crumpets & consciousness

After my first encounter on a shamanic dreaming journey; something awakened within me. A new awareness after my visit to the underworld; perhaps there are other worlds that exist within and beyond our consciousness. Perhaps there are gateways to other dimensions. Perhaps there is more to this existence than meets the eye. What a relief!

Following the earth shattering loss of a number of young family members all in the space of a few years I was carrying an emptiness. The grief was like a tidal wave but amongst friends and family, it always felt like it needed to be hidden. There was no safe space for my grief. It would sneak up on me and the emotion would express itself in wild ways. I was delicate, reactive, and fucking furious at seeing these beautiful beings of mine suffer. My evenings and weekends were spent numbing my loneliness with alcohol and drugs. 

Peering into another world gave me a feeling of hope, of possibility. Maybe this wasn’t the end for my loved ones, maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg and there was so much more I wanted to learn. 

I googled “shaman near me”, searched out my local practitioner and booked myself an extraction, a mesa reading and a soul retrieval. With little understanding or expectation of what it would be, pure curiosity spurring me on. 

The Mesa reading is something I’d not encountered before, and the practitioner told me that ahead of my arrival, she had “hollowed out” and channeled spirit for insights. The mesa that she had laid out for me was full of symbolic objects and as she talked me through each one and what they represent for me it became very clear that she knew an awful lot about me, my family and my internal family system. It was astoundingly accurate. Amongst other things she also told me I was meant to be a channel and that I was going to have a spiritual awakening very soon. 

“What on earth is a spiritual awakening?” I thought. I left the session feeling a little off, like I had exposed some part of myself. I was confused about all the information. At the time, I brushed it off and just thought, lets see what happens. 

A week or two later I had organised a weekend away for a friend’s birthday at a strange and unique venue; a converted medieval church owned by an artist. The perfect place for a maxi dose of mushrooms which I was armed with. 

After dinner we had some shrooms but they had no effect so we ended up raiding the leftover bags and munching them like sweets. I had no idea how many I’d had. As the night went on we were playing games, laughing, the room filled with psychedelic glitter and the medieval building pulsing with energy around us. Everyone had 6 eyes, everything was funny, hours of chatting passed.

At some stage later on, I remember feeling really unwell and had slumped down on the sofa like a blob fish. I couldn’t move and the stomach cramps were really bad. I probably needed the toilet but didn’t have the energy to get there. Everyone had gone outside to see the stars or play on the trampoline whilst I stayed indoors and melted, hoping for the pain to pass. 

The time alone had my head swirling. I started to feel like I was going to spew. I ran to the kitchen and vommed in the sink, all over the dishes. I’m not sure if anyone has ever puked whilst on psychedelics before but it was really weird. I was completely euphoric, feeling really lovely despite the cramps and vomiting. It was a really happy feeling, I was thrilled, but also confused because my vomit was made entirely of mushrooms with faces and arms and legs and they were running away from me and giving me the finger and this expression like “haha..nerner.. shouldn’t have eaten so many of us should you”. “Get back here you little pricks, I wanna talk to you”. I was fuming and laughing and vomiting. It was hilarious, exciting and disgusting, all at once. 

Alas, a relatively sober human came to my aid and got me cleaned up, shimmying me away from the sink that I had just decorated and was still talking to. 

I went into the garden like a small child letting their mum know “Hi guys, I did a sick!” I was so pleased with myself as the cramps had now gone. And as I looked around the garden all of the trees were looking back at me. In the darkness each leaf glowed with a strange symbolic fluorescent “aztec” pattern and the patterns moved like the leaves were faces peering this way and that to watch. The flint stone wall of the church pulsed and all the rock people showed me their faces. The stars hung down like curious angels, every one connected. It was beautiful. 

I wondered around the garden for a little while, but it was getting late and I was pretty tired after all the shenanigans so I decided to head to bed. It had been 6 or 7 hours since we took the shrooms but I was still tripping absolute balls so it was impossible to get to sleep.

I eventually managed to get myself tucked into bed, but still needed to wind down my mind. I started to meditate by just looking mindfully at my hands. As I focused on my hands something weird started to happen. 

I felt a rush of heat in the front of my brain and in my forehead and suddenly I didn’t recognise my own body. It was as if a third eye had opened in my forehead, like the alien who lived in my brain was finally able to see what it was driving. My own sense of self was completely gone and I was experiencing the world through the eyes of a brand new soul. But rather than feeling fear I looked at my hands with awe and wonder, marveling at the beauty and wonder of hands. Wow! How lucky am I, I didn’t think I was going to get to drive a human – sweet!

As I turned my hands and moved my fingers in front of my eyes, these beautiful energetic codes moved down my hands and through my fingers. I looked at my body, my arms and legs, my little feet and felt so much joy and gratitude for my exterior form. As someone who grew up as an awkward gorky child this was a brand new emotion and feeling. It felt alien. But so magical.

I had recently learned reiki and took this moment to do some self-healing on my heart. As I did so I imagined a construction site around my heart and an army of little beings getting to work tying up my inner wounds. I could literally feel my inner being get zipped up to new strength. I could feel a bubble start to form around me, a bubble of self love and I felt so powerful and untouchable. Like suddenly the world was my oyster and I could do anything. All it took was self love. None of my external circumstances had changed but suddenly I felt completely different about my future, my life, myself and everyone around me. I was so excited to start living without fear.

Something else completely remarkable changed too. My inner voice went completely silent and this lasted for months. My reality-perception became pure and perfect. Everything was clearer, colours were brighter and I had more energy. I was seeing rather than perceiving for the first time. I slept like a baby. As someone with ADHD and various depressive episodes the mental peace was wonderful. People noticed a change in me. I was happier, more focused, engaged in conversation, open, clear, excited and driven. The quiet in my mind lasted for three whole months. I could have made it last longer had I spent time raising my vibration with meditation and reiki. However I spent the three months engaging in my usual self-destructive behaviours and I also lived in fear of the voice coming back. I found myself constantly mentally shouting into the inner void. “Are you back yet?” It was weird, like I was paranoid my ego was going to sneak back up on me and yet I kept calling to it. Predictably it came back in. 

Even though the inner voice came back, I learnt the most valuable lesson of my life. The key to unlock all of your personal issues is self love. If you can love yourself with absolute purity, and see yourself as the truly marvellous human that you are, that everything about you is perfect and remarkable, you are your biggest supporter, you are your own favourite human, you are a precious and perfect being and that your opportunity is boundless. Nothing can touch you or harm you. You can form an impenetrable bubble of high vibration energy that radiates and is so beautiful. You can raise the vibration of others around you just by being you. You can let others hate feeling safe in the knowledge that they only fear your radiance because they cannot possibly understand it. Everyone’s feelings are their own, and yours only emit love and beauty. As someone who has always been consumed by the opinions of others, and fear of being disliked, this was the ultimate freedom.

But spiritual awakening is momentary, it’s a lesson. Life has its ups and downs so it’s not always love and beauty and freedom but I know better now how to manage in the darker times. It’s all about acts of self love. Even if I don’t feel like it, I act like it. Act like I love myself, treat my own energy with love and respect and gradually I start to feel things change. Failing that, support from my mushroom guides in a spiritual setting always gets me back on track.

The other valuable lesson I learned was that mushrooms are spiritual teachers. Although I had a life changing experience in a recreational setting, my spiritual awakening was as a result of meditating, putting effort into being present and I dam well put every ounce of faith into the power of mystical healing too. The soul retrieval opened a doorway for me. So it made me wonder what other doorways could open if I work with mushrooms and mysticism in a quiet space and with a pure intention. The journey continues..