Can Substances Be Spiritual Teachers Without Leading You Astray?
How Substances Can Both Guide and Derail Your Growth
I've always identified with the shaman archetype even before I knew what archetypes were or how they worked.
Shamans are a kind of guide, and anyone brave enough to get close to me quickly discovers my knack for seeing where the universe wants them to go and shoving them in that direction.1 What makes shamans different from your average life coach, however, is that they use psychiatric aids from Mother Nature's medicine chest.
The shadow side? Getting so tangled up with the tools of the trade that you forget you're supposed to put them down eventually.
I definitely did that. A lot.
Now that I've taken my life's biggest step back from all substances, it's like standing in front of a pantry full of potions and finally being able to classify each with crystal clarity.
"That one makes you brave."
"That one makes you sleepy."
"That one makes you think your houseplant is trying to talk to you."
Let me share what I've learned about nature's psycho-spiritual toolkit.
Setting the Stage: The Three Layers of Reality
Yes, we live in a world where putting things in your "real, physical" body creates "real, physical" effects. Your brain chemistry shifts, and voila—psychological changes follow.
But the most profound truths stack across physical, psychological, and energetic planes. So, when you ingest a substance, a shaman would tell you there's something happening at this energetic level too.
Regardless of whether you believe such a plane exists, sometimes it's more useful to speak at this level because it allows us to say more in fewer words.
So, I'm going to do that a lot in what follows. But in the spirit of agnosticism, don't feel you have to assume that any of my claims about energy are objectively "true."
Feel free to replace my arguments with more biochemical and/or psychological interpretations, and you'll find my conclusions still check out (I'm confident this is one area of life where the conclusions of science and spirituality gel very neatly).
So, with that out of the way, I need you to bear with me.
I need you to do something a little odd.
Please Picture Yourself as a Stack of Squiggly Lines
These squiggles are your unique library of frequencies that make up the total sum of who you authentically are.
Some of these squiggles are fully "online" and humming along nicely—you express them openly without fear or shame. Others got scared into hiding by society, your parents, or that kid who dacked you in third grade.
To squiggle through this reality peacefully and at your full potential, you need to coax as many of the offline squiggles back online as you can.
People, stories, places, food, animals, plants, and—you guessed it—substances are also stacks of squiggles; they each have their own energetic signature.
When you feel drawn to any of them, it's usually because they mirror or promise to unlock forgotten, disowned, or under-expressed squiggles in your own personal squiggle stack.
When you ingest something, it becomes part of you. You're letting its squiggles mingle very deeply with the online and offline squiggles in your own stack.2
This presents both opportunities and risks and is why smart people treat nature's medicine cabinet with reverence—as a teacher, not a plaything.
In my experience, the squiggle-altering things we can ingest tend to work in one of three ways:
Ego disabling
They disable your ego, letting offline but poorly integrated squiggles come online while you (as awareness) are dazed and distracted
Frequency amplifying
They increase your expression of certain squiggles when there's a frequency match between a squiggle in your stack and theirs
Psychedelic
They temporarily grant perception of the energetic plane where all this squiggle-related stuff is occurring
Note that the boundaries of these categories may overlap somewhat, and some substances may fall under more than one category. For example, cannabis is both frequency amplifying—enhancing the expression of feminine qualities like ease and relaxation—and also psychedelic.
In this post, we'll just explore categories (1) and (2) because (3) is a big kettle of fish and deserves its own post.
1. How Substances Disable Your Ego
Example: Alcohol (others: benzodiazepines, opiates...)
I made friends with alcohol at 17.
At first, it was the perfect workaround. Socializing became easier, the mental hamster wheel slowed down, and it silenced my mental chatter enough to allow me to string two creative thoughts together.
Alcohol didn’t just loosen me up—it shut my ego down.
The fear, worry, and chronic self-monitoring that usually ran the show took a backseat. Suddenly, I could chat freely at parties, bang out book chapters in the evenings, and channel my late-night Socrates with my then-partner on the couch.
Alcohol gave me access to a bunch of underdeveloped squiggles—traits and abilities that had been hiding in the wings, waiting for their cue.
With my ego out cold, they got a moment in the spotlight, and some of them even turned into decent skills. But while the benefits of the booze were real—more ease, more access, more expression—they came with mounting costs.
Besides the increasing toll my nightly G&Ts were taking on my health, using substances to disable the ego also disables its ability to keep unintegrated parts of you in check.
The exiled bits—the basement-dwellers of your psyche—get curious.
And when the inner bouncers are drunk off duty, these parts have a way of sneaking into the VIP section.
When the Ego Is Offline, the Archetypes Come Out to Play
Occasionally, my tipsy bookish pastimes would be tossed out and replaced by a bold, sensual, chaotic energy that, frankly, surprised me as much as anyone else.
How else do you explain flirting with a taxi driver so hard that you forget to pay him? Or making out with your guy-friend's girlfriend to stamp yourself in his memory by proxy?
I wasn’t trying to act out. It just happened.
You know, a few times.
Like some deeply repressed siren archetype had hijacked the wheel and was gleefully running red lights. And every time, I’d wake up, hungover and mildly horrified, replaying my antics with a mix of shame and strange admiration.
“Why aren't I more like that without the ethanol possession?” I’d wonder.
Truth is, I probably could be—but alcohol made it easy. Too easy. It fast-tracked self-expression but also short-circuited integration—the spiritual equivalent of giving a toddler the car keys.
The consequences were rarely catastrophic, but they were clues. Clues that ego suppression without awareness doesn’t make you more authentic but rather unpredictable.
Eventually, alcohol stopped being a bridge to my bolder self and became a blockade. The longer I leaned on it, the more it anchored me in low-vibe territory. Lust without discernment started doing damage, and the shadow doesn’t care if it ruins your night or someone else’s.
It just wants airtime.
So while alcohol helped me override fear and crack open new parts of myself, it also showed me what happens when you skip the hard work of conscious integration.
You get possessed by your own potential—and not always in a good way.
2. How Substances Amplify Your Frequencies
Examples: Cannabis, coffee (others: see masculine and feminine lists below.)
I may as well torpedo my professional reputation completely here.
Alcohol served me faithfully until my mid twenties, after which I graduated to greener pastures, discovering the Devil's lettuce.
Thank god I didn't find it earlier because if you're under 25 and smoke it regularly, it messes with brain development in ways that can derail your life—I’ve seen the consequences and am concerned they’re not being talked about enough.3
Worse yet, hospital admissions for psychosis are through the roof in places where weed is commercialized.4 This stuff is being promoted as "safe" medicine now, even though it comes with a bunch of risks.
One of these is that if you're not good at taking control of your life, it risks trapping you in cycles of use instead of necessary action. But the very thing that makes it trapping is also what makes it so useful.
When Feminine Plants Seduce You Into Stillness
Substances in this second category can be divided into the camps of masculine vs. feminine. They interact with our own masculine and feminine tendencies in our squiggle stacks to either bring them online or amplify them.
When I refer to "masculine" and "feminine," I'm not talking about gender roles here. Instead, think yin and yang.
Masculine expressions are activating, energizing, and directive—they push outward, encourage movement, and sharpen your focus. Examples of masculine substances include:
Coffee
Tobacco
Rhodiola
Maca
Yerba mate
Guarana
Feminine expressions are receptive, relaxing, and inward—they invite stillness, surrender, and emotional depth. Examples of feminine substances include:
Cannabis
Cacao
Kava
Blue lotus
Mugwort
Chamomile
Cannabis is a powerfully feminine plant. It invites you inward and says, "sit with this" instead of "go do that." This passivity cannabis induces can either trap you in dissatisfaction or give you much-needed rest.
Context is everything.
With proper set and setting, decent mindfulness, and energetic grounding5, you can ideally sidestep its anxious and disorienting effects and access its feminine, relaxing gifts instead.
This profound relaxation made me fall in love with the leaf instantly and—once I peeled myself off the couch—sparked an obsessive quest to access that depth of relaxation naturally because I knew it had to be possible.
The trouble was, I initially went looking in the wrong places.
Steeped in the plant’s feminine allure, I began daydreaming that a man would bring me the life of ease I craved, rather than creating that life for myself.
Over time, these fantasies became increasingly bizarre and improbable: I became convinced a man twice my age on the other side of the globe would see my brilliance and leave his wife to rescue me from my mundane life.
Yeah. Yikes.
Substances (and people, for that matter) only "loan" us their frequency so we can learn to cultivate it ourselves in our own squiggle stack. Think of them as airlifting you up the experiential mountain so you can plant a flag, fly back down, then hike to that waypoint on your own.
Never make the mistake of positioning substances (or people) as the permanent means to some desired end. To do so is a trap and basically the definition of addiction (or obsession).6
Anyway, for someone who’d spent five years meditating, I figured I’d earned a bit of inner stillness by now. But apparently, I’d been caffeinating it out of reach.
It turned out my love for the lettuce was largely a countermeasure.
It was balancing out the effects of my morning coffee—a masculine substance that had powered me through years of achievement but quietly wrecked my system’s ability to relax.
How did I know it was coffee's fault?
Because days after quitting it, I felt so relaxed it was as if I'd smoked a joint. The weed had been patching an imbalance I didn’t know the coffee had created.
Once I made the connection, I ditched both, sparking my current war on coffee—which you can read more about in last week's post:
The real takeaway?
Balance isn’t just a lifestyle tip—it’s key to lasting peace. The substances you reach for without thinking are often the ones worth questioning most. So before you light it, sip it, or smoke it, ask yourself: Am I using this as a tool—or letting it use me?
The Case for Conscious Use
Substances aren’t inherently good or bad. They’re amplifiers, disrupters, teachers, and tricksters—all rolled into one. Whether they become your ally or your downfall depends on how consciously you use them.
You can borrow a state, sure. But if you mistake the loan for ownership, you’ll stay broke. That’s why the goal is always integration. To learn what each substance unlocks—and then find a sober, grounded way to access that frequency yourself.
Because if you can only feel calm, bold, creative, or free with a substance in your system, then you’re not free. You’re just outsourcing your squiggles.
Use the tools. Thank them too. But don’t let them run the show.
Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic. If you’ve ever treated a latte like a spiritual crutch or made out with someone’s energy field by accident, you’re in the right place. Subscribe for more irreverent breakdowns of your psycho-spiritual habits and enjoy new posts every Friday, straight to your inbox.
Not everyone enjoys being turned into my pet project, I've learned. But others don't mind the free therapy.
In case you're wondering: Yes, the same thing happens when you sleep with someone. Depending on how hard you go at it, it can take months to clear off that energetic residue. So, y'know, think hard before you smash.
Huberman, A. (2022, December 31). Effects of cannabis (marijuana) on adolescent & young adult brain | Dr. Andrew Huberman [Video]. YouTube.
Myran, D. T., Gaudreault, A., Konikoff, L., Talarico, R., & Pacula, R. L. (2023). Changes in cannabis-attributable hospitalizations following nonmedical cannabis legalization in Canada. JAMA Network Open, 6(10).
Saying you’re “grounded“ in energetic terms is basically the same as saying you’re “not psychosis-prone” in psychological terms.
Maté, G. (2010). In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction. North Atlantic Books.