The Medicine That Helped Me Remember The Medicine

“Psychedelics are to the study of the mind, what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy.” – David E. Nichols

For many years, I felt like I was slamming into the same invisible walls over and over again. No matter how much therapy I did, how deeply I prayed, or how committed I was to my healing, I kept circling the same patterns of fear, self-hatred, guilt, and shame. I understood my story intellectually - but my body didn’t seem to get the memo.

Then one day, a trusted supervisor - who had walked alongside me as both a therapist and a guide - looked at me gently and said something unexpected: “I see you struggling with the same things. I think it might be time to consider a psychedelic-assisted therapy session. Specifically, MDMA.”

I was terrified. Not of healing - but of the method. I had grown up with the message that drugs were evil. I still remembered the old commercials about fried brains and ruined lives.

Even as a therapist myself, the biggest hurdle wasn’t emotional - it was moral and nervous-system fear.

On the day of my first session, a dear friend flew in from Chicago just to sit with me. We sat in my car in the parking lot as rain poured down the windshield. A song played softly - something about slowing down. My tears matched the rain. I was wide open, and still afraid. And my friend just kept saying, over and over: “There’s nothing bad here. There’s nothing bad here.”

That one day - after 17 years of traditional therapy - was worth its weight in gold. Not because it fixed everything. Not because it made life easy. But because for the first time, I touched a truth about my childhood that my body had never been able to access before.

In a single moment, I felt more freedom than I ever had in my entire life. And paradoxically, that freedom didn’t make life easier right away. In many ways, the journey actually got harder before it got lighter. But something fundamental had shifted. The door was open.

Over the next four and a half years, I worked with psychedelic journeys very intentionally - never casually, never to escape - more like stepping stones. Each experience helped me gently unwind layers of complex trauma and attachment wounds that had been stored in my body for decades.

The best way I can describe it is this: It felt like fear was being flushed from my body on a cellular level. And as that fear softened, something strange began to happen. Time started to feel different. The future loosened its grip. And I began to come into presence.

And presence, I learned, is not an idea. Presence is feeling this breath. This moment. The person in front of you. The warmth of tears on your cheeks. The sound of your own laughter. The ache in your chest when a younger part of you feels scared or alone. It is being here without bracing for what’s next - and no longer being constantly pulled backward into old stories, past patterns, and former versions of myself. It is being here now.

One of the biggest questions people ask me now, is about addiction and dependence. Can you get hooked on psychedelics? What I can honestly say, five years out, is this: When used intentionally, they have the opposite effect. There came a day when my body simply said “no” to what it no longer needed. No to ADHD medication. No to alcohol. Not out of willpower - but out of clarity. Psychedelics as medicine have actually moved me away from substance use.

Eventually, I even held a personal ceremony of gratitude for the medicines that had walked with me through that season. I thanked them for their role, and I released them. Because the greatest irony of all of it is this: I have now come full circle. I truly believe that nothing enhances presence more than presence itself.

When you are present, life is breathtaking. When you are present, you can actually see people. When you are present, you can feel joy fully - and grief honestly. When you are present, you can stay with your scared parts without abandoning yourself.

And one night, I came across something I had written in my journal as an eight-year-old child: “To be fully alive.”

I couldn’t have imagined back then how long the road would be. Or how many layers I would have to walk through. Or how many fears I would have to face.

And I never could have imagined that the very thing I once feared - medicine itself - would one day help return me to the truest medicine of all: The one that lives inside each of us. Our breath. Our presence. Our aliveness. Our capacity to be fully here.