🍄‍🟫 What 50+ Legal Psilocybin Sessions Taught Me About Being Human

This year alone, I've sat beside more than 50 people during one-on-one legal psilocybin sessions. That number doesn't include group sessions, retreats, or the years I spent doing this work before Colorado created a regulated model.

That's more than 50 people with different ages, careers, diagnoses, relationships, childhoods, losses, beliefs, and reasons for walking through the door. Each person arrives with a story that is entirely their own.

And yet, after hundreds of hours sitting beside people in one of the most vulnerable states a human being can enter, what strikes me most isn't how different we are. It's how much we have in common.

I obviously can't tell you my clients' stories. Those belong to them. But I can tell you what they have collectively taught me about ours.

We are all carrying younger versions of ourselves

I have watched accomplished, intelligent, seemingly confident adults encounter the child who learned that love had to be earned, that their needs were too much, that crying wasn't safe, or that belonging required them to become whatever the people around them needed them to be.

We grow up, build careers, raise families, develop relationships, and become competent adults. Yet some part of us may still be organizing our lives around rules we learned when we were seven.

Sometimes moving forward requires us to turn around and look at where it all began.

So much of what we call pathology once served a purpose

Hypervigilance, perfectionism, rumination, people-pleasing, emotional walls, the need for control, and the relentlessly critical voice in our heads can look very different when we become curious about them instead of immediately trying to eliminate them.

Often, there is something protective underneath.

These strategies may have helped us survive difficult environments, maintain relationships, earn approval, or create some sense of predictability when life didn't feel safe. The problem is that survival strategies don't automatically subside when the danger is over.

Growth can involve recognizing that something which once protected us may now be preventing us from fully living. We can appreciate why it developed – and even show it gratitude – without allowing it to continue running our lives.

Beneath so much of it all is grief

There is grief for what happened, but there is also grief for what didn't happen. People grieve the parent they needed and never had, the marriage they thought they would have, the years spent surviving instead of living, and the version of themselves they abandoned in order to become acceptable to everyone else.

We are remarkably good at building things on top of grief. We build achievement, busyness, anger, control, and even spiritual bypassing, but grief has a way of hanging out underneath all of it.

When someone finally stops running from grief and allows themselves to feel and process it, what emerges isn't always despair. Sometimes what comes through on the other side is relief and an enormous capacity for love.

Many of us learned how to be loved before we learned how to be ourselves

We learned to be successful, agreeable, useful, attractive, strong, easygoing, or whatever else helped us maintain connection to the people we needed. Those adaptations can become so deeply embedded that we stop recognizing them as adaptations at all.

Then one day, someone can find themselves living a life that looks perfectly reasonable from the outside and realize they don't know how much of it they actually chose.

This is one place where I think our conventional approach to mental health can fall short. We have become very good at naming symptoms: anxiety, depression, insomnia, rumination, burnout... 

Those symptoms are real and diagnoses can be useful. Medication and therapy can be lifesaving.

But maybe a question we should be asking is, "What is your distress trying to tell you about the way you are living?"

Medication can reduce suffering, but it can’t make an inauthentic life feel authentic. Therapy can help us function better, but functioning better within the confines of a life that is fundamentally out of alignment may not be the same thing as healing.

Control is often the fear of uncertainty

One of the most common struggles I witness during psychedelic experiences is the attempt to make the experience go a certain way. People wonder whether the medicine is working, whether they're doing it “right,” why they haven't had the breakthrough they expected, or why they can't seem to let go.

The harder we try to surrender, the further away it seems to move. Of course, this isn't much different from ordinary life.

We try to control other people, outcomes, our bodies, our futures, and how others perceive us. Not knowing what happens next can be very uncomfortable for many people.

But learning to live with some uncertainty, rather than organizing our entire lives around preventing it, may be an important form of freedom.

Self-love is much less abstract than it sounds

People talk about "loving yourself" so often that the phrase has almost lost its meaning, but I've watched people experience it viscerally, sometimes after a lifetime of believing that they weren't enough.

It doesn’t manifest as narcissism or some grand revelation of exceptionalism. It's usually something much simpler: an understanding that they are human, that they have been doing the best they could with what they had, and that perhaps they don't have to spend the rest of their lives punishing themselves for being imperfect.

I wonder how differently we would live if self-compassion were our starting point rather than something we believed we had to earn.

Sometimes healing is remembering how to have fun

This is one I don't think we talk about enough.

Many people come to this work because something hurts, but many also come because something is missing. They want to feel joy again. They want to feel curious, creative, motivated, playful, spontaneous, or excited to be alive.

Adulting can become incredibly serious. We accumulate responsibilities, losses, careers, mortgages, diagnoses, aging parents, relationship problems, news alerts, and endless lists of things we're supposed to be improving about ourselves. Even healing can become another job. We read the books, listen to the podcasts, track our habits, analyze our attachment styles, optimize our nervous systems, and work very hard at becoming better versions of ourselves.

Sometimes we need to do less work on ourselves and go play!

I have watched people laugh uncontrollably during journeys, rediscover music they had forgotten they loved, become fascinated by something as ordinary as the texture of a blanket, or experience a childlike sense of awe and wonder that had been buried under decades of obligations.

I don't think those moments are distractions from the "real work." I think they are part of the real work.

Joy, humor, silliness, creativity, pleasure, and play are not frivolous additions to a healthy life. They are part of what makes a life worth healing for.

We are profoundly lonely

We have never had more ways to communicate, yet so many people seem desperate to be witnessed for who they truly are. 

We have built a culture that prizes independence, productivity, and individualism, and then we wonder why so many people feel anxious and depressed.

Human beings did not evolve to thrive in isolation. It’s not enough to move toward a healthier individual self. We must also move toward relationship with other people, with nature, with the body, with something sacred or mysterious, and with life itself.

The mystical experience may be less about escaping reality than remembering our place inside it

I have sat beside people with very different spiritual beliefs. Some arrive deeply religious, some describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, and some are skeptical of anything that can't be measured.

I don't tell people what their experiences mean, and I don't think anyone else should. But across belief systems, one theme appears again and again: connection.

People describe a sense that the boundaries around the individual self aren't quite as distinct as they normally feel, or that they belong to something larger than themselves. Some call it God, consciousness, nature, love, humanity, Spirit, or the universe. The language differs, but the experience of not being separate is pretty consistent.

Our sense of being out of alignment isn't only psychological. Some of it may be relational, existential, and spiritual. If that's true, a model of health that treats a person primarily as an isolated collection of symptoms will always miss something important about what human beings need to be well.

The medicine doesn't do the living for you

A psychedelic experience can sometimes show someone the difference between the life they're living and the life they want to live. What it cannot do is resolve the differences for them.

Monday morning still comes. The relationship still needs the conversation, the boundary still has to be set, the apology still has to be made, the body still needs to be cared for, and the life that no longer fits still has to be changed.

Insight can happen in five hours. Transformation usually can't. If you’ve worked with me before, you’ll know that I’m always reminding people, “The medicine will illuminate the path, but it’s up to you to walk down it.”

Walking the path means making dozens of ordinary choices afterwards that slowly bring a life back into alignment with what someone already knows.

Personal growth is coming back to ourselves

After more than 50 one-on-one sessions this year, I believe in the potential of psilocybin more than I did when I began this work, but perhaps not for the reason people might expect.

I don't think the medicine contains all the answers. I think it can sometimes quiet enough of the noise for us to hear what was already underneath it.

And underneath all our different histories, diagnoses, defenses, identities, and carefully constructed lives, I keep encountering the same basic human needs.

We want to be loved and to belong.

We want to be seen without having to perform.

We want permission to grieve and reasons to laugh.

We want to forgive ourselves.

We want to stop being afraid.

We want to experience joy.

We want our lives to feel like our own.

We want to know that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

More than 50 people have shown me this in more than 50 different ways.

But fundamentally, we aren't healing from 50 different things. Maybe, underneath it all, we're healing the many ways we learned to disconnect from ourselves, from one another, from joy, and from the mystery of being alive.

From what I’ve witnessed, healing is, in large part, the journey back.

An invitation to go deeper…

If this resonates, I’d be honored to work with you, either one-on-one or in a group setting. The next group experience I'll be facilitating is a psilocybin retreat in Boulder, Colorado, October 26–30.

It's a five-day experience that offers something we don't often give ourselves in ordinary life: enough time and space to step away from our routines, turn inward, and explore what becomes possible when this work happens in community.

After spending so much of this year sitting one-on-one with people, I'm especially looking forward to bringing another element into the healing process that I believe we desperately need more of: each other.

If you feel called to explore this work, you can learn more about the retreat through Chariot’s website: https://www.chariotspace.com/retreats