[art: Stanley Mouse]
I’m just young enough to have missed the first wave of psychadelic enthusiasms and just old enough to remain skeptical about the life-altering power of this or that particular concotion. I mean, all of those tripping teens I grew up with mostly settled into the bumpy ride of ordinary life with no exceptional spiritual resources—and every time another person waylays me in the grocery story to tell me they have “met the mother” on their latest trip, I put a few more root vegetables into my cart and smile as kindly as I can.
Life has always felt psychadelic to me. Extraordinary. Vibrating. Supernatural. As a child I could sit and stare out the window for hours, watching the leaves in the breeze, listening to the thrum of instects, all of it sensual ecstasy. I could get lost in a piece of music or spend hours coloring outside the lines. I felt the imminence of magic all around me. I knew the trees were speaking, the animals were wise, that beings beyond my ken gathered close. I also knew that to speak of any of this was to risk being labeled kooky at best and crazy at worst. I knew quickly that I had to hide most of what I was experiencing—the dreams that came true the next day, the synchronicities that felt like messages from the other side, the figures that showed up in my room just as I fell asleep. I had an over-active imagination I told myself and my job was to harness it and ride it. I wrote stories. I read fantasy. I studied how to be an ordinary girl—sit coms, magazines, sleepovers—so I could blend in and pass for normal.
A psychic friend of mine once told me that everyone is psychic, everyone can be in communication with the other side, but we are conditioned in our culture to override such perceptions. We learn to tune out our extrasensory perceptions, mistrust our intuitions and intimations, ignore our dreams, and surrender to the merciless aloneness of modern materialistic life. This psychic friend, Suzan Saxman, had to teach herself as a young child to tell the living and the dead apart. She took psychadelics as a teen because everyone was—and found the experience fairly banal.
Which doesn’t mean that mushrooms and plant medicine don’t have their uses. If they can help us remember our own psychic abilities, if they can bring us back into conversation with the “animate everything,” if they can help us perceive and partipate in the mystic wonders of everyday life, if they help us experience how radically un-alone we are, then they are true helpers. The cancer patient who can overcome their fear of death to enjoy their last days of life. The trauma survivor who is no longer caught in cycles of terror. The stuttering teen who recovers his voice while on mushrooms. Yet every one of these truly remarkable healings seems to be undermined by those who become so attached to the exceptionality of their psychadelic adventures—and the need to endless repeat them in regular ceremonies—that they actually become more and more distanced from the organic miracles of ordinary existence.
I teach any number of different classes on working with the dead but my goal is always the same—to help each person have a direct encounter with someone on the other side so their “belief-sphere” is transformed. When we experience the reality of the dead, the living come back to life, too. A student who is skeptical about this work is neverthless frustrated with her inablity to get a handyman to fix her broken door. Finally, she asks her grandfather who was a businessman and networker to lend a hand—and within an hour a friend of hers is telling her about a carpenter who can come over that afternoon to work on her house. The student is shaken, changed, awed. I’ve seen it again and again. Oh, she said, this is real. The dead are real. And if the dead are real, then everything is real. It is like that moment when Annie Sullivan holds Helen Keller’s hands under the water pump, spelling the word for water into her hand, and the child’s mind opens. Oh, she realizes, the whole world is still there. I am not alone.
All you have to do is find the courage and the inner worthiness to bring your needs to someone particular on the other side—and see what happens. Micro dose in the beginning. Small jobs, someone who’s passed that you know. Help me get a doctor’s appointment today. Help the test be normal. Help the solution be simple. Help the medicine work. Help the car to be fixable. The dead, too, will find ways to show you that they are there. They will give you dreams and visions, signs and wonders to empower your faith in them.
The more we trust the dead, the more attuned we become to their presence, the more they speak with us. On a trip to the doctor’s during a crisis the orderly has our grandmother’s name tattoed on his inner arm. We dream of someone on the other side—and an unexpected surprise answers our heartfelt prayers. A hawk comes and lands outside our window and stares in at us as we are writing this essay.
We don’t need to go somewhere else to experience these wonders—we don’t need to take a trip. They are right here. The dead are right here. All the dead are right here waiting to help us remember the language of trees and mountains, sparrows and stones. They want us to know that the whole world is nothing but healing and love, reunion and ecstasy and bliss—if we can open our senses again to all that is. So sure, do it with mushrooms or plants if you need to…but don’t think that is the only way to open your third eye. You can also lie in bed as I do every morning and call on the dead to show up for you eall day long…and get ready for a wild ride of a day.
Each day I take a heroic dose of the dead. I bring to them all of my worries and fears, all of my tight knots, my hopelessness, and my terror. And each day they show up and I am woven back into the fabric of existence. I have teams working on each of my books, teams for my children’s various prayers and needs, for my husband and my home, my pets and my car and my community. I meet someone on the other side and I immediately get them involved in my life. I don’t go away from my life to get inside it…I start right where I am and welcome the dead in and they make the ordinary, well, extraordinary.
I suppose I might go out to some mossy grove one day with my wise and centered son and take some mushrooms—but I suspect that like my psychic friend it will only tell me what I already know. Every stone is alive. Every drop of dew is alive and all those lives, all those souls, are woven together in love and blessing. What more do I need to know than that?
Capitalism has trained us to believe that something is missing from our lives and needs fixing. We need to buy a pill or a program to get the thing that will make us new and improved. This is the medicine that will fix everything. On Monday I was even feeling fomo about the totality of the eclipse, as I had been conditioned to, but the dead arranged for me to be alone at the shrine with a flock of starlings all of whom went silent as the eclipse began. What if we can access everything we need right where we are?
If you on that ayahuasca weekend, just remember that its purpose is to help you know what you already have available to you…that every soul on the other side is your mother and is waiting for you to call and ask for what you need. What do you need? Ask someone on the other side for help and get ready for the adventure. Let me know what happens.
You can find out more about my work with the dead at takebackthemagic.com To join in my monthly Zoom conversations about collaborations with the other side you can subscribe to my paid substack, which includes excerpts from my upcoming books as well.
As a square and a doctor and all of the control-freakiness that comes with that, I've always had a healthy apprehension about psychedelics. On the other hand, my ancestors and plants talk to me on a regular basis. My favorite tree conversations were when the red oak in our yard told me we would learn to be elders together and when Aspen told me that like we use their oxygen and they use our carbon dioxide, they transmute our fears into healing and we transmute theirs into action.
How often have I commented on your pieces, I love this so much? And I do this time as well. I came to psychedelics late - well in my 20s rather than teens. I realized right away they were tools, and not games. And I decided to learn as much as I could. I watched a Norway pine in my living room breathe. I knew I had amazing energy surging through my body that I could direct. I traveled on my life line, an experience that I really needed. And then, one day when the opportunity came to trip - shrooms or peyote (because you didn’t know if acid was cut with something) I realized I had learned all I needed to learn from them, and that was that.
I remember visiting the Chalice Well in Glastonbury with a friend. It was a cloudy day, and we stood in front of the two ancient Yew trees in the garden. And my friend said: “The trees are glowing! Do you see it too?”. And I said, “Yes. And they always glow! All the trees!”. She was a friend who would roll her eyes, so often, directed at me. But now she looked at the Yew trees in awe and didn’t say a word. Even now, and we are no longer friends, which is sad, she insists that I’m “crazy”. But she saw, and she felt it.
I recently had an experience “beyond the veil” whooshing to the energy body of a young man who had just died, the son of a friend. I’m not going into the details because it’s a long story. But during the whole experience, that I had never done before, not only did I know exactly what to do (like I’ve known all my life but just “forgot” somehow is how it felt), but I felt so protected. I literally had a legion of my dead around me, protecting me. They were just there. I did not ask because I had no clue - this was a new experience. I was doing this because a beloved I was talking on the phone with, asked me to join him sending love and care to our friends. I was not expecting such an amazing adventure, and neither was he, because he experienced it to a point, and then “saw” what I did and was really amazed. But for me, I just did what I knew to do, and my dead were there. It was awesome. And I’m still integrating it.