Psychedelics

 

Practice is a lifelong endeavor. It is an inner pilgrimage of the soul.

 

…daily practice is the most essential ingredient in the alchemy of self-transformation-it reveals the answers to many of our questions and consistently invokes a movement towards positive change.

Gita Bechsgaard, The Gift of Consiousness

 

I was recently watching the new Netflix series “How to Change Your Mind” which is about psychedelics and their potential for opening us up to transcendent experiences.  In this series, Michael Pollan shows evidence that these drugs taken once or twice in a lifetime may provide profound and long-term healing from addictions, depression, and anxiety.  For cancer patients near death, one experience provided peace from the fear of death and even brought calm in knowing that death was a transformation into greater union with what is divine or immortal.  

  

The key to this healing and recovery comes through a dissolution of the egoic self.  People tripping on mushrooms describe a death of the self and then a rebirth into self that is connected to a great whole.  Yoga works in the same way.  Yoga brings us into states of profound calm, contentment, and transcendence by tuning down the egoic self and tuning up the soul, the part of ourselves that is connected to a greater whole.  But in yoga, this happens only over a long period of uninterrupted practice.  Yoga isn’t a one-shot deal like a mushroom trip. 

 

It took me a long time to establish a daily yoga practice.  I had taken classes for about fifteen years before I was able to start one.  But once I did, almost fifteen years ago, I have not stopped.  Maybe something had to ripen inside of me before I was ready to establish deeper roots into the practice.  Sometimes, things unfold in this way.  We long to be doing something for a long time before we can cross the threshold into the doing. It is a struggle between the ego which is afraid of failure and the soul longing to be manifested in the world.  For me, the process of failing to get to a daily practice was important work even if it felt for a long time that I wasn’t getting anywhere. 

 

Daily devoted yoga practice cultivates humility and surrender. Yoga is not something you do to reach an outward facing goal like getting in shape.  Then it wouldn’t be yoga.  It would be exercise or stress reduction.  To practice yoga, one is aiming the arrow of consciousness towards a union with the deepest innermost self.  The ego can’t get us there and in fact is an obstacle to this kind of union. This is because the ego is the part consciousness which gives us the experience of separateness. 

 

Each morning I practice to reestablish a connection to my innermost self.  To start the day without this connection would feel interiorly disorienting and fractured as if part of me were numb.  Connecting to the inner compass, I can set the course of the day towards balance, patience, awareness, clarity and calm.  All of these things along with the wonderful opening and spaciousness in the joints, muscles, organs, and bones.  And with a little less ego and little bit more faith, courage, and connection to my life source and oneness with all others. After another fifteen years of practice, ecstasy may be right around the corner.