My First (Very Underwhelming) Psilocybin Trip

When I first encountered psychedelics, I didn’t think they’d ever impact my life so immensely. 

I remember that day so vividly, I was in Mexico and was abstaining from alcohol after a series of unfortunate events that led me to feel so distanced from myself. My partner at the time was dabbling in microdosing and as someone who’s always been an experimenter, I knew I wanted to try it.

We split the chocolate up into the dosing squares as recommended on the box for a microdose and we went about our day. 

Looking back, I don’t think I would have allowed this to be my first experience with psilocybin, knowing the power it held, but nonetheless, this was my first journey. 

Everything felt more vivid and enhanced, the colors, the heat from the sun, and the joy I felt bubbling from deep within me, something I had forgotten about for quite some time. Yet still I felt disappointed that I didn’t have any big revelations. Missing a massive lesson that this was what life was about, but way too caught up in the societal narrative to see that.

Months passed and we dabbled a few more times with these squares, only ever taking a small dose and nothing more, just enough to enhance our experience and our joy, but never enough to dive in. I knew this was something I wanted to try, but I somehow knew I wasn’t quite ready.

Gut Intuition and Surrendering to the Unknown

As a fairly new San Diego resident with new friends, an opportunity arose to go deeper with psilocybin, doing what most people would call a rite of passage and journeying out to Joshua Tree for the weekend to dive into the unknown.

I was in a very interesting transition in my life, this was my last weekend before giving up my freedom as a ‘failed’ entrepreneur and going back to a full-time job for a mental health company that was focused on psychedelics. I didn’t realize the irony that was occurring at the time, I had just chalked it up to being in the right place at the right time and promised myself that if I did go back to a full-time job, it had to be for something I believed in. My motivator was mental health, but psychedelics found me.

That weekend I chose to journey into a world that I didn’t understand. Starting with a dose I had played with before, and slowly making my way into new territory. It was the first time my heart felt like it floated out of my body and connected with the earth. I stared at the clouds for so long they began to follow the same breathing pattern that my lungs were involuntarily expressing. Soon everything became alive.

By far the most impactful moment of the journey was the music. I closed my eyes and it took me far away from where I actually was. I let tears fall as it moved me, how much I was physically feeling just listening to songs that sounded like I was now a part of.

Psychedelics, Mental Health, and Getting to the Root of it All

The following Monday I started my new job for a virtual ketamine treatment company, as you may have guessed I also met with a clinician on our team and got my initial ketamine prescription. 

Sometimes I think that this was the moment I was reborn, I can only really remember life with this indicator: Before vs after psychedelics. 

I have always struggled with immense anxiety. When I was young it was hard for me to understand or explain what was happening, but as I got older, the symptoms became more severe and easier for me to blame for my problems. 

Anxiety turned to severe panic disorder, OCD, and other hard to manage episodes that swallowed me whole, leaving me as nothing but a shell of a human. Eventually slipping and falling into a depression so deep, I didn’t think I’d make it out alive. 

This depression was what ultimately pushed me to move across the country and start my life over, only to be faced with these same dark dreadful feelings. It ebbed and flowed and the only thing I could do was let it take me, fearing that it would get deeper and that I would eventually lose myself to my own mind. I couldn’t run from it, it followed me.

By far the hardest part of this to face was the joy that I knew I was capable of feeling yet couldn’t feel at all. As a deeply emotional person who could swing to both extremes of happy and sad, I felt like I could no longer reach my peak happiness, I only could dig myself deeper into the sadness. The deeper I got on one side, the less capable I was of climbing the other. 

Psychedelics returned me back to this feeling of joy. Showing me that I was the joy and the love on the most extreme level. Some of those first journeys were so hard to understand because it was just me as an entity of light radiating out of me, flowing into everything around me, showing me exactly how I could tap into these emotions and bring them back into my everyday life through careful integration.

20% Experience, 80% Integration

I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t enough to just have these massively mystical experiences, I actually had to incorporate these insights into my life. I was so determined to make this my new normal that integration became the biggest priority. I would sit on my bedroom floor on my meditation pillow day after day, sitting with myself, meditating on these feelings and letting myself feel all the pain that would come up until I could let it go. From this pillow, just sitting, sometimes in complete silence, I moved mountains.

I stuck with my ketamine treatments for 9 months before I felt something deep within me tell me I was ready for something more. Low-dose ketamine opened me up but I still felt a well of information was living within me that I wasn’t tapping into.

Ego Death & Connecting to My Purpose

For my 28th birthday I gifted myself a Bufo (5-MeO-DMT) ceremony. This is often referred to as the God molecule, the most potent psychedelic you can take. There were conditions to this journey that were very clear to me when the message came through. It had to be a solo adventure, it had to be local, and I had to surrender. I did very minimal research so as to not cloud my experience with expectations, but ego death was something that I kept reading. Though I didn’t expect this to happen to me, something deep within me felt like it might.

I still to this day can’t quite explain how I knew I needed this, it was an inner-knowing that was beyond me yet so deep within me.  

The psychedelic journey for me has been one that I’ve trusted my own gut on. No one forced me into it, it found me on its own and I know there was a much larger force at play here. 

I’m forever learning through every experience I have, opening up more and more to the idea that life is meant to be explored physically and spiritually and that I’m meant to use these experiences for good.

I have finally connected to the concept that I am meant to share this journey, and to use my talents to help others find these medicines to aid in their own healing and expand their consciousness. I’m meant to dive in deeper so I can continue to release and hold space for others to do the same.

My motivation still is mental health, but psychedelics have helped me understand that there’s more to life than just being mentally well. We are spiritual beings having a human experience after all, and connecting with our souls and the earth we get to play on everyday is the most important piece of the puzzle of feeling inner bliss and deep connection.

I am committed to being a forever student of these beautiful medicines gifted to us by our ancestors, to be an ally for anyone going through these journeys and uncovering their inner wisdom, and to honor the path of those before me and after me as we rewrite history and reclaim what is our greatest teacher: love.

Pioneering My Own Path in the Psychedelic Ecosystem

Today, I help psychedelic brands, practitioners and healers find and share their identity through intentional and empathetic branding and web design. I also soon will be a student to be of service as a therapist with the strong hope of being able to guide others through these deeply intentional experiences via psychedelics. 

I believe that our gifts are meant to be shared with the collective and that we all have something that contributes to the community we exist within. 

Truthfully, I want psychedelics to be more accessible and approachable so we can find more harmony and joy in daily life, making this world a kinder and gentler place to be a part of, learning how together, we can integrate our suffering to help us grow and evolve beyond it.

It’s no coincidence that this journey found me on 3 separate yet very connected occasions, and that my entire life changed because I surrendered to what psychedelics could teach me. Now I seek to help others expand their mental health practices and connect with more people.

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