Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.2
Here's a deep dive on what a psychedelic retreat did for me, and what it was like
Whole Blog Series
Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.1 - This blog post was about the background of psychedelics in America and why I’m calling it a renaissance.
Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.2 - This is my “trip report” where I go into great detail about my personal experiences and benefits.
Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.3 - What makes Ceremonia special? Who should go? Why? How do you prepare?
“It scares the hell out of me every time!” ~ Terence McKenna
Why I wanted to go
I won’t bore you with the details and a long-winded poor-me diatribe. But, suffice to say, I was in bad shape. Repeated burnout from toxic workplaces, entrepreneurial efforts, a previous failed marriage… you know, typical Millennial burnout. I swear, the more I connect with my audience, the more I feel like my life is just a caricature of all the Millennial stereotypes.
So, in a word, I wanted to go because of burnout. Enough said, really.
Now, I’ll give you a bit of structure to understand that the Ceremonia retreat is not just a one-and-done kinda thing. At some retreats, you just show up, they do some music and welcoming rituals, you do some drugs, and then you pack up and leave. At Ceremonia, it goes something like this:
Weeks ahead, Prep work: In the weeks leading up to the retreat, there are books and workshops you can engage with, as well as some other prep material. At a minimum there’s a book you’re supposed to read (Letting Go by David Hawkins) and I only did about half that. Also, there’s a WhatsApp group created just for your cohort so you can start to meet people, plus there are a few getting-to-know-you Zoom dates.
Day 1, Arrival: We all started rolling in around 4PM as the retreat venue was being cleaned up and prepped for us. Introductions, unpacking, the typical stuff. We sit around for dinner, talking, and we also do a microdose ritual.
Day 2, Workshops, then Ceremony 1: I was surprised at how jam-packed the retreat was with workshops, such as Circling. Then, we had the first ceremony the second night.
Day 3, more Workshops, Ceremony 2: Day 3 was much the same as day two, at least when viewed from 30,000 feet. The ceremonies themselves were rather different (see below).
Day 4, Workshops, Rest: More circling, workshops, and a break from psychedelic ceremonies.
Day 5, Morning Ceremony, Workshops: We started the psychedelics bright and early on the last full day.
Day 6, Workshops, Departure: Unfortunately, my wife and I had a snafu with our plane tickets so we had to leave rather early on the last day, and missed all the workshops
Weeks after, Integration: On top of the prep work leading up to the ritual, there are also ongoing integration services going on, with daily check-ins for the first week or so after we left. This critical for cementing in changes.
How I feel now
As I’m writing this, I’ve only been home from the retreat for about 72 hours, though it feels like several weeks. But rather than burying the lead, I want to just capture for you how much better I feel, so that you have some context as to why I put myself through the experience.
In order of significance:
At peace in my body. I feel so much physically lighter while also being grounded in my body. You know those rare occasions when your body just feels good? Like after that first glass of wine? It’s not quite that euphoric, but it’s almost all day, and I can easily get it back simply by settling down and checking in with my body. A big reason that I wanted to do go was burnout, which meant that I was pretty much constantly tired and often in pain. All that is gone, or at least, the affective impact is different. For instance, I still get headaches from time to time, but my relationship with pain is different. Like, it’s unpleasant, but it doesn’t become all-encompassing and oppressive. I can also get up and dance and feel good doing so the instant I hear a good beat. This will sound a bit woo-woo, but I am far more in touch with my body’s energy. I don’t necessarily mean like magical Force energy (though I’m open to the possibility), but rather I can feel if my energy is slow, fast, stuck, agitated, and moreover, I can intuit what my energy and my body needs.
I am suddenly sleeping much better. One of the greatest cruelties of burnout is that it destroys your sleep. The one thing that you need most to recover from burnout is good sleep. But now, with very little effort, I’m sleeping through the night, regularly getting 8+ hours. With any luck, insomnia is now a thing of the past for me, and I’m back to the version of myself from 2014 when I could just… sleep… get up… do stuff all day\… and repeat. So far so good! My eyes feel lighter, instead of feeling like they are constantly heavy and want to just close. I’ve had a few midnight awakenings since returning home from the retreat, but finger crossed, I’ve been able to fall back asleep in a reasonable amount of time every time.
I am far more physically resilient. On top of being fully (or nearly fully) in tune with my body, I feel like the world is just easier to move through. For instance, I wanted to go shopping for new light dance clothing with my wife and we went to a nearby town in 95°F weather, and I was dressed in jeans, and I felt fine. We walked around, out in the direct sun, from store to store for about an hour. I don’t think I’ve been this thermally resilient in my entire life, but it actually felt good for a while. We went for a walk in the sweltering heat the following day, a good 3 to 4 miles, when the air was still and oppressive in the midday sun, and while I did pass out on the couch for a while after, it felt great to be out. I actively enjoy the heat now. Just this morning, as I’m writing this, I went bouldering (a form of rock climbing) first thing in the morning, did some work, then went for a walk in the woods in the summer heat with my wife again. (Editor Dave here: I’m polishing this draft a full day later, and last night we went dancing in the evening, and it did not drop below 91° the entire evening we were out dancing in the park, it actually felt too cool when the wind blew at times)
I am hyper-conscious of emotional impacts, and able to move them. This may be harder to explain. Here’s an example: I got in the car to run some errands and I fired up my cyberpunk music playlist. I listened for a bit but then a tiny voice in my head asked “How is this making me feel? Is this how I would choose to feel? What else might I listen to?” and it just occurred to me all at once: I would rather listen to something lighter and more spiritual. New habit, new pattern. I’ve had almost no impulse to look at porn, news, Reddit, or any social media, with the exception of a few interesting people on Twitter. Beyond that, I’ve had very little screen time. I tried playing some video games, but after a few minutes, I just switched it off. Instead, I felt totally at peace doing dishes, laundry, cooking, cleaning, doing errands, and other useful, productive, or feel-good things.
If my life were an Amazon rating, I would say it was about a 1.5/5 before the retreat, and today it’s solidly a 4/5. Not bad. I am hoping that I’m now on a trajectory for full burnout recovery, and that I can get back to how I felt in 2014 when I ran the Tough Mudder with a hangover.
Ceremony 1
Rather than recount the entire retreat in excruciating detail, I’ll just focus on the juicy parts in this blog post. I will characterize what (I think) made the retreat so powerful and impactful in part 3 of this blog series, what I did leading up to it, and the structure of the retreat. I’ll talk about what to look for and what to avoid, green flags and red flags. I will also share some advice and wisdom for anyone interested in retreats, particularly those who host or facilitate psychedelic ceremonies or sessions might find interesting.
Anyways, the first ceremony was the second night we were there, and it was based on the Golden Teacher strain of mushrooms. My stated intention for this first ceremony was “integration” in the Jungian sense.
Don’t forget about me…
The “come up” was hard, as it often is for me. For the uninitiated, the “come up” is the period between taking the psychedelics and “breaking through” into the good part of the trip. It’s often disorienting, exhausting, and sometimes sickening. I tried to throw up but nothing came out. However, as I settled into the journey and broke through, I had a vision and heard a question. It was all still a bit visually muddled, but the question was loud and clear.
Why do you choose to be sick?
I replied that I wasn’t choosing to be sick, but then I saw a much younger version of myself, about 7 years old I think, that said: “Don’t forget about me.”
And for the next (what felt like) hour or so, I was back in my mom’s apartment that she got after she left my dad. I was in the bunk bed, looking at the map of the world she’d put just over, so I could trace the countries and routes as I was going to sleep. I saw the glowing plastic moons and planets she’d put on the ceiling, because I so loved space. I remembered all the LEGO she got me. And then it hit me: my mom loved me so much. I was the absolute center of her world. For some background, I was thoroughly cut off from feeling loved by my parents because of the trauma of their divorce. I was an extremely sensitive kid and basically had zero support. I actually still don’t remember first and second grade, though I have plenty of memories from before their divorce.
And I just basked in that love for what felt like hours. I was able to reconnect to what my mom felt for me, even twenty four years after she died.
After that I had a “moment of clarity”—a phenomenon where you snap out of the dreamlike state of psychedelics and sort of crash back into your body and return to the real world. My legs were twitching and convulsing, and I was breathing deeply, almost heaving (like you’re about to cry or just ran really hard) and I was crying intensely, and then I reconnected with that young, tiny version of myself. I was beckoning to him, “Come with me!” It was like a dramatic moment from a movie when two people are reaching for each other in slow motion, but it was adult me now, at 38, reaching for the 7 year old me, frozen back in time, still in that apartment by himself.
Little-me asked “Are you sure?” And I remembered how lonely I was, how no one cared to show any interest in the things I built back then, my LEGO, my nerdy interests. And then I reminded that little version of me that everyone wants to see what I build today. I have over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube and thousands of forks on my GitHub projects.
“It’s okay now!” I called to little me, and he took my hand and we came back to the present. Apparently I said that last part out loud, and it was loud enough that everyone heard it, but I was hardly aware of anyone else going through their journeys at the time.
After that major breakthrough, all I saw for hours was fractal sea creatures and insects, whirling by and morphing like a kaleidoscope. I was in touch with the Divine, something that is somewhat familiar to me at this point due to past psychedelic experiences. It felt very familiar, like “Oh, hello again. I’m back. Good to see you.” During this phase, I felt as though the Universe was explaining things to me. Rather than give you the exact messages, I will paraphrase for clarity.
The Divine said…
The Universe as we experience it on this plane of existence is not really primary reality. Nor is it simulation theory. But rather, there is a layer of reality from which everything emerges, and this other layer is non-linear and non-causal, at least not as we understand it. Many spiritual speakers today call it Source, which is a good enough term for our purposes here. Source is the Universe, and the version of the Universe we see is more like subspace, a low-dimensional projection or a subset of reality. But this idea is nothing new; see Plato’s Cave.
I got the profound sense that the Universe is working towards something, and perhaps the best word I can describe it as is “understanding.” There is a Process, or the Way (the Tao) and our human existence, the process of evolution, physics, science, writing, language, all of these emerge as part of the Process. But remember, time, matter, energy, and everything we think we know within our ontological container exists only as a projection or subset of the real reality.
Think of it this way: if the Universe, as we know it, is a novel being written, edited, drafted, and revised, Source is the author. Source exists on a different modality, and time and space are not meaningful to Source in the same way they are to us. Our ontological container is the pages of the book we’re in.
This message was a callback to my first trip, when I did 4g of mushrooms entirely by myself and experienced full ego death for quite a while. I had to relearn time as my mind skipped around, seemingly at random, and that the name “Dave” was connected to this body, this subjective experience. That was pretty cool. My anchor at that time was the woman who would become my wife, Anna. As I was spinning through endless cosmos, I had the thought “Why did Dave do this to us? Dave is smart, there must have been a reason.” And then I remembered my wife, and reasoned “Dave would never do anything to hurt her, there must be a good reason for this.”
That’s how far disconnected I was from myself.
So, during the wind-down of my first ceremony, I was reminded of that first trip, and I found that all Forms are trying to exist, to manifest through the Veil of Forms (a term my wife coined during one of her trips as she was contemplating the Form of trees; her words were “It’s so fucking hard to be a tree!”) All the crustaceans and fish and insects, and even us humans and the machines we build. The Universe is trying to Manifest them all. But of course, there are rules, constraints, and lots of other things going on. Remember the author/novel analogy. The author of the Universe is trying to achieve something with this cosmic story.
As with my first trip, I was left with a message, that I felt compelled to repeat, hundreds of times, so that I wouldn’t forget. The Universe reminded me of my purpose. During my first trip, I was visited by Miller, from The Expanse, who said to me “This (stories/fiction) is import, we keep coming back to this”. During that first trip, I was left with the profound sense that my stories were important, that the works of fiction I produce were somehow salient to the cosmic plot.
This time, perhaps due to the ceremonial setting, the message from the Universe was much clearer:
Tell stories about the sick parts.
I murmured this to myself dozens, if not hundreds of times. Tell stories about the sick parts. This is how I can honor all the pain and suffering that has existed in the Universe, and how can help the Divine heal. At the end of the fractal sea life period, the Divine showed me that she is sick, a subtle hiding and turning away, and a gentle bid to tell stories about the sick parts. She appeared to me like a shy centipede, hiding between two leaves, and it was beautiful.
As I came back down to Earth, I was reminded that all evil committed in the world has been due to a lack of love. Had Hitler been loved better, he would not have been evil, nor Pol Pot or Putin or Trump or Xi Jingping. Love is the cure for everything, the prevention, and stories about the sick parts are how I can help us heal. I was also left with a better sense of the Great Mystery. Think about it: all the best movies and books in history have an undercurrent or even a main theme that explores something sick about humanity or existence. We’ve told more stories about WWII than any other subject in history, because it represents such a cataclysmic manifestation of the sickness. Anna Karenina also tells a story about a sick part. It goes on and on.
During another moment of clarity, I was watching the full moon out the gigantic windows of the ceremonial space, a clarity and brightness you rarely see. It was perfect. My wife was appreciating the same moment, albeit with a very different experience. I was left contemplating what I’ve come to call the Great Mystery.
Why do we exist rather than not exist? Even the Universe asks itself this question.
Ceremony 2
The second ceremony was done with Mazatech mushrooms, a variety that gives you a more embodied experience. My intention going into this ceremony was to “Embrace lightness and joy, and let go of the heaviness.”
The come up here was very slow, and I almost didn’t realize it until I was surrounded by bioluminescent jellyfish, something like out of that episode of Love Death and Robots or James Cameron’s Avatar.
At first, they were bright orange and all around me, transferring energy into my body. It felt good, like the flush of blood from a good run or when the shot of whiskey first hits you, but it was more intense and more penetrating. It was so intense that I was fighting it, despite how good it felt.
After a while, I was laying on my side, feeling a bit sick and disorientated, but I had accepted the warm tingly energy from the jellyfish and one was investigating my belly, just poking through my organs and I could hear its thoughts, like “Why are we sick here? What’s wrong with it?”
At that moment, I heard a snap, or a crash. My wife was in her come up as well, across the room. She was struggling with what was coming up and she’d hit her pillow. That snapped me out of it for a brief moment of clarity but then I fell back into my own place.
What came after was very muddled and painful. I was trapped, mired in that depressed, flashback melange of just feeling sick and like all hope has drained, it was like an intense concentrated version of burnout: too tired to do anything, too painful to move, and too much hopelessness to event contemplate continued life. It was absolute hell. It was rather intense and lasted a while, but not nearly as long as I’d feared. Finally, a question clarified in my mind.
Why do you want to die?
I was afraid of death but I didn’t want to die, and yet I did. Finally, I had to admit to myself, I wanted to die because I didn’t want to be sick anymore. Once I accepted this fact, yes, I wanted to die because I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, the journey moved on. While this is easy to state in hindsight, it felt like it was anything but obvious at the time. Once I was able to articulate that feeling and admit it to myself, we moved on.
After that, I was shown my parents and grandparents, and my wife’s lineage as well. I was shown, almost like a rapid-fire slideshow, that we were all sick, and had been for a long time. It’s all intergenerational trauma and familial dysfunction. Narcissism, alcoholism, abandonment, indifference, whatever you want to call it, it was as though there were dozens, if not hundreds of lifetimes of sickness and pain bearing down on me and finally, I had to accept it. All of it.
When I say “accept” I don’t mean a shrug and well it is what it is. Apathy is not acceptance. I had to accept responsibility for it. I had to take it on and let it in. True acceptance is embracing and shouldering responsibility. It was about taking in the pain that had been passed down from generation to generation and imbibing it all, rather than carrying it.
After a while, once I had fully accepted responsibility for the intergenerational sickness, I just had to move. Physically move. With the facilitators coming by, singing, playing music, I found my arm dancing like a flame. It was as though I could feel the smoke, or embody it, and my hand just fluttered in the air like the smoke or the candle dancing on the end of the wick. I was starting to feel how dancers feel when the embody non-human things like geese or water.
For much of the rest of the night, I just had to keep moving. Whenever I tried to rest or stay still, I started feeling sick again. I just felt better when I moved.
Much of the trip, as I recall, is nonlinear. At one point, I was sitting on my cot in the moonlight sobbing quietly as I remembered my dad and how good things were when I was little. Hey became increasingly sick after my mom left him, and he was either unavailable or unstable and aggressive for the rest of my childhood.
As part of this acceptance, I was able to fully reconnect with my dad. My mom had been ceremony 1, and now my dad was back. Fortunately, my dad is still alive, as my mom died suddenly of a heart attack when I was 14. After embracing and accepting the sickness in our family, I could no longer hold any resentment at my dad. It’s just gone. There’s no need for forgiveness or apologies. Maybe you could technically characterize it as forgiveness.
At one point during this ceremony, my wife had worked through her difficult journey and had started dancing. I’ve never seen her move so fluidly, dancing with a long feather in each hand in the bright moonlight flowing in through the gigantic floor to ceiling windows. She’d learned, from the first ceremony, that she was the daughter of the moon and that “Pleasure and beauty are her birthright” and now her power name is Moondancer. She danced briefly with another facilitator and they just laughed, and that moment brought a lot of positive energy to the ceremonial space.
Mazatech is supposed to be a more embodied experience, so there’s not as much to write. I spent much of the rest of the night reconnecting with my body, rolling on my cot like a baby learning to move for the first time, vibing with the music, and watching people move around the moonlit space. The first ceremony, for those who are curious, was Golden Teachers, which are widely regarded as the most spiritual of the mushroom varieties. They are called “teachers” for a reason, and if you want to learn the secrets of the universe and commune with the Divine, they are almost certainly the way to go.
At one point during the ceremony, I was sitting on my cot, just slowly weeping, and Austin came to check on me. I asked him how he let go of his own father, who passed recently. That was painful to ask.
By the end of the ceremony, my sinuses were burning and congested. I’m still battling the ear infection that came from this. I do not think it is a pathogen, not in the conventional sense, but rather an idiopathic response now that I have accepted the intergenerational sickness and that this is a manifestation of. I was left exhausted from this ceremony, but feeling hopeful that I could now truly begin healing. One thing that was shared by our facilitators is that this sort of shamanic ritual heals back seven generations of pain, and seven generations forward. It was certainly painful enough to register as seven generations.
I was left with a question in the morning. I had learned from my first ceremony that love is the universal cure for all human ailments, like the conflict in Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. So why does pain block love? Why does pain cut us off from love? I found that pain and love are opposite sides of the same coin, and the generator function of life is to find its way back towards love.
“Now I get to begin healing.” ~ My takeaway from integration the following morning
Ceremony 3
My sinus infection had taken full force by this point, and I was not sure if I could or should do the third ceremony. One of the facilitators-in-training who was also on his own journey asked me if I got these kinds of things frequently: no, almost never. I can’t even remember the last time I had a sinus infection. Years. The timing was rather conspicuous—it started within hours of me accepting the intergenerational sickness of my family. Popular YouTube spiritual guru Teal Swan calls this ancestral healing. It seems accurate enough to me.
However, after an ice plunge and steam room visit, I was feeling good enough to go through with it. I did a relatively low dose of 1.4 grams. For ceremony three, we started in the morning and we used a strain of mushrooms called Enigma. My dose was relatively low, though my come up was still just as tense and confusing.
The lessons that came from Enigma were muddled, as usual, until I had my breakthrough moment. So instead of regaling you with the whole process, I’ll just give you the polished final product:
Understanding has always been the core of my “theory of control.” I was an insanely curious child, and I came to believe that the more I understood the more power I had. After all, I built an entire career based on understanding and solving problems. But my curiosity had become a twisted, perverted, protective and dark version of itself. I had to let go of my need to understand, my need to for control, and I just needed to accept and embrace the confusion and chaos and wonder and awe, and return to a childlike state of curiosity. I had to let go of my mind.
Now, to provide a little bit of background, the day before we did our third ceremony, we had some workshops. One such workshop was receiving feedback from our peers. The setup was like this: pretend that you’re gossiping about the person like you’re at the bar, but instead they are just nearby. So we got to give frank feedback indirectly. The feedback I got was that “Gee, Dave would probably feel much better if he could just relax.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
So, during the third ceremony the following day, I realized that I couldn’t relax because of this need to understand—a need to control.
After that, I felt much lighter and was moving around the ceremonial space, but I felt quite tired and still a little sick. I found myself in the “Goddess Room” which is a chill spot in the center of the house. I felt quite good and just rested there for a while until Austin, the founder and lead facilitator came to find me. I’m not sure why he came to find me, as some other people spent most of the ceremony elsewhere. I think he had a sort of sixth sense. Anyways, he brought me back to the main ceremony space and eventually offered me more sacrament (oh yeah, you can do up to three doses, I never did as I’m a total lightweight). I looked up at him and declined the extra dose and said:
The music is the medicine now!
And then I burst out laughing as it felt so good to say those words. Not long after, more people were dancing, including my wife. I had a thought “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if I could just learn to dance like that.” And I imagined a character from my novel saying “I just need to dance all this out.” And Austin seemed to hear my thoughts and gestured for me to get up and start dancing too. And I got into it. I mean, way into it. And in that moment I realized that dance is not how it looks but how it feels. Dancing is like whole-body stimming with music!
Side note: this is called manifesting. When you’re still in ceremony space, and for some time after, if you notice yourself thinking “Gee, I just wish I could figure out X” or “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do/be Y” then that’s one part of your brain saying “Hey, buddy, you CAN do that! You SHOULD do that! Now is your opportunity!” I manifested quite a few things during these ceremonies: the ability to feel my body and dance, to get my energy back, and so on. Many psychedelic insights and breakthroughs happen like this, they start as just a simple thought of something you want or are attracted to. And no sooner do you embrace them, they become true.
I sort of lost track of the experience, as part of the lesson here was to let go of my mind. My most powerful asset, my prized possession, my superpower is my brain, and I had to just let go. My final takeaway was this, though words on a screen hardly do it justice:
Relax by accepting the chaos.
Retrospective
Looking back, I can see how each of these ceremonies unlocked another part of myself, and even as I write this, I can feel more at peace, comfortable in my body. I did a check-in exercise with my wife yesterday, where we each took turns saying what we saw in the other. What had changed.
She told me that I “take up less space” emotionally, that my moods are much less dramatic, and even when I don’t feel good, there’s a distinct softness to it, and that I’m more sensual. She also said that I’m markedly more comfortable in my body, and that I have far fewer aches, pains, and complaints. On her side, I told her that she takes up more space, that she’s more grounded and placid and has better boundaries. It’s like she went from being a ghost to a solid person.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. It was difficult, painful, and challenging. I almost didn’t go. Austin actually worked really hard to make sure I went. I’m already planning my next trip to Ceremonia, if that tells you anything.
But it was absolutely the best decision of my life, hands down, no contest.
To put it into perspective, in terms of value, I have spent more than a year trying to recover from burnout. I feel better than I have in many years, since before I broke up with my ex-wife, since before the pandemic, and I’m pretty close to how I felt during the peak of my life, when I was working a job that I loved and my body was resilient enough to run the Tough Mudder while completely hungover. That was 2014, so a decade ago, almost a quarter of my life. Can a five day retreat really treat or cure ten years of burnout? It’s more than I’d hoped for, it’s more than I’d expected, and it’s more than I thought was possible. I told my wife that I’m still operating at about half capacity from where I was in 2014, that’s how much health and vitality I’ve lost. But going from 25% to 50% capacity in five days is nothing to shake a stick at.
Wrapping up in Part 3
Part three will cover more practical nitty gritty—what makes the retreat good, what the facilitators did well, and what I did to get the most out of it. One thing that you learn about psychedelics is that “you get out what you put in.” Many of my fellows at the retreat commented on my courage and vulnerability, and thanked me repeatedly for what I brought, for being a mirror. Even Austin, the lead facilitator, told me that my courage and authenticity was valuable energy to add to the group, to give them permission as well.
This is just one example of what I need to cover in part 3, so that you’ll know what to do and how to bring your full self should you choose to go to a retreat.
Very cool, thanks for sharing such an intimate experience.
Incredible articulation and framing of a truly mindbending phenomenon that remains a part of the possible dimensions of the human experience and can have deep implications and things to learn that relate to the rest of the human experience if one is so aligned and open. On a somewhat side note, I just watched your interview on Win-Win and was struck by your description of your fatigue and sensitivity. It reminded me starkly of my own experience with Lupus and believe it or not the use of a 1/4 tab of acid microdose a day that plus small doses throughout the day of caffeine that have made it possible for me to do a very taxing 80 hour a week job and thought I should share my experiences in that realm if it is of any use to you in your health journey. Thanks for being the person you are, David!