I grew up with ghost stories. My extremely left-brained dad spoke to us children of his own sighting from his crib of his grandfather who died suddenly and tragically, and who seemed to hang around as a cold spot on the stairs or the occasional appearance at the foot of a bed in the old family home in Dublin.
The story was firmly ensconced in family lore and my beloved Great-Uncle Bill corroborated the stories with his own experiences. Uncle Bill was a gentle man who repeated the stories with all the magic of a traditional campfire urban myth, swearing their veracity but with enough twinkle in his eye to protect us from real fear and save our dreams from descending into nightmares.
There was one further tale from Uncle Bill that stood out; it wasn’t long or detailed, but he maintained steadfastly that he had seen a banshee before the death of someone in the family. In Irish folklore the story goes that the banshee is a female spirit who appears, heralding the death of a family member, usually crying, wailing, keening or shrieking, and often combing her red hair. The scant details of the mythology certainly tallied with my Irish Uncle’s account, lending it enough credence to unsettle me as a child with a vivid imagination, a predilection for the spooky, and a propensity to overthink.
I’ve always loved to believe in the supernatural. As I grew into adulthood and followed an academic pathway into science and empiricism I lost the capacity to believe without throwing the doubt of cold fact on beautiful or tantalising stories of the unexplained. Coupled with my experiences of religion as a dour and dogmatic system of oppression and control through fear, it took me until recent years to embrace my instinctual belief in the magic of the universe and my strong conviction that the material world is far from ‘it’ as far as existence goes.
It has taken time for me to accept these beliefs for myself, let alone talk about them with anyone else; I think I feared sceptics would pour cold water on something I hold dear and I wasn’t strong enough in my conviction in the past to have my beliefs challenged without them becoming somehow tarnished for me. A lot of my deepening conviction has been a silent but unwavering process for me, unnoticed even by my conscious self, but I realise now it has never left me and it’s unshakeable, even in the face of the most strident denier.
This background mysticism has always been a part of myself and my heritage that I have liked. Life is so much more beautiful and meaningful to me when accompanied by things we can’t explain; it has always brought me hope and comfort, and it harms no one.
My experiences in life, especially those that touch on the esoteric, have led me down a path of self-development that embraces the unconventional as well as the traditional. Although not a conscious approach, I realise I have followed a path of cherry picking the aspects of conventional medicine and psychology that resonate for me and liberally sprinkling those with more experimental, and often inexplicable (at least to modern science) elements.
My interests too have grown to encompass more of my cultural heritage. As I have connected more with my Irish roots I’ve developed a strong appreciation for the way the language and culture developed through largely oral traditions, as well as a deep well of admiration for those who resisted the attempts of colonialism to extinguish the language and pre-Christian ritualism explained so beautifully in the mythology and folklore of the island. I adore how nature is venerated, celebrated and explained through a collection of archetypes and tales that paint a colourful and rich guide to living in tune with the land.
This meandering introduction is all to express how perfectly synchronistic it felt to me when the opportunity to experience a guided psychedelic journey presented itself to me. I’d long held a curiosity and interest in psychedelic therapy, but options are extremely limited in a country lacking the political, legal and spiritual infrastructure to support this. Despite having no prior experience with psychedelics I felt no hesitation in embarking on this experience, just a deep-rooted certainty that this was something I needed. I am certain my spirit guided me to this experience and this community at this time.
Intellectualisation of my life experiences no longer helped; understanding the why didn’t help me to feel any different and I had stopped feeling almost entirely. I think I probably couldn’t bear to feel so much in the face of so much unwelcome change with limited control, and irresolvable uncertainty, which basically sums up the last year of my life.
Despite being so overwhelmed I had resolved to learn to listen and lean in to my intuition; I knew it was there and speaking to me, but I had learned to shut it out, allowing my overactive brain to shut down my faith in myself and my ability to know what to do. Years of conditioning myself to listen only to my mind; something I have long known to be my best friend in terms of providing entertainment, company and diversion, but also my worst enemy, using those same traits to fill my thoughts with anxiety and a near-total absence of peace. I trusted that the universe was pushing me towards necessary change so I could connect with my purpose and live a more fulfilling life, but I was terrified by the process of it all and resentful at my lack of agency in initiating that change.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, at the start of my journey I really fought with my mind to let go, hand over the reins to something higher for a time; to get back into my feelings and instincts, and to listen to a different voice. But with the help of the medicine and gifted, incredible guides, eventually my mind did accept it, and I was able to enter fully into the most beautiful and profound experience of my life. To describe the full extent of the two journeys I undertook could fill an entire book, but I gained such peace, reconnected with my self deeply, felt and processed an ocean of grief, and am left with a deep, beautiful and unshakeable faith in the realms beyond this one.
I’d like to focus on the grief. I think on a level I knew that’s why I’d come to this experience. The rituals and traditions of grief even came up conversationally when I first discussed the concept of journeying with our guide. So much synchronicity couldn’t be explained away as coincidence. But I held a fear of going there.
For one of the most universal experiences, there’s so much fear of grief and so much reluctance to give in to it, perhaps because it’s usually the result of irrevocable loss, and if we can’t materially change that then there seems little would be gained from going through the pain of that in its entirety. I know how wrong that is now.
With help from our guides and the medicine, and with the support of the collective, I gave in to the grief in me, allowed it to swell and rage within me, allowed it to flood out of me in wracking sobs and seemingly endless tears, allowed it the space it needed to be felt. And I let it go. I felt held as I went through it; safe and loved. I gave no thought to how it seemed to anyone outside of me, and out it all came. Years of accumulated loss held in by the veneer of coping, the much-prized resilience our society talks so much about, was processed in one journey.
To say I felt drained afterward would be an understatement, but that righteous exhaustion you feel from doing the work. And the relief, the joy and the peace that stays with me after letting so much go feels just as boundless.
After my intense process, an intensely inward experience, I looked up at my fellow journeyers, each going through their own processes, much of it grief related, and in the corner of the room I saw a huddle of about five banshees.
Contrary to the accepted wisdom they were silent, a commanding presence of essentially faceless women all with long wavy hair in various shades of red. They swayed ethereally, leaning in towards the grieving group. I felt no fear but I recognised them for what they were on a deep level. I was able to watch them sending waves of support to draw out our grief which flowed and swirled as a dark river. I knew they were there to help and I felt a sense of gratitude and awe as they moved hypnotically, conducting the flow of outpoured grief and dissipating it.
I saw my own place in this orchestra of loss and felt a sense of my own purpose in helping others to grieve. It needs to be felt to be let go. We are a people who fight for our individuality and cling to the need for our own uniqueness, sometimes to the exclusion of the benefits of sharing our humanity as a species, forgetting that we are not alone. There is strength in community and the wisdom of the collective amplifies our own exponentially.
So, we come full circle. I think I understand myself a little better, and I like me a lot more. I found comfort in my vulnerability and the expansion of my worldview this has gifted me. I feel more connected to my roots and comforted by the idea that the stories of my childhood came to feature in this moment of epiphany in my adulthood, and I feel more connected to the group through sharing this experience. We have so much less to fear than we think and so much more to feel; I truly believe psychedelics are a gift from the planet to remind us of all of this, and one for which I will always be grateful.
crumpets & consciousness 