There's a whole industry built around personal transformation. Most of it sells the costume. What gets skipped: the actual practices. The ones with a few thousand years of field testing before anyone thought to put them in a subscription box.
I'm a professional mentalist. I'm no stranger to meditating at Zen temples. I've worked inside hypnosis, ritual, and shamanic traditions long enough to know there's something real beyond the crystals, incense, and ceremonial garb.
When you watch someone in pain, your brain runs a partial simulation of that pain. You don't just see other people. On some level, you briefly become them.
David Chalmers called it the hard problem of consciousness. Why is there subjective experience at all? Serious philosophers admit it's unsolved. Some think it's unsolvable.