My name is James Jesso.

I like words and crave to better the lives of others by the manner in which I wield them.

I write stories to inspire personal insight, essays to educate supple minds, and books to build new conceptual paradigms of reality. I speak in the open domain, weaving my storytelling tendencies beyond written language and onto vibrational winds to open the hearts of those who choose to listen.

Following the path of my talents and inclinations to create with words, my mission is to build an accessible language for the otherwise indescribable challenges and blessings of being alive.

My mission is to create an approachable, engaging, and exciting conversational medium for people to better understand the complexities of themselves and the world. I seek to co-create linguistic, social, and conceptual platforms for the growing inclusion of people from various walks of life into the spiritually mature future of humanity.

Psychedelics, in particular, The “magic” psilocybin mushrooms, played a major role in helping me come to understand this mission.

They helped me step into my adulthood and into a deep understanding of what it means to be myself. They offered me such an incredible and valuable gift that I believe part of my role in this world is to represent them. This means being open, clear, and celebratory in my relationship to psychedelics while maintaining a responsible discernment sourced in a harm-reduction model for drug education. These substances, plants, and fungi are profound teachers and I seek to embody, distil, and translate the lessons they offer me in a way that unlocks them for others, as well as to educate people on how to do the same for themselves.

We are currently staring down the barrel of a dystopian future, and the only thing that locks us forward into self-destruction is our collective captivity to the archaic behavior of traumatized adult-children and the systems they have created. I truly believe that when used with skill and maturity, these psychedelics and the insights they offer us about ourselves and the world can free us from our psychic captivity, from the conditioned perceptions of a profoundly sick society.

But the potential for saving ourselves from ourselves extends beyond the psychedelics, as they only show it to us. It extends into how we show up in the world, how we show up to relationships, how we show up to ourselves. And so I seek with my writing and other works to inspire self-knowledge, self-awareness, and self-compassion in a way that reconnects with our authenticity, the self that exists beyond all the bullshit we’ve been fed by systems and generations of trauma, violence, and fear.

Day to day I do my best to be the best version of myself, using presence, faith, and courage to dissolve and transcend the deeply conditioned structures in my sense of self that tell me I’m not good enough; that I’m not worthy; that tell me to settle down and fall in line. Each day I struggle somehow, yet each day I transcend a little further, and I want to help others find the platform that allows them to find that sense of transcending a little further each day. Be it psychedelic or not.

This website is a collection of what I have been doing along this path, a catalogue of creation, and a means to continue this mission of sharing in transformation. I have written two full-length books on the spiritual potential of the magic psilocybin mushroom and given many public presentations with the continued intentions of inspiring people face to face. I am also the host of the Adventures Through The Mind podcast, a project bred of merging my desire to commune with those who inspire me and to be a source of inspiration that lights up the whole world surrounding the receptive hearts of those who witness it across the internet.

Thank you for honoring my journey, thank you for honoring your journey.
With love,
James ♥

See a full list of James’ publications here

See a full list of James’ past and upcoming speaking events here.

Or Listen to his lectures online Here

Formal Bio

James W. Jesso is an author, public speaker, and podcast host with a deep respect for psychedelic medicines. His work is inspired by his healing path through depression, substance abuse, and trauma, and focuses on translating the profound insights of the psychedelic experience into a higher quality of life, for both the individual and society.

As a creative entrepreneur, James has successfully utilized crowdfunding to independently publish two books, launch an interview-based podcast, and tour around the world both as a speaker and a researcher of psychedelic plants, cultures, and medicine. Although mostly in his home country of Canada, his more than one-hundred public speaking events since 2011 spans over eleven different countries. He has also authored numerous articles, essays, as well as having done radio, podcast, and print interviews.

His two books, Decomposing The Shadow: Lessons From The Psilocybin Mushroom (2013) and The True Light Of Darkness (2015), present a model for working with the ‘magic’ psilocybin mushroom as an ally in personal transformation and in developing psychospiritual maturity.

Adventures Through The Mind — his podcast and youtube channel — is an effort to contribute to the psychedelic culture at large. Featuring interviews with luminaries in science, art, and culture across a range of disciplines, this platform expands James’ work into a broader exploration of how we might work with and through our psychedelic experiences to become better people—for ourselves and for all those with whom we are nested in relationship, human and non-human alike.