My bathroom shelf has been making a very specific promise for years. I have not held it accountable.
I am careful with money in most areas of life. I comparison-shop. I wait for sales. I return things. My threshold for “good enough” is, by most measures, unreasonably high.
Except, apparently, when it comes to my face.
The moment a product promises “transformation,” something in my otherwise functioning brain goes quiet. The ingredient list stops mattering, the price tag ignored. I watch the before-and-after reels, and I note cynically that the lighting is doing at least half the work. I buy the product anyway… Koriderm All-In-One Time-Reverse Moisturizer. Magic Wrinkle Eraser Night Balm, with its clinically proven Arctic botanicals. Champo serum. A triangular green soap beloved by women in a country whose name ends in -stan, who apparently all go to the grave with thick, gleaming hair intact.
Each product arrives in tasteful, recyclable packaging. Each delivers approximately as much transformation as a glass of tap water.
So when I started noticing the same word – “transformation” – migrating into psychedelic retreat brochures, I felt something that resembled recognition… A biopsyche renewal protocol. A paradigm-shifting pilgrimage into the heart of your transformation. And the category winner: Psychedelics are optional. Transformation is not.
The word “transformation” is working overtime right now. Double shifts. It is on the serum label and in the ceremony circle. It is what the before-and-after photograph promises, and what the medicine journey is said to deliver.
But here is where the analogy ends, and where I want to be precise. The moisturizer never delivers on its word (silly me!). What I have witnessed in my own retreats is something else entirely. Something too particular to each woman to fit inside a word like “transformation,” and far more impactful than that word suggests.
When I ask the women who join my ELLEder Journey retreats to describe what they experienced, none of them say “transformation.” The word I hear most often is magical. Then sacred. One woman said she felt calm and embodied, with a deep sense of sovereignty. Another described extraordinary epiphanies and deep molecular healing (which is not a phrase any copywriter would produce and is precisely why it lands). A third said only: a deep remembering of who I am and why I am here on earth.
The word “transformation” appears to be too small for what actually happened.
What they are describing, each in her own style, is something more like a clearing. An experience so specific and so interior that it sharpened their sense of who they are and what they are actually here to do. Not a new identity. Not a reinvented self. Rather, a return to something they already knew but had stopped being able to hear.
Take R. In the months after her journey, she noticed a familiar pattern rising with her husband. A groove that was a little bracing. Critical in a way that had always felt automatic, just how she was with him. But now, when that tone arrives, she pauses. Not because she has been instructed to. Because she remembers what it felt like, during the medicine experience, to see him clearly. Not the version she argues with. The person she cherishes deeply.
The old instinct still comes. But then there is a flash of something, and the critical voice loses its footing. Her tone softens. Not because transformation happened. Because clarity did.
That is what plant medicine offers when the setting is right. Not a rebranded self in recyclable packaging. But a more honest encounter with the self that was already there. And a tapping into your innate intelligence about what to do next.
The word “transformation” cannot do the work. The experience has to.
