To follow on from my introductory 1g of liberty caps a couple of weeks ago, I upped the dose. But before the tale of the latest voyage, some impressions from after the 1g and some background:
I had a definite after-glow that lasted for days. I was generally feeling well and happy in myself although it rocked the boat in a personal relationship, reframing my experience of it, it also strengthened other relationships and I made more effort to make and keep in contact with people. My sleep improved considerably, with my normal routine being very broken and often short, the night of trip #1 I slept for eight hours, the following night for 11 and then regularly getting several hours which is completely unheard of for me (although I also had a couple of nights where sleep was just about impossible). I had removed the TV from the lounge for the voyage, and it stayed out, unplugged and unloved behind a curtain, while I listen to music or read instead, and I also have no desire to drink alcohol, and haven’t touched a drop since. Also, my coffee consumption is highly reduced. None of this was anticipated and all of it is welcome!
My backstory for discovering mushrooms is having a challenging few years where life became rather tough, including a couple of really difficult intimate relationships that pretty much broke me emotionally and which I felt were potentially screwing up a relationship now, a very stressful job, general life stress and then not working due to the global covid pandemic.
After coming out of the second difficult relationship a friend of mine suggested micro-dosing mushrooms using Dr. James Fadiman’s protocol of two clear days between micro-doses for ten weeks. I had no idea of the strength of the tincture I was given and I don’t believe it was very strong at all, the dose I took just being one drop of alcohol/ground golden teacher solution. I found this had a general low-level positive effect, but nothing profound. I let micro-dosing slip and then this year found myself not working due to covid, and I suddenly had lots of time for research and reading around.
I found Fadiman’s work online, then a blog about micro-dosing LSD and with some considerable luck managed to get hold of some liquid LSD and micro-dosed that in-line with Fadiman’s protocol. It was like turning a light on, removing a veil and turning up the colour on life, all at once. I felt like the authentic me again, indeed like the me I always knew I was but couldn’t find under the layers of baggage and stress and anxiety that you accumulate through life. It felt like I’d shed a couple of those layers. Wow, I thought, this is something to behold 
I read ‘How to Change Your Mind’ by Michael Pollen and then ‘ The Psychedelic Explorers Guide’ by James Fadiman, and was just blown away by the contents of both, and knew I had found the path I need to explore. I then found the Shroomery and did a whole pile of reading around, and here I am, already changed by 1g of liberty caps ground to dust and taken with lemon tek two weeks ago. But I am but a noob and I know there’s much more to come.
Roughly following Fadiman’s research, I decided that I would take a low 1g dose to prepare the mind, heart and body for the mushroom medicine, then follow up with an equivalent of 20mg psilocybin/70kg body weight (2.3g), then on up to 30mg/70kg (3.6g) using the assumed average of 0.98% psilocybin in P. semilanceata. I believe that Fadiman’s research wasn’t in this step-wise fashion, but it feels appropriate to me so I don’t go in deep and hard without some idea of what I’m getting into. I am no hero and don’t need to start with a heroic dose as some brave souls have done! 
I had a difficult day at work and so delayed the Friday night’s session to the Saturday, to give me time to chill out and de-stress. My trusty psychonaut friend was to be my sitter again, I fasted all day, cleaned and tidied the lounge, spread my sheepskins on the floor and had a supply of snacks for afterwards. I didn’t go with the previous predominantly psy-ambient dance music playlist but chose mostly ethereal and Buddhist and Hindu ritual music and chanting, with some new-age hippy wafty stuff thrown in (which didn’t really work). I had several candles and my Buddha rupa, still in place since trip #1. The 2.3g of libs were finely ground in the spice grinder and taken with orange juice. No lemon tek this time, I wanted to ease up on the speed of delivery and uptake, just in case. My voyage intention was ‘to really know and manifest deep love and connection in my daily life’.
Music on, candles lit and I lay on the sheepskins with a cloth across my eyes. 20 minutes in I could feel the energy working up my arms and legs then centering on my solar plexus.
45 minutes in and things were starting to happen with low level colored sparks and CEVs starting to become apparent, and then by 60 minutes I was in it. With my very limited experience I’d say that it was not such a strong wave sweeping me up and away as with lemon tek, but a more gentle riding the wave to its peak. The trip was much more intense than the 1g experience and so much more difficult to pin down in my memory or in words.
I’ll give it a go:
I had intense closed eye visuals, but much more centered and not as interwoven with my consciousness as before, not such a blurring of edges of me and the music and the sheepskins. The peak was intense, about 1.5 hours after ingestion, beautiful fractals and psychedelic kaleidoscopes, the chanting felt deeply nourishing, very warm and safe and which kept turning me inwards rather than outwards, it kept grounding me, turning my focus back to my heart rather than outwards as the psy-ambient music before.
I felt I was coming down onto the plateau but then another wave would take me. I had open eye visuals with distortion of the room and psychedelic edges to things, and a kaleidoscope of candles. Back with my eyes closed I had a vision of dozens of eyes watching me for what felt like some time, in a loving way rather than anything creepy, just witnessing who I am. A few faces came and went, although I didn’t recognise them. I felt like I could feel the potential of what lay beyond, that there was a bigger deeper experience there to be had, it felt so much bigger than me. It was like I was stood on the edge of a profound realisation but couldn’t quite go there. Is this the ‘waiting room’ that people talk of?
I asked my sitter for the Moola Mantra, which last time had a profound effect in coalescing my dissolved essence and which this time had the equally profound but opposite effect of breaking my heart open. I looked within and saw the unprocessed and deeply buried pain and grief that lay there from my last big love affair, pain and grief that I was clinging to as it was all I had left of my lover. The Moola Mantra went around a second and then a third time (total 1 hour) and I sobbed my heart out. I grieved the loss I never grieved at the time, it poured out of me. My sitter later said he was a bit concerned at this point but knew I’d ask for help if things were too difficult. I realised it was my attachment to this relationship that was blocking me from future relationships. I had clung to it like a comfort blanket, a toxic, harmful, fetid comfort blanket. I put down the blanket and walked away from it, released, cleansed.
I talked with my sitter in some profound way about universal love and self-love, and went to the lounge mirror and just looked at my reflection for what felt like many long minutes. My face warped and distorted, thinner, fatter, older, younger. And I knew to the depths of my heart that I was truly worthy of deep love and that I was able to give deep love, indeed that I was love itself. I knew that my trip intention ‘to really know and manifest love’ wasn’t really it, it was, and is, to surrender to love 
Silence fell.
I sat on the sheepskins before the Buddha, waves of intense love and emotion came and went and I had absolutely no concept of time. I asked and was surprised to find I was only two and a hours in. “After I first started tripping?” I asked. No, after ingestion! The hour and a half of the deeper voyage could have been a lifetime. The eyes still came to witness me, they saw the depths of my authentic being and the love I had within me.
My sitter and I played two Tibetan singing bowls and a couple of drums. We played tribal rhythms and it truly felt like a spiritual ritual. We talked more about love and how it really is all there is.
At four hours I could feel myself coming down off the plateau and at five and a quarter hours I was back in the room. I was drained, and all I wanted was to sleep. Which I did, for eight hours.
I didn’t have the post trip elation and afterglow of the day after as I did on my first trip, but the local river was beautiful in the sunlight and I sat on the bank and watched the ducks. As the afternoon wore on, I started to feel really rough, like I had the start of flu and I made it home and went to bed in the late afternoon. I fairly rapidly felt worse and worse. Reading became difficult, then the radio was too much and I just lay there feeling absolutely terrible. Sneezing, aching, wrung out, hot and cold sweats, definitely the flu. I had intense lights behind my eye lids and when my eyes were open in my darkened room, swirling white patterns and pulses, which reminded me of when in deep mediation, of when I was processing ‘stuff’.
I slept ten hours and woke just before my alarm, feeling utterly fantastic. I had no flu symptoms, I was just energised and renewed, like I had undertaken a cosmic reset on my emotional operating system. I'm wondering if my flu-like symptoms were my body’s response to the release of intense, long held emotional baggage? I've not seen any other comments about similar, has anyone else had this?
Everything had and has clarity and I felt l like some significant emotional block had passed. I put the stereo on at breakfast and had to dance! Through the morning I’d dance between emails. Everything felt different, and yet I know that the only thing that is different is me.
Eyra
 
Edited by Eyra (12/07/20 03:47 PM)
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Thank you so much for writing this! This is the rare trip report that shows serious attention to set, setting, and intention and also shows the therapeutic value of psychedelics.
I think there are few themes here that to me characterize these experiences. One, there's something inseparable about understanding ourselves and understanding the rest of the world. Love and self-love might seem distinct, but they really are not. The pain the world inflicts on us and the pain we inflict on ourselves might seem distinct, but they are not. Perhaps our self isn't the whole story, but it certainly overlaps enough with the larger reality that when we really care about things, it's folly to ignore it.
And I'm glad you included the bit about dancing in the aftermath! While it can be tempting to just discuss the slaying of our massive demons, there's something legit in admitting there are small-scale demons. One of my favorite aspects of psychedelics, including microdosing, is the discovery of newfound and profound beauty in the familiar. Unsurprisingly, I also find myself dancing at times!
This report makes me more likely to reach out to others with serious recent pain in their lives and recommend these therapies. I'm not totally sure it is a good idea, given their situations. But I am heartened to hear that you've found some relief and it is good to have a reminder that these results are not merely possible but are actually quite likely!
-------------------- Knowledge is finite, ignorance is infinite.
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Thank you LeafRaker for your thoughtful and insightful reply.
I agree that there should be no separation of love of self and love of the other and that they are intrinsically one, but the ego has a habit of derailing and self-sabotaging, we tend to judge ourselves much more harshly than we do others and also have life's experiences to incorrectly reaffirm why we aren't worthy of love.
When we suffer repeated rejection or abusive relationships they leave deep scars in our emotional and mental health, scars than can be very hard to look at, let alone heal.
I came to psychedelics after four cycles of depression over 30 years. With experimentation I finally understood of how I had to deal with my issues outside of mainstream healthcare, and that these incredible medicines were a really important tool not just for hedonistic experience but also self-exploration and self-healing. I had been prescribed four different meds over the years and sat in front of several counsellors, none of which really had much of a (positive) effect. All four meds made me feel considerably worse without exception; dissociation, emotional numbness, self-harm and suicidal ideation, even telling a girlfriend that she had nice veins in her wirst and I wanted to cut them (I kid you not. Citalopram, two days into a course of treatment). They may work well for some people, they did not for me, not by a long way.
I feel that my limited use of psychedelics, whether micro or macro dosed, have been more beneficial to me in eight months than all the other prescription meds and therapists over 30 years. It's difficult to express the difference they have made to my way of thinking, or rather my way of being: more open, more postive, more optimistic, more able to deal with stress, more joyful, more... everything positive! The effects have been astounding. I am a convert. And if I have to self-medicate with pyschedelics (either micro or macro dosed) from here to the end of my days then I will, without hesitation.
I know there is far more here for me to heal and experience than what I have done so far. Far, far more. The doors of my perception have been opened and will open further. This is work in progress, and it is work that I am prepared to do to enable me to be the best version of me that I am able and to live the best life that I can. Life's too precious not to do it!
Eyra
 
Edited by Eyra (12/08/20 12:48 PM)
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