The first time someone said that sentence to me, quoting John Caputo, I had to actively work to keep my eyes from rolling. The esoteric silliness of it all was heightened by the fact that my friend said it with such a straight face.

You know how sometimes something can become so overly soaked in the world of academia, and then so hung out to dry on the lines of philosophy, that by time you bring it back in the house it has essentially lost all practical purposes?

That’s what it felt like. A fatuous phrase intended only to make the hearer sound simple and the speaker sound deep.

Fast forward seven years from that moment and one morning I’m working on a draft of chapter 4 from my book, The Shift, about how we might think about, talk about, and feel about God as we shift away from conservative Christianity and toward something more open/expansive/progressive. On page 62 I wrote these words:

You could also think of God as Event, which, bizarre though it may sound, best describes how I most often conceptualize God. To think of God as Event is to speak of that which calls us, summons us, and invites us forth. Thought of this way, God doesn’t exist; God insists… [for] God is not a separate object, a being to whom one can relate in a subject/object manner… God [is perhaps] like an insist-ing force that calls people in to action.

Ah the gift of eating crow. How often do we reject ideas so viciously at one stage in our life, only to then embrace them as our own later on down the road?

As I continue sharing about the first stage of my mushroom Journey I want to suggest that whatever the psilocybin was doing in and through me, it was a kind of “insist-ing” like force calling to me. As previously mentioned I call this first (of three) stage in my Journey “Invitation,” which I’d now like to say a bit more about.

To do that, consider Moana.

In one of the opening scenes we watch as toddler-Moana wobbles to the shore where the sea seems to beckon her.

Moana chooses to accept the invitation as the waves invite her deeper and deeper, enticing (rewarding?) her with beautiful shells along the way.

Until she’s fully immersed in the ocean itself.

What I’m saying is, I was baby Moana to psilocybin’s Ocean.

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Before proceeding with further attempts at describing my mushroom Journey to you,

I want to take a moment to create a framework for my four hour trip.

As I get in to more detail about my consciousness…

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What began as the stenciled pattern tiled across the ceiling, primarily occurring in one or two muted colors, suddenly burst into myriad colors and leapt off the ceiling.

Though it wasn’t the ceiling any longer. Not really. Because my eyes were now closed (with an eye-mask pulled down), and plus, the concept of “ceiling” was very much This Dimension, and I was sinking in to That One.

The patterns swelled into three dimensionality and zoomed toward me (or I toward them?). Then they all vanished. Or maybe I zoomed past… through… into them?

Next it appeared black all around me, as though I was in space. But not outer space (with stars and planets and such), more like, I don’t know, emptiness. A void. But again, as I mentioned earlier, this was not scary.

Then an explosion of  colors, increasing in vibrancy and variation, appeared all around me, forming in to patterns and shapes. Triangles appearing here. Strands of blinking rope lights twisting over there. Circles upon circles. Fractals swirling with mesmerizing predictability.

My mind scanned for an analogue of this visual experience, as though my consciousness in That Dimension needed some assurance of connection to This One. It finally settled on

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Five Words That Framed My Journey

Drifting, dancing, dissolving from This Dimension to That One.

I’m straddling the line between surface level awareness and a deeper sinking into the very heart of consciousness.

As the mushrooms slowly worked their magic throughout my body, I likewise moved further away from “living room, couch, Encinitas, Ryan, Michelle, train,” and toward, “darkness, lights, swirling colors, enveloping sound, heightened sensation.”

With the last vestiges of my This Dimension awareness, I suddenly noticed that Ryan was sitting next to me, up by my head as I lay on the couch, but then became overcome by a panic that Michelle was no longer nearby.

Immediately, without any thought, I uttered a question that not only were my final words before sinking completely into the psilocybin experience, but they also proved to be words that I would utter several more times throughout the four hour Journey. In fact, I can’t really explain it other than to tell you that as I said these five words it was as though I knew, somewhere deep in the core of my Being, that I would return to this question again and again.

As the words left my lips the air around them felt heavy with meaning.

You know those mattress commercials where an actor places their hand down on the mattress and as they pull away you see the imprint of their fingers slowly rise back up to the level of the surface? The weight of my question to Ryan created an impression in my heart space that would take four hours to release.

But before I tell you what that question was I need to give you some background on my life.

More specifically, on my childhood.

While this series isn’t technically about divorce (or the trauma I experienced as a child because of my parent’s divorce), in order to communicate how the mushrooms provided me healing I suppose I need to provide some picture of what it was I got healing from. Specifically, what it was like for me to grow up in a family whose parents hadn’t yet faced their own childhood trauma, which led to a tumultuous, chaotic, and painful separation, which caused the tearing apart not just of our family but utterly ruptured my adolescent sense of security and well being.

Memories of an Unstable Childhood

I couldn’t tell you what the first sign was, nor when it occurred, but when I try and reconstruct my childhood the mental scrapbook is littered with vague memories that mostly signaled to my young brain: all is not well in the Martin home.

I’m going to share just a few of those memories, presented here knowing that, as with all memories, they are a patchwork of images that mix together elements of what actually (probably?) occurred, swirled up with impressions of how those events made me feel, and caramelized by the various ways in which memories get built over decades of trying to both repress and access the past. As such, no memory of past events can ever be fully reliable in the sense of perfectly capturing what really, truly happened (aka, the fly-on-the-wall account), and this is doubly true for events that register as a kind of trauma.

A quick word on trauma. By “trauma” I mean something that happens to/in/around us that is beyond our capacity to handle or deal with. As a result, the event (or the memory, or the impression of the event) gets captured in our nervous system and stored as energy trapped in our body. This storing in our body renders us susceptible, later on in life, to having those traumatic experiences triggered or activated by, well, all manner of stimuli: people, places, sights, smells, sounds and so on.

When I talk about the trauma I experienced growing up, in part I am naming experiences and situations that happened where not only could I not process it as a kid, but I didn’t have the support I needed to help me navigate it. The following sketches of events that I “remember” happened probably sometime between the ages of seven and ten, but made a lasting impression on me. Since I couldn’t process them at the time they got stored in my body, in my nervous system, and I’ve been carrying them (and others like them) around for 30+ years.

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The first thing I notice is the slow dissolution of what I’ll call This Dimension.

By that I mean, the realm in which we normally live and move and have our being. The reality we experience with our five primary senses. Whereas That Dimension, the one I would soon be traveling to, operated at a different frequency. That Dimension is a place where my senses would be simultaneously utilized and irrelevant.

Moments before the mask dropped over my eyes, and while I was still remarking on the not-actually-there-but-still-totally-there pattern stenciled across the ceiling, you could say that I was still aware of, or in the consciousness of, this world.

• ceiling ✅

• Ryan ✅

• couch ✅

• blanket ✅

• pillow ✅

• daylight ✅

all normal, predictable objects in my visual and tactile field (weird shapes on the ceiling notwithstanding). I could hear the train blowing by. I knew Ryan was sitting near my head as I lay on the couch while Michelle was down near my feet. I felt the sensation of the blanket wrapped around me. All my senses were keenly aware of this dimension, the ordinary world around me.

But as soon as the mask went on and I closed my eyes, things began shifting. I was less confident of, well, everything. Was I really lying on a couch? Is that train real? I hear music playing, yes… but also, when did Ryan and Michelle invite a flutist to come sit in the kitchen and serenade us?!

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Mushrooms ingested and intentions set, Ryan and Michelle ushered me from the kitchen to the living room and had me sit on the edge of the couch where soon I’d depart to another dimension.

“We’re just gonna go over a few last things together before the mushroom kicks in,” Ryan said as he sat on an ottoman directly across from me.

On my left Michelle sat down and began unscrewing the cap on some tincture bottles. She explained they were essential oils she wanted to apply to certain pressure points on my body, as well as have me breath some in. The scents were pleasing, calming, grounding. She then mentioned that momentarily, as I would begin to enter my Journey, she’d perform some Reiki on me.

Prior to that morning I had very little appreciation for or “belief in” (you might say) woo-woo things such as oils, reiki, crystals, and so on. Mind you, I don’t judge those for whom these things provide a meaningful additive to their life, it’s just that for me, for my first forty years on this planet, they held, at best, little appeal, and, at worst, a kind of irrational fraudulence. Vaporous ideas engaged in by those who either can’t or won’t face reality as it is and instead would rather offload their sense of logic on to esoteric, pseudoscientific nonsense. (Okay, so maybe I did harbor some judgement? Oops. 😬)

What’s interesting is that, as I typed those last few sentences, I heard echoes of Karl Marx critiquing religion as the “opiate of the masses.” Perhaps my lifelong attachment to Christianity is different only in degree, and not as much in kind, from the world of crystals and oils and stars and so on. Which would make sense in terms of my clunky stumbling through a not-so opaque judgment and critique of others. Likely it’s nothing more than a projection of my own insecurities.

Regardless, let’s be honest here….

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After parking my car outside their house and shutting off the ignition, I took one last look at myself in the rearview mirror, shrugged, and opened the door.

Walking to the front door would not be my …

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Why am I seeking a psychedelic experience right now in my life?

Am I willing to do the work when things get difficult?

Am I willing to hear, tell, and feel the truth?

These are just a few of the two dozen questions Ryan sent to me for contemplation prior to my Journey. With only a few moments left before I was scheduled to arrive at Ryan and Michelle’s home, I scanned over some of my answers scrawled on the pages of my notebook.

As mentioned last week, I wrote these answers while in New York City on a sort of exploration of the question, “Do I still want to be a pastor?” During one of the afternoons there the organizers of the event blocked out several hours for attendees to create intentional time for reflection. I made my way down to the Meatpacking District with no particular destination in mind other than a place to sit, think, and work on some of the pre-mushroom questions I’d yet to reflect on.

As I turn south off W 20th St on to Lincoln Highway that runs the length of the Hudson River, I’m arrested by a captivating sight of concrete pillars jutting up from the river, neatly arranged in an undulating pattern. The funnel shaped pillars remind me of a marble game I used to play with my kids, where you’d build a tower of connected plastic colored ramps and tubes for the sake of dropping marbles in at the top and watching them drop, roll, and spin their way down to the bottom.

I learn this landmark is called Little Island, and on top of the concrete funnel shaped pillars is a stunning manmade island of grass and trees and flowers and hills. It’s remarkable, the way this arrangement of elements sits out on the water. Brimming with people walking about, I decide it is there, out on Little Island, where I’ll take a couple hours to sit with these soul intensive questions.

I’d like to share with you my responses to some of the questions that primed my heart, mind, and soul for my upcoming experience with mushrooms. I present them here with little to no editing so as to capture the essence of how I responded in the moment.

Why am I seeking a psychedelic experience right now in my life?

I’m about to turn 40. I feel like I’m less sure than I’ve ever been about what to do in and with my life. So much of my adulthood (all, actually) has been about being a pastor and working/serving the church. But so much is different for me now. Beliefs. Passions. Desires. Feelings. Plus, I feel a bit stuck with regards to some of my spiritual/emotional growth and transformation and I’m not convinced more talk therapy is the answer. Perhaps a psychedelic experience will not only jumpstart or assist with connection to God, but help me get/be in/find my self in my body.

What goals do I have?

Do something I’m afraid of (aka, not being in control).

Do something I’ve been curious about but haven’t believed “it’s for me” (is this religious baggage? Maybe).

Have an embodied experience.

Let go.

Trust another person.

Be okay with uncertainty.

Am I willing to do the work when things get difficult?

Although it can be hard for me to do things I don’t feel as though I can “win” or “excel at,” I’ve done hard things before (aka, therapy) so I know I can do it again.

Am I open to commit to something deeper than my comfort?

Having just done karaoke in Korea Town with strangers in NYC, I’d say the answer is yes :)

Am I willing to hear, tell, and feel the truth?

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The week before I did mushrooms I was in New York City attending a retreat for progressively minded Christian leaders.

Emotionally I was there because I felt lonely and wanted to be with friends and colleagues. And psychologically, well, I went with the intent to explore a question I’d never before seriously considered: “Do I still want to be a pastor?”

I’ve been working as a pastor in local church ministry for twenty years and, save for one small blip of time in 2011, never had I doubted the answer to that question. Since I was 17 years old I’ve known that I wanted to be a pastor.

Call it a calling,

call it God’s plan for my life,

call it a realization that it would be a profession uniquely designed for my particular set of skills…

the point is, I’ve never really questioned my vocation.

The one noted exception was back when I worked at The Grove, an evangelical megachurch outside Phoenix, and they fired me in 2011 because my theology had shifted to be affirming of LGBTQ people. Sure, for a couple months after that I wondered if I was still meant to be a pastor, but that was more a function of, will there be any churches out there ready and willing to hire me? (My world at that time was pretty small. Such a concern now seems quaint. There are lots of ministry opportunities for LGBTQ affirming pastors.)

In NYC, however, I legitimately sought clarity on my future. Did I want to keep being a pastor?

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Quickly reaching for my phone before it woke up Kate, I silence the alarm in the darkness of the early morning.

It’s 5:45am, May 31st, the day has finally come. Today I will trip to another dimension.

As I unplug my phone and roll out of bed I still can’t totally wrap my head around what I’m about to do.

Ryan wants me up at their place at 8am. They live about an hour away and I want time to stop somewhere for coffee.

“Don’t eat anything in the morning,” he told me. “Sometimes food can dull the impact of the mushrooms. But coffee is fine—just no cream or sugar.” Fine by me. I drink it black anyway.

I shower, brush my teeth, and apply all my normal morning facial serums, creams, and moisturizer. I go back and forth on whether or not to do my hair. I do it. Obviously. That wasn’t ever really a question, was it?

Before I went to bed last night I stared at my closet pondering what to wear. I wanted to be comfortable, but also, I still like to look good (see above note about doing my hair). I’m not sure how many people try and look their best before tripping on psychedelics, but I am who I am. Or at least, I was who I was. More on that, later.

I slip on my black skinny jeans and thread a gray and white belt through its loops. I like this belt, I think to myself. I got it primarily for golfing, but it’s become one of my go-to belts for most occasions. I cinch it tight, having no clue that in only a few hours this belt would become a bit character in my Journey. Again, more on that, later.

Quietly I make my way out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, and toward the front door. As I gather my keys and wallet Kate emerges from the bedroom. She saunters down the hallway and meets me at the front door.

“Have a good trip,” she whispers, pun intended, as I reach for the handle. I turn, she tips up on her toes and kisses my cheek.

“Thanks, babe. I sure hope to.”

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In the weeks following my breakfast with Ryan, I had all but settled the matter: I really wanted to have this experience.

However, even though most of the voices inside of me spoke in unison about my desire to move forward with exploring plant medicine with Ryan and Michelle, there was yet that part of me that (felt like it) needed external validation from people I respected.

A kind of permission slip, if you will, to try this crazy thing.

But if I’m being honest, the whole idea still sounded bonkers to me.

“Colby? Do mushrooms?!”

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Last week I wrote about some of the well documented benefits of using psilocybin in a therapeutic setting. So today, just to be thorough, I wanted to share the most common “risks.”

I put “risks” in quotes because, truly, they’re pretty limited. But, no discussion of something like psychedelics would be complete (or reputable) without naming the risks because there are risks. Of course there are. There’s risks with everything in life. Any casual viewing of television with ads will tell you that. We’ve all seen the commercials for drugs/medicines whose list of “potential side effects” go on for so many sentences that the voice over actor has to take multiple breaths! And anyone can find an article on the internet that links anything/everything to cancer.

My point is, it should’t surprise us that there are risks involved with psychedelic substances, and yet, all things considered, the risks are relatively low—in my opinion, anyway.

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Before meeting Ryan, learning about his work with plant medicine, and embarking on my own journey,

my knowledge of magic mushrooms was fairly limited.

Here’s about as much as I knew.

1. A buddy of mine had been experimenting with microdosing the past couple years. Microdosing, for the uninitiated, is the concept of taking smaller amounts of a substance (ie, micro doses, usually around .25 gram) that—in the case of mushrooms—is not enough to fully alter your consciousness, but perhaps just enough to nudge your mind toward more openness and awareness. The research on microdosing is still fairly limited, and the results are often imperceptible, but for some people it is a helpful tool for enhancing their mood, creativity, and ability to empathize with others. (Such enhancements might be, however, more a result of the expectancy effect than from the psilocybin itself.)

2. Another friend of mine had fairly recently experimented with about a gram of mushrooms—higher than micro, but not quite a full trip-dosage (which usually requires north of two grams). He offered a glowing report of his afternoon being delighted by nature, enraptured by small children, and overall experiencing a feeling of spaciousness and love. Albeit anecdotal, it nonetheless provided a close-to-home account of someone I knew and trusted’s experience.

3. My most significant touchpoint to psychedelics, though, came through my years of listening to the Pete Holmes’ podcast, You Made it Weird. Pete is a comic who’s podcast has served as friendly guide for me for the past ten years. Mirroring a lot of my own experiences, Pete was raised in fundamental Christianity, went through a period of shifting faith, and came out on the other side with a more open and expansive view of spirituality. But to the point, Pete has also shared openly over the years about his experiences with psychedelics, and he’s often had guests on to talk about it as well. Even though I don’t know Pete, hearing these kinds of conversations over the years has had a kind of normalizing effect, serving to demystify a lot of the stigma around substances like mushrooms. Rather than being this scary, foreign drug that only hippies and addicts dabble in, I’ve come to understand that mushrooms can (and have) served as a helpful resource for many people for many years get more in touch with themselves and with the kind of Source that seems to be in all and through all. Because of how much I’d come to trust and respect Pete over the years, hearing him tell tale of how mushrooms expanded his mind and opened his heart provided me a safety net that would, as it turns out, keep me grounded and not-freak-out once my own Journey began.

In addition to my own results (which, in due time, I’ll obviously share more about), since my Journey I’ve had my eyes open to the mounds of research (and it’s only growing) on the positive effects of psilocybin.

Here’s just a sampling…

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If you recall, last entry I wrote about one of the main reasons why I decided to do mushrooms last year. Today, I want to share with you the other reason.

My therapeutic process ached for a level-up.

I’ve been in and out of therapy for eight years and for the most part I cannot say enough good things about therapy in general and my own experiences in particular.

Wonderful therapists have sat across from me and walked me up to and through some of the most profound insights of my life. Prior to regular therapy, my awareness of and connection to my emotional landscape was paltry at best and utterly severed at worst. I’m a deeply emotional person—always have been—but until I started seeing a therapist trained in EFT (Emotional Focused Therapy) I simply was not able to access those emotions. Like the wind, they were there and causing all sorts of effects, but I struggled to ever see them or know them (let alone have the resources to do something about them).

So for years I have sat on a couch and opened myself up to the loving, non-judgmental, compassionate ears of therapists trained to walk me back home to myself.

It has been transformative in all manner of ways.

And yet…

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I introduced you to my guide for the Journey, former progressive pastor Ryan Meeks, and set the stage for how one breakfast with him would change my life forever. Today I continue to share more about why I chose to do this Journey.*

In order to take the leap and do something as mind-blowing as mushrooms I knew it had to be with someone I trusted.

Actually, to be more precise, the only reason I even considered doing something like this—when I’d never before done any kind of drug—was because first and foremost I trust Ryan implicitly. Which, as I’ll explain, was key to the whole thing.

Over the years Ryan and I had loosely kept in touch and even gotten together a few times since he moved just 45 minutes north of me. On that particular May morning I drove up to meet him because their family was preparing to move (again) and Ryan had stacks of books on progressive spirituality that he thought I might find interesting.

Though our interactions over the years were infrequent,  I loved spending time with Ryan. I always sensed a degree of authenticity buried at his core. No, that’s not right. Not buried… because that might suggest his authenticity was hard to find—and it most certainly was not. The guy is as genuine and true and honest as they come. So maybe it’s more like how Tony Stark has an Arc Reactor in his chest. In one sense, yes, it’s “buried” in there, but also it’s impossible to miss. It simultaneously animates Tony (giving him Iron Man powers), and it shines bright to any who are near.

Authenticity is Ryan’s animating core. Which helps explain why I’ve always felt so drawn to him. I’m an Enneagram Type Three, and most Threes crave authenticity because we find it so challenging to embody ourselves. When we see it in others we are both attracted to it (because we need it) and scared of it (because it puts in stark (😉) contrast just how in-authentic we ourselves can be).

I tell you all this about Ryan (about his history in ministry and his over-flowing authenticity) for a couple reasons.

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