Nobody hands you a manual when you’re born into a family with a story.
They just start the download. Religion, culture, gender scripts, survival rules from wars your grandparents fought. You absorb it all before you’re old enough to have an opinion. By the time you’re making your own choices, the infrastructure is already there– designed by people who are no longer around.
My family fled Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war with suitcases and a strong instinct for survival.
To my father, meditation looks like laziness. Sitting quietly, exploring your inner world? Nonsense! Something for people with too much time and not enough problems.
The irony is almost too much.
His ancestors, our ancestors, were mystics. Rumi wrote about annihilating the ego. Hafez spoke in riddles about divine intoxication. Ancient Persians built an entire cosmology around the eternal battle between light and darkness within the soul.
But you don’t contemplate the divine when you’re running from bombs. You don’t read Sufi poetry when you’re learning English and paying rent in a country that doesn’t really want you. Survival doesn’t just push spirituality aside; it makes spirituality look like a luxury you can’t afford.
So it gets buried. Then it gets inherited and buried again.
The cultures carrying the heaviest programming were often, not long ago, the most spiritually sophisticated. The repression isn’t ignorance. It’s what survival did to wisdom. And it didn’t just happen in Iran. Swap out Tehran for a Pentecostal household in Alabama, a Confucian family in Seoul, a machismo culture in Mexico City. The flavors differ but the architecture is identical. Generations of survival strategies calcified into identity, handed to children living in completely different circumstances, with no expiration date attached.
You absorb the fear of people who have real reasons to be afraid. Then spend your adult life reacting to threats that don’t exist anymore. A nervous system built on outdated yet real data.
Therapy can take years to excavate.
What psychedelics actually do, stripped of clinical language and wellness branding, is temporarily dissolve the narration.