Where Your Feet Can’t Touch

It’s become common to hear psychedelics described as tools. Tools for healing. Tools for transformation. Tools for rewiring the brain and even dissolving the ego. It makes sense. It's reassuring. Tools have handles. You know where to grasp them, what they’re for.

In a world hemorrhaging uncertainty, a tool implies mastery, something to hold on to when the world feels ungraspable. The word fits neatly inside our cultural lexicon, where value is measured by utility, worth by outcome. Tools fix the broken part, they loosen what’s stuck, they bring light into the dark.

But language doesn’t just describe; it bends the thing it touches. The metaphor of the tool domesticates the psychedelic. It renders the ineffable into protocol. Healing, even awe, are framed as deliverables. To frame psychedelics as a tool is to place them in the technocratic imaginary: something to be optimized, scaled, slotted into pre-existing architectures of utility. Toolness is about control, repeatability, design. If a thing has value, it’s because it can be used.

Underneath it all, what this metaphor protects is a certain faith: the idea of a self at the center of experience. A user, an agent, a chooser of outcomes.  We think of psychedelics as another promise that the self can be improved without being endangered, that transformation can be administered like a vaccine, guaranteed, scaled.

But what if psychedelics are not tools for healing, but thresholds that pull us into the unbearable density of being alive? Not instruments that fix us, but occasions that offer to undo us. That ask us to sit with grief we cannot language, or awe we cannot explain. That entangle us with forces we do not understand.

Psychedelics don’t just work on us; they work on the fragile scaffolding of “us” itself. They reveal that the person we think we are, our coherence, our story, is not a solid structure but a temporary swirl of experience, other beings, and memory, barely held together by habit and hope. Psychedelics make that visible. And sometimes, they tear it down.

I’ve seen it happen.

A client once tried to describe a journey in fragments.  It began with grief. A grief so vast it felt older than his life. It poured through him like an endless river, every loss he'd ever lived braided to losses that were not his but were somehow carried in his body: grandparents he’d never met, children never born, a partner's sorrow picked up along the way. In that moment, he shared that his body wasn’t his anymore, it was dissolving, filamentous, barely tethered to time. He felt himself thinning into roots and mycelium, into the weight of rain on soil, into every uncountable thing he'd once thought was outside himself. No insight. No epiphany. Just unbearable aliveness that could not be held, only endured.

Tell me how you pick up a tool after that. Tell me where you grasp it, where your hand ends and the handle begins.

What if the self is not the point? What if healing is not a fix, but a redistribution, a reweaving of relation that has nothing to do with mastery and everything to do with mystery? We don’t like to talk about it this way because mystery can’t be captured, can’t be kept.

Mystery doesn’t reassure us. It unsettles. It asks us to stop trying to hold on, to stop making life into something we use. It requires being at peace with something larger than can be understood. It is life moving through you right now, reshaping you beyond your say in it.

This is the risk psychedelics hold: that they might not deliver what we ask. They might not leave us functional. They might not leave us healed. They might not leave “us” at all. And this is precisely what our culture resists. To call them tools is to corral them into safety, into repeatability and control. It reassures us that the self remains at the center, sovereign and intact, the wielder of experience.

Because they can undo more than they restore, not everyone will want, or be ready, to step into that kind of undoing. No one should face it alone. It takes care, steady company, and something larger than individual will to meet what these substances can open.

If we need a metaphor, it's not the tool. It's the tide pulling you past the place your feet can touch the bottom. It's the animal in the dark that meets your gaze and doesn't blink. It's the split second on a swing when you float before coming back down.

You don’t wield psychedelics. You don’t master them. You don’t use them to improve your life. You enter something. Something enters you. And sometimes, it leaves you rearranged in ways that will never make sense in the language of fixing and function.

Think of psychedelics not as instruments in our hands, but as invitations-and sometimes incursions-into a reality vast enough to swallow “you” whole. What comes after may not be clarity or control, but learning to feel what you couldn’t before. To walk back into your life with a little more room for what’s hard and what’s beautiful, even when you can’t make sense of it. You let the experience change you in ways you won’t ever fully name. Keep living, softer around the edges.

And you stay there, where your feet can’t touch, long enough to notice you’re not alone in it. Others are there too, not to hand you a tool or fix what broke, but to sit with you in the mystery, learning together how to live without handles.

And none of us ever touch bottom the same way again.