Healing States: The Lost Art of Plant Medicine

She sat in my chair — a new client. A friend had put us in contact and she was curious. Excited about what was to come, but nervous that she didn’t know where to start.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. A common line I hear. What most people are really saying is: I’m sorry I’m nervous, I just don’t want to mess anything up.

So I talked her through — giving her just enough information to relax, but not enough to spark curiosity. I calmed her into the space. And when she was ready, and when I was ready, and while the room itself was watching, I hovered my hands over my collection of oils.

I felt something. Like if I could feel light shining from the bottle — a resonance. And I pulled the oil.

Cinnamon.

Crazy first oil,* I thought to myself. Cinnamon doesn’t come up lightly — especially not to start a session. It’s foundational and potentially… seismic. Like using a jackhammer to hang a painting. The question it asks: *What is true healing?

I diluted the oil and dropped it into the foot bath, charged it with three clockwise swirls of my right index finger and placed the stones in the water. I looked her in the eyes, and with a smile I invited her to step in. She dipped a toe, and once she was satisfied the temperature was safe, she submerged with a sigh. Both feet found their rocks. She asked if she could move them around. “Make yourself comfortable,” I told her. We had a lot of work to do.

I hovered my hand over the oils and the next one announced itself.

Lemon. The oil of emotion.

Lemon has cut through thick emotions for me — rescuing me from physical and mental anguish — and I’ve seen it work wonders on clients. I uncapped the bottle and placed my middle finger on the opening, inverted it, and brought it back upright. It gave me a thin coat of oil, which led me to a spot on her wrist. With a delicate touch, I applied the oil, then cupped her hand in both of mine, supporting it, allowing it to unfurl and relax — all the little muscles gaining their freedom. I did the same to the other hand. And once ready, I put us in a combined mudra and ran a current — waiting for her body to settle into a new flow.

When it did, I placed her hands in her lap and made sure she was comfortable.

Back to the oils. I waited for them to be ready, and when they were, I hovered over my collection, waiting to see who called.

The last oil. The final. Where the healing begins.

I waited… and eventually it called.

Frankincense. Are my belief systems serving me?

I understood the session now. From my end, the story was clear: I didn’t know what she was going through, but the oils told me it was something big — emotional, and fundamental to her sense of self.

I gave her time to settle — the oils were in her system now, starting the work. From the outside she’d been sitting still, but on the inside I could feel rapids. Not the tumultuous kind — not anger, not sorrow — but big, forceful water nonetheless. The consequence of allowing yourself to feel deeply without fighting it. She was no novice.

When she was ready, I gently lifted her feet from the bath and placed them on the towel I had waiting. I dried her feet, held pressure on them, connecting them to the ground for just a moment. I let go. I took a few steps back and held the space — held it until it all came together. Time and patience.

She slowly came to. And as she did — as her nervous system switched from rest and recovery to active exploration — a big smile washed over her face. The room breathed around her. Light poured in from outside, the dust sparkling in it, and she took a full-chested inhale.

“Wow,” she said.

I smiled and continued to give her the time she needed. And when she was ready, she spoke.

“That was amazing. Can I tell you what I experienced?”

“Of course,” I said. I always love hearing people’s experiences.

And she recounted the session — but from her side.

She told me when she first smelled the cinnamon, she was immediately taken back to being a kid. In the kitchen with her mom on the holidays. The joy they shared, family bonding over cookies, building an immense sense of belonging. She told me about her beautiful childhood and how grateful she was for the wonders her parents shared with her.

I listened, happiness and joy welling up inside me because I could feel it in her — almost like a kid herself was telling me the story. Like she was back to that age with her mom, telling me what her mom meant to her.

And she told me something had been weighing heavy on her. She made it clear it wasn’t anything bad, wasn’t anything sad. It just was. Something in her life that she needed to navigate. She was excited to do it, but she wanted to be careful.

She told me how she was adopted. Her adoptive parents were wonderful and loving and amazing. The situations that led to the need for her to be adopted — that wasn’t something that brought her pain. Actually, she said, she was ecstatic to reconnect with her birth mom. But she’d been struggling with how to navigate it. How to make sure the mom who raised her didn’t feel overlooked, taken for granted, or forgotten.

I listened — I supported — I encouraged.

I could see, and feel, the pieces of her puzzle softly arranging into something harmonious — a beautiful mosaic. And as she ruminated, she was building the courage to bring that newfound sense of self into the world.

She asked me about the oils. I told her what they told me. But she already knew. She’d experienced it — the feeling of being with the truth, not having to solve it, just letting it be. Confident and comfortable.

I told her: just go home and relax tonight. Take it easy. The oils are in the system and they’ll be doing their thing for the next three days. You don’t have to worry about much. Just be.

And that’s how she left the session. A little more relieved than when she came in.

What Is a Healing State?

A healing state is that moment when you feel your body let go.

You know you’re holding onto something. You can feel it — the tension, the weight, the pattern that keeps running. In a healing state? You feel it disappear.

Here’s the thing: you want it gone, but you don’t know what life is like without it. So part of you holds on.

You want to live in a green world. But you’ve lived in a blue world your whole life. All you’ve ever known is blue. And you’re blue, inside and outside.

You can see the green world from where you are. You know it exists. You’ve caught glimpses of it — in childhood, in moments of flow, in rare instances when the weight lifts and you remember what it feels like to just be.

But you were taught to live in the blue world. And standing at that border is terrifying.

Because what if you can’t make it over there? What if you can’t navigate in a green world? What if they look and see you’re blue? What if you can never really be green? What if green doesn’t accept you?

So you stay. Even though the blue world is crushing you. Even though you know the green world is right there.

That’s what it feels like to live with anxiety, depression, chronic stress, or trauma. The blue world is the nervous system state you’ve adapted to — hypervigilance, rumination, constriction, fear. The green world is the state you’re trying to access — calm, presence, openness, safety.

And that woman in my chair? The oils took her inside. Showed her she could stand there. Showed her she didn’t have to solve anything — she could just be with the truth of it. That’s a healing state. That moment of relief. That moment of oh — I can exist here.

The feeling doesn’t fix everything. But it proves the green world exists. And once you know it exists, everything changes.

The Path

There’s a path from the blue world to the green world. It has three parts: Plant — Water — Harvest.

Plant. Cannabis plants the seed.

For years after my first experience at eighteen, I was high 24/7. People looked at me like I had a problem. Maybe I did. But what I was actually doing was investigating.

I used the plant consistently to slow down and find that stillness. The dysregulation was the tool, keep the old patterns offline — and follow the quiet — before those patterns could come back and close the door. Disorienting? Yes. But I wasn’t broken. I was doing the work. I kept those patterns trimmed back with constant cannabis intake — following the state of peace it was teaching me, slowly understanding and removing the things that took me out of it.

I literally followed cannabis. Always paying close attention. Where did it land — calm to anxious? Which strain for sleep, which for the morning? What did it feel like in my body — where did the tension release, what opened, where did the warmth arrive? What happened in my mind — what thoughts quieted, where was my focus?

Cannabis has CB1 — the dysregulator. When THC activates CB1 receptors in your brain, it disrupts your default mode network — the neural patterns associated with rumination, self-referential thinking, and automatic responses. It cuts the trains of thought that keep you trapped in the blue world.

Cannabis cut those thoughts. It stopped that thinking. It relaxed the body. And it said: Look at right now. Look around you and see what’s in this very moment.

In that space, I could ask myself questions I couldn’t ask before. Not because the answers changed — because the resistance to hearing them dropped.

What do I actually want?

What am I afraid of?

What would it feel like to not self-doubt?

I wasn’t escaping. I was investigating.

In that state I accessed calm I hadn’t felt in years. I forgave things I hated — about myself and about others. I found answers to questions I was told not to ask. And when I’d share what I learned, someone would always say the same thing:

“Oh, that’s not real — it’s just because you’re high.”

Just?

You systematically dysregulated your nervous system to keep your default patterns from self-sabotaging an experience, and let your body actually inhabit a state it didn’t know it could reach. Not as a concept — as a lived experience. A mark on the map. And now you have a direction.

Cannabis shows you the green world. It proves it exists. It gives you the felt sense of what calm, presence, joy, or openness actually feels like in your body.

That’s planting the seed.

Water. Essential oils water the seed.

Here’s what I learned after years of using cannabis: dysregulation shows you the door, but you can’t stay dysregulated forever — I tried. Your nervous system needs to reorganize. The pathways you discovered while high need to become pathways you can walk on your own.

Essential oils contain the same terpenes found in cannabis — linalool, limonene, beta-caryophyllene, pinene — but without the cannabinoids. No CB1 activation. No dysregulation.

These terpenes hit the brain and modulate quite a bit. Their therapeutic value when used intentionally is immense — albeit much quieter than the weed, because you’re not dysregulating at the same time. This is the entourage effect: terpenes and cannabinoids working in concert, each amplifying the other. Strip the cannabinoids out, and the terpenes still work — quieter, more refined. And that’s the difference: cannabis wields them like a mallet, breaking through resistance, while essential oils work like a chisel, shaping what follows.

The cannabis guided you into the green world — but you were dropped off right at the line again. But now that you’ve had your tour, you can use the essential oils as your walking buddies for the journey.

I learned this from Andrea, my teacher. She didn’t have a connection to cannabis like I did — so I set it aside to study what she wanted to show me. She introduced me to her plant world — essential oils — and mentored me. The sessions we did were designed to amplify the voice of the oils and sharpen our ability to hear them.

Cannabis had shown me the green world. Essential oils taught me how to live there.

That’s watering the seed.

Harvest. Power of mind is the harvest.

Once that pattern is strong enough — once you’ve accessed the state enough times with cannabis, reinforced it enough times with essential oils — neuroplasticity seals it in. The pathway becomes automatic. Your nervous system remembers the way.

And eventually, you don’t need the plant to access the state. You can activate it through intention alone.

Plant → Water → Harvest and Enjoy.

Every day I was planting seeds — every day, all day. It saved me from the march. It gave me something to do. But eventually it wasn’t enough. I needed to water what I’d already planted, not keep planting more. Andrea showed me how. Years later those seeds have begun to blossom — and in doing so, I’m beginning to share what I learned, so you can build something green too.

The Transformation

So what does this actually look like? What happens when you follow this path for years?

Let me tell you.

On my 18th birthday, I was deeply depressed.

I always saw the world differently. I could never understand why adults were unhappy if they were the ones who made the rules. They seemed trapped in something. And the people around me, they were fine with it. They could sit together and laugh, kids could kick a ball and have fun. And this weird tension sat underneath all of it.

I was raised in a blend of Indonesian and German culture, here in America. The world didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t make sense to it. I was raised religious, and I loved it — the songs, the sounds, the mysticism. A perfect intersection between the known and the unknown.

And then I realized I was gay.

The high school I attended was openly anti-LGBT. The religion I loved cast me out. My parents’ relationship was struggling. And I was internalizing all of it…

Then we moved — from the lush forests of Connecticut to the high desert of Colorado. I lost connection to the land, to my support system, to any sense of familiar ground.

I couldn’t tell my parents the truth. I had so much shame, and I didn’t know or trust anyone around me. I fell in love with another boy. I went through all of it alone.

I was heartbroken, confused, and felt like I had no options to make it better. I had no control, no autonomy.

I hated myself and I hated my life.

What I didn’t have language for, at the time, was what it actually felt like from the inside.

Every day a march. Every step one inch closer to a void — desolate, isolated, alone. Every step breaking me further from myself, and from any chance of true connection with the outside world.

The threat was real. Not just the school, not just the religion — the whole shape of the world I’d been handed. It had no place for someone like me. And in a hundred different ways, it made that very clear. The danger wasn’t in my head. It was in the air.

And the cruelest part? I took all of it inside. I breathed it in and became my own jailer. The world was pressing in from the outside — and I was pressing in from the inside too, furious at myself for wanting what I wanted, fighting who I was, turning their judgment into my own. There was nowhere safe. Not out there. Not in here.

I didn’t know how to stop. I couldn’t change who I was. I couldn’t change the world around me. And everything just kept moving — deeper and deeper into that void. Every day. Every minute.

And then I sat on a couch with a friend. A sofa, a bong, and one drag. And twenty minutes in —

It just stopped.

Not a rush. Not a revelation. Not some beautiful vision of the future. Just — an absence. Something I’d been carrying so long and I didn’t know how to put it down, until suddenly I did. My mind felt like a calm lake. My body felt comfortable. I could feel myself in the room — on the sofa, with my friend, with a dog — and that was enough. That was everything. I could breathe between the ideas.

That void I’d been marching toward? Gone. Not solved. Not fixed. Just — not there. And in its absence, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.

Right now is okay.

That’s all. No promises. No roadmap. Just: right now is okay. And that was the most radical thing I had ever experienced.

I walked through the door. And I stayed high for years so it wouldn’t close — terrified that if I stopped, I’d find myself marching again.

And for a long time, I was right to be scared. Because I was still using it as an escape — planting the seed over and over, but never watering it. The green world existed. I knew it existed. But I couldn’t stay there alone. I needed cannabis to hold the door open.

It was Andrea who taught me how to water the seeds I planted. The oils. The intentional work. How to reinforce the pathway instead of just finding it again and again. And slowly — over years, not months — I stopped needing cannabis to keep the door open. I learned to live and flourish with other plant molecules. And I brought those lessons with me into EMS, and then into LUMARANA — where the whole system finally found a home.

Today, I actually do love myself and love my life. Thirteen years ago that just wasn’t true.

It’s been a big journey. And it’s been a lot of work — but that work is intention. That work is in not self-sabotaging, not stopping myself, not falling for the same lies that still echo in my head. I’ve built and stepped into a life I control now — a mind, a body, and a spirit of my own. That’s a feeling I can’t fully describe, but I want for everyone to experience. There’s nothing else I want to spend my time on, nothing else that brings me the same peace, joy, and satisfaction. This life is the life I wanted — not because of what I have or what I will get, but because in this life I allow myself to be me.

The Invitation

You don’t have to use cannabis or essential oils or plant medicine this way. There are a million ways to do this work. The journey is the same — the tools you take are up to you.

These are the tools I teach, and here’s why:

I don’t trust institutions to show me the organization underneath reality. I’ve tried. Not the church, not the schools, not the government, not the community. What I trust is nature — because nature lives it every day, without effort, without agenda. Plants exist fully in this moment. Nothing else I know does that. They sit at the intersection of the known material and the infinite mystery, and they do it constantly, quietly, whether we acknowledge them or not. They are constantly working in harmony with us despite our naivety. We cannot exist without them, and fighting against that is exhausting. I’ve decided to learn from them instead.

What I teach is a framework. A way of understanding the pieces, so we can talk about what we think this all means — what’s the point, why are we here. Because when I step outside right now, I can’t help but think we’re missing something.

And once you can see it, and you develop a language for it, you can start exploring it — talking to people about it, recording it, collecting data on it.

In that exploration, I hope you find yourself. I hope you build a world where you love who you are so deeply that it spills over into how you love others.

And in that, maybe we find what we’ve been missing.

FOUNDATIONS is what I have to offer. It teaches the language of the green world. Before you can freely explore the depth of possibility, gathering data, using it to change your life and the world around you — you have to be able to hit your target: the state you actually meant to initiate. That’s molecular literacy. How to read cannabis so you can access healing states reliably, intentionally, and safely. Cannabinoids, terpenes, how to read a COA, how to choose strains that actually take you where you want to go. The precision you need can be waiting at your fingertips — the deep exploration becomes possible. You can learn to plant the right seed in the right soil to harvest what you want to eat.

FOUNDATIONS alone won’t fix your life. But it will make your steps intentional, and the growth that follows easier to integrate. You’ll walk out a little more relieved than when you came in — confident and comfortable with what you find.

Cinnamon started our journey, like it started hers — the woman who sat down in my chair not knowing where to begin. And in an interesting way, we might all be asking the same question: How do I take what I know and love, and add more to it? How do I respect the life I’ve lived and come from, while I want to change it? How do I love who I am now, and who I want to become, at the same time? And like her, when we answer these questions for ourselves — truly answer them — that’s when the healing begins.

She received the ingredients, and she ate the meal. That session may have been immensely beneficial to her, and I’m glad and touched and happy to have played a role in something so absolutely beautiful. But something always lingered after a session — quiet, low, persistent. She ate, but she didn’t learn to cook — to pick the seed, plant it in the right soil, water it just so, and watch it bloom. It’s not something she can do for herself, on her own time, when she needs it, for the next challenge.

FOUNDATIONS changes that.

In the massage room, I fought to empower my clients. In the ambulance, I fought to empower my patients. With LUMARANA, I’m fighting to empower you.

Keep reading through the blog. Relax, and just be. When you’re ready to step through the door, I’ll be waiting inside.

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Let’s build a green world together.