Going from Altered States to Altered Traits 🤟
Integration as trait development for the initiated.
📍 Coordinates: Buenos Aires, Argentina. 🇦🇷
📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
🧉 Vibecheck: We’ve opened the doors to the HERO100 TODAY! On January 14, join hundreds of fellow heroes as we embark on a journey of self-discovery, embodied evolution, and collective initiation. I hope to see you there — it’s going to be legendary. 🦁
Last month we wrapped up 2 incredible Apotheosis retreats…
I had the honour of facilitating these experiences. As they so often are, the retreats were profound, invigorating, and enlightening.
Something meaningful to me was returning to the hallowed grounds of Kumankaya, the center where I had last facilitated retreats ~2.5 years ago. Synchronistically, I was placed in the same part of the maloca as I sat those years ago. To re-member back to the man I was then, and take a clear and unflinching look at the man I had become today, was humbling and inspiring. It filled me with joy and gratitude, deepening my reverence for medicine work and the integration process of self-mastery and personal transformation.
The work, works.
If you let it, and if you’re willing to show up for it.
We’re now deep into the integration process. It can be challenging at best, and destabilizing at worst, to return to the normal world — to obligations and the familiarities of life back home after emerging from the evolutionary cocoon of a retreat.
“Nothing has changed, but everything is different,” is one of my favourite lines related to psychedelic therapy. A retreat is ~7-10 days, a blink of an eye in the lives of most. But time has an incredible way of dilating on retreats, feeling like weeks or months have transpired in the span of a few short days.
It is possible, however, through an earnest integration process, to change that statement to “everything is different, and now everything has changed.”
It’s possible to become a new person, change the circumstances of your life, and bring your existence into deeper alignment with your values, dreams, and desires.
After accessing new realms of being through altered states, integration is about taking them, transmuting them, and funnelling that energy toward altered traits.
Integration is going from altered states to altered traits. Integration is trait development.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
— Anais Nin
It looks something like this:
What you do, what you think, and what you feel create your personality.
Your personality creates your reality: how you see and relate to Life.
If you want to change your reality: change your personality.
If you want to change your personality: change what you do, what you think, and what you feel.
Integration is the container—the meta-structure—that facilitates the transformation of what you feel, what you think, and what you do.
You take the spark of inspiration and stoke it into an inferno of embodied action.
Serious, playful, consistent activity is the easiest, most direct, and paradoxically most effortless path of integration.
My biggest revelations revolved around stepping deeper into radical authenticity, and continuing with renewed vigour my path of Holistic Self-Mastery.
To give myself the gift of making mistakes, of doing it messy, and of deep experimentation.
One of the things I’m most proud of in myself is my breadth. I know a lot about a lot. I can do a lot of disparate things. From high-level snowboarding and 15 years of hockey, to helping someone through trauma healing and building psychedelic organizations, and my writings.
But the Achilles heel of breadth is that I feel a visceral lack of depth in my life. I want to master something. I want to be world-class at something.
The path in front of me is one of Self-Mastery.
I’m excited about the integration work. I’m anticipating the growth and challenge that will come from it.
I’m excited also because I know I have the resources that I need. Over the past years, I’ve been building what I consider to be one of the greatest containers for deep psychedelic integration available: the HERO100.
While not explicitly designed for psychedelic therapy/plant medicine integration, I come up short looking for better alternatives.
6 daily disciplines for 100 days. The individual disciplines themselves—and more importantly the holistic synergy that comes from doing all of them together—creates a sacred container that holds you through the ups and downs of serious self-transformation.
Each discipline is carefully curated to provide the ongoing energy, motivation, discipline, emotional freedom, and accountability to ground these fundamental transformations:
❌ Abstinence: stop doing something that keeps you stuck in your personal reality. Overcoming a major addiction, vice, or energetic leak.
🪬 Ritual: start doing something to step toward your new personality. Bringing ritual, new behaviour, and renewed structure to your days.
🥶 Cold Showers: cleansing the energy body while developing grit, vital life force, and willpower.
🧘🏻 Meditation: facilitates neuroplasticity and focus, essential nutrients in transmuting the personality and personal reality.
📝 Journaling: brings about insights regarding the current personality structure, and also helps to clarify the vision of the new personal reality to move toward.
🚮 Item Elimination: removes physical anchors to the past reality, creates physical and mental spaciousness, and shows intentionality and commitment to change, growth, and inner development.
All of this is done within a community of heroic individuals doing the same work.
The accountability, inspiration, and support provided by a community of practice is unmatched, and in itself is healing and transformative along the path of personal change.
All of this is done with a spirit of excitement, non-judgement, support, and eagerness.
Change is always made best from a place of positivity, optimism, and excitement. While change is possible simply because you hate your current circumstances—or yourself—it is never the best fuel source. Self-love and inspired action will always win, and that is the energy and worldview that we bring to this experience.
Last, but certainly not least, is that all of this is done for the length of time (100 days) it takes to steward and stabilize deep fundamental changes to the psyche, personality, and personal reality.
While bursts of inspired action are possible, it takes time to allow the changes in yourself to ripple out into your life; whether that’s moving homes, changing your living environment, making a career transition, having difficult conversations, rewiring new neural pathways in your mind, updating your model of yourself, and allowing others to update their model of you as well.
All of these factors and more take time. They will not be firmly rooted after a 2-week sprint or a 30-day challenge.
The length of time here is essential, with each discipline working its way deep into you and providing you the evidence needed to fully embody a new personality structure, and subsequently begin to inhabit a new personal reality.
While the road ahead of me, and all of us, is long and challenging – I feel rooted, grounded, excited, and inspired to march forward – knowing that I have the support, the container, and the experiences approaching that will help me midwife a new identity and reality for myself with ease, greatness, and love.
Thank you, I love you. 🤟 EB
The doors to the HERO100 are now open. It begins on January 14. If you are ready for true transformation, to become the person you have always wanted to be, I invite you to join us on this adventure. You can use ‘SERIOUSPLAY’ for a friends & family discount.