaphor, the Atman is the depth—still, calm, unaffected by storms above.

But most of us live on the surface. We experience ourselves as personalities, bodies, histories. These outer layers carry the marks of life. They can and do feel broken. This is where the paradox shows itself: the core remains whole while other parts are deeply hurting.

Picture Russian nesting dolls. The outermost doll is the version that interacts with the world—the roles you play, the identity you protect. This layer takes the brunt of life's impact. Here, heartbreak and trauma leave visible cracks.

Inside, the dolls become smaller and simpler. Each represents a deeper part, less defined by external roles, more connected to essence. At the center is the smallest doll: pure, intact, radiant. This is the Atman—the unbreakable self.

Healing is moving inward through the dolls, reconnecting with what has always been whole. But healing is not discarding the outer dolls. Integration means caring for the cracked dolls while staying connected to the pristine one inside.

This is where psychedelics can play an impactful role. In many journeys, the medicine temporarily dissolves outer layers of identity. People describe this as unity, oneness, or pure being. It can feel like stepping inside the smallest doll and realizing: This is me.

But this comes with a trap: mistaking a glimpse for a cure. Psychedelics reveal the core but don't erase outer layers. After the journey, protective shells return. Without integration, people chase the glimpse repeatedly, hoping it will make cracks disappear. What they need is not another glimpse but steady work tending to outer layers in light of what they've seen.

Integration is where paradox becomes practice. It's bringing the memory of wholeness into broken places. It's daily, patient, and often uncelebrated work. But it's the only way the Atman's truth becomes embodied.

Understanding the layered self softens shame. When you realize pain lives in outer layers, you stop believing it defines your essence. You can say, "Part of me feels broken right now. And I know there's a deeper part that's untouched."

Without this perspective, people fall into two traps:

1. Identifying completely with brokenness—seeing themselves only as damaged, endlessly chasing healing

2. Over-identifying with wholeness—clinging to spiritual truth while denying real pain

True healing honors both layers. It validates cracks without mistaking them for the whole structure. It celebrates the core without using it to bypass pain.

For a deeper dive into my meta theory of psychedelic healing, please check out “How and Why Psychedelics Heal.”

If you’re looking for a deeper exploration into psychedelic healing, check out
Healing with Psychedelics: A Step-by-Step Handbook to Safe and Sustainable Transformation

Permission to Feel and Release

One of the most radical gifts you can give yourself is permission to feel like crap. In a culture obsessed with productivity and positivity, allowing yourself to feel awful can be revolutionary—and a doorway to genuine healing.

From childhood, we're taught to suppress difficult emotions. These messages reinforce that painful emotions are problems to solve rather than experiences to honor. As adults, we continue by numbing, distracting, or overworking to avoid sitting still.

Yet emotions, like all energy, need movement. When blocked, they don't disappear—they solidify. Grief buried can resurface as depression. Anger denied can harden into resentment. The refusal to feel becomes its own prison.

Granting permission to feel is not wallowing; it's acknowledging reality. That simple validation often softens the experience, creating space for movement and release.

Cory Muscara offers valuable insight: many people think they're being present with emotions when they're actually just enduring them with awareness. They notice their sadness but approach it with an agenda: If I sit with this long enough, it will go away. This is not true presence—it's resistance dressed as mindfulness.

The Process of Release

Genuine release unfolds in three stages:

1. Curiosity—Instead of changing the emotion, become curious. Where is it in your body? What texture does it have? This shift from judgment loosens resistance.

2. Contact—Make tender contact with the emotion. Breathe into it, allow tears, or place a hand on your chest. The goal isn't pushing away, but meeting directly.

3. Patience—Let the emotion run its course without rushing. This is hardest because the mind wants resolution. But emotions have their own timelines.

When these steps are followed, energy moves. Grief releases as sobs. Anger melts into clarity. The release comes not from forcing change, but creating space for expression.

Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers—they show what we're hiding. If you've been avoiding grief, it may crash through during a journey. Many difficult journeys happen because the person fights the emotion rather than allowing it. When surrender happens, what felt unbearable becomes cathartic.

And you don't need psychedelics to practice release. Ways to cultivate it daily:

• Somatic check-ins—Pause and ask: What am I feeling in my body?

• Safe expression—Create containers: journaling, crying, screaming into a pillow

• Community support—Share honestly with trusted friends

• Mindful patience—When feeling arises, sit with it for 10 minutes. No fixing—just presence

These practices teach your nervous system that emotions are not threats but visitors to be welcomed.

Living the Paradox Daily

The paradox of being both healed and broken is not just philosophy—it's practice. Living with this awareness means holding contradictory truths without collapsing into extremes. It means carrying wounds and wholeness into everyday life, letting them coexist without demanding resolution.

One of the few things the human mind hates worse than fear is uncertainty. It wants clean categories: Am I healed or broken? But reality refuses neat boxes. When we cling to one side, we distort truth. The paradox asks us to live in tension—and that tension is where healing deepens.

Consider grief. You can feel shattered after loss while simultaneously laughing at a memory. Or recovery from addiction: proud of progress and still ashamed of past choices. Both are true. The paradox is not contradiction—it's the fullness of human experience.

A Few Practical Ways to Live the Paradox

1. Name both truths—When hurting, say: "Part of me feels broken, and part of me is whole." This interrupts binary thinking.

2. Tend without over-identifying—Care for wounds, but don't confuse them with identity. "I am experiencing sadness" differs from "I am sad person."

3. Anchor in the healed self—Create daily rituals reminding you of your unbroken core: meditation, nature, breathwork.

4. Integrate glimpses—When experiencing deep peace, ask: "How can I carry a little of this forward?" Integration brings wholeness into cracks.

5. Witness others with both/and vision—Acknowledge suffering while reminding them of strength. Presence matters more than solutions.

Without practicing the paradox, we swing to extremes: over-identifying with brokenness creates victimhood cycles; over-identifying with wholeness creates bypassing. The middle path is not compromise but higher truth: we are both.

Living the paradox is lifelong practice. Some days, broken parts will be loud. Other days, wholeness shines through. Over time, you learn to let both coexist without panic. You stop needing to resolve tension and start trusting it as the ground of humanity.

Finding Comfort in the Paradox

Healing is not about becoming one thing or the other. It's not about finally proving wholeness or endlessly fixing what feels broken. Healing is learning to hold both truths at once—seeing yourself clearly, not as a problem to solve, but as a layered being already complete and still in process.

The broken parts are not failures. They're evidence of a life lived fully, reminders of your humanity, your capacity to care so deeply that loss can wound you. To feel broken is not weakness—it's participation in the human story.

The healed parts are not achievements to boast about. They're the essence of who you are, always present beneath experience's noise. This is the Atman, the unbreakable Self no trauma can touch. To touch this place is to remember: I was whole before I was hurt, and I am whole even as I heal.

Living the paradox brings freedom. It frees you from exhausting chases toward perfection. It frees you from shame of thinking wounds define you. It frees you to live honestly—cracked open and radiant, tender and resilient.

When you hold this paradox, compassion deepens. You stop rushing to fix yourself or others. You begin trusting that even in painful seasons, part of you remains untouched, a steady flame never extinguished.

Think of the ocean. Surface storms rage, waves crash, tides shift. But in depths, water is still. Both realities exist at once. You are the waves, and you are the depth. As Rumi reminds us, "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."

So when someone tells you, "You're not broken," you can smile gently and say, "I am both. And that's exactly as it should be."

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