Life, Mushrooms, Frogs and Toads
My life so far (the relevant parts) & then mushrooms
I am providing the following background into my life as a preface for the psychedelic experiences I am going to blog about. My main aim here is to share with you the beneficial nature of these entheogens and how they can be used for spiritual and emotional healing, and potentially even physical healing.
I spent most of my early adult life without purpose or ambition. I had a decent enough career in IT, and led a comfortable lifestyle - a lot of money was spent on nights out - going over the top with drinking, mind-washed by my cultural indoctrination. I had formed a daily cannabis habit, and had a laissez-faire attitude to eating - I had quite an appetite and a love of rich and spicy foods. In spite of this I was never particularly fat, although did have a bit of a beer belly - I would often eat beyond my means - I was addicted to the taste of things. I had massive social anxiety issues as a result of having been bullied regularly at school. I hated myself for not being good enough. The alcohol and cannabis provided an escape as well as justification to carry on the way I was, but in hindsight I was only making things worse. Around 2002 (21 years old) I picked up a bacterial infection - the state of my immune system was dreadful - I was always picking up colds that I would suffer from horrendously, and they would last for over a month sometimes. Taking the prescribed antibiotics for the infection upset the balance of the microbiome in my gut and I subsequently developed an inflammatory bowel condition. This later led to a major systemic inflammation issue, where the skin around my face began to dry, crack-up and bleed - it was like an extreme case of dandruff, but on my face rather than my scalp. To cut a long story short, my doctor’s solution of “putting cream on your face for the rest of your life” didn’t wash with me and I began to look for alternative solutions. This began a long journey of health discovery, culminating in me studying for and obtaining a diploma in Nutritional Therapy which I completed in 2016. I have had a huge interest in alternative healing methods ever since this event.
The anxiety in my mind persisted until the age of 27 or so (2008) when I remember one day this background humming sound in my head I had come to normalise completely stopped, and I realised this was what it was like to be normal, as such. I had been developing an interest in Spirituality, improving my diet, and reading personal development books such as The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which helped me considerably.
I never managed to completely sort out my inflammatory bowel - symptoms at the beginning of this year were still there, albeit completely diminished thanks to diet and less self-abuse. I have made several attempts over the last few years to go on diet protocols to allow my gut to heal and remove the inflammation completely, but ultimately, things have never quite worked out.
Lovelessness
15 years of social anxiety wreaked havoc on my love life. During this stage I couldn’t even talk to any stranger without my voice breaking up, without thinking they must hate me before I’d even engaged them. Asking women out was unimaginable. Bouts of drunken “emotionless intimacy” here and there perpetuated my own self-loathing. Alcohol would take this to exponential magnitudes.
The day that humming of fear stopped, I knew I had turned a page, and yet lovelessness abated. I had somehow been rejecting love and love had been rejecting me. A past-life regression I had around 2011 revealed that I had been cheated on by my wife. Having been forced to work at sea as a sailor in the 18th century, I had escaped to a beach and hidden in a cave. I was slain with a sword for desertion - taking this feeling with me to the grave, carrying the karma forth. I was very skeptical about this story at the time. It felt as though I had just made it all up - but the more time passed, the more it began to fit in with my soul’s story as I began to discover it more.
I had built a wall around my pride and around my heart over all of this - it was something I never wanted people to know about me. The wall began to be built in my teens and early 20s, at that age when our peers are all calling one another out for not fitting in or not being “normal”. I would be in a complete state of fear that my issue wouldn’t be brought up and called out in a room full of people due to my constant anxiety. My peers were not really friends, but I had to pretend that they were for my own sanity.
This is the main reason I continued to indulge in the constant escapism that I did.
Mushrooms
I had many mushroom experiences over the course of 3 years or so - every trip was different and had its own unique properties. Regrettably, I failed to write about many of my experiences following each journey. So what I have written below is more of a summary of those experiences..
In Summer 2014 i had been away on a stag party to Amsterdam, and decided to slyly bring a few magic truffles home with me. I had indulged in a few while over there, having consumed both psychedelic truffles and mushrooms at various stages throughout my life, but mostly in groups with other people leading, and mostly within a recreational context.
I took the truffles at home with a friend, but had some food with them and they ended up not working to the extent that they should have. I ended up buying some more mushrooms but took a lower dose. I began to take mushrooms on as a new form of escapism - a new alternative to alcohol and cannabis. However, the more I experimented, the more I realised that mushrooms were more of a spiritual medicine than a recreational drug. The psilocybin comforted me, it helped me think things through and made me feel good about myself again. Every 6 to 8 weeks or so, I would set aside a day and indulge in another 6 hour trip to wonderland, usually on my own. I preferred tripping on my own. In spite of me getting over a large part of my anxiety, a residual part of it still remained. I had always been bothered about being judged by others (probably because I judged others in the same way - a projection of sorts!) - what other people thought of me, and self image. So I preferred not to be witnessed in a mind-altered state and just allowed to do my own thing.
By this point I had tried a couple of 5 gram doses and had had some amazing experiences. About a year into the 3 year experimentation process, I discovered that bringing cannabis into the equation on top of the psilocybin, brought me into an all new state of consciousness. This was in spite of the mushroom dose - even 2 grams would be sufficient. I had feelings of immense cerebral euphoria and a feeling of omnipotent power. Coincidences and happenstance would occur instantaneously. I remember thinking that this was the law of attraction, but it just happened more quickly in higher states of consciousness. An example of this was when I had been made redundant from my job, and in my mind I was looking for answers as to where I was headed in life. My favourite peaking music album was and still is to this day Nothing Lasts but Nothing is Lost by Shpongle. It has lots of tribal drum music, talking in tongues and psychedelic overtones. Every track bleeds seamlessly into the next and most importantly, it has many Terence McKenna quotes! As I lay there, comforted by the Psilocyn coursing through my brain, asking questions of my life, along came one such quote from Terence at that precise moment: “Nothing is wrong, nothing is wrong. Everything is on track”.
I repeated the mixing of mushrooms and cannabis for a number of subsequent trips. I even started to have some deeply spiritual experiences, with some removal of bad energies, accompanied by noise, spitting and vomiting as I purged it all out.
As time went on I began to get more tolerant to the mushrooms to the point I would need to take the cannabis with them because they were not doing very much on their own.
Around the Autumn of 2017 the trips began to turn on me slightly. I made the mistake of wondering how negative thinking could affect me - and it did for every trip afterwards where I brought cannabis into the arrangement. It felt as if my mind was being taken over by a foreign entity, hellbent on hijacking my mind to create the kind of outcomes that it wanted, not what I wanted. I would be fine on mushrooms alone, but as I have said,I had become so tolerant at this stage that 5 grams was barely doing anything for me. I felt disappointed that I had essentially ruined something I took great pleasure in. I had made a lot of spiritual progress - my intuition and insight had increased massively - this is a great help to someone working with natural health in ascertaining the path to send somebody down with their own healing. But thinking about it, my disappointment could only mean one thing - that I had once again begun to treat this as just another form of escapism. I had made some progress but essentially I was still at square one. I hadn’t dealt with any of my problems. In fact I hadn’t really even established what my problems actually were - I was just suffering the consequences of them. Having the gift of hindsight and being able to compare these experiences with Ayahuasca, mushrooms seem to be more of a riddle, relative to the more straightforward answers given by Ayahuasca. It is also quite interesting that Ayahuasca journeys seem much easier to recall the following day, whereas mushroom experiences need to be written down almost immediately after the trip, if anything is to be remembered.
A New Year - Kambo and Bufo
I began 2018 with the ambition of “sorting my fucking life out”, finding myself single at 36, my closest friends living too far away for convenience and having their own families and/or agendas, I was feeling pretty alone - not depressed or anything like that - I have my ambitions and a purpose to life, but I just found myself in constant escapism - every day on returning from work I would get stoned with a big bag of vape as a way of forgetting all the bullshit of the day and my own life situation. I had been consuming weed almost daily for about 18 years - there was some time off here and there, but it was mostly every day. It was comforting and relaxing - like taking my mind to the beach, away from the hustle and bustle of the busy, polluted city. Fridays would usually involve a couple of lunchtime beers. To be fair, I had cut down vastly on alcohol and cannabis. I knew that I had to - 10 years ago it was 7 joints per night (smoked with commercial rolling tobacco), and maybe a few beers several times a week - double all that at the weekend! I gave up tobacco in 2013 but I struggled to give up the weed - I could go a day without, but there was always that longing.
One evening after work (stoned again!) I was mindlessly browsing Facebollox, when I stumbled upon an event hosted by an Ayahuasca organisation that hosted retreats in Europe. Ayahuasca had been on my radar for 6 or 7 years, but this was about something else. I read into the retreat they were holding - involving the venom from a tree frog - Kambo which is not psychedelic, but was said to have healing properties beyond the physical. Every part of my intuition sang to me saying Yes Yes Yes. I watched a lot of YouTube videos on the topic - the Kambo essentially flushes out the lymphatic system and cleanses the liver, but can also remove emotional and spiritual blocks too. I booked.
The retreat was just what I wanted. The Kambo was very therapeutic.. We had to drink around 1.5 litres of water prior to the treatment. They have to apply burns to the skin and put the venom on the burns. This is so that the venom only enters the lymphatic system, as it would be poisonous to enter via the circulatory system. As it began to take effect, my head felt full, like it was at a high pressure - I remember thinking it felt similar to Amyl Nitrate - something I had tried a few times back in my fuck-up days. I began to shake, and my muscles tightened, making it impossible to clench my fists. More water was required to be drunk during this process. Other participants struggled with this, but it was easy enough for me for some reason. Bouts of nausea then started to be felt and then the bucket on my lap began to get its first utilisation. The vomit contained water inhabited by a thick bile-like substance of sometimes white and sometimes yellow colour - this was a good sign of the liver being cleansed.
This was repeated another 2 times to complete the 3 day “Kambo Vaccine” when it is claimed that the immune system is primed to resist a large number of microbial infections from that day onward. Each day a larger number of dots (skin burns to apply the venom to) were applied. I had a total of 19 dots. The second day was the hardest - I don’t know why - but all in all I managed to cope fairly easily with this process.
Bufo Alvarius
At the beginning of the retreat I was offered “Bufo”. I didn’t know what this was other than a vague recollection of a bin-aural beats album I had had on an old phone. The album was called “i-doser” and consisted of brain-wave entrainment tracks supposed to mimic the effects of certain recreational drugs when listened to. One such track was called “Bufo toad”, and I had done a little research on what it was. I knew that it contains a substance called 5-MEO-DMT, but thought it was pretty much the same as DMT. That turned out to be wrong! I said yes and had some on the second day.
I sat up on the bed with a crash zone behind me as the facilitator explained what was going to happen. I was told not to fight anything I was feeling, and that the best policy was to simply let go, to surrender. The other participants sat down in front of me to “support”. I didn’t realise there would be an audience and my first thoughts went back to the reasons I tripped on mushrooms alone. I put this to the back of my mind, knowing there was nothing I could do about it anyway. After all, I needed to surrender!
I heeded the advice and then took the consumption instructions upon me. It was to be smoked in a glass crucible pipe. I was to take a deep breath in, a deep breath out, and then the substance would be heated in the pipe with a lighter. As this occurred my next deep breath in would be to inhale as much of the smoke as possible with a sharp breath in at the end, and to hold the smoke in my lungs for as long as possible. I duly obliged.
I remember seeing a purple background with fast psychedelic shapes. It began like a mushroom trip at 100 miles per hour. There was a tone that intensified as the visuals sped up in tandem with the imagery. As things sped up I couldn’t help but have a small amount of fear as complete ego loss approached and then arrived. I was still me in terms of consciousness, but I was not a living breathing human being on earth who identified with anything anymore. If I were religious I would describe the next part as if I were sitting before God bathing in his energy. Since I am not (notice I did not captalise the last pronoun!), I recognise God as Infinity. He or it is not an almighty bearded man in the clouds playing a harp and casting judgement on us all, but rather infinity. Everything there is, was and will be with every potential possibility. I then became God, became infinity. Shortly after this I had sat up suddenly and was back in the room, coughing erratically and bewildered at the faces looking back at me. Oh yeah, I remember this - this thing called reality. I had completely forgotten myself, and now I was this human being again, with an identity. But something had definitely changed. The facilitator said “Welcome to your new life”. I later thanked him for that as it was a nice touch. For the next 20 minutes or so, I found myself in a perfect state of wonderful bliss. It was like a strong MDMA experience but better; cleaner. I stared at the opposite wall which had big letters mounted to it reading “Joy, Peace, Home”, one word beneath the other. I had already noticed those words before, but this time it felt as though they had been put there just for me, just for this very moment. I tried to explain my experience to the others, but I was still not completely back in reality, and I was struggling to remember it all anyway. I decided it would be better to talk about it later!
When I traveled home from the retreat it would have been common practice for me to get home and get stoned as soon as I got through the door, especially after several days of abstinence. I had actually taken something to the retreat with me as an emergency but didn’t use it. I had gone with the intention of cutting down. I did not think that stopping completely was even an option. As it happened, I got home and just didn’t bother. Oddly it didn't even require any will-power.
I continued with this process and the physiological changes of denying my body the cannabinoids it had been in abundance with for the previous 18 years began to take its toll over the next few weeks. I got stressed out a lot more easily. It was more difficult to get to sleep at night, and I was regularly waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning, sometimes able to get back to sleep, and sometimes not. In spite of this, I was not once tempted to get back on the weed. There is still some sitting in my kitchen cupboard today, untouched since February 22nd. The changes have since resolved themselves, and I am more “normal” again. I am now getting more things done - I can learn more things that I need to without forgetting them straight away!
Having just had a bit of a liver cleanse, it didn’t seem right to begin drinking again either - not immediately, anyway. I had given up alcohol a few times before out of respect for my health, for a month, sometimes 2 months at a time. On those occasions, I was always counting down until the day I could drink again, ensuring I went to the pub and watched others drink as a test of my resolve. In reality, I was watching their drinks enviously. But now it was different. Again, no will-power was required.
I also gave up Facebollox (with no withdrawal effects!) - I realised what I had suspected for a while - how unhealthy it is for my mind, and probably everybody elses too!
At the time of writing, I am a little over 3 months without cannabis or alcohol. I am hoping to reach 6 months - in August when it is my birthday. I have promised myself a beer and a joint, but have also promised myself that it will be a much rarer occurrence following this - I do not want to fall back onto the bandwagon of psychological addiction again, and besides, this will save me a cool £3,000 per annum - money that can be invested into other areas.
Anyone for Ayahuasca? :D
To be continued...