Why Are Executives Seeking Plant Medicine After Success?

There can be a strange moment after success.

For years, the direction may have felt clear. Build the career. Grow the company. Take on more responsibility. Keep going. Then the goal arrives, and the question becomes less about what comes next professionally and more about what comes next personally.

That is part of what Behold Retreats co-CEOs Danny Yepez and Sarah Lynn Thomas explore on the Path of Purpose podcast episode “Set, Setting, and Stewardship for Plant Medicines.”

They speak about people in high-performance jobs, people moving through career and identity changes, and people who have reached the top of the corporate ladder and begun asking what all of it means.

For some executives seeking plant medicine, the interest begins there. There may be healing involved, or expansion, or simply a desire to understand themselves more clearly.

We have explored the wider relationship between achievement and inner work in our article on plant medicine for high performers. Here, Danny and Sarah take the conversation somewhere more personal: identity, purpose, and what happens when success is already present.

What Happens When You Reach the Top and Ask, “Now What?”

Sarah explains that people come into this work from different places.

Some are on what she calls the healing side, while others are on the expansion side. Often those two meet. Someone who comes for healing may experience expansion, and someone who comes for expansion may discover areas of life that could become stronger or more grounded.

A common thread is identity.

Sarah talks about retirement, changing roles, athletes in the middle of their careers, athletes retiring, and people in high-performance jobs who feel they are “on the edge of something.”

Danny then brings the conversation directly to professional success. He says they see people who have climbed the corporate ladder all the way to the top and arrive at a realization:

“Okay, I’ve got to the top, now what?”

For Danny, one of the common threads underneath that question is purpose.

People begin asking, “What is my purpose?” The success itself may still matter. The career may still matter. Yet something else is asking to be looked at.

Danny describes modern life as hectic and fast-paced. We rarely take time to slow down and pause. If someone is genuinely seeking purpose, he says, it is difficult to find it in all the exterior distractions around us.

His language in the conversation is simple: sometimes we need to retreat from what surrounds us long enough for the things that have true meaning and value to surface. Pasted text

Why Are Executives Seeking Plant Medicine?

For Danny and Sarah, there is no single profile of a person who comes to this work.

Sarah says some people come for healing and some for expansion. A person may feel blocked without knowing exactly what that means. Someone else may feel that they are moving into a new version of themselves.

That can happen in a high-performance job just as easily as it can happen during retirement or another major life transition.

Danny describes the people on the expansion side as particularly interesting because many have already achieved what they set out to achieve professionally. The question is no longer how to reach the top. They are already there.

The question becomes: What is my purpose now?

This is where plant medicine may become part of the conversation.

Danny says these plant teachers can sometimes provide “a glimpse” of what purpose could look like. The language matters. He does not describe a fixed answer being handed to someone. What may come instead is a different perspective from which to look at the question.

He also emphasizes the value of stepping away.

“We live in such a hectic, fast-paced life that we rarely find the time to slow down and take a pause,” he says in the conversation.

For someone whose life is full of decisions, meetings, responsibility, and people needing answers, taking that pause can itself be unfamiliar.

How Can a Career Become a Mask?

One of the clearest parts of Sarah’s conversation is about identity.

She talks about how easily we can begin defining ourselves by our roles. A hedge fund manager becomes a hedge fund manager in every part of life. A corporate professional begins carrying everything that is expected of a corporate professional. An athlete begins carrying everything expected of an athlete.

“We start putting masks on to become that person,” Sarah says.

Then she asks:

“Is it a layer or is it a mask? Is this me or is this a means?”

Sarah spent time in finance herself, and she uses that experience to explain what she means.

Finance, like many structures in professional life, is something humans created. We can participate in it, become very good at it, and still keep enough awareness to notice whether we have begun defining ourselves through it.

She talks about external validation and about asking what is actually important to us.

In her words, “We can still be a hedge fund manager and not be in it. We can be an observer of it.”

That is an important distinction.

The invitation is not to stop caring about the career. It is to become aware of the relationship we have with it.

We explored another side of this subject in our article on psychedelics and the success of influential entrepreneurs. That article looks at psychedelics in relation to achievement. Here, Sarah is asking what happens when achievement begins defining the person who achieved it. Pasted text

What Happens When We Feel We Have Lost Ourselves?

Danny follows Sarah’s point about masks by talking about how people can lose their sense of identity.

He describes a society filled with programming and conditioning. Identity is shaped by parents, the world around us, expectations, distractions, and the things we learn we are supposed to be.

Over time, he says, “we slowly forget who we are.”

Sarah brings that idea back into everyday transitions.

She talks about someone changing careers, children leaving the house, or someone graduating and suddenly saying:

“I kind of lost myself.”

Her response to that moment is much more hopeful than fearful.

“Okay, let’s get to know ourselves,” she says, and then shifts the language toward something active:

“I’m going to write this. I’m going to write my life.”

Sarah talks about making the question of identity interesting rather than dreading it.

“Who am I?” can feel frightening when the old answer no longer fits. It can also become a path someone chooses to explore for the rest of their life.

That is especially relevant when a professional role has occupied so much of a person’s attention for so long. Pasted text

Why Do Preparation, Safety, and Setting Matter?

Danny and Sarah repeatedly return to the environment around plant medicine.

Sarah describes her own early experience in the jungle and makes a distinction that has stayed with her: there is being safe, and there is feeling safe.

She knew she was physically in a place where a ceremony could happen, yet she did not feel able to go deeply into the experience because the setting did not give her that sense of safety.

From her own experience and from working with many guests since, she says:

“The safer we are and the safer we feel, the deeper we can go.”

Sarah says people want preparation. They want somebody who can help them process what happened. They want support with integration afterward.

Danny adds that the work may be ancient, but people coming from modern Western lives often need a carefully considered environment around it.

He speaks about screening, integration, and creating what they call a “container,” an environment with thoughtful intention behind it.

The purpose of that environment is trust.

For Danny, when the nervous system is more at ease, a guest may be better able to enter the experience with a sense of surrender.

Sarah adds another important point: no one has to arrive in a perfect mindset. People can come while working through difficult things. What matters is feeling safe enough to be with what is present. Pasted text

Plant medicine can be physically and emotionally demanding. That reality is part of why the preparation around the experience deserves as much attention as the ceremony itself.

What Happens After Someone Goes Back to Daily Life?

Later in the conversation, the host puts the question in very practical terms.

Someone goes on a retreat, has an experience, and then they are back on Wall Street.

How do they continue practicing that awareness?

Sarah says the first step is making a decision: “I am going to live a life more consciously and in more awareness.”

She describes awareness as something that develops through practice.

At first, we may fall into an old pattern and not notice for two days. Then perhaps it takes a day. Eventually, maybe an hour.

For Sarah, the work includes noticing how we react.

Are we conscious enough to act rather than react? Are we able to have conversations from the heart? If negativity is something we are working with, what practice are we creating for ourselves to notice it?

She even gives a very ordinary example of setting an alarm every hour for a week as a reminder to check in.

Danny adds two words:

“Presence and intention.”

For him, those are daily practices regardless of whether someone has been on a retreat.

Once a person knows what a greater sense of connection or awareness feels like, he says, the practice becomes finding their way back to it. That may happen through meditation, yoga, breathwork, or other modalities.

Our article on integration for breakthroughs explores this part of the process in more depth.

The experience can show us something. The practice is learning how to live with it. Pasted text

Do Executives Need Plant Medicine to Find Purpose?

Danny and Sarah answer this very clearly.

When the host asks whether these substances are required to reach heightened states of awareness, Danny says:

“Absolutely not.”

He talks about breathwork, fasting, music, mantra, meditation, and other paths into a meditative state.

Sarah agrees with the idea of different paths. She describes contemplation as a practice in itself.

Ask: Who am I?

Look at the day.

How did I show up?

Where am I proud?

Where would I like to do something a little differently tomorrow?

Then develop the discipline and agreement with yourself to keep walking that path.

Danny also acknowledges why these practices can be difficult. Life is full of distractions, and it can be hard to immerse ourselves deeply enough to hear what is going on inside.

This is why he sometimes describes plant medicines as teachers or even shortcuts. They may allow someone to experience a state that could otherwise take much longer to reach through practice.

The important part comes afterward.

Sarah says the goal is to have these experiences, learn something, and bring what was learned into normal daily life.

“We don’t have to keep coming back,” she says. “We don’t need something outside of ourselves.” Pasted text

What Can Executives Take From This Conversation?

Danny and Sarah’s conversation does not reduce the experience to a productivity tool or another form of optimization.

Their words keep returning to something more personal.

• Some people come for healing, while others come for expansion.
• Success can create new questions about purpose.
• A professional role can become a mask when we stop noticing where the role ends and the person begins.
• Career changes and other life transitions can bring up the feeling of having “lost myself.”
• Preparation, safety, screening, setting, and integration all matter.
• Awareness is something we continue practicing after an experience.
• Presence and intention can become part of ordinary daily life.
• Plant medicine is one path among many. Breathwork, meditation, fasting, music, mantra, and contemplation can also support self-inquiry.

For someone who has spent years asking, “What is the next goal?”, there may come a time when the more useful question is simply, “Who am I?”

Danny and Sarah do not pretend that one retreat can settle that question.

They speak about it as a path.

Frequently Asked Questions

Closing

There is something powerful about the moment when “What do I want to achieve?” begins turning into “Who am I?”

For some people, plant medicine becomes part of that exploration. For others, the path may be meditation, breathwork, contemplation, or simply creating more quiet in daily life.

What Danny and Sarah return to throughout the conversation is awareness, preparation, and what happens when we bring what we have learned back into the way we live.

If you feel called to explore whether a retreat is right for where you are in life, a Discovery Call can be a place to begin the conversation.

We are here, when you’re ready.

Sources

Path of Purpose. “Set, Setting, and Stewardship for Plant Medicines.” Podcast conversation with Danny Yepez and Sarah Lynn Thomas, co-CEOs of Behold Retreats.

Sharma, Kshamta. “Redefining Working Identity in Career Transitions: The Role of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation.” Acta Psychologica, 2026.

Soren, Andrew, and Carol D. Ryff. “Meaningful Work, Well-Being, and Health: Enacting a Eudaimonic Vision.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2023.