Healer Q&A: Building resilience for spiritual entrepreneurs with Alessandro Grampa
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
Join us in this episode as Alessandro Grampa's journey from struggling startup founder to spiritual bridge-builder offers a powerful roadmap for navigating our increasingly complex world. Through raw vulnerability, he reveals how debilitating panic attacks and entrepreneurial burnout became the catalyst for a profound healing journey spanning Buddhist meditation, scientific biohacking, and transformative plant medicine ceremonies.
What makes Alessandro's perspective particularly valuable is his systematic approach to what he calls "the trinity" of healing - addressing body, mind, and soul as interconnected systems. His scientific background combined with spiritual exploration positions him uniquely to translate between worlds that often struggle to communicate. From discovering how gluten sensitivity contributed to years of depression to receiving clear guidance through shamanic ceremonies, his story demonstrates how personal healing becomes the foundation for helping others.
Spiritual Awakening Amidst Internal Adversaries
Alessandro Grampa: Yeah, so it was quite long, I would say, which, from what I'm reading now, it's the normal path of healing, the more rocks that you need to get empty from your soul, the more the work to be done. But for me, everything really started consciously when I got to a point where I was having so many panic attacks every single day that I couldn't function anymore. And I say this quite often in every show that I speak to, because the reality is that a lot of people are not talking publicly about this and so there's still a stigma or a taboo behind being vulnerable in that sense. But the reality is, especially when it comes to founders 73% of them are neurodiverse and literally almost everyone has these problems. So they just don't either show it in public or, some even worse cases, they don't even take action. For me, I went into breathing, breathing exercises, breathing meditations when I really couldn't function anymore.
I'm an ADHD person. Looking backward right now, it was my gift somehow. If we consider that we choose the parents and the first seven years of our lives, then I definitely chose to suffer a lot, be not understood for a long time, even though my parents were great, they really did everything they could, but there was literally very little awareness about these topics. And after six months of breathing exercises, it was just a very simple meditation that I was running on loop on Spotify. I want to learn how to meditate, because somehow I got connected with meditation. I said, “okay, who does meditation?” And immediately Buddhism came to my mind. I found a meditation Buddhist center in Milan, where I was living at the time, and somehow I got into the world. The two people there, they welcomed me and they hugged me. They didn't ask me who I was, what was my name, where I came from, what job I did, and so on. So that was the first probably awakening moment of saying, “hmm, there is another way that people live in and I'm not aware of.”
And then I discovered that gluten sensitivity comes out days after you actually eat gluten. So I realized also that my chronic depression disappeared and it was strictly connected to me eating gluten. That really sparked my interest into biohacking and understanding from a more contemporary, modern, scientific point of view what is really good for your health and what is not. And then the last piece of the puzzle, I like to call the trinity: body, mind and soul. I worked on the mind with meditation, the body, with biohacking.
The last very big piece for me was going back to Colombia. I lived in Colombia many years ago with my now wife and we did some work with shamans, but only acupuncture, no real plant medicine and so on. We didn't feel ready back then, but we came back to get married. I had so many questions and I was able to go so deep for the very first time taking the medicine. I already worked with psychedelics before, but nothing, nothing comparable to this experience. And I really feel that I received a very clear message and path. And this is my mission now, because the medicine told me I asked the medicine: first, shall I keep my current company at the time, which we were working on vertical farming and so on and technology, and or shall I leave it immediately and in general, what is my mission here? And the medicine first told me you should keep going as far as you can. You will receive a very clear message when you're going to arrive, for when to leave your current company, but your mission is to develop technology for elevating the human mind.
Building Business Bridges Using Intuition
Alessandro Grampa: I don't have enough scientifically, statistically evident proof, but my intuition made me understand that the majority of people that come with this knowledge and also the skills, they are relatively good at starting up like zero to one. I have an idea and that's my calling and I want to put it out there. Where I've seen most of the struggle is going from one to 10 and then 10 to multiples, because, of course, there is no structure, there is no knowledge of how to do this structure, and I believe it's also because the way that we run our businesses today it's very different than a natural ecosystemic point of view that a normal village or tribe would go. All of them don't necessarily want to have a super hierarchical structure and more horizontal and so on, but startups got there much before, like in the past. You have companies from the 90s in Silicon Valley. Even before that they broke down hierarchical structures and they're fully horizontal and giving people authority for doing what they believe it's right.
But somehow planning this process it's not easy. Iit happens sometimes that I call them founders, just because it's a terminology that is closer to me with my background. You have these founders that need to plan hiring. They need to understand how many events to do in a certain time and how to structure the brand so that it's clear what they're communicating. It's one single thing. Then of course, it translates into different products, but it's one thing. It's not tons of different products, but it's one thing. It's not tons of different products and tons of different things at the same time and working on this with them, things that really come natural for me.
Technology, Humanity & Healing
Alessandro Grampa: What I'm seeing is that, on one hand, a lot of successful people in business and science world are really turning into fully acknowledging the essence of spirituality. And there is one video, which is an interview from Federico Faggin, who is the inventor of silicon. So Silicon Valley wouldn't exist if it was not for him. He's in the late 70s, early 80s right now and he has completely turned his life and his legacy now is about talking about AI and technology in general with a lens of understanding how quantum physics work and how consciousness works. And hearing these people like him, confirming what I've been studying on my own, is really a confirmation that the world is changing. We are going into a merger between technology and humans. This is inevitable. We cannot really escape from this trend, and I also like what Matias de Stefano talks a lot about. He's a “Rememberer”, so he does a lot of work reconnecting with his past lives and bringing also the ancient wisdom of what's the name of the population before, like the previous big Atlantis.
Then, on the other perspective, you have AI, which is going to take literally everything that we're doing, that is considered to be a machine-like job and, to be honest, I don't see this as a negative thing, because the reality is that we've been forced for very too long to work on machine-like jobs that are completely dehumanizing our experience of life. So those are going to be replaced in 10 years. But after then, the work that the healing community is already doing, it's really going to be the only work that matters. Everything that's left is being finally back as a human, connecting peer-to-peer, sharing energy, doing the healing work.
