My first experience with shamanic healing was through my spiritual enabler/therapist, L. A trim, raven-haired, woman with an aquiline nose, she had studied and practiced under the supervision of several founders of the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
The glimpse into my native past, whether allegory or true, whether a construct of my mind or a connection to the collective unconscious, opened a door to another world, an alternate reality…
Several months after my first experience in therapy with the entheogenic medicines, L suggested that I go deeper into my current narrative and ask who I am in this life, in this incarnation – for that is what shapes the present. What is the meaning of me and who am I really, she asked?
I also experienced a reptilian world of slivering creatures with red dinosaur-like eyes and black backbone-like structures, wet and ominous. This world held no beauty nor feeling of love or compassion, and was rent of any emotion except for that of to consume or be consumed…
Many have their first experiences with the psychedelics in group ceremonies, often presided over by a shaman – a facilitator steeped in the use of these medicines. One October weekend, I was invited to join just such a ceremony held in the desert with facilitators from a community of therapists from San Francisco engaged in the shamanic path of healing.
This question echoed further within me the following day, as we first pursued meditative and group connectiveness exercises, and then five hours alone in the desert, each alone with the wind and rocks, and an occasional scolding bird that paused to make itself known.
Several months after I had taken my journey into the darkness of grief and emergence into the light of forgiveness, I had an early springtime session on the beach. The day was warm and thus so the evening…
The next journey began with a long stare into a lone flickering candle, whose small flame seared an imprint in my mind as the mushrooms came on quickly and rather smoothly, taking me down that path of ineffable imagery…
After many hours of traveling the axis of European bus-rail-taxi, I finally arrived at a secluded house in the woods outside of Köln for my next encounter with the psychedelics. So obscure was the site that even the taxi driver himself did not know of it…
I had heard a great deal about ayahuasca, how it is a spirit vine that provides life review, spiritual rebirth, and awakening. The indigenous people of the Andean and Amazonian territories devised this slow-brewed concoction of both vine and shrub…
I unexpectedly left my earthbody-mind and became a part of everything for a few brief moments. How beautiful it was – I hope that my physical death, the death of my waking body, be so graceful and peaceful…
The cessation of I and experience of pure timeless awareness as the true reality was what I had been searching for. Yet, for all the miraculous aspects of this clarity and pure enjoyment it brought I felt that I needed more.
With my eyes closed, the sunlit imagery of retinal afterglow suddenly fragmented into endless fractals of red and orange. As I exhaled and opened my eyes, the veil of vision also dissolved, turning into geometric fractals, and I began to see the world without borders of the mind – to be the world.
I was the mandala, a circular fractal of different colors and overlapping geometries, and the mandala was me. Not intricate, nor greatly detailed like Tibetan mandalas, it was quite simple yet beautiful and most pure in color…
Suddenly, there was no self anymore and the I became a dazzling swirling ocean of color and beauty, a pure dimensionless state of consciousness that is infinite, eternal, and ineffable…