#46 3.8g of Golden Teachers / I'm in love with the shape of you
Yoo
This is an account of my first shaman-guided trip, written 2 hours after I landed.
Summary:
There is no intrinsic me, just a summation of others - this applies to everyone around me and means I am either nothing/I am everything.
All pain that I feel isn't 'my' pain but due to others having been mistreated and unable to be safe
The mushrooms & the set-up
I had followed the following diet for 5 days before and will continue for 3 days after to allow for integration: No sugar, no alcohol, no sex, no carbs
The trip started with drinking 3.8gs of Golden Teacher mushrooms
These mushrooms were harvested 2 days ago and taken off the dehydration this morning - these could not have been any more fresh.
With the big red cup from Bathurst, I put a bag of camomile into it and mixed the ground mushrooms.
Nima had prepared the room both with a shaker and a sprayer
We sat for a period as Nima burnt seppe, a root from the native healers who use the mushroom. After the tea was finished, I put on my headphones (the ones I had borrowed from the Imperial studio), attuned the volume of the Psycedelic Therapy Playlist (1) and lay back for the adventure.
The journey:
Listening to the music, I was already very calm having done an hour of meditating, some yoga and some walking throughout the day. From what I felt is that a large proportion of the trip felt like it was observed - there were crazy patterns, faces, eyes etc etc which were incredibly beautiful yet it felt like there was a tension - it felt like these were known to be projections and it felt like it was being viewed from a specific location. I'm not 100% sure what this tension was, but it felt like the all too familiar duality - where there is the thought that this thing is being observed from this location.
I found myself worried about being lost in a loop of meditation practices while tripping and found myself once or twice getting stuck trying to figure something out - it was at these moments that the unparalleled phrase 'let go' from Jack Kornfield made a huge difference as I realise that there is nothing I actually need to figure out. The whole process is learning to trust and listen to my experience.
I perhaps had an expectation of the trip having been more visual, or being lost in a garden, rather than a series of both beautiful and savage experiences - it was what it was and I learnt some incredibly valuable truths - it didn't need to be this big screen adventure through a jungle - that wasn't what happened!
Of the visions that did come, one vision was a college of eyes and mouthes, as if someone had shattered platinum blue glass and it reflected the different expressions. Another was moving pink chains sliding past each other. It seemed as if there was this size-less timeless column (but going in which direction?) of moving patterns - this was my whole experience for a while.
At different times of the trip, I had the voice of friend saying "accept everything with compassion" - I noticed a large part of me was frustrated that it wasn't my voice that was guiding myself, and I found it hard to even find what my voice was - where is the me in terms of the thoughts that I have?
It felt uncomfortable to have another voice which I was listening to and relying on. I then investigated why I felt it was uncomfortable to have another voice that I was relying on - it was uncomfortable because it appears that the voices that I had been reliant on were met with conflicting intentions and unpredictability.
It has been these parts which have been haunting me most (i.e. my alertness to the sounds of people sniffing, typing, closing doors) and then I realised that this wasn't my pain I was feeling. There are two parts to this understanding:
1. I realised that when I felt pain, it wasn't my pain that I was feeling, it was the pain of all those before me who had been unable to express themselves, it was the boy and the girl in all the adults before me. These are just the human condition - this is what it means to be alive.
2. I couldn't find my voice, but then I realised that it doesn't exist (I have experienced this as a permanent shift through meditation however this was a deepening of insight) it's just the sum of the sum of everyone else's voices. This is the same with feelings & thoughts (which is what I mean by my voice anyway) - The 'my'-ness are actually just a mixture of everyone elses - I can't find 'my' core thought, feeling or anything. This is because it doesn't exist - this is the experience that is experienced by everyone else too - there is no 'me' to them either. It's really hard to explain ;
This diagram below only makes sense if the titles (and the small icon next to the title) are seen as thoughts (imaginary). If I am Mr Square, my actual experience is that of mrs circle and mrs Triangle - there is no 'me', it's just their impressions. If Mrs Triangle and Mrs Circle are then removed from the pic, Mr Square is empty, nothing. If we are nothing then we are also everything, in the sense that 'we' are every single thing around us.
Other a large part of my mind was consistently telling stores and planning ahead for how I would talk about this or anticipating when it would end or trying to figure out how I would cope if suddenly things changed and I had to be able to communicate. I made huge steps during this in terms of opening up and trusting and seeing that things won't be pulled out from underneath my feet. I saw that there were no consequences for thinking the wrong thought, and that I could think about anything, in any way, and that there was nothing to fear. This high level of expectation which I have been holding myself to isn't me either - it's just a pattern and it can simply be welcomed and accepted with open arms. These patterns wont go overnight, but thought loving awareness, seeing that they come from a root much larger than myself, and seeing that they're not me, makes it much easier to manage.
Peace
Lex
SOTW:
🔥🔥🔥🔥