A lot of my transformation started because of my own inner work that I needed to do. I was diagnosed with depression as a kid. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Prozac when I was 13 or 14 years old. I remember it just didn’t feel right because I didn’t want to take pills for the rest of my life. From that young age, I remember going to my mom and asking her, “do I have to take these the rest of my life?” She told me, “No, you’ve got to go do happy things for yourself. You have to take care of yourself. Go watch funny movies, get exercise.” From that point in my life, I understood more clearly how to use my body as an instrument. That meant getting exercise, playing sports, and doing fun things for myself. I don’t think I took the pills for more than a month or two. I was done with them and threw them away. Later in life, feelings like depression, anxiety, stress started coming up, especially about ten year ago when I was going through a breakup. That’s what led me to meditation. I went and did a deep dive into Vipassana, which is a 10-day meditation retreat in Joshua Tree. That was the first time I really understood the spiritual aspect of calming the mind down and going inside. At that point. I was like, “what else?” It was like the veil had been lifted. I began finding all these new medicines and practices that were super helpful and I wanted to start spreading the word. I started filming these little stories. I went to Bali, India, Thailand, Mexico… I was always meeting these interesting new people. All these different healers were coming into my world and I would consume their medicine or their practices. People began to come to me for advice, and I felt like I was giving good advice. But I was draining myself, because I was always wanting to help people. And that’s what led me into spiritual psychology. I knew that I wanted to be able to give back in a way not only through plant medicine, but to help people in a way that wasn’t going to drain my energy. And so, I went back to school and I got my master’s in spiritual psychology.

One of the things that spiritual psychology helped me with is my relationship with my mom. I was always talking to her, and during every phone call she’d have these problems that would just drain me. It was so bad. I remember the moment where I was able to finally communicate with her in a way that wasn’t harming me. It was great. Another thing that spiritual psychology helped me with is being able to relate to myself differently. It’s given me tools and practices in order to say “okay Lane, You have issues but you are not your issues. Let’s move through this. Let’s move through this with some compassion and self-forgiveness for yourself.” Healing is the application of love to the place that hurts. So, it’s helped with teaching me how to love myself and how to move through hard times compassionately while releasing judgments. Those have been some really big ones for me.

The greatest part is that it’s always changing. It’s always different. It’s continuously having to adapt and change. That’s what I love about it. Everybody’s unique, everybody’s different. And so, it allows me to tap into my own intuition on what I feel a person might be saying or what they want to do. You always get to try new things with different people.

How deep they will go on their own journey, is how deep that will go with their own healing. I’m always clear with people that I’m not going to save you, you’re going to save yourself. I’m going to be your buddy along this process. They can expect to go as deep as they want to go and heal as much as they want to heal. But I’m not your healer. I’m not responsible for you for your happiness. I am here to assist you. It’s almost like a very easy, gentle conversation we have, and I allow people to come up with their own issue resolution. I’m here to assist you, but you’re really doing the work. I’ll ask you the questions, and I’ll be your guide on this, but it’s up to you.

I definitely think this is a big opportunity. These pandemic times have allowed me to step up my practice with virtual breathwork. I’ve also started working with this company and we’ve been doing virtual reality therapy. Any way you can get help, is great. I always prefer personal contact, face-to-face, but we’re not in that place right now. We’re adapting as we always do, and we make the best of it.

What’s unique about Wake is that it’s not about just trying mushrooms for fun. There’s a whole spiritual part of it. There’s a whole technique behind what we’re doing at Wake. We’re going to open you up, but we’re not leaving you alone to deal with it after the Clinical Immersion. There’s integration. There’s work after the process of being in a clinical immersion. That’s what I feel is unique and what really attracted me to Wake; we’re not just going to let people loose after, we’re going to help them do the work. We’re providing a platform for people to heal, but it’s still up to them to do the work. I’m not going to force you to jump into your meditation or breathwork class every morning, but the platform is there if you’re ready to heal and do the work. We’re tying in the world of tech with spiritual psychology and fungi medicine. That’s what I love about it.

When you’re getting into fungi medicine, you’re opening up to a spiritual part of yourself. Call it your higher self. And in spiritual psychology, we work a lot with your inner child or your higher self. And so, they go hand in hand. When you’re opened up to that world – the other world outside of your physical reality – there’s a lot of healing through the inner child that can happen. There’s also a lot of higher self allowing you to see the path of where you need to go. The study of spiritual psychology is of the science from within, it’s the art and practice of conscious awakening. Within psilocybin ceremonies, you are consciously awakening. Spiritual psychology allows you to see that, but also gives you practical tools and principles in order to move through and process and integrate that knowledge.

I had very profound experiences during one of my first experiences. Three of us all took psilocybin together, in nature up in Vermont, and we were all witnessing the Earth breathe. Literally – inhale, exhale. It blew my mind. We were seeing the trees wave and there was this psycho-spiritual experience. I got this understanding of “Wow, we are all really connected to this nature.” That was 20 years ago, but that was my first insight into how the Earth breathes, and that we’re all connected and we are all one with this nature. That was a big realization and that’s what started opening my world to the idea that there’s more than just going to take mushrooms at a party.

Recently, a friend of mine was undergoing cancer treatment. He had to get operated on his prostate to take the cancer out. And through his experience with psilocybin, he was able to meet a part of himself that helped create this disease or the diagnosis. He was so elated that he had healed himself. He was still going to go under the operation, but he’s said, “I fixed it, I healed it!” That was profound, a pretty amazing moment. And again, that’s him doing the work. He went as deep as he could within that experience. For him to have that realization was pretty powerful. That he went in, saw what was the root cause of that diagnosis, and then saying, “I think I’m good.”

I definitely see that the field is going towards more retreats, and more people doing these retreats. I feel that eventually, there’s going to be more and more people turning to fungi medicine. Cannabis kind of paved the way for this; CBDs are everywhere now. More and more people are understanding that fungi medicine can be used for depression, anxiety and stress. It’s going to be more prevalent.

Integration is the application of tools, practices and principles to your everyday life. Specifically, following a ceremony that would be addressing things like, “what are my behaviors? What are my actions going to be moving forward after this psychedelic experience?” For me, integration is meditation, and then I go into movement and breathwork. That’s how that’s how I integrate my knowledge and stay on point. There is also the spiritual side of integration. Integration work also goes into what I’m consuming – the liquids and the foods and the thoughts that I’m thinking. If I start getting off course, if I start feeling a little funky, I go back to my tools that I had set up for myself for when I get off course.

Well, I have a shaman box that’s pretty awesome. In my shaman kit is: my micro doses of psilocybin, my MSM drops, my daily vitamins, my meditation cushion, and my yerba mate.

Healing is the application of love to the place that hurts.

The opening to your highest self, your highest vibration and most authentic self.