We recently connected with Billy Buffington and have shared our conversation below.

Billy, appreciate you joining us today. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?

This is a story about a professor of mine that weaves together a good portion of my path.

My sophomore year of college at USC, I had a writing professor, now Dr. James Owens. He was a curious character. We got along well, and after the course, he helped me write my first CV as I scrambled to apply to an internship program in London (one I found out about days prior to the deadline). I was accepted and had a magical summer abroad. The next year at USC, James reached out to see if I wanted to start a student-run club supporting his literary non-profit — The World Is Just a Book Away. Books had opened up and fueled my world, so I jumped at the opportunity to support. I grew the club into a big organization on campus, and we fundraised to build a bunch of libraries with ongoing reading programs in impoverished parts of Indonesia and Mexico. James then partnered with Jane Goodall, we included environmental education in the programs, and we got to travel together to Mexico to open one of the libraries and spend time with the children — it was moving. But as much as I believe in the power of literacy to break generational cycles of poverty, as much as I’ve seen it do just that, I knew non-profit fundraising wasn’t my main mission in life. So when I graduated USC with degrees in exercise science/human biology and business, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I had opportunities in the early tech startup scene in LA, so I started there, but the question of what to do with my capital-L Life ate at me. I worked just enough to afford an apartment in Santa Monica while I spent the rest of my time voraciously reading, learning to meditate, meeting people, and exploring ideas and places along the California coastline. I had an urgency to figure out where to take my life, but little guidance. Again, James came through. He suggested we set up a regular Tuesday evening call to brainstorm and strategize about my career. A professor and non-profit CEO now, James had tons of experience and success in the business world and was a pro at this very task. I was also a personal trainer, and James, in need of some exercise motivation, hired me, and we often combined the sessions.

There were days I remember walking along the ocean in LA feeling like I was so close to figuring things out, but also feeling like I wouldn’t make it. In hindsight, it’s clear the pain at not being aligned with my work felt like it was destroying me. I felt ill. And it was those Tuesday evening calls that in many ways saved me. Kept me tethered. Gave me the confidence I’d figure it out. After searching and searching, I finally found the next step — I was going to get a medical degree, become a doctor, a way to pull all the disparate threads of mind, body, and spiritual wellbeing that seemed to be driving me. So James helped me craft a masterpiece of an admissions essay for Columbia’s Postbaccalaureate premed program, where I’d need to start with prerequisites before applying to medical school. James, a professional writer, can get paid $600/hour as a writing consultant. But again, he poured hours and hours into me for free. I applied, got in, and excelled in the program. Two years later, I gave the commencement speech at Columbia University, where James had matriculated with an MBA two decades before. He happened to be in NYC on the day of my speech. A scheduling conflict arose, and he turned down a meeting with a prime minister to come see me speak. Standing there, delivering an impassioned speech to my incredible classmates, family in attendance, and my USC professor who taught me the art of public speaking, that was a special moment. For James too, sitting there in the cavernous hall of Low Library, a room he’d only been in once before — for his business school graduation years ago — now watching his former student deliver a commencement address — it was special.

I went on to get into Columbia’s medical school, get most of it paid for, and I’ve been off ever since. These days, James is more like a brother than a mentor or professor. I’m a god parent to his new son. And that’s the biggest gift, a lifelong best friend, a fellow journeyer. I feel blessed to have had what feels like such a cinematic experience — that one professor who saw something in me, invested and went far beyond the call. And it worked! As James likes to say, “I bet on the right horse.”

(Side story: Years before, when James thanked his dear friend and mentor Dr. Jane Goodall for trusting him to partner with The World is Just a Book Away to carry out Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots work in Indonesia. She said “of course I trusted you. I knew you would do it”. After Jane said “well, I guess you bet on the right horse Jane”. She replied with a smile “I always do James.)

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My work is in health — the wellbeing of mind-body-spirit. And my role is that of a bridge — between disciplines, systems, and perspectives. I’m a psychiatrist, but not because of anything particular to psychiatry; rather, the conventional medical education and psychiatric training provides a broad scientific foundation with which to integrate everything else. It’s a vehicle, one I can use to weave together ten thousand threads. Because it’s not one thing, it’s everything.

I am in medicine because I saw a fractured world of experts and information without cohesive integration; a world that’s mapped out and categorized pathology but forgotten flourishing. I aim to understand the nuts and bolts of health without losing sight of the forest for the trees; I use the scientific precision of the west along with the time-refined gestalt of eastern and indigenous practices and philosophy, most notably Taoism, Buddhism, and Shipibo, as well as a pluralistic approach with various western psychological frames, with particular Jungian influence. And at the same time, for example, the unfolding story of the ways in which light, water, and magnetism — biophysics — underlies the biochemical paradigm that presently dominates most physician’s scientific understanding is profoundly important.

My curiosity was catalyzed by a book of 1000 questions I read cover to cover over and over again when I was five, and my dive into health was catalyzed when I broke my back while weightlifting in high school. During recovery, I had to learn to create my own programming to work around my injury and continue my career as a ski racer and high jumper. I continued competing in both sports at USC, and delved deeper into the underlying science of sports performance in the classroom. As I pulled that thread, I soon found how inextricably connected health, thriving, is to everything. So I developed expertise about the lifestyle factors, from recovery and sleep to nutrition, studying that stuff in my undergrad, then psychology, then spirituality. All were clearly implicated in thriving and dis-ease. Medicine emerged as the best path to not only continue to lay a solid scientific foundation but gain the licensure and credibility I needed. I saw a radically different future our health systems needed to move towards and figured I’d be able to walk out a bit further with a few letters behind my name.

So I got my medical degree from Columbia, and got to live and study in the most urban medical environment in the country. On the heels of that, right now I’m in the middle of my psychiatry residency at Dartmouth, the most rural academic medical center in the country. I like extremes, juxtapositions illuminate. My current work spans staffing a psychiatric emergency department, helping run an acute care inpatient psychiatric unit at a VA, one at Dartmouth Hitchcock, working at a State Hospital with the most severely and persistently mentally ill, and doing more longitudinal psychotherapy in the outpatient setting.

So at this stage, I’m mostly within conventional bounds, though I feel like I talk as much about circadian biology and light exposure with my patients as I do pharmaceuticals. My future work is a lot less conventional — a mixture of continuing to work with some of the most complicated and, frankly, poor populations, while also working in settings like psychedelic retreats where we get stack variables, combine nature immersion with body work with group processing and therapy. I have a particular expertise in the bride between wester perspectives and ayahuasca (through Shipibo lineage), and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, though more of my focus is on the ecology of healing surrounding and connecting to these powerful interventions.

And I’d be remiss not to highlight that to an almost unbelievable degree I’ve been exposed to how widespread and severe trauma is, how much it underlies so many of the other diagnostic labels we apply, how few resources so many have, the futility of standards of care for so many. Most people have no idea — if they made movies or wrote stories about how bad it is for so many of these people, people wouldn’t watch or read, they’d look away, it’s too much. It’s bad. Life is really, really harsh to so many people. But as much as this suffering breaks my heart, it also galvanizes me. The greatest problems of our time are the greatest opportunities. These are the challenges I’m spending my life with, and I wouldn’t—couldn’t—have it any other way.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

That I have to do things on my own, that it’s not okay to not be okay, that not being perfect is weakness. My solution to household challenges growing up — nothing especially traumatic, but for example we were kicked out of our childhood home when it was repossessed by the bank — was the classic push-it-down-push forward “I’m okay”. I poured myself into academics and athletics and it worked, for a while. I needed to learn to be with and to love all parts of my being.

This is something I see so ingrained in this culture, especially in men, perhaps most so in veterans I work with. I find myself frequently quoting the great humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I graduated from USC with degrees in exercise science/human biology and business and began a career starting and growing early stage tech companies, because that’s where I had opportunities. I knew all the while it was just a placeholder while I searched to figure out what my vocation was. As I searched, one of the epiphanies I had was zooming out from “where will I be at 30?” to “what do I want to do with my life?” With that perspective shift, that timeline shift, new horizons opened up, and it allowed me to pivot into medicine, which involved going back to do a decade of training. That’s a big chunk of life, but I’m going to be 40 either way, what do I want to be doing? And, it turns out, being aligned with my work, even if I’m working crushing 80-hour weeks, even if I’m doing 28-hour call shifts, is worth more than any amount of freedom or material success.

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