Elul 5786: Six Not-So-Easy Pieces

As this year winds down, I find myself thinking about all of you—the people who have sat with us in Oregon and Colorado, the community members walking this path in ways large and small, everyone doing their own quiet work of opening and returning. And I keep coming back to a question I hear in some form from nearly everyone: how do I actually continue to integrate an experience like this once it's over. What am I supposed to do with it. For how long. Why does something that felt so clear and so certain in the moment start to slip through my fingers within weeks, sometimes days. This is one of the most persistent and least-discussed struggles in psychedelic work—the confidence gap between having a profound experience and trusting yourself to steadily carry its lessons forward. But it is also, almost exactly, the struggle of teshuvah. The month of Elul asks the same thing of us every year, in the weeks leading into the chagim and in the quieter days that follow them. I want to share six not-so-easy lessons I have learned by supporting this work for the last six years, and I beg you to have faith in yourself to engage with them all fully in the year to come.