By Twocats 1/26
The plane had sat for more than an hour on the tarmac at LaGuardia as snow began to fall, then stick, to the runway, the flight delayed. I texted my friend and host of the ceremony near Chicago to break the news: It wasn’t looking good. Maybe we try again in a few months? He replied “Just get here safe, we’ll wait for you”.
I arrived around 10:30 pm and was greeted by my friend, his wife and six people I had never met, all of them dressed in white, all of them kind. I slipped on my white clothes to match and we lined up to drink the tea. Then, we sat in a circle and sang songs from a song book, in Portuguese, about lions and rain and spirits. Pretty simple stuff, I thought.
A while later we took a break, then lined up for a second glass of tea, the flavor akin to an old man’s worn, brown leather shoe, boiled overnight in vinegar and shoe polish. Again, we sat and sang. I tried to sing along. As I started to feel the effects of the tea, the thoughts began: What am I doing here? Am I such a mess that I need to travel halfway across the country to sit in a circle with a bunch of strangers and get high to feel better? I feel old. I’m getting a gut, a middle-aged gut. I must look silly. I feel silly. I don’t look good in white. I don’t understand Portuguese, how am I supposed to…my posture is terrible. I’m tired. I need to exercise more. Why am I here, again?
The Work
A few minutes into my rumination parade, a sense of foreboding began to descend. I was going to get—was getting—very high. I did not want to get very high. I was afraid. I opened my eyes half way and peeked around the room: happy people singing. If these people are here and they’re ok, then I can be, as well, I reassured myself. Closing my eyes, I saw patterns emerging from the blackness, neon, complex, aggressive, intruding into my field of view. Deeply uncomfortable, I watched as a series of bright red, orange and white arrows, vulgar and pulsing like an early MTV logo, moved from opposite sides of my field toward the center, then pointed down toward the ground. I felt myself begin to panic and frantically searched my mind for any option for escape. My mind shrugged and shook its head. We got nothing. Do your best. The pattern repeated in a loop, at high frequency and I understood this to mean that I was about to purge, to vomit. Terrified of hurling in front of my new friends, I stood and stumbled upstairs to the bathroom. A voice said “we’re going to do this now” and I heard myself reply “ok”. I spent the next 20 minutes vomiting every demon I had accrued over the years into a toilet. The experience was violent, loving, intuitive, firm and, as I was given to believe, necessary. Most importantly, I was not alone. This was a collaboration. I had agreed, after much time, research and consideration, to come here on a plane and Ayahuasca had agreed to do the rest. We were in relationship, a team. On hands and knees, head in the bowl, defeated at last, I purged with an intensity that had me fearing I might be injured. It was delicious. Good fucking riddance.
Transcendence
Later, lying exhausted on the floor downstairs, I saw what I thought must be angels. I experienced what open- heartedness feels like for the first time in maybe years and understood what humans mean when they speak of transcendence. I saw the unlimited potential for my life, and was given to understand that there exists an infinite abundance of love and expansiveness available to all of humanity, directly proportional to our ability to open our hearts to it. It was, in that moment, self evident: Open your heart. Simple.
Contraction
Three weeks later, I was flirting with familiar patterns. Resentments resurfaced, self-soothing and addictive behaviors reasserted themselves. The experience had begun to fade into a pleasant memory the way a dream does—residual, homeopathic. I can’t say I was surprised, but I can say I was disappointed. There was a sense of something-too-good-to-be-true about it all and here was the evidence. Apparently, I was still me. Time passed and the visceral faded—but there was the memory, which remained ingrained in my chest as an almost physical sensation, like a seed. As my life began to shift beneath me and doubt emerged, I would refer to that memory and remind myself that something had happened, a fundamental truth had been revealed. And though my life was much the same as before, I had integrated this truth as potential.
Soon after, I began a relationship with psilocybin mushrooms, which became my primary modality for healing and self-discovery. Over the following two years, the exhilaration of the journey and the inevitable contraction that followed became a regular rhythm. I often felt lost, frustrated, self-critical, impatient with my lack of “progress”, with my stubborn and ever re-emerging addictive behaviors, my crazy mind.
The Joke
Below the surface, however, something profound was manifesting. I was, despite myself, being compelled to contend with this critter I call me and to make choices about how I would relate to him: would I continue to wage war on this poor creature or forgive him for being the very thing he was designed to be: a human? When faced with myself, the world, life, would I continue to hold grudges for not having my lofty expectations met or would I let myself in on the joke? It was, at times, a slog.
Paying Attention
I began to laugh more easily, to notice my mind more often and, rather than responding with harshness, chose to find some humor in its often bizarre workings. I started paying attention. I opened my heart some to others, to community and to the woman who would become my wife. These were also choices. I decided to stop taking myself so seriously and tried doing a few things outside of my comfort zone, which was scary…but I did them. The experience of being me slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to feel lighter.
The Path
The expansion of a psychedelic journey can be astonishing, humbling, unnerving, euphoric and heart-opening but the inevitable contraction—the return to ourselves, our personalities, habits, ruminations—that must follow is where, for my money, the healing and growth happen. It is where we are compelled to make choices about how we will regard ourselves in all of our grandeur, mediocrity, uniqueness, trauma, creativity, goodness, lostness, crappiness, laziness, industriousness, addictive-ness, loneliness—in our human-ness.
Psychedelic healing is a path and like anything worth anything, the process takes time and patience. Over time, one can learn to live with more awareness, spend less time in rumination and more in service to and in relationship with ourselves and others.
You will likely be challenged, humbled, irritated, enraged. You may feel shame, regret, remorse, anger and grief. You will be thrown into the deep end expected to swim—and you will almost certainly swim.
Where’s my transcendence?
A decade and counting since my first psychedelic experience, I can report with a high degree of confidence that I’m still human. I haven’t transcended a damned thing. What’s different now is that I don’t care to transcend a damned thing. I like ice cream too much for that.
I have many of the same proclivities, biases, talents, sense of humor, fears, personality traits and things I like and dislike about myself. The difference is that these days I can more easily hold my experience with some good humor and, taken as a package, I wouldn’t trade me for someone else with their own assortment of issues. I like mine ok.
My mind hasn’t changed that much, I just don’t buy into every drama, fear or resentment it whoops up in it’s ham-fisted attempts to keep me from being eaten by some imaginary wild animal that hasn’t existed on the planet for several thousand years.
If I were to attempt giving language to what psychedelics have taught me about transcendence, it might read something like this:
“Be patient. You are a child, you just got here and you are not human by accident. Learn to breathe, relax, and pay attention. Say “thank you” more and for god’s sake, take it easy.”
I still struggle some days with feeling lost, depressed, aimless and when, for a long time, I could not countenance the idea that such states were anything but aberrations, horrors to be transcended, banished, avoided, medicated and/or corrected, they are now, in some ways, teachers. Kind of like math teachers. I don’t enjoy the subject matter but I can hold on until recess, which I know will come, it always does.
And I laugh more. In all of life’s weirdness, horror and beauty, I finally, most of the time, get the joke.
