S2 | E12 Jeremy Robinson

I'm back with another episode of The Permission Slip, and this time I'm joined by Jeremy Robinson, a medicine sitter working out of beautiful Northern California. Jeremy's story starts long before he ever sat with a client — a latchkey Gen X kid raised in a strict fundamentalist household, quietly absorbing bullying rather than fighting back, until he ran away at eighteen and spent a year and a half homeless in Los Angeles, sleeping in unlocked cars on dealership lots.

We trace how that early self-reliance carried him into a high-stress, high-hours corporate career — the kind that costs you six years of your daughter's childhood without you noticing — until COVID forced him home and the wall he'd been running toward finally arrived. Jeremy describes sitting by a pond, recognizing the shape of depression, and the moment he realized suicide had quietly become the only option his mind could see. That's the moment that scared him into calling his doctor, and the start of a very different road.

From there we follow his journey into the medicine world: six weeks of talk therapy, then ketamine that cracked him open in ways he never expected, then MDMA and EMDR work that finally let him see his own father wound clearly, and eventually psilocybin, which stripped away every identity he'd built until only a steady, unwavering candle was left. We talk about what it meant to have a guide who never once assigned him meaning — who let him arrive at his own truth instead of handing it to him — and how that principle now shapes his own work with clients.

Jeremy and I get into the practical and ethical texture of this work too: how he handles touch and consent in ceremony, how he vets whether someone is really ready for the medicine, why he always starts with ketamine before moving to MDMA and psilocybin, and how he pairs newer clients with people further along in their healing so no one has to carry their journey alone. We also talk honestly about the shadow side — the myth of the instant cure, the client who spent a year hitting himself with a sledgehammer before he could finally lay it down, and why this work is called "the work" for a reason.

We close on lighter ground, trading notes on indigenous music traditions, the Huni Kuin tribe's medicine songs, the despacho prayer ceremony, and Sundance — reminders that this path, however hard, is also full of beauty.