Hey I’m Erick and I want a renaissance.

If we don’t ignite one, and future generations were able to represent themselves in a world court; the generations on this planet today would be guilty of crimes against humanity.

(if this sounds like poetry or hyperbole, spend a week rabbit-holing existential risk theory, and listen to "The Shimmer Series."

Because this is what I see, and because I am a child of the mono-cropped ultra-processed americana culture; I’m a little underdeveloped to aid in ushering of a renaissance. So, I seek out initiatory experiences to help me remember what I really am and what is really possible.

I’ve hunted mentors, practices, and initiations since I was a kid.

(practices = daily behaviors, initiations = seasonal experiences).

As far as practices, the top four I’ve found are:

1. Truth journaling
2. fear eating
3. Meditating / Dharma Sprinting (both train concentration)
4. Dreamcatching (recalling and communing with your night time dreams)

My journey started when I listened to Julia Cameron and started telling myself the truth first thing every day in my journal. I’ve come to call this Truth Journaling.

My life started changing fast after I made the promise to myself that whenever I feel my gut pull me to do something, especially if it scares me, I do that thing. This is what I mean when I say ‘fear eating.’ I also playfully have come to call this ‘eating death cookies’ (s/o Dr. Phil Stutz for ing up with that term).

Your entire life is experienced through the quality of your mind, and so a consistent meditation practices improve everything. Most people I know know they ought to be meditating but don't, so I designed a game called ‘Dharma Sprinting’ to try and trojan horse concentration training into modern life and, to my surprise, it’s the most popular thing I’ve written about.

These 3 practices sets up the 4th. If you learn to tell yourself the truth, to face your fears, and cultivate the quality of mind to notice your dreams and how they work; you will unlock a living dynamic relationship with a god-like intelligence that will nourish your soul more than any preacher, book, demagogue or affair every will.

As far as initiations; below are my big 4:

1. Vision Quest (what I’ll be talking about today
2. Darkness Retreat (the true yin to Vision Quests Yang)
3. Plant Medicine (from multi-generational lineage holders)
4. DEVA Piloting (creating/selling a dharma-infused artifact or service)

The vision quest will be the story I share today, but I’ll give a brief overview of the other three.

The Darkness Retreat is an ancient practice where one spends prolonged time alone in complete darkness (back in the day it was caves, today it can be a well engineered room). Some Buddhist lineages had 49 days as the standard duration. Most westerners do between 4 and 10 days. I’ve done a 4 day and a 6 day. The Darkness Retreat is something I will do the rest of my life, and is one of the initiations I think is a part of the renaissance.

Plant Medicine doesn’t need much explaining. I recommend you practice telling yourself the truth, eating fear, meditating, and dream catching before you decide to do plant medicine with any kind of regularity. I aim to do 1 to 2 significant experiences a year with plant medicine (multi-day immersions with multi-generational lineage carriers).

What I call DEVA piloting will likely surprise you.

Another way to say this is; if you only care about feeding yourself, you can learn to get by, but if you want to provide for a community, you’ll learn how to farm; and if you want to be a steward for the next generation, you’re going to learn how to generate and direct wealth.

However, the Darkness Retreat and Vision Quest are unique.

Specifically a 100% light proof room, and the dry fast vision quest (no food, no water).

These are special because they both remove essentials to reveal divinity. Long enough in darkness and you will start to produce inner visions. Long enough without food and water and the animals began to communicate, and you remember that trees are our grandparents.

Have you ever curiously explored what you personally find beautiful and why that might be?

I think there is a kind of universal beauty, but each of us has a unique beauty aperture through which we appreciate the divine. Like our iris or fingerprint, our personal sense of beauty reveals something unique about each of us.

I’ve always appreciated elegant designs; how less is more, how even less can be even more, and somethings, how nothing becomes everything.

The vision quest and darkness retreat are uniquely beautiful to me for this reason.

They’re masterpieces in design and initiation.

Dear reader, I hope you seek out a darkness retreat. I hope you do a no food no water vision quest. I hope you answer the call to be what you came here to be.

If you’d like to hear my trip report from my first darkness retreat, you can listen here.

For my second darkness retreat trip report, you can watch here.

The following is my trip report from my first 4 day, no food, no water vision quest that began October 13th, 2025.

This is dedicated to those becoming what the renaissance needs so that our children’s children can enjoy clear water, living soil, and a connection to nature and divinity.

Day 1

This was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Nothing comes close.

You are brought to a 10x10 clearing where they tie the 411 stringed prayer flags you spent the last week making to 4 trees. This creates a square. Inside this square, they lay down a tarp and your sleeping bag (you watch this happen because you just did a sweat lodge and you won’t be drinking or eating anything for the next 4 days and they want you to conserve some water).

Next to your sleeping bag is whatever you brought with you. The guide checks the bag. No food, no water, and no distractions are allowed. I had extra boxers, two blankets, and a long sleeve shirt / sweat pants I never used (it got into the 90s everyday and didn’t cool off until deep into the night).

I did my vision quest in boxers (100% cotton of course).

Luckily, I was also gifted a bug net to wrap around my sleeping bag at night by one of the other two questers who did this with me. Mosquitoes find me delicious.

I had some wipes for the forest poops (if they came), and lastly, I was given a sacred pipe with a herbal mix packed into it. Not to smoke, but as ‘my telephone line to spirit.’ This was what I was told to pray with 'when it gets hard.’

We stopped drinking and eating around 1pm on Monday, October 17th. The opening sweat began around 2pm, and by the time I was brought to my spot and everyone left after giving goodbyes, it was about 5pm.

However, my ‘ceremony’ started earlier in the morning.

“nope, not here”

I had arrived on the 112 acre land the night before and discovered that the spot I had picked for myself a month previous was too close to one of the other questers and that I would have to move.

This broke my heart.

If you know me, you know my default isn’t ‘spirit guided me here,’ but a month ago, I had intentionally walked this land listening to be guided. Through a series of synchronicities, I felt guided to a particular spot. I placed a rose at the trunk of two trees that reminded me of Caitlyn while my dragonfly guide perched on a branch next to me. The central prayer for this vision quest was transitioning from Erick the young man into Erick the father and leader, and the dragonfly guide felt to me like a helper sent by the soul of one of my future children.

So, on the morning of my vision quest, the leader of the ceremony, the other two questers, and myself go to my rose claimed site and it was evident to all of us that it was just too close to the other quester, and so I had to pick a new spot.

The day’s schedule was set and I quickly felt like I was taking too much time trying to pick a new spot. Because of my disappointment, I felt no connection to the land and couldn’t pick.

It's surprisingly hard to pick a spot to suffer when you have options.

Finally, in frustration I asked the leader “since you’ve done this before, will you help me pick a spot?” I said it with some heat, but he seemed unfazed. He slowly turned his head around for a moment and nonchalantly points to a spot - “this looks good.”

I felt slightly sick to my stomach as we walked back to the house to prepare.

A part of me wanted to cry.

Another part was hopping up and down, rubbing his hands together, yipping "oh baby ceremony is starting."

get ready, sweat, let go

I drank about 105oz of water and 4 LMNT packets before the sweat at 1pm. I’ve never made myself sick from drinking too much water before, but I think I did that day.

I started feeling nauseous (maybe this was the anxiety too...i was so nervous), and began having random episodes of full body sweat waves like my viscera was trying to shovel water out of me. Thankfully, I made it into the sweat lodge without throwing up.

Also, I somehow managed to eat a steak with all that water in me (one of the questers did this last year and said it was a good move).

The sweat was sweaty, the songs were beautiful, and I was feeling one of my favorite feelings in life; the ‘i want to run away and hide, but instead i’m walking towards by choice.’

Dear reader; live your life pursue that feeling.

the first evening

Can you imagine what you’d do if you were left alone in the woods, without food or water, and unable to leave a 10 by 10 square?

The first thing I did was start ‘setting up’ my space.

lol — i was done in 5 minutes.

Then the mind starts.

Because I have done two darkness retreats, I know what the medicine is — it’s grieving.

Some free game; we're sick from the griefs we haven't wept, and when you give up your distractions and addictions, without the ability to connect (distract) with other people, a stirring begins to quiver and before you know it, if you allow it, you are weeping.

I hope you never again hide your face when you cry.

I pray our children become adults that allow themselves to cry.

I think laughing and weeping confesses human’s unique divinity. Laugh deep enough and you're crying. Less known but equally true; weep deep enough and you begin to laugh. Like free diving, it'll take practice to not shut down the tears.

Laughing and Weeping are physiologically similar to orgasms; they all are the spontaneous spasms of sphincter muscles (take a moment if you need it lol). Laughing and Weeping are orgasmic. They are remedies to our chronic clenching, and so many mfers suppress their laughs and 'don't know how to cry.'

A body that cannot weep is like an arm dislocated from the socket. A full body, gut cramping, snot dripping weeping is like slipping the arm back into the shoulder socket.

A body that cannot weep is like a dehydrated muscle. It cramps, stiffens, and eventually locks ups. Weeping lubricated our souls. A stiff soul is quicker to judge, defend itself, and eventually kill itself early from decades of broken sleep and shallow intimacy.

A big reason I plan these kinds of experiences to give my soul a proper quenching.

My weeping started when I began the prayer flag tying. I wept at least once a dance the week leading up this first day. 411 prayers will break you open if you do it without distractions.

So, during this first evening, I wept until I started giggling. I laughed because I noticed my mind started asking "um, we're losing a lot of water here, should we consider stopping?"

I didn't wipe my face of the tears or my beard from the snot. I was gunna need that moisture.

-- -- --

Note: Tips for the weeping; unclench.

You can trust it. Unclench your jaw, let go of reifying your thoughts, allow the muscles in the face to pulse, and again, unclench your jaw.

To super charge this, begin to say aloud whatever sentence you most needed to hear from your parents that you never heard.

Some examples:
"I trust you."
"I'm proud of you."
"I love you."

If you have the courage to admit the sentence and you begin to repeat it with a relaxed jaw, you could start weeping in the next few minutes.

Night 1 - hummingbird vision

Once the sun went down and most of the snot was reabsorbed from my beard, I got into my bug net/sleeping bag combo…

and holy shit it was hot inside.

I run hot naturally, and the Texas heat this October was in the 90s. I laid on top of my sleeping back in my boxers, but under the bug net for what seemed to be 4 or 5 hours before the heat broke and it got cold enough to try to sleep.

As I rolled to my side to attempt sleep, the first thing I noticed was how drenched in sweat the top of my sleeping bag was.

like full body nose to tail sweat soaked into my sleeping bag.

“thats not good” I thought.

I used a mantra to soothe my thinking mind and slowly fell to sleep…only to violently jerk myself awake. Again and again and again.

These mfers are called ‘hypnogogic jerks,’ and sleep researchers aren’t sure why they happen but they’re normal. I normally have 1 or 2 once or twice a week before falling asleep. However, I remember when i’d sleep in class in high school (junior year ya boi would start his day with 3 chocolate chip cookies with milk and would crash the fck out by 3rd period math).

My hypnogogic jerks were very intense in that class, and I think the jerk intensity and frequency increases if a part of our nervous system doesn’t feel it’s suppose to be sleeping (aka not safe).

Because most of us spend the majority of our days not realizing we’re in a fight or flight response, our limbs jerk us awake.

Well, my first night in the woods, I don’t think I slept more than 20 minutes at a time. My honest to god best guess is that I hypnagogically jerked myself awake 20 to 30 times.

There was no fear yet.

dream vision: humming bird

At some point in the night I had a dream. It was a single image of a hummingbird, it’s wings out, it’s chest facing me with it’s beak up and to the right, revealing its face a little. Behind the hummingbird was a soft iridescently glowing pink light.

Day 2

Have you ever slept outside without a tent? There’s a moment, (it deserves a name), where the black of night first shifts into a slightly lighter illuminated shade. The sun is still half an hour more from cresting the horizon, but the night has ended and dawn has not quiet begun.

I woke up shivering. Oh God it was ecstatic to feel cold. I was still in my boxers, having never gotten cool enough to get into my sleeping bag. I got out of my bug net sauna and spilled my body onto the tarp. This land was gorgeous. I laid in awe, basking in the cool dawn wild.

I was shocked how quickly the dawn came and went. In what felt like at most two hours, the sun had risen above the coverage the trees provided. If directly above me marked noon, I guessed it must be maybe 7am, and thus began the ass kicking.

My spot did not protect me from the sun. There were about 6 or 7 ‘trees’ around me, but only one had leaves, and the leaves were above half the size of one of my thumbs. The trees were more like large shrubs, reaching about 8 or 9 feet.

It was October in Texas, and unfortunately for us, fall had not started yet. Each day hovered in the high 80s and crossed into the low 90s during midday. I hung up the towel someone brought from the lodge in the tree to create some shade, and for the next 10 hours, I slowly moved around my spot as the little rectangle of shade moved due to the suns progression.

The benefit of dancing with the sun and heat this way is that I didn’t much notice and hunger or thirst pangs. Throughout the day, I was repeating a mantra to tame my mind and I had some delicious non-duel moments.

After what felt like a full work day, the sun was only now directly above me. There was no shade at all anymore so I laid down and used my hands to hold the towel over my head. Sometime around this point I had my first existential breaking moment.

What the fuck…this is impossible. I’m getting sunburnt, I’m sweating all day, the sun is kicking my ass…and I have to do this sun wrestling two more full days…

I thought about quitting for the first time, but then I brought my mind back to the mantra. Hundreds and hundreds of times until the sun passed from directly overhead and started to descend into the branch line of some of my trees.

From the moment the sun broken the morning tree line until it descended below the evening tree line; I mantra'd and contended with the blazing sun. No grand insights, no deep discoveries.

Around what seemed like 5pm, judge by the position of the sun, I started crying from relief. I finally had enough shade to fit my entire body in it while laying down. I tried not to think too much about the fact that I had spent most of the day sweating. I also ignored how sunburnt my entire body was now.

As I laid there crying, looking directly toward the sky, a butterfly circled the branches directly overhead. The immediate somatic gnosis was she was comforting me; giving me a glimpse of beauty. As I appreciated her, hundreds of feet above her a hawk gently soared around my field of vision. The dance of these two grace filled sky creatures balmed something in me. I thanked them.

I proceeded to enjoy the dusk of the day as long as possible, because I knew once I got in my bug net sleeping bag sauna, that I would dump more precious sweat. The heat hadn’t broken last night until many hours after the sun went down, but the mosquitos would be out at dusk to feast.

Night 2

I hoped maybe my fasting biochemistry would make me less appealing than normal to them. For whatever reason, my entire life, I’ve been a mosquito super attractor. If I’m out with friends, I will get 4 to 5 times the bites. I think it’s a CO2 concentration per breath thing, but I’m not sure.

My hope did not pan out. Like some giant celestial clockwork, as soon as the sun was completely covered by the trees, but not yet below the horizon, my body became US war ships and those bugs kamikaze pilots. After catching a few sucking blood, I reluctantly got into the heat tube.

This night was like last night. Dumping sweat, I laid there for many, many hours before the heat broke.

However, this time I trusted the bug net more. The first night I kept hearing the mosquitos inside my ear and worried they had got in some how. I hit myself in the head enough to make my ears ring lol. None of that the second night. I figured out that the bug net was an inch or so from my ears and the mini vampires were hurling themselves at it but not getting in.

This allowed me to appreciate the sounds of the night. The main sections of the orchestra where the howling coyotes and the pack of barking guard dogs. The more sporadic instruments where the buck's guttural moaning and the female deer's high pitched yipping. I wish I had had a night cam out there because 2 or 3 times I heard something rustling just outside my prayer flags.

The first visitor was large and slow. I could tell by the slow methodical crunching of debris below it’s feet. My best guess was it was one of the large red bucks on the land.

The second and third visitors were smaller and quicker. Maybe coyote, maybe smaller deer, but because I was trying to sleep, I didn’t have my glasses on, and without my glasses, I am legally blind haha. I wasn’t seeing shit in the night, but I also wasn’t worried. The only real threat to my physical safety would be snakes, and I never heard any slithering.

Eventually the first waves of the deep night’s chill came on, and I attempted to sleep.

Day 3

I savored the dawn like it was the last night with a lover before the final goodbye.

I was dreading another 10 hours with the sun.

This was the day the dehydration changed my consciousness. There was no more mantra or meditating. It’s like my prefrontal cortex melted. My urine was darker than I had ever seen it, and around midday, I fantasized about getting up and leaving my prayer flags. I imagined it with the desire a teenage boy masturbates. I imagined it the way a magician visualizes a spell. In my delirium, I fully believed I had created a new timeline where a different version of me quit that day.

From noon to dusk, I cried and prayed. I cried at how unrelenting the sun was, how I couldn’t keep myself from sweating, and how hard this was.

I said I didn’t have a mantra but that isn’t true. My Sanskrit turned into “1000s have done this before with less.” I kept repeating that between bouts of crying.

1000s have done this before with less.

I repeated this to myself hundreds of times.

I imagined our ancestors doing this without a sleeping bag, without a bug net, without a towel to hang in the tree.

This mantra brought me a great deal of solace.

This can be done. I won’t die.

After another day of crying and sweating and deepening my sunburn, I made it to evening.

I didn’t cry this evening like I did the last. I think I was running out of water to cry. This evening as I laid on my back and looked up at the sky, I saw the same butterfly again. This time she brought a friend. They played in my field of vision until the sun went down. Again I saw a hawk soar through their dance a few times.

Again, I waited in my boxers until the bloodsuckers started invading me an despondently got into my bug net.

Celestial clockwork.

Night 3

The major event of night 3 was I heard a squad of coyotes kill something about 50 or 60 yards northwest from my site.

Have you ever heard the bloodlust cacophony a pack of coyotes makes when they kill? I hadn’t before this night.

And wildly, it not only didn’t startle me at all, it somehow felt comforting.

This is hard to explain now that I'm hydrated, but I felt so smelted down at this point by everything that there was no fight or flight response, rather, it felt like I was interwoven with the land and it’s life and a part of me was eating while another part of me got to give up the effort and strife of being alive.

I was the marauder and the mauled, and somehow, this gave me the best night's sleep.

Day 4

As the beauty of dawn turned into morning, I saw something that made me believe in magick.

Clouds.

I mentioned I spent the majority of the previous day crying and praying. My main prayer was for clouds. I begged. Groveled. No poise, but also no shame.

And today…clouds.

From morning to noon, I laid sunburnt in my boxers on the tarp covered earth, praying through the sacred pipe for the clouds to ‘cover me from dawn to dusk, cover to cover, shield me.’

I must of been quiet the sight. An Irish man turned lobster, rolling around on a tarp deep in the Texas thicket, periodically crying, wearing nothing but 100% cotton Hanes.

But I only cared about magick being real and that I had to keep praying. The clouds needed me. It was the last day. If 1000s of others had done this with less, I could do this today.

But then noon came and the clouds ran out.

Meditating in the shadow of my crucification

After the sun kicked my ass the previous day, as soon as the clouds ran out, I put everything I had in the tree to create a shadow.

Sleeping bag, towel, long sleep shirt I never wore, and my sweat pants; threw it in the mfkn tree.

Unintentionally, the laundry decorated Christmas tree shadow cover was shaped like a cross. Because of the angle of the sun and the location of the tree, even with all that shit in the branches, the amount of shade I had was smaller than a 3 feet by 4 feet rectangle.

Not enough to lay down.

So I sat in that little square, without a functioning prefrontal cortex, a man who believed he called the clouds, and I stared through space and time as my head began to sweat.

“meditating in the shadow of my crucifixion” popped into my head

Somehow I knew this was the treasure of my vision quest.

My cosmology can be summed up with: we each are crucified buddhas.

The buddha part of us is consciousness; that, like Viktor Frankl said, each of us has the choice in the attitude to which we respond to karma and the fate of our lives.

Our Buddha nature is present always. It is merely shadowed by our personal crucifixion.

Our crucifixion is are story. Our parents, what they did or didn't do; our traumas and our dreams.

Personally, I think what Buddhism misses is the ecstasy of the drama of those who bare their crosses. The crucifixion gave us Shakespeare and Goethe; the orchestra and cinema.

If it's between art or peace, I choose art baby (thankfully, we can have both).

What most Christians miss is; the thing that made Yeshua Christ was the state of consciousness he was viewing from. This consciousness is alive in all of us. There is no hierarchy of buddhahood. You help no one glorifying your shame, guilt, and brokenness with your obsession on original sin, or condemning all that you don't agree with as demonic.

The crucified buddha knows their essential nature is buddha christos, and they appreciate a good story. They carry their story like a great actor merges with their role.

My crucifixion today is this goddamn son (of god? lol).

After gawking at the timeless crucification block the sun, I eventually fall backwards, sprawled across the tarp. I no longer care about trying to hide from the sun. I begin to drift in and out of consciousness.

I awake to my right arm going numb. I could move it, but it was starting to tingle the way a lover’s head can begin to cut off circulation. I look at my arm and think “nothing’s compressing it, huh...”

A few minutes go by and the numbing continues.

In my dehydration, I wasn’t alarmed. I continued to lay there, sun beating on my face. After what felt like 10 minutes, maybe 20, I decided to sit up. Maybe I was laying on my arm in a weird way. A few minutes go by, but now in a sitting position, and not only does my right arm not return to feeling, but my left arm begins to go numb.

Very weird feeling this.

Never is all my years on planet earth have both my arms gone numb while I’m awake and sober. I sat there like that for a minute or so, marveling at the curious case of the boxer briefed man with no feeling in his arms. And without any mental tension, the following thought process unfolded.

It was a clear: choosing to stay beyond this point reifies my individual identity. Choosing to leave now honors prioritizing my relationship.

(for those who doesn’t know, the last thing the body does before organs start shutting down from dehydration is to shut down function to the arms and legs).

I left my prayer circle at approximately 2pm Thursday, 72 hours after getting into the sweat.

and proceeded to get lost for about 30 minutes lol.

Because I had to move spots on Monday, I didn’t know where I was on the land. The adrenaline of being lost brought feeling into my left arm but my right was still feeling like telephonic ants were blinking in and out of existence through it.

I wanted to yell for help, but I didn’t want to disturb the other two questers who were still out there.

So I did the only thing I could do and I prayed. I don’t know if its true, but I think tears supercharge prayers, and so I cried while I prayed for help.

This was the only point in the quest where I felt fear.

Eventually I turned onto the right path and I saw the outline of the sweat lodge. I saw one of the helpers and I yell “Where’s Ken.”

Woah.

This was the first time I had spoke and holy shit my voice sounded like…its hard to describe. I sounded like a mfker without any mositure in his throat lol.

The helper, we’ll call him T, looked at me like I was a zombie. He spoke slowly “He’s not here. I’ll call him. You’re the last one. Congratulations.”

What is he talking about?

Where’s Ken…oh, he’s saying the other two questers had already come in early. Is he lying to me?

One of the questers was a former UFC heavyweight fighter and the other was a former special forces operator in the army. The army vet had done this last year and had completed the 4 days.

Severe dehydration is funny.

A part of me thought T was lying to soothe me and I felt a flicker of rage. I got even more enflamed when the leader, Ken, didn’t answer his phone. I can’t drink water until Ken sweats me out one more round and my arm is still tingling.

T senses my emotions and runs up to the ranch house.

I sit in a chair in the shade, surrounded by drums full of water, the big blue ones you put in office coolers. Theres 4 or 5 of them, and my desperation mixed with my sunburn has me feeling like I’m sitting in an inferno of rage because I can’t drink any of this fucking water until I sweat again.

After what seems like 15 minutes T comes back and tells me Ken is coming. Another 15 minutes pass and Ken arrives with the ufc fighter and the special forces operator, plus a few helpers and we crawl into the sweat lodge. They place 7 heated stones in the middle, close the flap, and begin to sing some songs. I fall to my side, letting my body melt into the damp earthen buddha.

After a few songs, the flap opens and Ken hands me an ice cold mountain valley water. I bring it to my lips and as the first gulp of water enters my mouth a euphoric bliss raptures through my body that leaves all the orgasms I’ve ever had before laughable in comparison.

I was one with the Father in the Kingdom of heaven, I was Shakti and Shiva finally united, I was annihilated by relief and I wept until I laughed, took another sip and cried more.

For the next few minutes I wove between weeping, laughing, and moaning.

Eventually, Ken says "one of the gifts of vision quest is to remind us of what truly matters: water, food, and the touch of relatives.

Nothing truer has ever reached my ears.

I'll be back next year.

Outro

It's been 6 days since I came out of quest. I've spent most of it writing this in the morning and watching Alone in the evening. I haven't looked at my email, haven't responded to almost any texts, and have lurked on IG a couple of times but haven't opened up the flood gate that is my inbox.

Over the years I've developed an integration practice that might benefit some of you, and for others, hopefully, at least will be interesting.

Step 1: write the trip report

When I review my life, writing trip reports has been one of the central threads of my creative and professional life. My 'career' as a writer began with writing trip reports of my solo adventures into psychedelics when I was in college.

To sum up 20 years of cognitive psychological research: writing is a therapeutic psychotechnology that can make you smarter, healthier, and more connected to meaning.

When we write our experiences in the form of a story, we heal something in our minds.

I write the story as soon as I can after the profound experience.

Write honest, but tell a good story.

Step 2: uncover the call and turn it into a commitment

I think something that sets me apart from most psychedelic users I know is that I will commit to a specific single behavior change after any initiation.

If the experience doesn't lead to behavior change, you didn't heal, you went to the movies.

So as I write the trip report, I feel for what the single action is I can take that can honor the significance of the experience.

For this quest; the full story is a story for another time, but for the first time in my life, I'm prioritizing my physical health over my academic study.

I've haven't done this since I was a teenager. It's a huge change, because there is a lot of shame, grief, guilt, and judgement I have for myself in this arena -- but I had a special dream the first night out of quest that has made it clear to me that this is the way.

step 3: set the table and get to work

The unsung champion of effective behavior change is to redesign your physical and digital world to make the new behavior as easy as possible.

The new behavior is the prayer.

The commitment is my gratitude.

The resistance is the sacrifice.

And integrity is feeling myself yoked into a new shape before I go back to alter asking for help.

addendum 1: don't complain if you didn't listen

the harsh part of our innate buddhahood is that we actually know what to do, but we'd rather bullshit ourselves.

addendum 2: trust beginning again

theres a parable of a student of the founder of judo asking the master

"how is that you're never off balance master?"

The master says "i fall out of balance hundreds of times a day, its that i return to center before my students notice."

Our dharma is like this. Be willing to return to something you knew you needed to change 5 years ago, if that is what reveals itself as the behavior change to change.

Often, it is exactly the oldest 'knowings' that we have failed the most at rebalancing that are the ones that will most bloom in us what was once stagnant.

Song I'm Listening on Repeat

Rise - Lynnic

Quote I'm Enjoying

Learn to meditate in the shadow of your crucifixion.

Final Call:

I'm starting my final class of Mentally Fit October 27th. If you'd like to be a part of this final class, you have until Sunday night to join. Enroll here.