What a psychedelic journey can give you (from someone who's done it three times)

Plant Medicine  ·  Microdosing  ·  Business  ·  Limitless Woman

By Julie Cyvonne  ·  Plant Medicine Coach & Business Mentor  ·  9 min read

My friend, Dr. Erin Hallahan, is not someone you'd look at and think, "she needs healing." She's a chiropractor running a thriving multidisciplinary clinic in San Diego. She travels constantly. She left a successful career in oil and gas in Canada because she had a bigger vision for her life and followed through on it. She is, in the best possible way, someone who does what she wants.

She's also been on three of my retreats, just finished the last round of Limitless Woman, and is one of the most honest people I know about what this work really does and doesn't do. So when I sat down to record a podcast episode with her, I knew the conversation was going to be good.

Here's what came out of it:

She didn't come in thinking she needed to fix in anything. She came in curious.

Before Erin ever met me, she had experimented with psychedelics recreationally. She knew she wanted a guided experience. But she had never done a full dose of psilocybin, and she had a very clear personal rule for herself: she wasn't going to touch ayahuasca until she'd done a full ceremony with mushrooms first.

What she was looking for wasn't a fix. It was facilitation. Someone experienced enough that she could let go.

There's a huge difference between taking a substance and having an experience. The container is everything. When you trust the person holding the space, your nervous system can do what it came here to do.

Three retreats. Three completely different journeys.

Each of Erin's experiences brought her exactly what she needed in that moment, even when she didn't know going in what that was going to be.

That last one is the one that sticks with her the most. Because we talk so much about breakthroughs and revelations, and sometimes the most profound thing is just give yourself a few hours of quiet when your nervous system has forgotten what that feels like.

What most people misunderstand about a retreat

People hear "facilitated psychedelic retreat" and they imagine someone watching over them while they take something and then everyone goes home. That's not what this is.

Erin put it perfectly when she said she had no idea how much support was coming on the other side of the journey. The intention setting before. The integration work after. The moment where I sit you down and we look at what came up and figure out what you're going to do with it while your brain is still in a more plastic state.

I've had this conversation with someone who essentially wanted a trip sitter and I had to be honest with them: that's not what I do. It would be like going to a bakery that makes extraordinary lemon meringue pie and asking for a chocolate chip cookie. I'm not going to give you that.

The retreat is the catalyst. The integration is where the shift lands.

What microdosing gave her that the macrodose couldn't

Erin was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. She chose not to medicate, partly because she was protective of her sleep and didn't want to mess with a stimulant. Microdosing became her alternative, and she loved what she noticed.

Focus. Patience. Clarity of thought in the middle of a patient intake where she has to diagnose and build a treatment plan in real time. Less road rage. More creativity. Better marketing ideas.

She also made a point I want everyone to hear: she microdoses on her workdays on purpose. Because she's better at her job when she does - not altered or high but firing on all cylinders in a way that felt like her brain had finally been fully switched on.

The misconception that gets in the way for so many people is the association between psychedelics and fuzziness. We think of alcohol, we think of that cloudy feeling, and we project it onto everything. But a true subperceptual dose of psilocybin isn't fuzzy. It's more like Windexing your brain. You realize there was a film on it you'd stopped noticing.

How it showed up in her business

When Erin came into Limitless Woman, she was doing everything in her clinic herself. And I mean everything!! Things that absolutely did not need to be done by the person who spent years in school to become a chiropractor and then built her own multidisciplinary practice from scratch.

One of the first things we did inside the program was a deep dive into her Human Design. What came up was something she'd been beating herself up about: she's someone who generates incredible ideas but struggles to execute them alone. She had started to interpret that as a failure, like she wasn't cut out to be a business owner.

She was cut out to be a visionary. Those are different roles and they require different support structures.

What made Limitless Woman different from every other coaching program she'd tried was something pretty simple: I asked her what she truly wanted. Not how many patients she wanted to see per day. Not how many weeks of vacation she was allowed. What did she want her life and her business to look like?

She'd been through programs that handed her a cookie-cutter framework and told her to follow it. One coach wanted her seeing 25 to 30 patients a day. Another wanted her to pre-decide her annual vacation and stick to it. She left oil and gas specifically to get away from that kind of thinking. She wasn't going to recreate it in her own clinic.

The microdosing protocols ran alongside all of it. The focus and patience it gave her made it easier to answer the hard questions instead of spinning. The creativity showed up in her marketing. The clarity showed up in what she was willing to let go of.

That's what this work does. The microdosing creates the conditions for clarity. The coaching gives that clarity somewhere to go. The next round of Limitless Woman starts August 10th, and if any part of Erin's story sounds familiar, you want to be one of the 10 women in the next round.

Her advice for anyone thinking about going on a retreat

I asked Erin what she would tell someone to do to get the most out of the experience. Her answer was simple and I think it's exactly right.

You're seeking this out for a reason. If you're not going to go all in, why go at all? The people who get the most out of these experiences are the ones who show up willing to be surprised by what comes up. The ones who are open.

Erin is one of my favorite humans and I'm genuinely so lucky she ended up in my world. If you're in San Diego, go find her at the Carbon Collective. Get adjusted. Get your sinuses cleared with nasal release. Talk to her. You'll immediately understand why her patients keep coming back.

And if what you read here sparked something about what microdosing and the right coaching container could do for your business, that spark is worth following. 🍄