A reflection on the quiet pull toward something more, the responsibilities that keep us grounded, and how somatic and psychedelic work can help us navigate the tension with clarity and care.
A contemplation on longing, livelihood, and the somatic and psychedelic tools that help us listen for what wants to emerge—without burning the life we’ve built.
There comes a moment—sometimes subtle, sometimes insistent—when the life we’re living starts to feel slightly misaligned with the life that wants to come next. Not a crisis, not a collapse. More like a soft ringing in the background. A sense that something in us is stretching toward a future we don’t yet have language for.
And yet, most of us can’t just drop everything and run toward that distant shimmer. We have responsibilities. Rent. Kids. Mortgages. Health insurance. Lives we’ve worked hard to build and are committed to sustaining. The longing doesn’t erase that reality. It just lives beside it, asking for attention we’re not always sure how to give.
This tension—between stability and desire, between the known structure and the quietly growing “more”—isn’t a moral dilemma. It’s a physiological one. A full-body negotiation between safety and possibility.
I’ve sat with many people in this in-between. I’ve lived in it myself.
Not the dramatic version of change, but the slow, thoughtful kind that asks:
How do I expand without imploding the life that supports me?
How do I honor the longing without abandoning the ground beneath my feet?
There is no single answer, because the answer isn’t conceptual. It’s embodied.
When we’re pulled between what sustains us and what calls us forward, the body often notices first. Not in a way that demands interpretation—just in shifts of rhythm, breath, pacing, appetite for novelty, or a subtle ache for something unnamed.
Not signs. Not symbols.
Just information.
People sometimes come into somatic sessions not because something is “wrong,” but because something inside them is slightly out of sync with how they’re living. They don’t always know what should change. They only know something wants space.
Somatic work doesn’t force answers into existence.
It simply reveals where there’s room to breathe—and where there isn’t.
It gives a person the chance to meet themselves without the noise of urgency or expectation. Sometimes that clarity settles the longing. Sometimes it sharpens it. Either way, the nervous system gets a voice in the decision.
And that voice is often more honest than the narratives we tell ourselves.
Psilocybin doesn’t hand out new careers, new identities, or new callings. It doesn’t give marching orders. What it does—when held well, with structure and integration—is loosen the internal grip that makes change feel impossible.
It lets people see the architecture of their lives from a slightly higher vantage point.
That vantage point doesn’t demand that someone leave their job, or overhaul everything, or choose a radical reinvention. More often it shows them:
• where they’ve been carrying roles that no longer fit
• where they’ve outgrown certain expectations
• where there’s still life left in the work they do
• where they’ve been living more for the container than for the contents
No judgment.
No directive.
Just increased visibility.
From there, people often find a quieter kind of balance: the ability to stay in the career they have while slowly shifting how they inhabit it. Moving from a posture of survival to one of alignment—sometimes incrementally, sometimes with small structural changes, sometimes with nothing more dramatic than permission to want more.
Psychedelic work doesn’t blow up a life.
It asks what might grow inside it.
Career transition often gets framed as an all-or-nothing event. Quit your job. Burn the ships. Rewrite your résumé. Reinvent everything.
But most real transitions happen while people are still working, still parenting, still maintaining their current lives. The transformation is internal long before it’s external. It starts with noticing where something feels tight, or rote, or slightly too small.
It starts with curiosity, not disruption.
Somatic and psychedelic work don’t tell people what to choose. They help people feel the difference between a choice made from fear and a choice made from clarity.
They help people widen the space between “I can’t leave” and “I must leave,” revealing all the paths in between: adjusting boundaries, renegotiating goals, shifting internal orientation, expanding outside of work, building a side practice, or simply reconnecting to what once brought meaning.
Transitions, when done well, rarely look like escape.
They look like maturation. Like alignment. Like breathing in a little deeper.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting more.
There’s nothing wrong with needing stability.
And there’s nothing wrong with holding both at once.
The work isn’t to choose between them.
The work is learning how to listen—to the body, to the longing, to the parts of us that know timing, pacing, and truth.
Somatic work helps us hear ourselves more clearly.
Psychedelic work helps us see ourselves more fully.
Life, in the meantime, asks us to keep living while we sort it out.
You don’t have to leap.
You don’t have to abandon anything.
You don’t have to decide quickly.
You just have to start paying attention to where there’s room to grow—and follow that space at the pace your life can hold.
Every path branches into another. Wander through more writings on awareness, integration, and the quiet teachings of the natural world.
