The science behind the stuff that sounds made up
There's a version of me from ten years ago who would have done the polite smile and changed the subject. Energy healing, ceremony, crystals as a "gateway drug" — I would have been like, sure, very fun, not for me though. And I say this as someone who has done yoga teacher training and listens to a lot of podcasts about feelings.
But one thing I’ve come to realize is that there’s a very fine line between "that's a bit out there" and "okay that's actually real"
The woo stuff is just science we haven't named yet
A lot of what we call "woo" is essentially the body doing things that the research hasn't caught up to yet — or that the research actually HAS caught up to and we just haven't heard about it.
Breathwork activates your parasympathetic nervous system. That's literally a biological response.
Visualization changes your brain's neural pathways. We now call that neuroplasticity.
And the fact that it also feels a little mystical and slightly wild doesn't make it less real. It just makes it more interesting.
Visualization works even when you don't believe in it
You don't have to believe in the outcome for the practice to be doing something. Elite athletes have known this for decades.
And I think about this man lying in a hospital bed visualizing his immune cells as laser guns — pew pew pew — while his daughter led him through a golden light meditation that he completely reinvented into a battle scene.
The key thing: you can have the scary intrusive thought come up during the visualization. You just can't end it there. You keep going. You see yourself on the other side. And something in your body starts to believe it before your brain does.
Your body is running a conversation your brain isn't invited to
I found this out the hard way, during what I can only describe as an experience where I genuinely thought I might be tripping out — completely sober, completely safe, lying on a table with someone doing energy work.
My brain had a very organized little question prepared. My body had completely different plans.
The tension in my chest, the buzzing in my gut, the thing in my throat that I've apparently been working on since I was in theater — my body knew all of it before I did, and it wasn't remotely subtle about it.
We are so in our heads. We are so analytical and logical and good at explaining things.
And sometimes what we need most is to stop explaining and just feel what's actually there.
The skeptic-adjacent person is actually the ideal candidate for this work
You don't need to be a crystal collector or have a dedicated journaling practice or fully understand what a chakra is.
If anything, coming in a bit skeptical means you're going to be genuinely surprised by what happens — which is kind of the whole point.
The people who are most moved by this kind of work are often the ones who weren't sure they believed in it. Because when something shifts and you can't explain it away and you're not doing it because you expected to feel something, that's when you know it's real.
And also, for the record: there's science behind all of it. You just have to be willing to sit with the fact that the science and the mystery can coexist.
You're allowed to want the whole thing
The career that feels right AND the version of yourself that's alive in other ways too.
The practical toolkit AND the stuff that doesn't fit neatly into a framework.
I think a lot of us have been treating those as separate compartments — the professional, logical, credentialed part over here, and the curious, seeking, slightly woo part over there — and the real work is letting them actually meet.
And it turns out there are medical doctors who have been doing this integration their whole careers, quietly, sometimes at great professional cost, because they couldn't figure out how to stop.
Want more of this?
Including a live ceremony debrief recorded less than 24 hours after it happened, a genuinely honest conversation about SSRIs that has zero shame attached to it, and the moment I told my guest I was pretty sure I was tripping out.