There is a Tibetan practice I am not qualified to teach and will not pretend to. It is called Chod, which means cutting through, and it comes down from an eleventh-century woman named Machig Labdron, one of the few times in the history of these lineages that the teaching flows from a woman to the men who later carried it. I want to be careful here. Chod is a complete contemplative discipline inside a living tradition, with empowerments and a lineage and centuries of context I do not own. What I can do is tell you what one piece of it did to the way I understand the work I actually do.
The piece is this. In the practice, the practitioner does not fight her demons. She feeds them.
The demons in question are not horned things in the dark. In the tradition they are the forces and fears and hungers that obstruct a person. Machig’s radical move, the thing that made the practice famous, was to refuse the obvious strategy. You do not arm yourself against the demon. You do not cast it out. You invite it closer, you ask what it wants, and you offer it the thing it has been starving for. In the most vivid form of the practice she offers her own body. The whole armored project of defending the self gets turned inside out.
She does not fight the demon. She asks what it wants, and she feeds it.
Hear why this lands so hard for the kind of men I sit with. We are trained to do the opposite. You find the threat, you fix it, you destroy it. That reflex is the entire architecture of a fighting life, and it works on enemies. The catastrophe is that men come home and turn the same reflex on their own grief, their own fear, their own need. They treat a wound as an enemy position to be assaulted. And the strange law of the inner world is that whatever you attack in yourself digs in. The harder you fight your fear, the more ground it holds. You cannot clear a room that is inside your own chest.
An American Buddhist teacher named Tsultrim Allione spent years with this material and built a modern version she calls feeding your demons, precisely so people outside the tradition could touch the insight without cheapening the source. The structure is simple to say and hard to do. You let the difficult thing take a form. You ask it what it wants. Then, and this is the hinge, you ask what it actually needs underneath the want. The rage wants to burn the house down. What it needs is to be told it was right to be angry. The fear wants you to never sleep again. What it needs is to know the war is over.
I translate this into integration language without the costume, because borrowing the costume is how you flatten a sacred thing into a technique. Here is the plain version. The part of you that you have been at war with is not your enemy. It is a part of you that took on a job during the worst years of your life, and it has never been relieved of duty. The hypervigilance kept you alive. The numbness got you through things no one should survive intact. The rage protected something soft underneath it. These parts are not malfunctions. They are veterans. And you do not heal a veteran by attacking him. You sit down across from him, you find out what he was protecting, and you tell him, at last, that he can stand down.
Under psilocybin, in a prepared setting, the parts a man has been fighting often show up in the open. The terror, the grief, the thing he swore he would never look at. The instinct, even there, is to brace against it and white-knuckle through to the good part. That is the moment that decides whether the session does anything. The work, and it is the hardest work, is to turn toward the thing instead of away. Not to conquer it. To meet it, and ask what it has been trying to tell you all these years that you were too busy fighting it to hear. The medicine can bring the demon to the table. Whether you feed it or fight it is still your choice, and the integration that follows is mostly the long practice of making that choice again, sober, on an ordinary day.
So the practice I will offer, stripped down and humble before its source. The next time the thing you hate in yourself shows up, the anxiety or the anger or the part that wants to disappear, do not fight it for sixty seconds. Ask it one question instead. What are you afraid will happen if you stop. Then be quiet and let it answer. You will be surprised how often the most monstrous part of you is a frightened sentry who was never told the relief column arrived.
Machig understood eight hundred years before our research caught up to it that the enemy at the gate is usually a starving part of yourself in a costume. You can keep fighting it and keep losing, because you are fighting your own hands. Or you can do the harder, stranger thing. You can set out a meal.
— Return Path