“I need to heal myself before I find somebody.”
I never thought that I would utter these words. It still feels incredulous that I would say something so profound. As a spiritual seeker, I have been committed to the pursuit of self-actualization since my childhood, and I have now arrived at the closest place of peaceful harmony and acceptance. After spending the last several months hopefully pursuing a girl while trying to fill the deep void in my heart, I realized that I had traumas and associated behaviors that needed to be examined and rectified before I could commit to a serious relationship.
For the first time, the confusion and disconcertment surrounding my suffering had unraveled, and I recognized my path forward.
This is just one of many unanticipated, transformative insights that I experienced over the span of five hours during my first session of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) therapy, a novel psychotherapeutic treatment that allows the brain to process painful memories and examine the root causes of one’s mental suffering.
Before committing to such a seemingly radical and dangerous endeavor—getting high on mind-altering drugs—that violated my family's ethical expectations and cultural mores (Hindu and Sikh background), I had to arrive at a point in my life where I felt the need for a fundamental psychological shift.
At 20 years of age, I felt wrought with anxiety and resentment. One year after graduating high school, my career began to take off in a way that I never would’ve imagined. However, my mental health and social life inversely deteriorated after some of my most meaningful relationships with others irreparably fractured. This all reached a devastating low point in early 2021, when I suffered my most painful romantic rejection.
After having foolishly exhausted all the futile means of convincing someone of my value, I was confronted by the reality that you simply can’t persuade someone to love you. You can't change someone's nature.
But you can change yourself.
At this point in my journey, I realized that I had to reorient my efforts inwards. The only antidote to outward rejection is inner transformation. As an Eastern-influenced thinker, I had been meditating with consistency for approximately a year; however, this practice did little to quell the cloud of misery hanging over my daily waking existence. I felt like I needed a more dramatic change.
As an avid reader of Sam Harris' work on altered states of consciousness, I became fascinated by the psychedelic origins of his spiritual journey. A series of revelatory MDMA experiences (akin to the mental state of Jesus, in his words) exposed him to the profound depths of consciousness and inspired him to leave everything behind and travel to India and Nepal to fully immerse himself in Buddhist philosophy. Having departed at the age of 20, he spent a decade studying various contemplative traditions.
How the ingestion of a synthetic compound could inspire someone to sit idly for 12 to 18 hours at a time, merely observing their breath, for several weeks and months on a voluntary retreat (as Sam writes in Waking Up) utterly mystified me. At the same time, it made me want to experiment in this realm myself.
After becoming engaged with this field of inquiry, I immersed myself in psychedelic literature for several months. Everywhere I looked I was stunned. Common across documentaries, books, podcasts, and even music were stories about overcoming fear of imminent death among terminally ill patients, sexually abused women who learned to embrace their trauma after a few sessions of MDMA and psilocybin, and war veterans who were inexorably cured of PTSD. These stories were incredible; I could hardly believe them myself.
After Michael Pollan’s magisterial book How To Change Your Mind convinced me of both the reliable safety and incredible healing potential of psychedelic therapy, I began to seek this treatment for myself. I encountered an experienced guide in Vancouver who offered to help me. He was formally credentialed, with a background in psychology and interest in Eastern philosophy. After completing a rigorous screening process and three prerequisite counseling sessions—wherein we ruled out any red flags (such as cardiovascular problems or a genetic predisposition toward schizophrenia) and explored my psychological afflictions—I was ready for the journey to commence.
My drug of choice for the first trip was psilocybin because of its association with explicitly mystical experiences. However, my guide said he strongly felt that MDMA would be a more suitable introductory treatment for the purposes of “heart opening” and for making it safer to “be in the body.” Having first heard about this whole realm through Sam's MDMA trips, I promptly agreed. We set a date for December 15th.
***
One day before the trip, my guide told me to set my intentions toward three of the most emotionally charged experiences of my life. Immediately, I thought of my recent social and romantic turmoil and made some notes. I arrived at his house and was greeted by lit candles and some soft, low-fi music playing in the background. He offered me my dose of MDMA in a 120 mg capsule, and I swallowed it with some water. While waiting for the MDMA to take effect, he guided me through a meditation, wherein he told me to get in touch with my feelings and become amenable to them.
A couple of hours in, the effects of the drug became quite salient, and I put on my eye shades, as recommended, and laid down. I began to feel rushes of extraordinary mental relaxation, clear thinking, and emotional openness.
I was surprised by how "normal" the experience felt. I didn't feel as though I was traversing some cosmic dimension or communicating with spiritual entities. After all, MDMA is not technically a “psychedelic," as it does not induce the kinds of mystical hallucinations that are characteristic of DMT or psilocybin. It is grouped in a class of drugs that are known as empathogens, which produce intense feelings of empathy and openness. However, at its root, “psychedelic” simply means “mind-manifesting” or something that "produc[es] expanded consciousness through heightened awareness and feeling.” Therefore, nearby compounds, such as MDMA and ketamine, are essentially considered psychedelic.
I could absorb the quality of my thoughts as they naturally unfurled in my mind like never before. Physically, I felt that my body was in a state of deep rest. A warm sensation hovered over my heart region.
With little control, feelings about my mom rushed to the surface.
I began to feel how my mom's emotional baggage had taken a toll on me. As a child, I had a deep-seated worry for her well-being. Was she going to be okay? Was the world fairly treating her? Some of this stemmed from paranoia, but that was a manifestation of genuine concern. My mom recently told me how I would come home from elementary school and ask her how she’s doing, receiving a positive answer (“I’m good!”) that I would reflexively reject: “No…I don’t think you’re okay mom.”
Though my mom never openly expressed her sorrow when I was a child, my senses picked up on the darkness lurking in the background.
Early in the trip, I began sharing a memory of my mom telling me a few months ago how she felt "dead inside" because of trauma she experienced as a child, her longing for her estranged father in India who she hadn't seen in several years, and her mother who passed away a few years ago. It was a rare moment where my mom had broken her hardened stoic demeanor and shared her raw emotions. It had left a vivid mark on me—and now I was able to feel it.
My mom's unexpressed grief had subconsciously wounded me.
I began to realize how much of my current suffering was the result of my childhood conditioning. Due to my parents' unresolved traumas and the emotionally volatile dynamics in the home, I never felt stable. I was always alert and fearful for something going awry.
The novelty of the MDMA experience is that it restores a kind of childlike innocence in one's mind. Shame, embarrassment, and self-judgment are temporarily extinguished, letting one freely explore the darkest parts of their psyche with extraordinary lucidity. As I was traversing across the buried landscapes of my subconscious, I unreservedly vocalized whatever came to the surface. There was no shame in often slurring my speech, stuttering, making noises, uttering trivialities, and asking seemingly basic or nonsensical questions. At one point, I bluntly stated the following:
"I've never felt happiness. I'm never ever happy. I just hate my life.”
Although I always knew this to be true in my heart, I had never acknowledged it. It was obscured inside my subconscious, waiting to be released.
To my surprise, the majority of the five-hour trip revolved around my childhood and the influence of my parents. In the last hour, however, I began to uncover another source of suffering in my current life—the loss of youthfulness.
"I just want to be with the 'bros'...I want to laugh, tell stupid jokes, and just have a good time.”
Over the past couple of years, I became distant with a few of my closest friends from high school, yet through my work in journalism developed rapports with some of the greatest minds of the century. Unfortunately, the latter can't replace the former. Although I made new friendships, they were all with people who were several years older, including some who were in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. Although many of the sophisticated conversations that I had with these friends were wonderful, I missed being a goofy eccentric around my peers. I realized that I felt like I was growing up too fast and missing the ebullience of youth.
The fun in life had been sucked out, and I felt imprisoned by my rational, intellectual head.
In the absence of anything else exciting in my life, I felt like I was living my life on Twitter, enslaved to its perverse algorithms. I said,
"I'm always on Twitter, chasing after likes and retweets...it's so artificial and hollow. I'm searching for happiness in the wrong place."
***
On a neurological level, MDMA notably does the following two things: it decreases activity in the amygdala (the fear center in the brain) and increases activity in the hippocampus (involved in memory processing). Subjectively, this allows one to lift his or her emotional guard and re-visit past traumas without experiencing debilitating fear and anxiety. In addition, MDMA floods the brain with serotonin, which dramatically increases positive emotions (hence the name "the love drug").
In many ways, MDMA is essentially a kind of psychic X-ray—it reveals the root causes of one’s suffering. These root causes are not invisible during sober consciousness, as they are often hidden, obscured, and neglected. We purposefully avoid these causes because they evoke overpowering feelings of sadness, anxiety, and depression.
Compared to being psychoanalyzed by a clinical psychologist and given a set of diagnostic labels, MDMA empowers the individual to examine their own traumas and viscerally feel their unrealized toll on the mind and body. After all, we don't rationally think our emotions—we feel them.
***
Once the effects of the drug wore off, I somehow felt both exhausted and deeply refreshed. I came out of the experience with a renewed sense of compassion for myself and my flaws. My suffering wasn't "my fault." I am the product of my environment. I had gained a new visceral understanding of the chain of events that had led to my current state of mind.
After the trip, my guide explained to me the magnitude of the step that I had taken and said something that I'll never forget.
"You're on a hero's journey to heal the intergenerational trauma in your family"
“It stops at you,” he added.
Merely days ago, I was amazed to see Jordan Peterson echo these very sentiments in his podcast with Joe Rogan:
My guide then summarized some of the revelations from my trip and explained the integration process moving forward. Integration involves the aid of a therapist or psychologist to help dissect and apply the insights gleaned from the MDMA experience. He referred me to Thrive Downtown Counselling Centre in Vancouver, which he described as Western Canada’s most prominent psychedelic-integration focused counseling center.
The integration process aside, self-healing is foundational to MDMA therapy. The idea is that only you carry the passport to your inner world. There is no psychologist, counselor, priest, or guru who can heal your deepest afflictions. Only you can save yourself.
After the trip, the transformational power was in my hands. I could ignore it and just move on, but that would be a wasted opportunity. Deep contemplation, meditation, and journaling helped me to further reevaluate my life and make changes as needed. In addition, discussing my revelations with friends and family members I trusted was crucial. In one reflective text conversation with one of my friends, I said the following:
"If I were mad at the universe for not giving me any relationships up until this point, I no longer feel that way. I realize I need to go inward and heal myself first."
Both he and I couldn't believe that I had arrived at a place of such radical acceptance. This is the enduring 'MDMA effect.'
Interestingly, these effects aren't exclusive to the substance itself. Your brain is fully capable of producing the states of consciousness associated with psychedelics. Many people report achieving transcendental states akin to DMT while doing Kundalini yoga, for example.
In my case, I vividly recall one instance from a year-and-a-half ago at my friend Sahil’s birthday party. After a long night of partying, it was 1am and my friend Daren and I had to share a bed. We were slightly drunk but more notably, in a state of great vulnerability. We were recently going through a bit of a rough patch and earlier that night we had bitterly clashed.
With our eyes closed, we began organically discussing matters that we would normally never broach in ordinary social interactions. Unrequited love, fears and anxieties about the future, religious uncertainty. Over three hours flew by as we cathartically released the burdens on our mind into the open darkness. When discussing his future relationship prospects after a recent breakup, Daren profoundly said,
"It only takes one person...I could meet that person tomorrow, next year, or in a decade."
If my memory serves me right, I've never had such a prolonged, spontaneous, and unveiled conversation. With a bit of inebriation, mutually exposed vulnerability, and real compassion for each other's struggles (in an uncanny backdrop of nocturnality), we undoubtedly entered into the proximity of ecstasy.
How close we got remains a mystery—but coming to new insights through radically free and cathartic expression can perhaps be done to some extent without the usage of psychedelic drugs.
***
In the end, MDMA did not transport me into some permanent nirvana state characterized by boundless joy and equanimity. I’m still the same person with the same anxieties, fears, and insecurities. However, MDMA did illuminate a path out of my bleak suffering. A path that only I can carve out for myself.
For that reason alone, one cannot exaggerate its poignant utility.
Listen to Rav’s post-MDMA-trip audio recording.
Thanks to my friend Sydney Johnston for helping edit this piece.
And much appreciation to Joe Rogan for sharing it on Twitter/X which lead to one reader reaching out and eventually doing psychedelic therapy at this very clinic years later (updated: Feb 2025).
Rav Arora is a 24-year-old independent journalist widely published in The New York Post, The Globe and Mail, and Foreign Policy Magazine. He has appeared on The Ben Shapiro Show, Sky News Australia, The Jordan B. Peterson podcast, The Dr. Drew Show, and other programs.
Where was this done at? I'm a veteran and have struggled with PTSD for a decade now
A well written traveler’s tale of a journey that is difficult to describe. Best of luck and love with your healing.