There's a moment that happens reliably in psilocybin sessions—and in meditation retreats, and sometimes in therapy—when someone realizes something they've always "known" but never quite seen:

I am not my thoughts.

It sounds almost trivially obvious when stated directly. Of course you're not your thoughts. You're the one having them. But there's a difference between understanding this conceptually and experiencing it viscerally—watching a thought arise, recognizing it as a thought, and choosing not to follow it down its familiar corridor.

This single insight sits at the heart of both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Buddhist contemplative practice. It's not a coincidence. And understanding why this modern psychological framework and this ancient tradition converge on this point—despite originating 2,500 years and half a world apart—offers something genuinely useful for anyone doing inner work, with or without psilocybin.

The Problem Both Approaches Diagnose

Let's start with what ACT calls cognitive fusion: the state where we don't just have thoughts—we are our thoughts. The boundary dissolves. When the thought "I'm not good enough" arises, we don't experience it as a mental event. We experience it as reality. We're not observing a thought; we're living inside it.

Buddhism makes a related diagnosis, though it frames it differently. The Pali term upadana—usually translated as "clinging" or "attachment"—points to our tendency to grasp at pleasant experiences and push away unpleasant ones. When something feels good, we cling; when something feels bad, we resist. This constant grasping and aversion keeps us caught in reactivity, unable to meet experience as it actually is.

Both approaches notice something crucial: these patterns happen automatically, beneath conscious awareness. We don't decide to believe our anxious thoughts or to cling to pleasant feelings. We're already doing it before we notice. The reactivity is the default mode.

And both approaches observe that this automatic reactivity is central to psychological suffering—not the only cause, but a key mechanism. Buddhism calls this dukkha, often translated as "suffering" but perhaps better understood as a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction or unsatisfactoriness. ACT talks about experiential avoidance—the tendency to struggle against unwanted inner experiences—and psychological inflexibility—being so caught in our reactions that we can't respond effectively to what's actually in front of us. The vocabulary differs; the observation converges.

The Shared Solution: Changing Your Relationship to Experience

Here's where it gets interesting. Neither ACT nor Buddhist practice aims primarily at changing the content of your thoughts. This distinguishes them from approaches that focus on disputing irrational beliefs or replacing negative thoughts with positive ones.

Instead, both aim at changing your relationship to whatever arises in experience.

In ACT, this is called defusion—learning to see thoughts as thoughts, mental events passing through awareness rather than commands to be obeyed or truths to be believed. The thought "I can't handle this" is still there. But you're holding it differently. You're watching it rather than watching from inside it.

In Buddhist practice, particularly vipassana (insight meditation), you cultivate the same capacity through sustained attention. You sit. You notice thoughts arising. You notice them passing. You do this thousands of times, and gradually the automatic fusion weakens. You start to experience a gap between stimulus and response—what Viktor Frankl called the space where freedom lives.

The ACT term for the perspective from which you observe your thoughts is self-as-context: you are the awareness in which mental events occur, not the events themselves. Buddhism points to something similar with anatta (non-self), though Buddhist philosophy takes this further than ACT's pragmatic framework requires. The meditator discovers that the solid, continuous "self" they assumed was running the show is actually more like a process—constantly constructed, surprisingly fluid, and not nearly as in charge as it believes.

Why This Matters for Psilocybin Work

When people take psilocybin in a supported setting, something happens to the Default Mode Network—the brain system associated with self-referential thinking, autobiographical memory, and what we might call the "narrative self." Activity in this network decreases. The usual story we tell about who we are and what everything means loosens its grip.

For many people, this creates exactly the kind of defused perspective that ACT techniques and meditation practice cultivate. They watch their thoughts without being captured by them. They experience emotions fully without drowning in them. They encounter difficult material with a spaciousness that wasn't available before.

This is why psilocybin experiences are often described as "ten years of therapy in an afternoon"—not because ten years of content gets processed, but because the relationship to that content shifts dramatically. People see their patterns from outside. They recognize thoughts as thoughts. They feel, sometimes for the first time, that they have choices.

But here's the catch: psilocybin creates a temporary window. The Default Mode Network comes back online. The narrative self reconstitutes. The old patterns of fusion and reactivity reassert themselves. Without a framework for integration, even profound insights tend to fade.

This is where ACT and Buddhist practice become essential—not as explanations of what happened, but as ongoing practices for maintaining and deepening the shift.

Practical Convergence

Someone who has experienced defusion under psilocybin has a reference point. They know what it feels like to watch a thought without becoming it. They've tasted the difference between "I am anxious" and "anxiety is present." That experiential knowledge is valuable.

ACT provides tools for returning to that perspective in ordinary consciousness: defusion exercises, mindfulness practices, the ongoing work of clarifying values and taking committed action even when difficult thoughts and feelings show up. It's a framework designed to be learnable and applicable in daily life, without requiring retreat conditions or altered states.

Buddhist meditation offers a complementary path—one that deepens the capacity for present-moment awareness through sustained practice. The meditator isn't trying to recreate the psilocybin experience; they're cultivating the same fundamental skill of non-reactive observation that the psilocybin experience revealed was possible.

In my own practice as a facilitator, I've found that clients with meditation experience often navigate psilocybin sessions with more ease. They have a pre-existing relationship with their minds. They've practiced letting go. And clients who discover meditation after psilocybin often find they now understand what meditation is for in a way that eluded them before.

Where They Differ

I want to be careful here. ACT and Buddhist practice aren't the same thing, and collapsing them together does justice to neither.

Buddhism is a 2,500-year-old tradition with elaborate philosophy, ethics, and path to liberation. Its ultimate aim—freedom from the cycle of suffering—goes beyond what ACT, as a clinical framework, attempts or claims. The concept of anatta (non-self) isn't just a therapeutic technique; it's a profound claim about the nature of mind and reality that practitioners spend lifetimes investigating.

ACT is deliberately pragmatic. Steven Hayes, the psychologist who developed ACT in the 1980s, has acknowledged explicitly that the approach draws on Buddhist psychology. But ACT avoids metaphysical commitments. It doesn't ask you to believe anything about the nature of reality. It asks: Does this way of relating to your thoughts help you live a life aligned with your values? If yes, continue. If no, try something else.

This pragmatic orientation makes ACT accessible in clinical and coaching contexts where Buddhist religious framing might not fit. But it also means ACT doesn't offer the depth of practice that Buddhist traditions do. A six-week ACT protocol isn't a substitute for years of meditation, any more than years of meditation are a substitute for targeted psychological support when you need it.

Both have their place. In my work, I draw on both—ACT's practical framework for values clarification and committed action, Buddhist practice's depth of present-moment awareness cultivation—because both point toward the same fundamental capacity: meeting your experience as it is, without unnecessary addition.

The Second Arrow

There's a Buddhist teaching I return to often, both in my own practice and with clients.

The Buddha spoke of two arrows. The first arrow is the unavoidable pain of being human—loss, illness, disappointment, fear. We can't prevent the first arrow. To be alive is to be struck by it.

The second arrow is the one we shoot at ourselves: the suffering we add to pain through resistance, rumination, self-criticism, and fusion with thoughts about what the pain means. "I shouldn't feel this way." "This will never end." "Something is wrong with me."

ACT makes essentially the same distinction: pain is inevitable; suffering is the product of psychological inflexibility—our unwillingness to have the experiences we're already having.

Psilocybin, at its best, helps people see the second arrow clearly. They recognize how much of their suffering is self-generated. They feel the possibility of meeting pain without adding to it.

But seeing isn't the same as living. The work of not shooting the second arrow is ongoing—daily, moment to moment. It requires practice. And it requires frameworks that translate insight into action.

This is what integration means: taking what you glimpsed in an altered state and building a life that reflects it. Not chasing the peak experience, but embodying what it revealed.

A Note on Humility

Neither ACT nor Buddhist practice nor psilocybin are magic. They're tools. They work differently for different people, and they don't work at all without engagement.

The capacity to observe your thoughts without fusion doesn't eliminate difficult thoughts. It doesn't make you serene in the face of genuine suffering. It doesn't excuse you from the hard work of living—making decisions, maintaining relationships, confronting injustice, caring for others and yourself.

What it offers is something more modest and more sustainable: a different place to stand. A bit more room to choose. One fewer arrow.

For some people, that shift happens in a psilocybin session. For others, it emerges slowly through years of meditation. For most, it's not a single event but an ongoing process—sometimes forward, sometimes back, always requiring attention.

The Buddhist tradition and the ACT framework agree on this much: the mind can learn to watch itself. And in that watching, something becomes possible that wasn't possible before.

Michael Kelly is a licensed psilocybin facilitator and life coach based in Portland, Oregon. His practice, Mindstream Wellness, integrates preparation, facilitation, and ongoing support within a psychological flexibility framework. He is also a longtime Zen practitioner with a deepening interest in the Thai Forest tradition.