How Psilocybin and LSD Helped Me Move On

The first time I tried psilocybin mushrooms was…mostly silly to be honest. (Same goes for LSD, although it was more memorable.)

I was in college. A friend got their hands on some mushrooms, and we - my roommates at the time - decided to eat some together.

The mushrooms gripped me with their infamous “couch lock”, and I laughed at pretty dumb stuff for several hours in our living room until our faces hurt.

Some of my friends went outside for a walk through the park, but that was too tall an order for me. I was content staying inside where I knew it was safe, afraid to venture into the unknown.

The first time that I healed during a mushroom journey was in September 2018.

It was Saturday night, and I was at a music festival. Typically, LSD was my drug of choice for festivals, but my LSD just wasn’t hitting like I wanted it to. I could feel myself approaching the trip, and it would slip through my fingers again and again.

It was getting late, and I was getting impatient. LSD lasts much longer than psilocybin, so I decided to pivot.

I started eating mushrooms. Then I ate some more. I would, little by little, eat one more every so often. I have no idea how much I ended up ingesting as I walked around the festival grounds. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Let’s be very clear: this is not a recommendation.

The mushrooms ended up taking me on a physical, emotional, and spiritual journey that shaped the next several years of my life.

At a certain point, I realized how tired my body was, and I lay down in the grass with some friends. The music was perfect for the moment. I closed my eyes and let the Earth below cradle me. As I slowed down and turned my attention inwards, I became aware of a soft, familiar, and inviting presence within me. My awareness was expanding inwards. I felt a strong connection to my body and to the Earth.

I ate another mushroom, and I started walking. Not very quickly, mind you. There was another stage of music, so I popped over there for a bit. I felt as though I was guided there. Still, there was a restlessness in my body. I didn’t want to dance, even though I was loving the music. I wanted to keep walking, to where it was quiet.

I ate another mushroom, and I journeyed into the darkness of the parking lot, a huge grass field adjacent to the farm next door to the festival grounds. It had rained that day, and the grass was wet.

At this point, I wasn’t controlling my body. My body was in charge, and I was the passenger. This was comforting because I don’t know where I would have gone otherwise.

I walked until it felt right to stop, just at the edge of the corn fields. I had been to this place before.

I lay down in the wet grass, and I could feel the mushrooms pulling me into the earth, wrapping me in their embrace, gently and forcefully.

Holding On

A month or so before the festival, my ex had broken up with me after 1.5 years together. We knew it was ending. Even so, it ended more abruptly than I had anticipated. She was leaving the country. She was younger than I was and had some exploring to do, and she had my full support in that.

Still, it was painful. I was grieving, and I was in pain. There was still so much between us that was never resolved, still so many unwritten letters of love and heartbreak. There was a lot of anger and frustration I had never expressed, and I was still holding onto some resentment for how aspects of the relationship had played out.

The plan shifted from, “We’ll see how it plays out while I’m gone”, to “I need space and this is the end of things”, seemingly in the course of a day.

Even though I was moving on and accepted this reality, the shift caught me off guard.

I wanted one last…everything.

Becoming the Mushrooms

And as I lay in the wet grass, the mushrooms wrapping me in their somehow both warm and cool embrace, I could feel myself literally becoming the mushrooms. Not just “one with the mushrooms”.

I was a mushroom.

I rolled over onto my belly, planted my forehead in the earth, and felt a magnetism between my pelvis and the earth, as I felt some kind of gravity pulling me in. I felt locked there. Plugged in.

And just like that, the mushrooms did their magic.

The Healing Magic of Mushrooms

Mushrooms, or Fungi, are natural decomposers. When a stick falls or an animal dies in the forest, fungi decompose the waste material into nutrients that can revitalize the ecosystem. They act with an intelligence that can send and pull nutrients from one part of a forest to another.

Consider this when we work with psilocybin, especially as we apply it to healing.

Even though defining healing is tricky, “letting go of what no longer serves us” is a decent place to start.

Perhaps a more nuanced way of putting it would be that healing allows us to convert energy that is counterproductive into something that is productive.

Just like fungi.

Letting it go where it is needed most

One rule of healing is that no feelings are “bad”. This is part of why I cringe at some of the new-age language to “let go” or “transcend” our negative emotions. In my experience, those shadows can’t actually be let go, they can only be transformed through our loving awareness.

Which complicates what I am about to say.

When I was plugged into the earth, I began to feel all of my repressed emotions of anger, fear, guilt, and shame at once. And as I did this, I remembered the words of one of my teachers along the way: “Let these feelings go into the earth, and trust her intelligence and capacity to transform and distribute them where they need to go”

My sense was that I couldn’t let these things go without inviting them to be witnessed first, though. And so, I began to focus my entire being on this mass of feelings, and my awareness built at my hips and pelvis.

It felt like I was talking to someone, but I couldn’t tell you who. I remember muttering, “I’m sorry, I forgive you”, over and over.

I couldn’t tell you how long I was there. I have no clue. I kept breathing, and I could feel these emotions being released into the earth through my hips and pelvis.

Making sense of the experience

Eventually, I stood up. I had the feeling of being emptied out, 50 pounds lighter, yet more whole and more aware of myself - and like I had just slept about 16 hours.

It seems like the mushrooms helped to decompose some stagnancy that had lingered in my body for…years?

The interesting part is that the next day, the LSD worked!

Something in me was blocking me from tripping the previous day, and the next day, it was gone - or transformed. I needed to move through the darkness in me that I had repressed in order to have an expansive experience the next day.

It was one of the most impactful LSD trips to date. I cried, I danced, and I opened my heart. I began to feel whole again after a painful breakup.

During one particularly moving song, I walked out towards the parking lot again. I still had some sticks of incense given to me by my ex, and I was burning one as I walked out. Burning them made me feel closer to her.

This was the last stick that I had. I started towards the place where I had become the mushroom the night before, only this time, something stopped me.

I didn’t need to go back. I told myself, “When this incense is done burning, I’m done being sad about this”. I meandered around, and, just like the LSD trip the day before and the relationship, the last stick of incense, still burning, slipped through my fingers, and was lost in the blades of grass.

Just like that, I was done being sad about it.

All because I ventured into the darkness, alone, unsure what was going to happen, trusting that I had the tools to guide myself home.

Still though, there was some unresolved relationship business, and it came up about a month later.

The Flames

I had an opportunity to go to yet another festival. This time, it was early October, and it was unseasonably cold. I could only attend for one day, so I made it count.

I turned to my tried and true, LSD. I started with about 250 micrograms. While coming up, I spent quite a bit of time alone in my tent. It was very cold outside, and the LSD had increased my awareness of this.

We were camped next to a very large fire pit. The flames had shrunk from the earlier majesty, as most of the folks were soaking up the tunes at main stage.

I was freezing. So, I did the only logical thing. I piled wood on that fire pit until I couldn’t anymore. I built a rager, parked myself next to it, and felt its warmth.

This time, there was no doubt that the LSD was working.

Two epiphanies emerged as I stared into the flames. One had to do with my relationship with long-time bugaboo, tobacco. The other pertained to my ex.

Tobacco

I started smoking cigarettes when I was 16 years old, and smoked regularly until age 29. I was 31 at this time.

Smoking was a way for me to know who I am. In my younger years, I longed for identity, the clarity of how and where I fit in. I was often jealous of people who had even negative identities, like, “the fat kid”.

At least he was someone! I felt like no one. Even worse, everyone else seemed to have all sorts of ideas about who I was, and none of them felt right.

When I took that first puff of a cigarette, it was me saying, “You think you know who I am? Fuck you. I’ll show you who I can be. I’ll show you how wrong you are.”

Over the next 13 years, I tried to quit many times and failed. It was meeting my ex that finally motivated me to leave them for good. I vaped for another year or so after that before letting that go too.

After we broke up, I opened the door to tobacco again.

Aha!

And as I stared into the flames, I had the realization that stopped me dead in my tracks:

“I’m happier when I’m not using tobacco”

I could feel the truth of this statement radiating through my body and being. It struck a chord that couldn’t be unstruck. Even If I didn’t quit that day (which I didn’t, that came later), this realization laid the foundation. My quality of life improved in every way when tobacco was not a part of that life, and articulating that clearly was monumental for me.

(I am planning a dedicated post to how and why I eventually quit all tobacco forever, so keep an eye out for that)

Saying goodbye

I continued to sit next to the fire, smoking the last of the pack of cigarettes I brought with me, contemplating life and existence.

Eventually, I thought of my ex again, and I was overcome with emotion. I still missed her, and I never really got to say all the things I wanted to say to her. We ended abruptly, and it was clear that she didn’t want me to reach out much - we both needed space to heal.

And I had so much I wanted to say. So, as though she was the fire, I talked directly to her now, out loud, staring into the flames. My eyes welled up with tears.

I told her everything I loved about her.

Everything I wish I had done differently.

Everything I needed to apologize for.

How I wish I hadn’t been so hard on her.

What a pleasure it was to get to be with her.

Thanking her for everything.

That she was right, and I was wrong.

Facing It

I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a form of Shadow Work. Whether we think of Gestalt chair work, the 3-2-1 Shadows Process, or Step 9 - making amends - in the 12-step program, it is effective to speak or pretend to speak directly to a person where there is unresolved conflict.

It helps us clear out and convert shadow material.

It helps us move forward.

Psychedelic substances are serious business. Just because I am able to use them doesn’t mean you should. They are a skill we must develop, and it is probably helpful to have a guide or teacher in this process.

If you are a business or leader who wants to access the enormous potential of psychedelics, legally, please reach out. My work with Delics brings legal "non-ordinary states" to corporate through guided Holotropic Breathwork sessions, a method developed by Stanislav Graf, one of the last legal LSD researchers.

It's just as good as the real thing.

Schedule a 30-minute intro call if you would like help moving forward.