5 Lessons I’ve Learned from My Relationship with Cannabis and Psilocybin

As a Type-A personality in recovery, control was my drug. Naturally, my preferred way of consuming weed was smoking it, because I could “control” how high I got.

With hesitation, I started exploring edibles. I’d convinced myself that this was the limit for me; that I’d venture no further into drugland, that the only time I’d even consider taking psychedelics was as an old woman on her death bed.

I’d fallen victim to anti-drug propaganda that demonized these healing plants. You know those stories of having to restrain a crazed person under the influence, limbs a-flailing, from jumping through a window? Those were seared into my brain. I’d prefer control over my mind, thank you very much.

But, in the haze of an early spring evening and under the influence of an edible (mind you, it wasn’t even the entire weed gummy, just half), I closed my eyes and saw a vision that would completely change the way I conceived of reality.

At the time, I thought I witnessed God, but I don’t think we’ll be able to witness the full power of God until this universe contracts unto itself (and even then, who knows what lies beyond?)

I can only better describe the vision as Now: the ever present moment, where past-present-future exists simultaneously — the Eternal Dance of Time.

As I’m writing, I feel like I’m just throwing words onto the wall haphazardly, hoping they’ll stick and coalesce into something that describes even a sliver of what I experienced, so I’ll cut my losses and end my description there.

In any case, a door had opened in my mind. I stepped through it, and came to the bittersweet realization that I could never go back to the way I used to be.

Mushrooms became the sentries on the next part of my journey.

And now, my relationship with both cannabis and psilocybin has shifted. I now view them as powerful tools in my spiritual arsenal and gateways to a larger consciousness.

Read on for the biggest lessons I’ve learned, or watch my YouTube video below.

1) Plants stimulate the inner healer

The power I need in order to heal already lives within me. Plant intelligence just helps me more easily access that innate power by breaking down walls of stories I’ve made up about myself and societal programming about how the world works.

For example, simple questions like “Why did I feel the need to censor myself in that moment with that specific person?” or “Why do I seek that person’s approval so much?” open up dams of relevant memories I had long forgotten. And within them I find a key to aid in my healing.

Your subconscious holds all the information you could ever want, and yet we only manage to tap into a trickle of its wellspring.

I guess you can say that the accusation of drugs “breaking/frying/melting/[insert grisly visual here] brains” has some sort of truth. But what I would counter is that in something broken lies an opportunity for repair.

In Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine, Tim Read writes: “This is one of the gifts of serious work in expanded states of consciousness: deep, sometimes subtle wounds can be healed.”

2) Ride the waves

While surrendering during any journey is crucial to a smooth trip, I can steer my boat, albeit gently, along the currents.

I give into closed-eye visuals if I want to play with my inner child. If I’m trying to be on my sage shit, I open up my running Google doc to capture the downloads that flow into me before they vanish.

But it’s a constant conversation and feedback mechanism. I’ve had mushrooms beckon me from an unseen corner, saying, almost as if it were a dare, “We have more to show you.” And I follow them eagerly. When uncomfortable truths about the world are beamed into me, however, I’ve told the weed, “Hmm this is interesting information, but I’m not ready to go down that path yet” and they relent.

3) You can guide the trip…until you can’t

Set, setting, and dosage are important for setting the tone for how I want a trip to go, but plants are going to show me what I need to see in that moment. They really do have a mind of their own and embarking on a journey signals a sense of surrender on my part.

Cannabis showed me the vision that changed my life off a relatively small dosage (5mg) of THC , which I chalk up to the belief that I needed to experience that exact thing at that exact moment for my soul’s continued evolution.

4) Psilocybin feels like primordial knowledge

With both plants I receive similar insights, but get there in different ways.

With mushrooms, I feel like I’m tapping into a primordial knowledge that predates most life in this world. As a result, the experience feels more earthy. It sometimes feels like I’m the mushroom growing in the dirt — that I am the dirt.

Overall, I feel pure love. I arrive to insight through pure feeling, whether it’s reliving past experiences or experiencing the feelings of others. I’m much more grounded in this earthly reality.

During one particularly emotional trip, I felt — and this is where words fail me because the sensation was so much bigger than feeling — the emotions of my parents. I felt — again, the limits of language — the stories and patterns and traumas they carried with them. And I felt like I could trace that feeling all the way back to the beginning of life on this earth if I wanted to.

Psilocybin works through feeling, a deep…experiencing (ARGH — WORDS!)

5) Cannabis feels like a higher dimension

Cannabis, however, feels out of this world.

It feels like I’m being lifted to a higher dimension where all the answers exist. I feel an overwhelming sense of oneness and tapped into the collective unconscious.

The best way I can describe it is that the Magic School Bus (really!) is flying me ever higher to a place where everyone’s just hanging out, and…well, chilling. I’m able to look at my life through a much more objective lens since I’m looking down on it, and am not actually in it.

Psilocybin speaks to me through love, cannabis speaks to me through oneness. These are not mutually exclusive, and I would even argue that they are one in the same. But that could make for an entire book 🙂

Either way, I believe that I need to tap into the energies of both psilocybin and cannabis and trust that they will give me the knowledge I need at different stages of my journey through this life.

Integration is crucial. I’m still working through the insights I gained through a psilocybin trip I took months ago. They’ve shown up unexpectedly during sessions with a therapist and when I do my own shadow work.

Tim Read reminds us: “An experience of this nature requires careful integration. The integration process has layer upon layer. There is low-hanging fruit that is easy to pick, but some of the fruit lies in the higher branches and one has to reach for it. This takes time and patience. It is probably inevitable that some of the integration process is challenging to our existing way of seeing the world and ourselves. But if done properly, I think it will generally reveal something of our shadow and birth a little more of ourselves into consciousness.”

Have a good trip, everyone 🙂