The Profile:
Name: Kyle
Nationality: American
Lives in: Kansas, USA
Age when taken psychedelics: 24
Job: Entrepreneur
Psychedelic of choice: Psilocybin
Place of ceremony: Kansas
What was your intention?
My intention was to get more answers. I knew it can also make you more creative and unlock parts of your mind, so I just wanted to try it to reveal my capability and see how far I can get.
I started really small and it made me feel I had all these different senses – I could feel things a bit more and multitask at a new level. At some point you get synaesthesia and smell colours – it was really cool. All that was fun and made me feel a bit more euphoric.
At a certain point, I went deeper and while I went in looking for answers to some questions, I got a ton of unanswerable ones that just flooded me. So, I think it opens your mind to those things. Sometimes it’s paradoxical as you get answers to things you were not necessarily looking for either.
My questions were general things like the meaning of life, what’s the purpose behind things, what’s the end goal – existential things. Then you are like “what is nothingness? what could it all be for? could it be for nothing? why am I chasing the material things? why do I continually chase one thing after another?” I am a motivated and an entrepreneurial person – I have my business and have always been that way. So, I was asking why I was doing all this.
Why did you take it?
I first heard about it when some friends did it recreationally in a forest at camp. To my knowledge, they didn’t really have an intention or purpose behind it. It came to my attention again later on as it started to come up a bit more with people’s curiosity and more science popping up about it. Once I started to do research, I realised this was one of the safest things you could do and mushrooms are organic too!
I’ve always been into spiritual types of things and alternative medicine. My grandparents were certified in Qi Gong (energy work). They would get patients for who that kind of healing was the last resort – they were very ill (e.g. cancer…) or they were people with a lot of psychological damage like PTSD or bad childhood experiences. My grandparents also did EFT (tapping). These were all alternative ways to do the healing.
That meant that from a very young age I was always exposed to this sort of stuff and was already open-minded to everything like that. In my mind, psychedelics and spirituality correlated well to each other too.
And then a couple of people around me were pretty much the same, reading philosophy books and eastern teachings, so our conversations would get very philosophical. I also have friends from different religions and have always had all this diverse input and didn’t necessarily grow up in a particular religion myself, so it was easy for me to be open-minded and be open to as many different options as possible.
What were you most afraid of?
I was scared at first because of all the scare stories you hear in high school. I valued my mind a lot and I didn’t want to lose it - that was the last thing I wanted.
What did you most look forward to?
I tried not to have any expectations for it. I just thought it would reveal whatever lesson I needed to be taught and I knew something could happen that might take me a while to process. So, I was just open.
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
The 1st few times were not hard but the most recent time I took it, I experienced a lot of things and one of them was that I felt like I was dying. That was the biggest thing for me, especially that I had lost both of my grandparents within the space of a couple of months at that time – they were the people that I looked up to for spiritual guidance. That was my first encounter with death and it really bothered me. Before that, I thought of it as a cycle of life but this time it went deeper.
During the experience, I was out camping. I had headphones in and was lying outdoors. There was a bit of light rain, which didn’t bother me at all – I was completely satisfied on the ground and everything felt very natural. The lyrics from the music I heard in my ears coincided a bit with what was happening in my life as I was intentional about this stuff – it talked about medicine, death, being yourself – I was just following it and it almost made me feel I was experiencing a certain kind of death myself to the point where the beeping in the music I was hearing made me think of the beeping of monitors in a hospital, which added to the experience.
I was seeing visions of my past, every single person that was in my life and every single lesson they had to teach me and what the underlying meaning was.
At some point there was this lonely experience where I felt I was this consciousness doing these things to experience itself. Material things didn’t exist at all – it was just this vast consciousness type of energy (there are no words to describe that). Sometimes it was very calming and sometimes I had anxiety that I was not going to come back. It just came in waves. Eventually I came out of it though.
What was the best bit about the experience?
It makes you super present, the feeling of connectedness to things and nature. Everything just clicked into place for a little while. Feeling like you don’t have so much of a body anymore. And then there were times, before I went deep, when there were all these vibrant colours and the sensory part of it – it’s so interesting and I felt I had all these different personalities inside of me interacting with each other while I was doing things. You see things differently – your vision is a little sharper and you notice things you were not noticing before. You get more sensory input.
What did you get from it?
It made me see how to live the most fulfilling life I can. Being OK that there are more questions than there are answers to. When you start getting all that wisdom, you start realising you know less. I think it’s learning to be OK with that and living with more intention and really finding how to bring out your true self.
My biggest dose was 3.5 grams but I put it in LemonTek – anecdotally, that may increase its potency. And I smoked a little bit of weed with it too, so I had time distortion as well. I can get deep inside my mind really easy though as I had done meditation and I think that matters. It’s also about the intention and set & setting.
How did it impact your life?
It was a big impact for a while as it set me back a little bit but it made me re-valuate things and so I’m clearer on the path I need to take and I was able to create much more intention in my life. I’m also just a bit more at ease with things, more open-minded. It made me work on myself, it brought certain things more to the surface.
What did you struggle with after?
After the experience where I felt I was dying, my mind was blown a bit. For a couple of weeks right after it was fine but a month or two later, I started to have anxiety and panic attacks, which I had never experienced before – it just gave me a lot of existential questions and made me challenge myself and who I was. It made me think of all those things that I wanted to accomplish to be true to myself that I was not quite doing yet. I felt as if I was going to die and I didn’t want that to happen without having done them, without ever having lived and having revealed my true self to the world.
Before the experience, I already knew I had things to work on and that just made it more apparent. I now needed to deal with it and make sure that I live my life more intentionally, evaluating why I was doing things, e.g. I started questioning why I was so social, why I was escaping facing myself having to go through solitude. Being alone and lonely are two different things in the end. So, I decided to try and be the best person I can be.
I wanted to be in the best mind state. I did a lot of research in Philosophy, e.g. existentialism and Albert Camus, or Alan Watts – I looked at every single aspect of my life. I even went to see a therapist for the first time in my life, which I had always been against. I tried as best as I could to exercise. I got into meditation – more than I had been before. I was very vigilant about making sure that I did it at least once a day for at least 20 min – I would start my day that way. I went at it with all the angles that I could.
My dad has anxiety and I have seen him on the medications he’s been taking and I didn’t want to do that. So, I found some natural supplements like Ashwagandha and then I started to do things like microdosing with psychedelics. I was terrified of psychedelics at the start but then I learned that when you microdose, you take really small amounts and you don’t feel anything. I started to do that and then pair it with other types of mushrooms like lion’s mane which are completely legal.
I did research on all of that and what they were supposedly doing: reducing anxiety & depression because they cut off the blood flow to your default mode network. That apparently makes you more present. It was also going to help with creativity and being good with problem solving. There was a lot of upside with that, so I started doing it. And it took a bit of time – it’s not instant like Xanax that a doctor gives you where it’s going to make your feeling go away but once you have control over what you can do, it is worth it so much more – going through all this stuff, processing it and doing all of that work made me way better off than what I was before. It put me into the ground and made me hit rock bottom but if you are able to build yourself from the ground up and put in the work, it’s totally worth it.
What improved?
I always liked a lot of creative stuff, so I started to do a lot of drawing that puts me in the flow state and makes me very present.
I’m also enjoying being in nature and started to take weekend trips to be able to do that more.
It’s interesting because I always had all of that entrepreneurial motivation to do well but I also have this other side that just wants to live in a van and travel and experience. I need to figure out the way to blend these two together somehow.
I do feel I’m clearer on what I want to get out of life and which direction I want to go and that is towards helping others. If that’s the way you want to go, you do have to go a certain way and I feel being pulled in that direction for sure.
Psychedelics helped me a lot and now I need to work things out to be able to go that way.
What do you need to work on?
There is so much stuff – you are always searching, trying to be the best you can be.
I’m trying to work on things that I enjoy, not allowing to compromise that or my values, guarding my time, making sure that anything I do I enjoy and if I’m sacrificing it, I know why I’m doing it. My dad hates his job and I don’t want to be that way. I’d rather be broke.
I also want to enjoy the moment, like Allan Watts says with life being like a dance. So, I’m trying to surround myself with good, like-minded people who would not make me compromise my values. I’m trying to do things that can make me more honest and vulnerable around people – that’s always been hard for me. Normally, I would be there for a lot of people but not really revealing a lot of myself. That was a big thing for me. I could go through that experience of death and not have my true self be really out there with all these people meeting only some version of me. So, I’m just trying to be as true to who I am as I can be.
It was a hard trip and took months to a year of a lot of processing and research but I also don’t feel like I need to take these substances more now.
Kyle’s experience is an example of how psychedelics have this undeniable capability to bring whatever issues we are cultivating deep inside right to the surface. It makes us uncomfortable – the reason why we are stashing these issues right at the back of our psyche in the first place, distracting ourselves with things, sometimes even dressing it as ambition, drive or sacrifice for others. Psychedelics have a way of not negotiating though – they go straight in, so you’d better be ready to face yourself!
Kyle, like so many of us, got caught up in the chase we all (knowingly or not) participate in. But he had an incline – that’s why he was asking questions, searching for ways to get inside and find the truth. Psilocybin helped, although it didn’t look like it right at the start. Getting anxiety and panic attacks may look like you messed things up but that’s the way our western culture thinks about things – seeing anxiety as the unwanted outcome. It’s there as an emergency function though. Instead of us running away from it like the plague and numbing it with pills or pleasure that never satiates, we could be looking it right in the face and picking up the broken pieces of us, rebuilding ourselves the way we deem more fit, more in line with ourselves and our values.
Kyle did that and I was glad to speak to another human who seems to have gone through a similar bit of the journey as me. We are truly not alone.