Why I Stopped Microdosing

Signs when it is time to “healer, heal thyself”.

At some point you must lay all the vices down.  Let them get strewn about at your feet and you will see the final spirals of the labyrinth that will lead you all the way to your center.  Wind in and out as the old impulses scream inside your mind trying to get you to grab at the dead and shake open a mouth long shut to the whisper of the “I love you” you long for.  

You must turn toward the silent ache and dare to strip yourself bare of any and all blankets that secured you from feeling the winds that have been trying to blow storms through your life, part the never ending clouds in the sky and cleanse you of the lies.  Winds of change.  You hate change.  The broken heart wants nothing of change- at first, and sometimes for a long while. 

It wants the dead to come back and dance and say it is going to be ok I love you and I am here and I am never leaving and you are safe and you are so important to me and you can do anything and you can dance for me and I will use these hands to applaud your beauty instead of all the other things my hands have done to hurt you.  

And when you stand bare and shaking like the Aspen, vulnerable to everything that moves the slightest stir past your precious body, is when you will know what is true about you.  Shaking and feeling the impulse to stray back to the old ways as they burn through you again and again- and again.   The path you have walked and the medicine that has entered your blood when you finally crumpled over at the altar of the one and only medicine maker- has shown you that on the other side of this torrential fear is a prayer made for your ears to hear that will guide you on the path of truth.  You know because initiation has claimed you before- when you were born.

All of the support you have sought has given you a lift and the momentary grace of peeking behind the curtain to see the face of the ONE- who looks a lot like YOU.  You blink, bewildered, and look away while those old nefarious indoctrinations say- “that can’t be true”.  But something has come alive inside that tugs at your soul and awakens a memory compounded by a well skilled hand into your bones.  You cannot unsee what you have seen or forget the feeling of that omnipresent love that graced you during your psychedelic journey, vision fast, drum circle, sweat lodge filled with Grandmother’s tongue healing.  And you are willing to do what must be done to know thyself as such.  

 As you crawl, or dance or heave yourself forth from the long walk in the desert thirsty for Her blood with a face salt stained by your tears, it is only you who can set down the burden packed with stories that someone told you are you, but She told you aren’t true and you’ve got nothing left other then to hedge a bet against your own life that She is right.  

That threshold of healing the deepest layer of your being can only be done naked and alone, now fortified with every bit of love and medicine that you have gathered from every land you have roamed, and every hand that has made you soup from the stone- so heavy in your heart.  

So you bow to Earth Mother and let all the vices fall away with a wild resounding grief cry that cracks you open to the love you need to face the abandoned one long screaming, buried in the understory of your life.  She will listen because you have consumed the medicine and let fires teach you the lullaby that bends her mind toward trusting you to make the new choices that bring her heart alive.  Inside of the crucible there cannot be interference, no guessing at whose voice it is you are hearing.  Clean, clear, sober and fully feeling every terror as a guidepost to love - you become her master, you are her savior.  

Yet, no one is coming to save you.  And, now you know with every breath that you would never want anyone or anything to because the resurrection of your soul, of the greatest love you have ever known must come by your own hands.  Only then will you know what you are made of, what made you and that you have always belonged.  

There was never a separation.  You ARE the integration.  You are not a victim of your circumstances.  You ARE the medicine.  

——>>>

I did not come to live a life of coping skills.  There is nothing wrong with coping skills.  I have a basket full of tools that I pull out daily.  A giant surfboard made of rituals and women’s circles and music and dance and prayer and hot baths and good meals and beloved people and long walks and lots of tree hugs and magic Earth medicine.  The Ocean of Life is beauty and beast and all of it is medicine when I listen to the shifting wind and respond accordingly.  

Only in my being with what is, fully in touch with my feelings can I differentiate the voices of trauma from the voices of truth.  Plant medicine has allied me more than any other healing modality in my ability to be with my nervous system and how my trauma is running covert operations in the background.  Knowing and loving myself at this level has brought about deep healing and the ability to bravely choose all that is opposite of trauma.  It is a daily process.  It is a moment to moment process. Those old voices have been alive a long time and know how to disguise themselves. But my body knows the origin of those old feelings now and this is how I am able to make different choices.   

I am currently addressing one of the most holy wounds of my life.  It is a radical time. Don’t ya think?  I know I am not alone in this.  I sit with people in various ways daily that are being blessed by their most terrifying thoughts, feelings and sensations.  

It is clear I am in a deep period of integrating the initiations I have walked through since before my time in the womb.  Yeah, it is that big huge and I am honored to tend such an altar that holds so many human potentials.  I feel everything.  

In the midst of this profound transformation I got a strong message that I am done microdosing.  Seems counterintuitive huh?  But the medicine isn’t a medication.  The mushrooms don’t heal me, I heal me.  They groom me in understanding the path of initiation and therefore life.  (You know that’s what is happening right?- welcome) They upwell everything that blocks my belief in true love, that I am true love.  They create a buffer between feeling the big feels and total collapse into them so I can see their root.   Once the root is exposed, differentiation is possible and therefore the ability to make new choices that repattern the trauma loops back into divine truth.  

I want to know thyself fully while leaving a space for the mystery to guide- a place where I am meant to know nothing and hold deep faith in the power of the unknown.  There is always more to uncover, there are so many layers and there is no destination.  But at this moment I have seen so much, I have been gifted everything I have prayed to understand in my healing process.  I don’t need another boost at the moment, and I don’t need to feel anything different than what I am feeling.  I can meet me everywhere with love.  It has taken a long time to say that. 

This has been a process that has taken place for over a decade.  Diving in, listening, pulling out, integrating.  This is the sacred dance with plant medicine- to honor it as a relationship, and not a codependent one.  These medicines are meant to support healing and will grant you everything you need to do so.  But you must be the one to feel the final and deepest layers of your being- raw, naked, empty of everything but your breath and your prayer.  

I highly encourage everyone who enters into sacred partnership with plants to do so with the mindset that you will not do this forever.

Yet not everyone is willing to do this level of soul forging and will want to cling to using plant medicines repeatedly- which begins to tip towards addiction. Mushrooms themselves are not addicting, behaviors are.  As we move towards legalization and put magic mushrooms into the repertoire of industrialized healthcare they risk landing inside of the medication mindset which moves the medicine journey relationship towards codependency. Microdosing is not an invitation into lifelong coping skills, it is a courtship in deep healing.   Be gentle.  It will take the time it needs to take.  As long as there is awareness, reverence and integration, you will be guided.  

(Caveats.  Always caveats.  Some people’s brains need constant medications.  I am not addressing the people with severe mental imbalances that prevent them from being in society or who harm others.   I believe in restoration and yet some spaces in humanity hold too much trauma.  And some people just want to be where they are.  And that is beautiful. Free will is a thing.  So I pray for balance and what serves the highest good)

So how do you know if you are done microdosing?  

• If you have been doing your integration work and you “get a message”.  And you will, if you are doing your integration work because the mushrooms talk to you ya know- by way of your soul that has come back alive to guide you.  Little whispers.  

• It’s been a few years of off and on work with microdosing. It can take this long.There should be breaks in your microdosing schedule and you can be on a schedule for a few years in cases of deep trauma and long term depression.

• You are noticing that you are responding differently to situations that once triggered your nervous system. This is a sign that it is time to take off the training wheels.  

• You will begin to feel “high” from smaller and smaller doses.  My microdose almost doesn’t exist it’s so small.  I was beginning to experience a sense of ungroundedness in my daily microdose. This tells me that I was moving past the tipping point of support that can be integrated effectively and now in the realm of codependency. I want to feel my life, not bypass it.

A thing to note is that unlike pharmaceuticals, which suppress other functions in the body, magic mushrooms, and plant entheogens in general, repattern, boost, rewire, nourish and fortify the mind- body. This is why many people’s symptoms come back after pharmaceuticals if there haven’t been other types of therapies integrated into their healing. And why when people come off a fully integrated microdosing regimen they can take profound steps forward. 

Plant medicine is connected to Gaia.  Gaia sustains, regenerates, replenishes, heals, nourishes, loves and teaches in a way that only Mother can.  And the medicine of Mother is what our wounds have been seeking since inception.   

Trust Her to hold you when you let go of everything you thought you needed to fly.  The plants don’t give you wings, they just help you remember that you have always been a songbird.  

Blessed Be. 

PS. For individualized integration support you can read more here :).  

There will be a free microdosing training in June hosted by yours truly and two others through the Port Townsend Psychedelic Society.  You can sign up for the PTPS newsletter here.  If you don’t want another email in you inbox, you can email me and I can just send you a reminder when the time comes.