Is Grind Culture Blocking Our Healing?

As psychedelics continue their expansion in Western medicine, culture, and commerce, foundational questions around extraction, appropriation, and erasure of the cultures that have traditionally cultivated medicines and stewarded ceremonies persist. For the last year, Preeti Simran Sethi has been exploring these challenges through conversations with a diverse range of medicine holders, scholars, therapists, and advocates committed to decolonizing their relationships to psychedelics.  

In the final interview in this series, Wilhelmina De Castro (she/they), Executive Director of  PRATI and founder of Integrate invites us into a deeper exploration of how colonization shows up in quests for authority and mastery, and how true decolonial practice requires radical honesty — with ourselves and, thus, others — beyond new titles or credentials. 

De Castro’s work is rooted in remembrance, resistance, and relational care. She asks what it means to come home to ourselves, and – after generations of displacement, assimilation, and disconnection – our cultures.  

Can you tell me how you name yourself, your identity, and your engagement with the world?

My identity is as a Filipino, queer, nonbinary person. Once I start naming one part of my identity, though, I feel like I want to break out of it. I also have a strong identity tied into service and care, something I hold and protect in how I walk in the world. When I find myself in the regenerative process of caring and restoring, I feel really beautiful in the world. 

How did you come to psychedelics? 

I came into psychedelics recreationally and not without guilt. I was supposed to be the good, sober kid, which is not the case anymore. But through exploring these different medicines, I got to meet a truer version of myself — a playful, joyful, messy, and imperfect part that I had exiled and then got to meet and love on. 

When I started to understand that [exiled] part as essential, it helped me connect with people in a more real way. I wanted to share medicines, but because of the work I was doing, I had to keep them separate. When that separation became depleting, I decided to build my work and life purpose around medicine.

The Center for Babaylan Studies – an organization that uplifts Indigenous living wisdom in the Philippines – describes decolonization as “a psychological process that enables the colonized to understand and overcome the depths of alienation and marginalization caused by the psychic and epistemic violence of colonization. [It] transforms the consciousness of the colonized through the reclamation of the Filipino cultural self and makes space for the recovery and healing of traumatic memory, and healing leading to different forms of activism. It is an open-ended process. It is a new way of seeing. As a way of healing, it is also a promise and a hope.” 

Does that resonate for you? 

Absolutely. I have been sitting with this theme and with the process of remembering who I am – of who my people were – before colonization, capitalism, and even job titles. As a form of safety and protection, there were many ways that I was socialized to forget and abandon the wisdom of my ancestors and of my lineage … this silent buzz of white Western dominance that tried to infiltrate my existence at all levels. 

In the work of decolonization, we remove the veil. We work to see more clearly. We work to remember our power. Then, we galvanize the power.

What does it mean to decolonize psychedelics? 

You know, I have white folks saying, “I love that you do this type of work…” What I say back is that we need to get into a space of shared meaning around what decolonization means. What's showing up in your life where you feel you need someone to facilitate that discourse with you? Let’s start there. 

That’s deep.  

People at certain intersections of queerness, or who are BIPOC, are tired of being in spaces that aren't reflective of them. They want to be seen in their wholeness. And I think that’s part of decolonizing. But where we get stuck is in actually knowing when we are actively decolonizing our minds, our hearts, and our spirits.

This series is an attempt to touch into that knowing and explore decolonization from multiple perspectives. Susan Beaulieu from NDN Collective, for example, talks about slowness, and how the way we experience time is an expression of colonization. How does colonization show up for you — and how can folks in psychedelic spaces move toward decolonization?

I think a lot of the work is in challenging our desire for proximity to whiteness. I am continuously and actively working on my own decolonization, as I have family members who still hold deeply to a colonized mentality. I feel these tensions in my own self while in service to my clients and have to ask myself, “Am I pushing a decolonized or a colonized narrative, for example, of rest or wellness or healing? And where did I learn that?” It's a constant evaluation.

Considering the Philippines endured 300 years of Spanish occupation, 50 years of American colonial rule, and Japanese occupation during World War II, it’s not surprising how deep this runs. We know Brownness is not shielded from racism and xenophobia as we see in the makeup of the new political regime. 

This is nuanced, but is it whiteness, or is it proximity to power that is held by whiteness, that comes up as a desire? The former is how it’s often named but … 

I've never been seen as white, but I've really been taught to assimilate, to fit into white systems. So, that creates some proximity for me in how I can be an English-speaking Asian who sounds American. Those types of things are seen as valuable in my upbringing. Who gets the seat at the table depends on how well they assimilate into the type of person holding dominance.

That feels familiar. When we immigrated here, it wasn't named as assimilation to whiteness, it was fitting into Western culture. Melting into the melting pot. It didn’t feel like choice; it was an act of survival.  

Yes. It's such a weird, fucked-up experience to think that one of the reasons my family left the Philippines was that martial law was being imposed. The layers of colonization that produced this ideology of fleeing their home country to come to a colonizer’s country and live out the “dream.” The idea that if we can assimilate and be part of this culture, we can succeed. But the consequence of colonization is fragmentation and separation from our origins and where we come from. 

There is a passage in the book Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans that comes to mind. Leny Mendoza Strobel writes, “Colonization was like a time of madness. Our sense of lostness and the negative traits we ascribed to ourselves are a result of a violent and repressive order imposed upon us. We have had to survive this violence, and we had to repress our genuine and colorful selves.” 

Oppressors have long wielded fear, shame, and division as weapons to maintain power and control. This is an old story — one that has led many to shrink, to silence their magic, and to abandon the fullness of their being. It is by design that we are made to fear our own brilliance, to fade into the background for the sake of survival. And at times, our very survival has depended on it.

But at what cost? What have we lost, abandoned, or forgotten in exchange? The question now is, how do we reclaim our power — both individually and collectively — not just to survive, but thrive?

Sometimes my parents and I talk about what it was like to struggle in the first 15-20 years in America. And I often want to ask my mom, “What did that feel like for you? How did your personality [have to] change in order to assimilate?” Luckily, we had a spiritual community who were Filipino and kept us tied to the culture, but I think those are questions that could include an experience of grief. 

I hesitate to open up a door without them fully consenting, but when I speak to my parents, I can sense the tensions between a longing for homeland and culture. They hold that their lives and the fabric of their existence forever changed once they arrived in America. 

That schism can bring up such grief. Speaking more generally, when grief is opened up, what does care look and feel like? Particularly when people may be disconnected from their home places, communities, and modalities of healing, and while knowing the Western paradigms of support weren't created for us and still exclude most Global Majority people. 

I think about how they got through those experiences and wonder what their protective factors were. What was it like being in a community that had many issues, and in experiencing the fragmentation and separation from ourselves that comes from colonization? They moved through it together; that was a huge protective factor. But what I get curious about is examining what families continue to carry on as normal – and what they would like to invite in to change. 

I see that in my work with Millennials and Gen Zs. They are working with parents and grandparents who have held onto their colonial nature like a dead limb. One client, in particular, has had all of this guilt projected onto her for having pleasure in her life. Every time she wants to travel, her mom asks if she shouldn't be working or going back to school. My client just wants to live her life, but that isn’t a good enough answer for her Filipina mom. She cannot [surrender] into pleasure because of the guilt that is projected onto her from the  generations before her. 

And add to that socialization into beliefs that Western ways of being are far superior to our own. It’s so deeply embedded in the stereotype of being the so-called “model minority” and in patterns of migration and survival … of coming to the U.S. with very little, because of how colonizers stole from our countries. And, without strong ties here or maybe a limited understanding of U.S. culture, pushing education and work as the only pathways to advancement. 

As someone who works with medicine, do you see imprints of colonization in the emergent Global North psychedelics movement?

I’d love to interrogate the teaching of “psychedelic-assisted therapy” a little bit. I think the medicine carriers from centuries before us would be like, “What is on their head? What's covering their eyes? What kind of music is this? Yeah, you can keep on doing that eye shade and headphone thing with the pretty plant in the room, but are you doing the real work?” 

I’d really like to encourage folks to be critical of what their programs are teaching—and examine if that feels like a right relationship to themselves, their lineage, and the medicines they're working with. 

We are also seeing emerging efforts to decolonize training programs—or at least efforts to use the term “decolonizing psychedelics.” How do you define it?

I once had more prescribed ways of understanding decolonization than I do now because so much of it was based in rage and resistance. And that's an important element. It's an ancestral expression to be able to have that. But it's also exhausting to always be angry. For me, the practice of decolonization has evolved into being in a softer conversation with myself and others.

Punitive, rigid expression is exactly what colonizers put on Global South peoples. The antidote of softness and of rest has to be remembered.  

I remember visiting my family in India, and being so unsettled when everyone would retreat for a post-lunch nap. I’d pace the empty streets, in an attempt to be productive. But they had it right. I now long for what I resisted. 

It's bizarre how that idea of a midday rest still feels really foreign to me, as much as I don't want it to. Even when I take days off or try to have a vacation, it takes me a long time to decompress and quiet things. It’s an unlearning for my nervous system. 

And there were parts of me that used to see rest as a luxury. 

Especially when that's how you're rewarded in the world–through productivity. Either financially or in how you get love from your family or validation in society. 

Exactly. Colonization would have us veer further from ourselves to get closer to a system of assimilation — of productivity that determines whether we are valuable in the world. The decolonization work, though, is not to “leverage” the medicine to be a better person in capitalism, to increase productivity or get more work done in a day. The decolonizing work is to become closer to the truest essence of ourselves. This is not easy; getting closer to ourselves can be really, really hard and uncomfortable and sometimes we need to pause. 

In my recent trip to Mexico, I had the profound opportunity to work in ceremony with a Mazatec medicine woman. She sat with me and lovingly and sternly told me that I need to rest … that rest is critical to do this work. She is right. 

You know, the medicines give us a reverential space in which to question [internalized colonization]. They can soften us and give us room to work around it. But also — when someone is in a non-ordinary state and highly vulnerable to influence — we have a responsibility not to push a full decolonization agenda. We need to honor their relationship to their truth at a certain point in time. 

I think the invitation for people to be in their truth is an act of love and of decolonization in and of itself.

What do you think about the models that are in place around the commoditization and medicalization of psychedelics?

I mean, can you “dismantle the master's house with the masters’ tools,” like Audre Lorde said? It's harder to do this work when you are reliant on systems that are meant to oppress your freedom. But, sometimes, we can work in small fractals within systems, until the fractals become large enough that they are the system. 

Some of the work that we have done together in the Queer Psychedelic Facilitator Education Program is exactly about how we begin to galvanize and gain momentum in small ways that can become a [bigger] force. 

The ten-week training program you created was a potent expression of liberation. 

In the deepest sense, everyone wants to be seen and witnessed in their wholeness. And the erasure of that wholeness has happened in educational systems, medical systems, and social groups. The ethos in which I strive to operate is to create an experience that's available for everyone to be in their fullest self, where educators are creating space for everyone to be seen. Ten weeks is not a lot of time for the complexity of everyone's messy humanness, but to set that dynamic was really important.

What are the steps you would invite people to take in order to start embodying decolonization and expressing it back out in the world? 

Being self-critical. Not in the rigid way, but in asking yourself, “Is the way I learned how to do this the most liberating to me and to others?” I found that a lot of the work in moving towards a decolonizing paradigm in psychedelics is in exploring – What do I need to unlearn that is stopping me from being in my fullest freedom? — and then moving through that with grace, compassion, and accountability.

There are many identities, of course, that we all hold, but I'm thinking specifically about two that we share — being queer and Asian. How do those identities inform your decolonization praxis and what you invite people to consider?

Yes, I hold that I'm Asian and I'm queer. And I hold positions and identities in which I'm privileged, and acknowledge the colonization that has been embedded in me. I invite the people I work with to let me know if something doesn't feel right, or if there's a power dynamic coming in. It's a messy process and there's not one right way to do it, but I think it is important to be in communities of accountability. 

When we talk about intersectionality, what is also really important is asking, “How do we work between those places of privilege to uplift others, to create clearings, to use our power where we have it?” And to create spaces and communities in which we are not only held accountable, but held. In the places where we feel vulnerable and wounded … that we receive care there, too. 

One of the hardest things in my own decolonizing work is to see myself as deserving and a recipient of care, because there is that work ethic that I've learned over time that I'm not sure I'm totally down with, but am still doing. 

What does it really feel like to be cared for—and to receive that without having to rationalize it? That's the intersectional dance I find myself doing.

That work ethic in Asian folks is tied into the myth of the model minority that was imposed on Asians by a white sociologist — the idea that all Asians are hardworking, compliant, well-resourced, educated, and so on. Elements of that might ring true for some, but it erases individual experience, pits us against other ethno-racial groups, and perpetuates grind culture. How do you see that playing out in this practice of decolonizing?

I've been realizing this really deep-seated narrative that I have that if I work hard enough to be the top of the game, then that is an unquestionable identity under which all my other identities could fall, that at least I have something that's at top of the food chain that would uplift all of the other oppressed intersections of me. That's a fucking false narrative. But I've been realizing that that kind of grind culture – being a good member of capitalism – has really been injected in me. 

What does being Filipino, what does being Asian really mean? How connected am I to a pre-colonial essence? I’m trying to use medicines to dream up and understand the world and my ancestors’ world before this violent dominance happened. If I can have practices that help me be embodied in that, then I feel like I'm doing the right work. 

What are those practices?

The two paradigms of care that come to me are Bayanihan and Kapwa. 

Filipino culture is deeply rooted in communal care and interconnection, shaping a paradigm of healing that extends beyond the individual and into the collective. Bayanihan speaks to the spirit of communal unity, where care is not an individual burden but a shared responsibility. Traditionally, it’s symbolized by neighbors coming together to lift and move a traditional stilt home, a báhay kúbo or nipa hut. Bayanihan represents the belief that healing and support are strongest when carried by many. In the context of mental health and psychedelic healing, this means creating spaces where people feel held by their community, ensuring no one navigates their struggles alone.

Kapwa, meaning “shared self” or “interconnectedness,” is the recognition that we’re all reflections of one another. It challenges the Western notion of individualism, instead centering on relational healing. When one heals, the community heals. Kapwa invites us to approach care with deep empathy, seeing others not as separate but as extensions of ourselves. This shifts healing from being solely clinical or transactional to being relational, reciprocal, and heart-centered.

These paradigms of care remind us that healing is not meant to be done in isolation. Whether through psychedelic-assisted therapy or traditional healing practices, Filipino wisdom teaches that true transformation happens in community, with deep connection, and through a shared responsibility for one another’s well-being.

Preeti Simran Sethi is the founder of the Asian Psychedelic Collective. She is a writer, educator, mental health coach, and integration facilitator who advocates for culturally attuned care in psychedelics. Find more on her work here. This interview is made possible with the support of the Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. It has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

Editorial Process

DoubleBlind is a trusted resource for news, evidence-based education, and reporting on psychedelics. We work with leading medical professionals, scientific researchers, journalists, mycologists, indigenous stewards, and cultural pioneers. Read about our editorial policy and fact-checking process here.