Walking through fear on psychedelics

How feeling our fears while on psychedelics can help us navigate change.

As a psilocybin facilitator, I meet many people who feel anxious before and/or during  a psilocybin journey. I myself frequently feel varying levels of anxiety before taking psychedelics. Fear is a normal and important part of psychedelic journeywork.

Having a big psychedelic experience can be scary because, like life and that box of chocolates, we never know what we’re gonna get. There’ve been times when I’ve been extremely fearful pre-journey and had a smooth and ecstatic ride. And there’ve been times when I’ve come in feeling confident and brave only to get my ass whooped by a terrifying hellscape.

Many people come to psychedelics hoping to let go of something – an overly rigid sense of self, relational or career expectations that haven’t been met, phobias which rob them of peace of mind, or just a heaviness or confusion that can show up as symptoms of depression or “stuckness”. Underneath all of these is a fear of losing control. Psychedelics go straight to the heart of this fear.

Unlearning contraction and birthing your new self

In the 1960s and 70s, “go with the flow” was the catchphrase of the hippie counterculture. Today, it’s evolved into “let go”, “surrender to the moment” or “be present” (an iteration of Ram Dass’s book title “Be Here Now”). Most people seem to be aware that letting go is essential for happiness because it’s the only way to relax or be “at ease” as we move through the river of life. Control is a natural response, and our identities are built upon layers and layers of it. When we work to control our bodies, life circumstances, finances, moods, relationships, what others think of us etc., we are contracting or shrinking ourselves to fit into a limited “I” when we could be expanding into infinite “I”s that we haven’t yet tried out. Like a cervix contracting then expanding in childbirth, pushing through fear enables new versions of ourselves to be born.

 

Crossing over the ocean between this chapter and the next

The word “fear” is rooted in the Proto-Indo-European word “per,” which means “to try”, “to pass through”, “cross over”, “to risk”, or “to ferry”. Within the context of psychedelics, fear is that ocean that carries us from one shore (our current life stage/circumstance) to another (our next life stage/circumstance). It is the ferryman that helps us travel across that sea of unwanted and dark emotions separating our past from our future. It is also the “fare” (a cousin of the word fear) that we must pay in order to discover why we are here and where we need to go next.

Somatic and emotional rehearsal for grief and dying

On some of my psychedelic journeys, I’ve experienced the deaths of my loved ones and my own dying and death. Not imagined it but felt it in every cell in my body and consciousness as if it were an actuality, happening at the time of the trip. Once the hallucination was over, I would be overwhelmed with joy and gratitude to be alive and to know that my loved ones are still here in the world. But I would also know for certain that their departure and my own departure are inevitable; realities that I will have to accept. The fear evoked by the death and loss experiences serve as an emotional and somatic rehearsal for the inescapable future. Having practiced my terror and mourning in vivo, I can more fully appreciate all the life and living that I still have the luxury of experiencing right here, right now.

“Change is the law of life” said John F. Kennedy. Growing up can be bittersweet. As we leave childhood, we see possibilities in the horizon but also become increasingly aware of illness, aging and death looming. If you survive late adulthood, growing old means the compounding of loss, grief and death, making change harder to bear.

I think that for many of us, the big, monstrous fear underneath all the other fears is that our story will come to its end, perhaps a lonely, ugly, painful, abrupt or inchoate end. Coming to terms with this is the universal process of letting go, and psychedelics are especially helpful for those of us who grip too tight.