“Free

Unfettered

Shriven

Free –

Dream that what is dreamed will be:

Old eyes clasped shut until they see,

And sing the silent prophecy –

And be –

Unfettered

Shriven

Free.”

–Stephen R Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Rage

Friday evening our journey with heart medicine ended unlike in previous ceremonies. There was a quiet tapering; we slowly returned to Earth, going through the gentle transition back into normal space together. It was beautiful.

Saturday was cool and sunny, a perfect day in the Pacific Northwest. K and I shared our morning beverages outside, tea for her and coffee for me, whilst waiting for the rest of the tribe to wake. There was a communal breakfast, a long and leisurely walk on the trails in the surrounding woods, and we returned to the temple for a quick lunch before ceremony.

Dr Z began with some warmup movements, including some that included aggressive verbalisations. I shied back from this; volume and intensity being traits I often try to limit in front of other people. Of course, this did not go unnoticed. Dr Z asked what was going on for me.

I replied that I was nervous about going “too big” in front of a group of women. I explained that I’ve unintentionally scared women in the past with my intensity. Dr Z asked the group their feelings.

They were having none of my shit.

One of the comments that I found most surprising was that my holding back was more disconcerting and scary than being honest and open. Others offered this space as a place of trust and safety. I realised that I was making excuses, another shadow of shame, to hide some part of myself from exposure.

Dr Z brought out a padded baton and a pile of cushions and asked if anyone wanted to engage in rage work. The physicality of hitting something is often a catalyst to accessing deep anger and trauma[1]. Dr Z has attempted to do this with me many times in our standard therapy sessions but I’ve never been able to let go.

Two of the women did so, however. The raw power of their pain-fuelled rage filled the domed sanctuary and we all resonated with their anguish. Tears flowed from all of us in empathy and commiseration. We all know the anger that arises from being harmed. It was an honour to witness their vulnerability.

Then Dr Z asked if anyone else wanted to have a go. Every head turned in my direction.

I surrendered. Ok, fuck it, let’s do this.

I took the baton, Dr Z holding one side of the pile of cushions and B the other; I pictured my father. The first half-hearted swing quickly became a torrent of blows raining down on the cushions. Anger rose within me threatening to engulf my senses…but there was a disconnect, a hesitation. I realised that I’ve stepped aside from being angry at my father, I had accepted that he was a broken person and what he did to me was merely him acting according to his flawed nature.

I paused to catch my breath and changed my focus to more recent work. I thought of being scared with Hell and invading armies, being taught that I was a deformed and unwanted soul. I told Dr Z what was happening and he asked if I could picture those things. I nodded.

A barrage of blows; rage and immolation erupting from within, howling berserker screams. My face contorted, teeth bared to rip flesh from bone. Animalistic growls echoed off the shocked, wide-eyed faces of my witnesses. I rained down retribution and justice for the loss of innocence. I fired volleys of destruction at her for every moment she took away from me, for the limits and labels she put on me. I expended myself utterly in defence of my Self.

My worst nature gets the best of me

I could level cities with ferocity

I could crumble buildings and societies

With exceptional grace and phenomenal ease -William Elliot Whitmore

Chest heaving, I bent over and let relief wash over me. I had never allowed anyone to fully witness my rage and yet I had just done so in front of people that I truly cared about. As I caught my breath, Dr Z asked the circle to reflect back to me. I watched them nervously; several looked stunned.

‘Primal,’ ‘frightening,’ ‘never saw anger like that before’ were some of the comments that I heard. These did not shock me, but others did.

“It was scary…but I wasn’t scared because you were directing your anger appropriately.”

“It was powerful but it was ok, I felt safe knowing it wasn’t aimed at me.”

I had always been ashamed of my anger, believing that getting angry made me a bad person, yet I had bared every bit of it I safely could in front of this group and felt even closer to them; they accepted even this part of me that I had thought was so heinous and vile.

Relief and gratitude washed over me and I returned to my place in the circle.

Mischief

When Dr Z came around to ask us each how many mushrooms we wanted, he smirked when I said 7 grams. In technical terms, 7g of psilocybe cubensis is a bloody shit-tonne. I wanted a deep experience, to go very far inside and see what truths might be revealed.

Going deep means, to me, that I may reach a place where physical senses and emotional experience lose their separateness, where the filters and blinders of everyday existence are meaningless. It is the place of revelation and deep life changing insight where the varied bits of the Self merge and meld into the cosmos.

We lay back and let the medicine rise within us. At first it was chaos. My thoughts were fragments bumping into each other, frenetic molecules of hot air in a sealed jar. Behind my eyelids, bits of brightly coloured patterns swirled in shattered kaleidoscope fractals. I waited to dive in to the depths but I stayed at the surface; still here, still moving, still inhabiting space.

Music was playing and a song came on that seemed to be nothing but fog horn blasts from ocean-going ships[2]. I started to giggle, I had never heard such hilarity! Soon, the entire world became funny. I laughed at my lying there on the floor with a brain full of mushrooms. I laughed at the floor, it was so flat! I laughed at the world, society, people, it was all just a big game that we get to play with the most ridiculous rules.

I sat up looked around. K was lying still under her blanket with her eye shades on. I laughed at her. A was up and moving, I laughed for the joy of her exploration. Dr X was looking at me and trying not to laugh, which made me laugh even harder as I pointed at her to show her that I caught her. She hid her face. I laughed to share the humour with her.

This was pure joy. This was unrestrained freedom and glee. There was no malice or sarcasm in my laughter, it was light and pure. I was doing my best to not be too loud and disturb the others and it was not a limitation or hindrance, it was respect and caring. As I laughed I became fully unburdened and child-like.

And then I imagine that a glint came into my eye, a gleam of mischief, for that is precisely what it felt like.

I want to be naughty.

I wanted to break the rules. Not to hurt anyone or do any damage, yet a mischievous wildness came upon me.

I decided to sneak out. There are no strictures about going outside or being on your own providing you let the guides know where you are going and stay within certain bounds. Following the rules wasn’t part of my plan.

Dr Z moved past me to check on someone, his back turned. Dr X was attending to a sister having a difficult journey.

Go now!

I got up as skilfully as I was able, though psilocybin and fine motor skills can be inversely proportional. As I closed the door behind me I thought I saw Dr Z look up at me. Was I caught?

No!

Outside to the deck, I took off my socks, and ventured barefoot into the muddy forest, feeling more alive than I could remember. My mind was not in the past, I was completely present in this moment, my only concern the watchful eyes of our guides.

I stopped and half-crouched in an approximation of a cartoonesque posture of being sneaky. Three steps, crouch and look back at the door. Two steps, crouch. Nothing, nary a peep. I had done it.

With silent exaltation I threw my hands over my head and ran. I ran along the trail, through the trees and rain, splashing mud and joy. This was play and authenticity, limitless and unconstrained life force. I was a child running for the pure joy of running.

I came to the main trail and took a left toward a large field of grass surrounded by rental cabins. Two steps into the clearing I stopped dead and dropped to sit on my heels.

A deer and her fawn were no more than 2 metres from me at the edge of the brush line. Their coats were calicoed with rain, dappled with wet. The mother’s tail flicked nervously but stayed down. Her huge brown eyes focused on me, unsure of what to do or what I intended.

My breath came slowly as I drank in the beauty of this moment. I felt the fleeting, temporary life of the deer, and that also within me, and realised that its impermanence was the source of its grandeur. We were each here against improbable cosmic odds, both of us children of the same mother Earth.

I watched her reverently, she considered me warily.

After a full five minutes she slowly moved off. Between her last step into the grass and the next she was gone, suddenly invisible in the brush and deepening gloaming.

I stood and began to dance in the grass only to see people walking between the cabins. Somehow I was still very lucid and knew that no matter my sense of freedom, meeting others from outside the circle whilst in an altered state of consciousness was not a good idea. I returned to the trail and everything changed.

As I entered the dark spaces between the trees and brush I had walked through a portal and was translated into another plane of reality.

Sacramentum

Three steps along the trail I stopped, overwhelmed with wonder and awe. A growing feeling came over me: connectedness, relationship, love…all of these at once and so much more. I slowed to a snail’s pace, my hands reaching out to brush the leaves and branches around me. I felt the edges of my Self blur and commingle with the spirits of all the life around me. The energy of existence, of life and growth and death, moved within and through me.

This had always been here but I had been too blind and preoccupied with daily minutiae to see. This glory lived and pulsed around us every day and I had been given the gift of knowing it. This was the real world revealed unto me.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptised. Acts9:18 KJV

It was overwhelming wonder beyond measure or retelling. I stepped along the trail slowly, every step a journey of a thousand years. I trailed my fingers through the verdant life around me and felt its energy move, tendrils of holy spirit reaching out from my soul to intertwine with those yearning for me.

We became one, had always been one.

How much time passed, I cannot say. 3 steps, then 4, and suddenly there was a new trail. I had been down the main path dozens of times in the full light of day yet had never seen this track before. The way had been opened as a gift, an invitation to step through into a reality I had never known. I did not refuse.

With still-growing reverence I steadily moved along the new path, this passage into new realms. I gently stepped over a log, feeling its fallen bones nourishing new life; the way in which we each cycle through life and death; we feed on others and then others feed on us. I gasped at the gorgeous magnificence.

I step along a slow curve to the right and then a small clearing, barely wider than the span of my arms. Three trees grew toward each other as they yearned for the sky to make a living cathedral. The ground was bare, the tree tops reserving the nourishing light for themselves to make this place sacrosanct.

I stepped into the middle and realised this was the centre of all things; there is no centre, everywhere is the centre. This was the axis mundi, the place of connection between all of the realms of existence.

This was the moment in which I knew God.

Not God as we see in old movies, a cranky old man with a curly white beard, this was the God of Creation. This is the God that lives in all things, things that we call alive and those we ignorantly call inert. In the presence of God I knew myself as both mortal and eternal.

I stood wrapped in holiness, baptised in glory.

In this chapel of life, under a canopy of trees, I received the Word of the Lord. God spoke with my own voice and showed me how infinitesimal I am, how intrinsic and necessary I am to the Universe; every blade of grass is needed to make a field in which to dance.

I felt God in the trees and bushes, in the ferns and dirt, in the decay and birth under the ground. I was inside it, part of it. I am God, God is everything. We are all one, we are born and return to the same source. God is no one thing, it is every thing.

My mortal experience had no context for this, it was complete transcendence; ineffable and numinous. The life force of all Creation flowed through me.

I turned, taking in the deep beauty around me and, as if with new eyes, saw the pulsing life in the tree in front of me. I felt it with senses I had never known before. I felt its slow life moving up the trunk, bringing water to its leaves so they could capture the Sun. I felt the hope it imbued in the seeds it cast out into the world. .

I saw its life and felt our kinship. We were cousins, this tree and I, just small parts of the great organism we call Earth.

I touched the rough texture of the bark as gently as I would a lover’s skin, shuddering in joy and connection as I caressed the bark. I moved my hands over the gentle curves and sharp protrusions of lost branches. I felt how intimately we were now connected, root to foot, through a mycelial link growing from the magical mushrooms living in me. I yearned to one day nourish this tree with my mortal remains as an act of homage and respect.

I was immersed in a love.

Inexorably, my thoughts turned to our guides, and I felt concern that they may be worried. I was far from where they would ever think to look for me. I felt a twinge of sadness that I might have caused them angst.

As I thought of those I’d left behind I knew that I was to be sent forth to deliver the Word of God. I was to bring them to this place where they might see the truth as it had been shown to me. I ached for them to join me in this holy communion. As I slowly, almost grudgingly stepped back along the path I imagined myself clad in flowing, white samite robes resonating and glowing with the light of the Divine. I was Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha, a carrier of sacred knowledge.

I was a messenger from God.

There was no ego, only humility and oneness. I was just one being amongst a billion trillion and though I could not feel each one individually, I revelled in the great community of existence.

Filled with divine purpose, I slowly made my way back to the sanctuary through the growing darkness. A flash of concern blinked across my awareness that I might not be able to see where I was going. But there was also the knowledge that sight was superfluous, my brothers and sisters all around me would guide me.

The forest would show me the way[3].

I was just a stone’s throw from the back door to the sanctuary when I realised I had no idea how to get back. Each choice of direction seemed blocked yet this did nothing to change my sense of connectedness with all the life around me. I took a few steps, knew I was not on a path, and continued anyway. I stopped under the branches of a pine tree, wrapped in the embrace of its branches when I saw the light.

It panned to and fro, a will-o-the-wisp searching, and I heard Dr X’s voice calling my name.

“SISTER,” I cried. “I am here! I bring such glad tidings!”

She came closer, she could not see me through the heavy brush, and asked, “Where are you? Are you near a trail?”

I boomed a hearty laugh into the night and stretched my arms out in recognition of the wonderment all around, “I am beyond the need for trails! The forest guides me! I have walked in the presence of the Divine and return with news to gladden your hearts!”

She did not respond in the way I had hoped. In hindsight I see that her only concern at that moment was my safety, and asked me to either stay put or come back to the temple while she went to replace the batteries in her light.

“I will respect your wishes,” I replied.

She went back in and I followed her as best as I was able. I made my way back to the main trail, walked that to the road, and came back to the sanctuary from the other direction.

I stood at the back door of the sanctuary knowing this was a great moment; I was to deliver the Word. Soliloquies of grand import and meaning were composed in my head, each written in more flowered and nearly Shakespearean prose than the last. I opened the first door and stepped through, transformed.

I waited for a minute, preparing my message before stepping into the temple. I held my hands palm outward, slightly away from my side. This was the beneficent posture of sacred blessing of the Jesus that once hung on my grandmother’s wall. I turned my head slowly from one side to the other, bathing my tribe with God’s love and joy. At least I turned to Dr Z, held out my hand to him, and said, “Walk with me, brother, I have news.”

In the anteroom I looked into his eyes, the cosmic vastness of the message I brought spinning through my mind. I formed poems filled with epic stanzas that swirled like galactic pinwheels, holy texts that would inspire and exalt the world into a new golden age of peace.

Yet all that came out of my mouth was, “I made love to a tree.”

He laughed; I continued, tried to explain. When Dr Z saw my earnestness he quickly composed himself and quelled his laughter. I soon realised the thoughts would not become words, they stuck in my throat. It was too much. Language could not summarise or contain the vastness of the message, the concepts were too grand for syllables. I was trying to stuff an elephant through a keyhole and I sadly relented to the impossibility of my task.

Dr Z needed to return to his other charges and returned into the temple. I went back outside to find Dr X. We spoke for a while about the beauty of the world, connectedness, and love. She went inside, asking me to stay close.

I stood outside the temple, on the small patch of grass where my spirit animal, the coyote, had appeared to me in my healing vision quest this past spring. A stirring inside, a need for connection and freedom from shame, life force moving yet again. Looking around at the life around me I needed to be a part of it.

I stripped off my clothes, naked and unashamed, and lowered myself to the Earth. Along the full length of my body the crisp and precise points of grass covered in evening dew sent a flash of the purest ecstasy shuddering through my body. I lay with my face to the Earth, taking in the tectonic sensations of the entire planet. My spirit again melting into the oneness of being.

I lay motionless for some time before returning the present and weariness fell over me. My mortal self needed rest, as joyous as the journey had been it had also exhausted me.

In the temple I went to each of our guides, performed a deep bow of respect, and returned to my sleeping pad to rest, grateful and filled with wonder.

—

For most of my life I have been an atheist, though it is perhaps more accurate to say I was an anti-theist. I hated religion, spiritualism, any flavour of unscientific ‘woo-woo.’ I would sneer and curse when I drove in front of a church and roll my eyes when a friend or family member made any mention God.

I used science as a cudgel to beat back the imprecise, soft, and gooey ideas espoused by those that I believed had less of a grip on reality than I did. I called them weak; unable to face the harsh, gelid truths of reality and logic. God was a crutch for cowards.

Even as I began my healing journey nearly 4 years ago I rejected the often spiritual, star-gazing wonder of my companions and teachers on this path. I held firm to my strict belief in the material, the proven. If there wasn’t peer reviewed science to say it was so, I rejected it out of hand.

Yet slowly, and very possibly inexorably[4], I began to soften. Journey after journey showed me wonder and grace in the ineffable and numinous experiences that I was once cut off from. I began to sense the full depth of beauty for the first time.

It may be easy to for some to write this off as the addlepated ramblings of a dude who was tripping balls. I was clearly tripping all the balls; yet that makes the experience no less real or profound. It’s been shown in various studies that psychedelic experiences with LSD or psilocybin are often among, if not the, most meaningful of a person’s life [5].

What happened a few weekends ago was, without doubt or question, the most spiritual and profound evening of my life.

As I described this weekend to him, a brother from other ceremonies asked if I believed my journey arose from somewhere outside myself or if it was merely a psychological manifestation of subconscious bits of my psyche. I replied that I didn’t know and that I didn’t need to know. I am content with accepting the experience as it was.

If there is any clearer proof that this work has fundamentally changed me, I don’t know what it would be.

What I brought away from that evening is a sense of holiness and reverence that I’d never been capable of before. Awe and wonder have a new context for me.

And so does laughter; I learned a new way to laugh that evening. I learned the laughter of joy, laughter as the only way to truly express the sacredness of conscious existence. Even as my tribe and I giggled at my exploits there was a clean, bright glee in it.

The next day I walked back alone to the small chapel where I had been baptised. I again laid my hands on the tree, felt again our relationship, and smiled broadly in gratitude and love.

References and Notes

1. Payne, P, Levine, P, & Crane-Godreau, M. (2015).Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(93).

2. Björk. (2008). Wanderlust. Digital download single. London, England: One Little Indian Records.

3. This was a fascinating state of being. Somehow I had one part of my consciousness grounded mostly in ‘normality,’ it knew it was dark and finding my way might be a challenge yet the other part of me was fully convinced that the forest around me would consciously guide me. It was doublethink in its most beautiful and hilarious form.

4. It has been shown in scientific studies involving psychedelics (psilocybin and LSD specifically) that subjects report an increase in their sense of openness: which is the ability to consider new ideas, ways of thinking, and experiences. Many report psychedelic experiences as the most meaningful in their lives. ref: Pollan, M. (2018).

5. Pollan, M. (2018). How to change your mind: What the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. New York: Penguin Random House.