Healing with Psilocybin: The Seed
After cleaning up the ice shack, I started walking off the lake to go home. I had parked my van at my friend Vivian’s house and she was opening the door as I was packing up to leave. She yelled, “So? How was it?!” I looked at her silently for a moment while my mind shouted: “Intense! Confounding! Scary! Liberating! Opening! Grounding! Appalling! F*cked up!” Instead of any of those words, I simply said, “Can I come in for coffee?”
I told her about my night (which you can read here if you missed it) and I noticed my emotions were really close to the surface. Multiple times my eyes teared up and I had a lump in my throat. I felt tender, exposed and sensitive but we had a great chat and I headed home after an hour or so.
Once home I fell back into the role of mom immediately. Lunch needed to be made, dishes put away, laundry folded and Clay was getting ready to head to the shack for a night to himself. There was no time for reflection. Duties called! But part of me knew I needed some down time to really think about had happened. It wouldn’t happen that night.
Saturday I woke up to a debilitating depression. I could barely get out of bed. Clay said it was typical of psychedelic use to have a down period. I did not sign up for this part. I was just SO empty. There was a complete absence of feeling. I was a vacuum, bereft of gravity or matter. To even say I was numb would be to acknowledge I felt something but there was nothing there. Zilch, nadda, nothing. I couldn’t shake it. I was morose, somber and had zero energy for anything. I even had my monthly book club meeting that evening which I never miss and I stayed home telling the girls I didn’t feel right. I knew this was alarming if I had no drive for my beloved book club.
I tried to talk my way out of it knowing where this depression came from but alas, I’ve learned the more we focus on fighting emotions with logic, the worse they seem to get.
I had to honour where I was. I knew it wouldn’t last so I went to bed early. A few minutes into attempted sleep, I turned my lamp on, grabbed my journal and wrote: “I think I was hoping for something drastic to change in me so to come home and find everything the exact same, is as if, even if I did change, it couldn’t fully manifest because of all the triggers and chaos in the house are still there. Nothing has changed.” We can’t change if we aren’t given a chance. Read that again.
I took this sleeplessness to finally think about the mushroom trip.
I felt some shame. It was a shame similar to the shame I felt when I had Kaizley unmedicated. I went into that birth wanting a peaceful, pain free as possible, empowering goddess birth but once the contractions were on top of each other, the pain won. All of the training and preparation went out the window as I just tried to survive a pain I thought would kill me. I couldn’t ‘mind over matter’ labour and I was mad at myself for not being able to. I felt shame I couldn’t honour the potential of birth. The psilocybin trip was the same: I was trying to ‘mind over matter’ the experience and absolutely couldn’t. I recently edited a book for a friend who referenced, “not my circus, not my monkeys” and I think that’s why the circus and monkeys came to me. It was my circus and my monkeys and they were preventing me from seeing what is/was beyond. They were distractions and I gave in to them. I had to reliniquish control and I couldn’t do that. Intuitively I knew that if I simply surrendered, the monkeys and the insects would dissipate and something amazing would happen. But something was in the way. I learned from this that my thoughts are frequently out of control and as someone who uses control as a trauma response to maintain balance in her life, this was a slap in the face.
I felt a smidgen of pride for accomplishing the goal, despite the outcome. I had been thinking about this for a long time. I was (and still am) fascinated by plant medicines and let fear hold me back for far too long. I once said to my soul sister, Krissy (about plant medicines and psychedelics): “what if it changes me for the worse?” And she said, “what if it changes you for the better?” I let that idea be the compass for this particular experience.
During the ‘trip’ Clay and I talked about ‘humanness’. I believe we chose to come into the bodies we have and we essentially create and sign a soul contract for this lifetime. So if we are soul entities having a human experience by choice, why do we spend so much time escaping it? Instead of fully embracing the experience, we numb with addictions: booze, drugs, porn, gambling, shopping, sex. We ignore feelings, disassociate from our bodies and avoid the things that make being human the best part of being human! If we don’t fall into any of those vices, others try to escape by trying to get back to the Soul state. We meditate, go to spiritual retreats, take plant medicine, read all of the books, walk in Nature, obsess over near death experiences, do intense breath work, all in hopes of touching “Home” again. Why can’t humans just be human? In all its messy, chaotic, hard glory?
These are the thoughts that were running on repeat. I am both side of that coin. I’ve drank and done drugs to ignore, avoid, and forget feelings and issues. I’ve searched for God since I was 15 always obsessed with knowing Spirit. And since this night of mushrooms I’ve planted this thought: “Why can’t I be content with being me, the me in this skin suit, who agreed to this life and simply be happy with it?”
Next…the rebirth.
Strumming G,
K