Discerning Between "Chill" Energy and Dissociation

Issue 42 - Read Time: 2 minutes 46 seconds

I spent years chasing the chill of stoner sages..

like The Dude, Slater, and Saul from Pineapple Express, only to realize I wasn’t calm—I was numb.

For a long time, I was known as the chill guy. Nothing phased me. I never reacted, stayed cool, and I prided myself on it. I

did my damnedest to channel their laid-back wisdom, smoking weed at every possible opportunity to complete the persona.

I played baseball in my younger years and leaned into the motto "cool, calm, and collected" on the field. It worked—kept me steady in the heat of a pressure situation during a game.

When Chill Becomes a Mask

That motto served me on the field, but off it, I leaned harder into weed and “chill” until it wasn’t a choice anymore.

In my personal life, I started to see this chill energy wasn’t authentic. I was feeling things—I was just stuffing them down deep, hiding them behind a cloud of weed smoke.

Any time an emotion crept up, I’d get high, ignore it, and move on.

By 19, that numbing trick was so automatic I barely needed the weed to feel nothing. I was living in a dissociated state most of the time.

I lived that way until I was 27.

The Crack in the Facade

Through a beautiful mix of life shifts—meeting my future wife, starting graduate school, diving into psychedelic medicine, and grinding through personal therapy—I started questioning the chill identity.

I wanted Saul’s stoner wisdom, but I’d ended up with his bong bar-mitzvah and none of the insight. Hints piled up that I wasn’t chill, I was numb.

In a graduate school class on somatic therapy, I hit a wall.

Everyone’s talking about tingling in their chest or tightness in their gut, and I’m just sitting there, thinking, “What the hell are you all talking about?” I stared at the screen, dumbfounded, while they described a world I couldn’t comprehend.

That lit the fuse for the quest to reconnect to my body.

Numbness vs. Real Calm

I understand now that numbness and calm, connected groundedness look nearly identical on the outside. (Ask my friends from back then—they’d probably wouldn’t have called me numb.)

It takes real attunement, a deep dive into your inner world, to spot the difference.

Questions to Dig Deeper

Here are some guiding questions to help you feel out that edge:

1. When emotions or sensations bubble up in your body, what do you do—shove them down or let them breathe?

2. Do you chase drugs or alcohol to feel something, anything, because sober life feels flat?

3. Are you tired most days, dragging along even after solid sleep, like rest doesn’t refresh you?

4. Do things move you? Can you watch a sunset or see something beautiful and feel it?

5. If I ask, “What do you feel in your body?”—do you do like I did and think, “What the hell is he talking about?”

The Raw, Rich Reward

When you wrestle with these questions, you’ll start tracing the edges of your emotional world and the pulse of life’s sensations.

I promise it’s a quest worth taking.

Feeling sucks sometimes, but it’s a hell of a lot better than sleepwalking through a grayed-out life.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY!

If you missed my previous announcement regarding Attunement Collective here is your invite!

I recently decided to give away as much of my knowledge and coaching as possible for free. So I careted this online community.

Inside you will find long-form content, community forums, mini courses and longer courses (that I used to sell for $1000) all for free!

My mission is to provide robust mental health resources for folks who can’t access them otherwise and my commitment is to give 90% of everything I create there away for free!

So come join - its a no-brainer. We want you there, we want to you engage and we want to learn from you.

Follow the link below to join!

ATTUNEMENT COLLECTIVE

Thank you!

I love that you are interested in exploring yourself in the pursuit of growth and expansion. 

And I love that you are diving deeper into the unconscious patterns that limit our capacity as a species to transcend this paradigm. 

You are becoming the change you want to see in the world and that is incredibly inspiring!

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey ✨✨

With Love,

Christian

Raise your consciousness - change the world.

Exploring the human condition — breaking down the blockages that limit our capacity to give and receive love.