There was a wonderful irony in my long following of new age spirituality, plant psychedelics (Neo shamanic) and eastern traditions, but usually taught by westerners.

Somehow my ego reveled in the idea that:

1. I was was becoming more compassionate and non judgmental, but at the same time becoming more ‘conscious’ than others (religious, atheist, etc) ie: judgemental. I missed that the simple act of living in the world as an adult, would mature and humble me.

2. I was getting ‘somewhere’ / advancing towards some idea of what healing / enlightenment / truth is. — The reality was I still had the same issues I did as a child, and my consistent focus on those issues was creating disease, not facilitating any healing.

3. My ideas about society were really progressive. — But in reality my progressiveness, became unhealthy and unrooted from my judeo christian traditions (note I’m actually not religious), and what I takes to keep a healthy, stable family together. Being married into a Russian family, I started to reconnect to some of these traditional values.

4. My Neo shamanic or new age teachings professed to teach past traditions, but often those teachings were scattered/light, and disconnected from my own lineage or ancestry. — I have both African and Slavic ancestry, and yet I tended towards the Americas or Far East.

5. Now that I had had deep spiritual experiences over a decade, I’m somehow now qualified to teach others. Even funnier was identifying as a healer — So so naive was I. I noticed a greater (and greater) disconnection between what I said, and what I did in life. It was easy to talk, and spread philosophy. It’s difficult to implement day in day out, with incremental change over years. Even perhaps more worrying, the community of facilitators, teachers and mentors I knew in the new age world were profoundly ungrounded human beings when I got to know them better, who struggled to operate in a material world.

I started to learn that my own values are mostly rooted in tradition, not because the ideas aren’t easy to understand intellectually. But they require years of training to implement, and traditions support that patience and maturity. Philosophies which borrow roots from everywhere, seem to be grounded in nothing. My own wisdom came with age, life experience and practice, not primarily through workshops, books and plant medicine ceremonies (those were intro 101 sessions). Getting ‘insights’ versus seeing through fundamental changes in myself required very different expertise and people to lean on. My wife, family, business partner and children have been my core people to learn. For that I’m very blessed. The final irony in all of this, is that I never regret any of these experiences. It’s all contributed to the person I’ve got to know inside, who was always there from birth, and I’ve spent a lifetime getting to know.