What the Mushrooms Taught Me Part I.

What I learned from my first mushroom trip. CYC is open until September 23rd.

Mushroom in Borneo by Mark Ziembicki

If you’re picking up from the newsletter, begin scroll down and begin reading after the image of the purple mushroom.

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When I was a teenager, my friend Joanna wanted to try mushrooms. Being the adventurous teenaged creature I was, I said why not? -  not fully knowing what i was getting into. 

It was the nineties and we lived in the suburbs; we still rented movies at a store, and had few places that actually catered to teenagers outside the mall, let alone easy access to education about psychedelics or plant medicine.

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Somewhat inelegantly, we got the mushrooms down with some peanut butter, and soon after, got in Joanna’s car to head to a friend's house who often had people over in his yard to hangout around a fire.

As I sat in the passenger seat, I started feeling really warm and strange. Minutes felt like hours and all of the colored lights in the interior of the car were blending together into streams of light and running towards me. 

I told Joanna I felt weird, but she seemed a little annoyed. Maybe it was because the mushrooms weren't ‘working’ for her or because she was realizing she might need to look after me, or maybe it was all in my head. I'll never know exactly, but I felt completely alone and very overwhelmed. 

We headed to the fireside hangout in our friend's yard. I quickly realized how overstimulated I was; I wasn't able to recognize people's firelit faces and everything felt confusing and sort of sinister.

It wasn't long before someone noticed something was wrong and decided the best thing to do what give me some alone time in a garage, since we weren't allowed in the house for whatever reason. 

Blue Mycena

The garage was very brightly lit and full of tools, and everytime I tried to call a friend on my cell phone (complete with buttons and an antenna), I ended up feeling like I was actually inside my purse and had a hard time figuring out how to get out. 

I couldn't seem to figure out what to do. Finally, a friend tried to help me by putting me in a car with someone from school who had some rote knowledge of psychedelics, who I knew from my advanced writing classes. He was very intelligent, but also particularly intense and dark (in a Dostoevsky kind of way).

As we sat in the car alone, I felt very anxious. He started to try to coach me through the experience I was having. I remember him saying “Xenia, just remember that in some indigenous cultures, the shamans were initiated by working with these psychedelic plants.” 

I was very freaked out. In the world I was in, we didn't talk about shamanism or plant medicine. We didn’t have Wikipedia or Instagram. I didn't know what he was talking about and I wasn't feeling reassured by his words.

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I was raised in a very conservative albeit fun-loving and informal household by two devoutly Catholic people who loved me very much but certainly never taught me about consciousness or the nature of reality. In some ways, I think of that era as the height of capitalism in the suburbs because everything we did involved buying or consuming something. At the time, we didn't have easily accessible alternative sources of media outside public access television, zines, and record stores, so we didn't really question things beyond the occasional philosophical conversation.

We were insulated, privileged and comfortable, and perhaps had too much entertainment and too little motivation to ask questions with no answers.

Hygrocybe Psittacina via Discovr

While there was some economic and religious diversity in the public high school I went to, simply due to the fact that there were 2,000 of us, there was not a lot of diversity of thought. I had group of friends who were interested in ‘alternative culture’ in the form of music, film and literature, but even within that, I don't think any of us were able to perceive the deeper aliveness of and sentience of nature, or how we could possible be part of it. 

In fact, a lot of people I knew ‘took’ mushrooms for fun and just giggled a lot when they ate them, which I have never experienced. No, for me, psilocybin was always a deep consciousness expansion, and during that first trip, I was not at all prepared to unearth parts of my psyche that were trying very hard to get my attention.

A purple mushroom spotted in Cavite in the Philippines via Project Noah.

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In retrospect, it's a wonder I didn't do more damage than I did by stretching my mind in such a quick and sort of jarring way, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone without a lot of deep consideration and self education, and respect.

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That night, I didn't trust anyone. I couldn't tell who was messing with me and who was trying to help me, and overall, I was deeply aware of a sensitivity and feeling that everything about our reality felt… fake. 

I also had this thought that horrified me and came out of nowhere: Why were my parents working so hard?

For the first time ever, I felt pain, grief and terror about the way they were exploiting themselves through their constant labor. This thought that had no basis in my everyday way of thinking or reality, and wasn't even an inkling of a perception I ever had before - at least not consciously. And my parents had very conventional and common office jobs, so this felt sense of horror didn't make any sense to my logical mind.

From that time onward, every single time I sat with mushrooms, they impacted me immediately, even when no one else felt the effects of the psychedelic at all, which happened more often than not. It was as if my body already knew the language of these plants and was waiting for me to remember.

It took me over twenty years to begin to understand my own relationship with psychedelic plants, and the terrifying grief I had about my parents giving their lives away to a system that didn't promise them anything in return, except the potential to soothe their worry about their children and the future, oftentimes, at the expense of taking care of themselves or owning their time. Thus began a familial cycle of martyrdom and conflating Love with self sacrifice and in particular, equating safety with money, and responsibility with forgetting deeply beautiful aspects of self.

What I know now that is the plants were helping me connect to the parts of me that I unconsciously but actively suppressed since childhood, the parts of me that did not like what was going on in my environment, but felt powerless to change anything. The plants showed me how uncomfortable and confused I was about the self-punishing work culture, the ritualized meanness of my peers, and the general chaotic feeling of hyperstimulation culture.

Knowing these things did not help me to “be good”, socialize with others, be a good student, or do well in school. They were painful truths that were only useful for one thing: to better know the deepest aspects of myself, and from that knowing, to motivate myself to question the world around me instead of passively allowing it to tell me who I was and what was possible.

The value of a psychedelic perspective is the invitation to see and sense beyond what has been interpreted for us.

At its core, nature is psychedelic and so are we. Every being is a kaleidoscope of possible realities, creativity and relationships. What deludes us into thinking we are flat is the culture of objectification we live in, which approaches all of nature as an inanimate object, and encourages us to treat ourselves as objects by proxy.

This flattening culture is like a prison for our spirits and our imaginations who know deeply just how many layers of meaning exist in every moment. And this denial of existence is extremely painful and confusing for those of us who are probably here to break out of that flattening prison, which means noticing this pain is the first step to breaking free.

Taking a naturally psychedelic approach to life is something we can certainly cultivate for ourselves - even without imbibing plant medicine.

If you are interested in cultivating your authentic perspective shifting lens, please join me for Create Your Cosmology here.

I am pleased to announce that CYC will include Somatic Imagination with Cara Liguori.

About Somatic Imagination:

How can I be more present with my feelings? How can I respond to my environment more than react? How do I get in touch with my capacity to change? These are some questions we will explore in Somatic Imagination, a bonus workshop exclusively for the participants of Create Your Cosmology.

In this 90-minute experiential talk, we will examine common misconceptions about nervous system regulation, connections between our beliefs, visions, and bodies, and the imagination as an embodied space of potential transformation. Cara is a Somatic Practitioner, Movement Educator, and Dream Guide with a background in dance and writing. She is currently studying toward a degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.

Check out my Free Workshop: Magic Without Hierarchy here.