Did We Heal or Just Code-Switch?
On a shared impulse in wellness culture, lucid dreaming, and biohacking
I went to the opening of a wellness space that was high-end, in a pocket of the city where that money lives.
It had the usual spiritual accoutrements: crystals, gongs, a Buddha in the corner. But it was elevated. A hybrid blending the best of all worlds: modern chic meets spiritual-in-the-city wellness.
I wore shoes too casual for the gala it turned out to be. People were in Prada’s and Birkin bags.
Champagne was flowing. The cocktail bar in the back always had a lineup. The hors d’oeuvres were healthy and beautifully plated, and I couldn’t help but think: wow, it must have cost a fortune to make watermelon and carrots look this fancy.
It was consciousness, catered, in a way I hadn’t seen before.
The contradiction was glaring, but I didn’t feel any urge to resolve it. I wasn’t there to police anyone’s glass. I had two flutes of my own.
I was there to immerse myself in something new, something I hadn’t witnessed in these spaces before, but knew needed to be bridged.
The owner got it right. Smart move to meet others where they are.
Seeing it all was its own kind of interesting. I was fascinated.
That got me thinking about something I’ve thought a lot about in the spiritual spaces I frequent.
Judgment never left. It just changed its wardrobe.
.
The Substitution
Nowhere is this clearer than around substances.
I once saw a spiritual leader bolt to the other side of the room at a birthday party when a group gathered to do shots of water. Likely to avoid being wrongly implicated in any photographs.
But hand that same person a cup of cacao with psychedelics for ceremony, and now it becomes something to post about.
For them, micro-dosing may be “nervous system regulation.” Ketamine is “medicine.”
But a margarita? Now that is a character flaw.
The substance changed, but the moral framing didn’t.
Now, there’s a real version of this that I respect completely. Someone in recovery who can’t be in a room with alcohol isn’t judging anyone. That’s self-preservation. I’d never ask that person to sit closer to a bar.
That’s not what I’m describing.
I’m describing the person who left alcohol behind, picked up recreational psychedelics instead, and now treats the swap like evidence of how enlightened they are.
As if changing the substance is the same thing as changing the relationship to needing one.
It isn’t.
If you still can’t access a peak state, a regulated nervous system, or a sense of belonging without something entering your body first, the substance changed. You just found a more spiritual context for the same reliance.
I’m not defending alcohol. It’s poison. Too much of it will bring your life and liver down.
I’m also not here to villainize psychedelics. I’ve sat in enough ceremonies to firmly believe in their merit for healing when they’re held with care.
What I’m pointing to is something else entirely.
The Test
There are fit, disciplined people who run marathons, train daily, eat clean, and still drink.
There are deeply spiritual people who cannot get through a weekend, a festival, or a hard week without something in their system, as long as it signifies the nobility of someone “doing the work.”
So here’s the question I keep circling:
If you can sit in a room with someone who needs a substance in their body just to be there, as long as that substance has a spiritual connotation, but you can’t sit in a room with someone having a drink at a party because alcohol doesn’t carry the same branding—who are you, actually?
That’s the test.
Not what people use.
What meaning they assign to what they use.
Discernment Is Not Judgment
This essay isn’t about substances.
It’s about what we forgive when the story sounds elevated, and what we condemn when the story sounds “low-vibe.”
I shared the opening gala with many people from my spiritual community. Some balked at the presence of alcohol while others defended it.
Because spirituality didn’t dissolve the human need for hierarchy.
There’s a difference between discernment and judgment.
Discernment says, I notice what creates presence in this person, and what creates avoidance.
Judgment says, my path is sacred. Yours is dirty.
Discernment looks at the pattern.
Judgment looks for permission to feel superior while looking at the pattern.
Same hierarchy. Different vocabulary.
Peak Experiences
Dreaming is a natural psychedelic experience.
And it’s still not enough for many.
It’s free and built-in, happening every single night whether you do anything for it or not. And still, in many dreaming circles, there are those trying to enhance, ignite, or amplify it: teas, tinctures, Galantamine.
Even something freely given isn’t enough. We still want it faster, deeper, on demand.
We want the peak experiences.
And the biohackers, the health-conscious, the ones who built an entire identity on discipline, diet, training, sleep—the whole self-optimization stack are now reaching for peptides to get peak results that used to take time, effort, and extreme discipline.
No one is calling it a shortcut.
It is now referred to as optimization.
I’m not saying it’s wrong.
But the thread in all of these examples is this:
The needle becomes a more evolved version of the gym, the same way recreational psychedelics become a more evolved version of a bottle of wine.
What the Judgment Is Actually Protecting
The fitness people who drink and the spiritual people who medicate are not in competition.
They are mirrors of the same human strategy, dressed for two different rooms.
Everyone needs a way to regulate.
But here’s what the judgment is actually protecting you from noticing:
If someone else’s reliance unsettles you, it’s rarely because you’ve transcended it. More often, it’s because some part of you still needs the same thing, and you haven’t made peace with that yet.
The thing you can’t tolerate in someone else is rarely a verdict on them.
It’s your unprocessed material, just with their face on it.
And none of the judgment, the substitution, the spiritual vocabulary actually bridges anything.
You don’t bridge anything from outside the discomfort.
You bridge it by staying in the room anyway, next to a version of regulation that isn’t yours, and letting it teach you instead of threaten you.
The Rebrand
Nobody actually says, I’m better than you anymore.
They say:
I protect my frequency.
I don’t have capacity for that energy right now.
That luxe wellness space owner got it right.
She’s bridging.
And maybe that’s what stood out to me most.
Because it wasn’t the bubbly, the contradiction or polished spirituality.
It was the willingness to build a room wide enough to hold more than one type of person without pretending they were all the same.
Did We Heal, or Just Code-Switch?
Maybe both.
But maybe that’s not the failure I thought it was when I started writing this.
None of us are doing this cleanly.
The wine and the psychedelics are both reaching for relief from a life that already feels heavy. The Galantamine and the peptides are both reaching for a peak that won’t arrive on its own.
Either way, we’re reaching outside ourselves and creating a more sophisticated alibi around it to appease ourselves and lessen our self-judgment.
The wine glass isn’t the problem.
The psychedelics aren’t the problem.
The Galantamine isn’t the problem.
The peptides aren’t the problem.
We’re all just finding our way through, in our own time, at our own pace.
The very least we can offer each other is the grace to do that without keeping score.
Hierarchy never really goes away, it just gets rebranded. Judgment needs two separate, comparable selves competing on a scoreboard to even make sense as a concept. They're just the same current showing up in slightly different containers, all reaching for the same regulation from a life that's heavy in the same basic way for everyone.