Every time I return to Mexico to apprentice with the Mazatec family, there’s a ritual that happens before any ceremony begins. We meet at the base of a mountain and begin the climb in silence. The path winds through mist and moss, past tiny shrines tucked into the rocks and places where people have been leaving offerings for generations.

At the top, there’s a small clearing which the family calls the portalito (the little portal). Here, before we touch the medicine, before we sing the first prayer, we make Pagos.

As the leaves turn and the air grows crisp, we approach that familiar time of year when families gather around the table. We bring out our favorite dishes, old recipes, and heirlooms that appear only once a year — like my grandmother’s delicate China, passed down from her great-grandmother as a wedding gift over a century ago. Our homes fill with the scents of cinnamon, sage, and roasting vegetables, and as we pour the wine, we offer our prayers of gratitude, honoring both the present moment and the generations that came before us.

Yet beneath all the warmth and nostalgia, Thanksgiving carries a complicated truth, which is a story that, for many, is both sacred and sorrowful. The holiday has become a symbol of togetherness, but it is also one rooted in the erasure and suffering of the Indigenous peoples of this land. It is no longer possible, or ethical, to feast without remembering the full story.

To honor the ancestors, we must honor all of them.

When people first step onto the medicine path, it’s easy to approach this experience through the lens of our Western conditioning. We often treat it like a supplement or a treatment that will lead to greater happiness and transformation, but this way of thinking makes us miss the deeper truth.

These are not substances to be consumed, but actual living teachers. They are intelligent, sacred beings that have been communed with for millennia to help humans remember their connection to the divine, to one another, and to the Earth itself.

Standing in the North here at the retreat center is a family of aspens, their trunks slender and upright, their leaves quivering in the slightest breeze. Aspens have incredible healing qualities. In fact, I often work with Aspen as a flower essence for those who experience anxiety. However, one of the greatest lessons these trees can teach us is about connection. 

One of the most beautiful truths about psychedelic work is that the journey itself is only the beginning. The real medicine unfolds in the days, weeks, months and even years that follow as we integrate what was revealed and allow it to shape the way we live.

During a journey, there are often moments that have deep meaning whether that be an image, a sound, a sensation in your body, or an encounter with something beyond words. These moments are not random; they are gifts. These moments we can use as “anchors,” which are living threads that you can weave into your daily life to keep you connected to the heart of your experience and moving you toward your purpose.

One of the most important things I’ve come to understand through my years of walking this path, both as a guide and as a student of the medicine, is that the medicine never works in isolation. It works in relationship…always.

That is why I so wholeheartedly believe in a wholistic and multi-dimensional approach to, well, everything!

They say a true pilgrimage begins long before your feet touch sacred ground and mine began not only the moment I boarded the plane to India, but 15 some years earlier when my mentors were taken by Rudiji to many of the sacred cities and sites. I heard the mystical stories, the way that myth and magic are woven into the fabric of Indian culture, quite the opposite of our “rational” Western existence that is really, anything but rational.