I slept near a jaguar cave and fasted for seven days in the jungle when I was sixteen

Before I entered the professional world of nervous system regulation—or had certifications to my name—I had a different kind of education.

I grew up learning from elders in the jungle.
I was there when Gabor Maté was starting Compassionate Inquiry—collaborating with my uncle, who facilitated plant medicine ceremonies in the mountains of Mexico.

Before that, I had already done a dieta.

In the plant medicine world, a dieta is a ritual for deepening your relationship with a master plant. You work with it, sit with it, listen to it. It’s not a psychedelic journey it’s subtle, slow, and asks a different level of presence.

I had done one before but this one was different.

It was an isolation dieta.
I was sixteen.
And after the opening ceremony, I was guided to a hilltop near a jaguar cave in Mexico.

No phone.
No food—besides diluted rice congee every few days.
No journaling.
No breathwork.
No rituals.

Just silence. Stillness. My body. The land.

And a plant spirit that would become one of my greatest teachers.

The first few days, my mind did what minds do—spiraled, obsessed, begged for distraction.

But this wasn’t an ayahuasca ceremony.
It wasn’t a mushroom trip.

Master plants are more subtle in how they guide. Their teachings aren’t loud or dramatic—they work through the body. They take time.

This is what I now call my first somatic training.
Not in a certification course, but through lived experience with something far older and more intelligent than human theory.

The plant I was dieting with had a known physical effect—slowing the body down so deeply, some days I couldn’t move. Literally.

It was intentional.
The medicine works at the level of the cells—repatterning the nervous system from the inside out.

I was being stripped of the layers that wanted healing to feel dramatic.
There was no tapping, no shaking, no big breakdown-into-breakthrough moment.

It was quiet. Confronting. Real.

…something felt off.

In most rooms I walked into, it smelled like performance.

The way I had been taught—both by elders and in later certifications—was not about constantly “doing” more practices.
It wasn’t about turning somatics into a spiritual hustle.

And yet, I started to see somatic work turned into another aesthetic.
Wellness influencers copying each other.
Nervous system coaches parroting the same phrases like AI wrote them.

Somatics became content.
Regulation became a checklist.

But the thing is—practices are just part of the picture.
They help. They regulate. They reorient.

But they don’t always get you to depth.
They don’t guarantee integration.

For years, I’ve joked that my work is the “unglamorous” work.
Clients come to me when the shiny tools stop working.
When they realize the real work isn’t in shaking or tapping or ice baths or fancy morning routines.

It’s in how you live.
How your body responds in real time.

Because a regulated nervous system isn’t always about being calm.
It’s about capacity.
To feel. To stay. To be with.

I know—when I say “integration,” it can sound vague and word-salady.
But it’s not.

Integration isn’t something that happens just because you downloaded someone’s somatic course.
It doesn’t live in a perfect morning routine or in a stack of self-soothing techniques.

It lives in your actual nervous system.
In your real life.

It shows up in how you hold discomfort in a hard conversation.
In how you soften instead of snap.
In how you’re not chasing a “breakthrough,” but building a body that can be here now.

Yes—I have libraries of tools.
But that’s not the core of my work.

Because if you just want tools, YouTube has thousands.
If you want depth, that’s different.

The work I do is confronting.
It holds up a mirror.

It asks:
Have you swapped micromanaging your life with managing your healing?

Have you replaced hustle with hyper-vigilant wellness?

Are you still performing—just with softer branding?