The Curiously Hopeful Pinhole Of Evolution

2025 was a pivotal year for me personally. I had spent much of the last ten years ripping open the walls and floorboards of my 32 years of life with primarily one question: “Why?”. Once I found myself sitting in a pile of wires from my mind, the plumbing of my experience taken apart and cleaned out, all freshly piled up and set aside, I knew it was finally time to spend a year laying a new foundation. 
Realizing after much exasperation, study and reflection that explanations are not answers and even the most concise information won’t break down walls, or open the locked doors of hearts and minds that aren’t ready to receive. 

I spent much of that time diving into social psychology, philosophy, politics, history, personal development, attachment styles, the enneagram, metal health, going to therapy and more. Trying every angle out of curious desperation to understand what makes us who we are and why. I was unaware however, that as I was accumulating all this knowledge and information about my external world, I had neglected to proportionally broaden my perspective of my internal world. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot about myself. I grew, integrated new perspectives and ideas, but most of this work was disconnected, only mental and intellectual. I was renovating a house that had a basement I didn’t even know about. Unaware of how I allowed my childlike love for life to be slowly chipped away:

Comparison told me I should be more and have more, which devolved into self consciousness, envy and shame. 
Judgement scolded me to always be right, and notice everything that’s wrong.
Expectation kept me dependent on outside variables to feel internal peace. It devolved into striving, grasping, discontentment and self pity.
Like a game of ping pong that gets played in a circle, it’s a great recipe for making peace impossible.

There finally came a point when I was so black pilled, at a loss, nihilistic, depressed, feeling like existence was pointless and tired of beating my head against the wall that I realized something fundamental was broken. Something about the way I related to my outer world and inner world needed to change.

I think everyone has a different tolerance for the looping lessons life uses to teach us how to grow. Some people seem to create impenetrable bunkers of certainty, gritting their teeth and stubbornly living out their entire lives with white knuckles, never letting go. Sometimes we run in fear and avoidance while grasping the leash of the beast it’s attached to, thinking it’s chasing us when we’re actually the one dragging it along. Others stumble blindly, struggling to make their way to the curiously hopeful pinhole of evolution and sadly leave this world prematurely. I was there somewhere in the middle of them all.

Until this point I had never examined the origin or nature of my thoughts, or sat in silence with an emotion long enough to feel where it manifests in my body, let alone understand it. So much of my inner world was divided, mind and body divorced, spirit neglected. I had tried guided meditation a few times, found it intriguingly relaxing, but never thought much of it. One day however, when I was on the cusp of reevaluating my inner world, I became interested in consciousness studies. After all, it falls perfectly into my curiosity about how we become who we are and it was a realm I hadn’t explored yet. I started learning about the cognitive and biological benefits of meditation and started doing guided meditation more regularly. Eventually coming across interesting studies on dreaming, exploring the subconscious mind and the mystery behind lucid dreaming and out of body experience. I had experienced sleep paralysis, night terrors, and one or two out of body experiences in my late teens and 20’s and was always mystified by them. I began practicing regular meditation with binaural beats or hemi-sync in hopes of understanding for myself, and at the very least get a 20-30min recharge for the second half of my day. (A binaural beat is a type of audio track which plays a slightly different tone in each ear. Your brain picks up on the difference between the two frequencies and depending on that difference it can help entrain your own brain to move into a different brainwave state: delta, theta, beta, alpha, gamma). I did this practice for about 6 months and experienced much benefit when it came to regulating my emotions and energy, as well as some profound visions.

Over the months leading to the end of 2024 I could feel a positive tilt happening internally. I was beginning to feel more at peace and even a lightheartedness that I’d not felt in a very long time. I had a sense of forward momentum and equanimity that I wanted to maintain and push forward. Which is why when a couple good friends invited me to join them on a meditation and plant medicine retreat in January of 2025,
I said yes.