#76 – Kyle Kingsbury: Finding meaning, depression, and psychedelics

Kingsbury’s sports psychologist introduced this as a focused breathwork practice — distinct from the holotropic work he would later do. The goal was not transcendence but baseline: 'at least right before the fight' find some stillness. This became foundational because it was the first internal tool that worked without an external substance or an external opponent. Cannabis (THC specifically, not just CBD) was a parallel tool for sleep during fight camps, but breathwork was the pre-competition practice.

Kingsbury’s boxing coach was the practitioner — a Native American/Mexican man who ran the ceremonies at the reservation and had already earned deep trust as a strike coach. The sweat lodge preceded psilocybin by enough time that the psilocybin felt like a natural escalation within an established practice rather than an abrupt departure. The coach’s introduction of psilocybin was unhurried — 'I’ve been waiting for you to ask.'

Kingsbury describes 26 ceremonies as still incomplete — 'the infinite onion' — citing people like Dennis McKenna who have done hundreds of ceremonies with each one 'completely unique.' His hardest ceremony (Satara, Costa Rica) came after many ceremonies had already cleared substantial material; the remaining childhood wound was accessed more deeply precisely because the surface layers had been processed. The ceremony resolved through surrender and a vision of son Bear: 'this is where it ends.'

Kingsbury later recognized during the Colombia ayahuasca ceremony that his off-camp alcohol and cocaine use had been running parallel to the structured THC-and-breathwork in-camp protocol without him consciously perceiving the polarization. The ayahuasca ceremony surfaced the pattern: 'in fight camp I was a perfect little angel — the second the fight is over it’s whoppers and alcohol and blow and whatever I can get my hands on.'

The psychiatrist’s act of handing Kingsbury studies rather than a new prescription was a pivotal gesture: it met Kingsbury where he was (skeptical of mainstream pharmacology, open to evidence) and gave him agency. The fish oil protocol plus creating physical and social distance from the party environment ('creating space') produced a measurable mood shift that Kingsbury credits as the stable platform from which he then re-entered athletic training and eventually plant medicine.

This was Kingsbury’s bridge between the aggressive, externally-focused sports identity and the internally-directed plant medicine work. The sports psychologist taught him that his mental state was trainable — the same lesson the plant medicines would later extend to trauma processing. Kingsbury describes this as running in parallel with the sweat lodge and psilocybin work rather than being replaced by it.

Attia draws on Terrence Real’s book 'I Don’t Want to Talk About It' to reframe Kingsbury’s arc: covert depression in men shows up as incarceration (93% of US prisoners are male), alcoholism (3:1 male-to-female ratio), drug abuse, and violence. When you add up the absolute numbers in treatment for depression, they’re equal — the difference is the form. Kingsbury’s arc from childhood rage, to collegiate substance abuse, to near-suicidal overdose, to MMA to plant medicine is a textbook covert-depression progression.

After the hospital, Kingsbury’s psychiatrist — having been refused SSRIs and lithium (which he described as making him 'a mute' at full dose) — handed him six peer-reviewed studies on fish oil and the brain. This was Kingsbury’s first encounter with evidence-based supplementation for mood, and he credits the fish oil protocol plus creating space from the party environment as catalysts for his stabilization before starting MMA training.

Kingsbury describes a hardest-night experience in Satara at age 37: second dose after a quiet first dose, intention set for 'any remaining childhood healing.' The entire night became a first-person re-experience of age 6-7 and 15 trauma — his father’s anger, his mother screaming, 'spit flying into my mouth.' Surrender rather than rationalization was the only exit. The ceremony resolved when he visualized his son Bear and understood 'this is where it ends.' He frames integration as ongoing: 'there’s no endpoint, it peels back layers like an infinite onion.'

Kingsbury describes the psilocybin work as ongoing to the present day, 'not often' but regularly. He frames it as a precursor to ayahuasca that taught him the framework of intention, respect, and safety that he then applied to the more demanding medicine. The coach’s patience — 'I’ve been waiting for you to ask' when Kingsbury asked about ceremony — suggests years of relationship before the introduction.

At the time, Kingsbury’s framework for supplementation was purely athletic (protein synthesis, performance) not neurological. The psychiatrist’s handover of fish oil studies planted the idea that brain chemistry is modifiable through nutrition — a scaffold that later made the plant-medicine work feel scientifically coherent rather than purely mystical.