DOSE:

3.5 g

oral

Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT:

80 kg

BACKGROUND:

31 year old atheist/agnostic with natural-science background

After a difficult childhood with a depressed and suicidal mom and largely absent/incompetent father with outbursts of violence on part of my mother I entered into a traumatic and emotionally abusive on/off – relationship with a borderline-personality-disorder partner at age 17 lasting until I turn 26. Thanks to an alcohol- and cannabis-infused night being intimate with another woman I finally see a different way of living, being seen as a valuable and lovable person and break off all contact with my long term abusive relationship and enter a new relationship with the new woman who gave me a burst of hope and clarity (that is still ongoing 7 years later and has been central to my healing journey) and am for the first time in my life happy for as much as 3 years from there on.

A sexual encounter including other people into our intimate relationship suddenly triggers a major past trauma and I am retraumatized immediately. Feelings of inadequacy and compulsive jealousy and mistrust most prominent symptoms.

3 years of analytical psychotherapy follow and I make some progress, stabilize emotionally and make progress in academia. In the summer of 2018 my SO leaves for working abroad for 6 months. After 1 month I fall into a major emotional crisis: the spatial separation from my SO triggers another emotional crisis that leaves me majorly depressed for weeks. Being very interested in psychedelic science and having a biology background myself I decide to radically intervene on my emotional state with the help of psilocybin mushrooms.

THE EXPERIENCE:

I ingest the 3.5g of dried psilocybe cubensins on an empty stomach. After 15 minutes I get intense, spiraling visuals like black/white snakes shifting through my vision. I get quite anxious and after a couple of failed attempts to distract myself from my anxiety I decide to lay down on the couch with eyeshades and a therapeutic music playlist, telling myself to „trust the process and surrender to the experience“.

I experience 2.5 hours of uncomfortable feelings of intense loneliness, anxiety and isolation in my own mind and fear of actually losing my mind. Waves of tingling and buzzing wander up and down my body. In my mind I hear a distinct sound (waaahhh wahh wahwahwahwahwa….. Beeeeeeep). In synchronicity to the sound in my ear I feel like being momentarily pulled out of my body with the beeps. All discomfort ceases while I'm „out“, yet continues when I fall back into my body. All the while my mind is very present and I observe the gradual deconstruction of my normal consciousness. It very much feels like some sort of entities are tinkering with my mind. A certain comforting presence is with me – it’s like they make me understand: „we are doing what we are doing and you have no power to stop it. Don’t worry though, we know exactly what we are doing. We know it’s uncomfortable but you wanted this for yourself, didn’t you?“

More and more parts of my mind seemingly shut down and I lose myself gradually and become one with my closed-eye visuals and the music from my headphones, completely immersed in it. Bodyload is bearable. I begin to feel hints of a vast, maternal entity‘s presence and along the closed-eye visuals I begin seeing some clear images with my inner eye, including a typical grey-alien face. I am getting less and less scared and am at this point accepting what is happening and surrender what is left of my ego to the mysterious forces at work.

Music sounds incredible. It's like I'm making out details in structure, tone, depth 100x more clearly than ever before. It's like I have audio-super"vision". Which was REALLY cool.

Suddenly, an incredibly clear vision appears in the blackness of my mind and all other closed eye visuals cease. A female figure with long, frizzy hair, a demonic face with long teeth and witch-like extremely long fingernails is presented to me. It suddenly violently hisses at me and to my surprise, with quite intact thinking I think to myself: „wow, I’m not scared at all, and this is completely crazy!!!“ The demonic witch-woman relaxes and suddenly morphs into an image of my mother as I remember her from my early childhood, smiling at me warmly and lovingly. The vision shifts again and morphs back into the demonic figure, again hissing at me. It morphs yet again into a figure resembling my ex-girlfriend (the one who was emotionally abusive), then back into the demon hissing at me violently.

I begin to grasp that my core trauma, the one on which large parts of my personality have been built around pathologically, is being revealed to my in this crystal clear vision of this „woman I love smiling at me/demonic witch-woman hissing at me with teeth and claws out“. Tears start rolling down my face. An intense burst of relief, grief, acceptance, gratitude, hope, confidence, content but also sadness overcomes me.

The music shifts to a beautiful piano/violin piece and along with it the vision in my mind shifts to my current SO: with great clarity, I see her sitting at a table in a living room, her back facing me. An infant child, definitely MY child as I instantly understand, is being held by her lovingly. She turns her head and looks back at me with the sweetest, most loving look on her face. She is giving me the smile of smiles, looking perfectly happy, safe and full of hope, content and with pristine love for me as the father of this child and the love of her life. The entire scene is immersed in a bright golden, shining light. Like the morning sun coming in through the windows on the most beautiful, pure morning you can ever imagine.

I begin to weep uncontrollably. I feel the urgent need to say a thought out loud, no, scream it into the world with all my heart: „I love you so much baby!!!! I am so, so, so incredibly sorry for not trusting you all this time!“ Within seconds, I realize so many things about myself that have eluded me my entire life up until this moment. Words don’t do justice to the profound emotional depth of the epiphanies that emerge from my highest, clearest self. Among those epiphanies:

„I forbid myself to love out of fear of being hurt“

"I forbid myself to be vulnerable at all times, cutting myself off from the ability to feel anything to a full extent"

„I forbid myself to love because I have learned that I cannot trust another human to love me without me doing everything in my power to be lovable/desirable to them“

„I believe that I am unworthy of love, that I am broken, that I am not enough, that I never would be enough, that I am a loser and a failure and if anyone ever sees how pathetic I really am they will without a doubt despise me and be dissapointed with me“

„I built this entire fake-person around the vulnerable, hypersensitive real me. I locked the real me up deeeeeeep inside me so it can‘t get hurt by anyone anymore.“

I open my eyes. I look at my cellphone and I realize 3 hours have passed since ingesting the mushrooms. I had lost a large part of my sense of time. The couch is soaked from the constant stream of tears running down my face. I feel like there is no seperation between me and the couch, between me and the entire universe.

I look down on my body and am overcome with joy and cry out: „ohhh look at you, what a big boy you have become!!!“ For the very first time in my life, I feel genuine, intense love and compassion for myself. I can’t believe how I couldn’t dare to love myself just the way I am for all those years. I look out of the window. I see clouds in the sky, I see a car passing by. The car’s exhaust makes me think of the state of the planet and I feel an unquenchable urge to help earth heal and help humanity to stop being pathological. The vague motherly presence I have felt for a while has risen in intensity and is now an all-encompassing, eons old, almost ineffably powerful spirit, bathing my soul in a constant stream of maternal, universal and unconditional purest love. (I believe this had to be mother earth herself, our planet’s consciousness.) I relish in the rich and intense stream of love and stop thinking for a while, riding what feels like a spiritual wave of orgasms in my mind and body, sobbing tears of joy all the while. I feel my soul and body heal in fast forward together by the second. The waves of buzzing throughout my body have become intensely pleasurable at this point and my mind and body feel like long lost friends reuniting after an eternity of separation and are happily exploring each other with great joy. The same feeling of „reunion after an eternity“ is felt between me and the maternal, vast entity that I so strongly feel present with me.

I suddenly have a profound deja-vu like feeling. I mumble „holy shit, I KNOW this feeling - I’ve been here before. This is who I really am. This is…. Home. This is exactly as everything is supposed to be, I just KNOW it!!“ I am baffled at how real this intense feeling of „homecoming“ is , but am at the same time too busy experiencing being flooded with neverending love and joy to think about it any further. I begin to think about various people in my life and feel intense, furious love for them. I close my eyes and see clear images of my family from back when I was a little child, particularly my (2 years older than me sister’s face appears over and over and I feel intense love for her and the others.

The music shifts to a shamanic song with drums and rhythm, and to my amazement, the chandelier wobbles and dances to the rhythm of the song. I join in and „dance“ with the chandelier, while lying on the couch. I move around to the rhythm and feel completely free, happy and content. This blissfull state continues for a while. I get up to pee and am mesmerized at my mirror image in the bathroom, finding myself truly handsome and I realize what a kind soul I really am and am very amused at the ridiculous charade I've been playing for years and years. How many false beliefs I held about me for so long. I feel so liberated and happy!

A dear friend comes to check in on me (as we had agreed on beforehand). Her presence is very welcomed, but I realize quickly that I would rather continue being by myself and immersed in universal love. But I’m tripping too hard to articulate this need and I am too grateful for her to come check in on me. I notice the effects of the mushrooms weaken and it becomes a little uncomfortable again, especially talking to my friend feels like hard work. Getting back "down to earth" feels forced and my ego is forced to take over the conversation with my sober friend, but it's being torn at by the mushrooms and it's not comfortable at all.

She leaves to get us a beer and pizza, and I relax for a while. She comes back and we eat the pizza and drink the beer. It is delicious!

The effects are even weaker now, but have shifted once again to an uncomfortable trippy „maybe I am insane now?“ state. But she reassures me that I am still tripping hard, informing me that my pupils are still dilated like crazy and that everything will be ok very soon. This calms me down and the waves of trippyness become shorter and longer intervals of me feeling rather sober begin to dominate.

She stays for another 2 hours until I am more or less completely baseline. I say goodbye to her and get ready for a run, because I feel like going for a run right now.

Aftermath:

The first thing I noticed was that every sign of depression (I actually had slight suicidal ideation the day before my trip – no real intention but I know suicidal ideation from my childhood) had completely vanished. I felt like a veil had been lifted from my world. Everything felt fresh and exciting to me. I felt like I did as a child/teenager. A slight baseline euphoria was with me for a couple of days or maybe weeks.

For weeks and months after, I couldn’t believe how happy I felt. I found myself weeping tears of gratitude for feeling so happy and alive and emotionally open more than a few times. I still missed my SO, but all desperation was gone. I was now happy for her to have that experience of working abroad and was intensely looking forward to my next visit to her (which turned out to be magically beautiful!).

For 1 ½ years following my experience my mental health remains in good shape. Old symptoms creeping in very, very slowly, but never returning to baseline intensity. I feel like thanks to whatever the mushrooms opened me up to, my healing journey truly has begun and I am ready to heal further!

I no longer identify as atheist. I feel like I was given the privilege of experiencing something greater than myself. I believe now that there is purpose to our human experience. Like Wayne Dyer put it: „we are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.“

The intense feeling of „coming home“ I had during the peak really shifted my understanding of who and what I am. I am merely a part of a greater whole, and my individual death as this person in this life doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is the consequences my human experience contributes to the greater whole. What matters is that I try to live this life with love, compassion and purpose. Connection over Mistrust. Eco over Ego. Simple as that. I try, my friends, I truly do!

I now most closely identify as eco-spiritual scientist interested in the true nature of not only physical reality but also what reality encompasses beyond that (which I believe is so much more complex than we can even begin to comprehend as human incarnations). Mushrooms opened my eyes in the most enrichening way and I am forever grateful for the ability to have a profound experience as this one.

I am positively changed, and I am healing.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 113774
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 31
Published: Nov 18, 2019	Views: 3,781
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Mushrooms (39) : Glowing Experiences (4), Entities / Beings (37), Depression (15), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Health Benefits (32), Alone (16)