Are we ever done healing?

A few years ago, I came back from my biggest psychedelic journey with unwavering clarity. I understood the roots of my eating disorder. I knew what I needed to do. I bought an acrylic whiteboard and stuck it to my fridge. In neat rows, I wrote down all the habits and practices I’d follow during integration: meditating, journaling, yoga, dance, walking, reading, writing, nature, healthy eating, chanting. At the end of each day, I’d check off what I’d accomplished. One month in, I stared at a satisfying mosaic of little white crosses. Two months in, I had the biggest relapse of my life.

There it was — the pattern underneath the pattern. The compulsion to do everything right. Healing had become another form of control, and I’d been running it like a project for years. A quiet knowing woke me up from my trance that day, as I realized there was only one thing left to do: surrender. After all this work, it was finally time to just let myself live. To accept the possibility that I might never change again — and that I would be okay.

So I stopped everything. I stopped meditating. I ate pasta and pizza and multiple desserts every day. I swapped self-help for romantasy novels. I took a long break from psychedelics. For the first time in a decade, I let myself be a person instead of a project. Slowly but effortlessly, my eating normalized.

It was only then that I passed the threshold from healing into living and entered my post-healing era. But I’ve seen over and over that not everyone makes it. Not because they “can’t heal”, but because they get stuck in the never-ending hamster wheel of self-improvement. If you’re not careful, the work that liberates you becomes a cage.

There comes a moment in the healing journey where you remember your wholeness — where you see, clearly, that you never needed fixing in the first place. I've had that moment dozens of times. In crowded ceremonies. In a random church in Pasadena. In the shower on a Tuesday. Each time it felt final. And each time the old stories and patterns crept back in. My eating always told the truth: If it wasn’t normal yet, it meant I was still coping. Until the main thing I was coping with became my inability to just let myself be.

That’s the threshold you eventually pass: your flaws will stare you in the eyes and you choose — will you continue trying to eradicate them, or can you surrender and let them be? Deep healing work is episodic and catalytic. It may take months or years or even a decade, but it’s not meant to go on forever. If you never stop renovating in there, you forget that outside your four walls, there’s a whole world waiting for you.

This is the biggest pitfall of inner work: healing perpetuates a sense of deficiency. Because acceptance is the hardest thing to practice, we instead look for things to change. And we will always find something. As a facilitator in psychedelic ceremonies, I’ve witnessed this again and again: The people who come to ceremony every single month without an end in sight. I’ve also seen it on social media, where in an effort to eradicate stigma (admirable) people tie their mental health diagnoses deeply and permanently into their identities (unhelpful).

When self-development becomes compulsive, what feels like an act of self-love becomes an act of self-abandonment. Because the perfection we seek is impossible to achieve. Healing becomes a coping strategy. It helps us avoid a fundamental truth about human existence: we are flawed creatures.

After a certain amount of conscious effort, the antidote is often not more healing work. We don’t find wholeness by going and fixing the parts that don’t feel whole, we learn to be with the sense of lack, which is part of the human experience.

This is the paradox of change: you only move forward if you truly accept where you are. It was only when I completely surrendered control over food and my body that, within months, the fight was over. It was only when I unleashed my flawed self onto Hinge after a decade of isolation in the name of healing that I opened myself up to the relationship that would usher in my next stage of growth.

It doesn't mean patterns won't return. It doesn't mean you’re off the hook. Inner work doesn't end — it just changes shape. You stop excavating and start noticing. You stop trying to fix what arises and practice being with it instead.

My big surrender didn’t end my inner work. For years to come, I experienced nervous system dysregulation and shame spirals that didn’t resolve until I mustered up the courage to sit with Iboga. But healing no longer dictated my life. I tended to it when needed, without attachment. But I also devoted more time to all the other things that make life worth living: relationships, rest, work, play, and creativity.

There's always more inner work.

But there's also life — and at some point, living well becomes the work.

With gratitude to your journey,

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