Note: This is part one of a many-part series I’ll be rolling out between other pieces, laying the foundation for and introducing an exploration of the “slow path” of healing, by which I mean working at deeper levels of the psyche without the use of psychedelics/entheogens.
The soul moves at geologic speed.
Francis Weller
I woke this morning from a dream of preparing for an ayahuasca ceremony. In the dream, I’m in a dark, mostly empty room. There are two other men present - the one preparing the space is an actual ayahuascaro and tribal leader I briefly met at a climate conference in Scotland in 2019. The other is a man I can’t see clearly who reminds me of a presence from other recent dreams - a very solid, available man, tender and strong. The word initiated comes up each time I explore his energy.
I am lying on the ground. The facilitator comes over and places a purge bucket in front of me. Suddenly, the gravity of what I’m about to do sets in. Fear bubbles up from my belly, the woosh of adrenaline at being swept up in something bigger, more demanding than I expected. I recognize that I haven’t set a strong intention or prepared myself for a deep encounter with a plant teacher. There’s no time now - I’m here and it feels clear that I must drink.
Memories of other psychedelic experiences flash through my mind - I remember again that these substances can really fuck me up. I remember that my body still has psychedelic-induced traumas stored in its tissues. Looking over, I see the facilitator on his phone, distracted. I don’t trust that should I get caught in a dark loop, he could help me.
I wake up.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Psychedelic Trauma
I’ve never done ayahuasca. Invited many times, it has always been an intuitve “no.” Many of my close friends have had incredibly healing experiences - some have apprenticed to her for months or years in the jungles of South America. Hearing their stories, I often feel low-level envy. The visions, the breakthroughs, the clarity and the cosmic love. Even the haunting descriptions of shadow warfare and horrible death loops awaken my longing. It’s the depth I crave, the communion I have desired since my first foray into mushrooms at age 15. It’s hunger for open-heartedness, for the healing I know is possible. And yet, my body and psyche tell me no each time the invitation comes around.
I know why. My deepest traumas happened under the influence of psychedelics and between the ages of 19 and 23 I dug a hole so deep it took me the better part of a decade to climb out of. Only now, as I pull my head up above those dark walls and drink the hard-earned air of ease, do I recognize that the “I” climbing out of that hole is very different than the “I” who fell in. That’s the point, I think.
I used to to love psychedelics and did them frequently through my late teens and early twenties. They, in combination with some people and books at the right time, first opened me to the dimension of meaning and the many beautiful possibilities of spirituality. They also introduced me, well before I was ready, to my shadows, the falseness of my persona, the emptiness of everything I thought I was and shattered my developing ego in their fiery mirror. At age 20, over a 12 month period, life broke me all the way down through serious bodily injury, intense psychedelic social rupture and exile, and the loss of my best friend to suicide. Thus began the dark years.
Those primary wounds were driven further into my psyche and body by my stubborn insistence to keep taking drugs. I knew there was something important happening in those experiences and I knew that the levels of consciousness they opened held the keys to my healing. The damage happened in those depths, I reasoned, and so too must the healing.
That was before I had any training or understanding of the basic safety principles of deep spiritual work or the nuances of what differentiates a healing psychedelic experience from a traumatizing one. I had no idea how dangerous my behavior was and by continuing to blast open my psyche in the wrong settings and without preparation, concentration, intention, or understanding what was happening, I was rooting psychic knots ever deeper into my mind. It wasn’t until I began a deep study of Buddhist psychology and it’s conception of mental formations and patterns that I started to grok the seriousness of what I had done.
We must go back and find a trail on the ground
back of the forest and mountain on the slow land;
we must begin to circle on the intricate sod.
By such wild beginnings without help we may find
the small trail on through the buffalo-bean vines.
William Stafford
Buddhism
“So…” I stuttered, looking across the room into the tranquil face of Steve, the meditation teacher, “I am noticing a lot of sensations in my body. I feel the momentum of the practice. It’s happening, my concentration is growing I think. But…well, there’s got to be a faster way, right?”
“Oh,” Steve said, laughing quietly. “You’re looking for a shortcut. That’s understandable, but there isn’t one, unfortunately.” He didn’t break my gaze, hoping his words would sink in, his clear blue eyes communicating the many thousands of hours he’s spent sitting, watching his breath.
I was at my first week-long young adult meditation retreat at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center in southwest Washington, wandering beneath old cedars and pines and watching for excruciating, eternal minutes the sensations of my breath against my upper lip. My body was in knots, my mind was mostly scattered. Sitting, hour after hour, I fluctuated between fantasies, boredom, dread, ecstasy, and frustration, wondering when enlightenment would arrive.
The week unfolded pretty much like that - breathing, distraction, tightening, recognizing, softening. Repeat. Even though I felt like nothing was happening, by the end I recognized that my body was looser. I saw that I was tenderized in a new way, feeling the intensity of my emotions and the raw intimacy of another person looking into my eyes, feeling their presence in a jarring yet captivating way. Colors were brighter, my gnawing thoughts and social anxiety were mostly absent. My sense gates were open, my heart was soft, and I felt something that I hadn’t experienced in years: Happiness.
The week after I got home, my grandfather died. I still remember the depth of presence I had available from the retreat as we stood around his bed while he took his last sputtering breaths.
“Don’t resist. This is the way it is right now. Meet the moment.”
The words of Steve and the other teachers cycled through my mind as the grief arrived like a storm. And yet, something else was available. An observer; a part of my consciousness not identified with the grief, the family dynamics, the finality. I could stay present and feel the impact of this event I’d been dreading for decades.
After the retreat my mind was subtly habituated to coming back to the moment, to ‘what is;” allowing everything to be without resistance. That balance point, like my early days of riding a bike, charted a wobbly path through the funeral and my eulogy, giving me just enough capacity to speak from my heart as I stood at the lectern of the Methodist Church and said goodbye to my grandpa and my childhood.
You’ve got to be somebody before you can be nobody
Ram Dass
The Slow Path
This first Buddhist retreat began my journey on what I’ve come to call the “slow path.” It was the mirror of Steve’s words, “no shortcuts,” that made me realize that I’d been trying to chemically storm the gates of consciousness without the readiness to meet what lays on the other side. After the retreat, as I stopped taking drugs and turned toward other practices, my personal healing truly began.
I’m following this thread today because of the dream - I don’t know what it’s saying, and part of writing this is figuring that out. When a dream like this comes, it could either be addressing my distraction (the shaman on his phone), my lack of appropriate intention setting in other areas of my life (my dream ego), or it might be communicating, in the gravitas of my fear, an actual invitation - a call from the spirit of the plant, which, I’ve been told, arrives when the time is right.
I’ve been on this slow path of healing for 12 years, weaving between countless modalities from many traditions (which I plan to write about in this series) for weeks and months at a time and I wonder often whether that is the way it will always be. I wonder whether sacred plant medicines will ever play a role in my life again, whether this dream is a reminder or an invitation. And what feels good in writing these words is that I’m finally to a place where I’ll be fine either way.
Spiritual bypassing is particularly tempting for people who are having difficulty navigating life’s developmental challenges, especially in a time and culture like ours, where what were once ordinary landmarks of adulthood - earning a livlihood through dignified work, raising a family, keeping a marriage together, belonging to a meaningful community - have become increasingly elusive for large segments of the population.
John Welwood
As the quote above points to, much of returning to my body (trauma is leaving the body) has been about the grounded realities of life. Building my confidence back up, growing enough trust in myself to build deep friendships again, re-orienting my approach to food and nutrition and sleep and exercise, washing my sheets, and stumbling through many relational errors, trying and failing and growing through my blockages to intimacy. It’s been an achingly slow process and it is often not until I look back at last year, or two years ago, or five, that I realize how much has shifted, how much more whole I feel, and what is increasingly clear from that wholeness about what I’m being asked to do in service of life.
In the coming months I will return to this thread and this dream, diving into my personal experiences with many different practices/traditions/experiences and explore how possible it is to access the deep states of consciousness required for deep healing through non-chemical means, and how I envision chemical medicines from where I am now. So, I will leave you with a relevant poem from my new collection, Start Here:
Trauma Work
It’s a long one
the road back to ease
back to not walking past the mirror
with closed eyes
and not flinching
in the eyes
of another.
It’s a long slow walk
a crawl really
coming home
along the gnarled roads
and labyrinths of mind
the booby traps I lay for
myself
unworthiness recited as prayer
and the horrible way
I don’t even realize
I’m doing it.
The hard part is not
speeding up
when I catch a glimpse
of that glowing front door
forgetting it’s speed
that got me lost in the
first place.
The hard part
is letting myself be found
then lost
then found
and lost again
inching through darkness
on my knees
knowing
this is
just
how
it
is.
It’s a strange thing
watching my body age
and what I thought
gray hair would mean
while I time travel back
through the bad neighborhoods
of my heart
to find the lost children
and catch their tears.
Humility, humus;
dirt deep knowing
of my own fleeting life
and the impossibility
of finding any other path
than the one I’m on
wandering
the wounds I thought were me
back
to their waiting
grave.
Trust, I’m told
as if there’s another choice
but to say
yes
yes I will claim this life
rubble and all
and build a patience so true
a real smile will grow
will have to have to grow
from the debris.
What a beautiful sharing, Kristopher. Psychedelics truly are a storming of the gates of consciousness. What we find on the other side can wreak havoc as readily as it brings awe and transcendence.
Containment, lineage, instruction and guidance are key for the safe use of these tools in the greater collective.
So wonderful to be with your writing and wisdom. I really enjoyed this soulful and contemplative piece - looking forward to reading more.