When people ask me why I believe so deeply in immersive experiences, the answer isn’t theoretical. It is personal.

Looking back over my life, I can trace the most significant turning points not to moments when I learned something new, but to the times I left my everyday world behind and entered a different one. I traveled somewhere unfamiliar. I stepped into a container held by someone I trusted. I gave myself permission to become a student again. Each experience changed the direction of my life.

The first was in the early 2000s, about eight years after my mother passed away. Grief had transformed me, but I knew there was something deeper I was being asked to understand. I wasn’t looking for another book to read or another weekend workshop. I was looking for something that could reach beneath the surface. That search led me to Caroline Myss and her Sacred Contracts program.

What was originally designed as a two-year journey became three years of traveling to Chicago and Austin, Texas, several times each year. I immersed myself in the study of archetypes, symbolism, mythology, and the deeper architecture of the human psyche. More importantly, I immersed myself in my own life.

Those years invited an extraordinary amount of self-reflection. I began to understand the unconscious archetypal patterns that had quietly shaped my choices. I discovered parts of myself I had never fully met. I healed pieces of my story I hadn’t even realized were asking for attention.

I also found community—people who were asking the same profound questions I was. We learned together, challenged one another, and witnessed each other’s becoming. Caroline remains one of the two most influential teachers of my life.

But perhaps the greatest gift of those years was something I could never have predicted. Somewhere along the way, I began to recognize the first whispers that I was being called into practitioner work in the healing arts; something inside me remembered.

Years later, that path led me into the Sonoran Desert. While studying with Caroline, I met a Yaqui elder who taught in the program (Don Lorenzo Archuleta). Something about him stayed with me. Years later, I reached out, traveled to Arizona, and spent time learning from him in the desert. That experience shifted something even deeper. My second greatest teacher. It moved me beyond spiritual concepts and into living them even more deeply. It awakened a relationship with the Earth that felt ancient and familiar. It rooted me in ways I didn’t know I had been longing for. It deepened my connection to ceremony, to lineage, to my own ancestral inheritance, and to a way of knowing that cannot be taught through information alone. Many of the ways I sit with people today have their roots in those days.

Then, a year and a half ago, I found myself boarding another airplane. This time, my destination was the Peruvian Amazon. I spent time in the jungle working with plant medicines, getting to know Grandmother Ayahuasca. Again, I stepped completely outside the familiar, entered a world that asked me to surrender. It was an immersive experience of ego death. Not the destruction of who I was, but the unraveling of who I believed myself to be; I returned home changed.

Although each of these journeys looked entirely different, they all shared the same thread. Each required me to leave behind the rhythm of my ordinary life and to enter an environment intentionally created for transformation. Each surrounded me with teachers, community, nature, and experiences, making it difficult to remain the person who had arrived.

Distance has a way of creating perspective. When we temporarily remove ourselves from the responsibilities, identities, habits, and environments that continually reinforce who we have been, something remarkable becomes possible. We begin to hear ourselves again. Not the version of ourselves shaped by obligation or the version performing for the expectations of others. But the quieter voice beneath it all. The one that has patiently waited for enough silence to finally be heard.

I’ve come to believe that this is one of the great gifts of pilgrimage. Whether it takes us to a classroom in Chicago, the Sonoran Desert, the Peruvian jungle, or anywhere else that calls our soul forward, stepping outside our ordinary life creates space for something extraordinary to emerge.

It is not only the location that changes us; it is who we become because we were willing to leave what was familiar long enough to remember who we really are.

Every one of those journeys prepared me for the life I live today and has become some of my greatest medicines of all.

In my next essay, I’ll share why these experiences have forever changed the way I believe transformation is supported—and why I am offering private immersions of my own.

Aho.