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 woodywoo
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Registered: 01/26/12
Posts: 5
Last seen: 10 hours, 23 minutes
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 First time: resistant subconscious, or what? 
#15720621 - 01/26/12 11:34 AM (4 months, 1 day ago) |
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Hello All. I'm hoping I may be able to get some help here, especially from the more experienced and therapeutically inclined among you. I just did my first mushroom journey as part of a sequence of guided therapeutic treatments. I'm after access to early memories (still inaccessible after a lot of traditional therapy) and inspiration and guidance on where to go with life. I'm fifty and it finally became unavoidably clear that prior modes of operation, hopes, aspirations, etc., despite a lot of introspection and what would look like great things to a lot of people (like a Yale PhD and a promising academic career...although it fizzled) just were no longer any good. I suppose to put it in a nutshell I'm also learning how to really feel and to love, as someone who has always been introspective and psychologically inclined but still pretty derned cartesian-rational.
So anyway. I did a session with MDMA a few months ago. There were ZERO new memories uncovered, but some new insights into the significance of existing ones, and generally a remarkable catalytic effect that really helped me open up and love and grieve over the course of several weeks in ways I never had. Then, the window kind of closed, the rubber-band stretched back, etc., but there was still a little greater ability to really engage with things.
So last weekend I did mushrooms. It was an intense and at times beautiful experience, but an awful lot of it was like a dream that I didn't have direct access to. Maybe like I got beneath the surface of reality, but my psyche dove down to another level entirely. There were no visions, or even visuals, except some lights at the beginning. There were times when I felt like I had been asleep through much of the journey.
There were a few powerful things. (It was entirely lying down, blidfolded.) A curling up and retreating under the covers followed by a powerful uncurling and yelling "get off my back!" which resonates with family stuff. There was a point when I caught just a glimpse, the very tail end, of an intense, deeply traumatic crying--again, it was like catching just the end of a dream. There were times of feeling like I'd been sleeping and waking up to be surprised at tears under the blindfold, but these more happy-sad or even happy-beautiful, I think. There was intense resonance with music--the power of some Indian chanting, an incredible, sublime beauty of a very pure, clear choral music. The music was big-- transcendent, though I can't say it stuck with me in a visceral way--it's like I can remember remembering it. There were a couple of points where I wanted more volume or there was a distraction and I realized, no, wait, I can HEAR it even with the distractions--I can see the beauty, the unity. There were a few points where I had internal dialogue going and I could stop and say, no, wait...listen...and be calm. Oh, there were also points, earlier on, I think during when it was like I was asleep, when there was a great internal tension and struggle, some rolling from side to side, though I can't remamber exactly what it was.
So that was the journey. Really for the most part things snapped pretty quickly back into my normal sense of reality, and a bit of depression, though perhaps also just from physical exhaustion, I was pretty wiped. But: A few powerful, helpful dreams in the two nights after. Also on the second night after, repeated waking and going back to sleep, very powerful, like riding a powerful horse or monster--sort of roaring out of sleep and roaring back into it again, but no dreams, except just once, a very brief powerful and important image as I was roaring out of sleep--about my mother. Very definitely felt like there is this tremendous, powerful, and positive thing beneath, inside, but I'm still separated from it.
And then three days out I had an episode with a recent ex-girlfriend that blew a hole in my heart all over again, so the timing is really unfortunate, I feel like the journey got completely overshadowed and has faded.
So! I haven't come across any descriptions like this. What does it mean? Is it what I think, that I've got my subconscious and its connection to the uncontrolled wisdom of the plants pretty well sealed away and this is the beginning of opening it up? Other possibilities? How might this progress, and is there anything I should be doing short of signing up for another session in a few months? I'd love any thoughts people have, advice from anyone who might have come across this sort of reaction, etc.
MANY thanks!
WW
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woodywoo
Stranger
Registered: 01/26/12
Posts: 5
Last seen: 10 hours, 23 minutes
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Re: First time: resistant subconscious, or what? [Re: woodywoo]
#15720701 - 01/26/12 12:08 PM (4 months, 1 day ago) |
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I forgot to mention that I'm simultaneously doing some fairly intensive therapy, which has been very good and insightful. A friend suggested, and it sounds quite plausible to me, that there may be a counterintuitive thing going on where if you're in the habit of being introspective and have the terrain mapped out in a certain way, that could actually function as a sort of psychic control (therapy is still pretty rational) and rather than making it easier to move into this other realm, actually make me more resistant.
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 redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 13,639
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Re: First time: resistant subconscious, or what? [Re: woodywoo]
#15722018 - 01/26/12 05:31 PM (4 months, 1 day ago) |
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well, yes this direction will help you to find things that you have lost.
it may be less of a matter of dissipating things that are occluding what you have lost, than simply recognizing those things when they pop up suddenly and fade again.
firstly I would hazard that you did dream when you said you did not. and that you do have visions but that they repeatedly escape notice and retention.
noticing is an important area to work on.
a lot of what happens in the mind is in fragmentary formations as opposed to erudite revelations.
partials and chimeras formed of partials abound - usually with some common cues.
I would like to dispel the illusion that your subconscious is resistant.
I would actually like to dispel the illusion of there being any subconscious at all, but few will follow me there willingly since the term is so ingrained in our culture, but it is not a real construct (except in psychology texts).
I just call it mind, consciousness and memory:
much of memory is in fragmentary recollections linked to what's happening and linking to other fragments.
No structure exists delimiting what is conscious from what might be a subconscious but - as you are experiencing,
many of the partials are being disregarded and
what is unwelcomed is quickly forgotten.
so
where I think you need to go,
is to where you have already been, but with paying more attention to partials fragments and vague formations.
not so much treating them as important, but not discarding them as unimportant.
all of your baggage is still here,
it has become streamlined over 50 years
but it is all available.
let yourself be less refined - less perfected, to see through the cracks.
you can't push it
you need to be very patient and gentle.
the inner child is happy to be found but does not appreciate any superior attitude. hence the need of humility, gentleness, persistence, and honesty.
you can certainly find what was lost (with psilocybin, salvia, or lsd...), but don't be too specific, look at each fragment equally (with wonder?), the space between them holds more hidden stuff, all of which has been swept (streamlined) into cracks.
I think it is a good general approach.
some of it is intellectual (that's natural too),
lots of it is about treating the body kindly.
you don't need heroic doses, and do proceed slowly, you don't have far to go, since what you lost is now tucked in the spaces between your usual habits and expectations.
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~~~~~
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