Have you ever felt like you are on the outside, looking in? And everyone else is on the inside where it’s light and happy? And you’re just longing for someone to come, tap you on the shoulder, and invite you inside? Does it feel like happiness is always just outside of your reach? That your life is full of suffering one blow after the other?

What if I told you that the only person that has the ability to truly invite you in and take you into the happiness you are longing for, is yourself? Would you believe me if I told you the distance between where you are and where you want to be is in your mind? What if the change you long for begins in your mind?

But first, let me bring this back to the heart. Because I want you to know that, for me, this is not a theory in my mind. This is a story I have lived.

In case you’re new here, in my last post, I shared that there were many moments earlier in my life when I struggled to be here. And if you have been following me from the beginning, you have seen me process heartbreak and grief in real time. For so long, I felt like my life was defined by grief and pain.

And yet, if you would bump into me today on the street, you would not recognize me as that same person. In fact, when people who’ve come into my life more recently, see photos of me from ten years ago, they tell me I look younger now than I did then.

This does not mean that my life is free from grief and pain. In fact, this year has been bringing it by the boatload. And yet, I am here. Fully here. Tapped into a joy I didn’t know was possible.

Do you want to know my secret? How I invited myself into a life defined by joy instead of pain? It all started by changing my mind. Literally.

You see, the trauma I experienced as a child caused me to isolate tender parts of myself, and I believed the only way I could ever be safe is if I first made everyone around me happy and safe. So I spent my life tending to everyone around me. I became the adult in the room, able to read the mood before a word was spoken. I gave, and gave, and gave. Until I had nothing left. And those tender, isolated parts were just as scared and unhappy as before.

This wasn’t a character flaw or a choice I made. It’s what trauma does to a young brain — it wires the nervous system for vigilance and self-erasure, and those grooves get carved so deep they start to feel like personality, like fate. The brain builds a kind of armor, and then forgets it’s armor at all. For decades, mine held.

Then, years later, I found something that could soften it.

A friend told me about a documentary on Netflix called How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan. Each episode follows a different substance — LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, mescaline — and traces where it’s been. The early scientific promise. The explosion into 1960s counterculture. The decades of prohibition that followed. And now, the quiet resurgence — scientists circling back, asking whether these substances might actually help people carrying depression, PTSD, addiction, the fear that comes with dying. Old footage, researchers, and people who’d lived it — sitting with their own stories of what these medicines opened up in them. Pollan included.

I decided to watch the series because I was growing weary of the heaviness that defined my life. At first I was skeptical, to say the least. I’d grown up following all the rules, outsourcing my inner authority to others. My teen years were sober, quiet, and filled with volunteering and serving others. No drinking. No dancing. And certainly no drugs. But by the time I’d finished watching the series, something shifted deep within. My intuition, which is actually one of my strongest gifts but had been silenced from years of religious trauma, was waking up. Telling me it’s time. I could no longer live in the cage my mind had trapped itself in.

And so I experienced my first psychedelic journey and it opened the first door for me to begin walking towards those tender isolated pieces that I had left behind. It was not a fun experience by any means. In fact, I wept and wept, as I saw something I had been carrying since my birth.

That was the first of many healing journeys I have taken. I have come face to face with many traumas. Sat unflinchingly and let myself feel the depths of the pain. I’ve also been taken to the heights of ecstasy, held for hours by pure and Divine Feminine Love. I’ve seen lifetimes of my soul in unspeakable pain and heard the words, “This time you get to choose.” And so I am choosing. I am healing. And I am living. My brain is literally rewiring itself and I feel like a new person.

This is because, as I mentioned before, trauma wires us a certain way so we can survive. But when we do psychedelics, the brain opens back up — a window of time where we can literally rewire it. New neural pathways, forming where the old, scared ones used to run the show. Gül Dölen, the brilliant neuroscientist who famously studied MDMA’s effect on octopuses, says the therapeutic window isn’t just hours or days. It’s weeks, sometimes months, after the acute effects of psychedelics have worn off.

While there is so much I could share on the topic, and entire books I could write about my experiences, I want to sum it up with care and reverence. For me, these are not drugs. That is the word the law has given these substances. It’s also the same word, incidentally, that defines things like ibuprofen and Tylenol that many take daily without a second thought. Sit with that for a minute.

Indigenous cultures have been using these mind altering substances for thousands of years and see them as Sacred. They are treated as substances that have great power to heal. They are not taken in parties and for fun. Not used to numb or forget. No, they are used to remember. To bring up the forgotten pain so that it can finally be healed.

These sacred substances are not to be used lightly. Set and setting is so important. Having a trusted guide who can hold the container is invaluable. Not having these things in place, can actually bring about more harm than healing.

Equally important, is that window of time after the experience, when the brain is in a neuroplastic state and new pathways can be formed. This is why intention and integration are so important. There are therapists who are trained in this specific kind of integration.

If this stirs something within you, I encourage you to sit with it. Don’t rush into the first option you find. Do your own research. Find others you trust, who have experienced this and can give you advice. Help may be closer than you know.

Healing is available. Not just to everyone else. It’s here for you too. And the first step begins in your mind.

Want to hear more? Find me on Instagram @marshandmoon1 and Facebook Marsh and Moon. Email me at palmtreemomma@proton.me to be added to my email list.

For more on this fascinating topic, I highly recommend this podcast on On Being, where Gül Dölen is interviewed by Krista Tippett. https://onbeing.org/programs/gul-dolen-psychedelic-science-and-radical-healing/