In case you were wondering, I’ve spent my entire life being a bit of a square. My grade point average was perpetually near the top of the class. In middle school, I won second place in a Math 24 competition. I was a card-carrying member of the Science Olympiad team in high school. I had my first alcoholic drink in college, my first fuck at 19 and my first experience with weed in my 20s. My mom and sister refer to me as a nerd in their text communications.
So, I’m not generally the type to experiment with hallucinogenics. I mean, I love the Matt Maeson song about it, but that’s pretty much as far as it went until last weekend when I failed to write the Sunday newsletter because I was tripping on 6 grams of homegrown magic mushrooms in a suspiciously Wes Anderson-y Airbnb in Tucson, Arizona. I used to consider “psychedelic enthusiast” to be one of the more annoying characteristics of people I’ve met, but now I get it. And despite my reservations, I’m going to tell you about it.
The roots of how I came to be under the influence of a fantastical fungus in the Grand Canyon State began with my first yoga teacher training back in 2016. After being summarily rejected by a spin studio where I wanted to teach classes, I set my sights on instructing yoga. This led me to Yoga for Life in Portland, where I took a 300-hour training with a wonderful group of people that included a few absolute nutjobs and three ladies who would become some of my best and truest friends.
After the first training, the three of us would take many more together. The path to enlightenment is rarely linear, but I think I speak for all of us when I say we were trying our best to get there. At any rate, we were learning the skills we’d need along the way. I mostly saw mushrooms and other substances as a cheat—a means of avoiding the work necessary to make it to some sort of spiritual finish line. Besides, using substances to achieve the feeling of oneness would be fleeting and maybe even a little scary. Yoga and meditation offered the promise of experiencing the results fully and for all time.
But after years of yoga education that sometimes left me feeling exhausted and bad about myself, I fell off the wagon. I traded 4 am training sessions for leisurely walks, later wakeup calls and spiritual pursuits that were as soft and feminine as I felt. Eventually, I got interested in experiencing spirituality in a new way, one that involved some help from Mother Nature’s mischievous helpers.
Never one to jump right in, I started flirting with the idea of a drug-induced journey. I knocked some potential substances off my list right away. Anything that was going to burn my throat or make me vomit or shit myself was out. I also wasn’t ready for something that would make me feel completely out of control. We’ve all heard stories of someone who had a seriously bad trip. I was anxious to avoid making that my reality, and I felt somewhat confident that I’d be properly prepared. The years of yoga training were not for naught, it turns out. I’d already done the inner work that would set me up for success when the psilocybin hit my system.
At this point, I’ve done mushrooms four times. My first experience was very mild, but I learned something about a relationship that I’d struggled to understand in the past. I’ve only recently been able to put this lesson to use and heal. Nevertheless, I believe that first trip laid the groundwork for the most recent one, which I will get to in a minute. The second trip was no trip at all. Nothing happened. The third was in Arizona with two of my longtime yoga friends, using the mushrooms my friend’s partner grew himself. We only did a few grams in order to have a “giggly fun time.” And we did! It was hilarious with the added benefit of making me less afraid.
Our intention, however, was always to do a vision quest. Using the same homegrown mushrooms, the three of us tripled our intake from two days prior and settled in for the long haul. Six hours later we emerged a bit, only to realize that the effects would continue in a milder form for hours and days after. The yoga prepared us, we decided, but the mushrooms took us to the place our training was leading all along. The heart of this multi-hour journey was unlike any other we’d ever had. The three of us began and ended together, but the travels in between were uniquely our own. I’ll speak to mine below.
R. recently described trying to detail a spiritual journey that took place under the influence of mushrooms like attempting to recall a dream 30 minutes after it ended. That feels accurate to me. Regardless, there are many things I remember. Much of what I retained is silly: how my arm didn’t feel like my arm, how the Subaru Forrester in the driveway became a dragon, how I considered for a moment that I might be Lena Dunham until I realized that I couldn’t be because Lena Dunham had to be Lena Dunham. You get the idea. But there were deeper lessons, too. Those are the ones I’d like to share with you in detail. I’ll do my best to make it make sense.
Lesson 1: I am everything all at once.
If you’ve seen the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, you might have the slightest sense of what I’m talking about here. You can wrap your head around it a little. The idea is not completely out of left field. While I was tripping, I actually felt this concept come alive. I would end up in different places: a dream I had, a country I traveled to, a book I read, a meditation I visualized, a movie I saw, a memory I recalled. I was there, everywhere, even places I’d never been and didn’t exist.
I realized that I was a part of everything, and everything was me. I felt myself as everyone—my daughter, my lover, my cousin, my friends, the aforementioned Lena Dunham herself. The message I heard over and over was simple: “I am everything all at once.” I don’t have to worry. Everything that ever was and ever is and ever could be is happening to me at the same time in different timelines across millions of universes. Nothing matters, but not in a nihilistic way, in a beautiful one. In the way that nothing matters because everything does. Nothing is happening because everything is. Nothing is real because everything is.
We are experiencing all of it, even if we are only conscious of one specific life in one specific timeline of one specific universe. Having all of that be a part of us every moment would be overwhelming, so we focus on our current state. For me, it’s enough to have experienced all of it for a short time to know what truly exists outside of my present reality. This realization keeps me in the moment, as worrying about the past or fantasizing about the future no longer makes much sense when everything is happening concurrently.
Lesson 2: You don’t have to keep it all straight.
For a lot of my trip, I was deeply confused. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I would say over and over again. “No one could ever explain this to anyone.” But for everything I said, the universe would respond in kind. “You don’t have to keep it all straight,” a higher power would tell me ever so gently. “There are no real tests.”
I’ve never felt such a lack of worry or fear. Even in moments where I was under water and “forgetting” to breathe, it was OK. I had always been alive and dead at the same time. I could just exist in whatever place and time and body I felt myself in at present. I didn’t have to keep track of everything. No one was going to quiz me about my feelings later. They wouldn’t bother because somewhere some time they were experiencing the same things. We all feel all of it.
And if that were true, I thought, why did I get so mad about that one thing someone did to me? And hey, why were they so mad at me for that other thing? And why did I ever feel left out when everyone is always everywhere and always invited? Why do I waste time being unhappy when all I really want to do is laugh and see the beauty and love and joy and humor in every single experience forever?
I could do that, I decided. I could choose to keep coming back to that lesson that beauty exists within everyone and everything, instead of trying to keep remembering how things “really were,” so I could keep score about how good a person I am compared to everyone else. Now, I see myself in everyone and everyone in me.
Lesson 3: We live in poetry because we are the poem.
“How could I have seen so many things?” I asked myself a million times. “How are there so many colors and languages and textures? How are there so many rainbows I’ve never seen before?” The mushrooms restored my ability to marvel at my own life. I spend so much time wishing I could travel more, that I were doing more things, seeing more sights, having more experiences. Under the influence, I realized that I had seen so much already. We all have. Even if we never went anywhere again, we would have seen so many beautiful things in our immediate surroundings.
After all, when you really look, isn’t there such incredible depth to each color and object? Aren’t there so many sounds you never noticed before? So many sensations you didn’t realize you were feeling this very instant? Everything is so expansive when we consider things beyond the five senses or, better yet, go deeper into each of the senses that are already so accessible.
When we allow ourselves to be this present, we start to realize that poetry is all around us. This is an actual thought I had: “We are all poets, and we actually know it! Or maybe we don’t know because we’re in it all the time and it seems normal. Maybe we don’t know because we are both the poet and the poem itself.” Exactly.
Lesson 4: The only way out is through, of course.
One of my biggest fears before consuming the fungus was that I would want to bow out of the experience, but I would be stuck with nowhere to go. “Is this forever,” I asked myself at one point, knowing that I no longer cared if it was. I was so content and liberated and happy and carefree that I could have gone on like that forever. I didn’t have to keep it all straight, so I was good to keep floating in and out and all over.
But at the beginning of this journey, some resistance came up. I was feeling a little nauseous, and I realized that I hadn’t considered that my body might feel weird. I knew I had to surrender though, so I kept reminding myself to let go. I used a lot of self-talk: “I love you, Karli. You’re doing great. Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.” The thing I heard most often from the universe, though, was, “the only way out is through, of course.” It felt very Alice in Wonderland, which was fitting because I felt like Alice in Wonderland.
I had to see this through. I couldn’t quit before I experienced what I had come to this journey to find. There were lessons to be learned! I couldn’t rush the process. I had to do what I realized I’d been doing since the day my daughter was born of my body and became a human separate from me: Surrender. I no longer have any control over what happens to her, not really anyway. I now let my heart walk around outside my body without any actual power to ensure her life goes how I hope it will for her.
This led to another realization, which is that I’ve actually been surrendering since the day I was born. I’ve never had any control over what happens (only how I react), and my heart has always been outside my body because it is with my husband and friends and family and everyone I’ve ever loved. The only way to live this life is to accept that this is so. We must continue on until the end, surrendering and letting go and celebrating our outward hearts as they do whatever they will in the world, with the inward hope that it all goes well for them and for us, as we all fumble our way on through.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix