The Body Never Lies: Psychedelics and the Return to Felt Truth
Welcome to the Psychedelic Blog. I write about the Impact of Psychedelics on Grieving, Relationships, Culture & Death. This week, I’m exploring how Psychedelics bypass the mind and speak through the body—revealing what’s true not through thought, but through sensation. Because the body never lies.
"There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen." — Rumi
The Body Never Lies
Let’s start with a heresy: The Body Keeps the Score is not some sacred text. It’s pop-psychology dressed up as neuroscience, a Trojan horse that ushered in an era of endless diagnosis and intellectualized suffering. A bestseller, yes—but so is Chicken Soup for the Soul, and no one’s using that to rewire their nervous system.
Take the famous marshmallow test, for example. Once hailed as proof that childhood willpower predicted lifelong success, it turns out the effect barely holds up when you account for things like family income and parental education. Later replications showed that what looked like “delayed gratification” was often just a reflection of environmental trust—kids from unstable homes weren’t impulsive, they were pragmatic. The original conclusion? Pop psych fluff. Like much so much self-help wisdom, it doesn’t replicate and shouldn’t be the foundation of your worldview.
Here’s the truth: talk therapy is on the decline. We’ve spent decades sitting in rooms intellectualizing our pain, rehashing our trauma with therapists who nod solemnly and ask, “How does that make you feel?” Meanwhile, the body—a literal map of what’s unresolved—goes ignored. This trend of over-intellectualizing pain has led to some wild pseudoscientific takes.
summed it up perfectly in this article:“It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularized by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score. The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, it’s also un-agentic; if you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it.”
The Psychedelic space flips that. These medicines bypass the rational mind entirely and drop you straight into the somatic. Under the right conditions, they force you to feel what you've spent years talking around. You don’t “remember” the truth—you become it.
The Body > The Mind
We live in a culture obsessed with cognition. We journal, we analyze, we therapize, we intellectualize our suffering into neat little frameworks.
Even healing has become performative. We recite affirmations we don’t believe. We role-play attachment styles we haven’t embodied. We chase frameworks instead of freedom. Therapy culture has turned many of us into self-diagnosing analysts—fluent in the language of trauma but disconnected from the sensations that hold it.
But there’s a shift coming. Instead of talk therapy, modalities like Hakomi & Somatic Experiencing are emerging for resolving emotional debt and uncovering root causes.
Hakomi
Core idea: Uses mindfulness and the body to access unconscious beliefs formed in early life.
Style: Gentle, client-led, and introspective. It's less about fixing and more about discovering what's running in the background of your behavior.
Process: A therapist helps the client enter a mindful state, then explores how subtle physical reactions (tension, gestures, etc.) reveal unconscious core beliefs—often ones related to safety, love, or identity.
Goal: To bring those beliefs to consciousness so they can be re-examined and released.
Think of it as mindful inner child work meets body awareness.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Created by: Peter Levine
Core idea: Trauma lives in the nervous system, not just the mind.
Focus: Completing the body’s natural stress cycle that got frozen during a traumatic event.
Method: Tracks physical sensations (trembling, tension, etc.) and supports slow, safe release of trapped survival energy (fight/flight/freeze).
Goal: To re-regulate the nervous system and reduce trauma symptoms like anxiety, hypervigilance, and dissociation.
Think of it as trauma resolution through body signals rather than talking.
These work because they don’t just talk to the mind. They speak to the nervous system. They shake loose what the intellect suppresses or ignores.
I align with the following predictions. I’d just add that the shift will likely be asymmetrical—these modalities will take off in places like LA & Austin, but not so much in Buffalo or Green Bay:
When the Medicine Brings You Back into the Body
MDMA is a cheat code for embodiment. It softens the inner critic, quiets the mind, and tunes you directly into the heart. People describe it as “coming home” to themselves—not because they’ve arrived somewhere new, but because they can finally feel what’s always been there. Safe. Held. Loved. You don’t need to talk it out. You need to feel it through. These aren’t mental exercises—they’re somatic breakthroughs. And once the body speaks that clearly, the mind listens.
When the Body Sneaks One Past the Mind
Sometimes on a Microdose day—when I’ve taken just enough to sharpen the edges—something strange happens.
I’ll be sitting at my desk, writing, reading, and I’ll feel this…warmth behind my eyes. Next thing I know, a tear’s slid down my cheek.
No sobbing. No dramatic music cue. Just this quiet, involuntary leak from somewhere deep. And here’s the thing—I’m not a cryer. Not the “I just need a good cry” type. Never have been. Never will be.
So when that tear shows up? That’s not me crying. That’s the mushroom moving through my body, catalyzing something it needed to let go of. Something I couldn’t think my way into releasing. Some residue I didn’t know I was holding.
It’s humbling. A reminder that even the tiniest dose can pull something ancient from the basement and say, “Hey, this still lives here. Can we let it out now?”
Sometimes the body wins. Just don’t tell anyone ;)
Even Love is Felt, Not Figured Out
This isn’t just about healing trauma. Even love — that most sacred of human feelings — isn’t intellectual. It’s embodied. It’s chemical. We talk about falling in love like it’s a story we tell ourselves. But it’s not. It’s biology—precise, predictable, and deeply embodied.
Author Arthur Brooks laid it out in five steps:
The Ignition – that electric charge of attraction.
The Chemical Cocktail – norepinephrine & dopamine flood the brain, creating euphoria & anticipation.
The Spiral – serotonin levels drop, so we obsess. We ruminate. We can’t stop thinking about them.
The Long Game – what we’re actually chasing isn’t just a crush. It’s pair bonding.
The Hook – oxytocin & vasopressin kick in, the same hormones that connect us to kin. You don’t just love them. Biologically, they become family.
You don’t think your way into that. You feel your way in.
Love—like grief, like joy, like truth—is a full-body experience. A biochemical storm. No narrative required.
And under Psychedelics, you can sometimes feel all five stages at once. Not directed at a person, but at life itself.
Scenes from the Felt Realm
The first time you realized your body knew before your mind did. Maybe you were shaking uncontrollably while telling yourself, “I’m fine.”
That mushroom journey where your stomach turned the moment someone spoke inauthentically—not because of their words, but the frequency behind them.
How your relationship to sexuality, movement, and stillness has changed. How pleasure now feels like presence. How silence lands differently.
The visceral recognition of truth. How sometimes, when someone names it, your whole chest tightens—or opens. Truth has a weight. A texture. A sound.
Embodiment is the New Frontier
Somatic awareness. Breathwork. Vagus nerve tuning. Nervous system literacy.
These aren’t fringe anymore—they’re foundational. And once you’ve had a state-shifting experience where your body feels what your mind couldn’t name, you understand why Jonny predicts the rise of “nervous system clinics” & “embodied leadership training” that prioritize attunement over theory.
We’re evolving from peak performance to deep presence.
Futurecasting
It’s less about overriding the body to achieve some optimized version of yourself, and more about listening to what’s already there.
The body isn’t a hurdle to bypass — it’s a compass.
The more attuned we become, the less we tolerate environments, relationships, or careers that dysregulate us. The more clearly we can feel, the more impossible it becomes to gaslight ourselves.
How Healing Actually Works
Healing isn’t something that happens just because you sit in a chair and talk about your past. Real healing is active, embodied, and uncomfortable. It happens when you move your body, clean up your diet, reconnect with nature, breathe with intention, and redirect your focus away from yourself by helping others. It’s not always gentle, and it’s rarely affirming in the ways modern therapy culture promises—but it’s honest. And it works.
When I first published a critique of Therapy Culture nearly a year ago, it triggered a wave of pushback. Maybe I was early—because now, the cultural winds have shifted. I come across critiques of the mental health industry almost weekly. More people are starting to question the effectiveness of talk therapy and the downstream consequences of turning mental health into a market.
The commercialization of suffering is not a victimless crime.
Defending therapy culture doesn’t grant someone the moral high ground. That compassion is misdirected. It should be reserved for those truly suffering—people with clinical depression, PTSD, or real trauma. That’s a small percentage of the population.
Claiming trauma when there is none? That’s the stolen valor of our era.
Closing Reflections
In a world that rewards numbing, speed, and certainty, feeling is an act of rebellion.
Psychedelics don’t just open your mind — they reintroduce you to the language of the body, where truth is primal, not performative. And they aren’t the only way back. Somatic work, breathwork, and movement-based practices are also shaking people awake—reminding them that truth isn’t a thought. It’s a sensation.
And once you feel truth like that, it becomes much harder to lie — to others, sure.
But especially to yourself.
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“Thinking about how I’m feeling about how I’m thinking” is most of our problems
Love this post! Especially this line:
Healing isn’t something that happens just because you sit in a chair and talk about your past. Real healing is active, embodied, and uncomfortable. It happens when you move your body, clean up your diet, reconnect with nature, breathe with intention, and redirect your focus away from yourself by helping others.
Been doing talk therapy for years and it makes me feel better but I don't think it really heals. I'm considering dropping it altogether in favor of other modalities.