It's not about getting high. It's about getting real.

What if the healing power of psychedelics met the powers of destruction we are witnessing today?

Hello!

At the end of this post I have a link to a three-minute quiz aimed at assessing your preparedness (or not) for psychedelic therapy. If you are considering this path, I highly recommend checking it out.

Okay then.

Based on some of the responses to my last post, I am guessing the account of my day-long psychedelic session must have sounded rather grim, which means I did not convey it very well. 😌

Perhaps the death reference landed rather differently than I intended, since many of us think of death as something dark and abhorrent, an absence of life.

I take a different view. Throughout our lives we are constantly dying. Old versions of ourselves die. Dreams die. Illusions die. Relationships die. ~ And then, something new comes to fill their place, and we are transformed.

Personally I believe that even our physical birth is a death, as we are passing from another dimension to this one. Similarly, I believe that, when we die, we are passing on to a dimension different from this one.

That is what I was referencing when I wrote that ingesting the medicine must be what dying feels like. Not as something dark and horrible, but like passing into something else, another dimension.

As for the physical trembling—that was not something I experienced as negative. On the contrary: I welcomed it. For me it was a symptom of the deep psychosomatic healing I was undergoing. Those were the original responses of my nervous system to the trauma I’d experienced, that had been smothered and stifled, and were now, decades later, being given expression.

With that came an immense relief and sense of freedom. After all, when we drive our emotions into our bodies and smother our impulses, we become locked in an emotion prison. When our brain and nervous system are re-aligned and our impulses are given validation, our spirit becomes free.

A couple of people remarked that they could never permit themselves to “lose control” like that. Yes, I get that it seems scary when we have spent our whole lives “holding it together” with the survival strategies we learned. But that sort of control is an illusion. The very things we are trying to avoid, or control, wind up directing the course of our lives. As Carl Jung put it:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

The paradox is that, in order to be fully in control, we have to be willing to surrender control.

The day after

When I wrote that my day-long therapy session was like being thrown into a centrifuge, I was not joking.

A centrifuge is a device that spins at high speed to separate components of a material. That is very much how I felt: as though I had undergone something of high intensity to separate the authentic parts of myself from the dross that had accumulated from decades of twisting myself into shapes designed to compensate for what I had experienced as a child.

I likened it to giving birth—the incredible experience of giving birth to my daughter, both painful and exhilarating, knowing that life was forever changed, and feeling humbled, like I was part of a larger plan.

Except that now the person I had given birth to was myself.

The first thing I noticed the following morning was that my body felt very different—which was to be expected. I felt much lighter. I had learned to clench my muscles to maintain strict control over my impulses (e.g. expressions of anger, grief, frustration, fight-or-flight) and this had become a part of my constitution. It was something over which I was not at all conscious.

That day I had the same impulses to clench or bear down physically to keep things in check … but then the impulse was intercepted, and I the thought came to me, “Oh right—I don’t need to do that any more. It’s gone!”

That was pretty wild.

I headed to the gym—this is one of my main ways of coping with the stresses of life and various injuries I have had (long story)—and started my normal routine: 30 minutes of cardio (treadmill/elliptical), then 30 minutes of yoga/stretching, then some resistance training, followed by a sauna and hot/cold tubs at the pool outside.

Normally when I’m on the cardio machines I’m listening to music and also scrolling on my phone: watching reels, reading something, perusing the news sites, my mind cluttered with all the notifications, information, distractions, escapes that our perpetually-connected reality serves up.

That day, I did not want to scroll. I could not bear the thought of it. All I wanted was to be in the moment. To really be in my body, to really hear the music.

But the most incredible thing was the stretching. I was blown away by my ability to let go and surrender. I was lithe, and flexible, and had the ability to go deep, deep into my body, and correspondingly, deep into my mind. It was the best meditation. It felt like exploring a landscape that was at once familiar and foreign. The relief I felt, the release of toxic energy … I cannot describe it in words.

Here is a section of the notes I dashed off that evening:

I was able to go so deep into the stretches, much deeper than before, and I felt so liberated and free. So much lighter. And things that used to massively annoy me didn’t annoy me so much any more, like someone talking on the phone in the change room. And I realized how caught up I have been in others’ opinions of me, feeling so conspicuous, and today it was like .. “no one is looking at me”. And I felt free. And my skin glowed! And also like someone had straightened up things in my head. Like tons of clutter was just .. gone. And so much felt new and fresh, yet not new – more like the way I used to feel before some of the trauma hit (though I know so much of it is very, very deep). There was more trauma release in the stretching, too, I felt it, letting go of tension, like goosebumps. So much bad energy dissipating. I kept thinking this is one of the most intense and powerful things I have ever done.

I remember being in and among people, looking at them, and feeling like I could see right through their facades. I could see the tension they were holding, the shadows, the way they braced themselves against the world, and I kept thinking: This could help so many people. This could help SO MANY people.

I still find myself wondering how different our world would be if there was ready access to these substances for therapeutic purposes, and if the stigma were removed. If the healing power of the medicine was unleashed to meet the powers of destruction we are witnessing in our world today.

But maybe, given the surge of interest in psychedelic therapy that we are seeing today, that is exactly what is happening.

For those of you interested in learning more about the use of psychedelics for healing purposes, consider taking this quick quiz that I heard about via Recomendo.

Thanks for reading.

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