From Wharton to Hogwarts: Salman’s Story

Blog, Leadership

Meet Salman, Our Journey Director

Below is the story of our Journey Director, Salman Hatta, originally released on Medium.

To label Salman as this or box him in as that does Salman a disservice. However, we’ll do our best to capture the powerful, magical, and transformational agent we know as Salman, DJ Shalman, Salmancito, or the Cat Herder.

Salman is someone who wears many hats with 1heart, literally. He first joined 1heart on Journey 2 and now leads and supports numerous initiatives. From operations and logistics on Journey to transformational breathwork workshops as well as grounding & guidance to the first-timers throughout their preparation, Journeying, and integration phases, Salman’s perspective and wizardry impact much of the 1heart experience.

What follows are Salman’s own words about how he went from Wharton to Hogwarts. His story is a testament to what it means to suspend logic and invite magic. And like him, we hope you’re moved to feel something… new. Or maybe it’s as simple as acknowledging what’s always been there, waiting for your attention.

How I transmuted a logical life into a magical life, and 5 tips for how you can too

From Wharton to Hogwarts: Salman's Story 1 — Hello! Thanks for reading about my journey. I hope it helps you on yours.

“Have you thought about trying ayahuasca?” my friend asked. “Isn’t that for people who had major traumas and issues in their lives?” I responded. I had a cushy high paying job at a billion-dollar tech company and a stacked finance resume, an MBA from Wharton Business School, and no major traumas in my life that I could think of. My life looked great on paper and my parents had every reason to brag about me to their friends. While I considered my life charmed by mainstream society’s and my family’s standards, it was only sparkly on the surface. Inside I was feeling lost. Disenchanted. Listless. My relationship was on the rocks, I felt uninspired at my job, and my life felt like it was stuck in place. I didn’t know what to do. How did I even get here?

In 2017, this feeling of being stuck became so prevalent that I finally felt determined to do something big and change my life. I was now 33 years old, in my so-called Jesus year. According to the Urban Dictionary, during our Jesus year we are reborn in some sense — perhaps a mid-life crisis or an ego death. For me, this was the year when I abandoned old ways and started anew. Something inside of me had a hunch that this was a ripe and potent time for evolution and ascension.

Little did I know that two years after drinking that first cup of ayahuasca, I would set sail onto a personal path of alignment and integrity with my truth that promised both nothing and everything at the same time, and that there was no turning back. This is my experience of trading mainstream and logical for spiritual and magical, going from a Wharton finance and tech whiz living a life filled with expectations and achievements to a Hogwarts wizard living a life of magic, intuitive guidance, and synchronicity. May you learn a few things for yourself from my journey.

My personal story is intended to give hope to those of you who fear change but know you desperately need it, and some tips on how to go about it. It is my intention that my story be shared and serve as medicine for those who feel similarly as lost as I did and could use a shot of courage to help them along their way. We all get to face our inner dragons and demons, and if my story can help someone’s transformation, then I feel it is a story worth sharing. The safe path prescribed for you may only serve you to some degree. You may choose the path of satisfying external expectations imposed on you or choose the path of your own calling as the way of truth and integrity. While your rational mind can bring you to the brink of happiness and satisfaction, your heart will take you to the depths of purpose and passion. I chose my heart and you get to choose yours too.

The roots of my conditioning

Let’s turn back the clock to 2012. I’ve been accepted to and am attending the University of Pennsylvania as an MBA graduate student at the prestigious Wharton Business School after 6 years of working as a high-flying professional at major global investment banks in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Dubai. I was clean-cut, wore fancy tailored suits, flew business class internationally, took company executives out on fancy dinners, and built pretty slick Powerpoint presentations and Excel financial models to sell billion dollar investment deals. I was following the path prescribed from childhood onwards by my parents, society, the educational system, mainstream media, and so on. I had been conditioned to strive for professional and financial success in materialistic ways in order to receive love, validation, and happiness. My boss told me I should aspire to be a Managing Director by the time I was 30! My mom always told me I should get a Masters degree in order to be successful! (Correction: loved). By the way, don’t you think we get “should”ed more than we think we should?

1*O7PAFdflJAUuq cyeX gwA — Wharton Graduation Day — 2014. It was a major achievement and got me closer to personal satisfaction. And it also won me more love from my parents.

By living out this conditioning, I was not only creating better professional opportunities for myself; I was also seeking the approval of my parents, who were devout Muslim immigrants from Indonesia and Malaysia. If anyone knows Asian parents, especially religious ones, the path of the mundane and the mainstream is the accepted and expected one. Success in life is sold as a defined and linear path. As those of us who have really lived know, however, that is far from the truth. My parents loved to compare me to their friends’ kids, so I had to give them something to brag about. It is said that comparison is the thief of joy — and I felt robbed of my own joy when I felt myself being compared to others by my parents and comparing my own self to others.

Through higher education and professional development, I believed I could learn the hard and soft skills to chart a different course for my life that felt more natural to me — something that would allow me to engage more deeply with people and create a level of impact that didn’t just look like black numbers with multiple zeros behind them on a spreadsheet. My Wharton experience was truly special and I wouldn’t have changed it one bit. I benefitted greatly professionally and had many incredible experiences while at business school, from management classes with renowned authors like Adam Grant to an organized “Leadership Venture”, an amazing weeklong group experiential backpacking trip to a remote island in Patagonia, Chile in my second year that taught me more than any class ever did. Ultimately, the change in life direction I desired manifested in the most unexpected, unimaginable, and incredible ways. What I wrote about in my business school application had nothing to do with what I am doing now, and that is completely perfect.

Unraveling the old story of me

After graduating Wharton and working several successful years as a tech executive, I stood at the threshold of an uncharted school of life that contrasted heavily with the comfort and security of my traditional path up to that point. I had always been a very analytical, logical, and intellectual person. I lived from my left brain and in my mind. I valued everything to do with corporate professional success and judged my own self-worth based on having a respectable title at a prestigious company, typically doing things that weren’t filling my soul. These were part of the lies I was fed that I continued telling myself: that these positions and titles were important to my worth as a human. There were artificial limits to my personal and professional growth at any company I was at. Even though I would perform well, the inner critic in me was always feeling like I was “not enough”, which led to the feeling of stress about being “not enough”, and ultimately the feeling of unhappiness. I associated self-love with external status and it blocked my ability to feel inner peace. Who else can identify with this?

1*g5e3PUWSXN gN8vK6a3N7g — I got to move on from finance into tech companies. The collared shirts stayed on, but I was getting to play a little bit more.

As it turned out, in 2017 I found and sat with the sacred plant medicine ayahuasca, or as it is often said, she (“Mother Ayahuasca”, or “the medicine”) came calling for me, after I was feeling disenchanted, uninspired, and questioning the direction of my life. (For the uninitiated, ayahuasca is the psychoactive Amazonian brew that connects a person with the divine nature of themselves and provides clarity and answers often in the form of emotional healing.)

On the outside, everything seemed good. Stable job: check, committed partner: check, city apartment: check. On the inside, I was having existential doubts, asking myself things like, “Should I stay at the same company?” “What do I do about the relationship I’m in?” and “What’s my purpose in life and how do I get there?” Having been a curious internal explorer for some time, I knew that this ayahuasca ceremony was something I was meant to do. Like my Wharton leadership venture, my first ayahuasca journey taught me more about my true nature (and the nature of the universe!) than anything else before it ever did. It was also extremely challenging, forced me to face my own uncomfortable truths, and got me over the tipping point of unhealthy patterns. It was absolutely transformational.

My life, and my approach to life, started to shift. I sat several more times with the medicine. I began to find love and gratitude for everything I already had instead of beating myself up for not having more. I found appreciation for having quality time for myself to spend on meaningful things like nature and meditation. I changed my diet, behaviors, beliefs, and habits — dropping unhealthy patterns and addictions like alcohol and caffeine completely. I traded steak dinners and professional haircuts for plant-based organic meals and more unique forms of self-expression. Eventually, I aligned myself to the path I was beginning to see was mine and let go of the relationship I was in as well as some unhealthy friendships, changed careers, and began exploring a path of earnest curiosity around the nature of reality and consciousness. Instead of following a stream of paths and roads that held defined outcomes in being the “safe route” and common to most of mainstream society, I began to expand the possibilities of my life to the unthinkable and the unexplored, seeing everything as a perfect gift and moving from the mundane to the magical. Once I acquired a new perspective, I could not unknow it. At that point, I was compelled to act. In late 2018, I realized that I needed to enter a new school, one that would free my soul. I had to leave the corporate world to pursue a greater calling, one that was unknown to me at the time.

My medicine journeys were so impactful that when I finally left the corporate world in February 2019, I knew that plant medicine was the way for me, or would at least show me the way to my purpose and calling. It was not a thought in my head, but a knowing in my heart that led me to where I was going — there was no other way to put it. Over the New Year before I quit my last job cold turkey, I sought direction and attended a weeklong life-transforming ayahuasca retreat for entrepreneurs, founders, and changemakers called 1heart Journeys — where I now serve as program director and run retreat operations. This decision was a monumental catalyst for my future, as it gave me life, purpose, and a calling for service to personal transformation and opened me up to more magical opportunities and personal gifts I didn’t know I possessed. This ended up being my personal initiation into Hogwarts. How I did this was by staying open, following my curiosity, and saying yes to the right opportunities that showed up.