Michael Shapiro grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. His grandmother survived Auschwitz. His grandfather was a Nazi slave soldier. By the time Michael was 12, he was self-medicating with drugs. By 15, he was having mystical experiences in the forest. By 48, he had become a Buddhist monk, a clinical psychologist, a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, and the author of Truth Medicine: Healing and Living Authentically Through Psychedelic Psychotherapy.

This is a conversation about what it actually takes to heal. Not the shortcut version. The real version.

Michael and Brett go deep on intergenerational trauma and why we carry our ancestors' wounds in our bodies, the difference between using psychedelic medicine recreationally and using it as a doorway into serious inner work, the sister's letter that cracked Michael open at 19, and why true transformation requires community, not just ceremony.

If you've ever wondered whether you're doing enough work, or whether the work is even worth it, this episode is for you.

Truth Medicine is available wherever books are sold.

Jenny Shuman didn't map any of this out.

She became a mother at 16. She picked up her first loom at a summer powwow in 1992. She spent years selling beadwork from a booth while her daughter danced beside her in full regalia. She built a quiet, intentional life in Michigan and then left all of it behind for Oregon, her husband, and a new beginning she couldn't quite see yet.

Today, her work is worn by Bob Weir, Oteil Burbridge, Duane Betts, Anders Osborne, Derek Trucks, and Michael Franti. She's crafted straps for some of the most sacred instruments in music, including Jerry Garcia's Wolf and Alligator Guitars. Each piece carries a story. A family. A soul.

In this conversation, Brett and Jenny trace the full arc. The loving childhood in Rockford, Michigan. The grandmother who first put a needle in her hand. The teenage pregnancy, the alternative high school, the powwow trail with a toddler in tow. The sister she lost too young. The cross-country leap that cost her a pension and a paid-off house and opened something she never could have engineered.

And always, the loom. The meditation of it. The intention woven into every bead.

Jenny's story isn't a straight line. It's a perfectly imperfect tree, bent by wind and weather, shaped by love and loss, growing toward something most people spend a lifetime searching for: a life that is completely, unmistakably yours.

Ben Katt spent a decade building something rare: a contemplative community center in Seattle rooted in belonging, service, and inner life. From the outside, it looked like purpose-driven work at its best. Beneath the surface, the same old patterns were quietly running the show — achievement, performance, the hunger for approval.

It took a single moment on a morning run and the words if you don't have your heart, you have nothing to stop him cold.

In this conversation, Brett and Ben trace the arc of Ben's life from a childhood shaped by church, brotherhood, and the need to earn love through performance, through a decade of entrepreneurial ministry, through burnout and unraveling, and into the clarity that eventually became his book, The Way Home: Discovering the Hero's Journey to Wholeness at Midlife.

They explore why high achievers often do the most soulful work while still playing the same exhausting game. Why transitions are portals, not problems. And what it actually looks like to renovate your being from the inside out not just restructure your career.

Ben is a coach, meditation teacher, author, and faculty-in-residence at the Modern Elder Academy. He's also living proof that the unknown isn't something to rush through, it's where everything changes.