Unbehaved

Last week I told you about my own experience with legal psilocybin-assisted therapy in Colorado. This week, you get to meet the woman who held that container: Mikki Vogt.
Mikki is a licensed counselor who trains psilocybin facilitators. She also co-founded one of Colorado's first licensed psilocybin healing centers and has been integral to building Colorado's regulatory framework — and this is the first time she's sat down for a long-form public conversation about how psilocybin therapy actually works.
If you're curious about the emerging field of psychedelic-assisted healing, you're getting a rare, behind-the-scenes conversation with a working practitioner about how psilocybin-assisted therapy works and why it's so beneficial. 
Before Mikki was a licensed psilocybin facilitator, she spent years working in prisons, then community mental health, before deciding to start facilitating psilocybin sessions as a harm reduction provider — before it was legal, when it could have cost her everything.
In this conversation, we cover:
Why she risked her career to do this work before Colorado legalized it
Why traditional talk therapy often hits a ceiling that psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to break through
The typical process of a psilocybin-assisted therapy session 
The story of a young man with 17 years of daily seizures — and what happened during his psilocybin session with her
What a "bad trip" actually is (spoiler: it's not what most people think) versus a "challenging experience"
How Colorado built the first regulated psilocybin therapy framework — and what public support the model still needs to survive
How to find a legitimate psilocybin facilitator and what questions to ask them
Who this work is NOT for
If you listened to Part 1 and wondered how any of this is actually possible — this is the episode that answers that question.
Written companion pieces on Meghan's Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com Part 1 — To Shroom or Not to Shroom? Part 2 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs
Connect with Mikki: https://www.neuroalchemycenter.com/
Connect with Meghan: Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar Book: This Isn't Working — meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book

A few months ago, I laid down on a futon in Denver, drank a glass of orange juice filled with three grams of psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”), and spent roughly 7 hours in one room with a licensed therapist who took notes. 
I was doing an entirely legal psilocybin-assisted therapy in Colorado with medical supervision. And it changed my life.
In this solo episode of Unbehaved, I share my full experience with the promising field of psilocybin-assisted therapy — what led me there, the current legal landscape, the research on its effectiveness, and what genuinely shifted for me and my husband afterward. I talk about: 
Why psilocybin became illegal in the first place (spoiler: it wasn't the science) 
Where psilocybin-assisted therapy is legal in the US and how states like Colorado and Oregon are ahead of federal law 
What the research shows on how psilocybin addresses depression, addiction, PTSD, end-of-life anxiety, and more 
The specific process and how to prepare for the psilocybin therapy session
My concerns about social judgment as a mom and a professional
Who psilocybin therapy is NOT for, and how to vet a legitimate facilitator
What psilocybin therapy feels like and what happens during a psilocybin-assisted therapy session
What changed for me and my husband after doing the therapy session
Why healing yourself is leadership work, parenting work, and community work — all at once
After six years of therapy, antidepressants, and every self-help book I could find, I'd hit a wall in my own healing. Psilocybin-assisted therapy is what finally moved me past it. This episode is my honest account of what happened — and why root-cause healing might be what the next decade of mental health looks like. 
This episode has a Part 2 coming soon — a full conversation with Mikki, my psilocybin therapist and one of the people who co-wrote Colorado's safety protocols.
Written versions of this journey are on my Substack:Part 1 — To Shroom or Not to Shroom?Part 2 — Why I'm a Mom Who Does Drugs
Connect with Meghan:Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbarBook: This Isn't Working — meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book

Shirin Eskandani got the call most opera singers spend their entire careers hoping for: the Metropolitan Opera wanted her to perform in Carmen. Her dream role, her dream opera house, the contract she'd imagined since she was eight years old.
The moment she hung up the phone, the only thought in her mind was: "You're not good enough for this. You don't deserve this."
That moment cracked open everything.
In this episode, Shirin shares the year and a half of inner work that followed — the therapy, the coaching, the realization that nothing external was ever going to heal the wound she'd been outsourcing. And how, after she finally sang at the Met and enjoyed every moment of it, she walked away from her singing career entirely to become a coach.
Today she runs Wholehearted Coaching and built one of the few decolonized coaching certifications in the field.
What you'll walk away with:
Why perfectionism is a coping mechanism, not a virtue — and how to start naming it
The two-year test: the single question that surfaces clarity faster than any other
The "courage iceberg" reframe — why the courage that actually changes your life almost never looks like the big leap
Why joy is a discipline, not a feeling (and the magnolia bloom story that will stay with you)
What "decolonized coaching" actually means — and why your dreams may be more colonized than you realize
A permission slip you can carry with you for the rest of your life
This is a conversation for anyone who's ever achieved something they worked their whole life for and then quietly wondered why it didn't fix the thing they thought it would fix.
 
Connect with Shirin: Wholehearted Coaching: wholehearted-coaching.com Wholehearted Certification: wholeheartedcertification.com Instagram: @wholeheartedcoaching
Connect with Meghan: Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar Book: This Isn't Working — meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book

We spend more time at work than we do with our families. So why do we tolerate things from our employers — broken trust, withholding information, being told everything's fine when it clearly isn't — that we'd never tolerate from a partner?
In this episode of Unbehaved, Meghan French Dunbar sits down with bestselling author Minda Harts, bestselling author ofTalk to Me Nice and The Memo, to ask why workplace trust is so often broken, why we accept it, and — most importantly — what to actually do about it.
If you're a leader trying to build a team people want to stay on, or someone navigating a workplace that doesn't feel safe, this conversation gives you a real toolkit.
What you'll walk away with:
A new framework — the Seven Trust Languages — for understanding what trust actually means to you and the people you work with
The data that proves trust isn't a "nice to have" but a measurable business advantage (74% less anxiety, 24% higher productivity, $344 billion lost to turnover every year)
Three trust-breakers to stop doing immediately (micromanaging, unnecessary CCs, AI-generated emails)
A reframe of people-pleasing as something that erodes — not protects — your trustworthiness
The smallest, most effective trust-building move you can make this week (hint: acknowledgment over feedback)
A new definition of success that has nothing to do with money or title
Whether you manage five people or five hundred, lead a startup or work inside a Fortune 500, this episode reframes one of the most under-talked-about elements of work into the actual business imperative it's always been.
If you've ever sat in a meeting smelling smoke that no one else was acknowledging — this episode is for you.
Subscribe to Unbehaved wherever you listen.

On late diagnoses, medical gaslighting, and never taking "you're fine" for an answer
Have you ever known something was wrong — in your body, your gut, your bones — and had someone else tell you that it's just fine?
Lindsay Scola knew something was wrong at 16. She didn't get answers until she was 35. In the nearly two decades between those two moments, she worked at the highest levels — Congress, the Obama's advance teams, the Emmys — while taking secret naps in bathrooms and on airport floors, because every doctor she saw handed her a sleep hygiene pamphlet and sent her home.
She was eventually diagnosed with narcolepsy at 35 and ADHD at 41. And what she found on the other side wasn't just relief — it was grief, and then clarity, and then a completely no-BS framework for what it actually takes to advocate for yourself in systems that are very good at making you feel like you're overreacting.
This episode will make you laugh (the child ghost story alone is worth the runtime) and it will make you a significantly more effective advocate for your own health and your own truth. Lindsay gives everyone listening an explicit permission slip that everyone needs to hear. 

Deepa Purushothaman spent two decades at Deloitte, made partner in her early 30s, and was — by every external measure — successful. She was also living out of a suitcase three cities a week, constantly pushing herself, and beginning to get sick. It took 14 doctors before one of them finally asked her: "Is your job killing you?"
This episode is what she's done with that question.
We get into:
What it actually looks like to walk away from the path you’re on and build something new.
The four "shoe drops" that most often finally wake high-achieving women up — and why almost no one changes without one.
The difference between a season of busyness and a system of busyness.
How her definition of success has evolved, and how to start rewriting your definition of success in alignment with what you actually want.
And the one question Deepa thinks every one of us should be asking but most of us never do.
If you've been chasing a definition of success that someone else handed you a long time ago, this conversation is for you.
Deepa is the author of The First, The Few, The Only and the founder of The ReWrite. 
Subscribe to Unbehaved wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every other week.

Stacey Lindsay, author of Being 40, on the Made-up Timelines and Harmful Stories We Carry and How to Finally Let It Rip
Award-winning journalist Stacey Lindsay has spent her career asking the real questions most others shy away from—and in this conversation, she turned that same lens on the judgements about how life is supposed to go based on our age. 
We talk about the invisible measuring stick we’re held up against, the pressure women face around having kids, beauty ideals, and our careers, and the question that quietly chips away at many of us: have I done enough? 
We get into what Stacey calls "delayering"—the ongoing, never-finished work of taking off inherited stories, other people's expectations, and judgments you've been carrying for so long they feel like your own skin. We talk about outsourcing our self-worth, the two kinds of stress (and how your body already knows the difference), and why so much of what women do in their 20s and 30s is quietly, relentlessly in the service of other people's comfort.
And then Stacey introduces the concept that rocked my little world: the Autumn Queen—a different archetype for women in midlife, one that has nothing to do with decline and everything to do with renaissance. Because it turns out the systems at play don't want to give us a word for this stage of life, and there's a reason for that.
This episode drops on the week of Stacey's book launch. It's the right week to listen.

USA Today best-selling author Amina AlTai on Painful versus Purposeful Ambition
You've been told that ambition is the answer—that if you just work harder, push further, and want it badly enough, you'll be happy. You'll be successful. But what if the ambition you've been chasing is actually eroding your quality of life? Making you sick, overly stressed, exhausted, and unhappy. 
In the first episode of Unbehaved Season 2, Meghan sits down with best-selling author of The Ambition Trap, Amina AlTai, to dismantle everything we think we know about ambition.
Amina draws a line between "painful ambition"—the kind that grinds you down in a broken system that works against you—and "purposeful ambition," the kind that actually sustains you. They get into why there is no outworking a broken system, why we overdevelop our work identity at the expense of everything else, and why clarity doesn't come from sitting still and overthinking—it comes from moving, even if the first step is laughably small.
There's also a moment involving a dance party that might make you rethink your entire definition of quality of life.
If you've ever felt like you're sprinting on a treadmill someone else plugged in, this one's for you.

If you’re constantly overextended, guilty when you rest, or exhausted by the pace of life — this is for you.
In this Better Than This (now Unbehaved) Season 1 finale, Meghan French Dunbar reveals The Anti-Overwhelm Playbook: four simple, research-backed practices to help you de-stress, set boundaries, and flourish within imperfect systems.
Drawing on stories from real women and thought leaders, Meghan explores how guilt, judgment, and “busy culture” keep us stuck — and how to reclaim your agency through essentializing your time, relationships, inputs, and behaviors.
You’ll learn:1) How guilt and judgment keep us stuck in overwork2) Why depletion makes good leadership impossible3) The Impact–Energy Matrix for saying no without guilt4) How to “clean your closet” of draining relationships5) A soul-feeding filter for what you watch, read, and scroll6) Gentle guardrails for your health and habits
This episode is your permission slip to rest, recalibrate, and lead from a place of wellbeing — because flourishing isn’t a privilege, it’s a practice.
 

How to tap into your inner wisdom to transform how you lead
Intuition often gets dismissed as “soft” or “woo”—especially for women in business. Yet, it’s one of the skills some of the world’s most successful business leaders lean on most. 
In this episode, Meghan reframes intuition as a bona fide leadership super power: a rapid-cognition system that helps you spot risk, improve decisions, and choose the path of greatest relief and resonance. Guests Vicki Saunders, Diana Propper de Callejon, and Stephanie Nadi Olson share how they navigate by intuition in high-stakes decisions, from walking away from “crunchy” timing to choosing the next right move that feels frictionless.
You’ll hear a raw story of ignoring gut warnings with a powerful stakeholder and get simple practices to regularly tap into your intuition. If you’ve ever gaslit your gut to keep the peace or ignored an intuitive idea because it deviates from the norm, this conversation gives you language, tools, and permission to trust yourself—and lead with more clarity, resonance, and inspiration. 
What you’ll learn
A practical tests to ensure your aligned with your intuition when making tough calls
How intuition improves complex decision-making and deception detection
Three daily/weekly practices to strengthen intuitive signals
How to follow intuitive “breadcrumbs” from ideas to outcomes