Psilocybin Integration

Dear Friends,

For those of you who have been following this thread, Question VI is What is the medicine or teaching? More specifically, If this experience was medicine, what was it healing? If it were a teacher, what was it teaching? What is the wisdom you’re meant to carry forward? Here’s my answer.

The medicine, psilocybin mushroom in the context of now two ceremonial circles (Spring and Fall Equinox, 2026), is healing the barriers I had erected against experiencing love in a deeply intimate connection (along with all the associated risks). As a teacher, it is teaching me that I’m an important part of my chosen family, the people I’m drawn to interact with over time. The wisdom I’m meant to carry forward is probably best summarized this way:

Whatever is fun and meaningful alone is ten times as fun and meaningful and healing when shared with others. I can trust myself in love. I can trust the Great I Am.

In its essence the medicine was healing my identity as someone incapable of bonding, of enjoying lasting, partnered intimacy. It was healing my resignation to the status of “better off single.” Besides that, it has made me softer, more trusting and relaxed, less driven, yet ironically feeling myself to be at the prime of my life.

In many ways, the medicine set to work removing the barriers I had erected against love. The wall I had built that helped me function in the world. Interestingly, it didn’t feel like a wound at all. Rather, it helped me fit in, be productive, get recognition, and appear more or less normal.

What the medicine did, though, was to gently disassemble the wall, bit by bit, so that I could begin to feel myself as soft, receptive, and completely worthy of love. I had counted on the wall for all my life to protect me from the pain of lost love/connection. It was a very elaborate barrier that protected me from the pain, but also kept out the sweetness and pleasure that I was too traumatized to even reach for, even though I was in a revolving door of relationships during my twenties, thirties and forties.

Uncertain how to carry the grief, the loneliness, the fear of it never getting better, along with the very particular dread of the deprivation, the best I had learned to do was walk away anytime I risked caring enough to experience rejection once again. Keeping the vulnerable feelings at bay, I could continue to avoid feeling the discomfort of hopelessness that stemmed from the hidden core beliefs I carried about the world.

The nurturing experiences I desperately needed as a tiny infant and didn’t subsequently get as a child or adolescent were destined to just go underground. Nobody really understood that then. So there were no steps taken to help me recover from this very early shock and trauma and loss.

The wound that the mushroom medicine treated, that night in the forest, and the weeks and months since, appeared in the first minutes and hours and days after my birth. Psilocybin, as it turns out, produces feelings of safety and oneness, and augments a sense of being held by the universe.

As a teacher, my psilocybin journey taught me that it was safe to love. It taught me how it feels to be an important part of the human family, the people I’m drawn to interact with over time.

For those of you who want to get the whole story, follow the links below:

Integrating Psilocybin: A Personal Journey of Healing

Integrating Psilocybin – Part II

Integration As A Spiritual Practice – Part III

Releasing What Wants To Die – Part IV

What wants to be born or created? Part V – Integration Journey

My next post will mark the beginning of Pillar 2, which guides the initiate through a process of identifying the most prescient insights and distilling them into new embodied habits. Hope to see you there.