The following is an essay I wrote to sum up how I find myself where I am today. I think all my experiences have brought me here and I am enthusiastically embracing this path. Let me know if it touches something in you.
I stubbornly learned to read at five years old solely so that I could finally experience “The Hobbit” which my father had been reading inconsistently at bedtime for months. My efforts ushered me into magical realms where children’s hopes and naive determination could save a greed poisoned world. Worlds where humans and animals converse, where fairies are your neighbors (for good or ill), and where trees can become allies in the war if you take the time to listen. It seemed obvious to my young mind that every world, including this one, is imbued with magic.
I was eight years old when my life took an interesting turn. I saw my best friend reading a book, and I asked, “What are you reading?” “A book about astronomy… but you wouldn’t be interested, because girls don’t do astronomy”. No malice, just the observation of a young boy in a world with very little representation of female scientists. It wasn’t really a conscious or informed decision I made at that point; I just simply fell onto the path to become an astronomer.
My path to becoming a scientist and being raised in the Catholic Church began to erode my confidence that magic was a natural phenomenon. When I was informed that animals have no soul and were excluded from heaven, I questioned my startling discovery in which I perceived another soul in my cat's eyes. I had firmly understood this revelation to mean there were other beings (not just humans) sharing this world with me. I also had to start hard-core defending my scientific stance when my friend off-handedly asked how Catholics could believe in creationism. That was also the day that I learned what creationism was.
I was 19 years old and crunching the latest data coming in from the cosmos at one of the world’s largest radio telescopes when I realized that the life I had stumbled upon wasn’t the life I wanted for myself. I did finish my undergraduate degree in physics, discovering and reveling in the crazy, magical of quantum mechanics, but my choice to find something “down to earth” is what funneled me into studying the brain.
I hated biology in high school, so no one was more surprised than me to find I loved a cell physiology class I took solely to fulfill an elective. There I was introduced to G-Protein Coupled Receptors, which were the coolest little machines I’d ever heard of. This class of receptors binds to nicotine, cannabis, opiates, and psychedelics, a magical world in which the human body can intimately interact with the plant world around us. This class of receptors naturally landed me in the brain, where I was introduced to another weird and wonderful world, consciousness.
While learning how the brain works was a great intellectual exercise, it made no difference in the way I led my life. Basically, unsatisfied with the trajectory my life was taking, I was blissfully unaware that I may have something to do with why my work was unfulfilling, and why my relationship had lost its spark.
I was 26 when I first participated in experiential transformational education. It was the first time I experienced - to my bones - what I knew intellectually: that my view of the world wasn’t ground truth. Practically, I again fell in love with my husband after cleaning up an affair, and I also started dismantling strongly held beliefs, such as I can’t be both a mom and a scientist. I had two of my three children while working on my PhD.
I had my first spiritually transformative experience while participating in this educational modality. I was in labor with my first child when I realized I was unable to claw my way to the top of these contractions any longer, it seemed I sat myself down and told myself in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t getting off this train, and that the only way out of this situation was through. I surrendered to the next contraction even though at some level I knew it was going to kill me. I felt myself sinking under black oily water, being crushed by the pain and the fear. After what seemed like an eternity, the pain started to recede and with it the brackish water. Before me was a brilliant golden sunrise and the realization that while it was hard and painful, it didn’t last forever, and I was strong enough to withstand it. I became mother in that experience, not only literally, but I was the archetype. I dove into the black water of each contraction and was torn apart again and again, but I was remade each time. I surrendered to my labor for 4.5 hours before my first child was born.
I spent the next 20 years integrating the distinctions of this educational modality into my life and leading seminars to teach others to do the same. I called it practical neuroscience and it was as close to magic as I’d come in years.
Like most people who leave for college, I stopped participating in my family's religion, but through twisty paths found my way back to the Catholic Church. There was something about the early church that was enthralling to me, magic was all over the Bible in the stories of miracles and faith so powerful it could heal. The modern church however was as sterile as science in many ways. The closest I could come to mystical was singing Gregorian chants with a fabulous women’s choir. Ignoring the atrocities of the church for that brief glimpse of the eternal, however, became impossible to reconcile so I left religion again vowing to find something to fill that spiritual void. I did start to sing again in the Threshold Choir, a choir that sings at the bedside of those under hospice and palliative care.
Meanwhile, my career led me from the research bench to scientific communication and education, to data science, and work with graph databases.
It was at this point I was introduced to the intentional psychedelic trip. Almost three years ago, I, unaware at the time, embarked on a sustained psychedelic inquiry. I discovered that non-ordinary states of consciousness were a deep and intense methodology to unearth what had me stuck in ordinary ways of thinking, and engaged all of me, not just the cerebral muscles I had been honing for decades. My first journey surprised me by laying bare just how little regard I had for myself. Of course, I didn’t like that lesson much, thinking I’d grown beyond that thought pattern. Instead integrating that message, I blamed the poor set and setting created by the guides of that retreat. My second journey repeated my previous lesson, but this time I listened. Two other significant events took place during this mushroom journey, first; I was moved by the spirituality of the guides, so much so that I undertook a two-year training in Shamanic Healing. Second, our guide said, “You have faeries in your hedge”. This single notion both grounded me and made my heart soar.
I started listening to my intuition and welcomed serendipity. I registered for a conference I had wanted to attend for 20 years, The Science of Consciousness. The connections I made there resulted in my returning two years later to present my research on mapping the spirit realm using AI and machine learning algorithms to text-mine narratives of people’s extraordinary experiences (near-death experiences, drug induced mystical states, spiritually transformative experiences, and shared death communications).
I filled the spiritual void in my soul with a devotion to Pachamama and all the beings, seen and unseen, connected to her. I found community in some of the best and weirdest places; I received permaculture training on the land of an ayahuasca retreat center in Peru, and regularly attend workshops with folk who collaborate with the fae.
At some point I realized I was being called to carry mushroom medicine, but to do that I would need to develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence to hold that sacred space, and that is how I find myself a part of the Psychedelics Today Vital Community. My research, singing at the bedside, and personal experiences with my medicine family make specializing in Spiritual Emergence an obvious choice for me. Only six weeks into this program I’ve already started to see what I will need to confront to do justice to the people that I work with, but I am willing to do whatever is needed.
In one of my most impactful recent journeys I was given the message to “just listen”. I went to the paddock prior to taking the medicine and an old mare came right up to me and just stood with me. When I had sorted myself out and was ready to go, she wandered away. Eight hours later, after an earth-moving experience, I came back to thank her. From ten feet away, I asked her if I could come over. Her clear response to me was “If you want kisses, go talk to them”, and she swung her head towards the ponies. Shaken, I walked over to the ponies, one of which ran up to me and licked my entire face.
Cuz, who wants to live in a world without magic, anyway?