*while I do not support the draconian and fear based laws that keep things like psychedelics illegal and make people that use them criminals, and in fact favor a harm-reduction approach to drug policy and would rather see all drugs legalized and regulated, I cannot suggest that anyone pursue illegal activities like actually ingesting any of the currently illegal substances mentioned in this article.

No, I’d never do a thing like that. On purpose.

I: Relapse Prescriptions:

what led me to intentional psychedelic use

Researchers have long known of, tested and proven the efficacy of psychedelics to treat many pervasive and stubborn modern conditions like depression, anxiety and addiction. Unfortunately, the promising initial research into them performed over decades in the middle of last century was cut short and discarded by a hysterical reaction to a cultural revolution in which LSD played a major part. Launching a Drug War had the effect of criminalizing entire populations along racial, economic and political lines. Conveniently, many enemies of the Nixon administration- those that opposed the war in Vietnam, and those that fought for civil rights tended to use drugs, like marijuana and LSD. I can’t say it better than Nixon’s watergate co-conspirator, John Ehrlichman, as quoted from a Harper’s article by Dan Baum-““The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/).

Finally, at the end of the twentieth century, the door on the subject has reopened. With the famous research into the effects of n,n DMT on humans at the University of New Mexico popularized in the book Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman, the baton has been picked up by others and we now see several institutions regularly performing well funded research into psychedelic’s therapeutic value as well as discovering how they work . The value of organizations like MAPS (the Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) cannot be understated as they slog through the seemingly endless sea of regulations as well as fighting to change public perception of these compounds and the people that use them. Their work raising awareness and money is invaluable. However, while that research is being done, and we wait for the results to effect change in legal policy and for FDA regulation, for many a route to freedom from their illness is out of reach, and looking to self-heal with the help of these substances is a path undertaken by many people, myself included.

I have struggled for many years with suicidal ideation and severe depression, stemming from PTSD that for years went un-diagnosed and that I treated the only way I knew how- and in the process became heavily dependent both physically and emotionally on heroin. Rather than attending individual therapy, the only options available to me-sometimes enforced through court order- were the overwhelmingly 12-step-based treatment programs made available through county and social service agencies or a pharmacological approach of being prescribed antidepressants- and the real issues were not addressed. Hospitalization for emotional crisis, through an ER, was another route to treatment, but there I would be given SSRI anti-depressants, tranquilizers, mood stabilizers or even anti-psychotics, none of which were tolerable to me due to side effects. These days, treatment service providers are getting a little better and expanding their horizons beyond the AA/NA agenda; harm reduction is the new paradigm in treatment, and those approaches lean more towards teaching practical coping skills and strategies like DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) than stressing dogmatic rules and willpower. But outside of more enlightened locales, the current state of the art in drug treatment still very much relies on the nearly century old thinking behind AA.

I don’t want to alienate anyone reading this who has found help from their addiction through the Anonymous traditions, but for me personally and for many of the ‘treatment resistant’ people I know it did not work, and not for a lack of trying. The entire mentality that allows one to succeed in that program is not one that I possess, and even after pursuing a suggested plan of “faking it until I make it”, I continually found myself relapsing on heroin. I quit the drug over a hundred times over fifteen years, relapsing over and over. Many of those times found me trying to make sense of it in meetings, however I never found anything but vague promises of things beyond and outside of myself that could relieve me of my slavery to drugs. Some of the tenets found within the actual 12 Steps are very valid guiding principles for living an honest life, I just am not a group thinker, and do not find much in the traditions that I can use.

I have no concern for the feelings of the professional that push psychotropic medications like SSRIs and even anti-psychotics on people without first attempting to uncover the real underlying cause of what’s going on with them. Having now finally engaged in individual talk therapy, combined with the insights provided through psychedelic experience and my spiritual underpinning i have been able to identify and work to integrate the dark shadow of pain within me that led me to such a empty place in life. It was only through a good insurance plan that I’ve been able to find a therapist to work with who accepts my world view. Until I did, I was never offered anything other than psychotropics, it. Luckily, I never continued any of them for much longer than a day or two in hospital, a week at the most, because of side effects, but for many people trust in medical professionals is absolute and they become hopelessly addicted to some very powerful drugs. For example, every time I was prescribed an SSRI, after taking it for several weeks, I would notice that I would be overtaken by disturbing feelings of anger bordering on rage that had no circumstantial cause, and when I found out that that was a rare side effect and that many people had committed murder as well as suicide while being on those things, I stopped pursuing them as an avenue for relief. They frankly scare the hell out of me.

Things ever so slowly crept towards oblivion until finally towards the end had one asked me where I expected to be in a year, I would have confidently answered that I’d either be dead or in prison. Now several years after having tried something that the medical establishment that pushed dangerous drugs on me would consider insane and which is quite illegal in the US, one would get a very different, very positive response. No longer slowly adrift toward oblivion, instead I move into the future with conscious deliberation. Using psychedelics for me in a conscious practice- ‘practical tripping’, I call it- has freed me from a prison of self-induced suffering. Through some very powerful excursions, both deeply inward as well as connecting me with a vast eternal source, I found the existential meaning that I craved as well as forgiveness for my suffering. By allowing me to stand “outside of my self” through in essence dissolving the ego; they impart an ability to dispassionately observe the self’s inner psyche now unburdened by the passions normally associated with generating emotional thoughts and memories. This allows me to feel compassion for my suffering, to understand that I am not to blame, and to let go of my attachment to that suffering.

II.Why Trip Now?

What gives psychedelic compounds, whether synthetic like LSD or derived from ancient plant medicines as is the case with psilocybin, value for medical applications are the several unique and fascinating properties inherent within them. While there are differences in acute subjective response such as duration of effects or whether they are more sedative or stimulating relative to one another, what makes them unparalleled tools for exploring and understanding human consciousness and, as has been repeatedly proven in study after study, effective aids for treating certain cognitive disorders are these remarkable pharmacodynamic qualities. A lot of experiential research has been done over decades, observing and documenting the human subjective reaction to what they undergo through a psychedelic experience, but we are only now learning, through studies using fMRI imaging technology on subject’s brains while on LSD and psilocybin. The fascinating result of these observations is that there is actually less brain activity, rather than more, allowing a sort of hyper-connectivity between regions that are normally restricted from communicating with one another. The philosophical implications regarding consciousness of these studies should not be understated, perhaps through psychedelics the greatest mysteries of the human experience can be answered. If we only open the door to see.

I began this essay talking about my inability to find help, which led to my pursuing this route. At this point, I have to make some disclaimers: First, I can’t condone illegal activity. While I don’t support the drug war in general and do support full legalization, I cannot suggest that anyone go out and break the law by pursuing these substances in jurisdictions where they remain illegal. Also, although I had not taken a psychedelic for over twenty years when I tried using 5meoDMT as an agent for healing, I was very familiar with the effects of classic psychedelics from past experimentation, and a lot of it. I would never suggest that someone do these things on their own, unless they are fully confident in what to expect. That said, a person who has fully and well prepared for the journey, by availing themselves of information on what to expect from the drug and by arming themselves some time beforehand with some form of counseling therapy, a meditation practice or the like, and furthermore who has taken the care to provide a safe comfortable environment (or set) for themselves can be assured that on some level, they will have a meaningful experience the least, and it’s possible that they will experience a powerful liberation that can be quite literally life-changing. It has said that good psychedelic session can be worth more on a therapeutic level than years of counseling.

If one does have a companion, it really should be someone experienced as well and a person who can simply ‘hold the space’, not interjecting their will or desires or interpretation into your experience. Sometimes a powerful emotional reaction to an internal stimulus will occur, and it can manifest in many ways, from physical contortions or yelling, to “purging’ spit, vomit or other not-so-pleasant things. With the dissolution of the ego which holds in check one’s traumas, binding them deep inside with the fears and expectations that have cemented them in place over time, there can be an outburst of energy as the person encounters the trauma directly for perhaps the first time. Sometimes the traumas are relived as powerful memories or they can be encoded into visions full of archetypal metaphor. A companion should simply be able to encourage one into and through their personal vision, be there in case of real physical danger, but otherwise be silent until perhaps engaged in conversation after the event unless otherwise urged by the participant. With the growing interest in these substances, there is an accompanying emerging field of practitioners who provide experiences, most often for a fee, and like with any other aspect of the psychedelic industry, one is cautioned to carefully vet the person providing the medicine.

In a psychedelic state, deep meditation that connects one directly into the eternal source from which we all have originated can be achieved quite easily, so much so that to not be that way normally seems the absurdity. The great cosmic joke may be that right in front of our eyes, all the time, great secrets of existence blatantly proclaim their solution yet we are most often completely unaware, unless stripped of the blinders that prevent it by psychedelics, and complain of our isolation from the Grand Mysteries. Furthermore, a person can suddenly see through their responses to the environment that are solely the result of years of social conditioning, and may perceive the world in an entirely new fashion. Without the binding of one’s ego intact to hold the structure together tightly, one’s inner reality unfolds around them as the petals of a complex and beautiful flower at the center of which one’s eternal unsullied self resides. Upon these petals is written the totality of one’s experience, their ‘karma’, and the removed place of observation allows one to identify and sort issues that may hold them back. It is as if one can observe themselves as a friend, able to see exactly what they are doing wrong and to lovingly offer good advice, because they are not so emotionally involved.

There has been a long, systematic removal of the experiential awareness of the divine in our culture which has finally culminated in the meaningless rat race many feel is the only acceptable option of living life available to them. Perhaps the root cause of many of our deepest fears and anxieties, extending out to our depressions and addictions (that are not directly correlated with cases of PTSD), the ‘existential ennui’ widely suffered are not the manifestations of a disconnect from religious precepts or “the Church’ as is often bemoaned by that institution, but rather the distance from any real experiential knowledge of what it deals with imposed by it (I use the term the church, implying Christian dogma as the sole culprit, but I intend that toward religious authority and fundamentalism as a whole, no matter the faith). These conditions present themselves in different ways, from minor emotional disturbances which nonetheless impair one’s ability to be the most functional and effective in life all the way to seriously debilitating conditions that can effectively or literally destroy a life. These modern neuroses which can paralyze our attempts at reaching happiness and retard our effectiveness as members of society are manifestations of a congregate cultural condition of disconnection, a complete alienation from “source”.

Ancient pagan religions were based upon the living out of the connections between humans and nature, the mysteries and mythologies and ceremonies acting out the complex esoteric interplay between human consciousness and the seen and unseen cosmos. Their gods lived within them as well as without, and they were stamped out in fear by religions trying to gain Geo-political strength and power and structures of those organized religions placed their machinations of priestly oblations firmly between humanity and the divine as a barrier to real existential awareness. It has thus become accepted that there are only a few – the priest class – who can mediate for us vulgar mortals a connection with God (source, the cosmos, the void, etc.) and can only do so upon the terms of their specified dogma or religion. This practice has served to place humanity in the service of the various churches and today the two things that rule this world, God and money, are both fictions and are both contained within the same structure. These religions have since their inception been responsible for all of the non-natural, human caused egregious disasters that have befallen humanity since civilization began. The rise and fall of nations, their borders and cultures, genocides, brutality, oppression, repression, bloody conflicts of man against man all justified by and all caused by the definition of a word-God.

Therefore, not only have we been cut off from the source by design, but the actions of these established systems have repulsed so many who have any sort of conscience whatsoever and are capable of independent thinking that even the concept of what they connect to has been made unpleasant, a symbol for all those evils. Religion itself murdered God, or is at the very least, implicit in the crime. It could be that all the religions and their texts; all the convoluted and occult words of mystics and prophets all discuss a very real thing, something so majestic and awe-inspiring and so hard to grasp that capitulating the understanding of it to another who professes the singular ability to do so is an appealing way to assuage the deep need within humans to understand their place in the cosmos. The thing is, there is nothing in the church-or temple, or mosque, more holy than you and conversely you are more so than anything in it. And it is very real; our minds are a creation and pale refection of the eternal source of infinite creation, however all the religious prohibitions and allowances built up around it are not.

III. A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:

“Psychedelic drugs exist all over this globe, in plants and even endogenous to the human brain as keys for us to unlock a passage way to explore the realms beyond this dimensional space, traveling upon only our mind to do so. The apex of cognitive evolution and still evolving to its highest form, the human mind is not bound by time nor space and therefore by definition is hyper dimensional.”

I found myself for the first time in a long time comfortable in my own skin after having a deep personal experience that was just as or more real than anything I had ever seen or felt. When I came back from the void after injecting myself with 5meo DMT I felt a stillness in my being that was both new and familiar to me, a feeling of being finally home. After one dose, the effects of which lasted for all of 20 minutes, I was more profoundly healed than through years of “treatment”, the results of which, had it ever actually been effective, I expected to be nowhere near as significant as that which I had just been gifted with. I was renewed, granted a new sense of awareness and purpose. This was several years ago, and the effects still reverberate, and rather than diminishing as the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond, the beneficial effects continue to increase, affecting all areas of my life and allowing me to be of better service to others and to my community. When those 20 minutes were over, I had a new purpose in life, which was to fashion a new life for myself from the ashes of the old, for that which had placed me where I am is that which uniquely qualifies me for a specific purpose. By developing a practice of self-care using the experience and using the substances as a tool, and to spread awareness of this method in its effectiveness by communicating my progress and missteps, and to become active in changing the policies which keep it out of our hands, perhaps my journey includes planting some signposts for others lost in the wilderness of being to find their own way home. I had been given a purpose where before I had none, and soon the voice with which to go at it came to me. By no means whatsoever is the journey close to done, life has a way of challenging any belief system to its core, what I have found through this path however is that it is not based upon such false constructs as faith or belief but in an experience and the reality of that experience informs me through the darkest events that otherwise push me to my knees. One key thing taught to me in my 5meo DMT experience was that nothing has ever happened to me. The balance I seek in life is determined by me, whether it scales to the negative or to the positive.

A Death Trip:

After my 5meo DMT “initiation”, nothing would ever be the same. It was far more powerful than anything I expected and I was completely unprepared despite the reading which I had done (which turned out to be on the wrong substance, more later). I was instantly pulled from my body, leaving everything that I associated with ‘me’ behind with it, stripped to an intrinsic core of Big ‘I’ which was intimately connected and extended from the eternal and infinite source of all that is. I realized upon my return to it that my body, with the god-consciousness seated within it, was merely a sensory organ of the divine, but that was once I was back. At first, being unfamiliar with the drug but knowing what a classic psychedelic experience was like from extensive past experimentation with them, because of the difference in physical effects from those substances I actually thought that I had poisoned myself and was quite literally dying. I had a brief moment of panic, having collapsed face down on the floor and perceiving everything, even my heart as having stopped and become still then feeling my consciousness slip away through a tunnel of light into a place beyond time and beyond space I knew that there is nothing I could fight and just let go. There was no resisting to be done it was futile, and it became surprisingly…comfortable, as if somehow I knew where I was going. I did not sense the presence of any specific entity or form, but the entire time I felt comforted and guided by a consciousness I’ve come to know in moments of crisis, physical and otherwise, as a sort of Guardian Angel figure, some sort of being connected with the divine that can communicate to me.

(Let me point out and make absolutely clear here that what I did was incredibly reckless and stupid, but I related a little bit of the place where I was when I did this, a place of desperation and sadness, and caution was not a primary concern at the time. I actually thought that I had on my hands a vial of n,n DMT, another powerful tryptamine psychedelic with fast onset and short duration but very dissimilar in somatic and perceptual effects to the one I just ingested. 5meo DMT is also more potent by weight than n, n DMT and the dose I measured thinking it was the latter was very large, and I injected intravenously. I was alone, and any number of things could’ve happened, resulting in a very real death. Please, don’t do this at home kids.)

On with the story…Proceeding to lie there on the floor, I felt as if all that “I” was, that is, my consciousness, not my physical being, begin to build up as pressure inside my skull which was then released through its top and I began to perceive as if I was going through a tunnel of light. As I flowed through this long corridor all that I knew to be me, all the experience, all the memories, thoughts and concepts that comprised the thing that was “me” begin to fall away, no longer suited or relevant to where I was going, as if I was shedding off layers of old, dirty, ill-fitting clothing. I neared the end of the tunnel and passed through an aperture and was greeted not by some Ancient of Days or other theistic figure but by pure pregnant emptiness. A void full to the point of bursting with nothing and everything; all that ever was is or will be existing simultaneously only as potential before even manifestation into form.

Many terms, like Samadhi, have been given for it through the ages by many who have attained this state of being through hard-won dedicated practice. It is ineffable, but it is at the very core, the very essence of what it is to be human, it is the point from which the human mind emerged, and into which our temporal consciousness will one day permanently dissolve. At that point in my progress to the void I was as a tiny drop of water having dropped into the ocean of existence and on the verge of dissolving into it, at once separate but surrounded on all sides by the enclosing ultimate reality, at the edge of the singularity, about to shed all that I was to join it in ecstatic bliss- I was then suddenly called to “Remember!” by the same presence that seemed to be my ‘tour guide’ on this fascinating journey. And with that my attention was pulled away from my dive into the eternal and turned back to the finite, to the earth-bound from the trans-stellar.

But what exactly was there to remember? Even being able to relate the story to you illustrates the perplexing complexity of a cognitive experience like this, for if I had ‘died’ who was it that observed this and who was it who can bring back this memory to you? It is as if one becomes both the observed and the observer at once, and somehow the consciousness is located in many positions at once, and at once I remembered. Remembered to breathe, to pull air into a body lying face down on the floor of a small room somewhere on a small globe of rock and water spinning perfectly hung in the vastness of material space. “Ah! Right” And with that memory I was pulled back through the same tunnel of light but in a reverse playback of the initial sequence and squeezed back into a seething hairy sack of skin. With a deep gasp, like a corpse regaining life I rose and utterly amazed and bewildered at what had just happened I exclaimed loudly “I am home, after 42 years I am finally home!” I put on some music, and began to dance a sort of jig, still feeling a little high.

But then at that point I began to feel nauseous and felt that I was going to vomit. The feeling came on very quickly and I was still not very confident of my footing and didn’t want to descend the flight of stairs to the bathroom so decided to just throw up on the floor. I got on my hands and knees and began to retch and felt something coalescing within the very center of my being, concentrated at the center of my body and extending all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes. I begin to feel it take form and enter into my gut and I began to retch. Expecting stomach contents to eject from my mouth I was mortified upon witnessing a thick, pitch black boa constrictor slowly emerge from it, curling itself downward and beginning to turn back around to face me. I could see that it was dissolving into spirals and fractal like forms of black smoke which dissolved into the air.

I was terrified. This was all of the evil that had ever entered into me through circumstances or my reaction to them, traumas or even passed down epigenetically. Everything I’d done, everything done to me, all the poison created by those transgressions had solidified and taken form as this monster that I was now puking out of me. All the bad stuff was coming out of me, and then I made my mistake of that session: I mis-perceived this “ultimate evil” as being unleashed upon a hapless and unsuspecting world, powerful with a destructive capability to wreak havoc upon it unless I retain it, scenes of atom bomb intensity destruction filled my mind’s-eye. I was very high, I know that was some serious magical thinking, but at the time it made very real sense to me, after all, I was vomiting an ethereal psychic black-smoke-boa. Perhaps that was the last lie of a real evil threatened by the end of its own existence, but in a panic I clenched my jaw shut and I felt some of this substantial being remain within me. This to me illustrates the value of an experienced person to be there with one during experiences this powerful.

I realize now this was no supernatural entity but was a manifestation through my mind of that which I was trying to release to regain a state of balance- the mind and body wish to be in a state of health-homeostasis. So in this state of consciousness, having just returned in-body, a giant black psychic boa is what I was perceiving and had someone been with me who had seen something similar happen before they could’ve recognized what was happening and helped me to rid myself of that which I was instinctually trying purge. That is what I am referring to when I spoke of the value of the role of a companion, someone who could ease me through a situation like that without overwhelming it with their reactions. Even though, despite the fact that I feel that the work that night was not perhaps completely “finished” therefore, as I said, I felt that I was renewed in a way which I didn’t think possible and that night gave me an experiential reference point upon which to I would find myself referring to in times of future crisis to guide me and give me strength.

I was not instantly “fixed” and I’m still not, this entire experience was only the catalyst for a long period of work to get myself to a place where I could say I feel like I have fulfillment and happiness in life regardless of whatever is going on around me. It was actually so shattering and filled me with such a sense of urgency to make major life changes, filling me with the realization that the lifestyle I had been leading was negative and harmful and the ways in which I was supporting myself no longer tenable or tolerable that I ended up homeless. That began a long, several year journey of self-discovery and finding the value and worth of myself beyond the contents of my pockets but which also lead to a place where I can see comfort and stability and a long-term vision of moving into the future with deliberation. In the long-term it did teach me many valuable lessons, but I feel this also illustrates the need for guidance on this path. There are as many ways to walk it as there are people who do, and the work must be done alone, but there are communities of people doing it that can help.

IV: Moving Forward: Integrating

At first I was pretty stunned by what I had been through, there is nothing in my culture with which to relate the experience I had just had, nothing to guide me. I looked around me and reached out into some of those communities online to people doing similar things, knowing that they were here but having no idea how to find the people in my local community. Within the online communities, and one in particular, I found a virtual home full of people burning with love, encouragement and excitement but also tempered by intelligence, ration and reason and from there I was able to begin to make sense of what had just occurred to me. I have found community in many ways to be a linchpin to success in this practice. Surrounding oneself with like-minded yet rational people allows one to avail themselves of those other people’s tempering reason. Discussing one’s progress with others who are understanding and intelligent allows one to build from a consensus model a workable reality.

Integration is, well, integral to the process. And that term means something different to everyone who undertakes it. It may mean repeated trips to enter into a state where one can confront individual traumas as they come up through meditation or guidance, and in the psychedelic ego-banished state deflate them of their negative power. It may mean taking the energy that has been breathed into one in-trip as metaphorical wind in their sails to carry them to a new place in life. Again, I want to impress upon the reader that the experience or the substances themselves are but a small piece of the entire equation, a good tool but one of many in your toolbox.

One does not lay a hammer down next to some nails in a field, walk away and return the next day and expect to find a home-built. One must dedicate work, identify their needs and find the tools they can use to achieve them. In this case that can mean many things – for me like I said community has been very valuable. I’ve since discovered that many cities have groups that meet regularly to discuss various topics relevant to the psychedelic experience and I was eventually able to find and make connections face-to-face within one locally. An online search at places like meetup.com can be helpful places to begin looking for the others. The growing interest in psychedelics being used with intent is seeing the creation of ‘integration circles’ going by many names in many cities, perhaps searching online places like meetup.com is a good resource for finding one in your area. If one can find a good support group of individuals sharing this world-view and with similar goals and practice, then the going isn’t so lonely and maybe some missteps can be avoided along the way.

While some find it necessary to repeat doses many times over the course of time for whatever reasons they may have, including just the fun of it, I have not found that to be needed to keep myself attuned to the source, remembering my experience is enough. The psychedelic journeys for me only occur on the order of maybe once or twice a year to sort of clear out the cobwebs that accumulate so to speak, but for others they may be more or less frequent. I have also found great benefit in “micro dosing” mushrooms. That is, taking doses that are too small to cause any somatic effects but which definitely offer some benefit in terms of mood stabilization, creative energy as well as anxiolysis.

While there is a ton of anecdotal evidence out there and some small studies have been performed that back the microdose hypothesis up, there is no real information on the mechanics- I don’t care, I know it works. Taking small amounts which are under the threshold to achieve real physical effects “tunes up” my brain and puts me in a state where I feel energetic and creative. More effective at putting thoughts into words and action, my first round inspired me to go back to school after having dropped out of high school at 16, and even though living on the street at the time, managed to complete my first year with a 3.8 grade average. This is not something that I do daily by any means. Only when I feel the need to, when I’m feeling sluggish and burned out I will begin a regimen for maybe several weeks to a month and I’ll ingest sub-threshold doses somewhere between twice and four times a week. This is what I have found to be personally effective, your mileage may vary. There is a lot of information online about it, look up the search term if this route interests you.

There is no roadmap to this, but once one starts on the path they can only move forward. It is taking a long time to begin to integrate the first experience which I described here but as I learn more and more new things out of that experience a long time ago, or as I allow new information to pass through the hole punched in my ego, I feel that I grow and become more effective and compassionate for myself and others as a human being. Placing into my reality a new perception of something greater than myself but of which I am an integral part, gives me something that can’t be taken away and which takes precedence over my suffering.

And I’ve stumbled along, another appellation I’ve only half-jokingly applied to my practice is “the Braille approach”, since all one can do is feel their way along and spills along the way are inevitable. The good thing is, that it’s usually quick and easy to recognize when one walks back into destructive behaviors, and with the skills of introspection one discovers along the way, identify the mechanisms behind it and find a way to get back. Relapses have been much shorter and less destructive, and eventually became less of a worry of occurring. I will focus another essay on the difficulties and downright failures I’ve experienced and witnessed.

I write this essay and I talk to people about this subject not to glorify my personal experience but to give hope to somebody who may come from a situation similar to mine. A living death, mired in darkness and despair and suffering, only relieved by periodic injections of whatever external form that relief comes from – drugs, sex, food, television, hate… Falling prey to our own egos and driven only by insatiable desires, filled with a bottomless empty hole with a thirst that can never be quenched; this is not hyperbole, this is what kills. I felt after my experience that I remembered something. Not the body I was reminded of while I circled the event horizon of the void, but rather the void itself. I felt like somewhere, somehow a decision was made to leave that void, to become manifest with consciousness able to perceive of something so complex for the express purpose of simply feeling it. That nothing has ever “happened” to me, and I am here by the purpose and design of something not external and foreign to me, but rather myself- to just be.

I wish you peace on your journey, and I wish you success. I wish you the courage to begin it and the perseverance to continue. Your hard work will be met with beautiful success in whatever that looks like, you will create something wonderful. Go, be good to you and in turn be good to the world. Move in peace, you will encounter understanding and compassion for yourself and only once you have empathy for yourself can you love others. There’s so much more to touch upon, from issues related to cognitive liberty, harm reduction, common paradigms and treatment modalities that need to accept this route and on and on and in future essays I intend to explore more. This one only deals with the “spiritual” underpinnings of this practice, but there are much more difficult parts of the journey, and I’d like to think that some of what I’ve learned can be a value, aiding you in yours.

There is no need to be hopeless

Thank you,

Christopher G Ewing