Where We Do Not Run from the Storm

Written By: Fabrizio Beverina

Crying children, wounded adults, and what psychedelic medicine teaches us about staying.

To Artemisia

A Cry That Ends Theory

I arrived at fifty before becoming a father. For half a lifetime, I walked through the world as if preparing for this moment without knowing it. I studied, traveled, and lived inside many cultures. I slept in yurts with Mongolian nomads, shared fires with tribes in Africa, spent years along the rivers of South America with people who still work with ancestral medicines. I filled notebooks with theories, read thousands of books, observed many births, and heard many cries.

Long before my daughter was born, I noticed something that would later become impossible to ignore: how differently modern Western culture listens to pain compared to traditional societies.

Then she arrived. Artemisia. And she cried.

A tiny girl with a fierce, beautiful Genghis Khan face. My daughter. And suddenly everything I knew collapsed into something very simple. I could no longer escape into theory. Not philosophy, not anthropology, not psychology. Now everything was here, pressed against my chest, breathing, trembling, alive. And crying.

The First Lesson Is Pain

She cries, especially after eating. Something inside her small belly twists, awakens, reorganizes. Her intestines are learning how to exist. I see pain written clearly on her face: the open mouth, the shaking lips, the eyes flooded with something too big for such a small being. She is suffering. Truly suffering. And this is life, not because life is cruel, but because life is becoming.

Her body is discovering what it means to be here—to digest, to breathe, to swallow air, light, sensation. In the beginning, growth always has a sound, and that sound is a cry. During those long nights with her on my chest, a simple truth keeps returning: life introduces us to suffering before language, before philosophy, before belief. The question is not whether we suffer—that part is not negotiable—but what we do when suffering arrives.

Staying: Nervous System to Nervous System

In those moments, I cannot remove her pain. I cannot negotiate with biology or accelerate time. I can only do the oldest, simplest, most human thing: stay. I hold her belly to belly, skin to skin, letting my warmth speak, letting my breathing regulate her breathing, letting my heartbeat repeat like an old mantra: you are not alone. Sometimes I answer her cries with sound rather than words, a primitive voice, animal and pre-verbal, saying I am here, I am not leaving.

This is not psychology as an idea. It is nervous system to nervous system, body to body, mammal to mammal. And it works, not because the pain disappears, but because the pain is no longer alone. She begins to learn something essential: that pain does not always mean danger, that discomfort does not mean abandonment, that suffering can coexist with warmth, breath, heartbeat. And I learn something too, quietly and without rhetoric: love is not the opposite of suffering. Love is the courage to remain inside the suffering with someone.

Biology’s Harsh Tenderness

When you hold a newborn while she cries, you understand something no book can teach: biology is not polite. It is raw. It stretches, burns, pushes, expands. A tiny body struggles, vomits, learns by friction. Life does not arrive gently; it arrives breathing hard. And yet, inside that intensity, there is something beautiful, the realization that this is not failure but construction.

Her intestines are learning their ancient choreography, her nervous system wiring its first fragile circuits, her immune system waking like a small warrior. A body does not simply arrive; it must become, and becoming often hurts. We like to romanticize nature as soft and harmonious, but it isn’t. Nature is demanding. It grows through stress. Muscles strengthen by tearing, bones harden under pressure, forests renew after fire. These are not metaphors; they are biological laws.

And evolution did not design only pressure. It also designed support. A mother’s breast is not just nourishment but a responsive system in dialogue with the baby, adapting, regulating, protecting. While her body learns to digest, we lend her our nervous systems. While her world overwhelms her, we make it inhabitable. Two bodies speaking without language, two nervous systems negotiating safety.

Something becomes clear, not intellectually but viscerally: suffering alone does not heal, suffering held does. Without presence, pain scars. With presence, pain transforms. This is not theory. It is milk, breath, heartbeat in the dark.

How Pain Becomes Psychological

Very quickly, pain stops belonging only to the body and enters the inner world. A child is not only building an immune system; she is building expectations about reality. If pain appears and nobody comes, the world becomes dangerous. If pain appears and someone stays, the world becomes survivable. This is the real beginning of psychology, not in books but in arms.

Modern trauma research, attachment theory, neuroscience all confirm something ancient: trauma is not what happens, trauma is what happens when what happens is faced alone. When pain meets abandonment, it becomes trauma. When pain meets connection, it becomes growth. And this does not stop in childhood. The cry returns in adult forms—heartbreak, grief, illness, depression, loss, existential fatigue—and the same question repeats: do we numb it, do we escape it, or do we stay?

When Culture Forgets the Art of Enduring

What begins in the cradle becomes culture. Traditional societies expect pain and ritualize it. Birth, death, illness, and initiation are held by community. Drums, chants, elders, silence, stories. Pain is shared, witnessed, metabolized. In the modern West, we tried something else. We tried to eliminate pain. We anesthetized it, medicalized it, distracted it, outsourced it. We built a world obsessed with comfort and allergic to discomfort.

But biology does not negotiate, and the psyche does not disappear when ignored. Pain mutates. It returns as anxiety, addiction, burnout, depression, loneliness, rage. We built systems designed to protect us from suffering and accidentally created systems incapable of bearing it. And just as an abandoned child grows into a fearful adult, a culture that abandons its pain becomes brittle, polarized, defensive. Unprocessed pain becomes ideology. It seeks enemies.

This is where ancestral medicine traditions matter, not as folklore or exoticism, but as technologies of containment. They did not eliminate suffering; they taught people how to meet it.

The Maloca: A Container for the Storm

Where modern society flees from pain, the jungle invites people to meet it. Not gently, not romantically, but honestly. Deep in the Amazon, people do not come to expand consciousness. They come because something hurts. A childhood that never softened, a grief that never moved, a weight carried too long.

At night, a circle gathers in the maloca. There is no spectacle, no performance, no new-age spirituality. Just human beings facing what they avoided. People cry, shake, vomit, whisper, pray, tremble, sometimes collapse. And nobody leaves.

When someone breaks open, the circle does not turn away. Some sing, some hold, some breathe, some stay silent but present. Pain becomes collective. Not managed, not fixed—held. Ayahuasca does not heal people; it reveals. What heals is the container, the presence, the safety, the fact that when someone falls apart they are not abandoned. This is not mystical. It is neurological. A regulated nervous system can only rewire in the presence of another regulated nervous system. Trauma is relational, and so is healing.

Inside the maloca, a simple law reveals itself again and again: we do not break because we hurt; we break because we are alone inside the hurt. The medicine opens the wound; the community prevents collapse. One person shakes, another breathes for them. One cries, another holds. Roles rotate. Life after life.

This is not “ayahuasca culture.” It is human culture. The same thing happens in hospital rooms, in bedrooms at three in the morning, at kitchen tables when someone finally tells the truth. The jungle did not invent this; it preserved it.

Psychedelic Medicine as De-Anesthesia

Psychedelic medicine does not create pain; it removes the anesthesia. It shows what is already there. This is why it is not entertainment and not spiritual tourism. It is an encounter with the parts of the psyche modern culture taught us to avoid: grief, fear, shame, rage, abandonment, longing. The medicine does not comfort; it exposes. And then the real work begins, not in visions but in integration, in relationship, in staying.

This is why so many people unravel when they drink without support. Opening the psyche without a container is not liberation; it is destabilization. The medicine opens; the circle holds. This is the architecture of healing.

The Same Question, From Birth to Ceremony

It began for me with the cry of a newborn, a tiny body discovering that living has weight, a nervous system learning existence. And the same truth keeps revealing itself in bedrooms and malocas, in infancy and ceremony: pain is not the enemy; abandonment is.

A baby screams because her body is learning life. An adult screams because his soul carried life alone too long. Different scale, same mechanism. In both, the nervous system asks the same question: am I alone?

Healing is not a technique. It is an experience of not being abandoned. When someone stays, something reorganizes. Fear softens. Pain becomes passage. I have seen it with newborns, with traumatized adults, with myself. The jungle did not teach me a ritual; it reminded me of an instinct: stay, not fix, not explain, especially not escape.

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Closing: The Art of Staying

Maybe love is not the opposite of suffering. Maybe love is the art of remaining inside it without closing the heart. And if we can learn that—in ceremony, in families, in communities, in ourselves—then pain will still hurt, but it will no longer be meaningless. It will become part of the strange, difficult, sacred work of being human.

And we will not have cried in vain.