I was kayaking with a friend at her cottage when she asked me something no one had ever asked me before.

Are you happy?

My first instinct was to justify. I have a house, a career, a partner. My life is okay. But when I got really honest with myself, the answer was no. Every day felt like any other day. There was no joy in moments. I couldn't appreciate what I had, and I kept thinking something must be wrong with me.

After that conversation I started to notice things I had been avoiding. How alone I felt even surrounded by people. How my partner didn't really know me, or maybe I didn't know myself well enough to be known. For a while I used alcohol to quiet that awareness because I didn't think there was anything I could do about it.

I started searching. I tried different things. Workshops, short programs, different approaches to understanding what was happening inside me. Some of them created small shifts. I began to see different parts of myself, slowly. Where certain patterns came from, what they were protecting, why they had been quietly running my life without my knowing it. For the first time I caught a glimpse of my own subconscious. A whole inner world I had been living from without ever seeing it. It was like a light turning on in a room I had been moving through in the dark.

What felt like a completely irrational decision: I left my partner and moved to Mexico. It was the craziest thing I had ever done. But something in me knew that if I didn't leave, I would feel like this forever. And the thought of that was unbearable. I knew there was something more.

Being in a completely different environment, surrounded by people who were doing their own inner work, felt like landing on a different planet. I was shocked to discover that a whole world existed that I never knew about. People with self awareness, people actively choosing to know themselves. I didn't know that was possible.

It was there that I met Nina, my guide. I had never heard of Ayahuasca. I had never considered psychedelics. But she crossed my path and something in me trusted her completely.

She prepared me for my first ceremony and held the container through the integration after. What happened in that process is difficult to describe. Every part of me felt like it was being taken apart, piece by piece, down to nothing. Like a caterpillar that completely dissolves inside its cocoon before it becomes something new. I was dismantled. And then, slowly, put back together. Still me. But a completely different version of me. For the first time in my life, I felt free.

When I started this journey, I thought I was chasing happiness. What I found instead was something quieter and more lasting. Peace.

Most days now I wake up attuned to myself. I listen to my body, my emotions, my intuition. I notice when something feels off and I stay with it rather than running from it. I experience gratitude for my life, real gratitude, not the kind you perform because you think you should.

I still show up for myself every day. The inner work never stops. But it gets easier, and it becomes more natural. This is the greatest and most important thing I have ever done in my life. And if I could go back, I would do it all over again.

This is why I do this work. Not because I read about it. Because I lived it.