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Skippy Mesirow went from sitting on Aspen's city council to sitting with people on mushrooms. (We’d take that trade, too.) The former politician is now a licensed facilitator running SANCTUM, Aspen's first psilocybin healing center, where leaders of all types come to work through their sh*t.

We asked Skippy how he managed the pressures of public service himself, whether psychedelic therapy could heal our political leaders, and why fixing our broken political system starts with each of us.

We all know integration is 90% of the work.

That’s simple enough to understand, but not easy to do. No matter what brought you to psychedelics, the insights don't integrate themselves.

What we’ve found helps more than anything is community and relationships.

The Plant Medicine Path is a platform for that connection. Inside you’ll meet other people navigating the same questions you are and vetted coaches who can guide you.

Plenty of special events to keep the magic alive, too.

Cyclists can check it out for 14 days at no cost.

Being one, honestly. I've been in public service for over 20 years, starting with Lead America in seventh grade. I went on to volunteer on our governor's first congressional campaign as a freshman in college, and I graduated early to work on the Obama campaign. I've always felt a pull to make change at scale, and initially, the political space is where I believed I could do that.

Concurrently, I was living my own mental health journey. I struggled with a pretty intense cocaine addiction and probably an unhealthy relationship with a lot of things. That progressed into generalized anxiety disorder. The deeper work started around my 30th birthday with the clear recognition that whatever I needed to be the human, the man, the partner, the professional that I wanted to be, the answer was no longer out there; it was inside me.

My experience wasn’t unusual. When serving in elected office or as a staffer or campaign manager, it's easy to see the intense stress and pressure everyone is under and the coping mechanisms they revert to, like domineering or fear-based behavior and heavy alcohol use.

At my last company, Civic Courage Lab, we created something called the COURAGE METHOD™. Elected officials at different levels sit in circles. One person speaks about a challenge for 10 to 15 minutes while others just listen with presence. Then the circle reflects back what they heard without trying to fix it. It sounds simple. It’s just one small piece of the method -but it's clear this process helps people.

I absolutely think psychedelic therapy can be part of the solution. In fact, I handed off Civic Courage Lab operations so I could spend all my time on SANCTUM because psychedelic medicines can wildly accelerate the rate of change and deeply bond the humans doing the work together. I think of psychedelics as an amplifier, an accelerant to an already deep process.

I know it can work because it’s part of my own story. I went to Soltara in Costa Rica hoping to understand the root of my anxiety. I didn’t get the answer during the ceremony, but I was given the tools and practices, along with a reprieve from alcohol for two weeks, that led me to that clarity a year and a half later. Now I understand that, for me, anxiety is the somatic experience of outsourcing my emotional safety and well-being to other people I can't control.

As far as politicians using psychedelics, research shows 30 million Americans have already used a psychedelic medicine, so it’s a statistical reality. I get elected officials from across the aisle reaching out saying they’re interested in coming to SANCTUM. I've worked with a handful myself, and I'm increasingly in rooms with politicians openly supporting psychedelics, though that doesn't necessarily mean they've used them.

I was serving on city council in Aspen during COVID. Most people don't realize Aspen has three times the national suicide rate. As an elected official, once a week someone is either taking their life or coming to you about an attempt, often with children or teens. It's really intense. I started referring people to Soltara, where I’d had my ayahuasca experience, and watched multiple suicidal people transform in a very short period of time.

Eventually, I stood up at a council meeting and said I don't think we should be waiting on the federal government to make psychedelics accessible. We have people dying now. So we convened a citizen group and created the first model for therapeutic delivery of psychedelic medicines at a municipal level anywhere in the country. Then Prop 122 passed and beat us to the punch. (I think) because of my overlapping experience as a legislator and someone who’d used medicine personally, I was asked by Governor Polis to join the Natural Medicine Advisory Board, which was a great honor.

After completing my psilocybin facilitator training, it dawned on me that I could just open the thing I wanted my community to have. SANCTUM is the synthesis of everything I've learned. We're not one-size-fits-all. If somebody wants to sit with medicine, great. If somebody wants to do COURAGE METHOD™ sessions without medicine, that's fine too. We have four licensed facilitators for one-on-one or group work.

Your favorite speedo-rockin' DMT jester psychedelic satirist is hosting a decidedly non-clinical, mushroom-enhanced week of fun, frivolity, and friends in Jamaica. Spots are limited. Belly laughs will be abundant.

I call it the happiness paradox. When you live in the happiest place on Earth where everyone is seemingly 10 of 10 every day, just finished a 100-mile race, and/or made a million dollars, it’s hard not to compare yourself to others. Then you feel a deficit on the inside, exacerbating your disconnection from others, which is the core of all depression. You feel even more isolated.

Yes, Aspen is a hub for the ultra-high-net-worth population, but if you look at empirical data, anxiety, depression, and suicidality correlate to high-income countries, not low-income countries. Some theories point to biophysical factors like altitude and oxygen concentration. My understanding is it's primarily about comparison and surplus time. For folks with a surplus of time and wealth, that mechanism in the brain that’s always searching for threats turns inward. While there is a lot of wealth in Aspen, we also have the highest density of affordable housing in the nation. More than half of our year-round population lives in affordable housing, so comparison is a real challenge.

I also see clients who had tough childhoods, found relief throwing themselves into their work, built three businesses, and became wealthy. Now they're ready to do something of deeper meaning, like raise the family they've put off or use their windfall to start something meaningful. It's not always despair that motivates people to work with psychedelics. Often it's readiness for that next chapter.

Hurt people hurt people, and healed people heal people. Often we don't know how hurt we really are. This goes not just for elected leaders but for the chiefs of staff, the city managers, the police chiefs, and everyone involved in implementation.

The reality is the political space operates more like a middle school classroom than any high-minded governance. Gossip, infighting, backstabbing, fear, ego, not being good enough—these behaviors and beliefs are the norm. 99% of folks anyone might call toxic leaders don't think they're engaging in toxic leadership. They're genuinely there to make a positive impact. But they're unaware of what's driving their behavior, the pain they're experiencing, and how they're projecting it onto other people.

When you do inner work accelerated with psychedelics, you open your mind, reconnect to others and the bigger picture, and start to feel safe. People act differently when they’re not afraid. For those in political leadership roles, that fear and projection can affect millions of people. We're experiencing it now, from the left, from the right, from everyone.

But it doesn't have to be that way. There's a next chapter of leadership where we put the public good first, recognizing that difference in perspective is a feature, not a bug. I've witnessed the destructive impact when a city council can’t engage in healthy discourse. City managers get fired, and then your water supply is unsafe, your streets aren't maintained, and your kid can't get to school. And I’ve also seen it turn around in short order.

These are all systems that we exist within. You are as much a part of the system as a cell in your body is part of you, whether you recognize it or not. Politicians don't operate independently of you. If you don't like your politician, remember you're the reason they're there. Not you exclusively, but inclusive of you. Whether you voted or not, you are part of that decision-making. We all need to think of ourselves as part of the solution instead of pointing fingers somewhere else. What this work teaches you is that we're all where we are from how we got here, but that doesn't mean we can’t go somewhere new.

Learn about SANCTUM’s psychedelic-accelerated system for healing and leadership development, and schedule a consult to explore a fit.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.