The Night My Life Changed. Part 1: The Magic Mountain
WARNING:
This post does not promote or encourage the use of any illegal psychoactive substances, and this text is for information purposes only, describing my journey and my journey alone.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND the unsupervised use of magic mushrooms for healing. I consider myself quite experienced in navigating and confronting deep-lying sub-conscious trauma and beliefs within me, hence why I have used them as I have.
If you are interested in taking mushrooms for healing then I recommend reading this book and/or investigating for yourself the full expectations of what a mushroom trip could hold for you:
The Magic Mushroom User’s Guide
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Introduction
Before I begin, I would like to say that I am OK. Better than I have ever been, so as you read, whilst what I write may be alarming, I’m fine. The past 11 days have been an exercise in rest, recuperation, reflection, reorganisation, reprioritisation and all the ‘re’s’.
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When I think about the night of Friday 30th December 2022, I chuckle and shake my head.
Fuck, Juan, you crazy little fucker.
I understand and see the pattern of what God and the Universe have presented me over the past few years – a series of life-defining challenges. Each has been an opportunity for transformation of different aspects of my ‘Self’ which have all led me to this point.
I have looked for it, restlessly, as deep down I’ve not been happy in myself, which has pushed me to try and understand why, mainly because I’m tired, exhausted in fact, of the negative effects it has had on my life. 40 years. Just writing it carries its own weight. More on that later.
What I have been through has been necessary and I have no regrets. I’m just pretty fucking tired. Body, though, I’ll sort that soon. Head comes first.
So I repeat. I am OK. But, facing my deepest fear was what I needed to do in order to understand the story of my life so far, and ultimately set myself free.
To use one of my favourite quotes from the Greek philosopher Thucydides (circa 400 BC) :
“The Secret to Happiness is Freedom,
The Secret to Freedom is Courage”.
Ain’t that the fucking truth.
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The Scene
Among the handful of books I’ve read about spirituality, there’s been more than one where the author describes a moment, an evening, or a night where something shifted within them irrevocably, moving them towards profound healing and enlightenment. In most cases, this is nothing less than a full liberation of what was holding them back, and not only that, a clear vision as to their purpose and missions moving forward on their journeys.
I, have often felt envy of these stories, saddened, that I had to endure this seemingly never-ending turmoil and deep lying pain. Slowly but surely stumbling my way through the brambles of my mind. Carefully, day by day, clipping, weeding, and re-growing the garden of my psyche. Painful work, with many thorns and splinters to show for it. It’s hard when you turn around only to see the path overgrown again.
I hoped, wished for, pleaded with God for a quantum leap (to use the words of my wonderful ex-therapist in Colombia), a lightning bolt that would take me through the barrier and truly on the way to healing myself. I’ve been pleading for years, typically at my lowest points after each emotional catastrophe. ’How many more times do I have to suffer this!??’ I would scream amongst the tears, the fury, the rage, the sadness, and bleak hopelessness.
Since taking them for the first time back in February last year, magic mushrooms, I knew, held some sort of key for me. The insights and release I have understood and felt during the two occasions have been nothing short of incredible.
I say that the first time was the most amazing experience of my life. A post or series of posts will have to come from this at some point.
The second experience, whilst very different, also offered enormous emotional release and paved the way to healing.
For the purpose of this post, as I’m pretty exhausted, I won’t be going into the Nth degree of detail around the substance, so basics only for now. I’m sure I will post in more detail when I’m able.
Psilocybin, the active psychedelic found within the mushroom, activates parts of the brain that aren’t normally active when we’re conscious. The part of the brain which effectively houses our sense of ‘Self’ or what is commonly referred to as the ‘Ego’, is deactivated when going through a psilocybin-induced trip. A certain dosage is required to enable this to happen. Typically, on average, you need what could be considered as a ‘medium’ dose, though our own sensitivity to psilocybin makes this a wide range that we need to understand prior to partaking in a healing session or retreat.
This de-activation of the ‘Self’ is referred to as the ‘Ego Death’, where our outer shell, the self which we ourselves have created throughout our lives to protect ourselves from danger, the primordial part of us that helps us survive, using, at times, toxic and negative behavioural patterns, falls away.
I experienced this the first time round, and it was nothing less than being set free, for the first time, of all expectations, insecurities, fears and traumas….all of it. I can honestly say that I have never felt more completely happy than in that moment, aside from when my children were born (though consciously in each of those moments, I was weighed down by all of my ‘baggage’, I mean, I wasn’t completely free to be happy).
Hmm. An interesting thought.
After years of trying everything under the sun, I could finally understand, with clarity, much of what was affecting me.
The effects, however, last from six to eight hours, and after that, disappear. That said, the neuro-plasticity created by the substance, and the clarity and insights provided by the trip, allows for the brain to create new neural pathways so that we can start behaving in a different way. They’re still figuring out how long this neuro-plasticity lasts for and the patents are already underway by major drug companies.
Think of the sub-conscious brain as a magnetic tape (apologies, but I’m an 80’s baby and I loved tapes), recorded with everything, the good, the bad, the difficult and traumatic from our childhoods. Psilocybin gives us the opportunity to press the record button again over previous thought patterns, allowing us to create new patterns, thus freeing us from negative thought cycles and toxic behaviours, for example. It’s essential that post-trip, the user continue to do his or her work, healing and re-defining those thought patterns so that they stick. New thought patterns don’t come on their own. That said, the trip itself, in my experience (and this is currently being debated by the doctors leading these ground-breaking studies), leads to insights on occasion so profound, that the trip changes the way we view both ourselves and the world forever. This in itself can be enough to make real, lasting change.
In a nutshell, psilocybin and indeed psychedelics are a world changer. Doctors at Imperial College London are carrying out medical trials to treat depression with startling results. The medical and perhaps previously incompatible worlds of psychiatry and psychology are working together in many studies to bring this into the public domain. Psychedelics in general are going to change the way we treat depression, addiction, PTSD, and many mental health problems, previously untouched by conventional psychiatric pharmacology and psychological treatments.
Without knowing any of this, I knew mushrooms could help me after having previous experiences in heightened states of consciousness, namely via Holotropic Breathwork, Ayahuasca (yagé), and Tobacco, amongst others.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, along this path I have uncovered many clues, big and small, all pieces of the jigsaw of Juan that have each helped me better understand my ‘Self’ and why I am the way I am.
The night on the mushrooms, however, was on a completely different level.
When my ex-girlfriend first mentioned them to me, chatting about her own life-changing experience as a young teenager, I intuitively felt deep down that mushrooms could finally be the way in which I could leap into my sub-conscious, and really get to the root of why I was the way I was. Something that I had desired for a long, long time.
I didn’t know how and I didn’t know when. I left that down to the Universe and God. I knew though, it would happen. And it did.
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Some Previous Detail
Some 20 minutes after I drunk my first mushroom tea the ‘magic’ began. For the purposes of this post, I won’t go into the detail of what I saw, only what I released. The mushrooms quickly broke through my consciousness, into my sub-conscious. The ‘Ego’ within me desperately fought against becoming detached as the substance did its work. I began to see-saw between laughter and sobs, until the laughter stopped and I was overwhelmed by a deep-lying grief, where I sobbed for my father like I hadn’t done since I was 13, the age I was when he passed away. It poured out of me, and I was powerless to stop it. The sobbing convulsed my body as I lay on the floor, as I let the pain wash through me. It flowed, and the sheer force of it was scary, but, like with the tobacco, where I broke through the fear of letting go and surrendering, I knew just to let the substance do its work.
After it subsided, I felt physically lighter, empty, almost, and like a great weight had been lifted from the left side of my body. From the myriad things that I understood that night, among them I understood, with an absolute clarity, that we hold grief within ourselves unbeknown to us, and emotional energy occupies physical space within our bodies.
I have no doubt that the sub-conscious mind and the emotional effects it has on us, has a profound impact on our physical well-being. Purging these emotions, this ‘energy in motion’, to use the words of Panache Desai, is a necessity.
During my second mushrooms experience back in April 2022, now knowing what was to come, I simply waited whilst they took effect and eventually worked their way through my consciousness.
What would I release? What would happen? I didn’t know. I knew there was something there, though, I could feel it, a weight, a pressure, I just didn’t know what. Very quickly I was once again engulfed in grief, though this time not around the loss of my father, but of having left my boys on the other side of the world. ‘What kind of father does this??’, I wailed, as the tears washed through me, curled up (again) in the foetal position on the floor, feeling an enormous, almost suffocating sense of guilt. When the grief subsided, I once again felt a great physical release, in my lower back this time, like the guilt and pain had been stored there and had been building since I left my boys in Colombia two weeks previous. During this trip, I felt, we had been able to truly consolidate our relationship as father and sons. It had been 15 months since I had left Colombia to come back to the UK to live.
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank my ex-girlfriend for being there with me, for setting up both sessions with so much love and care, for ensuring that the setting and scene were safe for me to go inward, and for being there for me throughout – it can’t have been easy to have seen me like that, and I am eternally grateful. Thank you, I will never forget it.
Both sessions opened up doorways for work within me. One, was intentionally confronting the loss of my father, something I had never done before, even after 10 years of grieving his death into my early 20’s. The second, was to work on the guilt I had around taking the decision to leave Colombia and my boys. This work has been invaluable, and I can now say, nine months later, that I have confronted the guilt and have let it go, focusing on our relationship, which is stronger than ever, and the essence and reasoning behind my decision. It was the right one, and I have made my peace with that.
All down to these magic little bits of mush.
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The Past Few Months
As has been documented in this blog, I have been working studiously through my Self-Love journal, one of three that have been a revelation for me. After completing this first journal, I have now started on the second, which is focused around the Inner-Child, day by day, night by night, working through each facet that these marvellous and challenging workbooks explore.
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After months of writing, introspection, confronting, understanding, purging and healing, I have felt, a deep, deep sensation that the mushrooms were calling me once more.
I have spent years on this path, doing everything I can, and have been willing to listen, read and learn from every source available to me. I have written at least a thousand, probably thousands of pages as I’ve delved into my mind and my behaviour, trying to understand why I behave the way I do. I’ve been brave, fucking brave along the way, but this shadow, this cloak that was stealing my happiness, had eluded me throughout these seemingly endless days and months.
I wanted to be shown. I had to gain further insight. I had to understand.
So, I made my mind up around November last year that I would set the intention and walk the path once more, to see if I could summit my own magic mountain.
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The Mindset
I have a deep, deep respect for the infinite wisdom of nature. The time I have spent in pristine natural surroundings has taught me to not just love nature, as I do, deeply, but to revere it. In the case of Ayahuasca (‘yagé’, as its referred to locally in Colombia), and other psychedelics/hallucinogenic plants, there is a great respect paid among local cultures to these Divine ‘teachers’. To many, this is their ‘medicine’.
After hearing stories in Southern Colombia from local ‘Taita’ chieftains who use yagé on a regular basis as a source of healing and wisdom, I quickly learnt that the intangible power of these plants is something with which you do not play. These are not recreational ‘drugs’, and those who think they are, soon, unfortunately, learn the hard way that they are anything but.
Colombia, as a note, has a national park called Flora Sanctuary Medicinal Plants Orito Ingi located deep in the south of the country. It is said that in this jungle, which lies on the eastern slope of the Andean chain as the mountains become foothills above the Amazon basin, has the highest concentration of hallucinogenic plants on the planet. I suppose knowing this, and having experienced the wisdom and beliefs of the peoples that have accumulated and incorporated this botanical, medicinal, and metaphysical knowledge into their respective cultures during thousands of years, showing this reverence in my own experiences comes naturally.
I fully believe these plants are a pathway to connecting with the Divine. In fact, I have no doubt about this. To me it’s not just a plant, it’s a powerful purveyor of energy that is allowing me to test myself, to gain understanding, to heal myself from the inside out, and, ultimately, give me the wisdom to change my life.
I accept and embrace that I know nothing in front of Divine wisdom, and in this mindset, I entered the afternoon, as I had done on previous occasions, in complete surrender to what was to come.
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The Prep
I spent Christmas up in Nottingham with dear friends during which I visited Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of Lord Byron. I love the place and was very happy to be there again. I saw some souvenirs and was drawn, for whatever reason, to a rather simple mug depicting a scene from Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, to be exact.
For my mushroom tea, I chose this mug as I thought it quite fitting, chuckling to myself, pondering on where the contents of my tea would take me that afternoon, and how big and how deep my own rabbit hole would be.
The dose, I knew, had to be big. Bigger than I had previously taken. I don’t know why I felt I had to take a larger dose, but the overriding feeling was that I wanted to ‘crack my mind open’. I had to go further than I had before, maybe because I felt the trauma I was trying to reach was in the deepest depths of my psyche, and because of this, would need for me to reach as hard as I could to get there. To do that I needed a big dose.
In the weeks leading up to the day, I had a very strong feeling that I needed to do this in 2022, before the end of the year – that whatever I was going to learn, release and let go of, I had to do and leave behind in 2022. I can’t explain that urgency, but it was there.
I also felt I had to go through this experience on my own. Again, I can’t explain it, but with what I felt I could potentially go through, I didn’t want to have any mental limitations caused by the presence of someone else there. I wanted to fully let go and have that freedom to go as far as the mushrooms wanted to take me.
Thinking back, I wasn’t feeling any fear. More curiosity as to what would come up, and excitement around potentially healing myself. The night of my tobacco experience was where I broke through the fear of the unknown. After that, I knew that whatever happens, it will eventually end, I just have to be strong enough to get through it. The body will heal, and the insights are, well, worth the pain.
So no, no fear.
Though knowing what I know now, maybe I should have been scared.
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To be continued in Part 2 of 3.
Thank you for being here with me, love to you all.
Juan
