Founder's Story
Everything I was
Everything I was
searching for was
already within me
A life that looked complete. A second chance. And the journey that became The Clearing Journey.
A life that looked complete. A second chance. And the journey that became The Clearing Journey.
"A clearing is an opening. There is light. You can see farther. You gain perspective. And perhaps, for the first time, you can see where you want to go."
For most of my life, I believed I understood what success looked like.
I built a successful career. I earned my MBA, rose through executive leadership across multiple industries, became CEO of a company, and joined YPO. I had a beautiful home, financial success, wonderful children, and a marriage I deeply valued. From the outside, it looked like I had everything.
But something was missing.
Despite everything I had accomplished, I felt unfulfilled. I felt lost. I didn't feel connected to a larger purpose. I was moving through life checking the boxes I believed I was supposed to check, achieving the next thing and then moving on to the one after that.
There was always another level. Someone with more money. A bigger company. A better title. A more impressive accomplishment.
And somewhere underneath all of it, I carried a persistent feeling that I wasn't quite enough.
Then my body began demanding my attention. After developing my second autoimmune disease, I began asking questions I had never seriously asked before. Why was this happening? What was my body trying to tell me?
That search introduced me to the work of Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk, and to ideas about the relationships among emotional experience, trauma, stress, and the body. I began reading. I started therapy. I explored different healing modalities and eventually began cautiously exploring psychedelics.
I was beginning to see through the trees. But I hadn't yet found the clearing.
On March 2, 2025, I walked toward a Home Depot knowing that my blood sugar was low.
That is essentially the last thing I remember.
What followed was a traumatic brain injury that left me unconscious and ultimately hospitalized for approximately two weeks.
During that period, I had an experience that remains deeply meaningful to me. I saw an intense white light surrounded by small, brightly colored forms of energy. It reminded me of imagery from an earlier psychedelic journey, an experience that had left me with a profound sense of peace about life, death, energy, and our connection to the people we love.
And in that moment, I remember thinking: Now is not my time.
The light pulled away. That night, I woke up in the ICU.
I don't pretend to know precisely what happened during that experience or what anyone else should believe about it. I only know what it meant to me. I had been given another chance.
And over time, I came to understand that experience in another way: something in me had died that day. Not my body. The old version of me. And what followed became the beginning of someone new.
When I left the hospital, I became intensely focused on recovering my brain and my life.
I leaned heavily on my wife's knowledge of functional medicine, continued researching brain health, and explored emerging conversations around psychedelics, neuroplasticity, and traumatic brain injury.
As part of my own recovery, I incorporated psilocybin alongside other approaches. Within roughly two months, my follow-up brain imaging showed a level of recovery that surprised my neurologist.
I cannot tell someone else that psilocybin caused my recovery. My experience is my own.
But I can say unequivocally what that period did to me psychologically and spiritually: it made me want to understand more. I began feeling pulled toward the psychedelic space, not simply because of what I believed these medicines might offer the brain, but because of what they were beginning to reveal to me about myself.
I had survived. Now I needed to understand why I was still here.
I had spent decades looking outside myself for validation of something I could only find within myself.Josh — Founder, The Clearing Journey
As my exploration deepened, I eventually undertook much more profound psychedelic experiences.
And those experiences helped me access parts of myself that years of achievement, reading, thinking, and traditional approaches had never fully reached.
I began confronting experiences from my past that I had carried for most of my life without fully understanding how deeply they had shaped me. What matters is what I discovered underneath them.
For much of my life, I had carried beliefs that I wasn't accomplished enough, worthy enough, adequate enough, or lovable enough. So I accomplished. I performed. I succeeded. I became what I thought other people needed me to be.
Somewhere along the way, I had become exceptionally good at playing the role of Josh, without ever really asking: Who is Josh?
That realization was painful. I had spent decades looking outside myself for validation of something I could only find within myself.
And for the first time in my life, I began discovering who I was underneath the expectations, accomplishments, roles, titles, and old stories. I began painting. I read voraciously. I continued doing my own work. And slowly, something unfamiliar began appearing in my life: peace.
Not the temporary satisfaction that comes from achieving something. A genuine sense of peace within myself. And with that peace came gratitude.
My transformation didn't happen during one psychedelic journey. It didn't happen during one therapy session, one retreat, one book, or one profound realization.
It was messy.
I bounced between traditional therapy, books, retreats, psychedelic experiences, different healing modalities, spiritual exploration, creative expression, and my own attempts to understand what was happening inside me.
There were breakthroughs followed by more questions. Clearings followed by another stretch of forest.
And eventually I realized something: the difficulty I had finding my own path could become part of my purpose.
What if someone didn't have to search quite so blindly? What if there were a place that could bring together preparation, psychedelic experiences, support, reflection, integration, and continued personal growth?
Not a place that promises to heal someone. Not a person claiming to have your answers. But a place that helps people create the conditions to discover those answers within themselves.
That idea became The Clearing Journey.
Finding it won't necessarily be easy.
But keep going.
On the other side of that work, I found something no title, paycheck, possession, or accomplishment had ever been able to give me. I found myself.
Josh — Founder, The Clearing Journey