Psychedelics as Pathways

The Role of Psychedelics in Soul Remembrance

Photo by Austin Neill

I have published essays on psychedelic harm reduction since losing a friend to death during a plant dieta in 2021, shortly after undergoing harmful dynamics in a psychedelic soft cult with the School of Consciousness Medicine. These essays are published on Mad In America. All of this happened nearly four years ago. Despite the disorientation, I now feel grateful for the re-emergence of psychedelics in our culture.

I carry respect for what I traversed in 2020 with the School of Consciousness Medicine. It was an amplified experience into all that can go awry in psychedelic containers. I was flooded with the shadows of my psyche with no defenses to escape. When I ingested mushrooms and MDMA every other week for six months in our training, there was no room to avoid the big black bag of undigested sorrow and terror looming behind me. Back then, I had a voracious appetite for podcasts, books, and direct experiences with psychedelics, as I believed they held a key to accessing my soul.

Now, in 2025, I sit in my living room with several books laying on the wooden table beside me, each one a doorway to a different world: The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity by Jerry B. Brown and Julie M. Brown, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, Credo: R.D. Laing and Radical Therapy by Andrew Feldmar, and Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart by my therapist and mentor Bruce Sanguin.

Seven years after first reading How to Change Your Mind, I am still enamored by empathogens and entheogens and the doorways of experience they open for us. In a mentoring session with Andrew Feldmar a couple of years ago, he said, “Psychedelics are amplifiers; they do not have a particular agenda themselves.” This resonates with me. Depending on who, where, and how I relate to empathogens and entheogens, my experience with them is deeply informed. The set and setting matter.

Empathogens and entheogens provide deep spiritual insights, but they can be utilized for life-destroying or life-enhancing ways of being. Everything depends on our relationship with them. What are we seeking? For me, I was seeking the recovery of my true self and a path to love.

Before my first psychedelic-assisted session with a guide in Boulder six years ago, my mother sent me a desperate message: “When will you stop? When are you going to have enough of your healing?” Her ego was crying out to me, pleading not to change and not to leave the role, the mask, the performance—"the good sweet Tara," the counselor. The image we had constructed for the last twenty-nine years was what they wanted: “We like you being who we want you to be for us.”

There was a roaring lion inside me that could no longer live in her cage. I wanted to live my life authentically. I did not want to die a performed life. I did not want to look in the mirror, wondering, “Am I true to my soul?”

As Mary Oliver says in her poem Journey:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

The path to soul recovery has not been easy; it truly was a wild night with howling, raging winds for many months and years, as Mary Oliver describes. The coldness was miserable. There were countless moments of purging all that was not love. The days and nights of aloneness felt immense, as if my body floated in space for eternity.

Along the journey, many people cried to me, “Mend my life.” This echoes my early experiences in my family system. Rather than my parents being whole individuals, they sought me to fill their emptiness. This pattern of feeling I needed to fill others’ emptiness haunted me throughout the journey, but I refused to succumb. I kept saying "No" to every person who wanted to use me.

I tried all the trendy new age methodologies, techniques, healings, technologies, tools, psychological and spiritual tricks. Most of these methods deepened my hypnosis and my compulsion to perform, ultimately teaching me a crucial lesson: the soul does not thrive when asked to perform its healing journey! My soul returned to me through simple means—being present with my mentor, writing, singing, engaging in psychedelics within an agendaless container, interspecies communication, and connecting with friends who accept me as I am.

This is why I work through an agendaless lens as a therapist. Rather than seeking to change my clients, my task is to accept them as they are and to shed light on any unethical treatment they have endured. From firsthand experience in my training as a psychotherapist, I learned to perform scripts to progress my clients and to train them to perform for me. Such performances never benefited my soul or those I worked with. The most beautiful healing I have witnessed as a psychotherapist emerges from authentic connection, which cannot be rehearsed—it simply is.

I believe this is essential for the future of psychedelic-assisted therapy. We need to create spaces where people do not feel compelled to perform during their experiences.

Within an authentic setting, empathogens and entheogens provide a gateway to the journey of soul remembrance. They can support us in accessing our innate heartbeat and unique way of moving in the world—the one that was silenced under conditions of abuse, lovelessness, and neglect. Instead of learning from external forces dictating how the world works, we can learn about the world from our own experiences. This is a feminine kind of knowing—indirect, subtle, fostering a connection from within to meet the outer world. A tragic loss from childhood abuse and living in a dominator culture is the loss of imagination, sensate perception, and the suppression of our unique movement and eros.

Psychedelics can help us recover the deeper questions that lead us to our true lives:

What delights us? What repulses us? Who do we love? What allures us? What gifts do we want to create for the world? What do we love to do? What do we hate? What’s our style? Who is our anam cara? Who do we truly want to know on a deeper level? Where do we live? What is our work to do in the world? What kinds of conversations do we enjoy having?

When there is severe trauma surrounding a person's essence, accessing their truth can be nearly impossible. They may have been so manipulated, controlled, and dominated, shaped into beings that are not themselves, with their bodies hardened by performance, scripts, and hypervigilance in pleasing others.

This is the lion in the cage. Have you ever visited the zoo and seen a majestic lion lying behind glass? It’s devastating. Look into his eyes—what do you see? Likely, you see a being whose essence has been thwarted. He has been asked to perform for the zookeepers, confined to his small cage, eating on demand, on display for the public, not in his agency, but at the whim of his keepers. This is what happens to us as humans in the face of relational trauma. We are often asked to live in cages instead of existing freely, moving through the forests and rivers as we feel called.

My mentor says, “True healing is the capacity to fully relax in the presence of another.” To relax around another means we no longer need to perform, contort, or shape-shift to appease them. To relax in front of another requires the experience of being unconditionally loved—to simply be, for our being to be enough. We need to surround ourselves with others who no longer try to confine us, dictating when to eat, drink, make love, sleep, or work. This is not freedom, and the soul cannot thrive without freedom.

Psychedelics can reconnect us with our wildness, our souls, and our natural ways of moving in the world. Yet, they will not achieve this if offered within cages. Imagine being a lion on five grams of mushrooms in a cage. What impact would that have on your psyche? I hope we carefully consider this as the psychedelic renaissance unfolds and we become more intentional about providing these medicines in environments that foster the emergence of each person's unique soul.

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I’m left with curiosities…

Is the full medicalization of these medicines truly best for its recipients? Are ketamine clinics supporting people in the recovery of root issues, or are they performing as Band-Aids, sending people back into the system to perform American functionality? How can we create more ethical spaces without incorporating oppressive bureaucracy and regulation around these medicines? Are we honoring Indigenous cultures' relationships to these medicines by patenting and regulating them?

Our mental health as a country is suffering as much as at any other time, if not more. We have some serious work to do on every cultural level—socioeconomically, politically, and religiously.

Hopefully, we can all come together with our unique gifts and support one another’s aliveness and create never-before-seen ways of creating a life-enhancing culture.

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In 2025, I aim to send an article once a month on the topics of psychedelic-assisted therapy, childhood trauma, Goddess Culture, ecopsychology, phenomenology, and existential psychotherapy. My attention is also being directed to a bigger writing project, publishing an album called Wild Cathedrals of Love, with 13 songs, learning jiu-jitsu and MMA, deepening and expanding my Psychotherapy Practice, and making money to live!

I deeply appreciate all of you who have followed my work through this substack, and I am grateful to be part of this community with you.

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Here is a link to my published single from Wild Cathedrals of Love:

With a wild heart,
Tara