Somewhere Between Manager and Mystic

I made every mistake after my first ceremony.

I turned into the guy who thought he had it figured out, talking in spiritual clichés and judging anyone who wasn’t ‘awake.’ Wanted to show them the way. Classic inflation.

I was insufferable for about a year. Probably longer. I could tell you what I actually said to people. I won’t.

My wife noticed first. She always does. She didn’t say anything for months. That was its own kind of mercy.

The experience was real. My interpretation wasn’t. Ego never misses a chance to claim credit for grace.

No one warned me about what happens after. The ceremony gets all the mythology. The medicine, the visions, the dissolving of whatever felt solid. The return gets nothing. I wasn’t willing to hear it anyway. No elders. No protocol. No one to say what happened was real or how to carry it forward.

So I made it up as I went along, looking for a checklist. I learned that improvising often just means pretending. I acted like I was here to save the world. I had all the answers.

Meanwhile, I still had a job to do. Teams to lead, deals to close. Meetings with no line item for what I now believed about the nature of reality.

That’s the part nobody talks about. Not the peak. The Tuesday after. Sitting in a pipeline review with something huge still settling in my chest, trying to pass as someone who gave a shit about Q3.

My hands would be steady. Voice normal. Underneath, something else was reorganizing itself. No one in the room needed to know that. Not even me.

The job was forecasting three months out. I couldn’t manage the next three minutes.

Thinking I’d arrived was the mistake. Not the experience. Thinking I had it all figured out. Enlightenment isn’t a destination. It’s a responsibility. The light shows what’s possible. Coming down from the mountain is when I found out if I believed it.

I treated the ceremony like a finish line. Something to complete, then list on a highlight reel of who I’d become. That’s not how any of this works. Nothing about consciousness comes with a certification.

Without grounding, revelations turn into arrogance. Chosen. Destined. Enlightened beyond everyone else in the room. Ego is good at hijacking insight and wearing it as identity.

I’ve watched this happen to other people since. Same pattern, different substance. A book, a psychedelic, a new diagnosis, a divorce. Whatever cracks you open gets treated as proof you were right about everything. Most of the time, it’s just proof you’d been carrying something heavy for a long time.

Less talking turned out to be the answer. Not more retreats. A lot less talking, especially for me. Sitting with what I didn’t understand instead of trying to explain it. Letting it show up in what I did, not what I said at dinner parties.

Years of that. Still doing it.

Some mornings that means sitting with coffee for an extra five minutes before opening email. Nothing to report.

What I actually needed wasn’t another download. I needed the discipline to sit with what I already had, even if I didn’t know what to do with it. Not-knowing became the practice, not the failure I thought it was.

This is part of what the book with Dr. Carlos Warter is about. Not the peak. The return. Park Street Press. Spring 2027.

I don’t know if there’s a name for the space between manager and mystic. But I’ve been trying to live there a long time.

Maybe it’s about presence. Or is one vocation and the other just occupation?

Some days it feels like the most real place I’ve ever been. Other days I’m still reaching for the old costume. At least now I can catch it. Most of the time.