Exploring Psychedelics, Personal Healing, and Entrepreneurship

How much of the way you run your business is shaped by patterns you learned long before becoming an entrepreneur?

In this deeply personal episode, we explore the connection between personal healing, psychedelic experiences, entrepreneurship, leadership, and self-awareness. The conversation looks at how unresolved fear, scarcity, trauma, and expectations around success can influence the way entrepreneurs make decisions, build relationships, lead, and grow their businesses. 

You’ll learn:

•  How personal healing can impact the way you lead and run your business
•  Why old patterns around scarcity, fear, control, and success can follow us into entrepreneurship 
•  How psychedelic experiences can create space for self-reflection and greater awareness
•  Why self-love, surrender, and gratitude are recurring themes in the healing journey 
•  How cultural expectations and traditional ideas of masculinity and success can shape identity 
•  The importance of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and daily practices
•  How changing yourself can create ripple effects across your relationships, family, leadership, and business 

This is an honest conversation about doing the inner work behind entrepreneurship—and what can happen when personal growth changes not only how you see yourself, but how you show up in your life and business.

Disclaimer: This episode shares personal experiences and reflections only. It is not medical advice or a recommendation to use psychedelics.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hey, small business heroes. It's your host, Gloria Chao. Today's conversation is gonna be very different, so buckle up. Usually, on this podcast, we talk about PR, marketing, AI visibility. Today is none of those things, today I'm gonna talk about something that you might have heard me speak about before, something very relevant and deep in my own personal journey that I've shared. It was fundamental to how I healed my relationship with my mom, how I peeled the layers of the scarcity, the fear, the trauma I was carrying. And the topic we will be talking about is healing through psychedelics. Now, I wanna be clear, I am not a medical professional, neither is my guest. This is not to motivate, initiate anyone to do any kind of psychedelic plant medicines. This is purely just a reflection on our exploration that we have done under supervised guidance in a safe space, and in no means is this telling anyone that they should apply this to your own journey. It's just merely a reflection of ours that maybe will be able to connect to some part of your journey. Welcome to the show, Kunle Campbell. He is my friend. He's based in the UK. He is a e-commerce coach in the, consumer space, and I actually interviewed him a year or two ago purely about, e-commerce. But today is something very different because we actually chatted about his journey with healing and psychedelics and the profound impact that it had on his life. And I think there's some nuance here because a lot of times when we talk about psychedelics, who gets to experience them? It's not main- it's not people like Kunle. It's not a Black man, It's not, an Asian woman. So I think there's some particular nuance when people of color get together and talk about what it means and for a long time it has been, commodified, consumerized by Western cultures when it's non-Western cultures that have carried, the legacy, the history, of these sacred plant medicines. So I just wanted to put that there before. So welcome to the show. Are you ready to get into this conversation? Absolutely,

Speaker 2 1:52

Gloria. Thank you for the intro. I appreciate you and it's always good to, to connect. always good to connect, and I'm looking forward to, just seeding a message with your audience. as we said, it's not necessarily an initiation, it's more just sharing my journey.

Speaker 2:09

as entrepreneurs, one of the greatest freedoms and blessings we have is that we don't get to necessarily separate our life from our business, right? Like our traumas, our insecurities will play out. So for me, psychedelics was really fundamental to, to seeing that, those sides of me. It's another mirror of reflection. Michael Pollan, who wrote the book, "Your Mind on Plants," he said that imagine your brain like grooves of snow, and you're always constantly sliding down those same grooves with a snow sled. But after a while, just gets used to those grooves, and what psychedelic plant medicine does, it puts a new layer of snow so that next time you can slide down new neural pathways. So I wanna hear from you, what are psychedelic plant medicines to you? What have they done? What is it, what are they a catalyst for?

Speaker 2 2:52

Let me give you a precursor. So I was speaking to an old friend of mine yesterday. We went out to the woods. it was Easter Monday. Here in the UK, you're allowed, it's also a bank holiday, quote-unquote, "Easter Monday." And we went out to the woods, and we were essentially just catching up. I hadn't seen him or spoken to him in five years, and life had happened, in both our lives. And, he'd gone down a different journey. He's in a men's circle. he's of Nigerian descent like myself. And the interesting thing is that he's been in this men's circle for 10 years, and I got into psychedelics a year ago, and the funny thing and interesting thing is we spoke the same language, right? what I took from that yesterday was all of that integration work, self-awareness work, and all of that 10 years of self-awareness work can happen fairly quickly if you do the work with psychedelics, right? and quite interestingly, he had a major life event in his life which put him in shame, guilt, anger, hate for himself that led him to the men's circle. And it was similar to me, life event, shame, guilt, anger. And our consensus was that whatever will heal you will call you. So whether it's a, a men's circle, a women's circle, don't know, psychedelics, when the time is right, life would so happen for you that you'd be like This is my calling. This is what I need to do. and that's my take on the whole journey thus far. it's, it has been life, completely life-changing, but I needed to break, like really break to say, "You know what? I'm not going down the usual drink and drugs route. I want to heal." And some people get down there too. I had an option to, to self-destruct or self-construct, and I built on that journey and, yeah, it's sometimes in the journeys you, you're like, "What the am I doing here? how did I get here? How did this even happen?" But, it's been absolutely rewarding and, I, I couldn't have, had it any other way.

Speaker 5:19

I love what you said about the other route because a lot of people do when they think about psychedelics, right, they put it in the classification as drugs. alcohol is a drug and I think there's a difference between taking drugs to escape, which a lot of people do with alcohol, right? Sugar, shopping, sex- Yeah porn, all of that, and psychedelic plant medicine. And I think what we're talking about here is a very intentional therapeutic guided exploration of our internal landscape, right? it's not for- Yeah the faint of heart. It's not like, "Oh, I'm just gonna take some mushrooms today." It's not fun. You are exploring dark night of the soul stuff. so you talked about, all the other things. for me, First of all, everyone's journey is different, right? I don't want people to take away from it. It's like, "Oh, I need to heal. I'm just gonna shove a bunch of mushrooms in my mouth." it's not that. It's not like a silver bullet. What it does, it reveals different parts of you. It gives you information, often felt somatically, in the body that allows you to then deduct, make, use of that information. But it's not going to just you're gonna wake up and heal, so I just wanna be clear about that, right? It's not... but what you're saying is it can be a faster path than purely talk therapy. at least for me, I had to feel my mother's grief viscerally in my bones to then open up compassion for her that I felt. Yeah so for you, describe what that feels like, 'cause I think a lot of people are-- We as humans, we're really good at rationalizing things in the brain. Oh,

Speaker 2 6:39

yeah.

Speaker 6:40

But trauma is- Yeah lived in the body, right? So how was that process for you?

Speaker 2 6:44

I took some notes. I journeyed... for me, it's an introspection, to self The set and setting is incredibly important. you need to be in the right setting. You need to have the right guides to help you. And my first foray into psychedelics properly was sitting in a psilocybin ceremony. It was very traditional. it was all men, apart from the Reiki healer. For those who don't know what Reiki is, they're like energy healers, that work energetically, who was there, who was female. And, for me, my entire view, worldview on masculinity was challenged there. I'd always thought that, being masculine was all about force, power, taking it, just always holding it in. And, that day I got the, still the strongest ever hug. I got a hug from the Reiki healer. she hugged me forward and then her husband hugged me behind, because I broke down. I completely broke down because, every notion, many first principle notions I had developed over the years were challenged in, in, in my spirit's mind. And, they reassured me and they quickly diagnosed me, and they're like, "My heart's chakra," if you're into chakras, was out of sync," and they were completely right. I did not feel loved, and I didn't love myself, and that was a huge pain to come to, to play to me on the surface. So that realization was the beginning, and I knew I had to do a lot of work to start to love myself. I thought masculinity was more about resistance when it is all about surrender. So that day, the medicines really humbled me to, create that awareness of what surrender was. and so I took on that understanding into other journeys, and when I surrendered, it would show me another thing, that journey to self-love is still ongoing it's always a conversation, you're having. It's a feeling, that rather, and just as certain settings are very important in a ceremonial setting or perspective, your certain settings every day is very important. If you have, people who tell you're no good on a regular basis, you're human, of course Some of it will come through. it's a matter of essentially changing your settings if you can. and you deserve to be loved. that's the key message. You really deserve to be loved, and this applies, this a universal, it's universal to anybody. I don't care wherever you are on your journey, you deserve love. Yeah. and you deserve, and once you deserve the love, you deserve to express love. and that's what all this is about. it's about journeying and s- just seeing love from all aspects, from all angles, and knowing that we are sacred, unique beings brought in. We have a lineage. I'd thought about my grandparents, my ancestors, and a lot of the time with modern life, we lose that connection to our ancestors. if you really think about what they had to bear for us to come through, it is our power. So the most external internal thing you can lean to is your bloodline, your ancestors, and the traumas they've carried and how you're healing from them as against anything external. I've come to terms with all of that. and so what the medicines have also shown me is the people after me. So if you have children, how are you turning up for the children? How have you turned up for your children in the past? I think it's the most honest way to come to terms with yourself. even sometimes I'm anxious to, once it's, to go into, a ceremony because I know, certain truths which are hard to take will come out, and it's left to you to accept, to surrender. Surrender is always the thing. and then, after that, it's left to you to integrate those truths. So for me, it's a journey of truths, yeah, I can go into more detail if you want me to, but, just at a top level, I think that's what, this is all about.

Speaker 12:01

Yeah. Your energy is very different. you have so much spaciousness. you speak slower, you're more grounded. I noticed one thing for me is, the nervous system recalibration. So first of all, just retract a little bit. When you said set and setting, what you mean by is mindset and setting, right? You don't want to obviously do this when you are in a deep internal conflict and you don't feel safe. It's better to have some kind of clarity, and that doesn't mean that you need clarity on your entire life, but not be in a state of distress, because obviously it can amplify that. So that's really what you mean by set and setting. So right mindset and the right setting. Do you have guides? Do you have facilitators? Do you have, people that can help you integrate? Because what can happen is after that, you go back into the real world, you're plugged and unplugged and you feel very jarring. So that's what you mean by that. I wanna talk about, the fact that we don't know what we come here with, A lot of times we think it's a blank slate, but we're actually carrying so much of our ancestors' stuff, so much of our parents' stuff, whether or not we'd like to admit it or not. my father died when I was three, so I don't really know him, but I know I represent so much of him. so that and the lineage of our ancestors who were either enslaved or in oppression, who were, my ancestors not ancestors, but literally, my mother was sewing shoes in a factory, living in communism. And so that scarcity, no matter how much money she made or where she was, she never felt safe. She always felt like she had to take care of everybody, right? 'Cause she had no running water or electricity in her house. And that, that gets passed down to us, and we don't really acknowledge it. So we go through life doing what we're doing, but not knowing that we're constantly projecting what the stories that we already carried. And our life is always a reflection of us. So if it doesn't go well or if we're not able to receive love, we can't give love, our relationships are lacking, it's because we don't have that within us. So I love what you said, that it's really about surrendering. And I think a lot of people think masculinity is, like you said, resisting or I li- as I like to say, living with a clenched butt cheek. holding on. We wanna hold on. And so everything is about amassing wealth, your hierarchical power, your title. but surrender is something that I realized too, because only through surrender and letting go do you realize that are unlimited vessels of love. we are love. We are here to express love in all its creations. So can you talk to me a little bit about being a West African Black man, in society and obviously masculinity? Because I think we can all agree that, there's so many podcasts about this, that masculinity is at a very perilous juncture, That there's a lot. If you look at school shootings, if you look at violence, that men are trying to find their place in society because now women are out-earning and out-educating them, And so they're what are we here for?" So there's a lot. So can you talk about that from your own experience and how that has changed you as you dealt with masculinity and the way that you-- masculine people should behave?

Speaker 2 14:42

That's a double barrel question. that's a massive question. Where do I start? Okay, so as a West African, as a Nigerian man, generally culture, it starts with culture. it starts with the definition of masculinity and culture, and masculinity and culture from my culture is wealth. my culture is very materialistic and I think it's because of the state of poverty, the level of poverty. So that hero story of nothing to something. so in my country or where I come from, I'm now British. I've lived in Britain for 21 years, but I'm Nigerian. Billionaires are celebrated they're like superheroes. They're like deities. musicians are celebrated because they're multimillionaires. So you are less if you're in a social circle, money would always come in. It's like, how much money have you amassed? And nothing wrong with abundance. Absolutely nothing wrong with abundance. The question is why, are you chasing it? Is it to show? Is it for external validation or not? If you genuinely want to be abundant to serve the causes that you, that are close to your heart, to change the trajectory of your family while keeping them grounded. You have to keep them grounded. Everybody, every single-- I have three boys, they have to be grounded. if you love yourself and you deserve, you feel you deserve more, and I always say this, and you're not posturing, you're not performative with it. It is coming from an inner power No judgment ei-either way. So masculinity is wealth in the UK There's an issue with masculinity in the UK now. I am a coach. with the things I'm involved in, without saying too much, I'm seeing avoidant fathers around We're losing our emotions, like, and not like because we're becoming heartless. we're just not able to be as emotional as we should be. and so there's this avoidance with our partners, emotional avoidance with our partners, emotional avoidance with our children, And it can go different ways. It could be a really pushy dad to a dad that thinks his child is an egg. would not express, any, just any correction to the child with love, that is. and that's because, Culture is external. if you've read, the book, what's the name of the book again? it's by Russian and he talks about pendulums, And pendulums could be religion. In Nigeria, religion is very heavy, so there are two means of identity, wealth and religion, right? in the UK-- And sports. These are pendulums, like where we attach and we have bliss for a period of time, and that gives us temporary happiness, Masculinity is about grabbing identity now externally instead of going really deep into essence, into love somatically, just into nothingness, into oneness. And when you go external, there's duality. There's always the other. There's no way. If you get to sports, you don't like the other sports team, you take that to politics, it's the same thing. We're not always going to go-- It's not for everybody, right? to, to go into your deep masculine. it's just not for everybody. That's just the truth. some people believe in, in reincarnation. I don't really have a view on reincarnation, but I just think that some of us are stuck in loops. It is what it is. so yeah, masculinity is, it's being questioned. you talked about, providers, women coming into workforce. women also have wounds, from, a point of view of how their mothers were treated, how their fathers were treated, father wounds, mother wounds. and again, it's many women come from a time when there was a patriarch, right? And it wasn't pretty, right? to their moms, and so there are wounds that they're healing. men have lost their orientation, and I think the key thing is we are not looking inwards. we're just not looking inwards enough And loving ourselves unconditionally, just loving ourselves. we're told that we shouldn't love ourselves, it's selfish and all of that stuff.

Speaker 19:44

So I heard a quote from someone that said, "You can't love and control someone at the same time." And I feel like so much of masculinity is control, right? It's control, it's power, it's structure. And so it's hard to love yourself when you are trying to Control yourself and others. And so maybe there's some thread there as well. And so as we experience this interesting and unsolved place A lot of people call it a masculinity crisis, for the men that are listening, like, what are some things that you want, you would want to leave them with based on your journey? Obviously, your journey is yours, But I'm sure people look at you and there's some expectation of what you should act and become. and you've, since you've been able to unravel that, what would you, what kind of parting thoughts do you have for other men who are listening to this?

Speaker 2 20:37

when I journeyed with Bufo, which is 5-MeO-2, the, the God molecule.

Speaker 20:46

the toad poison.

Speaker 2 20:47

Yeah. The toad poison. the facilitator there said, "Kene, you're never gonna see the world again the same way you see it. just accept it." And apparently there's something it does to your brain where you never see life again. So what I've started to see in how I process things is energies and frequencies. it's either there's high energy in a, in an environment or low energy, and sometimes I could be in a very high energy place that actually takes away my energy, and I need to actually replenish myself. Before not going too deep into that, life is frequency, and you determine how or where you wanna vibrate. This is not woo-hoo. If you turn up with courage, with love, with curiosity, you'd attract that sort of energy. If you're angry, guilty, you're full of shame you attract, you stay in that lower energy. So it's really working towards at least courage. And I'm not saying, hey, bravery, where you're some commando. It's courage to speak your truth and be okay with your truth. Courage to love again, to love yourself deeply and use that to, to reflect on your loved ones first. Charity begins at home and further on courage to be a better father, to be a better lover, husband. Just courage, from a good place, from a place of love, right? so those are my words to anyone listening to this. and what puts you in those lower frequencies would tend to be something external, So a lot of things external puts duality in, in you. It's us versus them and that just... Protect your energies, basically. I stopped watching the news a while ago. it does find me on social media, but I can control it. I'm not sat on my TV. I don't watch Netflix, not because I feel it's bad, I just don't feel drawn to going through narratives, or be conditioned or I don't even have time. but yeah, it's like really control what you consume at every level. I think one of the pluses of social media is the fact that you could just turn it off. you could just say, "I'm done." As in, "I'm aware now, I'm, I'm done." so just building that emotional awareness is key. another thing is life is not just psychedelics. as in do breathwork, somatically connect with yourself, have a practice on a daily basis. I do breathwork first thing when I get up in the morning. that takes me to a meditative state. I meditate, I pray, I have affirmations. you need somebody, you need a reminder to remind you of the power in you. just stay positive, And yeah, that's pretty much what I, would tell, or I'd advise, listeners or other men, listening to this. if anyone, if you're in an environment where You just feel like you're less. Get out. Get out of it. There's no point. Just leave. you have to be in an environment where people value you, and it has to be reciprocal, you don't want to be stuck in an environment that's, telling you're less, you're this, you're that, and it affects you. You will be that. you will embody it. you're not a mutant or something. so that's why I was talking about the settings, the set and the settings. it's just as important in a ceremonial, state as with in everyday life.

Speaker 24:33

And even for women too, I think that We all know about how the body keeps the score. More and more than ever, we have this lexicon now for nervous system. I wish my mother, I wish our parents lived in a time when this became more understood, right? But she didn't have the community, the resources, the lexicon to even understand what nervous system regulation was. and nervous system regulation comes from feeling safe, from feeling loved, and from feeling that you belong in your body, And yes, surround yourself with good people, but oftentimes what the power of the plant medicine is that they are vessels of love that allows you to release anything that is blocking, whether it's ego, whether it's greed, whether it's armor, protection, so that you can tap into the infinite that is within all of us, which is love. And that's what it taught me, is that it's always available. We just have to learn how to tap into it. And I think from a woman's perspective, I think the issue with masculinity is that there's so much armor now and so many ways to dress up ourselves, and you're wearing so many things that you don't even know where the entryway is to tap into that. And so I love what you said for yourself as someone who's probably, when people see you, you have to be a tough, strong, you're a boy dad, you have three, boys, that you're able to tap into that, and that's really beautiful. And so hopefully it has allowed you to enrich the lives of not only your family, your community, your partner, but yourself. So what would you say as a last thing? What would you say to the Kunle that was really going through it, All of your tough, difficult times in your relationship where you felt out of alignment, when you were just close to just giving up hope, What would you say to that person now that you're on the other side of it?

Speaker 2 26:12

it'll be all right. It'll be all right. keep on doing the work. My, people in the community just initially when you're, when you have a problem or w- for me, I'll, I'll speak for myself. I kept on e-externalizing. Oh no, it's this person or it's that person. It's my parents, blah, blah, blah. And what I'll tell Kane at that time is just lean in, lean into your controllables. Lean in, take ownership, take 100% ownership with a smile. It'll be all right. it will just be all right. and that's it. and it sometimes it takes people to journey over and over again to take the responsibility, and some people are stuck in a loop where they just can't. And It is hard. people have been through a lot, and I don't think I even scrape the surface of what some-- the amount of trauma some people have been through. And, They're trying to heal and it's their journey and one has got to respect it, life is relative And the most important thing is being grateful. and it's not to sound cliché, it is to just be grateful. If you're hearing this now, be grateful you're hearing this. I was speaking to my friend the other day, and he's sometimes he wakes up with panic attacks. Yeah. I'm like, "Yes, I have, done that," but the, it has happened to me and the one thing to counter that is, is just being grateful. particularly when you're at that theta level, there's so many worries that could come and surface at night. Just be grateful. Be absolutely grateful and genuinely And if you could move with grace and gratitude all through the day with that energy and train yourself that in any circumstance you can lean to being grateful, life starts to change. your just the frames, it's almost like God puts a, gives you a new set of eyes to, view the world and you just start to appreciate things you wouldn't otherwise have and attract certain things you wouldn't have attracted. You could start going into conversations and you snap people back to gratefulness. It's powerful- to speak to someone and, as in the person's complaining and it's not like you're trying to correct them. It's just like, "Oh, no." As in like you find the good in that narrative. "Oh, it's raining, and yeah, actually we need the rain because it's been really dry for the last three months." so yeah, it's really that leaning in and finding the good, all through. not to say that you shouldn't be watchful. We all have to be, but I think, we've been overstimulated with so many things that, we forget gratefulness. So when you see that, oh, you're a bit off, maybe just look around you and say, "What are the things I'm doing that's making me increasing my cortisol levels and just making me overly alert?" And then self-correct with gratitude. Walk in nature. I was out in nature for four hours yesterday. I've been having-- I track stuff with my WHOOP, and for the last week everything's been all over the place, getting yellow recoveries, and with that four-hour walk in nature, everything just back. my HRV just shot up. Resting heart rate just dipped down. So it's synchronicity really, and, it's just gratitude. in my opinion. and then somatic work. When I discovered... I've been doing breathwork properly now, properly since, about October of '20, of last year. I'd been doing it, I'd been in and out of it, but I didn't really do it properly. and that has changed my life, like completely. I know how to regulate myself. If I'm stressed, I know how to breathe deep into my diaphragms and really slow time down. Sometimes slowing time down Gives you space, gives you patience- and gives you energy to push forward no matter how things are going. So breathe. the breath. This is why you should be grateful when you have the breath. You actually have breath. Yeah. And that breath is fire. it's life essence,

Speaker 30:37

The one thing that I think about when I think about the silver lining or the thread in everything that I'm doing is just like you, like we are the change we wanna see in the world. And I know that sounded like a cliche school bus chant, but after healing this relationship with my mother, I really understood it because she didn't change, She didn't do the psychedelic journey. She doesn't even know what that is. But because I changed the way I react to her, I'm not as activated, I'm not as triggered, and I don't react to her immediately. I create this two seconds of spaciousness, and in that space comes awareness, comes gratitude, comes love. She also softened. And that has ripple effects into how she relates with other people. And she had an autoimmune condition that manifested and it came out of nowhere, and I really think our organs store emotions- in Chinese medicine. she had, an autoimmune thing that attacked her lungs, not COVID related. And in Chinese medicine, the lungs represent grief. And I think it was just all the years of grief, of losing my dad, of not having the life that she wanted, of always having to carry everyone's responsibility and provide. I think it finally caught up to her, and now she doesn't even take medicine for it anymore, right? Because- I've showed her so much love, and I just want to love on this woman. I fly her business class around the world. I try-- I call her every day. We used to talk once every four months. Now it's every day. Her being is absolutely changed. So we all have that power within us. A lot of times change sounds insurmountable or unachievable, but we are absolutely the catalyst for change. If we heal ourselves, we can heal the world. So thank you so much for coming on here. This is not the typical conversation we usually have, but it's a really important one given what's going on in the world. Thank you for reminding us to, to let go of control so we can tap into the love that's always there. Thank you for reminding us to be grateful for the present moment, because that's all we have is the here and now. So thank you so much for being on here, Kunle.

Speaker 2 32:20

A pleasure. And let everybody remember that there's some people circling the moon now, and they're looking at Earth and they're like, "We're one." No matter what anybody tells you, we're in this spaceship in nothingness, and we're just one. Like just it's wild, like this entire experience that we're having.

Speaker 32:44

Yeah.

Speaker 2 32:44

And if sometimes you just zoom out when you're breathing or whatever, to just realize that we're one. that's, it's all about oneness, not duality,

Speaker 32:52

Yeah, totally. Thank you so much. great conversation.

Speaker 2 32:56

Thanks, Gloria.