You go the same route every day. Same thoughts same turns, same smells, familiar faces.
Daily you experience about 50,000 thoughts and only about 8,000 of them are positive. Did you ever wander why? Heartbreaks, thwarted intentions, unfulfilled expectations, betrayals, struggles big and small of people around so close to us and some not, encased affirmations where you wake up feeling right. Those things big and small that happen to you are brushed aside.
You have a culturally appropriate response, “I am fine” because it’s weird to respond anything else to “Hi, how are you”, even if things might not be that rosy in your life. And things, in the background, they are just stuff that I am dealing with, they don’t affect me, I am numbing them down. Numbing them down….
Every day our neighborhoods, cities, countries are starting to get filled up with more and more uncertainty, suffering and anxiety. You are separate from it all, because what can you do in that big scope, right? The homeless person high on fentanyl is obviously not your problem and there is nothing human about him as he shoots up, and screams something as you passing him by, disturbing your inner peace with his nightmares and awful smell.
Look around, more and more people check out and are escaping to parallel reality. When was the last time that you really asked yourself why and what does it mean about the “I am fine world” that you live in. I am not calling you out to go give a hug to homeless or suffering person high of his mind outside, just pointing out how the suffering is occurring more and more around us since Covid, locally and globally and how much we trained our minds to just block the suffering out. We don’t question their suffering, they just go through it and we don’t really question ours unless we start to see a therapist with different levels of effectiveness.
Do you see what I mean? We are trained to block suffering and to package it on the background, personally and systemically, that’s how we deal with it as humans. Did you ever ask what’s the price that we pay for it, because I promise you there is a price. Separation, different levels of anxiety, numbness, righteousness. Starts to sound familiar?
Your outlook is a construct that is build on your reactions to occurrences in your past. Notice that you have answers to all of the problems and they all have a right connotation to it. It’s that voice inside of you that just said “what problems” “what do you mean by right connotation”. Being right controls you in a most sudden way and not always for the worst, it prevents future heartbreaks, repeated mistakes and ensures your survival. That voice is Ego, and it will do anything to be heard and to be right to justify it’s existence because you simply don’t know what lies behind so Ego got to be right and stake that claim to look good and avoid looking bad. Because there is nothing like looking bad. But there is a price we pay when Ego becomes too strong, too right and too self absolved, It’s where anxiety, checking out, numbness all come from and if that’s where guided psilocybin comes in. In the comfort of caring people, many of whom have spent years in the end of life care, you make a concisions choice to finally unpack, and when you make that choice there is no turning back. We don’t really know how it works but we know that it weakens the grasp of Ego, unpacks the dark corners that controls us in the most sudden ways and get us connected to who we really are with deep compassion for others and ourselves. How did mushrooms figure out how to do it, I don’t know but I can tell with certainty that they do work and I could not have imagined doing a guided session in a practice with less adequate standards than Mindtrek. Simply Amazing people. whether it’s Scott, Alexis, or Laurissa I think of them as compassion warriors with a deep commitment to remove suffering and struggles and to make a difference in other people’s lives making us more real and more ourselves. And by the way, their collection of teas is unbelievable as well. Take my word for it, there is nothing like an amazing cups of tea after that deep journey.
With the technological rise in the last few decades we forgot what is a true destruction really is and are now on the brink of a WW3. We need to get present now more than ever and it starts from a deep self reflection and taking responsibility where we can for the type of life we want to live going forward. I had a friend who passed who always used to ask her friend “ how do you eat the elephant” and the answer to that silly and slightly disturbing question is very simple “one small piece at a time” There is a hope, a hope that outdated labels would be reconsidered and that we give a chance to something that been with us since our dawn of African primate ancestors and probably responsible for us evolving from primates back then. At this point in time, in our giant metamorphosis we have to evolve. Evolve with small small steps, working on ourselves, widening the scope, with perspective on things that really matter, compassion and honest deep dive to the darkest pockets of your inner self with intention to weaken the grip of ego and to really connect with yourself. Why? Because Truth will set you free, just like it did me.
-D.