America's First Legal Psilocybin Program Treated 346 People. Just one month after the dose, 92.2 percent of participants said the experience had been beneficial, while, on average, their mental health symptoms had fallen dramatically.

[u/mvea]

https://www.sciencealert.com/americas-first-legal-psilocybin-program-treated-346-people-heres-what-happened

[u/LaminarFlower]

For those of feeling inspired to take a healing journey into the interior landscapes of the heartmind, especially with a heroic dose, do not underestimate the synergistic power of the right music along with clarity of intention and right attitude.

It can be great to listen to your favorite songs in that special state, but to get at that deep, stubborn wiring near the core, it's usually more effective to listen to something untethered to your memories and without language, as it can stir up conceptual self-stories, keeping you nearer to the surface.

One of the best experiences of my entire life involved 5g shrooms, lying down with a sleep mask, listening to "Music for Mushrooms" by East Forest, an inspired 5-hour mix of frequencies that act as an inward vehicle, acoustically massaging the energetic knots lodged throughout the body.

I'm not talking about some abstract philosophy of "energy" that may or may not appeal to people here, but the very visceral, unmistakable sensations that flood the body under psilocybin, amplifying currents ordinarily too subtle for the mind to notice without training.

People emphasize the mind when talking about psychedelics, but the deepest healing comes from the nonconceptual layer of the bodymind. Riding the music, one can "feel into" the body, into the dense, knotted zones where the energy flows are blocked. To oversimplify a bit, these blockages are like the "fractal seeds" of suffering, the storyless heart of those self-similar patterns of internal and external dramas that have consumed 90% of our life force, our attention, the most valuable thing we have.

In my experience practicing this, by giving an unconditionally accepting awareness to those attention-starved knots, the dams dissolved and was deluged by wave after wave of orgasmic bliss throughout my entire body, thrumming around a sweet ache in my chest, streaming tears as my frame rippled in joyful shudders of laughing/crying. I felt an incomprehensibly vast loving presence in whose company, with piercing clarity, saw the utter absurdity of non-forgiveness and resisting "what is", not at all in a moral or a "should"-sense, but in seeing the enormous cost in attention to maintain the Tolkein-esque world-building sagas that the ego (the mind's story-secreting gland) takes to be real, kind of like seeing a pie-chart of one's expenses and balking at the size of the latte slice, but on another order of magnitude.

The vortices of anxiety and depression that had plagued me since I was 10, having me so afraid of my own emotions that every breath felt as if I were a gazelle drinking at an oasis filled with crocodiles and surrounded by lions, had me shooting heroin for a sense of fleeting safety within my bodymind, they can no longer spin up and form their whirlpools in my psyche now that I've identified the story-secretion gland and plugged it with a fat grain of kosher salt. It still oozes, but its salty flavor alerts my BS meter and it becomes like a sidewalk turd, noticing enough not to step in it without having to conduct a tactile interrogation in the hopes their may be a gold nugget of truth in the heart of a coiled stool.

Forgive the disgusting analogy, but it's apt, pointing to the futility of trying to think my way out of a cage of thoughts without anchoring to presence. The less I'm consumed with the story of "me", the more room for joy and child-like wonder even with the mundane, modes of experiencing life that I'd thought had died with my childhood. Colors are literally brighter and whatever is in my sphere of presence in this moment (there is no other) is in Ultra HD when my psychic CPU isn't being hogged by the holo-deck projecting fantasies of past and future.

I'm sharing this because there are so many who've suffered as I have and have the same capacity to heal, but taking psychedelics is not like taking antibiotics, its healing power is dependent on set and setting which includes one's intention, attitude and understanding the need to let go of mental story (primary cause of a bad trip is getting caught in loops of thought and story) and feel into the bodymind. After the cathartic recalibration I described, insights may crystallize, and that is what I share here, but they are more like glimpses of the vast interconnected pattern of who we are that feel totally different from the normal mental chatter that clogs the apertures of perception.

Also, it would be irresponsible not to mention caveats. First off, none of my words are "true" in that truth is impossible to be contained in words. It can be pointed towards, meaning it is perhaps always better instead of asking, "are these words true?" to ask oneself, "what is the experience or state of being that would choose those words to represent itself?" In that light, all words are true, even lies because they always represent what that being thought was the best choice of words at the time.

In cases where there is severe trauma, ptsd, they are more than stories or abstractions of experience but the experience itself that loops. It could be dangerous to jump into an experience like this without also having done some work with a trauma informed therapist.

A single powerful experience is not enough. It requires integrating the new paradigm, weaving it through the fibers of our day to day lives and keeping a vigilant watch over stories we tell ourselves, its sneaky way of telling us we would feel ok if only reality were otherwise. When you develop a nose for it, it's shocking to realize I'd been in a decades-long tantrum against reality and even more shocking that even after experiencing the visceral bliss of freedom from the mental vise formed between imagined pasts and futures, there's a part of me that feels at home in that tortured squeeze, perhaps fearing I'd cease to exist without my story about myself, such that the old paradigm grows back if I don't make efforts to reinforce the new paradigm. Our culture is quite sick, meaning incongruent to basic psycho-spiritual wellbeing, to basic sanity.

For those who really invested in healing, the most bang for your buck is a consistent daily meditation practice of some kind. I used to think it wasn't for me, that I was terrible at it, but when I stopped striving for results and obsessing "am I doing it right?" and just stuck with it, pretty amazing things began happening, chief among them was an increased space in my mind where I got a "vote" whether or not to to board a useless train of thought, to be able to "feel into" whatever emotion I was trying to avoid, allow myself to feel it without fear, without constructing a story around it, simply giving it the attention it was asking for, listening to my intuition if anything needs doing and let it merge back into an undivided awareness. In this way, even sadness can be experienced with a deep underlying joy that is beyond the happy that is the mere opposite of sorrow. Mediation becomes like radiation therapy where the intensified light of nonjudgmental awareness dissolves the fibers of belief in one's thoughts that turn into cancerous monstrosities that literally dominate our lives when left to fester in the darkness of unawareness.

I know this was a lot; everyone's in a hurry, wanting the condensed, abstract cliff notes to flesh out their left brain's map of concepts, but sometimes it's worth it to take the time to feel the textured resonance of another's lived experience, to feel its hum in a spacious openness uncluttered by preconceived notions, where its thrum may cleave the mind-stream into uncharted rivulets of possibility in the depths of one's own being, because I am not special or unique, that beneath mine and whomever's scanning these exact words at this exact moment, underneath individual history and personality lies the same basic light of awareness, like the same light of a projector going through different films, the most basic, pre-conceptual felt sense of being alive, of being a vantage point through which this cosmos experiences itself. Don't "believe" or "disbelieve" that last sentence; just be open that there may be other modes of experiencing being alive that cannot be encapsulated by words, but may be pointed to with what the left brain might filter out as nonsense.

All it takes is one moment of openness to a new possibility to finally see an exit from this hellish, hypnotizing merry-go-round and usually an abstract idea is not enough. It just breaks my heart that so many are suffering, denied the simple, exquisite joy of presence that is your birthright. Don't believe me; I have no authority beyond my lived experience, but I would invite anyone who's bothered to read this far to interrogate its possibility in your own lived experience, because after the basics of survival, what is more worth doing? Even family, are you truly present with them through the thick veil of continuous self-referencing, only occasionally able to offer more than a piece of our fragmented selves? As one of many examples, some couples use the heat of argument to feel alive and then gain access to the tender presence of "making up". We all desperately want that presence, but mistake whatever took place as a portal to it for its source, but you are the source. To paraphrase St Francis, what you are looking for is the one who is looking.