The Psychedelic Experience Has a Body Count pt 2

The Price to listen to the Voice: Part Two

The hardest part of letting an identity die is feeling judged.

I didn’t abandon my sobriety. The divine asked me to set it down. I listened, and I call that part integration.

Nobody warns you that the cost of listening is being witnessed in the letting go.

Part One is where it began. Read Here

And now it’s time for the part where more of the identity dies.

That ceremony, followed by a precise microdose protocol, opened something inside me. It happened the way only the right medicine at the right moment can. And psilocybin has that power, since it was the first medicine to crack me open in 2002, when it led me into the Appalachian Mountains and started a remembering of how I navigated my friend circles.

I’ve always taken on the role of the trip advisor, not the mother, but the one showing up for all of life’s emotions, such as joy, sorrow, and depression. Really, the entire spectrum of being alive. I offered my presence without trying to control the situation.

I wasn’t aware that I was guiding spiritual awakenings; I simply knew that I belonged in that role. Even then, I guided friends on deep spiritual journeys through nature without fully knowing what I was doing.

Now, almost twenty years after those first journeys in 2002, it’s my profession to guide those journeys with our herbal allies, navigating those emotions in the most imperative time of our lives: everyday existence.

After the ceremony weekend, I engaged in every integration technique I teach as an act of devotion.

I call it the Psychedelic Herbalism Method, once I realized herbal allies are the ancient future of integration. Forever old, not discovered by me, but a process that will shift the future, as most herbalists can attest to.

As I mentioned in part one, before the ceremony, with months of preparation, I had launched Gnosis, my most transformative group integration program, and I was integrating alongside them. I was simultaneously teaching and witnessing the identity shift as I integrated the psilocybin experience.

We all shared the same experience of integrating, unraveling, and transforming together, with the support of our individual herbal allies. There’s a profound power in a teacher being actively involved alongside her students; the transmission deepens, and the container offers a different kind of support. I experienced this, and I continue to feel it with every cohort that participates in Gnosis.

One afternoon, as we’re closing our circle, a student shared, her voice trembling slightly, that she felt unmoored; caught between her old self and someone unfamiliar. Her words perfectly mirrored what had been surfacing for me; I realized I was mourning a version of myself I thought I needed to protect.

We locked eyes, witnessing the honesty of not having answers but holding space for the evolution. In that moment, the teacher-student boundary dissolved. We were simply two people mid-transformation, showing each other where the work was real. That reciprocity shaped everything that came after.

The humans I saw as mountains during my ceremony began to appear. They were present in my town, and it was like uncovering hidden gems that had always been there. And it’s not like I don’t have friends from other places, but as I longed for the camaraderie of those nearby, I felt the mountain range grow. Community was a comfort, like a landscape, steady and alive.

For this next evolution in my relationships, it required the death of what I was before, the shedding of more of what I had deemed authentic for myself, and, of course, the loss of some outdated friendships. Dissolution is part of becoming.

Then came July 2025.

I was on my way to Desert Hearts Festival, and I went to the festival alone. I met someone else alone, then another, and we became a trio without planning it. The dancing was amazing, the feeling of being part of a group, cared for, and witnessing the people I attract in my life are full of so much heart.

One of them had red wine from a vineyard in California. I thought about all the years of sobriety and lived only in the moment.

I had a sip!

It felt like letting go of a tension I didn’t know I was holding. Not recklessness, but relief. I enjoyed a moment that required only my presence.

Nothing bad happened, the world didn’t collapse on itself, and I felt aligned in my truth. It was resonant with what the plant medicine/nature teaches when you’ve actually been listening. It doesn’t take from you. It asks you to evolve.

Later, during the long drive to California, the voice returned. I have come to call her my older self (or perhaps the younger me…but that is a story for another time) years ahead, a future version of me who arrives from somewhere beyond to course-correct. This guiding presence has shown up before, weaving together the inner guidance from previous years with my present journey. I arrived, another pivotal moment, tying those threads together with a quiet insistence.

The message: “Sobriety is no longer serving the mission.”

It didn’t feel like a collapse or a permission slip for excess. A reorientation to balance.

The pendulum had swung hard for five years, all the way to stone-cold sobriety. To understand what it means to let that go, you have to feel both ends of the swing.

I remember one morning during those sober years: cacao steaming between my palms, sunlight sharp through the window, everything so clear and honest I could almost taste the air. It was a life stripped of cover, every feeling raw and precise with no barriers, nothing to blunt the world, only me, awake and unshielded.

But the memory of my early drinking days lingers too. A cramped bar, sticky with spilled alcohol, laughter tumbling around me, the familiar blur spreading through my limbs. I would chase numbness, letting the noisy clamor drown out the ache, reaching for one more drink just to make my own skin bearable. The blur was a comfort, a haze between myself and the parts of me I could not face.

Both extremes gave me everything they could. Yet, it appears neither was the destination. The center, not compromise, but integration, was always where this was headed.

It reminded me of how, on my 39th birthday, alone in Florence, Italy, I realized my future purpose was to connect more with people. I needed to learn new lessons that required real human connection. Not distant observation or the safety of sobriety, but the real, sometimes messy, experience of being with people where they are. And maybe this is a part of the prayer I created three years ago to be in honest relations with the world.

How do I know what I’ve learned matters if I don’t practice it in a relationship?

The pendulum isn’t swinging wildly anymore. It’s making small, conscious movements. Finding what harmony actually feels like in a body that has known both extremes.

Am I not sober because I occasionally indulge?

Am I an addict because I return to something that once controlled me?

Or am I learning, finally and slowly, what it means to choose?

To be genuinely sovereign in my relationship with pleasure, with medicine, with the full spectrum of what it means to be alive?

What about you? How do you define real choice for yourself?

Where do you locate sovereignty in your own life, especially in your relationships with longing, pleasure, or old patterns?

I am sober in my choices when navigating the relationship to life. That is the lesson that mattered. Not the substances. The self-knowledge underneath them.

The identity linked to sobriety doesn’t live here anymore. And neither does the identity that needed it to survive.

Psychedelics have a body count. The casualties are not just old habits left behind, but the personas, coping strategies, and myths we outgrow along the way.

Every version of me that had to die so the next one could breathe; the alcoholic, the ascetic, the one who confused clarity with control, she’s buried somewhere I visit with flowers at her grave in reverence.

This is what integration actually costs.

Not your vices. Not your pleasure. Not even your habits.

Your attachment to who you thought you were becoming.

Are you willing to pay it?

When I let the question land in my body, there is a slow tightening in my chest, a hollow ache spreading out behind my ribs. My palms feel warm, almost restless, and a quiet knot settles low in my belly. It is the weight of something real and irreversible. I can feel the cost, alive and pulsing, not just as an idea but as a truth I carry under my skin.

I have sat with enough people mid-ceremony, mid-dissolution, mid-becoming to know this: the cost I paid is not unique to me.

The psychedelic experience has a body count that extends far beyond sobriety.

Part Three is where we go there.