A Founder's Note on High-Functioning Depression and Recovery
For twenty years I worked in supply chain and enterprise software — SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics — as a consultant and project manager on large international rollouts. Long projects, complex stakeholders, the kind of work where you are inside the machine, you feel part of something important.
If you have spent any time in that world, you know exactly what I am describing. You also know what it does to you over time.
I lost most of a decade to high-functioning depression, eight years of insomnia, and the slow disconnection that high-achievers mistake for resilience.
Depression, when I look back on it now, was not an emotion. It was a dark cloud you move through — everything heavier, everything slower, the world becoming observational rather than experiential.
I could look at a sunset and remember it used to elicit something in me, without the feeling reaching my body.
High-functioning depression looks like this
I could meet every deadline, hold every conversation, and appear fully present while nothing actually arrived inside me. No one knew the depths of my dispair. After all, I had it all, why should I not be happy? So I continued doing what I was doing.
Burnout finally struck
Until I couldn't. I would sit for hours in front of my laptop in my homeoffice, I knew what I had to do, I knew how to do it, I just couldn't make myself do it. That's burnout.
I tried the reasonable things.
Some of it helped a little. Some helped for a moment. Some felt like they did nothing... now I think they all helped - in a way.
That is the part I want to spare you.
Some of the things I have come to understand
No one is coming.
Germany has one of the best healthcare systems in the world. It failed me completely. Twenty years on PPIs no one questioned. Eight years of insomnia no one asked about. No therapy place available — I paid out of pocket, and even then it moved too slowly. My husband loved me but could not help me. He gave up. Doctors could not help me. Family supports - it does not heal. The moment I understood that my recovery was my responsibility — not anyone else's failure to deliver it — was the moment things began to shift.
Therapy alone does not resolve emotional debt.
There is a difference between understanding what happened to you and discharging what is still living inside your nervous system. Years of repression do not metabolize through conversation. They metabolize through the body, through carefully held experiences that give the nervous system a safe place to finally release what it has been holding. Most professionals never reach this layer. They become articulate about their pain and remain unable to put it down.
You cannot heal the mind while ignoring the body.
For some symptoms the answer is as simple as a supplement. Magnesium changed my sleep after eight years of insomnia. Ketogenic eating, vitamin D, neurofeedback, saunas, long walks, yoga — none of these are exotic. Most are unglamorous. Together they did more in months than years of talk therapy could. The body is not a vehicle for the mind. It is part of the system. Treat it that way or stay stuck.
Mental health is a practice, not a destination.
You do not fix your mental health any more than you fix your fitness. You build it, daily, through inputs that compound — meditation, time alone, reflection, movement, sleep, nutrition, the quality of what you let into your nervous system. The professionals who stay well are the ones who treat their psychology with the same discipline they bring to their work.
No amount of Ayahuasca can change your life. You change your life
This is the most important thing I learned regarding psychedelics, and the one most poorly understood. Ayahuasca did not heal me. The eighteen months of work on myself on so many different levels did. The plant medicine opens doors. You do the rest. Some people expect the medicine to do the work. It cannot. It can accelerate work that is already in motion — or, when poorly prepared and poorly held, it can retraumatize.
There is more — about fears, about limiting beliefs, about what the body remembers, about what to do with a mystical experience when reality shatters and you still have to function on Monday. Five years of practice, eight hundred fifty + guests, hundreds of books across psychology, neurobiology, physiology, philosophy, ethics, plant medicine. It does not all fit on a page. It fits in the BioPsyche Renewal Protocol I carefully designed to support your journey.
What this means for you
If you are still delivering at the top of your work while quietly running on empty, you do not need another book, another podcast, another framework. You need someone who has walked the path under conditions similar to yours, who has tested the shortcuts and the dead ends, and who can compress what took me three years into a process that takes you weeks.
That is what Vine of the Soul Retreats is. Not a spiritual experience. Not a vacation. A precise, professionally held reset built on everything I learned the hard way, so you do not have to.
I built it because the version of me at forty would have paid almost anything for it.
If that is where you are, I know what you need next.