A live recorded conversation on UpTrust between Jordan Myska Allen and Brian Robertson, founder of Holacracy and now founder of Ledgeway Sangha, a psychedelic church in Austin, Texas.
Watch the recording or see the original AMA post, where the live questions came from.
Content note: this conversation includes a passage discussing a community member’s past suicidality. It has been handled with care; see the note below the passage.
A Psychedelic Sangha
[00:00:00]
Brian: Hey, there you are.
Jordan: Hey, welcome back. I still feel a ton of love seeing you. I’m excited to talk about everything — whatever people want to get into — but especially Ledgeway Sangha and the things that have changed. I think you’re doing something really unique and interesting. Tell us a little about Ledgeway, and then I’ve got infinite questions.
Brian: Yeah, totally. Just to verify — I know this AMA window is here. I’m not supposed to be commenting on it, but rather talking to you, right?
Jordan: It’s up to you. If you want to comment on stuff, you can just be typing and we’ll chat — kind of like a Twitch stream. Occasionally I’ll say check this out.
If there’s not a lot of site activity, and you’d rather just have a conversation, that’s lovely too.
Brian: Cool, great, excellent. So — Ledgeway Sangha. It’s the organization I’m building now. I describe it sometimes as a psychedelic church, because people have heard that term often, but that’s actually something I don’t like about it. I think of it more as a psychedelic sangha. The model is less pastor-and-flock, less church-like, and more communal — a community of peer-to-peer support, learning together, deepening together. More communal than top-down.
And it’s a rather different kind — the way we use medicines, psychedelics and others, the model of it is quite a bit different than the way a lot of medicine work is done today. That’s my passion. I can say more, of course, but I’ll stop there and give you a chance.
A Psychedelic Renaissance
[00:02:26]
Jordan: Yes. So — medicine work, psychedelic church — these are things that are really gaining momentum. I have my own opinions, but why do you think this is getting so much attention?
Brian: It’s weird — we’re in this psychedelic renaissance, which happened decades ago and got clamped down on big time. There’s a resurgence now, and I think it’s hard to suppress information in today’s age — the information of how powerful these tools can be is out there. There’s a lot of complexity in the world, and I think psychedelics, used well, can be such a powerful tool for developing the kind of consciousness that can navigate — that can thrive — in the world we have today.
And it’s also gotten into the right communities and movements. In Texas here, a lot of the psychedelic legalization efforts and reform are being led, in our current political system, by the right — because there’s now such ample evidence for how much it helps veterans. It’s largely become a bipartisan issue, which is fascinating — there are very few things that are. In the Texas legislature, a bill passed recently to basically legalize psychedelics for research purposes. That bill passed with more bipartisan support than any other bill that season — except the bill to raise the senators’ salaries.
Jordan: So cynically, the senators wanted to make more money and legally do drugs.
Brian: Yeah. Apparently.
Not a Blowout Medicine
[00:04:38]
Jordan: I’d love to hear some of the biggest breakthroughs you’ve seen in the community gathering.
Brian: So many of them. Let me start by sharing what’s different about these gatherings, because that connects to the kinds of breakthroughs we see.
We tend to use psychedelics quite differently than a lot of the quote-unquote psychedelic churches around, or even the underground psychedelic space. A lot of what I see out there uses big medicines — big spirit medicines that give people a blowout experience of a wildly different way of being: a heroic dose of psilocybin, or ayahuasca certainly fits that. Most of these journey containers are — somebody goes in, often blindfolded, on an inner journey. There’s a guide or a therapist, maybe some dialogue, but the journey is largely that person’s inner work with the medicine. That’s not how we do it at all, and those aren’t the kinds of medicines we typically use.
With us it’s a more communal journey style. We’re using medicines that are not big blowout medicines. We do three of our main journeys — we call them drop-ins — every month. So it’s almost one a week. As opposed to the typical model, where you might go to a retreat maybe a couple times a year at most. We’re doing this almost weekly, with a stable community. Different people come in and out at different times, but generally you’ll see the same people again and again. Some people come to all of them, or near all of them.
The medicine we use, we name it Clarity — that’s our name for it. It’s not a very known or common medicine — not one typically used in these kinds of spiritual or healing modalities. The reason is it’s not a big blowout medicine. You’re not going to dissolve into God. It’s a medicine of attunement, of clarity, sovereignty. It tends to be psychedelic, but one that doesn’t decrease cognitive capacity — you’re still completely here. And it’s a medicine of sovereignty — you tend to feel quite whole, quite complete in it. There’s a sense of I don’t need anything outside myself. I am whole as I am.
And then it dramatically increases attunement. It has a very bodily component — you can really feel each other, energetically.
With that kind of medicine, the space is fairly open and unstructured after an initial little setup. Most of the journey is unstructured, open, but with an invitation. And the invitation is: come to be of service to each other, or allow yourself to be served — specifically, come to be of service in releasing anything in the way of standing in loving acceptance of all that is. The judgments, the resistances — judgments of self, of other — any contraction, any wanting something to be different than it is in a way you’re hooked into. The invitation is to come practice releasing those. It’s an invitation, not a goal — we’re not seeking anything in these journeys, not pushing for anything, not trying to get anywhere.
So what you have is this peer-to-peer gathering, largely unstructured, but with this cultural field and invitation, and a medicine that puts people into a sense of wholeness. The heart tends to naturally open — it’s an indirect heart-opening medicine, not like a serotonin-dump kind of thing at all. But when you’re in sovereignty, in wholeness, and super attuned to each other, the heart just naturally opens. That’s what happens when we’re whole and complete and yet attuned.
So there’s this open-hearted, attuned space where somebody can come and bring something they’re wrestling with — some judgment that’s stuck, some contraction they might not even know the shape of — and they often get surrounded by several peers who want to support the process. Different people have different modalities of supporting. I have my own way of working with people, and I do a lot of work in these spaces to help somebody get more to the center of themselves, find the contraction, the resistance, and find a way to release it back into loving acceptance.
You Are Integrating
And this is done many times a month, in this stable environment. So instead of using big medicines to give people an experience they then have to go worry about how to integrate into their normal world — this becomes people’s normal world. It’s your community, hanging out with these people regularly, multiple times a month. Within that you’re doing this peer-to-peer supported work. And instead of it being a blowout experience that’s hard to integrate, you are integrating in the journey. This is a self-integrating approach. You do not need to think about integration, which is a big hot topic in the psychedelic space — and I think the fact that something’s missing that we have to focus on it so much says something about the context in which the medicines are used.
The way we do it, you end up with these deeply integrated transformations over time. It’s not a bam, blow-you-out thing — although people often will have life-changing experiences in one journey. But that’s missing the point. It’s not about that one journey. It’s all of the lead-up — all the trust and safety building with other people, all the being in this cultural field until they were ready for something. And then, when they’re ready and they go in and get some support, they’re able to release some deep structure, some identity structure, some resistance they didn’t even know they had.
So it leads to a more integrated change — one that’s in community, supported by community, that you don’t have to go try to stabilize and integrate afterward. It’s often incremental, so it’s more developmentally focused. I think the way psychedelics are typically used is more state experience, which can also be developmentally catalytic — for sure, you get a big state experience and that can open you to things. The way we use it is more like meeting people where they are. We use medicines like Clarity that meet people where they are, and from there it helps them figure out: from where I am, what’s in my way of just being love? Of just being in loving acceptance of all?
The Delta Is Shocking
[~00:09:00]
And so from that we see these developmental journeys — when I watch people over years, it’s shocking, the things I see. I have one friend who’s been coming a few years now, and when she first came in, several other people were like, Why did you invite her?
And the reason was: she came in highly autistic, and had struggled with attunement — this is kind of natural, comes with being neurodivergent sometimes. Huge heart, wonderful human. And now, a few years later, she no longer even identifies as autistic. You probably wouldn’t know, talking to her — it’s shocking, the delta. Now she’s just living this super heart-filled life. She came from being a tech founder, a CEO — ran an AI genomics company — and when she started, highly autistic. And now she’s an almost radically different human.
You’ll see others, too. Another guy who’s been coming just a year now — he came in with substantial darkness. A massive trauma background. He was wrestling with fairly active suicidality, thinking about killing himself — basically this was his last, last, last thing to try. My God, today he’s a fountain of love and light. He told me, some weeks ago — when he first came a year ago, he would’ve traded his life for pretty much anyone else’s on the planet. And now he said he wouldn’t trade his life for anyone’s — he loves his life. From actively wrestling with — to the point of planning how to end his life — and he’s now embedded in this deep, loving community. He’s just surrounded by love.
And that’s the other beautiful part. It’s not just going to a retreat with a bunch of people you might see again in six months. It’s communal — it’s built into this community that’s being built. You end up developing connections, friendships, deep friendships — ones that have served you in your journey, through some very dark places, or through some beautiful openings, whatever it is.
The relationships I’ve built like this — I’m shocked, honestly, I’m almost tearing up thinking about it. I have more intimacy now, in so many ways, than I did in my twenty-year marriage before I moved to Austin. The level of depth, of connection, of intimacy is off the charts, because we’re there with each other through these beautiful processes.
I have so many examples of this — I could share more if you like, but —
Why Community Changes the Outcome
[00:14:49]
Jordan: Let’s give examples — actually, there are some good questions coming in.
[Chat question:] What is it about doing it in community that leads to different outcomes than a smaller therapeutic setting?
Brian: Imagine you’re working with a therapist or a coach, a paid professional — you can get lots of great benefit out of that, and I do, I have people I work with, and it’s super valuable. Not knocking that at all. But there’s a different kind of value you get when it’s people who know you, love you, really see you — see some part of yourself that you’re rejecting, something you’re not loving in yourself. There’s something about it not being a paid, arm’s-length professional — there’s a bond there, and it lets something go in deeper, I find. And it’s frequent — these people get to really know you.
And then there’s something about the transformation happening in community. Often I find when people go and have a big leap at a retreat, then go back to their normal life, their friends treat them like they always have, and it can pull them backward. It creates almost a gravity well you have to escape when you want to carve a new version of yourself in a new direction. Whereas here, this community is part of carving that with you. There’s not this strange going back into an old self, an old world — they’re with you, pulling you forward. They’re watching you, supporting you in this. I have this experience myself — people around me in the community see my transformation sometimes before I do. I experience it with them too, where they have an old story about themselves, and I’m starting to see it no longer matches, and I can hold up a mirror to that.
And there’s just so much love possible in that. Another thing I find is often when I see somebody rejecting a part of themselves, I let myself just fall in love with that part, because I love that person. I had a friend once who was in rejection of his fear — it broke my heart, because I actually think it’s core to his superpower. I see him as one of the most courageous people I know, because he’s had to deal with more fear than most people I know, and find a way to stand in it.
This was years ago — I saw him in this space and found myself in heartbreak at his rejection of his fear. So I loved it — I started showering him with all the genuine reasons I love his fear and would never want it to be different, even though I’d wish for him a relationship with it that isn’t a rejection — not a shadowed relationship. And through that, especially on a medicine of attunement, he’s able to access that pathway himself — able to feel what it’s like to love that part of himself, because we’re using medicines that increase attunement, so he can feel what it feels like in me.
There’s something so powerful about the regular contact, the communal container, and the fact that it’s peer-to-peer — people who know you, love you, see you, supporting you. It’s similar, I think, to people who regularly go to circling, or Wakeful sessions. I’m sure you see similar things from this, right?
Isn’t Everything Outside Yourself a Tool?
[00:18:40]
[Chat question:] Sounds like full friendships. It sounds like the idea is to use the medicine to change a person’s ability to relate, doing so on a regular basis. This seems like another addiction to something outside of our own self and our own mind creating that — and being the agent of change.
Brian: Sure — isn’t everything? Isn’t a therapist the same thing? Isn’t going to the gym something outside myself I’m using for change? Of course. It all is. And there are different ways you can relate to that. You can relate to it as I need it, I can’t do this without the other,
or you can use it as a tool to reclaim some inner capacity.
Especially with Clarity, the main medicine we use — it’s one of the beautiful medicines. When I first took it, many years ago, I had this experience of wanting to be more like this every minute of every day. That’s rare — most psychedelics, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t want five grams of psilocybin every day; I wouldn’t be very functional. That’s true of many beautiful psychedelics. Clarity is different — it’s a reference point. Today I can tell you I’m not notably different on or off that medicine. It’s indistinguishable. I’ve even taken massive doses — thirty times what’s considered a normal strong dose — and you couldn’t tell. I could be on it right now; you’d have no idea. I’m not, but I could be. That’s from years of working with this and internalizing everything I got from it. Now it doesn’t do much — I enjoy taking it more like a visit to an old teacher, something I’m no longer necessarily getting much from, but there’s still a sweet familiarity.
I think that’s the potential here. Or said another way — the medicines we use are really not the medicine in this journey style. The community is the medicine — which is another thing outside yourself, other people. Though, of course, we can go real philosophical: is that really outside yourself? Is anything really outside yourself? But yeah — the community is the medicine. The medicine just increases your ability to get something from the community.
Medicine Is Optional
[~00:21:00]
It’s an amplifier that makes it easier to feel others and take that in — it builds new neural circuits, new pathways, and you get better at doing it otherwise. As another example, we also run retreats every three months — a quarterly, weekend-long retreat at my lake house. In addition to the almost-weekly sessions, at that we use another medicine alongside Clarity — one that takes long enough that we don’t use it every time. We call it Gratitude. Also a very rare medicine — I’m not going to name the chemical compounds right now, but most people have never heard of it. It’s technically the strongest heart medicine on the planet, and yet wildly, radically different from heart medicines people are used to, like MDMA. I don’t use MDMA — I’ll actually never use it again. Gratitude is just so vastly better. One of the things we find is that even after a single use of Gratitude, it can permanently increase people’s capacity for love. I have so many anecdotal reports of this, and there are anecdotal reports online with this compound too. It almost carves new grooves — it gives you a reference point of whoa, that’s what it’s like to be in this — with gratitude.
It’s a very grounded, sovereign, total heart-open state, and in that state it’s like, oh, I can access this now.
And sure enough, people sober off the medicine and have a reference point experience — which is the benefit of state experiences. The trap, I think the commenter is pointing to, is if you become almost addicted to the state experience, or reliant on it, trying to live from shifting to an altered state — there are downsides to that. But if we use them as reference points, to grow into, then they’re tools — like circling, or Wakeful sessions, like so many other things.
Jordan: Thank you. So — you get a lot of pushback for this sort of thing, and I’m sure you’re used to some of these questions. Looking at the comment threads, there’s something about — well, what about this reliance on drugs, this reliance on community, and also the relationship between the two? How much are the medicines part of the solidarity of the community — are they required? Do you have relationships outside that — I already know the answer, since I’m someone who’s part of this community who doesn’t do the medicines — but maybe you can speak to the relationship between the medicine and the community.
Brian: Yeah, the medicine’s completely optional. At any given journey we usually have multiple people there not on medicine. It’s a great tool — not required at all. Many years ago I sat with a medicine facilitator who worked with a bunch of different medicines, and one day a partner of mine at the time wanted to come and didn’t want to do medicines, and he said no, you have to be on medicine to be there. I thought — wow, that sucks. I respect everyone’s different way of doing this, but absolutely not required.
We often have comments from people who are sober saying, wow, I got so much out of being here in this field, even without medicine.
Often when people are new to the community, they’ll stay sober the first time or two or three — to build trust and connection — and medicine is optional. It’s powerful, an incredible tool, and partly the nature of the medicines we use is that they work well mixed, which isn’t true of every medicine. It’s not any fun being the sober person when a bunch of people are high on THC — at least for me, I find that miserable. But the medicines we use tend to work beautifully like that. Often, even when there’s a critical mass of people on the medicine, it shifts something in the field — it helps enough people access a certain kind of attunement and state that suddenly even the sober people find it easier to feel and access it. I’ve had many people, especially at retreats with Gratitude, who didn’t take any medicine, say, I feel like I’m on the medicine just from being around it, in the field.
And that’s great.
Love as the Norming Function
[00:26:11]
Jordan: I’m thinking about my own experience, thinking about the comments, thinking about where to go with this. Let’s talk about love as the container.
Brian: Yeah. This is another differentiator, I think, from the way I’ve often encountered things out there — in a lot of communities, medicine communities or otherwise, there’s an attempt to norm. Any community is some kind of norming function — norming people into some sense of we-ness. There’s usually some function serving that norming — it can be anything from external similarity, shared interest, religion, cultural background, whatever — which of course doesn’t leave much room for people who don’t resonate with that.
But then a lot of the conscious communities I see will norm by some kind of set of values or principles — here are the values we stand for, the principles we stand for — or sometimes agreements, which often interweave with that. That’s not how we do it. Often in the more conscious communities I see, that norming comes with very broad, very expansive values, very useful principles in a way. And yet whenever we’re norming with constructs of mind — values, principles, agreements, anything like that — there’s an inherent judgment in it. When you’re in one of those groups and there’s a right set of values in order to belong, it’s suddenly not safe to explore alternate ways of making sense of the world, alternate constructions of reality. It activates the membership and belonging needs — everyone’s tracking, to some degree, wait, do I fit in? Do I need to believe this?
— and that creates all sorts of dynamics.
We have a very different norming function. What I’m going for is: use love as the norming function. I use love in a very broad way — often as a synonym for God, the divine, oneness. Lots of ways to slice it. So what you won’t see at these gatherings is a set of values, a set of principles articulated, even a set of beliefs. It’s technically a church with no dogma, no doctrine — there’s nothing that we believe.
I don’t even know what that means. There’s just a very different ground — no principles, no agreements.
It actually reminds me, in many ways, of how you facilitate Wakeful sessions, Jordan, compared to the more integral style, which does use a lot of those things to norm. The norming I see you doing — this is my language for it, correct me if I’m not capturing you well — is more loving. Loving everything. It’s more like: how can I be in loving acceptance of whatever comes in, including my own reaction of ugh, I don’t like that.
I remember at the very first session I went to with you, when I first moved to Austin — you were hissing at me. And yet it was in nothing but love. I didn’t feel any judgment, any rejection — it was just an expression of what was coming through you at that point.
So in these gatherings, we’re not norming by these things. It’s a very different kind of norming, and it’s still a norming — everyone into something. But the something is really hard to define and describe. It’s norming into love, into oneness, into God, whatever — the kind of norming that is: can we be in loving acceptance of all, which includes loving acceptance of our boundaries.
Exclusion Can Be Loving
[~00:31:00]
We’ve had to ban people from the community — but not from an intellectual assessment of this person doesn’t fit our values or is violating our agreements.
Really, the best I can capture it: what will get somebody uninvited is a chronic pattern of hijacking others from some kind of unconsciousness or shadow. Chronic, because I actually want people to hijack others into shadow and unconsciousness — what a great learning opportunity for everybody involved, to find where the hooks were that allowed somebody else to be hijacked. But there comes a point where it’s simply, now I feel a boundary — this is disruptive, this isn’t serving anyone involved.
So there needs to be an act — we have a whole process for that when we need it.
Even then, we’ve banned people and, on their way out, offered them a journey with a group just for them, to work on the thing that got them banned — to serve them and love them on the way out. We’ve had people in tears telling me, I am sad and I feel excluded, but not rejected
— thanking me, thanking everyone involved in the decision, saying it was the most developmentally catalytic thing he’d had in years. It’s how we make love the norming force, not mental constructs at all.
Jordan: Yeah — I was actually going to ask about that. I’m glad you went there. It’s something I’ve been thinking about — I love the connection to the way I lead Wakefulness, and it feels true. I keep finding deeper layers where I’m like, oh shit, I’m not actually in love right now, I mean something else.
Sometimes people wonder — I ask, how come I lead every Monday and keep leading with new people, there’s always fresh people who’ve never been? It’s because it keeps working me, keeps showing me bits of being that I haven’t yet said a wholehearted yes to. So it’s super transformative. That really makes sense to me. And this exclusion-but-not-rejection — that’s been a big theme in the company. We’ve been learning how to include more exclusion, and the importance of that.
Brian: Yeah. We use a process in the community similar to one I pioneered in my companies, over many years, before firing people. I can genuinely say I love how my companies fired people — not many companies can say that. I’ve fired people with that process and had them come back and become major customers of ours. One guy stayed with me over Christmas, for a month, in my guest suite, after I fired him. Why not, if you have the right process? Not everybody — some people get stuck in their own stuff — but there’s nothing inherently judgmental or harsh about exclusion. Exclusion can be loving, a loving holding of boundaries. Just like any exclusion — just like when I say no to having sex with somebody, it doesn’t mean I hate them, reject them, or wish them harm. It just means I’m not a yes.
Sovereignty and Love Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
[00:34:09]
Jordan: Right, exactly. There’s a couple directions I want to go. One is about the relationship with danger — quote-unquote danger — though for me personally that’s slightly less interesting, since I have my own version of that. The other is the relationship between your other work — Holacracy — and the parallels. How much do you feel the insights you got from Holacracy have impacted what you’ve developed, and how you relate to your own self and individuality?
Brian: In many ways, I think what I’m doing now is simultaneously a substantial divergence from my prior work with Holacracy, and also kind of the natural next step for me. I gave a talk at the Integral European Conference about a year and a half ago, specifically about this evolution. So much of Holacracy — for those who don’t know it, it’s a management framework, an organizational operating system, that doesn’t rely on the traditional top-down command hierarchy. A very different approach to achieving structure. Not that it’s unstructured — it’s highly structured, just like the human body: highly structured, and yet there’s not a CEO cell telling the others what to do. There’s not a command hierarchy of cells — there’s a nested hierarchy of cells, with autonomy and sovereignty at every level, and yet also interdependence, part of a larger system.
Holacracy structures organizations that way. It’s a very different control system — it emphasizes sovereignty, creates a ground where everybody has a chance to really stand in substantial sovereignty. Everyone’s kind of the CEO of their roles — they might fill many roles across the company — and then there are processes for governing, collaborating at the intersection of roles, setting expectations and responsibilities that go with authority, and limits on that authority. But the core of it all is sovereignty. It creates a system where anyone in the company, whatever they’re sensing — we call them tensions — has somewhere to go to get rapidly and reliably processed into meaningful change. It creates an environment where people can really own their power, and it holds up a mirror when somebody is outside their power.
My path with sovereignty — I found that when you stand in so much sovereignty and wholeness, there’s just this natural thing that happens where the heart opens. There’s nothing to defend anymore, nothing to protect. When we’re in full sovereignty and full wholeness, there’s not a need for that contracted protectiveness — we can still hold boundaries, still take care of ourselves. So this path of sovereignty led to love, led to so much heart. I see sovereignty and love as really two sides of the same coin. It’s very hard to stand in loving acceptance when we’re not also standing in sovereignty.
Another way I connect love and boundaries: you’re going to fall out of loving acceptance if you’re not artfully holding your boundaries. If you’re not holding your boundaries, you’re left trying to change the other, to justify — you have to reject, to judge. So if we want to stand outside of judgment and rejection, we need to get really good at boundaries — which means really good at sovereignty and wholeness. Find what I call the distance of love — how close or far do I need to be, in any aspect of relating with somebody, to be in complete loving acceptance of them. Sometimes I need to move a little further away; sometimes it’s safe to lean in and move closer.
So I think a lot of the work I did with Holacracy built such a depth of sovereignty that it naturally led to this other side of the coin — I found myself, with my own wholeness, loving everything more and more, and my own spiritual path just blossomed and flourished from that.
Holacracy works on the structures and the systems — it creates an organizational system, and I still have questions about the culture, though it does affect culture. Holacracy is a structural intervention that wildly and radically changes culture, and there’s also a cultural field that makes it more effective in the organization. So it seemed a natural next step for me to have explored what I wanted to explore in the structural and systems aspect, and then get really interested in the humans, the relating, and especially — love. How do we stand in loving acceptance of everything, of everyone?
Beware of Unearned Wisdom
[00:39:40]
Jordan: What I’m curious about — what are some of the shadows of especially higher stages of development that get amplified by psychedelics, maybe in your own life, and what are some ways to work around that?
Brian: One thing I want to name — I suspect this’ll be useful. Talking about psychedelics broadly as a class is — we’re using a category for something with wildly different things in it. It’s like talking about drugs
— can we make any general comments about drugs? Drugs includes everything from Tylenol to heroin. If we’re making broad generalizations — drugs are bad,
drugs are good,
whatever — that’s sloppy thinking. And the same is true within a class like psychedelics — there are so many different ones, and they’re quite different.
A lot of the concerns people might have really depend on the specific medicine. There are different possible shadows and risks, some much more than others — in the same way heroin probably carries more risk of harm than, say, Advil. Or take Clarity, the one we use — it’s one of the mildest, lightest psychedelics. It doesn’t give you a blowout experience, you’re not going to have an ego death on it, you’re still very cognitively here. It’s such a different thing. There are concerns if you start giving people large doses of psilocybin, or 5-MeO-DMT, or others that can trigger ego death, give people a total blowout. There’s a there there — and don’t get me wrong, I think there’s lots of utility that can happen, I’ve gotten a ton out of my own work with those kinds of medicines. I just don’t use them in my work. Part of the reason is it’s easier to have shadow there. A friend of mine was quoted in The Atlantic, talking about 5-MeO-DMT — one of the most powerful psychedelics on the planet — saying, this stuff is so strong, in a single treatment it can cure PTSD or cause it.
A great cautionary note. When you give people blowout experiences, their mind doesn’t know how to make sense of them — especially people earlier in their developmental journey. The further out the state experience, the harder it is to make sense of.
The medicines we use don’t do that — they’re not going to give you anything your mind has to struggle to grasp, any more than Advil does. It does something, just something different. So it’s hard to talk about the shadow of psychedelics without knowing the specifics.
Another great quote — I hosted Jordan Peterson for dinner at my house once, and a friend of mine asked him what he thought about psychedelics. He gave a similar take to mine: they can be really powerful tools, and his caution was, beware of unearned wisdom.
Which I thought was great — it captures a lot of the reason I choose medicines that don’t give you unearned wisdom. They don’t catapult you there. They open you, attune you, help you clarify your own wisdom — the wisdom that’s already there — and help you attune to others, so you can feel them better, which makes it easier to build your own wisdom. That’s different from a blowout experience you then have to figure out how to integrate.
That’s not to say there’s no shadow there — of course there’s always the potential. I’m still in my own learning process. I don’t see much of that with the medicines we use, but of course it’s there. For example, one thing I’ve found: when there’s a lot of trauma that hasn’t yet been integrated, there’s stuff walled off in the psyche, and some of the medicines we use will tend toward surfacing — putting you in touch with stuff you’ve repressed. If you’re not ready to deal with it, this may not be the right setting for that. It’s quite person-dependent — but for what we’re doing, if somebody has a ton of trauma, I’ve hosted events and worked with people who have a lot of trauma, and if they’re early in that journey, they’re probably better off with a different modality — or, if they want to work with medicines, doing it with a therapist, in a setting that can help with trauma integration more directly. What we do is better indicated for people who’ve already done some work, who might have a lot of darkness left, but it’s not unfamiliar to them. That’s one example. I’m sure there’s more, and we’re still learning — but we work with medicines that are much lighter than most.
It Was Never a Goal
[00:45:50]
Jordan: Right. So basically — you did this thing helping better governance and coordination, which allows for more sovereignty and connection. You called it Holacracy. And you found your own autonomy through that — the more you deepened into it, the easier it was to love people. And then you came across these things, like Clarity — and, reflecting it back — it seems like your own libertarian-esque philosophy didn’t want these norms, didn’t want people trying to belong by proving they’re a good version of whatever the community is. So in your exploration, love seemed like the best container — not explicit rules. And now you’re doing this, finding things out, and you like talking about it because it’s really powerful and cool. You don’t recommend it for everyone; you don’t not recommend it for everyone. You’re not evangelizing — you’re just being you, doing your thing.
Brian: Yeah, that’s really how it came about. This wasn’t something I set out to do. Another piece — in our journeys there’s no goal, we’re not chasing anything, not pursuing anything. It’s leela — it’s play. And that’s very much how we got here. I got bored of the old stuff I was doing, started doing different psychedelics with friends, in casual social settings, many years ago. There were some medicines I just gravitated toward — took me a while to figure out why, since they weren’t the typical, conventional ones people did. And in these friend gatherings, we saw what was happening — this incredible developmental catalyzation, this richness, this depth — they inspired so much awe and reverence in me. So much of my own spiritual path started weaving into what I was watching happen in community. Word of mouth spread, other people wanted to join, and eventually we formalized it into an organization to host these things. It’s a nonprofit — Ledgeway Sangha — you’ll find ledgeway.org if you want to learn more.
For me, the depth of it is really just inviting people into my own spiritual path. How can I just be love? How can I stand in loving acceptance of everything, and live in awe and reverence, and all that. And it seems to be adding value for people, so — great. But again, there’s not really a goal. It’s just an expression of love.
Jordan: Beautiful. Thank you. I think that’s the end — anything else you want to add?
Brian: No, I think that covers it. Find us at ledgeway.org if you want to learn more — you’ll also see one of my poems there. I write a lot of spiritual poetry, and they’re actually woven into our bylaws, which define the purpose of the organization as: deepen humanity further into knowing love. Knowing Love
is the title of one of my poems — a spiritual transmission, on our website. It’s a very unique organization. Thanks for helping me share what I love.
Jordan: Absolutely. Yeah, thank you — I am a love lover.
Brian: Me too.
Jordan: It’s a pleasure. I really appreciate you being here. And thanks —
Brian: — Jordan.
Jordan: Yeah. All your support.
Show Notes & References
People
Brian Robertson — Creator of Holacracy, the organizational operating system that structures companies without a top-down command hierarchy. Author of Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World (2015). Now founder of Ledgeway Sangha in Austin, Texas, with co-founder Graham Pilger. holacracy.org · ledgeway.org
Jordan Peterson — Referenced for a dinner conversation at Brian’s house, where he offered the caution beware of unearned wisdom
regarding psychedelics.
Key Concepts
Holacracy — Verified: a management framework and organizational operating system
built around distributed authority (roles
and circles
) rather than a traditional management hierarchy, created by Brian Robertson and first implemented at his company Ternary Software in the mid-2000s.
Ledgeway Sangha — Verified via the organization’s own site and five independent sources (Integral European Conference listing, The Third Wave podcast, Embodiment Coaching podcast, Givebutter, Luma): a nonprofit entheogenic church
/ psychedelic sangha co-founded by Brian Robertson and Graham Pilger in the Austin, Texas area. Its bylaws describe the organization’s purpose as deepen humanity further into knowing love.
The raw ASR of this conversation rendered the name at least seven different ways (Leway Sangha,
leadway,
Knowledgeway Sangha,
legme.org,
and others) — all corrected here to Ledgeway Sangha.
5-MeO-DMT — A naturally occurring psychedelic compound, among the most potent known; distinct from the Clarity
and Gratitude
medicines Brian describes using at Ledgeway Sangha, which he characterizes as lighter and non-blowout. Referenced via a quote attributed to a friend of Brian’s in The Atlantic (this stuff is so strong, in a single treatment it can cure PTSD or cause it
) — this specific quote and its Atlantic attribution are unverified beyond Brian’s own account.
Leela (also transliterated lila
) — Sanskrit term, roughly divine play,
referenced by Brian to describe the goal-less, unstructured quality of Ledgeway’s gatherings.
Sangha — Buddhist term for a spiritual community; Brian uses it to distinguish Ledgeway’s peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical model from a conventional church.
Integral European Conference — Brian references a talk he gave there (approximately 2024–2025) specifically about the evolution from his Holacracy work to his current path.
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