“AI Mastery helped me build an app for people with PTSD—the place I would tell them to start”

I'm a physician. I had PTSD for years before I knew that's what it was, because no one in my profession talked about it.

After the diagnosis I was mired for more years with little progress. Zen practice helped. Legal MDMA-assisted therapy through Health Canada's Special Access Program helped more. But I was still stuck in the places that mattered: I couldn't feel my body, I couldn't get out from under years of backlog, and I couldn't tell the story I knew I was here to tell.

Mindvalley's AI Summit led me to AI Mastery. I followed the structure of the course and started building: skills, projects, a diagnostic instrument, apps.

The project I spent the most time on was Dojo, an embodiment training program I refined more times than I can count. Over several months it put me back in my body for the first time in 15 years. I feel strong, supple, and powerful. That spread outward: it broke many years of difficulties with eating, built daily routines that hold, and cleared the administrative backlog that PTSD's cognitive effects had helped create.

One of my patients, a retired firefighter I'll call Tom, has PTSD of his own and is earlier on his path. He asked me, "Doc, where do I start?" If a patient asks that about cancer, there's an answer: protocols, pathways, timelines. With trauma it's a ball of yarn, and it took me years to find the thread. I didn't have an answer for Tom.

Now I'm building one: an app called Here, for nervous system regulation, the place I would tell him to start.

The most unexpected outcome is the deepest one. PTSD is finally disentangling from my identity. I stopped remembering myself as a physician with PTSD. And the story I couldn't tell is finally being written: a memoir in progress, a medical journal commentary in draft, a TEDx talk taking shape, a screening tool for physicians like me.

AI Mastery was the final thing that got me moving through the dark forest - that's no exaggeration. The two photos are by the same photographer: one taken just before AI Mastery started, one taken four months later near the end of the program.