Tea with the White Rabbit

 

Saturday was a trip day. 

I started out with 3.5 grams of White Rabbit mushrooms, given to me in powder dry form by my friend MycelialDawn. I made them into tea using lemon tek and then hot water. I did learn an important lesson: FRESH lemons. My lemons were old, and I didn't think to taste them beforehand; tasting afterward, the juice was low in acid, almost bland, and I think the pH affected the potency of the process. I think that it may have also been an issue storing the mushroom in dried powder form. Whatever it was, 3.5 grams gave me an intensity that I would have associated more with 1 or 1.5 grams; it was definitely a psilocybin trip, but the visuals were less intense and much less colorful than what I'm accustomed to with the 2.5 gram trips I've been taking, and definitely less than the 3.5 I was thinking was going to be "when you're in the mood for a little more." It reminds me of the song from A Chorus Line, "Dance Ten, Looks Three" - my overall experience was about a seven or an eight; the actual psilocybin part of it was about a three. 

I had decided that with this trip, my focus would be on integrating my physical and sexual energies. This has been an issue for me - I have been caught up in cycles of anxiety and depression for so long that my sex and touch have been weird and problematic. I've been withdrawn and solitary too much. I've always loved touching and being touched, and sex and the sensual sex energy are important in my life. When I am in a good emotional and mental place, it flows through me like a river and I feel happy, free, strong, and engaged; when things are difficult, it's stagnant, turbid, intermittent, and unsatisfying. It often feels more addictive and compulsive, and I have the same issue with food. I feel like parts of my sexual self have gotten the mental "icky" of depression energy stuck to them, and I've gotten into some habits of unhelpful thinking and being around sex that I'm working to unravel. Since rewiring my brain with psilocybin, I've had a renaissance in my sex life (ask me about this if you're curious: email me at mycelialpath@gmail.com - it has its own blog, which I'm not going to link to here) but there are some stuck habits that I still want to give some attention to. 

I started out with the eye mask and the Johns Hopkins playlist, like I have done the past couple of trips. After a while, underwhelmed with the visuals from the mushrooms and frankly a little bored, I decided to try looking for something different - a guided meditation. I knew that I wanted something focusing on Tantra, breathwork, Kundalini energy, and at least respectful of my gay orientation, and I was lucky and found this video. It's not perfect... I could use a little less narration about the percentages of breath you're supposed to put in various parts of your torso, his voice isn't the one in my dreams... but overall? It's awesome. I've had some experience before with the SOMA breathwork system, Niraj Naik's project combining insights from yogic pranayama and modern music festival sound baths, motivational speaking, and visualization - I've done the Daily Dose in the past; lately, I've been doing Wim Hof's breathing technique, which is differently focused, but amounts to much the same thing physiologically. Wim and Niraj have worked together, and that video of Wim's actually uses music mixed by Niraj, if I'm not mistaken. I had forgotten how much impact the Mula Bandha (the yogic root lock, squeezing the PC muscles at the base of the genitals) has on the whole experience. The sensation of moving the energy combined with the support from the psilocybin was SPECTACULAR. I will be doing this again, probably next week. I was trying to describe to my virtual trip-sitting friends in the computer how it felt, physically... 

 

If you can imagine your body being made into fondant, and the fondant then being mixed with gunpowder, or that magnesium stuff they make sparklers out of, and run through a sheeting press like for covering a cake, rolled out flat, and then during the breath hold the gunpowder being ignited and sparkling its way all the way up from your feet to your head where a whole lump of it explodes, it was kind of like that. 

So... yeah. The breathwork is hallucinogenic in its own right; there were sparkling rainbow visuals which were similar, but not quite like, the stuff that the psilocybin was giving me. They played well together. I'm not entirely clear on the mechanism, and this will be a good path for further reading; I've read a whole list of books about breathing, but I need to re-read some now that I'm considering it in the light of breathwork with my psychedelic experiences. I'll probably do a little annotated bibliography at some point. What a cursory Google says, is that the combination of hyperventilation and breath-holding triggers release of DMT from within the body, and has a number of other physiological impacts. One thing that I found helpful, based on prior experience with other teachers - I moved a lot. Some of the scripts will tell you to fully relax, to lie flat on your back or sit upright in a very still meditation posture, and they want the only motion to be the movement of the breath; others will instruct you to move as much as you want to -  rocking, writhing, moving your limbs, rolling through the chest and torso. I found this very helpful in making me feel like I was more connected, more sensual, and more engaged with the energy I was trying to move. 

As is usually the case, I had a lot of thoughts bubble up after the intense visual part of the trip had passed. I've learned to think of these as the thinking stage; it seems like it's an essential part of the trip for me, at least if I'm working with the trip therapeutically. One in particular that I want to preserve: 

One of my mushroom buddies has an unusual first name. When I'm tripping, I typically use speech-to-text to dictate my texts, because it's easier than typing. I CAN type while tripping, but my error rate is higher. I switch back to keyboard to type in his name, because I can't convince STT to learn it. 

Names and words matter immensely to me. It keeps trying to call you wrong things; regular words that sound like your name. I switch back and forth to keyed entry.

I was always fascinated as a youth and even now with magical fantasy where the true names of things had special powers.

If you haven't read a book by Patricia McKillip called The Forgotten beasts of Eld, and holy crap autocorrect got every word of that correct, it is a soul-shattering read. It's very short; it cut me to the quick long ago, and I still go back to it. It is almost more poetry than prose.

It's about a misunderstood weirdo who lives in a house all by herself, with mystical beasts from ancient legends. The writing is like jewels.

I was named Michael after my Dad's friend Mike Lind, who I followed for a long time on Facebook, but unfollowed because he is a conservative butthead. I found out just now on Facebook that he died in 2020. 

I still wonder if he and my dad have some almost gay moments buried in their long past. They had a lot of camping out together.

My dad got me a little printed legend thing which hung on my wall when I was a kid. It was brightly colored, and it was done in pretty calligraphy, and it said Michael is from the Hebrew Micha El, meaning "who is like God," he was one of the four archangels of the bible, the one with the flaming sword. This probably made me a little bit weirder.