My First Mystical Experience
I've never done drugs before. But taking mushrooms in a safe setting was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
Hey there! Two quick notes about this post:
1) I’ve changed all names and personal details for confidentiality.
2) If it isn’t obvious, none of this is legal or medical advice. Do your own damn research. As Tim Ferriss said, treat this experience like surgery:
“I would not recommend that anyone touch psychedelics without professional supervision. There are legal ramifications to consider. I would take it as seriously as you would choosing a neurosurgeon to remove a tumor.”
I was nervous.
I was sitting in a stranger’s living room. I was about to take my first macrodose of mushrooms. The stranger sitting across from me: a woman who I’d only talked to on the phone before. I hired her to guide me through what would be one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
If I knew what was coming, I probably wouldn’t have been so nervous.
But then again, I hadn’t really done “drugs” before. I’d only done a few painful puffs of weed. Same with alcohol. I would never let myself get drunk because I’m terrified of losing control.
So you bet my palms were sweating. This was a good thing, though. It showed that I was being serious and treating the medicine as it was—absolutely sacred.
Her name was Heather.
As I learned on our phone call, Heather had a decade of different psychedelic experiences. LSD. MDMA. Ayahuasca. She’d seen it all. Heather said she felt this deep internal opening after her experiences. While the medicines don’t fix everything, she said that they do help you unravel old patterns and stories that don’t serve you anymore. And knowing that she trained with MAPS and was a friend of a friend, I felt like I was in great hands—even though I never saw her face before.
When I walked into her home, I immediately felt this sense of holiness. She wore an all-white spiritual dress. Candles and Himalayan salt lamps were scattered all over the place. There was an altar on the kitchen counter. The TV was covered with a white sheet. I saw sound-bath bowls sitting on the floor. The space smelled like the Earth—scents which I would later learn were sage and Palo Santo.
As I sat up against the wall cross-legged, my hands cupped a mini Mason jar of the medicine. It felt cold. Inside it was a thick pulp of ground mushrooms soaking in lemon juice. Heather grew them herself. The dose: 3.5g. The strain: a mix of golden teacher and mazatapec mushrooms.
But as I sat there, I thought to myself, “wait—why did I want to do this again?”
Research That Changed My Mind
On our screening call, I made something clear to her: I wasn’t doing this just so I could tell people about my trip. No. I felt deeply called to do it for myself and to go inward.
In April in Austin, the signs just kept showing up. At a men’s retreat, someone said, “many self-made billionaires are active users of psychedelics.” Then in the sauna, I ran into a shaman who said that the medicine shows you the truth. Then the final domino came when I ran into a friend at the gym who said that her friend facilitates psychedelic ceremonies. That friend was named Heather.
But besides feeling chosen to do it, I told her about some of the other things I learned in the months leading up to our call.
After listening to Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, I bought Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind. I learned that classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD aren’t actually addictive. They don’t have a lethal dose. Mushrooms themselves have been around for thousands, if not millions, of years. People were using them before our ancestors even came to North America.
Pollan also wrote something about fungi that surprised me: “we are closer genetically speaking, to the fungal kingdom than that of the plants.” I found a phylogenetic tree that captures this:
Then I found it fascinating what Jordan Peterson said on Joe Rogan’s podcast:
“What a psychedelic does in part is remove the inhibition of memory from perception, and that reimmerses you in the complex world and shows you how remarkable and beyond comprehension everything really is.”
To translate Peterson: you get to see life through the eyes of a child, with no labels, preconceptions, shame, or stories. You see everything just as it is. For example, if you saw a stop sign, you wouldn’t actually read the letters S-T-O-P. Instead, you’d get lost in their sensory details. The red, the white, and the material of the metal.
Then I watched a 2016 Ted Talk from Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins. After collecting psilocybin data in therapeutic settings for 15 years, he found that 80% of volunteers rated it as one of the top 5 experiences of their lives. 50% said that it was the most important—even more than witnessing a live birth. He said that there were enduring and substantial antidepressant and anxiolytic effects unprecedented in the field of psychiatry.
One of his conclusions really stuck with me:
“The fact that psilocybin can occasion, in most people studied, mystical-type experiences virtually identical to those that occur naturally, suggests that such experiences are biologically normal.
Then I also told Heather that many of my friends had done mushrooms before. They all spoke of the transformative power of psychedelics. Many of them comforted me by saying that I was way more intentional than they were, so it was gonna go great.
While I agreed with them, I couldn’t have predicted how well it would actually go.
It did. It taught me a lot, as you’ll soon see.
But before I share what I learned, I first have to talk about how I prepared for the experience. Intentions, expectations, and the mental and physical diet in the weeks leading up to it. No way it would’ve been so marvelous and mystical without it.
Intentions and Expectations
Aware of the expectancy effects that can happen with psychedelics, there was only one expectation I had for the experience: surrender.
As Heather told me, the mushroom will show you truth. A friend said something similar: don’t go in with any expectations. Just surrender to the mushroom. Let it lead you. Let it guide you. Trust that it will show you what you need to see.
At the time, I’ll admit, this sounded a bit too woo-woo for me. But now as I write this, I can confidently say that this is sacred, sage advice.
Then around a week before my ceremony, she asked me to text her my intentions. Things that I wanted to explore on my journey. Here were two:
Trusting myself and my opinions and my feelings. Not people pleasing and sacrificing my own feelings for the comfort of others. Leaning into my own personal and authentic expression from the heart. Trusting my own intuition and intelligence and not downplaying either one of those things.
Get more into the body! I’ve intellectualized and worked through many of my beliefs and stories at the level of the mind, but I want to get more into the body and feeling my feelings in general.
Mental and Physical Prep
For the two weeks leading up to ceremony, she wanted me to have the cleanest vibes coming in. “You will get out what you bring in,” she said. This involved a strict food and information diet. The psychopathic monk part of me was actually excited for this two-week ordeal.
For food: no red meat, no processed foods, no caffeine, no alcohol, no dessert, and minimal dairy. This was almost impossible for my muscles, but I did it. I drank a lot of chamomile tea, bought some plant-based protein powder, and made bunches of black beans. I really missed cotton candy ice cream.
On the mental side of things, she advised me to consume as little social media as possible. No problem. She also said to avoid reading or watching about trauma or violence because it could show up during the ceremony. And, oh yeah, I forgot to mention one more part of the protocol—no ejaculation or self pleasure, either.1
So I did all of this. And while I did starve a bit, I made it all the way through to the day of the ceremony.
The Day Of
On that last day, Heather wanted me to come into the ceremony six hours fasted. So for my single meal that Saturday, I had five eggs, sourdough bread, and some honey. I didn’t take any of my supplements besides some orange LMNT electrolytes.
After a wholesome outdoor community workout that morning, I stuck to myself for the rest of the day. I did two long walks in nature, an NSDR session on my yoga mat, and journaled about my intentions.
But then after my walk, I got this intuitive hit: I needed my own space for integration. While I would be staying the night in her guest room, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t want to come home so soon. At the time, I was living with three roommates. They were all awesome people, but I just figured it would be too chaotic to come back to all that energy right after.
Boy—what a legendary call, as you’ll see later.
Then around 4 pm, I got ready to go. I packed a blanket, eye mask, and journal in my overnight bag. For the hotel, I brought some bottled water, tea, and lots of LMNT. Then I drove to Heather’s house.
On the way there, I remembered why she said we were doing the ceremony at night. When it’s dark outside, there’s less going on out there. There’s less energy, less noise, and fewer distractions. It’s more still and quiet. She said that this allows us to tap deeper into our inner space, giving us more room to do the real work.
It’s Time
It was 6:00 pm—time to take the medicine.
After Heather said a long prayer, I unscrewed the lid and tried getting it all down real quick. Nope. The lemon smelled good, but God it tasted gross. The massive, thick pulp of stinky plants took me four awkward gulps to get down. I needed lots of water with each swallow.
After that, we did some light breathwork and meditation. Then she started playing her playlist.2 About 20 minutes before the medicine kicked in, she played this beautiful guided meditation about love. “Just try on the thought that everything about you is perfect,” it said. It was perfect programming to start the ceremony. After arriving at her house only about an hour before, I felt safer and more settled into her space. Less nervous for sure.
Now what follows is everything I learned and experienced during and after those six mystical hours in the living room of a stranger. I’m writing this three months later and am still processing this beautiful experience.
Trust Yourself
I brought an eye mask to go inward.
But when we sat down for the ceremony, I asked Heather when I should put it on. “You’ll know,” she said. “Just trust your intuition.” This was hard for me to hear, and I admitted to her that I’m very analytical. She said the medicine would help me get out of that and get into the body, which is exactly what I needed.
As I found out, in that state of consciousness, every action had profound meaning. Multiple times that night I wondered, “When do I put my eye mask on? When should I take it off? Should it still be on? What will Heather think?”
She was my guide, right?
Yeah. But it was my ceremony.
I kept wondering again and again if it should be on or off, but that tiny thought was not trivial. It gave me a clear message: I need to trust myself more. Whether the eye mask should have stayed on or off was up to me and what felt right. I learned that I am doing everything right if I’m following my feelings and my intuition.3
At one point, I caught myself qualifying a statement that didn’t need to be qualified with “I think.” I corrected myself and said, “Just say it bro. Just fucking say it! Express yourself and trust your opinions.”
Then I reflected on how in the past, I would dramatically downplay my intelligence and not speak up so that I wouldn’t come off as some pretentious asshole.
But that’s a myth! It’s a myth for me to hold onto this idea of not offending others, because them taking offense is their reaction related to their own beliefs and their own psychology. My perception of people taking offense to this shows that I don’t love and accept that part of myself. I am smart, and should speak up when it feels right but not righteous.
“Those Are Just Judgments”
I was laughing for hours. In awe and gratitude for everything in my life. My friends, family, and parents. The people I’d met in Austin. Even how I met Heather and was now tripping in her living room.
After loads of laughter, I came back to one of my intentions—authentic self expression.
When thinking about the opinions of others, I kept comically saying to myself, “who cares?! HA!”I embodied this insight that people’s opinions are their own. That I needed to respect my own opinions more.
To me, Heather symbolized other people’s perceptions. Many times I wondered what she thought of me sitting there, having conversations out loud with myself. This stranger. I wondered what she thought about me smiling and dancing to the music. I noticed myself questioning my own feelings in fear of being judged by other people.
So then I started to create this new groove during the ceremony of expressing my truth and actually feeling my feelings. I started trusting my intuition and only took the eye mask off when it felt right for me. I expressed what I felt deep in my heart:
“I’m feeling like I don’t have this strong internal code of how to act, speak, and conduct myself. It’s as if sometimes it’s bad to say x or y and other times it’s fine, but in whose eyes? Whose judgments? Those are just judgments.”
At one point, Heather guided me through some breathing. Lying down on the floor cot, I put one hand on my stomach and one hand on my heart. I breathed slow. She told me to envision myself breathing through my hands, passing life energy between them.
Then my belly felt extra warm. I expressed what I felt: “expansion.” One of the only visuals I saw that night was this golden rectangular box of light.
I told her what came up as I saw it. I was worrying about what other people thought about me. Some of this came back to reactive people from my past. Hockey coaches yelling at me. An old teammate punching me in the face. “It doesn’t matter,” she said to my mind. “It’s all judgments, opinions, thoughts of others. You have to know who you are.”
After the ceremony, I spent some time thinking about what this all meant. The conclusion I came to was that the golden box of light represents truth. Because this visual appeared when I was touching my chest and stomach, I interpreted this to mean that light and truth come from following my heart and gut. To me, this means that intuition has the final say in all decisions.
The Intuition Is The Internal Moral Code
The mushroom also brought me back to a memory of a retreat in Costa Rica last year. During a yoga session in the jungle, a friend said, “I’ve never felt called to take ayahuasca.” And I was thinking to myself, I’ve never heard that vocabulary before: ‘called to’ or ‘ayahuasca.’
So I asked myself about this: “Called to? What did he mean? By God? Or like, he just felt this attraction to do something?”
Then I answered myself, apparently already knowing the answer:
“Yeah, this is how life works!”
As it so happened, I went to Jordan Peterson’s live lecture in Austin just a week before my ceremony. One of the most surprising things he said was on this same subject of callings:
“You don’t get to pick what interests you—it picks you. If you take what you’re interested in seriously, it reveals the structure of the world to you. You get wise as you pursue what calls to you.”
Later in the journey I said something similar to myself:
“There’s this inspiration that drives you that you don’t have to explain to other people. It just is. And that people should just follow whatever the fuck they want to do and who gives a fuck about expectations. Who cares?”
This experience showed me that trusting the feeling reveals everything. I’m already analytical, so I like to think that my intellect is baked into my intuition. After reflecting on this, a long-lost quote from Steve Jobs finally made sense to me: “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than the intellect in my opinion.”
So this is the actual solution to not having an internal moral code—living from the heart and the gut. Surrendering to my intuition, which is the voice of God guiding my life. It already knows who I’m meant to be. So with any decision I make in my life, it’s my duty to honor myself and pay attention to when things feel forced and out of alignment.
For writing specifically, I thought back to how in the creative act, there are no rules! It should almost feel like I’m not trying. And if it doesn’t, then there’s probably someone I’m trying to imitate who isn’t me and that I must let go of.
Emotions Connect Us To The Human Race
After lots of laughing, I remember realizing that I was crying under my eye mask. Heather helped me find the box of Kleenex behind me to blow my nose.
But once I became aware that I was crying, I just started laughing even harder. Then I said to myself, “Emotions? Who cares? HA. Is any of it real bro who cares? It would appear that I’ve been crying. What? And why would that even matter? Who cares? It just is.”
There was no story that feeling my emotions was good or bad. Everything just was. I learned more about accepting my emotions, especially as a man:
“That’s crying. It just is. It’s totally fine as men—especially as men, perhaps. It’s these emotions that make us members of the human race. It’s why literature exists. The human condition doesn’t change and literature stands the test of time for this reason: emotions. To deny them is to deny our connection to everyone else.”
Niching Down to Authenticity
During the ceremony, I realized a profound paradox of writing: although I read and write and spend most of my time by myself, I’m ultimately writing to connect with other people.
That is what building an audience is really about: connecting with other humans! Whether they’re followers, friends, or even customers, it’s all about finding my people by using the Internet.
One unexpected example came to mind when I was thinking about creating content—Marc Rebillet. He’s a musician-comedian who says whatever he wants. He makes up all of his music loops and then adds in these shocking skits and raunchy jokes about pussy or penis. And no matter who the audience is, he doesn’t care, even if he’s swearing in front of little kids at a venue. He has no shame.
He knows that, “hey, my music isn’t for everybody, and that’s ok. I accept that, but I will still express myself through authentically through it, no matter how weird it is to other people.” So this is what he does. He’s a great musician and actor, and he improvises all of his shows, making shit up from scratch.
Beyond Marc’s intuition, I realized that what worked for him was niching down to authenticity. I resonate with Marc because he sustainably produces this feeling of freedom. He now has over two million Youtube subscribers and that’s what he does for life—makes up music.
While I don’t think my writing will make people feel freedom, it’s worth pondering: what do I want my writing to make people feel? How do I want to connect with people through my own creations?
The best answer I have right now is that I care about is attracting smart people who share my interests and values. People who prize books over TV, for example. The other day, a friend said to me that intellects are hard to come by. I’d agree. So I want to broadcast my beacon of curiosity and find the other intellects like me.
Don’t Believe Everything You Think
“Is any of this real? What is this? What is reality?”
Before my ceremony, I heard people talk about how there are different dimensions to reality that we can’t even understand. I was like, “sure, dude.” I was curious but downright skeptical.
But now I see what they were saying. I was so amazed at this realm of reality that I wasn’t sure if I was sleeping, dreaming, awake, or something else. It was actually like The Matrix. At times I even forgot that Heather was in the room. I was in absolute awe, laughing more, and I said, “I can’t even breathe it’s so cool. The nature of reality. What?! HAHA.”
Then when I woke up the next morning to take a shower, I slowly slid my hands down the gray tiles of the shower wall. I wanted to make sure that they were real.
They were. Or so I thought.
Reality was so different on my journey that I was making sure that this reality was real. I thought back to all the deepest details during my experience. The curly carpet. The loud echo of my pee pounding the toilet bowl. The threads in the towel poking out like little people.
There’s a reason I mention all of these sensory details to reality. Whenever I’m feeling depressed or in some kind of mental hysteria, I’ll walk myself back through this exercise I created:
“I cannot prove that a thought is real, unless I write it down. I can’t touch it, taste it, smell it, see it, or feel it. So what if this cloudy, negative state of mind isn’t real, and I just need to wake up and become aware that I’m aware?”
On those few down days, this has helped snap me back to living well. In the past, I’d heard this mental state advice before. Stuff like asking yourself, “Is this real? Am I actually in danger?”
But I didn’t feel what this meant until my mystical experience. I embodied this insight that nothing might even be real at all. I learned stop believing everything that I think.
Everything Makes Sense
Something that a lot of people seem to experience on mushrooms is this sense of interconnectedness and trust. I did.
When I was sitting up against the wall cross-legged, my hands were interlocked. During the journey, with my eye mask on, I saw this visual of those same hands interlocked in my mind. It gave me this feeling of how everything was in connected in this wonderful web. It made me think of how without my ex-girlfriend, I would never have gone to CU Boulder and met two great friends. And I never would have been on this path if I didn’t play hockey or if my family didn’t move to Colorado from Canada in 2007.
I had deep appreciation for my 2024, too. The reason why I was able to drive out to Austin this year was because of a DM a girl sent me. We only talked for two minutes in a Zoom breakout room last year during Write of Passage. But she must have remembered that I mentioned moving to Austin. Then Austin led me to the series of events that led to this very experience. A beautiful unfolding.
As I also realized, all of this started with the Internet. It all started with a single Youtube video I saw in college from Ali Abdaal saying that writing online can change your life.
I remembered him saying that he wouldn’t have started his Youtube channel without first starting a Substack. This whole thing made me realize that although I haven’t made much money on this path, it’s this entire journey and skillset that it’s all about. What a beautiful life! The Internet can be used in a wonderful way. Content can change lives.
“It all makes sense! It makes perfect sense.”
I said this so much. I just felt an overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude for my own life. I was also laughing at the wacko reality that I was in some stranger’s living room:
“I’m just here, meeting this wonderful lady in person for the first time. Like how crazy! It’s just trust in [my friend who referred me to Heather], God, and life. It just makes so much sense even though it doesn’t actually have to make sense.”
Happiness Can’t Be Acquired
The overall feeling and emotion that encapsulates the whole experience was total bliss. Like the state of a child—ignorant of innocence and innocent of ignorance. Lots of laughing. I saw what Anthony De Mello meant when he talked about happiness in Awareness:
“Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness, you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired.”
If happiness is our default state, then there’s just dump trucks of deconditioning that has to happen. To be in that state of pure consciousness is possible. But I learned that the only way to get there is by tuning into myself through things like meditation, breathing journaling, and maybe some mushrooms, too.
I felt deep gratitude for my life and all of the people in it. I remember laughing at a box of Kleenex, blowing my nose, and tossing the tissue in the air. I laughed as it drifted down on my face. I remember the sounds of my plastic water bottle crinkling. I heard the cold water slide down my throat. I let out a big AHHH, and was so blessed to have the water. It was pure enlightenment.
Factory Reset
When I woke up that next morning, it was as if my senses had a factory reset.
I tiptoed from my bed to the shower. I wasn’t in a Type-A rush anymore. I took a long, hot shower. I felt the water splash on my body and run down the full length of me. I touched and felt the tiles of the wall. I heard the spraying sound of water spewing out of the showerhead. Never heard that before.
For breakfast, Heather served a blueberry chia seed pudding. I felt the gooey texture of the berries and the coolness of the purple mush touching my tongue. I noticed the bigger pumpkins seeds hidden in there. They were crunchy. I saw the steam rising out over the cup of tea. Then the microwave beeped, and it scared the shit out of me.
But there was something strange: there were no thoughts in my head.
As I put my bags and blanket in my Jeep, I remember the shock I felt when I closed the car door. I heard the creak of the steering wheel as I backed out of the driveway. I quickly turned off the music and the entire screen on the center console—that would’ve been way too much stimulus.
I drove slow. My destination was the state park, where I’d spend the afternoon before checking in at the hotel. All of the cars moved in slow motion, even though they were coming at me at 50 miles an hour. When I hit a red light, I didn’t get impatient. I was actually relieved because it meant I could consciously breathe more. It also gave me more time to take a look at the texture of the gigantic red light bulb in front of me.
When I got to the state park, I went on a short walk. I walked slow, stopping to see all the caterpillars and sunflowers. I listened to the birds and what Ray Bradbury called the “dry rain” of the trees blowing in the wind.
Then it started raining. I wasn’t upset though—it was beautiful. Once my shoes started feeling soggy, I went to take shelter in my care. I sat there in the driver’s seat, thinking, listening to the rain drops splat on my windshield. I was so present that I actually saw the condensation of my breath spreading to fog up the inside of my windshield for just a second.
Eventually, I headed to the hotel to check in. I had two nights to sit down and make more sense of what the hell just happened.
Why The World Is Anxious
For those two days, I sat in total silence. No technology. Phone in airplane mode. I spoke as soft and concise as I could, only to people I needed to talk to—the park ranger and the guy at the hotel’s front desk.
My nervous system was so fatigued that I hardly had the energy to even write in my journal for the first night. I didn’t feel anxious that I was missing texts and emails. In fact, I didn’t even think about them at all. I still had no thoughts.
No thoughts at all.
So I just sat there. I meditated. I made some Yogi tea. I stretched. I soaked up the silence. I loved being able to crank the thermostat to 65 degrees. I feel fast asleep at 8pm that night and went back to nature the next morning.
It was sunny this time. It wasn’t raining, so I found a table to sit at on the trail. I had more energy to write in my journal. I watched a red cardinal dart about from branch to branch in the tree next to me. I saw some ants climbing up the skyscraper of the picnic table bench I was sitting on.
Around this time, I realized why so much of the world is anxious: there’s just too many inputs out there. Books, podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and much more. Music always playing. TV’s always on. People always talking. Blah, blah, blah.
Most of it is noise that drains out truth. It’s sensory stimulus that shifts us out of alignment. I recalled something Heather said during my ceremony:
“This is beyond just a sensory experience. The senses are used as a distraction to going within. So whatever’s happening outside of you is going to continue to happen, unless you tune into yourself.
We’re so focused on a lot of the outside talk. We have to stop becoming the victims to our stories. Take ownership, responsibility for our own selves. What’s happening outside of us—it’s not in our control. What’s in our control is mastering our own inner states of knowing and consciousness and well-being.”
“What Was That?”
Then I came back to the hotel, still wondering what I just witnessed. I still wasn’t sure any of it was real.
Before the ceremony, a friend recommended that I record my experience. I did. So sitting back at the desk in my hotel room, I listened and sat through the entire six hours. I noted down important insights in my journal. Many of those things are things you just read.
Then I bawled my eyes out.
This even struck me by surprise. It happened when I started listening to some of the songs. Heather played a lot of indigenous jungle music during the ceremony. I used to think that stuff had this weird spiritual sound to it. But after listening to it in that state, I saw that they’re the ones who are actually tapped in. Wow. I don’t think I’d ever heard music so beautiful before.
After listening to just two of those songs, I just let it all out. Uncontrollable crying. I let myself get past the barrier of worrying if someone saw me or heard me crying. I was so glad I had my own space to do it, too.
But I wasn’t upset. It was more like a confused-yet-grateful cry. The only words I could put to it were, “What just happened? What was that? Thank you so, so much.”
I had the chills. I cried and cried. And this was only after listening to just two songs, one time each. It transported me right back to that night. Beauty. Joy. Awe. Unity. Sacredness. A deep knowing and understanding of the universe. Ineffable bliss.
The Integration
After I drove back home from the hotel, I spent the next two weeks slowly integrating these insights into writing. I had a few 1-on-1 conversations with friends to help me make sense of it. I found a great guide from MAPS that broke down integration into six things: mind, body, spirit, relationships and community, lifestyle, and nature.
Many people say that integration is the most crucial part of psychedelic experiences. I agree. Most of the insights and things you just read about would’ve been lost forever if I didn’t spend some time every day writing and sitting with myself for the two weeks after.
At the top of my integration Google doc, I created a list of altered actions to refer back to later. Some of these notes to myself included:
You need to live alone.
Do a 30 minute meditation every morning.
Don’t check any notifications after dinner. It can all wait until the next day. Notice when you’re compulsively checking your phone and why. There’s probably some other anxiety attached to it.
No passive music consumption. Silence or music of my own choice. Be extremely cautious with the words you listen to, because it’s all programming of the mind.
No need to consume caffeine anymore. It’s a mild stressor that creates dependency, which doesn’t help with happiness.
Say how you feel with people. Lead with truth. “I’m uncomfortable.”
Do all cardio outside. Walking, jogging, rucking.
Buy some plants, big and small.
Say prayers before eating.
Stop drinking Fairlife protein shakes. Switch to Ascent protein powder or other protein powders because they’re just cleaner. If you consume it every day, it should be high quality.
I’m More Myself
One week before my ceremony, one of my friends told me: “this experience will make you more yourself.”
Wow, was he ever right.
As I write this three months later, I feel like I’m the most myself I’ve ever been. Life is beautiful. Life is sacred. I feel better than ever before because I’m living authentically. I’m in alignment with my heart and trusting things that transcend pure reason.
I don’t feel as anxious anymore, in large part because I’m consuming less information. I have more awareness around my own patterns, psychology, and programming. I have more reverence and respect for every single action I take.
I saw truth. I felt overwhelming love and for myself and all of humanity that I’d never felt before. And while I just wrote over 6,000 words, this was only a fraction of my full experience.
Without a doubt, this was one of the most meaningful experiences that I’ve ever had. Top five for sure. I’d rank it even higher than going solo to Spain, fly-fishing in Alaska with my Dad, and going to that men’s retreat in Costa Rica.
The trip was only about six hours long, but it felt like I learned a lifetime of lessons. My mind is changed, and I’ve changed my mind. While I don’t do “drugs,” I’m more optimistic and open to psychedelic medicines now.4
Mushrooms are another avenue to reach truth—but only if you take them seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future they become a treatment for anxiety, depression, and our mental health crisis. But of course, that’s hard to sell to society.
If you’re 21 or older and feel called to try mushrooms, you should strongly consider it. I’m a very calculating person, so take it from me: be careful and hire someone to help. Odds are, it’ll probably be one of the most helpful and transformative experiences you ever have. There might just be some truth that needs to shine its sexy light straight through you.
Notes
What’s the reasoning behind all of this? It’s all about cleansing. Heather was right: what you bring in is what you’ll get out. I’m convinced that my experience wouldn’t have gone as great without this prep work to take care of my “set.” As a side note, these guidelines were similar to those of other plant medicine ceremonies, according to Heather.
Heather picked the music. But she told me beforehand that she wouldn’t tell me what she was playing so my mind wouldn’t have any expectations. While I wish I could’ve listened to Beethoven in that state, she played some spiritual and indigenous music from her stereo. She said that some of it would intentionally triggering. The only songs I do remember had lovely lyrics like freedom, peace, and joy.
But then there’s a fine line between intuition and avoiding discomfort. I think if you’re aware enough to know that you’re not fooling yourself, then you’re probably fine. But even getting to that point is tricky.
I put quotes around “drugs” because I see psychedelics as medicines that can heal everyone. Mushrooms, stripped to core, are just plants that help us be happier and more loving people. What else would anyone want? “Drug” implies addiction and toxicity, so in that sense, I don’t do drugs. For what it’s worth, I don’t see myself doing a macrodose of mushrooms again for a very long time—until it calls me back.