Personal Development
“Like a wedding night with myself. And the wedding night is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
That is how one client described his first MDMA-therapy session. Opening our hearts — especially toward ourselves — is something far too many of us struggle with. To love your body and your being without shame is an essential step in personal growth. Psychedelics often point the way toward self-love and acceptance, even if obstacles make the road hard to travel. I believe everyone should walk at least part of this path, if they wish to live as freely and fully as possible.
Further along this path we may encounter deeper knowledge — even wisdom. But that journey is never easy. True knowledge unsettles our most fundamental beliefs — personal, ideological, and religious — the very frameworks we rely on to manage everyday life. For this reason, such knowledge must be taken in gradually, bit by bit, as our capacity to bear it grows.
As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane wrote in 1927:
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
Used with care, psychedelics can deliver the truth about ourselves and our place in the universe step by step, in ways we can integrate. Used unwisely, they may shatter our sense of self and our understanding of reality too abruptly, pulling away the very ground beneath our feet.
The task, then, is to bring these revelations back to earth in a form that both enriches our own lives and serves humanity as a whole. Nothing less.
THERAPY OR PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT?
Personal development often begins from a relatively stable foundation, motivated by the desire to grow, explore one’s potential, or enhance quality of life – even in the absence of diagnosis or acute suffering.
Therapy, by contrast, usually begins with a problem, symptom, or condition that causes distress or interferes with daily functioning: anxiety, depression, trauma, or relationship difficulties. While these boundaries may blur even within traditional approaches, psychedelic work goes further – it dissolves the very categories themselves. Classic psychedelics such as psilocybin do not allow the process to remain focused solely on repairing what is broken or silencing symptoms. Instead, they call for a deeper encounter with the entirety of our being – a truth many only recognize through difficult experience.
For this reason, the realms opened by psychedelics must be entered with openness rather than fixed ideas – whether about the substances themselves, or about the nature, limits, and capacities of the human mind. Sometimes, sadly, everything we think we know makes this difficult.
BREAKING THE BOX
Clinging too tightly to rigid conceptual frameworks makes the journey rougher than it needs to be. On a larger scale, the same dynamic could emerge as a coming crisis within medically oriented psychiatry. While the field may easily find room for a “softer” psychedelic such as MDMA, the classic compounds — psilocybin, LSD, DMT — will ultimately break its box, forcing psychiatry to confront an uncomfortable truth: its worldview, and its understanding of the human being, is fundamentally incomplete — if not outright false.
In the words of physicist Werner Heisenberg:
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Once the genie is out of the bottle, and sufficiently many have had a classic psychedelic experience, it will be obious to all that psychiatry and medicine cannot provide deep answers about the human body, psyche or spirit. Until then, walking the psychedelic path may remain a somewhat lonely exercise. Hence the need for companions on the journey, supporting you as the given truths of our culture crumble before our eyes.