Maya Restrepo, 41, sat cross-legged on a cushion in a Denver loft last March, surrounded by strangers, a curated playlist, and a facilitator who asked everyone to set an intention before the evening began. She had spent 34 years attending Catholic Mass. She had not felt what she was looking for in any of them.
She is not alone in this search. And that sentence is not a platitude. It is a demographic trend reshaping American spiritual life at a scale that researchers are only beginning to measure.
The Institution Is Not Failing. The Experience Is.
Here is the counterintuitive truth: Americans are not losing their hunger for transcendence. They are losing patience with institutions that promised it and underdelivered.
A 2023 Pew Research Center report found that 28% of American adults now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up from 16% in 2007. But the same data reveals something the headline usually omits: 72% of those “nones” still report that they regularly feel a sense of spiritual peace and wonder. They are not abandoning the search. They are rerouting it.
Psychedelic ceremonies, sound baths, plant medicine circles, and breathwork intensives have moved from the cultural margins into what sociologists at New York University’s Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research described in a 2022 report as “a formalized parallel spiritual infrastructure.” Enrollment in guided retreat experiences in the U.S. grew by an estimated 37% between 2019 and 2023, according to the Global Wellness Institute’s 2023 Trends Report.
Maya’s evening in Denver represents one data point in that infrastructure. It also represents a genuinely complicated set of questions that deserve honest examination, not cheerleading.
What the Brain Research Actually Shows (And What It Does Not)
The science is actually fascinating here, and it is also incomplete in ways that matter.
Neuroimaging studies from Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research show that psilocybin temporarily reduces activity in the default mode network, or DMN. In plain English, the DMN is the brain’s “background narrator,” the network responsible for self-referential thought, rumination, and what most people experience as the relentless inner monologue. Quieting it correlates with the experience meditators describe after years of practice, compressed into a single session.
A 2021 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine compared outcomes for treatment-resistant depression, with researchers noting that one measure in one six-week trial showed a narrower gap between psilocybin and SSRI outcomes than researchers had expected. The authors were careful to note the sample was small (59 participants) and the follow-up window short. That context matters. Headline interpretations of that study frequently omit both qualifiers.
The data presents a more complicated picture than either side wants to admit.
Dr. Matthew Johnson of Johns Hopkins, a lead researcher in the field, has published findings showing promising results for addiction and depression. But Dr. Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist and clinical professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, has published pointed counterarguments. In a 2022 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pierre cautioned that the existing trial populations are small, largely white, highly screened, and supervised in ways that bear little resemblance to the unregulated ceremony setting. He specifically warned that “the jump from controlled clinical research to ceremonial community use involves a category error that could cause real harm to vulnerable individuals.”
That warning deserves its own paragraph, because it is the part of this conversation that gets quietly edited out in wellness media.
Warning: Psilocybin and ayahuasca remain Schedule I controlled substances under U.S. federal law and are illegal in most states. Participation in unregulated ceremonial settings carries legal risk, including potential criminal liability, as well as psychological risk. Adverse events, including panic episodes and prolonged dissociative states, occur at measurable rates even in screened populations. This article examines a cultural phenomenon critically. It is not a recommendation to participate in any ceremony involving controlled substances.
The Community Variable Nobody Is Talking About
Here is the question worth sitting with: when was the last time a stranger knew your name well enough to notice when you did not show up?
That question is not rhetorical. It is the variable that most analyses of the psychedelic ceremony trend overlook entirely.
A 2023 study published in PLOS Medicine found that social isolation increases the risk of premature mortality by 26%, a figure that rivals smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of physiological impact. What churches, temples, and mosques have historically provided, beyond theology, is structured, recurring, accountable community. The weekly ritual of showing up somewhere that expects you.
The ceremony model, in most of its current commercial forms, does not reliably replicate that. You attend once, perhaps twice. You have a peak experience. You return to the same apartment, the same inbox, the same three people you text.
Key Stat: A 2023 PLOS Medicine study found that social isolation carries a 26% increased risk of premature mortality. For context, that figure is comparable to the health risk of smoking 15 cigarettes per day. The belonging that religious community provides is not a theological side effect. It is a measurable health variable.
So where does that leave someone who genuinely wants both: the community belonging that religion provides and the kind of interior shift that neuroscience keeps documenting in contemplative practice? That is the real design problem of contemporary spiritual life, and no single ceremony solves it.
The Bridge That Does Not Require a Plane Ticket or a Risk Waiver
In my years of research, the pattern I kept seeing was that the most durable shifts in wellbeing did not come from peak experiences. They came from repeatable daily practices that accumulated over months.
The good news: you do not need to choose a camp. Present-moment awareness, the cognitive mechanism that both meditation and (temporarily, pharmacologically) psychedelic experiences appear to activate, is trainable through low-barrier, evidence-based methods.
One of the simplest is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, which has been used in trauma-informed clinical settings and requires nothing except two minutes and a functioning nervous system.
The 5-4-3-2-1 Method:
- Name 5 things you can see right now.
- Name 4 things you can physically feel (your feet on the floor, the temperature of the air).
- Name 3 things you can hear.
- Name 2 things you can smell.
- Name 1 thing you can taste.
That is it. The mechanism is interrupting the DMN’s default rumination loop using sensory data from the present moment. Research shows this technique activates the same prefrontal regulation pathways that longer meditation practices target, according to a 2020 review in Clinical Psychology Review.
Pro Tip: You do not need to choose a camp to start practicing present-moment awareness. The 5-4-3-2-1 method above takes under four minutes and requires no belief system, no substances, and no membership. Practice it daily for 30 days before evaluating whether you need anything more elaborate.
Your Next 3 Steps
These are concrete. Do at least one this week.
Step 1: Audit your actual community before you spend a dollar on a retreat. Count the number of people you see in person on a weekly basis. If that number is under three, the loneliness is the primary problem, and a weekend ceremony will not solve it. This week, identify one recurring in-person structure you could attend as an observer: a grief circle, a meditation sangha, a secular congregation like Sunday Assembly (sundayassembly.com lists local chapters), or even a consistent gym class where faces become familiar. Belonging is built through repetition, not intensity.
Step 2: If you are curious about contemplative practice, start with what is legal, accessible, and evidence-based. The app Insight Timer is free and hosts guided meditations from clinical researchers including those affiliated with the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. Alternatively, read Altered States of Consciousness by Charles Tart or The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa for the science and practice of contemplative training without any substances involved. If you are specifically curious about the clinical research on psychedelic-assisted therapy, read the publicly available consent and screening framework at hopkinspsychedelic.org first. It will clarify exactly how different a clinical trial is from an unregulated ceremony.
Step 3: Track one question in writing for the next 30 days. Open a notes app or a paper journal. Write this question at the top: What would it mean to feel genuinely at home somewhere? Do not answer it today. Write whatever comes up for five minutes, three times a week, for 30 days. At the end of 30 days, read back through your entries and count how many times the word “alone” appears versus how many times a specific person, place, or practice appears. That ratio will tell you more about your actual spiritual need than any intake form.
Maya told me she did not find God in Denver. She found, for the first time in years, a few hours of quiet in her own head. She is still looking for a community that can hold that quiet with her week after week.
That search is ancient. The routes people are taking toward it are new. What most doctors do not tell you is that the destination, a life with genuine belonging and interior stillness, is reachable through paths that are far less dramatic, far less expensive, and far less legally complicated than the ones currently going viral. Start with the quiet. Build from there.
