Enjoy the Journey

It was a Saturday. I took a walk to my friend's place, about 45 minutes. I tried to dispel any worries or concerns.

When I arrived, my friend gave me some time to mediate alone, then he brought me the bowl of mushrooms with a side of honey to remove the earthy aftertaste. Once I had ingested them, my friend left the room and I was alone.

As I waited for the mushrooms to kick in, I tried focusing on a question. This question basically amounted to, "where do I go from here?", focusing on the future.

But it turned out that the mushrooms had other plans.

I lay down on the bed and was incapable of moving or speaking or opening my eyes. The word "expectations" came to my mind, along with the feeling that I was surrounded by some dark thing (trees or perhaps mushrooms) that cast these expectations aside.

The boundaries of my self dissolved and I experienced waves of rainbows and swirls and spirals. I felt alive, could feel my blood flowing, and I felt how I was here on this planet. The phrases "I am alive and I am here" repeated in my mind.

At various points, words and phrases came to me. Rather simple statements, because it was impossible to articulate otherwise.

This wave, as all the other waves, concluded with a sort of "return back to Earth" feeling plus a sensation that I think was coming from my inner ear.

The next wave I can recall transitioned to a more "negative" feeling. Everything was dark and spiky and full of nothing. I was afraid so I resisted it and I knew I was resisting it. There was this visual of a sort of disk pushing against the shell of my resistance, the mushrooms insisting that I let go and let whatever was to happen happen. So I stopped resisting and let it go, and the darkness and nothingness pressed against me such that I felt like I was nothing and maybe even dead. I checked myself to make sure I wasn't dead, feeling my heart beating.

As the dead feeling lifted, a sort of dialogue was happening between me and the mushrooms, though the mushrooms didn't speak with any words or appear to me in a visual form. It went along the lines of, "So there is bad along with the good. And really when the bad happens it isn't so bad so everything is really okay".

In the next stage, I was lying on the grass outside somewhere. It was a sunny day and birds were chirping. At one point the word "sister" appeared and I first thought of my sister but then I understood it didn't mean my sister. So I began wondering what it meant. Like general sisterhood? (With some thought I interpret this as just an acknowledgement of my longing for feminine connection, which I feel is rather lacking in my life) To the left a baby's head rose like the sun.

I can't quite remember what happened as I transitioned to the next stage. But by the time I transitioned to the next stage I came to a renewed awareness that I was in a body and needed to use my body to navigate this world. So it was time to get up.

The next stage was when the auditory hallucinations predominated. There were some auditory hallucinations before but they were not necessarily the main focus. The sounds I heard were clearly derived from the environment: the sounds of traffic and of people talking, of footsteps and floors creaking. But they weren't all "real" sounds, or otherwise their intensity was amplified by the mushrooms.

The sounds were more or less the same the entire time (at least in type), but my thoughts and feelings about them changed throughout. At first I was a bit frightened because the tram sounded really loud and there were a lot of people talking. But then I decided (at the mushrooms' insistence) to just listen to the sounds and take them in. There was no need to be frightened.

When I listened to the voices and the indoor sounds, I felt like they were the sounds of the building and of the people in it. I remembered there are other people in this building, in this city, that there were people all around me. It felt good to be surrounded by people like this, to be connected to the building like this.

At one point at the sound of a tram passing by I laughed, thinking "there's the tram again. There's always a tram!" and it led me to thinking about Prague and how much I like being here in Prague.

My feelings about the sounds around me constantly shifted from "good" feelings to "bad" feelings. I felt a bad wave coming on when the voices took on a louder, more male-sounding tenor and the sound of traffic intensified. When I was in "bad feeling" mode I felt like everything was too loud and there was too much or I got frustrated that I couldn't understand why a tram kept passing by and why I couldn't understand what the people were saying. Though I wanted to try to find out what people were saying I was still rooted to the bed at this point, my throat unable to make any sounds. For most of the trip I was voiceless.

The same state of hearing voices as if coming from another room also made me feel frustrated as to why they were just near me and not coming to me. Before I had felt safe in the room but now I felt like the room was a box that I couldn't get out of. I thought about leaving the room multiple times but the mushrooms were like "it's not time to leave yet" so I stayed in the room.

Also the idea of the voices and people being around me no longer felt like a good thing. Like why are they only around me and not coming directly toward me? Why is everything only happening around me and not happening to me?

Sometimes the voices felt like they were coming from a TV somewhere and sometimes I heard music -- sad but pleasant music -- that also sounded like it was coming from another room. The voices mostly sounded male, but sometimes there were female voices, and in the more "bad feeling" sequences the voices were arguing.

At one point I understood that the voices were speaking English, and that led to a moment of panic as to why I couldn't understand them, and I felt like they were coming from America, and a sort of longing took hold.

My brother came to my mind and I remembered he was maybe going to call me that day. I laughed at the thought that I would miss his call because I was tripping on shrooms. Then the laughing turned into crying as I felt how much I missed him, and then I had no thoughts, only feelings of sadness as I cried. I've been crying a lot lately but this cry was not about despair or thoughts of a lack of a future. It was more just the general sadness of life, the sadness of being far from home.

Not long after this I tried listening to the voices again. I focused on the footsteps above me. I tried to recall if there was another floor above this one and couldn't remember. This led me to wonder who was walking up there. I thought of my dad. He was certainly one to stomp around. Then, because my dad had passed away some years ago, I wondered if I wasn't hearing the voices clearly because they were the voices of the dead, and I couldn't understand them because they were somewhere else I couldn't reach. Music played again.

As I experienced the sounds I involuntarily made various positions with my body. I sat up, put my head in my hands, lay back down, folded myself, sat back on the bed, got up and walked around, frowned, laughed, smiled, recoiled in fear. I moved when and how I felt like it was the moment. At one point I was counting to twenty (originally thinking it was maybe 20 mushrooms, but then thinking maybe it meant 20 years) with my left hand involuntarily opening and closing four times. Then I counted to my age (stopping at 34, even though I'm not quite there yet) and then both hands put out three fingers (which I interpreted to mean just three, though now maybe it could mean six, but I fixated on the number 3) and wondered what that meant, but soon enough I lost focus.

At one point while I was lying down and at another while I was sitting up, I had this strange feeling that I couldn't articulate. It was more of a "bad" feeling, but a feeling that was hard to name. The visuals consisted of dark shriveled trees and a shrinking feeling inside my throat. It made me frown. I was not afraid or in pain but had an unpleasant feeling.

There were several moments where I actively thought "this is going to be hard to write about," "it's too complicated," "this is too much," for the experience was multi-dimensional in a way. I was experiencing everything inside my body, sometimes the boundary between inside and outside dissolved (as with the auditory hallucinations, as I experienced both "inside" and "outside" sounds at the same time), and though I hardly moved I felt myself trying to reach out and extend myself beyond my own personal boundaries. I realized that some things are hard to write about, maybe not even meant to be written about, because words just don't do it justice.

Until this point I'd been in darkness, with my eyes mostly closed. But then I felt like it was time to get up, turn on the light and write something. I turned on the light and put on my glasses and I noticed the holes in the bedsheet and the scratches on the floor, wondering if they were real at first, but upon closer inspection it turned out they were real. Perhaps I focus too much on imperfections.


Opening the window let in some new sounds -- voices of some guys outside, some kind of party music playing, the tree dancing in the breeze as the sounds echoed in the air. I leaned out the window to observe the outdoors and feel the wind on my face.


I sat down and wrote something maybe three or four times throughout the night. The first time I sat down to write I wrote really fast in very short, terse sentences, and when words failed me I drew circles to describe the "surrounded-ness" I felt. I stopped writing when the words stopped coming.


At this point the voices started to fade. It must have been because it was getting late and the people in the building were settling down to sleep. I wondered what time it was and it led me to thinking about time, how the experience of it changes. I think it was at around this point that I really felt like I should go pee and the mushrooms were like, "You'll go when the time is right," and I felt like this must be some sort of experiential/bodily metaphor. How I am holding things in. The sentence repeated, "You'll know when the time is right/when the moment is right," and I asked the mushrooms, what moment? How do I know when it's time? But there was no direct answer to that effect. It seemed that when my body knew it was time, my mind would know it was time. And it was okay to take my time, because the right time will come.


After some more writing and pacing and sitting, I finally left the room and used the bathroom. At this point I felt like maybe the trip was over, with this sort of bodily release. Washing my hands and looking at myself in the mirror, I didn't like the way I looked. I noticed all the imperfections on my face and neck. I didn't look at myself for very long.


Returning to the room I sat for a little longer and then turned off the light and settled in to sleep. But it turned out it wasn't quite over yet.


The voices returned, a little different this time (in what way, I can't quite say; maybe there were more of them). While for the most part again I couldn't understand what they were saying, I think I could hear some Czech being spoken (clearly in Czech, but spoken somewhere else, not at me). Then I heard someone say "Hello?" loud and clear. A woman's voice. I was so surprised I opened my eyes, still speechless. That was pretty much the end of the voices.


Thinking back I'm rather disappointed I didn't try to engage with them more, especially this voice that was so different from the others in that I could clearly understand it. Perhaps I was too aware that it wasn't "real," and so didn't feel the need to try to understand the voices directly, more just why I couldn't understand them.

I fell into a weird semi-dreamlike state. There were some weird intense visuals but I can't remember anything clearly enough to parse anything specific. Some faces. Lights. Grids.

I do remember noticing, as the hallucinations were fading, how I could begin to discern the "actual" from the "imagined." But rather than being produced in my mind, the hallucinations seemed to coming from some third place. Like not directly my mind but not quite from the outside either. Perhaps it was the boundary between self and world that had dissolved during my trip and was now coming back into solidity.

I couldn't sleep. My body felt like it was thrumming with energy. Not quite the usual anxious energy, though there was a bit of that as I was returning to my usual state of being. Thoughts and feelings were still passing through me, but now increasingly only in my mind and not within the body. I got up at one point and wrote a few more lines once more. The window had been kept open to let air in but the trams were too loud so I closed it. Eventually I fell into something like sleep.

I dreamed that my friend and I were talking about my experience and there was a bowl with an onion in it in the kitchen. I think our task was to peel back the onion and look through all the layers. Because if the mushrooms were telling me anything specific about me and my life, it wasn't straightforward.

* Live in the moment and experience being in the world in this body
* Be here now
* The moment will come. You will know when the time is right.
* Pay more attention to the world around me
* Listen
* You won't understand everything, and it's not necessary to understand

There are other takeaways from the experience that, in terms of their meaning, are a bit more obscure:
* This unnameable negative feeling (anxiety about ageing?)
* A focus on imperfections that had no resolution (maybe I need to focus less on imperfections?)
* The voices being only around me and never coming toward me until the end and my own voicelessness (Do I feel invisible? Do I not go toward the voices because it is safer to just be near them? Perhaps I fear connection and that's why I actually prefer the voices being around me and not directed toward me?) The meaning being unclear because my own thoughts and feelings about them changed throughout the trip
* What moment? How will I know? About what?

I was too focused on finding an answer rather than engaging in the moment and enjoying the process. The mushrooms kept me rooted in the moment, which has in a way opened up my mind to possibility. I felt much more relaxed and calm, and things that I enjoy made me feel positively euphoric. I became more receptive to change and whatever life will throw at me in the future.