Episodes on Episodes: What a mushroom ceremony taught me about life, death, misogyny and stealing your housemate’s loaf.
Disclosure: I’m no psychotherapeutic or psychedelic expert. This is an account of an experience, with a light sprinkling of basic science throughout. Every trip, for every person, is also very different. Read with care.
No colours except red and blue the walls are blue the sky is red (there is no roof, only a hole) the stars are blue the Widow is red but her hair is blue as blue. The Widow sits high on a high chair the chair is blue the seat is red the Widow’s hair has a centre-parting it is blue on the left and on the right red. High as the sky the chair is blue the seat is red the Widow’s arm is long as death its skin is red its fingernails are long and sharp and blue. The Widow rolls and rolls the children into balls and little balls fly into the night between the walls the children howl as one by one the Widow’s hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I cower and crawl wide high walls red fading into blue there is no roof and Widow’s hand comes one by one the children scream.
This is the dream sequence in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a book I forgot I had read seven years ago. It came back to me in the form of lived experience when I journeyed with psychoactive mushrooms at a ceremony on the weekend. The main difference: Rushdie wrote it (or maybe even experienced it) in green and black.
My second journey with mushrooms in this yurt, in the middle of nowhere, was the single most powerful, loving, accepting, difficult, terrifying, and ‘whole’ experience I’ve ever had in my life to date.
Why a ceremony? I promised myself that I’d embark on my next trip in a communal group setting run by experienced practitioners, along with the support of integrative psychedelic therapist on either side. Journeying alone with no support just doesn’t ‘work’.
I’m here to share my experience.
1) The Dark
I’ve never been so frightened in my entire life. Except it turns out that I have.
It was more of ‘gentle descent into darkness via the pool stairs’ rather than a plunge. I slowly felt the pain of everyone I was on a journey with. At its worst, I felt as though I channelled the suffering of all of humanity in one sitting.
I witnessed years of emotional suppression and trauma, both administered by parents and society, shed from one man in particular. He howled, growled, wrenched, rocked, rolled, until there was little left. It was half bear, half wolf: it was not human. It was years of ‘not living up to expectation’ or having to be a certain way. Needing to conform to expectations: societal, parental, and personal — no one is harsher on us than ourselves. I watched years and years of damage unfold, shed, and pierce this man as he faced the darkest barrels of his own fears.
He was experiencing intergenerational trauma, succinctly summarised by my friend James Caig via a tweet: “Yes the Blitz spirit, but also the children brought up by parents ill-equipped to help them deal with loss, pain, and deprivation so they went on to become Boomers wishing unnecessary loss, pain, and deprivation on younger generations today because “it didn’t do them any harm”.
But it DID do them harm, and I’m still livid about the way this man, and the rest of society has been made to feel. Has been made to suffer. And I wept and mourned this man because it wasn’t fair for anyone to feel that unloved. Watching what grew to being an entire row of men howling into their blankets made me realise: the bear wolf hybrid was the physical embodiment of the patriarchy. Not only do women suffer at the hands of it: we are all damaged.
Like the Aldi version of Ebenezer Scrooge, I was then shown the most painful moments of my childhood. I was there again: the feelings were real, as intense as they were the first time round. From the pang of fear in the chest I got just before being hit, to the neglect and loneliness I felt when I had to parent adults, right round to the dread I felt when I was left at the mega ASDA, aged 5, in a country foreign to my birth land.
I went around the merry-go-round of utterly terrible feelings of rejection and fear. The most familiar was a feeling, ripe as last July, where I re-experienced the dark, hideously inescapable dominant and confusing moments of crisis, only to be pulled out by the appearance of my dependent: a small ginger fluffy cat who needed a human to administer her biscuits and cuddles.
My instinct: to run away. Not at all surprising, with a refugee for one parent, and a wine-loving serial country-mover for another. I only knew to do the same. Yet, stuck in the depths of this experience, there was nowhere to go.
It occurred to me: this wasn’t my first rodeo with these feelings. The last shred of consciousness I had left was the repeated refrain a fellow trip-goer had, ‘everything will pass, eventually.’
It was then I realised I had nothing to be afraid of. I might have been consumed by the Widow that Rushdie writes about, but I was able to hold space and handle her as an adult. I was released from the shackles of these fears; they were things I was familiar with. Now they can sit within me dormant, and I know to no longer fear them. This was lifechanging.
2) The Shadow
I met parts of myself I was trained to hate. I met a control freak.
Control freak Sara isn’t one that likes to control people. Rather, she likes to control situations. I’ve always found deep comfort in understanding people, situations, interactions with others, relationships. Why things go wrong. Why things go right. Consequently, happy when things are going right, in a state of total crisis when love and acceptance slips from my arthritic fingers.
The message I got from my subconscious was that I did not need to understand everything. I struggled to grapple with this for ages. It’s my job to understand things I came to no conclusions. I could not understand why I should not understand
In waking life, in true Sara style, I sought to understand this. And to my relief, I could post-rationalise it before it niggled away at me.
The part of your brain responsible for overthinking, the bit which lights up when your self-esteem is fed by a twitter notification, is also the bit which leads to our experience of depression. It also happens to be the part that is hushed when it’s met with psychoactive, and funnily, breathwork and meditation. It’s your Default Mode Network.
The key to being less miserable was to be more present; to live in the moment, rather than the past and future.
Knowing I’ve got control freak tendencies makes sense of why I tend to dislike it as a quality in others. I’ve learnt to reject it. With this little nugget, I may move towards being less horrified by people with controlling tendencies.
3) The Light
It wasn’t all hideously terrifying. There were moments of light. I had a giggle fit with a fellow woman, who also found it hilarious that I couldn’t for the life of me find my mat and pillow.
I realised some obvious truth: life is infinitely better after a wee. We all know this, but it becomes irrelevant the second we’ve relieved ourselves.
I also realised: nothing is tastier than a slice of toast, slathered in butter, that belongs to your housemate, that you have quite possibly stolen from them. Literally, nothing.
It turns out, on hindsight, I wasn't breastfed (as a little one, obvs), for more than a week. This was internalised starvation.
Most importantly: Love conquers all. I felt a huge, overwhelming sense of love. Of world order. On the fact everything’s going to be okay. And that you’ve got a seriously cool brother who you’d love a hug off very soon.
So, not all hideously terrifying. With dark, you experience light.
Some Warnings. Mushrooms alone won’t ‘fix’ you. But integrating your experience might help you get there.
Firstly, this experience would be utterly pointless if I didn’t have the help of a therapist in integrating my learnings into my daily life. We mustn’t fall into the same trap we’ve fallen into with anti-depressants. That is, administer them as a means of ‘fixing’ things.
(If your GP recommends anti-depressants, you probably should seek out a therapist to help you process things. Anti-depressants merely increase your threshold to stress. They don’t process for you.)
I heed this caution because psychedelics aren’t legal everywhere just yet. This means people get hold of them and self-medicate without integration don’t end up processing much.
Secondly: Ever notice yourself throwing yourself into work a little too much?Or exercising a little too often or obsessively when life gets a bit tough? One too many pints, on too many days on the trot?
You’re doing a very human thing: soothing yourself from pain. Cause pain isn’t nice, and pints are. Sometimes it’s situational pain and avoidance. But often, you’re running from fear — parts of yourself that you don’t like.
But these parts live within you, whether you like it or not, what you’re running away from. Because they dampen your ability to control your thoughts. So make sure you’re prepared for what you’re going to see, because it may terrify you.
Which isn’t a bad thing if you’re ready: it’s only when you’ve accepted what you’re scared of, and what you’ve been taught to dislike about yourself, do you eliminate the need to indulge in unhealthy coping mechanisms (commonly known as addictions).
And so, to finish up…
In writing about my mental health journey and learning about other people’s, one thing has really stuck:
We all exist in a state of pain that we can tolerate, and change is scary. We only seek help when the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of changing.
Experience tells me that it’s best not to wait until we’re experiencing unbearable levels of pain. It’s much easier to take the bull by the horns when you aren’t pranging out. I end on a plea to society: please never let us eat up and internalise the miseries and traumas my brave trip-going pals experienced. Nip them in the bud, as early as you can.
You can of course do this with psychotherapy, drug-free. You don’t need mushrooms, but they may accelerate things, or reveal parts of yourself you may not have access to.
In short, this experience allowed me to face my fears, face parts of myself that I don’t like, and enjoy moments of light. Just as I’d recommend journeying with mushrooms in a secure and safe group setting, I’d also recommend embarking on your mental health journey with loved ones around you.
You are not alone: we are all, to some degree, damaged goods sat in Sainsbury’s ‘reduced but perfectly good’ section.
