Hallucinations on the Ceiling: The Magic Begins

Part 12 in my series, "My Mushroom Journey to Healed Trauma, Less Shame, and More Love"

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….