Naked Out Loud: Machan Taylor on Trauma, Music & Psychedelic Healing

A new episode of Cura Medicina with vocalist, teacher, and author Machan Taylor

What does it mean to return to the part of yourself that was left behind?

In a moving new episode of Cura Medicina, Derek Dodds speaks with Machan Taylor—acclaimed vocalist, teacher, and author of Naked Out Loud—about early trauma, identity, music, and the deeply personal healing journey that led her to intentional psychedelic medicine work.

Machan’s story spans continents, musical stages, and inner landscapes. Born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American military father, she moved to the United States when she was four and a half years old. The move meant leaving behind her grandmother, family, language, and the world she knew. Though she built an extraordinary outward life—including work with Pink Floyd, Sting, Pat Benatar, George Benson, and Hiroshima—she carried a quieter feeling for decades: that she did not fully belong.

The wound beneath the successful life

Machan describes music as both a refuge and a source of identity. It gave her purpose, community, and validation. Yet it could not, on its own, resolve the deeper pain she carried from childhood.

After years of therapy, she felt called to explore another path—one that could reach beyond intellectual understanding and into the places where old wounds are held. During the COVID lockdown, she began working with a trained psychologist and MAPS-trained facilitator in carefully held MDMA-assisted sessions.

Her first journey became a turning point.

“I felt like I completed something really important for myself.”

In the experience, a whale appeared as a guide, taking her back across the Pacific and into contact with her younger self, her family, and the original rupture of leaving Japan. The image resonated deeply: the ocean crossing that had separated her from her early world became, in the journey, the path back toward wholeness.

Reclaiming the younger self

For Machan, healing did not mean erasing the past. It meant returning to the young child who had absorbed the loss and helping her become part of a more integrated adult self.

“She is a part of me. It’s no longer a separate part of me.”

That insight offers something deeply human: our younger selves do not need to be abandoned, denied, or fixed from afar. They need care. Machan shares that the experience helped her understand that the painful events of her childhood were not her fault—and that her parents, despite their own limitations and wounds, did the best they could with the tools they had.

The result was not simply relief, but a greater capacity for self-compassion and empathy for others.

“Medicine work and the healing work that I’ve done for myself has made me a kinder, more empathetic person.”

Music, mantra, and the voice as medicine

The conversation also moves into the healing power of music. As a lifelong vocalist, Machan speaks beautifully about the body as an instrument and the voice as a direct expression of breath, vibration, and inner life.

She reflects on being introduced to chanting by the late jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter and his wife, and how a daily mantra practice helped her leave a painful marriage, move from Los Angeles back to New York, and begin a new chapter. In her view, music, chanting, and voice are not merely performance—they transform energy, connect her to her body, and send something meaningful into the world.

The courage to be “naked out loud”

Machan’s memoir, Naked Out Loud, grew organically from the journals she kept after her medicine journeys. What began as private reflection eventually became a book because she felt called to tell the truth about what lay beneath a seemingly glamorous public career.

She is candid about the fear of sharing such personal material. But when she finally held the published book in her hands, she felt something else: freedom.

“The shame is what holds us back from healing.”

Her message is one of vulnerability without self-pity. By telling her story, she hopes others may feel less alone and more willing to seek the support, therapy, or healing work that is right for them.

A conversation rooted in reverence

Throughout the episode, Machan and Derek emphasize that psychedelic work is not casual entertainment. They speak about the importance of intention, skilled facilitation, integration, and respect for the medicines themselves. Machan discusses her experiences with MDMA and psilocybin, the distinct quality of each, and her interest in ayahuasca—while making clear that any future work with it would need to be in a traditional, sacred, and trustworthy setting.

Her closing reflection captures the spirit of the conversation:

“It’s a tool for personal evolution. It’s a very powerful tool.”

This episode is about the healing that becomes possible when we stop running from our stories. It is about the courage to feel what was once too painful to feel, the value of being held in the right container, and the possibility of becoming more whole, more honest, and more compassionate along the way.

Listen to the full conversation with Machan Taylor on Cura Medicina.

Naked Out Loud is available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.