In early 2018, I told my friend Betsy, an author and leadership expert, that I was planning to write a book called The Healing Organization. It would be about healing in business: the idea that businesses can be places of healing for those who work there, sources of healing for those they serve – their customers and communities – and a force for healing in society. I defined healing as alleviating suffering, elevating joy, and promoting healthy growth The book had nothing to do with me or my need for healing – or so I thought.

Betsy suggested I come with her to experience a “plant journey,” which she had found to be very healing. I had no idea what she was talking about; I thought we would eat potted plants with medicinal properties. I trusted my friend and made plans to join her for a journey in March 2018.

Around 3 p.m., my Lyft entered the locked gate of a sprawling estate in Westchester County outside New York City. We drove down a long curving driveway toward a large house set next to a lake. I had no idea that I was about to have a transcendent experience that would illuminate aspects of my psyche that I had never examined and connect dots in my story that I had never connected before.

I met an eclectic group of people inside, from fashion models and opera singers to hedge fund managers. Those who were there for the first time looked nervous, while the rest were filled with joyful anticipation for what lay ahead.

Our host and guide, Laura, had apprenticed with a Peruvian shaman to learn how to use a variety of psychoactive plants to help humans heal traumas. She had made this work her life's calling after these plants had helped her recover from extreme trauma in her own life. She told us that the experience was intended to return us to our core selves, to connect us to the natural state of innocence and wholeness we all exist in before life takes ahold of us. Many of us predictably experience certain traumas before we turn seven: feeling inadequate, being rejected, being deprived. As our traumas accumulate and compound over time, we develop coping mechanisms to protect ourselves. We betray our true selves to maintain harmony or gain the approval of others. This prevents us from accepting and loving ourselves and connecting authentically with others.

After understanding our individual histories and the challenges we were facing, Laura intuited which plant was the right one for each of us. For those new to the experience, she usually picks a plant that functions as a “heart opener.”

Around 5 p.m., we all went downstairs to a large room where a dozen single mattresses had been arrayed on the floor. Each had a blanket, a pillow, and an eye shade. The room was dimly lit with several large candles. Mystical music was playing, and an electric apparatus created the illusion of moving stars and other astral objects on the ceiling. Laura called us up individually to the altar at the front of the room. She reached into an ornate metal chest and picked out a capsule containing the plant medicine she had selected for us. After we had each received our medicine, we swallowed the capsules, lay down, and waited for the medicine to take effect.¹

I soon found myself transported back in time and across the world to Kesur, to a time when I was about a year old. It was like watching a movie, with a narrator explaining what I was seeing. I saw my mother sitting on the earthen floor in the kitchen next to a smoky cooking fire fueled with wooden logs and cow dung patties. She was rapidly making chapatis (Indian flatbread) with a rolling pin and cooking them on the griddle, periodically stirring a pot of curry on another fire nearby. Outside the kitchen, I lay motionless in a gently swaying bassinet, covered in a blanket. When she saw me start to stir, my aunt (my father's older brother's wife) slipped a pea‐sized pod of opium into my mouth. The drug soon knocked me out and I grew quiet again. In my vision, I could see tears streaming down my mom's face as she watched my aunt do this.

In the next scene, I saw my formidable grandfather standing in the doorway that led to the exterior part of the house. It was dark; the dim, flickering light of a sooty kerosene lamp behind him framed his silhouette. Several women sat in front of him on the ground in the inner courtyard, their faces covered with their saris. My grandfather stood there for a long time, shouting abuses at the women, calling them whores and witches. The women cowered in silence, my mother and grandmother included.

In all the darkness, I was shown three points of light, little islands of innocence – my mother, me as a baby, and my cousin Gajendra, a year and a half older than I. I saw how the cunning and predatory ones in the family used and abused the innocents.

The visions lasted for a few hours. As the effects of the plant wore off, I stood up on unsteady legs, made my way upstairs, and sat down at the kitchen table. I took out my journal and started writing:

My life journey now makes sense. It fits together like a puzzle, though it is not yet complete.

I was forged in the fire of extreme patriarchy: a father who was absent and uncaring, a grandfather who evoked fear, workers being exploited and mistreated, rampant sexual abuse, intemperate lifestyles, alcoholism. I was able to survive with my innocent essence intact, but it became deeply buried.

I realize now that I needed to experience the worst kind of toxic masculine energy so that I could write a book decades later about elevating the sacred feminine.²

Scenes that I witnessed as a child became indelibly imprinted on me. There was misery, abuse, and tragedy all around, but islands of innocence survived in a sea of venality, like lotus flowers blooming in a swamp. They are the beacons of resilient goodness. They show us what we can and must return to.

I need to reclaim my innocence, but fortify it with courage and confidence and resilience. I need to find the innocence on the other side of wholeness.

The next day, I saw my life through a different lens. I thought about the people I've known. I could readily identify the corrupt, the cynical, and the cunning. I realized that I instinctively resonated with those who had held on to their fundamental innocence. I saw ways in which I had allowed myself to become corrupted, and how I could reclaim my innocence.

The Wise Women

A couple of months later, I did a second plant journey. Before the journey, Laura asked me, “Raj, why do you seem so unsure of yourself? You have accomplished a lot, but you are so diffident.”

I didn't have an answer, but I understood what she was talking about. I felt it keenly – the absence of a solid core to my being. My sense of self was a fragile thing, easily bruised by doubting and mocking voices from within as well as from outside. It didn't matter how many accolades I received for my work, how many people told me that their lives had been transformed after they read one of my books, how large and mainstream the Conscious Capitalism movement was becoming. Living inside me still was a frightened guilt‐ridden little boy who thought of himself as unworthy and deeply defective. How had I fooled so many people for so long?

Before I left the next day, Laura pulled me aside. “Raj, you need to slow down. Please take time to go inward and be with yourself. I suggest you take the summer off to do that.” I was speechless. “I can't do that, Laura! I have a book deadline on October 5. I have planned my entire summer as a series of writing retreats. I will be working day and night.” Laura replied, “I'm sure you can delay your book. This is important. You can't write about healing until you work on your own healing.”

Soon after that conversation, I interviewed Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, for The Healing Organization. The next day, she called me. “Raj, you were in my dream last night. I got the message that you need to come with us on the next Founders Journey to the rainforest in Ecuador. You are going to learn more about healing in those 10 days than you could learn in years of research.”

How could I say no to that? Lynne and her husband, Bill, had started the Pachamama Alliance 25 years earlier, along with John Perkins, an international development expert turned author and shaman.

Wisely choosing to listen to the women who were urging me to slow down and go inward, I delayed my book by five months. I said yes to additional experiences that I had previously declined: a silent retreat in upstate New York and a Shakti Leadership spiritual journey into the high Himalayas (led by Nilima Bhat, my coauthor on that book). I celebrated my 60th birthday in Ladakh, the seat of profound Buddhist wisdom close to the border between India and Tibet.

The Founders Journey was a 10‐day trip in August 2018 into the rainforest of Ecuador where we immersed ourselves in the wisdom of ancient Indigenous cultures (the Achuar and the Zapara), connected to nature, and experienced a variety of healing modalities with shamans. I realized that we are as much a part of nature as a tree or a bee, but we have used our intellect to separate ourselves, causing great suffering to ourselves, to others, and to the planet.

The centerpiece of the trip – an optional ayahuasca journey – was on a warm, sunny Saturday. The ayahuasca brew is prepared by boiling the leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub and the stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine for a few days. The shamans of the region call the brew “grandmother ayahuasca”; “a mother spirit of nature who provides guidance and healing to those who work with her.”³ Many also call it the “vine of the soul.”

Guided by our tiny, ancient shaman, we hiked for several hours through the dense, muddy rainforest, past trees with giant mushrooms growing out of them and surrounded by birds and insects. We arrived at a sacred waterfall, where we stripped down for a cleansing ceremony that involved inhaling water in which tobacco leaves had been soaked. I waded through the curtain of cascading water and sat on a natural ledge behind the waterfall to contemplate and release what no longer served me.

We resumed our hike. It took several more hours to reach the shaman's hut, which was in a tiny settlement on the banks of a large river. The hut had a thatched roof and no walls. Drenched in sweat, we bathed in the swiftly flowing river and changed into clean clothes. We approached the shaman's hut just as the sun was setting. In the twilight, we sat in a semicircle around him as he ladled the thick dark brew into small wooden bowls. For several minutes, he blew into the bowls and chanted and whistled. I nervously drank from my bowl. The taste was unpleasant but not unbearable. I lay down on banana leaves that had been spread on the ground next to the shaman's hut, a small lumpy pillow under my head and a threadbare sheet covering me.

That night, it was a lunar eclipse. I could see five planets lined up from horizon to horizon and countless stars dotting the sky. In his elaborate feathered headgear, the shaman stood over me and swished a leafy branch above my head, his silhouette framed against the twinkling sky. He swayed slowly and continued whistling and chanting and blowing. It was a surreal scene, and I slowly drifted into an altered state.

Hearing a baby cry in the distance, I too started crying. I felt that I was a little boy again, lying in my mother's lap. I had been emotionally blocked for 32 years, unable to cry for any reason whatsoever. My whole body was now convulsed with sobs; I cried as I had never cried before, without shame or self‐consciousness, as I remembered all the sadness in my life, in my family, and in the world. Two attendants assisting in the ceremony took turns holding me as I sobbed.

I cried for the sadness and suffering that had afflicted so many in my family. I cried for my grandfather, whom life had hardened and robbed of humanity. I cried for my father, a brilliant and idealistic young man who had to abandon his dreams and became angry and cynical. I cried for my mother, for all the suffering she had endured and for losing her own mother when she was a little girl. I cried for my children, for the many struggles they had endured. I cried for my wife and our marriage, for the loneliness and sadness that we had each lived with for decades. And I cried for myself – for the traumas that I had experienced as a young child and as a young man.

Crying is healing but so many of us, especially men, are unable to access its healing power. I am reminded of part of a poem by Charles Mackay:

• O ye tears! O ye tears! I am thankful that ye run;
• Though ye trickle in the darkness, ye shall glisten in the sun.
• The rainbow cannot shine, if the drops refuse to fall,
• And the eyes that cannot weep, are the saddest eyes of all.

My tears finally subsided, and I lay back down, drained and cleansed. I then began to experience a series of visions, each with a clear and beautiful message.

The first one was simple. I heard a gentle voice whisper, “Love that is not expressed is like a check that is never cashed. It doesn't do any good for anybody.” I realized I had been guilty of withholding my love and resolved that my love would never again be silent or concealed.

In the next vision, I was shown a long line of hundreds of people, standing for hours in the scorching sun, waiting for a hug from a tiny woman at the end of the line. I recognized her as Amma, the “hugging saint” from India, who travels the world hugging strangers. After being held tightly by Amma, people walked away in tears, overcome at having experienced unconditional love, perhaps for the first time in their lives. The message I was given was that all those people standing in line could be hugging each other; they didn't need to wait for a hug from Amma. The wise voice whispered, “We humans are the cause of most unnecessary suffering. We are also the source of healing for that suffering.”

The highlight of the night was a vision in which four words floated behind my eyelids, shimmying around before arraying themselves into a single row: love, innocence, simplicity, and truth. Even in my altered state, I couldn't help notice that they formed a handy little acronym: LIST. This was the list. An audible gasp escaped my lips, “Oh my God!” I had come on this trip to learn about healing, for business, for the world, and for myself. A voice whispered, “This is what we all need to do to heal. We have gotten far away from all these things. This is what we need to return to.”

Each word in turn then came into sharp relief, starting with love. The message was clear: we must always be rooted in love and always act from love. Even the hardest and harshest things that life sometimes demands of us should be done with love. Too often, we operate from fear, anger, greed, and other base emotions. We must be love, and we must express our love.

Then came innocence, which had been the centerpiece of my first plant journey five months before. We are all born innocent, and then we become corrupted by the ways of the world as we grow. We use our intelligence to trick each other and climb over each other rather than care for each other. We lie and cheat to get what we want. The voice whispered, “We must return to innocence – not the innocence of a helpless child, but the chosen innocence of a strong, mature, aware adult.”

As the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching teaches, “All good comes when we are innocent. In the very center of each of us there dwells an innocent and divine spirit. If we allow ourselves to be guided by it in every situation, we can never go wrong.”⁴

Next was simplicity. We humans make life too complicated and hide behind that complexity. The most important things in life are profoundly simple. We must seek the true simplicity that comes with mastery, and not settle for the simplistic. I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

And, finally, truth. Truth is the highest value. Sadly, most of us have lost our commitment to the truth – in business, in politics, and in our personal lives. As Gandhi (who titled his autobiography My Experiments with Truth) said, “The way of peace is the way of truth.” The truth matters even more than peace because without truth, there can be no real peace. That is why post‐apartheid South Africa needed to go through the “Truth and Reconciliation” process to start to heal from centuries of oppression.

The visions continued through the night. I eventually drifted into a trancelike sleep. I woke at dawn, grabbed my journal, and wrote down what I had been shown. The wisdom that came to me and through me that night would transform my life and set me on the path to healing. I believe that wisdom wasn't just intended for me; it is meant for all of us.

Twin Bombshells

Seven months later (in March 2019), I went to India for my niece's wedding. I went straight from the airport to the hospital. A week earlier, my father had fallen in the bathroom and severely fractured his right hip and wrist. He came home from the hospital a few days later. This was the last time I saw my father alive. He died 17 days after I left; my mother died four months after that.

I went to spend a night at my cousin Gajendra's house. The next morning, we went for a walk. We started talking about my father. Gajendra had always had a difficult relationship with him as well, and I can see why, since Gajendra's mild‐mannered and innocent nature is similar to mine.

I asked him how he had experienced the day in 1985 when I came to Indore to tell my father that I was going to marry Shailu after all. He said, “I remember that day vividly. He went into the other room and brought out a gun and said he would rather kill you than let you do this.”

I was shocked. “What are you talking about?” I exclaimed. My mind had completely erased all memories of this traumatic incident, probably as a matter of survival. What could be more traumatizing than your father, the person who created you, threatening to kill you? I had read about dissociative amnesia, but it weas shocking to realize that I had experienced it.

We walked in silence for a while as I digested what he had just revealed to me. I had something else on my mind as well. “Do you know anything about the curse that Papa often talks about? He says that there were two souls in our family that never attained peace. He also says that is why there has been so much suffering in our family.”

“Yes, I've known about that for years. It has to do with Kunwar Saheb.”

Kunwar Saheb was Bhupendra, Gajendra's father, the oldest son of my grandfather. He was the one who had gone mad in his early 20s and had been locked up in a room in the corner of the Rowla for the rest of his life.

“Our grandfather had 13 children in all. Six died in their infancy or as young children and six survived. They are the ones we all know about. But there was one more. We had another Bhua [father's sister], who became pregnant as a teenager. People say that it was the priest who got her pregnant. He probably raped her. I don't know those details.

“When Daata [our grandfather] found out, he was furious. This would bring shame and dishonor upon the family and destroy the prestige he had worked so hard for. He summoned Bhupendra and said to him, ‘As the oldest son, it is your duty to take care of this problem.’”

The implication was clear. Taking care of the problem meant getting rid of it, one way or another.

Bhupendra was a gentle soul, barely 20 years old. He had gotten married a couple of months prior. His sister's belly had started to show at his wedding; she looked distinctly pregnant, setting many tongues wagging.

Gajendra was close to tears. “So Kunwar Saheb went to her bed while she was sleeping and strangled her with his bare hands. She pleaded for her life and her baby's life, but he was in a frenzied state. She and her baby both died. Those are the two souls. That is the curse. Soon after that, he started to go insane.”

I later heard other versions of the story, including this: that our aunt was forced to ingest herbs in the middle of the night that caused her to abort her nearly full‐term baby, who started crying loudly. Kunwar Saheb quickly stuffed ashes into the crying baby's mouth to silence it. The baby died; our aunt died soon after from massive bleeding, shock, heartbreak, or a combination of those things. Kunwar Saheb and some trusted servants rushed in the darkness to cremate her body by the river's edge before the sun came up. In his haste, he badly burned his hands throwing smoldering logs into the river so no one would know that a body had been cremated. When he came home, his wife woke up and saw his burned hands. He broke down and told her what had happened.

It is impossible to know the full truth of what really happened that night. But this much is certain: two people died, and my uncle was so consumed with guilt over it that it seemingly led him to a psychotic break.⁵

I became dizzy; everything around me was spinning. Not only had Bhupendra been forced by his father to commit this act, but many others in the house had known about it. Gajendra's mother, my father, his sister, my grandmother – all of them had to live through this awful atrocity and bury this memory. From that day forward, they had to pretend that my aunt never existed, that what had been done to her and her baby had been for the best.

The immense amount of suffering our family had endured made sense now. This incident represented the ultimate loss of collective innocence: the brutal murder of a young girl and her child. I could not imagine a darker stain on a family. How could someone not go mad after doing something like that? How could all the other souls who were complicit in this heinous act not be tainted and wounded forever?

As far as we know, the priest suffered no consequences, nor were there legal consequences for anyone. But the spiritual consequences would cascade through the generations, casting a dark shadow over our family. We could escape the Rowla, as I had and my father had before me, but we could not outrun this curse. My father carried this secret with him to his grave. How much damage had it done to his psyche, his soul, all those years? How could our family heal from it?

No More Denial

That walk with Gajendra was a turning point for me. Within one hour, he had shaken me to my core. He told me about a successful honor killing and a threatened one. My father's action in picking up that gun also demonstrated a willingness to kill to protect a distorted sense of family honor.

I could no longer minimize the existence or extent of my own traumas. There was no more pretending they didn't matter, that other people had it far worse. I had experienced direct trauma from my father's actions, and indirect trauma because of the honor killing. I later learned that through epigenetics,⁶ the accumulated traumas of my ancestors, near and distant, impact me as surely as the traumas I directly experienced.

All my life, I had shied away from conflict and averted my eyes from ugliness. I could not bear to look at the disfigured beggars and wounded animals on the street in India. But now I had to confront my own demons. I had to find some deeper meaning in all of it, to mine the suffering for nuggets of wisdom I could use to heal myself and share with others to help prevent such atrocities and suffering in the future.

My journey from settling for false harmony to realizing true healing was finally underway.

Reflections

We don't know what we don't know. I have always been open to new modalities of healing and self‐awareness. When people I trust suggest that I try something new, I almost always say, “Yes.” This has enabled me to have some profound experiences that have had a lasting impact on me.

Do you reflexively reject anything that is not “proven” or known to you? Do you believe that science can explain everything in the world, or do you think that what we don't know probably far exceeds what we know? What can you say “yes” to today that offers the promise of significant personal growth?

When four wise women I trust and respect told me the same thing (“Delay the book and work on your own healing”), I had the good sense to listen to them. That changed my life. I believe we don't sufficiently value feminine wisdom in our lives. I now pay especially close attention when the advice is coming from that source.

Are people you trust and respect telling you something that you are rejecting? Pay particular attention to what you are being told by the women in your life.

I had been emotionally blocked for two decades before my ayahuasca journey. That experience opened me up, and I have remained that way.

Are you able to express emotions? Are you able to cry when you are sad? Are you embarrassed to cry in front of others? Crying and laughing are uniquely human behaviors; we reject or minimize each at our peril.

My vision of the LIST – love, innocence, simplicity, and truth – had a profound impact on me. I see it as a gift from universal consciousness. I strive to manifest LIST as much as possible in my life.

Does LIST resonate with you? How can you manifest each of these in your life, your work, your parenting, and your leadership?