The struggle of holding profound experiences alone is very real. It is not uncommon to feel isolated by experiences that those around you can’t understand, that aren’t safe to share, and that even defy your ability to describe in language.
Shifts In Worldview
Sometimes what you perceive on a psychedelic is not a specific experience, or piece of mental or visionary “content”, but an entirely different perspective of this world. For those fully absorbed in the normal day to day reality of social consensus and default consciousness, it’s frequently not possible to grasp new information that has reference points outside of that reality. And though they might try to take it in, it’s often with a mix of awkwardness and trepidation about an unknown that that they maybe unable to speak about, or nervous to confront. We also have to be conscious of the people who have strong negative judgements and rigid opinions towards any altering of consciousness, and the very real legal danger that still exists for these activities in most places.
That new perspective can also change our worldview, orientation, and value system. We might see a lot societal behavior as unconscious, thoughtless, absurd, or negative. We might see beauty in small things that make us look weird to others. We might grasp overarching moral values aligned with nature, empathy, and collective cooperation that clash with the state of our culture, political climate, and economic system. And sometimes we might also have a very individualized experience that makes us feel far apart from other people.
Interpersonal Blocks
While we can also face punitive consequences or judgements, even at best we might experience frustration in not being able to share the experience with others. We may feel blocked by not being able to bring these lessons into a world that isn’t ready for them. That momentum we need to actualize and sustain what we’ve learned sometimes hits a wall of other people who can’t receive it and/or can’t reflect the experience or energy back to you.
Even within a community of regular psychedelic users there can be a disconnect between vastly different experiences. You might have friends who take mushrooms for fun, laughs, and to see the “pretty colors”, and who seem to reliably have a pleasant time, while when you join them you experience intense anxiety, deeply introspective psychological process including re-living or discovering old trauma, encounters with strange and ancient entities/beings revealing heavy lessons, or become immersed in an ecstatic mystical revery of philosophical language. Or in reverse, you don’t get why someone you know finds themselves in such intense and isolating trips.
In these cases, it can actually be harder to communicate with co-travelers if they have a set expectation of what a psychedelic substance does based on what happens for them, and they don’t relate to the experiences you have.
When Words Fail…
Then there is the more subtle reality that a lot of this experience can’t be put into words, at least not with the two-dimensional language that we have, and that even the best of word choice feels like an imitation that cheapens the memory. It’s often said, the more times you tell a personal story, the more your drain it’s power for yourself, and it’s often wise to hold these to ourselves, privileging who else gets to hear them. This is doubly true when you try to tell the story to someone who can’t receive it, it falls flat. A little of that energy feels wasted.
Unfinished Business
We can end up with carrying the big weight of the whole experience, and all the energies that want to be expressed into the world, alone. What should be a source for momentum, inspiration, change, becomes a big rock in our system that we don’t know what to do with, and it becomes harder to relax. This burden can become a source of detachment, frustration, loneliness, anxiety, or cynicism. The mystery or promise hanging unexplored, and unacknowledged, or the big dream remaining un-manifest can actually lead to depression because you know that something more is out there, but feel unable reach it.
If a door is opened, it is best to go through it all the way.
Connection Heals
In my experience, connection is what completes an inner process, and what soothes and calms the struggles of a frantic or agitated mind. Being received by an Other is what makes the experience real, and unburdens the weight. It provides a validating context where we can place our experience, and then move on. When we feel not alone, we feel like we don’t have to carry all that weight ourselves.
Being able to talk and reflect about all of this helps us carve out a space where we can nurture the new parts of ourselves that are growing out of the experiences. Ultimately, close relationships and community where you can be felt and understood is most powerful in sustaining and allowing us to grow out from the journey. Ideally, those comrades can mirror back and validate our changes, and support what can sometimes be intense work. And, finding or building that community from scratch is not always so easily done, especially for those of us who are not full-time extroverts.
Find Your People
When participants start to come down from the mountain of various therapeutic or spiritual retreats they frequently ask the facilitator/teacher, “How do I take this back into my normal life, especially in a world that doesn’t understand?” I think success varies from person to person, but the typical answer is “Find your community, find people to be around who can understand and share what you are going through,” And this is the correct answer.
Yet there is also the reality that those of us who might constitute a community are spread out across the globe, and this is easier said than done. Some of us don’t even have a starting place, that retreat group etc, but have initiated this process entirely on our own, sometimes by accident, and we find that there is less pre-fab supportive community in our area than we had hoped.
So I think the imperative towards relationship and community is both paramount and urgent, and it is also a bit aspirational, something we seek and grow into imperfectly. Most of us are not surrounded by people who “get it”, most of the time, or in a culture that is genuinely empathetic to deep experiences. We have to start by carving space for ourselves with the relationships we can create around growth or common interest. We cannot assume that is already out there waiting for us (though it could be).
Feeling Connects More
And we may also find that people in our lives can empathize and relate to the emotional core of our experiences, if not the specific content of it. Feeling is simple, and can often be expressed more successfully than a big story or information dump. On our end, an emotional expression with the right compassionate person or persons also lets us share the heart of what we’ve been through, or are going through, without retelling the whole story and draining or cheapening the experience.
This is actually the core of Psychedelic Integration work within ourselves, distilling our experiences away from the fireworks to the emotional and heartcentered issues that we can relate to and really feel into as our full, human, personal selves. That is the stuff we can work with.
The Practice
And this leads us to a positive little twist: We CAN provide the necessary connection and empathy to ourselves, within ourselves, and it is an extremely useful integration practice. By strengthening our own capacity to witness ourselves and generate self-compassion we can create the conditions that help us let go of that caged energy and bring satisfying closure to the experience.
This is an important practice for journeying as it is for integrating, as it is for healing, as it is for transformation and growth. To feel accepted within ourselves, by ourselves, and not intellectually, but empathetically in very genuine and true way, is priceless. We need to be seen and heard by our own compassionate awareness as if by an ideal, supportive, and understanding parent. The force of that compassionate awareness changes the frame of a powerful experience from something otherworldly, or hard to process, into something that is very personal and affirming.
This is a muscle that we have to strengthen, and a habit we need to build, especially if we weren’t given great examples of this kind of acceptance growing up. It’s ok, if we don’t really know how to generate compassion for ourselves as we start out. In fact, accepting that you don’t know how to generate selfacceptance is a great first step! I find that developing compassionate selfawareness is the heart of what this work is about.