The Hidden Key to Ayahuasca Healing and Integration No One Talks About

If you’re navigating the complexities of Ayahuasca healing and you find yourself moving too fast on your path — pushing, improving, “doing the work,” yet still feeling that quiet internal pressure — this episode goes right to the heart of why. Because that pressure isn’t random. It’s the signature of a part of you that’s been left behind.

In this episode, we explore the core mistake almost everyone makes in deep healing: outrunning the very part of themselves that holds the truth, the timing, and the healing they seek. Through the story of a master diamond thief who searched everywhere for a diamond that was never lost — only hidden where he’d never think to look — we examine how most of us do the same in our spiritual and ayahuasca journeys.

What if the diamond you’re searching for was never missing… just placed in the one part of you you’ve been avoiding? The slowest-moving part. The tender part.

We go into the three phases of the Ayahuasca journey — Healing, Integration, and Transformation — and why they move in spirals, not straight lines. In this episode, we focus on the healing phase, the cocoon where you stop outrunning yourself and meet the parts of you that carry your real identity, your timing, your inner child, and the emotional truth that never disappears.

You’ll learn:

• Why most people run their healing at the same speed as their trauma, and why nothing lands when you’re ahead of your body • The difference between fast energy (sympathetic activation) and slow energy (parasympathetic connection) • How overwhelm drops you into dorsal freeze, and why this matters for your integration • Why your slowest-moving parts are not the wound — they’re the doorway to your wholeness • How Ayahuasca slows you down on purpose, so you can meet what you’ve been refusing to feel • Why the “diamond” of your journey is hidden inside the part of you that refuses to move until you’re ready

We explore the four pillars of the healing phase — Surrender, Listen, Open, Warrior — and how SLOW becomes not just an acronym, but a nervous-system truth. Fast is fear. Fast is survival. Slow is where your soul lives. Slow is where the real medicine works.

This is an episode for anyone who has felt:

• “I’m behind in my own life.” • “I’m ahead of myself, out of sync with my body.” • “I’m doing everything right… so why am I still not landing?” • “I’m exhausted from chasing clarity, purpose, or healing.”

If you’ve been searching for your wholeness, your purpose, your voice, your gifts — there is a real chance you left them behind with the part of you that moves the slowest. And just like the diamond buyer who hid the gem in the thief’s own pocket, close to his own heart… you may have been searching everywhere except the one place that holds everything you’re trying to find.

This episode invites you into the pace where real ayahuasca integration finally occurs. The pace where healing becomes embodied. The pace where transformation emerges naturally. The pace where the diamond reveals itself.

Slow down — the treasure is closer than you think.

TRANSCRIPT:

(City noise, distant train rumble)
There was once a diamond thief who had waited years to steal the biggest diamond in the diamond district.
He watched it from a distance, secretly hoping someone would buy it
so he could steal it from them.
And one day, a gentleman in a suit and hat walked into the shop
and purchased the largest diamond in the district.
The thief observed his every step and felt his pulse beat faster. Finally — the moment was here!
He followed the man through the streets and tried every trick he knew to steal the diamond.
But nothing worked.
The gentleman then boarded a train.
The thief slipped in behind him and searched again everywhere in the diamond buyer’s coat to find the diamond — with the precision of a master.
But still — nothing.
By the time they reached the final stop, the thief was shaken.
The diamond was nowhere to be found.
So he followed the man onto the platform,
frustrated, exhausted, bewildered.
Finally he stepped forward and confessed:
“Sir… I’m a professional diamond thief.
I’ve spent all day trying to steal the diamond you just bought.
I’ve used every skill I have, and I still can’t find it.
I just need to know… Where did you hide it?”
The gentleman looked at him and smiled.
“I hid it in the only place I knew you would never look.”
Now, my friend…
where do you think he hid the diamond?
I’ll leave that question with you as we go deeper into this episode.
Because you may have hidden your own diamond in the very same place.

BRIDGE HOOK (USE THIS):
What if you have been looking for something your entire life,
that was never actually missing…
just hidden in the one place you never thought to look?

What I see in almost everyone on this healing path with ayahuasca, and healing and transformation in general,
is that they’re moving just a little too fast to actually find it…
A little ahead of their timing.
Ahead of their body.
Ahead of their own true nature and truth.
And when you move faster than the part of you that actually matters,
you might miss the one thing you came here to find.

Because when we step into the ayahuasca healing journey, there are three distinct facets of that journey you’ll move through.
And they don’t happen in a straight line. They’re a spiral. You revisit them again and again.
The healing journey.
The integration journey.
The transformation journey.
And today I want to start with the healing journey.

Healing is the inward movement.
It’s where we step into courage and surrender.
Where we feel our vulnerability.
Where we step into acceptance.
Where we feel the things we could not feel before, or refused to feel.
And where we enter this cocoon — the inner cocoon of healing — where we let ourselves be still and meet the slowest-moving parts of us that might be vulnerable, hurting, or tender. And also meet something beyond this that, for me, is the real diamond in this work…
If you listened to the hermit episode, this is the phase where you are stuck in your old shell — and real hermit crabs, when they are hurt, actually have to heal before they get into a new shell, if not, they suffocate in their old shell. So the healing process is so important to honor — for hermits and for humans.

The second part of the journey is integration.
This is where we bring what happened inside into action. You are inside the cocoon, and starting to flap your wings and break out — you are bringing the light from all your healing with ayahuasca into action — alchemizing yourself and your life and starting to flex your power. You have expanded out of your old shell and are ready to fly and move into your new shell.
This is where we make conscious choices. We are no longer passive or just surrendering, feeling, in our inner process — we are bringing our inner force and action into the process.
A lot of people get stuck in the healing cycle because they never bring it into integration. Or they chase the light in Ayahuasca and never ground it into the earth, into their life — so they keep coming back because they are not integrating. They are cocooning because it feels safe — and eventually they expand so much it’s very difficult for them to stay in the cocoon.
Integration is where your inner world and your outer world begin to match.
It’s where the new parts of you begin to connect with your daily life.
Integration is coherence and wholeness.
Integration is closely rooted to the word integrity — meaning actually being in your truth.
So integration is also walking in your truth, not just talking about it or feeling it in ceremony.
This phase is where things get real.
It’s not just about seeing or feeling something inside.
It’s about choosing differently.
It’s about coming out of the spiritual closet.
Owning your new identity.
Making better choices for yourself.
Finding a community that matches your healed frequency.

Then comes the third phase: transformation.
This isn’t something you “do.”
It’s something that blossoms naturally.
Transformation is the moment you’re out of the cocoon.
You’re flying.
There’s a natural alchemy that happens because your healing and the choices you’ve made in integration combine into something new.
You’re not trying to be different — you’ve actually become true to you.
You’ve embodied your gifts. Your inner ancient wisdom. Your inner technology is now online and you can connect.
And in transformation, I see so many people step into service.
They use their gifts.
They bring something to others.
I’ve rarely met anyone who hasn’t discovered creative gifts, artistic gifts, musical gifts, or healing gifts on this path.
People naturally step into service after walking this journey, because there’s a sense of overflow within you.
And this cycle repeats itself.
Different parts of you will go through healing, then integration, then transformation — over and over. The good news is — it never ends, so you can never mess it up. You get to do you in all the ways you want and can and need.

HEALING:
And today I want to dive deeper into the healing path of this journey with Ayahuasca.
And there’s a lot of misunderstanding around the healing phase.
People imagine that everyone who comes to an ayahuasca retreat is in a crisis, shattered, falling apart, traumatized beyond recognition.
That’s not true.
It’s also not what the research says.
And it’s definitely not what I’ve seen after ten years at retreats with more than a thousand participants.
Half of the room is usually high-functioning, highly educated, curious people who aren’t collapsing in their lives.
They just know something deeper is going on.
They have a genuine curiosity for spirituality, for something that isn’t only intellectual.
And usually there’s something that isn’t working that they can’t quite name:
a relationship with themselves,
a purpose they can’t touch,
a pattern they’ve outgrown,
or the classic one — “everything looks great on paper, but I don’t feel as much as I want to.”
And then the other half — people like me — come in carrying something raw.
Grief. Trauma. Heartbreak. Confusion. Exhaustion.
For me it was exactly that:
“I don’t have any other options. I hope this works, because nothing else has gone deep enough.”
Therapy wasn’t enough.
Coaching wasn’t enough.
The pain was bigger than the fear of what might happen in ceremony.
But no matter which group you’re in when you arrive, ayahuasca puts everyone through the same doorway:
healing.
We all have something to heal.

Ayahuasca is a teacher that works on every layer — physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, ancestral, inner child — all of it.
This is why ayahuasca is a medicine and not a drug.
She never gives the same process twice.
You could drink every week for fifty years like the shamans in the jungle and they will still tell you,
“I barely know her.”
No ceremony is the same.
Maybe similar architecture — yes — but never the same process.
So healing always requires surrender.
Healing always requires depth.
And when we step into this phase, there are a few things we need to actually understand.

For me, the whole healing phase starts with SLOW —
Surrender
Listen
Open
Warrior.
Because healing is slow.
Not weak — slow.
And slow is one of the hardest things for people who live fast in a world that is always speeding up.

SURRENDER
Healing requires surrender, and surrender is not something we can prepare ourselves for — because it does not live in the mind. It’s an attitude — an approach of diving into the unknown naked, just trusting the universe and the guide. That’s why for me it’s so important to work with one teacher through my life — because with Ayahuasca, I can surrender deeper and deeper. I can visit things that are really difficult because I know I am safe with her and I trust her.
And she also knows where my limits are, and I know she will push me to my limit but never hurt me or scare me too much with my own self-created demons.
And without the surrender, we usually just stay in the mind discussing highly interesting visionary ideas with our own spiritual ego. Surrender is like jumping into the cold cosmic pool. Ayahuasca is that grandmother that sits next to that pool saying, “You can jump in, it’s not that cold,” but she won’t push you in, or try to drown you — to push you deeper than what you feel you can go. She is a safe grandmother.
Ayahuasca surrender and healing is not about doing.
It’s not about moving around dramatically or being in a spiritual aerobic class.
It’s actually about not distracting yourself.
It’s about staying still or sitting still so the medicine can access you.
For me personally, when the deep healing processes start, the spirits always say the same thing:
“Sit up” or “Lie on your back.”
Never on the side.
Never face down.
They want access to the chest, the stomach, the field around you — especially the solar plexus — so they can work.
And once the work starts, the instructions are always simple:
Be still.
Surrender.
Don’t move.
Don’t think.
Don’t interfere.
Just trust.
Deep healing in ayahuasca is receiving.
You don’t need to think.
You don’t need a framework.
You don’t need to analyze.
You don’t know how the spirits will work with you. (Honestly, 10 years into this and I just clap like a happy spirit seal when they arrive, so filled with gratitude that I am honored to be in their presence.)
You don’t know how intelligent your body actually is.
You don’t know how your own spirit will respond.
Your job is to let the space open.
This is why surrender is sacred.
You drop into the hands of the medicine.
And because of that, healing can feel dramatic.
It can feel like the part of you that is dying is ALL of you, even though it’s not.
This is where people feel the death spirals, the loops, the ego-dissolution, the “I’m disappearing” moment.
But the worst thing you can do in these moments is fight.
People who fight their own process experience the most difficulty.
As soon as they relax, breathe, and stop tightening against themselves, everything calms down.
So if you see a tiger trying to eat you, jump into the tiger’s mouth.
You’re gone. Problem gone. Tiger gone.
Every shaman says the same thing:
“Relax.
Breathe.
Be gentle.
Don’t run.”

LISTEN
The second part of SLOW is listen.
Not just to the visions.
Not just to the mental stories.
Listen to your body.
Listen to your heart.
Listen to your soul.
Listen to the plant teachers and the spirits around you.
If you keep talking in your head during healing, you cut off the access point.
Your mind is usually the very thing you’re trying to heal — so it’s not a reliable guide here. And always ask yourself after a ceremony: how many percent was in my mind?
Because if you are just in mental chatter mode, then you were listening to a radio channel that was not very helpful and might block the signal — because the spirits won’t shout at you. They wait until you stop running and are ready to listen, and they can wait for 500 more lifetimes. So pay attention to the mind, and if you can’t turn it off — drink another cup, surrender deeper, pay more attention to your body. Use your body as a doorway to the medicine inside of you.
When I am in surrender listening mode, I am just leaned back, steady, calm — and I see visions and I let myself just be guided by them. I do nothing. Any thoughts I have stop the visions and the depth, and my job is to stay calm and steady and thoughtless for as long as I can, to see how deep I can go before I start resisting, moving, distracting myself, or adding judgement or mind chatter or “marmalade” as the shamans will call it. It’s like diving into the pool of your unconscious. If you keep swimming at the surface talking to yourself, you’re not focused enough to take that deep breath and be guided down into the unknown water…

OPEN
And this is why we need to be OPEN, the third letter in SLOW.
Open means having a tiny, non-judgmental, open space for a new truth to be birthed — because most of our lives we try to fit all new knowledge and insights into the old container of our understanding. Open means stop insisting that your story is the total truth.
Stop insisting that you are your problems.
That all the games you are playing are you or yours.
And that all you carry is yours.
Every week people come to me with the same pattern:
they tell their story as if the identity they built around the problem is the only reality.
And I ask them, “Is this a real trauma we need to heal? Or is this a game you’ve been playing and you want me to believe it with you?”
Or they tell me their problems and what they want, and I ask them: “Do you work for your problems or for your solutions?” Because you are truly practicing making sure your problems have the most power, attention, and support.
And very often they realize, “I’ve been playing this game for years. And it’s not really me.”
Yet this part of the healing journey requires the openness that your story might not be ultimate truth. Or that two opposite truths can coexist in the same room.
Your identity might not be who you really are.
Your problems might be outdated.
You might have outgrown them without realizing it.
Openness means there is one other door available.
Even a tiny one.
If you believe there is no possibility for anything else — no possibility of healing, or partnership, or abundance, or peace — then you already decided your future.
You closed the door.
Openness is the seed.
The smallest willingness that maybe your life can become bigger, softer, more loving, more aligned than anything you can currently imagine.

WARRIOR
And the fourth part: warrior.
Trauma tells us to armor up, prepare for impact, tighten.
Healing asks the exact opposite: open, soften, feel.
In a room full of people.
With no guarantee of what comes next.
To me, this is warrior work.
Real spiritual gladiator work.
Because it takes courage to open a heart that’s been broken.
It takes courage to take off armor that once saved your life.
And when life is chaotic, triggering you, asking you to step back into old coping mechanisms, and you stay calm in the madness — still in the chaos — you’re a true warrior. One that doesn’t need force to face the most difficult experiences in life — someone that has cultivated enough inner space to hold themselves safe and responsible even in the midst of challenging problems.
Some of the healing processes we go into require real inner strength.
For me, I’ve had to stand in that warrior stance many times — not fighting, not pushing, not forcing — just standing still in my power.
One of the psychologists in our training calls it the warrior stand:
still, grounded, not collapsing, not panicking, not trying to dominate the process.
Just holding your ground.
Because the moment you start fighting — fighting the feeling, fighting the entity, fighting the spiral — you create resistance.
And resistance makes everything harder.
Standing still in your own power is part of the medicine.
To turn what once felt like powerlessness back into your power. To stand still in what once made us want to run, hide, camouflage, fawn, freeze, or just disappear from the earth altogether.
Also for me, this is very important for clients and participants to understand.
You are not a 50-year-old or 30-year-old ego. You are an ancient being with many millions of lifetimes of expansion, and that part of you — your miraculous, slow, steady, inner or higher self (I prefer your inner true self) — is not a tourist here on a dress rehearsal, is not freaking out. That part is here and has so much wisdom, experience, and power — and we all have the opportunity to connect to that part of us.
I found this part sort of by accident, when I lived in a very traumatized home — and because it was so unstable, I spent most of my time with goats in nature. I got to connect to my intuition and to this part of me that was always calm. So if I was bullied or abused, the voice would tell me, “Just relax, they don’t know who you are. It’s all good.” And it was this very mature voice that I found out when I was older was my true inner self — and I know we all have that part of us because when we do this work, we all find that inner warrior, that inner wise man or witch or oracle. And if we are grounded, this part of us can be a center for great grounding and service to ourself and also the world.

SLOW
So these 4 letters form SLOW. Now, I want to go deeper into why I call this acronym SLOW, because SLOW is so much more than just the letters for surrendering, listening, being open, and being a warrior who turns powerlessness back into power.
SLOW is about understanding the difference between fast energy and slow energy — because that difference is everything in this work.

So imagine this:
You’re running late for a bus one day, or a train, or worse — late at the airport.
You’re stressed, you’re speed-walking like a maniac, your heart is racing, you’re annoyed at yourself, and when you finally get onto the plane or the bus, you sit down but you’re still running on the inside.
Your heart is still racing.
Then you look at your phone and see an invoice you forgot about, and now the stress doubles.
Now you’re in fast-moving energy.
Everything gets annoying.
Every noise is suddenly too loud.
Everything feels sharp.
Or picture two neighbors arguing on the sidewalk.
Their voices escalate, their hands fly everywhere, both of them trying to win.
That’s fast energy too — loud, chaotic, frantic.
Most of us live in this fast-forward motion.
We wake up and we are already late to the train or the plane of our own life.
We yell quickly.
We talk quickly inside our heads.
We react quickly.
We panic quickly.
We go from zero to a hundred immediately.
Very few of us stand there, annoyed or hurt or angry at someone, and slowly say,
“I… hate… you…”
in a soft, slow voice.
No.
When we’re triggered, it’s rapid fire.
Fast.
Sharp.
Immediate.
That’s the fire energy.
That’s survival mode.
I’m sure you know your fastest moving parts, the ones running ahead, stressing, anxious, controlling — or not feeling enough. If you call forward that part of you now — what does it want? If it has a positive intention… What is that intention?
And where is it running? Where is it coming from?
Because where we come from is how we cultivate the energy we create in the future.

Now let’s talk about your slowest moving part…
Because when we’re loving — when we’re moving at the speed of our own truth and the speed of our own heart — the whole system slows down.
Think of how you speak and act to a baby. How your energy gently moves and is more centered.
You don’t go, “HEY! YOU’RE SO CUTE! BEAUTIFUL BABY!” like a caffeinated squirrel.
You soften.
You melt.
You say, “Hiiiii… look at you… welcome to the earth family.”
And everything expands.
Everything opens.
Everything slows.
That’s the difference between the fast self and the slow self.
Fast energy is survival energy.
The fast state is the sympathetic system: speed, threat, activation.
Slow energy is nourishment.
It’s the soil where real life can grow.
The slow state is the parasympathetic system: rest, feeling, connection.

If you live fast all the time, you burn your own life down.
You become a walking forest fire.
Or you become a little racing boat skimming over the surface of the ocean of your life, never dropping in, never landing, never feeling.
There isn’t enough internal space to actually experience life.
And when both states get overwhelmed, the system drops into dorsal freeze — everything shuts down.
And the truth is: most of the fast-moving parts inside us aren’t even us.
They’re our survival parts.
They’re coping mechanisms that somehow promoted themselves to the project manager of your entire life.
They say, “You’re late. Move faster. Get ahead. Fix this. Improve that. Be better.”
Those are your not-enough parts.
Your trauma parts.
And we confuse them for our true self, which is wild when you really see it.

This is where awareness becomes crucial.
When I’m in ceremony or in integration work, I see the same pattern every single day.
Clients walk in five steps ahead of themselves, already exhausted and anxious.
Their bodies are literally leaning forward as if they’re trying to get to the next moment before it arrives.
They’ve set the difficulty level of their life so high that they always feel like they’re losing.
They drown in their own purpose, their own expectations, their own pressure to “figure out their gifts” or “step into service.”
So they talk fast, think fast, push fast. And overuse the masculine pushing and controlling energy inside them, producing so many seeds in their mind that have no soil to land in — no feminine matter to be cultivated and grow.
They’re running their healing at the same speed they run their trauma — and then they wonder why healing isn’t working.
It’s like watching a train blast past at 300 miles per hour.
My job is to stand there and say,
“Hey… let’s slow this down before the whole thing derails.”
Because the body cannot live like that.
It was never designed to.
It hates that speed.
That is running from a bear mode once in a while, not running from yourself mode every day.
The moment I say,
“Let’s slow down and try to meet your slowest-moving parts,”
they look at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“I don’t have time for that.”
“That part needs to keep up with me.”
“I don’t have time to cry.”
“I don’t have time to feel my shame.”
“I don’t have time to fall apart.”
They assume the slowest parts are just the wounded parts — the sadness, the grief, the shame.
And yes, some of that is there. They stand in a circle around what’s been truer inside you. Even slower. A part of you that never moves.
And there is something else in the slow parts that they never meet because they are too busy outrunning themselves.
And that’s where the magic actually is.
Little by little, through meditation, breath, ceremony, integration work, they finally begin to connect with the slowest-moving parts.
And everything changes.
One of my clients, after six months of this, said to me:
“I thought the slow parts were just all the emotions — the shame, the grief, the anger. But now that I’ve actually stopped and met them… I realized the slowest-moving part inside it all was actually the real me. I’ve been running ahead of myself my entire life, trying to find myself, and the whole time my real self was never in front of me, or behind me — it was slow, still, steady, waiting inside me.”
And it’s so beautiful when someone realizes this from their own embodied experience.

Your fast-moving parts are many of your trauma parts.
They are coping.
They are looping.
Your slowest-moving parts are your truth.
They live at your real pace.
They don’t audition.
They don’t sprint.
They don’t try to catch your attention.
They don’t perform for your Instagram.
Your real self is steady.
Untouched by your story.
Untouched by this lifetime or any lifetime.
Not trying to fit.
Not trying to speed up.
Not trying to solve your identity crisis.
It’s just waiting for you to get tired of running in circles.
Your real self doesn’t chase purpose like a dog chasing a squirrel.
Your real self can lie in a hammock all afternoon doing nothing without guilt.
Your real self can sit in the sun and watch leaves move because it doesn’t measure worth by productivity.
And here’s the key:
Your slowest-moving parts always carry the truth of what needs to be healed.
Your trauma is fast.
Your healing is slow.
And trauma speeds you up — panic, obsession, comparison, pressure, loops.
Healing slows you down — breath, presence, emotion, truth.
Your healed self is already inside you. Your fully healed, complete, sacred self is here now inside you.
You don’t even need ayahuasca to find it.
Slow down, and there it is.
It never went anywhere.
Healing removes the blockages that hide your real self — the numbness, the distortion, the armor.
But your real self is always there, breathing, resting, knowing.
So when ayahuasca slows you down and you suddenly feel tired, soft, emotional — that’s not weakness.
That’s contact.
Usually the first slow parts that show up are the hurt ones:
the inner child saying,
“Why did you outrun me?”
the anger saying,
“Why didn’t you express me?”
the sadness saying,
“I’ve been waiting to cry for years, I can’t hold all of these tears and emotions anymore.”
When you let these parts catch up, integration happens naturally.
You don’t create wholeness — you stop outrunning it.

So when we’re in this healing phase, you actually have a lot of power.
People think healing is just surrendering to whatever comes up and letting all the scary emotions take over — like you just have to be dragged through the mud.
Or, I once felt like spiritual roadkill, just hit by the 18-wheeler of my own karma and expectations.
But that’s not true.
You have a lot of power if you choose to slow down and actually meet what’s happening, instead of letting everything boil over like a pot left on the stove while you’re running around the kitchen looking for other ingredients.
If you slow down right now — even literally right now listening to this — you can expand your consciousness.
You can expand the vessel through which you experience life.
And even just hearing that usually gives people a tiny release in their breath.
Because the breath is the governor of the mind.
You can use your breath to slow down your body, slow down your nervous system, slow down your process — so you have more capacity to feel and to actually be with everything that’s moving through you.
When I slow down, I am healing faster.
If I rush ahead of myself, I lose access to the healing because I’m not in myself.
I’m ahead of myself.
I’m out in those fragmented pieces that I haven’t integrated yet.
Your fast self is the one that learned to run to survive, to be who you thought you had to be for everyone else.
Your slow self — your true self — stayed behind with everything you didn’t have the capacity to feel at the time.
When you slow down, that part can finally be met.
And inside that part is everything: all the pieces you didn’t want to be, all the emotional reality you’ve been avoiding, but also all the gold.
All the medicine.
All the truth.
This is why slowing down is not optional in the healing phase.
It’s not a lifestyle choice.
Healing is not a cute word.
Healing is an attitude toward life.
A requirement for wholeness.
A way of being.
If you look at your phone today — look at the world — everything is getting faster and faster.
Your mind might scroll through two thousand videos in a day, gearing your nervous system into a pace that has never existed in the history of humanity.
You can turn that off.
You can slow down.
And as you do, you create inner balance and harmony because you’re returning to your natural rhythm.
You’re reconnecting with your true nature — the part of you that has zero interest in running.

And a lot of people confuse fast with success.
I’ve had to deal with that illusion myself.
For so long I thought my “high-functioning self” was my successful self. But now I see it as my spiritually broke self. Because my spiritual self is always full and complete, ready for a spiritual siesta.
And the people running the fastest are usually running from a traumatized self in disguise.
The most successful people I know now are the most relaxed ones.
Present.
Enjoying.
Living.
And you can do both.
You can have a gorgeous, abundant life, an amazing business, deep relationships — and move slow like a turtle.
Enjoy every moment.
Be deliberate.
Be grounded.
I’ve been testing this myself with this podcast.
It’s only two months old, but I’ve never had this kind of response in ten years of social media, webinars, or any other platform.
Eight episodes — and I have more messages, more emails, more clients, and more real connection than anything I’ve ever done.
Not by performing or pretending — just by being me.
And by slowing down.
By trusting that the slowest-moving parts of me are powerful enough, deep enough, and authentic enough to reach the right people.
When you move from that slow place — that steady place — it might look unpredictable or too relaxed for others, but to me it’s the sign that you’re integrating from wholeness.
You’re not trying to impress anyone.
You’re not trying to adjust yourself every second. Or to fit into trends that will change every moment. Or feed an algorithm on social media that digests your posts in seconds and wants more.
You’re not operating from exhaustion or fear that things won’t work out.
Because when you’re moving from your slow self, you know:
I’m on my path.
Everything that belongs to my path is already here. The diamonds that I am looking for, I don’t even have to create them in the ground or dig for them — they are laying there waiting for me. And you, listening right now — are one of those diamonds on my path — because being of service to you in any way makes me shine and smile from my soul.
And… the best part is…
I don’t have to chase it.
I don’t have to build a staircase to it.
I just have to stay in my truth and walk in my truth.
Slowly.
And this is where you realize that the slow self holds all the information you need.
It knows what was hurt.
It knows what was ignored.
It knows what matters.
It knows what needs to be grieved.
It knows what needs to be rebuilt.
It knows what needs to be forgiven.
And it will never rush you through any of it.
Healing is slow because the parts that heal you move slowly.
They never agreed to the pace of your life or the pace of society.
They never agreed to pressure, performance, pushing through, or constant productivity.
Your true self did not come here to be auditioning for the world or performing for social media.
All that fast stuff — it’s survival.
It’s fast because it has to be fast.
It’s fast because it’s not true.
If you take someone screaming or raging or panicking and you slow it down — really slow it down — you hear terror.
You hear hurt.
You hear the truth underneath it.
The emotional reality reveals itself.
The same is true for you.
Because the slow parts aren’t behind.
They’re not broken.
They’re not the problem.
They’re carrying the information and energetic charge that the rest of you abandoned.
They’re carrying the timing your body trusts.
And they’re carrying the gifts, the healing and the rest, and all the diamonds you’ve been searching for in every ceremony.

What if the treasure isn’t in the expansion… or in knowing or doing more…
but in the part of you you refuse to turn toward?
What if the diamond was never hidden in the heights of your journey,
but in the one place you didn’t want to look:
the part of you that refuses to move until you’re finally ready to meet it?
When ayahuasca slows you down — when you suddenly feel tired, or quiet, or heavy, or deeply emotional — that is not regression.
That is not “falling apart.”
That is the moment your real self finally steps into the room.
Your slow self begins to sync with the rest of you.
And in that moment, everything aligns.

So that’s the first phase I want to share with you in this healing–integration–transformation journey.
The healing journey is the cocoon where we stop outrunning all of these parts of us, and unify ourself and let ourself feel and accept it all.
So if I now tell you that the part of you you’ve been avoiding — the slow part, the inconvenient part, the one you keep pushing past — is actually your real self…
what would you do?
Would you slow down long enough to meet it?
Or would you speed up the way most people do?

Here’s the truth nobody in the spiritual world says out loud:
Your rushing isn’t ambition.
Your “I’m late,” “I’m behind,” “I’m not enough yet,”
that constant pressure in your chest —
that’s trauma running the show.
That’s not your true self.
That’s your survival self in action.
That’s you subscribing to the game, the energy, and the result that this traumatic self cultivates.
Unsubscribe — hit the slow button.
Because the part of you that moves slowly — the part you ignore, override, judge, or run ahead of —
that is the part carrying your actual identity. Your true self.
Your gifts.
Your timing.
Your wholeness.
Your truth.
And your deepest healing.
It’s the part holding the diamond you’ve been searching for through every ceremony, every breakthrough, every purge, every vision.
And it’s been in plain sight the whole time — inside the part of you you treat as “too slow,” “too emotional,” “too inconvenient,” or “not spiritual enough.”
The subtle truth, the whispers, that come from your heart, your intuition, your soul.

What if the reason you feel behind in your own life
is because you’ve been running ahead of the only part of you that knows who you are (and where you are going)?
What if your exhaustion, your searching, your hunger for clarity
aren’t signs that you’re broken…
but signs that you abandoned the part of you that holds everything you were trying to find?
What if the diamond — the real treasure —
is sitting inside the very part of you you’ve been avoiding for years?
If you’ve been searching for your wholeness, your purpose, your voice, your gifts…
there’s a real chance you left them behind with the part of you that moves the slowest.
Because in the story, the diamond buyer didn’t hide the diamond in his own pocket.
He slipped it into the thief’s pocket — right by the thief’s own heart —
knowing it was the one place he would never think to look.
Most of us do the exact same thing.
We search everywhere else, chase everything outside us,
while the thing we’re desperate to find has been sitting against our own heart the entire time…
in the part of us we keep outrunning.

So my friend — feel free to answer in the comments where you thought the diamond buyer hid the diamond — and where you have tried to find it.
I hope you will slow down now, and meet the diamond inside you, and — I’ll see you in the next episode, where we dive into the integration part of the healing journey.

With love,
David

You’re running hard, you’re running blind,
you’re always chasing your own mind.
Your body’s here, your life’s ahead,
you’re out of breath on dreams you’ve fed.

Pre-Chorus
You feel the pull, you feel the strain,
you’re looping through the same old lane.
But something soft, beneath the sound,
is calling you back to the solid ground.

Chorus (Proper Rhyme, Proper Flow)
Slow down — the diamond’s closer than you know.
Slow down — it’s in the place you never go.
Slow down — stop running past your inner glow.
Slow down — your heart will show you where to go.

Fast is fear and fast is fire,
fast is running from desire.
But slow is truth and slow is wise,
slow is where your soul will always rise.
The heart you left, the part behind,