Nervous System Wisdom
Your body knows the way home
Originally published March 20, 2026 • Updated September 10, 2026
I was facedown on the side of the Inca Trail in the pouring rain, resting. Thinking about how just six months ago I was drunk and high off my face on cocaine, but now I was lying in the mud hearing voices in the Andes mountains of Peru.
Only a few months ago I had finally stopped drinking alcohol for good. I hoped. After dozens and dozens of failed attempts over two decades, I had finally gotten some sober time, only to dive headfirst into a painful and terrifying relapse the last two years. Like a farewell tour where you get all the addictions and coping mechanisms back together for one more swan dive straight to rock bottom. The endless broken hearts and self-abandonment and fawning and lack of self-worth finally showed themselves to me fully.
Once you really see yourself, you can’t become unseen. The toothpaste cannot go back into the tube.
I was waking up. My drug use had shifted from escapism to soul revelation. The trippy mushrooms of my youth had stopped being nice and started getting real. It was scary, but I was listening. They showed me doors inside myself I could never access before. They made me believe I could have a different life. That there was a version of me somewhere inside who didn’t have to suffer. So in 2017 at Burning Man, I put my addiction in the temple and prayed to whoever could hear me to help me. And I burned it in the biggest fire I had ever seen.
After Burning Man, I arrived home to the reality of my broken life. In less than a year, I had crashed my car, quit my job, and set my life on fire back in Austin, where I had lived for 17 years. I was 39. Wounded, broke, and broken-hearted, I fled. Back to my hometown with my ever supportive and generous mom. Freelancing, but jobless. Trying to find my way back into the system that had chewed me up and spit me out.
The alcohol let go and I arrived back into my body. I was in between worlds and selves. And feeling a desperate urgency to protect this freedom at all costs. To make sure I never drank again. And to do that, I needed to go into the trauma and face my darkness. But first…
Arriving Back Into My Body
Those first weeks felt like waking up in a hotel room that had been trashed by Motley Crüe. I felt broken and raw and exhausted. The steady stream of depressants and stimulants I had been putting into my body for decades had stopped, and my nervous system was on full alert. Danger was everywhere. Feelings were everywhere. I was drowning in sensations and boredom and loneliness.
What nobody tells you about early sobriety is that the nervous system doesn’t get the memo. The substances leave. The feelings don’t. Every sensation I had been numbing for twenty years came flooding back at full volume with nowhere to go. Danger everywhere. Feelings everywhere. My body sending signals I had no language for and no capacity to receive. I had spent so long at war with myself — managing, medicating, outrunning the darkness — that I didn’t know how to just be in and with myself. So I did what I always did when things felt unbearable. I found a way out.
I began making costume art. Extravagant festival hats that sparkled like mini shrines to my party life. I made art, burning my fingers with hot glue while watching every season of Gray’s Anatomy. I did this alone in the basement apartment of a house where violence had lived. Traces of blood still on the wall in the stairway. My father’s death in prison an echo inside the concrete chamber I slept in. The memories of obliteration and booze and pain etched into the bones of this place.
I ended up in the ER at 3am with excruciating flank pain. I thought I must be passing kidney stones or was riddled with tumors. Tests and a CT scan found nothing. They sent me home with an IBS diagnosis and told me to drink more water.
The searing burning in my back quickly went from occasional nights to chronic, daily, constant pain. Everything hurt and no one could tell me why. So naturally, I went online and met a gorgeous man and within a month decided to meet him in person in Chile. I said yes, because if I couldn’t have my booze, I was definitely going to overdose on love and sex instead. What could go wrong?
Drowning in Self-Abandonment
After a hot and heavy online whirlwind, I landed in Lima on Christmas Eve. The back of the bus to Valparaiso was a blur of hands and mouths and chemical reactions. We arrived to the art swelled city built as if it rose out of the sea and I fell in love. With the color and texture and aliveness of the place. I was so far outside my comfort zone, but here I could be someone else. I was free.
I abandoned myself into the familiar high. Drowning myself in the lust and intrigue and wildness of running away from my life. The deeper I fell into the fantasy, the more he started to pull away. After a week, I felt the familiar avoidance and disappointment. He retreated further. And my anxious, not-good-enough, insecure, body shaming, self-consciousness I hid with alcohol had nowhere to hide. And it was clear he was walking back all the promises about building a life together. I was too much and he wasn’t into me. It was happening again.
I may not have been drinking anymore, but I was definitely not sober. I’d just traded booze for boys, as was my pattern. Which is how Spirit had cleverly tricked me into coming to South America in the first place. I created an opportunity to face myself on such a grand scale that even I was even laughing and the perfection of it all. It would almost be funny, if it wasn’t so fucking tragic.
The Calling on the Mountain
Two weeks later, I found myself violently ill in a hostel in Cuzco, Peru, with stage 2 altitude sickness and food poisoning. Adventure Man was hiking the Inca Trail, flirting with all the 22-year-olds that undoubtedly surrounded him. I had turned back on the morning of the 2nd day when I awoke at 4 am to the most spectacular array of stars I had ever seen, while also becoming violently ill out of every orifice at the same time. It took 7 hours to crawl back down the mountain in the rain, hallucinating and questioning my very existence.
It was in a fever dream on the Inca Trail that Grandmother Ayahuasca appeared to me in a vision, her ancient face coming out of the mountain. She asked me softly, “It’s time. Are you finished with this way of life yet?”
I knew the answer but wasn’t ready to face it. I was too sick, too sad, too humiliated, too busy dying on the side of a Peruvian mountain to know what it even meant, this calling. But the question lodged itself somewhere deep. Are you finished with this way of life yet? No judgement or pressure. Just an invitation from an ancient and mysterious source I didn’t know yet, but already knew completely. And she was asking with infinite patience if I was ready to come home.
That was only the beginning of my journey to find out what home actually meant. A winding path back to aliveness found through my unique alchemy of spiritual seeking, chronic illness, and plant medicine. A sacred weaving of body and spirit, heart and mind, that brought me home to myself into another lifetime. That turned me from addict to alchemist.
What I didn’t know yet was that getting sober was only the beginning. That without the alcohol and the drugs and the love addiction to buffer me, my body was about to get very loud. That the chronic pain and the mystery symptoms were just arriving. That I had been called on that mountain because the real initiation hadn’t even started yet.
Related Podcast Episode
EP 167 | NERVOUS SYSTEM WISDOM: YOUR BODY KNOWS THE WAY HOME
Turn Insight into an Embodied Way of Life
I offer coaching, plant medicine guidance, psychedelic integration, and ceremonial retreats and events.