DOSE:

2 hits

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

This experience too place approximately 10 months after the experience described in 'What's So Funny'. I'd been keeping up a regular meditation practice since then, consisting of formal sitting practice at least once a day (increased to at least twice daily after visiting my friend at his monastery about 4 months in), and some efforts at ongoing informal practice.

Those 10 months also involved a few experiences with psychedelics which weren't particularly noteworthy (but worth bringing up to illustrate that I continue to have experiences that aren't noteworthy and don't improve my spiritual practice, and that they still constitute the overwhelming majority of my experiences).

Returning to this particular experience, I discovered while a friend was visiting that he hadn't tried LSD (though he'd certainly enjoyed other psychedelics) and since I was aware of an inventory that we could dip into, we made plans to take a trip together when we didn't have any other responsibilities.

Prior to actually taking this trip, I was feeling vaguely dissatisfied with the state of my informal meditative practice . For a number of months I'd been endeavouring to focus my attention on external sensory experiences while riding my bicycle, and to ask myself the question 'Where am I?' at any time (including if it felt appropriate during a formal sit, e.g. if I were already distracted by something and answering the question seemed like a good way to address the distraction and more effectively put it aside than just trying my attention back to my focus space). More recently (a week or three prior to this experience), I decided that checking my emotional state would be a good additional informal practice for various reasons of personal development.

The problem is that I didn't feel that I was remembering to do these practices as often as I ought to be -- hence my dissatisfaction. I decided (beforehand) that since I was going to be taking some LSD anyway, I may as well give my informal practice a little extra attention or effort while I was on my trip, and see if anything would come of it.

For the first 4 hours of the trip or so, I don't recall having remembered to check my emotional state, ask where I was, or otherwise actually do any of my informal practice. As much as I'd like to claim otherwise, my informal practice was in a state where it wasn't at all abnormal to go this long without doing any of it.

What makes this trip notable is that when I did remember to check in on my emotional state (I don't remember if if was on the first check or immediately rechecking) my internal voice was just asking 'hey me, how am I feeling?' It felt like a friend who wanted to make sure I was OK. In noticing that I felt cared for by myself, I noticed that for so many of the other acts of informal practice, I hadn't had anything at all like that feeling. In fact, most of the time, I had been beating myself up with feelings of guilt about how long it had been since my last check, and how infrequent my practice was proving to be.

It occurred to me that all those other times, I felt like I was a child being nagged by my piano teacher for not practicing enough, instead of feeling cared for by a friend. No wonder my informal practice was so infrequent; I was making it feel terrible! This time though, it felt nice. I wanted to do it more, not because I felt that I ought to continue to develop my practice, but because it just plain felt good. This practice suddenly became a lot easier, and I could toss in the other practices by following up the question about how I'm feeling with a sort of 'now that I have my attention, where am I?'

Nearly a week has elapsed since then, and the improvement to my informal practice seems to be persisting.

One thought that's popped into my head about this particular improvement is that this effect may not have arisen so much from pharmacological properties of the drug as much as it arose from more social properties of psychedelics. In particular, asking how someone's feeling when they're on a psychedelic trip is something that I recognize as a trip-sitting behaviour -- that is a particular sort of caring behaviour. Consequently the fact that I was tripping might have made it easier to perceive my practice as that specific sort of caring behaviour -- to recognize it as the caring behaviour that it had always been.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 109900
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 37
Published: Feb 3, 2017	Views: 1,809
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LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Guides / Sitters (39), Combinations (3)