8/31/23 1g ghost mushrooms lemon tekked in stages, .5g followed 30 minutes later by .5g This was another tough one. I guess that goes without saying at this point. Even though I spaced the doses by halves, neither this, nor breathwork seemed to help this time. I was shot out of a cannon into this experience, the somatic burning and sinking felt unbearable and my amygdala was activated from nearly the very beginning. Recognizing a challenging trip, I stopped trying to curb the fear. Instead, I just went to bed, put on my facemask and headphones straightaway, and turned on my favorite trip music. Sinking in, I greeted the anxious and painful parts as they emerged and expressed what I could, as far as affirmation and appreciation, willingly entering into the void. As often as I could, I curbed the desire to sit up and rip off the mask. When this urge came up, I reminded myself that I felt love, that I was doing this out of love, that I was choosing this for my daughter, my family, and for me. The traffic noises in the bedroom kept pulling me out and having to start all over is such a pain that I went down into the basement, laid on the floor and went all the way down. This time, there was no emerging into the clear bright clear mystical light. Instead, my mind completely shattered, scattering pieces across a black empty void. Like, shards of mirror glass, swirling around each still playing portions of my disconnected cognitive reality. At points it was like my mind was in ribbons of DNA-like disassembly, actively collapsing but never actually dissolving completely. Most of this kind of experience is lost in retelling since words just make it smaller but suffice it to say, losing your mind and being stuck in a liminal void in a panic is real. Hell is real, (though I might suggest that it is a place where human people dwell who are attached to their reality constructs, knowing deep down that it is all bullshit.) Hell is being launched into existential undoing of fragment by painful fragment of reality construct. It is worth being afraid of. That was what my mind experienced. As my cognitive experience of reality vaporized, the ongoing energy-process in my body became more and more relevant to the journey I was on. Lots of oppressive somatic pain, like hot and suffocating physical torture with no hope of release. Try as I might. I was curled on the basement floor, face down, in the fetal position desperate for relief. As I went through the familiar process of surrender to this eternal hell, I began to feel some positive energy from the music I was listening to as if it was caring for me, comforting me. I felt it in my body in brief moments and I clung to those moments for as long as they lasted before they moved back into other sensations. I began to allow my body to move in the ways that it wanted to, in the ways that brought relief from fear and confusion. In a flash, I recognized these movements as identical to those of a child squirming and fidgeting. I recognized the “inner Nora” in me and I was overwhelmed with love and compassion for her, as well as regret for disregarding and even scolding her for this at times, just as I was scolded for not sitting still. I began to listen to my body pleading with me to follow its lead. Following my body’s natural instincts as I felt them swirling around in my chest, throat, and left arm, (basically, my whole left side,) I felt what my body wanted to do and I let it do it. I’ve never sobbed in my adult life. I’ve shed tears many times, screwed up my face in the process of crying, but the enormous wracking sobs that emerged from me, those were totally new. It wasn’t a mind thing, at least not most of the time. My body just needed to release it, and I followed the sensations as they came up. There were a few cognitive processes that led to more big emotions coming up and out as well, but this really was a body process experience, overall. Just leaning on my inner sense of what I needed here, in the privacy of my own basement with all the time I needed and no one to judge me. As I mentioned, some thoughts did bubble up, some really groundbreaking. At one point, I remember saying, “it’s not bad to want to feel good. It’s not bad to feel good.” This was an inception moment for me. Like, totally new information, connected to experience and integrated into my conscious awareness. It also dawned on me that Nora’s fears are real experiences. Coming out of that horror, that death-like experience. Not quite death, worse than that—forced to wander alone, confused, and in pain through the shattered fragments of ones own mind. Quite aside from childhood coping mechanisms being inconvenient and intrusive for adults to make space for, quite aside from my task in helping her to gently self-soothe in appropriate ways, the fear Nora experiences is something quite real, something I don’t have contact with in normal waking life—existential fear. She is right to be scared. The terror is real, and worth being afraid of. She is right to seek relief. Warm comforting embrace by a parent, sensitive connection with her body’s desire for movement and pleasure, these are primal and powerful human needs, the need to keep the existential anxiety at bay, or at least to feel comfort in the midst of it. I was my own mother through that portion of the experience, aided by the music that was still coming through my headphones, comforting and soothing music, like a mother singing to her baby. I wanted to just climb inside that little warm soft place and stay there, hugging myself in a warm blanket. The landing was a little shaky. I checked the time and when I did, I saw that I had received a number of scam texts and a friend had also received a scam invite on signal. My fragile state went into a little bit of panic due to fear that I had done something stupid with my phone by accident during this experience. This “coming out” moment colored the remainder of the trip. By now it was going on 12:30pm and I began to engage the world a little bit. Breathwork helped, but my overactive mind was still trying to make meaning over every turn of scene or change in perception. I experienced clearly how my mind disembodies me and felt that somatic experience of anxiety that comes when my mind abandons my body like that. By 3:30, I was back to about 90% and began to organize my day and get ready for my evening slate of clients. I jotted a few notes, some more cogent than others but I’m left holding a sense of having dived into the void, into hell itself and having clung to a thread, a single shining thread, and made a lasting connection in my brain that wasn’t there before. It felt like possibly the most productive healing journey to date. I don’t know if I could do this much heavy lifting without the crippling amygdala activation. I wish I could because there is definitely front-end trauma response to feeling the altered consciousness set in. From the trip I took in July that was atypically endurable, the only variable left unexplored is my ADHD medication. I had taken that during that experience and did not take it this time. The scattered and runaway brain that I live with seems to be potentially connected to these intense unpleasant experiences. While swirling around like a rag doll in the existential balance, I certainly remember moments when I wished someone was with me, moments of desperate panic as I experienced hell and was convinced that I was sampling “what awaits me in the afterlife” and other such nonsense. Moments where I’m convinced that I keep repeating the worst mistakes of my life but for some reason, the universe just keeps serving up enough processing work that it feels worth it. Hopefully I’ll know when it’s time to wrap up this meta-journey. As it is, I have a few more areas I’d like to explore, intentions I’d like to pursue.
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