I don't trust easily, certainly not to a white coat simply because of the letters after their name, and not to a shaman because they’re pouring vine, or someone barefoot in linen just because they carry the aesthetics of wisdom. Any trust I give to anyone outside of myself needs to be earned. What I actually trust is the practice itself: paying attention, the investigation, turning inward, feeling for the Truth, and then making the best decision I can with what all things considered. It isn't a defined and strict belief system, but simply a method and a philosophy that keeps me learning, listening and attuned to what’s right for me in every moment. It's the root that the rest of this grows out of, and the thing that keeps me from ever locking myself into a jail cell when the door is left wide open. I’ve learned that when my mind is set and closed, I cut myself off from expansion, evolution, and the possibility of something far greater than I could have imagined.

I love this earth with everything in me, and I choose the herbs over the prescriptions, yet when the moment called for it, I took the infusion when my body needed it because the others were working elsewhere. I've learned to hold grief and gratitude, wound and wisdom, and fear and freedom at the same time, one in each hand. I can accept the data and still leave the door open for God, intuition, science, the Sacred, and for the things we haven't built an instrument to measure yet. So much of the world wants to flatten the tension of opposition because it's uncomfortable to hold two true things that refuse to resolve into each other. Nothing is black or white, left or right anymore. I let both things be true at once, and find all shades in between because that's closer to how healing actually moves through a body, a population, and a living consciousness, like the moon's own pull on the water in us.

I didn't intellectualize my way through any of this. I read the research, sat through chemo, ate the mushrooms, and drank ayahuasca, and each one taught me something different because I let it, and because I stayed open enough to be changed by what happened in my own body instead of protecting a theory I'd already decided to believe. That's the difference between borrowed authority (as advice culture) and earned authority, between quoting a study and knowing the truth in my gut, in my own skin, and what it feels like when a belief I was sure of gets pulled open by something I never could have predicted from the outside. My ideas have been tested against my actual life. My beliefs have crumbled and my stubbornness has been lovingly smacked out of me, and because they had the chance to break and to be wrong, a truer version of me was born of it. I won’t offer advice from a fire I haven’t walked through, and I won’t take advice from someone who hasn’t walked through the fire.

My practices and protocols don’t come down to a supplement stack or a five-step plan to optimize myself into submission, because I've never experienced my body as a separate machine that just needs the right fix. I experience the whole web, all of it interwoven with all of it: nervous system, relationships, land, community, culture, and spirit. When I write about healing, I'm really writing about how a person finds their way back into their own integrated ecosystem, not how to hack one isolated part of themselves while the rest of the web goes untended. If one part of the ecosystem is out of balance or showing symptoms, we need to address it from a holistic “whole-listic” perspective, with compassion for the hurting and wounded parts of ourselves.

There's an edge in me, a stubbornness that I've learned is only useful when it isn't rebellion for its own sake. The spicier version of it asks harder questions than that: does this actually make sense, is it ethical, is it reciprocal, is it true, who benefits, and what are we conveniently choosing to forget, or ignore because it’s comfortable? I turn to research when research can actually answer the question in front of me. I turn to intuition when the punch in my gut is too hard to ignore. I turn to prayer when the fork in the road is foggy, and I try to keep just enough levity in me to call BS the moment a room starts taking itself too seriously, myself included.

Most of what I carry didn't come from a study or a clinic at all, but from lineages older than any of us, and people who knew how to grieve together and mark a threshold and listen to a plant before they had a word for the molecules in it. That wisdom isn’t to be treated like it’s a passing trend, and I try to walk with it the way that’s respectful, and carried forward in reciprocity. Ancient doesn't mean outdated, and that ancestral knowledge waiting for us to remember. We have the privilege of sitting with forest technologies like Kambo and Ayahuasca, but our lives in the concrete jungle are very different than those who use these tools in the Amazon jungle. My role is about translating that work into a life that actually fits the world we're living in now.