MDMA Therapy Session: Toppling The Leaning Tower of Endless Goals
My third MDMA session: experiencing heart-opening "peaceful presence" and immense clarity of mind, exercising agency & realizing the toxicity of ego-driven political discourse.
Read about my first MDMA therapy session from December 2021 here:
Table of Contents:
1. Prelude: Inside the Hyper-Ambitious Inner State
2. Setting the Scene
3. The Trip Begins
4. Act One: The Revelation of “Peaceful Presence”
5. Act Two: “I hate Writing and Politics!”
6. End of Trip: “What Just Happened?!”
7. Post-Trip Afterglow: Living More In Presence Than Guilt
Note: I’ve provided a fairly comprehensive overview of my MDMA therapy session — before, during, and after. For those interested in the journey itself you can skip to section three of this essay, “The Trip Begins.”
Prelude: Inside the Hyper-Ambitious Inner State
Goals, goals, and more goals.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m an extremely ambitious person. I have a grandiose personality and have always chased greatness. My shelves are stacked with the most acclaimed self-help books of our time. Before the perspective-shifting experience I’m about to share, I used to fill out my “High Performance Planner” religiously — outlining daily, weekly, and monthly goals with propulsive drive.
I set expectations for myself in nearly every domain of life. This mindset has paid off in measurable ways: I’ve found success as a young independent journalist, writing for major outlets across the U.S. and Canada like The Globe and Mail, The New York Post, and The Free Press. I’ve even done interviews with some of my heroes and greatest intellectual inspirations — Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Russell Brand, Dave Smith, and Bret Weinstein.
Sounds impressive, right?
Sure. But that’s not the whole story. Not even close.
On paper, my life might seem like a string of wins — but those bullet points don’t capture my inner experience. What if I told you I’ve only read 10% of the self-help books sitting in my basement office? That I often feel chronically behind, like I’m sprinting through life just to keep from collapsing under my own expectations? Despite years of daily goal-setting, my average goal completion rate is around 50–60% (as in, out of all the goals I set for myself every morning in my planner, I usually only achieve half of them). Which means I’ve lived with a low-grade, suffocating sense of guilt for as long as I can remember.
Every single day, I feel it in my gut — this anxious pressure whispering: You have to write. You have to read. You have to meditate. You have to exercise. And if I don’t? That quiet voice returns: You’re a failure.
Not so impressive now, is it?
And as amazing as those career moments are — the podcast interviews, the bylines — they don’t erase the daily emotional backdrop of pressure, guilt, and self-criticism.
When I stepped into my MDMA therapy session on January 31, 2024, my intention was simple: to feel “freedom from fear.” "I wanted to confront some of the irrational — and at times even debilitating — fears that have plagued my life. But that wasn’t what the medicine had in store. It had something else to show me.
And I did my best to follow where it led.
It had been over two years since I stepped into the psychedelic ring. A lot was revealed from three narrowly spaced trips (two MDMA and one LSD) from December 2021 to March 2022 — after I became convinced this was something I needed to try — and I felt no necessity to jump back anytime soon after it.
For reasons far too complicated to delve into in this post (I will write a separate essay on this later), in mid-2022 I suddenly developed a severe psychosomatic disorder (chronic left-side chest pain without cardiac cause, gastroesaphogal reflux disease, regurgitation, and extreme hunger pangs) from anxiety and fear patterns gone rampant and it took a hard, painful year of re-training my nervous system using pain-reprocessing therapy from Alan Gordon and Howard Schubiner’s books to arrive at a deeply felt sense of inner safety, calmness, and healthy parasympathetic activation (the “rest and digest” wing of our nervous system).
Towards the end of 2023 I finally started feeling healthy again, unshackled from debilitating, somatized anxiety, and at the same time ready for a new adventure into the underworlds to gain fresh insight and re-generate the soil of my consciousness. At this point, I had been thoroughly convinced of psychedelic trips being effective, insight-gaining voyages necessary from time-to-time to disrupt automatic patterns of thinking. While carrying the tradeoff of being only doable on rare occasions, they are far more effective at gaining insight than any self-help book, meditation, talk therapy session, podcast, or religious text I’ve ever experienced. But I view all such tools as essential daily habits which over-time can effectuate emotional and behavioural change. In fact, several things I had been exploring in my readings, meditations, and past therapy sessions came to light in the most dramatic, vivid, and unavoidable manner.
Setting the Scene
It was the morning of January 31st. I was in an Uber headed to the clinic in downtown Vancouver, about an hour from home. I hadn’t slept great the night before — my mind was spinning with anticipatory anxiety. Specifically, I was worried about what the trip might “reveal” regarding a set of intrusive thoughts I’d been battling over the past few months (classic ‘pure-O’ OCD spirals). Even though I’d done MDMA therapy a few times before, the “what if” anxiety still crept in. Rest assured: that’s normal.
I arrived at the clinic at 11:15 a.m. and entered what they call the “jungle room” — a warm, plant-filled, slightly mystical space that feels both earthy and otherworldly. I was greeted by my two guides for the day: Xiva and Carson. Xiva (Brazilian, hence the unique name) is my regular therapist, trained in Internal Family Systems — the kind of inner-child, parts-based therapy that’s become foundational for me. Carson, the clinic’s founder, has evolved into something of a mentor and friend. He guided me through my very first MDMA journey back in late 2021.
I showed up in my usual trip attire: an oversized white hoodie and black Under Armour sweatpants. Comfort is non-negotiable when you’re about to blast off into the inner cosmos. I settled onto the couch, and we started chatting casually.
Before taking the MDMA, I felt an urge to share a few things that had been on my mind. On the ride there, I had scribbled down a list — almost like a self-justification or inner permission slip. I wanted to remind myself, and maybe my therapists too, that I had earned this day of deep self-exploration. I rattled off recent wins: launching my podcast with Jay Bhattacharya in 2023, getting to meet and appear on Russell Brand’s show, attending conferences across the UK, San Francisco, and Calgary. I also mentioned losing the 30+ pounds I had gained during the aforementioned psychosomatic health spiral in 2022 — cutting from 210 to 179 lbs with sheer discipline, personal training, and a protein-dense, calorie-restricted diet.
My little life-progress sermon lasted about seven minutes. In retrospect, I see it as me trying to prove I was “worthy” of taking a day to go inward — but strangely, it was the perfect prelude to the journey. These were all things I hadn’t truly internalized or felt proud of. I’d been too busy racing to the next goal.
Carson lit a candle. I blew it out, silently setting my intention. One last wave of fear flared up: “Are you sure this MDMA won’t mess with my heart or land me in the ER?” I blurted (MDMA is known to increase your heart rate but cardiac events are extremely rare in high-risk groups). Carson gently and instantly disarmed the worry — he always does. Then I took the medicine: a 148mg capsule of MDMA.
He guided me through a few rounds of calming breathwork, and within 15 minutes, I felt it — that warm, expanding, unmistakable MDMA glow rising in my body. “Okay, I feel it now,” I said with a smile.
Time for blast-off.
Carson started the music — mellow lo-fi beats, my personal preference over anything overtly “spiritual.” Lo-fi is chill, unobtrusive, and grounding. I put on the black eye mask, pulled a soft blanket over me, laid back on the couch with two pillows beneath my head… and let the medicine carry me into a beautifully altered state of mind.
Note: for more of an intro primer on MDMA and its qualities if this is your first time reading about it, you can check out my essay from 2022 on my first journey. In summary: MDMA makes you feel incredibly safe, warm, and joyful (why its street name is “ecstasy”). This makes it very different from classic psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT which carry the real psychological — and psychosomatic — risk of inducing fight-or-flight states in more chronically anxious people like myself.
The Trip Begins
12:30pm - Forty-five-minutes after taking the MDMA, the inner voyage began and I started off saying things like, “I’ve worked so hard guys” and other affirmations of “excellent efforts” I’ve made in life as Carson wrote in the trip notes.
For those new to this, psychedelic therapy works by having typically two therapists by your side (helping you process any difficult emotions or thoughts), one of which takes notes throughout the trip to record major highlights or insights from the journey.
Most things I will write in quotes from now on about what I said is likely from reading the notes where Carson quoted my statements.
As the trip began, I started working out the powerful contrast of “trying hard but always feeling behind” in my day-to-day experience I went on an on for sometime about the perpetual, self-destroying guilt of always feeling behind and late to everything. It was a pressing issue in my psyche. I started remembering being in sixth grade and joining an online goal-setting course to orient my life in the right direction — in the hopes that I could fix my chronic procrastination problem.
“I’m always trying really hard. Going back to sixth grade I’ve been trying to fix myself and be more productive but I’m always behind. Always drowning in the guilt of not getting enough done.”
As with every trip, a particular set of emotions and feelings arise which make it unavoidable to address. I felt like this is what I had to work on — even though I had no intention or plan to focus on my relationship to goals and productivity beforehand. Remember, I wanted to focus on my irrational fears which contribute to various forms of anxiety in my life.
—
Next, I began to weave in a new piece — a felt, embodied insight in my experience — into the trip which has taken me several months to fully understand and unpack.
I started “discovering self-agency.”
I began exercising this freeing, somewhat new muscle of agency by “talking instead of going inwards.” At one point I vividly recall Xiva and Caron up close sitting right in front of me on the couch as I briefly opened my eye-mask and I said something like “I don’t need any help…I wanna do what I want.”
I recall several times saying things like “I wanna do what I want, I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do. This is my trip.”
“I can explore whatever I want [in my mind]. This is my journey. I can do whatever I want.”
I stated this sentiment probably a dozen times interlaced with self-doubts of “is this okay? Can I do this?”
In between these affirmations, I asked Xiva several times “Is that okay?” “Are you sure?” “Is this bad?” “Or do you want me to have some kind of spiritual, productive experience?”
(Another brief note to newcomers to the psychedelic world. Often times what you are saying in the trip isn’t coherent or perfectly logical as you might guess. But it does often capture deep parts of your psyche)
I was battling these two very powerful parts gestating inside me: one which wanted the freedom to self-explore and be released from the prison of constant self-imposed goals and another which felt like extremely guilty and self-judgmental.
The former part felt like this oceanic wellspring of freedom I had at my disposal while the latter was like a rational, meaning-making, scientifically-minded judge who needs perpetual “reasons” to do things, rather than the experience itself being enough.
I wanted to enjoy the joyous, freeing experience that the medicine was facilitating but a big part of me felt like “what’s the point of that?” and wanted to precisely maximize, optimize, and engineer the experience to “improve my life” which is such a modern, personal-growth, podcast-watching mindset.
After all, I thought, I’m here investing time, money, and energy into this because I want to improve my life. I want to be more free from deep-rooted fears, less captured by my obsessive tendencies. I want to find love soon, more friends, more fun experiences and adventures in the world. And I got started on this journey using psychedelic-assisted therapy in 2021 because all those things felt impossible to achieve and the resulting can’t-get-out-of-bed depression, sadness, and abysmal loneliness through me for a wild spin. And since 2021 in my weekly psychotherapy sessions I’ve realized patterns of behaviour and inner narratives have shaped that depressive, lonely reality which hit a low after graduating high school in 2019.
So what the hell is the point of just having an amazing experience without “fixing” all these problems (even though externally at least some of these things, like making new friends and getting out more, had improved as I acknowledged before my session)?
I kept asking “permission” from my therapists to be able to guide my own experience — without any sense of “have-to” or “purpose” — and have some fun just for the sake it.
“Struggling to let go of control. ‘How will things improve if I surrender?’” read Carson’s notes at 1:35pm.
He then elaborated in the notes this paradox:
“For effort and control to work, it needs to be alternated with presence and non-doing. If efforts and thoughts do not rest, our will-power will quickly exhaust and we won’t be able to self-discipline. This is how meditative, inward peace solves issues. It the necessary, soft foundation required for thoughts and action to have motivation and potency.
Meditative presence is the fertile soil for productive insight. Without spending time in silence, ideas are just chatter.
This part of yourself that’s ‘gotta keep going and be productive’ makes silence tricky.
Too much effort scares away solutions.
The pleasant void is the restoration needed to enact discipline. Either too much Yin or too much Yang result in nothing getting done.
Your intellect insists on trying to solve the problem so hard that it won’t allow you superconscious inner healer to wake up.
Ideas of what healing is supposed to look like (“I’m going to work on my childhood and heal my fear on MDMA”) limit what healing wants to take place organically. Tripping means abandoning all ideas and finding new growth in the uncertainty + chaos.
Rav moving into more silence now.”
As Carson acknowledged at the end of the trip, he offered more commentary and psychoanalysis than he usually does when guiding trips, but he and I had developed such a strong connection and trust over the years that he felt it was appropriate.
While he was writing this incredibly profound observation, I was continuing to explore this newfound muscle of agency. As he alludes to, at one point as I was traversing my consciousness (like calmly peddling on a boat almost) I recognized “wow, there’s no trauma here. I thought this trip was gonna unravel more childhood issues like my first two trips. I thought my mom and x, y, and z was gonna come up….” Of course, statements made on MDMA are not absolute truths, but relative, experiential insights. Recently in my own self-reflective journalling, I’ve unearthed how the trauma of being viciously bullied in childhood (this is a euphemistic description) has shaped my abysmally low self-esteem and I know this will come up in future therapy sessions (with our without psychedelics).
Yet, in this trip I was forced to reconcile with a radically new way of being so counterintuitive to my ordinary perceptions of reality.
The Revelation Of “Peaceful Presence”
About an hour into this exploration at 2:56 I began to enter “longer periods of silence” after grappling with the conflicting forces in my psyche.
“Woah.”
“Wow, this is incredible.”
I began to “arrive” at this sense of immaculate, unbounded clarity in the present moment which I had never seen, but only read about and strived for in my daily meditative practices.
“The present moment’s never good enough but right now I’m liking it.”
“Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.”
“I’m learning for the first time about the present moment.”
“Wow, I can watch all my thoughts and feel my words. I can do whatever I want.”
—
This was the unforgettable crescendo of the trip.
Particularly this one, probably ten to thirty-minute segment where I vividly recall sharing this transcendent “peaceful presence” flowing through my whole consciousness.
Carson and Xiva came to my side as I wanted to tell them precisely so bad! It was so amazing!
“I feel this peaceful presence, it’s so amazing.” Carson asked me where I felt it in my body and I pointed to my chest and described the depth and beauty of it.
This felt like an incredible spiritual insight into the nature of my experience. “It’s already there” I recall feeling. I’ve described this feeling to friends as “the medicine pointed me towards this underlying dimension of peace, joy, and contentment in my consciousness using the brightest of yellow highlighters.”
If I imagine the medicine talking to me here, it’s saying “this is it! this is the meaning of life. Not the daily endless goals you set for yourself in order to one day feel accomplished.”
—
This was the first time in my entire life (only 24 years, so that’s maybe not saying much) I actually felt vividly aware and at-peace in the present moment for an extended period of time — which is rare for almost everyone. Learning this new dimension of life, you could say, was so radically novel for me.
That nagging part inside of me trying to “maximize” and extract the healing in this trip kept resisting the ineffable beauty of the present moment and returned again:
“Isn’t there something to do here? Shouldn’t I be doing something”
“Shouldn’t I be more productive right now and figure out my issues? I have a lot of issues, guys! Everyday I have so many issues!”
Back to Carson’s commentary in the notes:
Wondering why he isn’t motivated….
The trip was hours of self-criticism! (Trying to be productive and not letting yourself enjoy the experience)
This is a terrible motivator! No wonder you aren’t responding to this in your life and can’t find yourself completing goals you set out for yourself.
Silence + flow need to be in correct ratio. You are hyper-forcing silence and wrecking yourself.
(For the sake of brevity, I haven’t shared all the notes here. For those interested, check back at this link where I will post the full trip notes with photos of all four pages.)
Act Two: “I hate writing!”
At 3:41 I felt this deep necessity to share something incredibly uncomfortable.
Using my verbose podcast-speak (lol), I asked for permission from my therapists to speak freely while making a dozen caveats that this isn’t all of me, but only part of me, and it may not be true….and this that and the other.
After a few minutes of ongoing negotiation with my therapists to speak freely without judgment or over-rationalization — out of fear of what it may reflect about me — I let it all out:
“Writing is boring!”
“Substack is boring!”
“I hate what it has become!”
“I fucking hate it!”
Oh, the sighs of relief after! Liberating!
Using my intellect, I began analyzing and clarifying again:
“To be clear, everything I’ve ever written before I stand by. I’ve never politically sold out and spouted right-wing talking points which is popular in my space of podcasts. I’ve always been independent and spoke my mind.
And then I used a couple powerful examples to illustrate my feelings on the matter:
“Like the Trucker protests. What Trudeau did, freezing the bank accounts of those who donated.
Or those harmed by vaccine side effects. That was so horrible and I wrote about it because it was right.
But deep-down inside, I’m not interested in vaccines or Trudeau’s latest political antics. I don’t ultimately care about it.
I hare writing and journalism. It’s just for recognition now. To get people to like me for once.
I hate what it’s become!
I just want people to like me!”
As Carson wrote here in the notes, “not married to these statements” and I previously alluded to, these are relative, emotional truths, not perfectly absolute ones — otherwise I would never be writing after this or would be extremely miserable doing so! Still, this tell a very large part of the story: that my career over the past couple years had devolved into this ego-scratching pursuit of validation.
Carson notes,
Noticing fame motivates way more than passion about toxic political discourse.
…
This part of the trip looks like you’ve stopped fighting and allowing.
I’m going to leave this here for now, pending a future piece on how I wrestled with this deeply uncomfortable truth.
All I will say for the time-being is that I have found my true calling (for now at least) — what I’m most excited about — and that is writing introspective essays here on my original Substack which has been on-pause since 2022 as I launched my new publication and podcast The Illusion of Consensus with Jay Bhattacharya in early 2023.
My clear change of heart in topics to focus on after this trip is also reflected in the majority of my work on The Illusion of Consensus since then: podcasts on mental health, psychedelic therapy, physical health, holistic medicine, stem cell therapy etc. Topics which often touch on politics but aren’t exactly Left vs Right polarizing political discourse which I have lost a lot of interest in.
6. End of Trip: “What just happened?!”
The trip wrapped up around 5:30pm (nearly 6 hours!).
I was utterly exhausted but incredibly refreshed at the same time. I didn’t really know what had all just happened. It’s like I gave birth to something new and radical but forget what it was. I asked my therapists if that actually was a “productive trip” because I was so confused by what had occurred and they assured me that was some heavy-lifting.
Carson said, “that felt more like a psilocybin trip than an MDMA one because of the incredible peaks (the peaceful presence and career revelations) and comedown.”
At the end of the notes he wrote,
Hear post-trip discussion recording on insights about “fear.”
—
BEAUTIFUL
SURRENDER WORK,INCREDIBLE TRIP!
7. Post-Trip Afterglow: Living More In Presence Than Guilt
The afterglow from my trip was spectacular.
I felt released from the prison of perpetual, shame-driven goal-setting which had become central to my everyday experience.
The day after my MDMA therapy session, I sat with my therapist and found myself asking a question I’d never truly considered: What’s the point? What’s the point of all these goals I set — daily meditation, writing, reading, journaling etc? Those are all good goals to set, but what are they actually leading to? What am I chasing? That question, so simple on the surface, was like a wrecking ball to my entire framework for living.
I had spent years under the illusion that inner peace was a destination — one I’d eventually arrive at if only I could finish all the right self-help books, release all my traumas, meditate long enough, journal deeply enough, and stay on track. But that day never came. And in the silence of the day after, I saw the absurdity of it all: someone like me, who externally seems fairly accomplished and thoughtful, quietly drowning in guilt for not doing enough. Not being enough.
This wasn’t a new idea to me, not entirely. I had read nondual meditative thinkers like Adyashanti, Mooji, and Sam Harris, who teach that peace is already here — that meditation isn’t a means to an end but a return to what already is. I had rationally understood these teachings. But MDMA gave me a felt experience of that truth. It bypassed the intellect and spoke directly to the part of me that had been suffering under the iron grip of my inner tyrant.
That’s what I saw with such clarity: I often wasn’t reading or meditating or journaling because I wanted to. I was doing it because I felt I had to. I had turned even the most nourishing practices into instruments of control and performance. All these goals — once rooted in genuine interest — had become orders barked down from a suffocating inner authoritarian part of my mind. And no matter how many goals I completed, peace was always deferred. Always just one more task away.
The metaphor I kept returning to was this “leaning tower of goals” — a fragile, looming structure built from self-imposed expectations. Like the Tower of Babel, it was my misguided attempt to reach transcendence through sheer effort, only to find confusion and collapse. Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it was always off-balance, threatening to fall.
But MDMA helped me realize: peace isn't at the top of the tower. It’s beneath it. It’s what is — no matter the structural integrity of the tower. There is a wellspring of presence and joy available now, in this very moment, before any goal is achieved.
In the immediate aftermath, ironically, the best integration I could offer myself was no integration at all. I didn’t rush to transform. I didn’t try to create a new plan. I just dropped efforting. I rested. I remember walking around my basement TV room the night after the trip, pacing back and forth in a kind of childlike joy. I could live again. On my own terms. Without the whip of guilt behind me.
This is where psychedelics’ unique quality to give you exactly what you need ought to be appreciated. A self-help book or sermon might offer general guidance, but psychedelics — when used skillfully — offer something far more tailored. They mold to your psyche. They show you what you need to see. My MDMA trip didn’t tell me to abandon discipline or dismiss my interests. It simply showed me how the motivation behind my habits was warping them — corrupting passion into punishment.
Since then, I’ve been slowly retraining myself. More than a year out, I’m still learning how to ask: What do I want to do today? Not what should I do? Not what must I achieve? Just — what do I want? It sounds so basic. But for me, it’s a radical shift. And it’s still hard. I’d like to be the guy who wakes at 9, journals, works out, meditates, and reads an hour before bed. Maybe one day I will be. But even if I’m not, I’m learning to be okay with that.
Because the true integration is this: I’m allowed to be a work in progress. I’m allowed to live from want, not obligation. I’m allowed to find peace before the checklist is complete.
And that — that’s freedom.
The post is so compelling to me that I am finding a need to respond again. I copied and pasted this as the most powerful words for me:
“For effort and control to work, it needs to be alternated with presence and non-doing. If efforts and thoughts do not rest, our will-power will quickly exhaust and we won’t be able to self-discipline. This is how meditative, inward peace solves issues. It the necessary, soft foundation required for thoughts and action to have motivation and potency.
For me that's a "wow". But of course it's one of those ideas you can hear in words and agree with but not "grok".
I believe that all of the upset in reaction to the (obviously, from either "side", F-ed up) state of the world, can be seen to be coming from some seeming mismatch between what is "out there" and what is one's ability to respond to it. For me, the solution is the recognition is that everything is existentially ok (the soft foundation) which DEFINES and ALLOWS a response that is infinitely confident and patient.
This is a SPIRITUAL solution, even though it MUST be expressed in physical form to have an impact in the world of those who believe they ARE physical.
All of this to say that I am glad for Rav's experience and resultant conclusions, as I believe this is the direction we need to go.
I love what Alan Watts said. "The meaning of life is just to be alive"