Talking to God on Psychedelics (Part One)

Spiritual journey ... or drug-induced psychosis?

Another long essay, with a personal story I’ve been reluctant to share. This is an abridged version of the story, with many parts omitted for brevity — and because some things are best saved for a paywall or between the covers of a book.

I would appreciate it if those who choose to start reading it stay with me until the end. Because this is a long story, I’ve decided to split it into parts.

This is part one.

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“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

— Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

The first time I thought I saw God, I hid under the comforter in my bedroom.

This was August 2022. My daughter, then about 11 months old, was napping on the bed next to me. She was a clingy baby — a result, I suspected, of a traumatic birth and a four-day stay in the NICU — and for the first year of her life, I rarely left her side, to the point of staying in the bedroom with her while she napped.

I was stretching on the bed, when suddenly I felt a presence, and the ceiling above me began to swirl with an orange-blue light, like clouds but not exactly like clouds, like mesh, but not quite, like a fire, but not a fire, like electricity, but not really.

I would see this being many times in the years that followed, and always fail to capture the Spirit in words.

The Spirit was beyond language.

The Spirit spoke to me beyond language, into the wordless right hemisphere of my brain. In emotion, in a knowing which my left hemisphere translated — imperfectly — into English.

The Spirit told me it was time to start writing again.

I replied that I didn’t want to. I was done writing, and was committed to being a stay-at-home “Earth mother” (in the snarky words of friend and writing mentor Susan Swan, who around this time pointed out — accurately — that I had the “brain of a writer” and couldn’t run away from that).

I knew I had material to write about, arguments I was sitting on that were not in the mainstream, and which I felt needed to be. I didn’t want to deal with potential backlash.

So I hid under the blanket.

I quickly realized how stupid this was. The Spirit told me to stop being a coward.

I came out from under the blanket.

The mesh cloud-like light dipped down toward me, like a long finger. Without knowing why, I reached my hand upward to meet it.

A warm electric feeling buzzed through my entire body, each cell stirring with energy.

The light disappeared and the room returned to normal. I collapsed onto the bed.

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In the early months of the 2020 lockdowns, psilocybin mushrooms saved my life.

I was very sick, suffering from chronic migraines, gastrointestinal issues, insomnia, crippling anxiety, and depression. My shoulder and neck pain — a persistent reminder of a skull-shape-altering fall off a staircase onto the cement floor of my parents’ unfinished basement just before my first birthday — had become so bad I could barely go fifteen minutes without massaging my shoulder or leaning against the edge of a wall for relief. I was in therapy to address some childhood trauma and emotional neglect, and this had led me to ruminate and experience flashbacks so intense sometimes I thought I could actually see my child self in the room with me — I knew the visions weren’t real, and chalked them up to a stress-induced misfiring of my unusually good visual-spatial skills and overactive imagination.¹ I was abusing Ibuprofen and marijuana to deal with the pain — both, which, obviously, were making the situation a lot worse.

The main trigger for this decline in health was a strong round of antibiotics to treat an infected cut in late 2017, which wiped out my gut microbiome. Afterward, my anxiety spiked and I found it increasingly difficult to eat, in particular meat and seafood. I started losing weight, which was alarming, because I started at a healthy weight and was very athletic, and began to look emaciated (my hockey teammates were very worried).

I was also under a lot of stress. I was in grad school, and working full-time at a feminist literary journal and festival in an increasingly “woke” literary culture, dealing with aggressive harassment from “activists”, in particular after I refused to fire two writers we were working with after they signed an open letter calling for accountability after the grad program I was in fired the head of the department over a rape allegation — one, which, as evidence emerged after the firing, may have been a false allegation. I was in conflict with my parents over my role at this organization, because I dedicated so much time to it — I was, and still am, an ardent believer in the power of stories to change a culture — and because I worked for such a low wage I was essentially a volunteer; my parents are wealthy (new money), and I felt that because of that, it was unethical of me to ask for money from an organization with such a low budget (the annual budget, when I left, was more than three times what it was when I started, and still only about 15-20% of my father’s annual salary). I wanted my parents to financially support me while I volunteered in the community, whereas they felt that I was allowing myself to be taken advantage of, and wasn’t valuing my skills or labour. (And they had a point; it did not escape my notice that many of the people who were quick to grab my hand when I was in a position to lift them up and help their careers, were the fastest to let go when my health declined and I began to express opinions that were inconvenient).

I quit this job at the end of 2019, in part because I knew I was censoring myself and that it was an unhealthy environment for me to be in. Despite everything, I was at a career high when I left the organization — the magazine had flourished while I was its publisher, tripling in subscriber numbers, I had connections and a good reputation across Canada’s literary scene, was respected as a grant writer for numerous arts organizations and festivals, had published in multiple literary journals, had recently sold a collection of short stories to a small publisher (the collection came out to fairly good reviews in 2021), and had been approached by a major literary agent about writing a memoir.

Photo from the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Awards, which I attended as a publisher and festival organizer

In addition, I was in a bad relationship with an emotionally manipulative boyfriend who wouldn’t let me break up with him. It took eight attempts on my part to end the relationship, in large part because he took advantage of my chronic pain — I’d try to dump him, he’d demand we have a long conversation about it, which inevitably triggered a migraine and/or tension headache, and then he’d start massaging my shoulders, neck, and head, and I’d cave to the pain relief. I finally successfully dumped him in February 2020, which was terrible timing because then the lockdowns happened, and he used them as an excuse to not move out of the apartment I owned, claiming that if I kicked him out, I was condemning him to death.

Starting in 2018, I had begun a fervent dive into the literature on psychology, epigenetics, autism, narcissism, Western history, and other related topics. I would sit on the floor playing Tetris Effect on VR for hours while binging audiobooks, trying to unravel a puzzle I couldn’t quite describe, seeking answers to questions I couldn’t articulate. I had always felt that there was something wrong with the Western world, that something, long ago, had gone horribly awry.

I lasted less than a month in lockdown with my ex before fleeing to stay with a friend for a couple of weeks; the stay ended when a migraine triggered cyclical vomiting, requiring me to go to the emergency room. I went home after that, and attempted to avoid my ex as much as possible (fortunately, it was a two-bedroom). Desperate to get away from him, I hopped onto OKCupid looking for a guy irresponsible enough to let me hang out at his place for a bit. I found someone within a week (Sam, from “Particles and Waves”). “Sam” was good-looking, athletic, smart, left-leaning but “anti-woke”, and interested in psychology and psychedelics … and, more importantly, he lived alone and only about an eight-minute walk away from me.

Sam and I hung out at his place, drinking beer and smoking marijuana out of his kitchen window, staying up late talking until 3 or 4 in the morning. From the beginning, we hit it off as friends more than lovers (and I continued talking to other men on OKCupid during this time, including my now-husband, Zach, who I didn’t meet up with until the lockdown restrictions lifted in June, as he lived with two roommates and was a bit more conscientious than I was).

Sam convinced me to try magic mushrooms, telling me that he thought they might help with my various ailments. He gave me a small bag, and gave me the contact information for a hippie-ish mushroom dealer so I could buy more on my own.

I had no personal experience with any illegal drugs (other than marijuana, back when it was still illegal in Canada) prior to this.

Sam told me to start by micro-dosing (< 0.25 grams), but after my first small trip, I became convinced that mushrooms had the power to heal me, and I recklessly jumped headfirst into hero-dosing (5+ grams), even though I was still living with my ex and the vibes in our condo were, to put it mildly, not conducive to having a good trip.

Despite this, my first hero-dose was magical. I caught a glimpse of the peaceful afterlife, the return to the planetary consciousness, the cheesy-but-romantic realization that we were all one, microbiota of the planetary microbiome (“as above, so below”). I was filled with love, and, in a revelatory moment, I understood fractals, the geometry of life and God. I curled up on my couch while The Sound of Music — one of my favourite movies as a child — streamed quietly on the TV, holding myself as still as possible, hoping that by conserving energy, I could prolong the trip and stay a bit longer in serenity. I’ve compared a hero-dose of psilocybin mushrooms to getting Christmas Carol-ed; but my trip with the Spirits of past and present were more akin to It’s a Wonderful Life than the Scrooge treatment.

I woke up the next morning, still on the couch, feeling absolutely, almost manically, wonderful. I instantly had more energy and motivation for self-care tasks such as cleaning (my ex had let the condo get incredibly messy in my absence, including stacking bags of garbage and plant debris from our balcony garden in the living room and outside my bedroom — I’d been dealing with it slowly) and cooking healthy food (my ex rarely helped with cooking, and I’d taken to doing stuff like eating cereal in the bedroom or grabbing breakfast sandwiches from fast food joints, in a cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face kind of way).

My ex had mooched a hero’s dose of mushrooms off of me that same night. His trip seemed to go a little darker than mine, and to my relief, he was subdued the next day, and kinder to me and more accepting of the break-up from that moment onward. (The downside was that during his trip, he interrupted mine to ask me to cuddle him, and I reluctantly agreed, because I have poor boundaries and I felt bad for him since he seemed to be having a rough time with the mushrooms).

This was mid-May 2020. I plunged into hero-dosing. It felt like the mushrooms were cleaning me out, repairing damage I didn’t even know I had, pulling me out of the inner darkness I had taken to calling “The Great Empty”, purging illness and insanity out of me, telling me I was loved and that I was worth saving. During this time, I switched from eating the mushrooms to preparing a tea, with an increasingly complicated recipe I was convinced would enhance psilocybin’s healing effects — because the mushrooms themselves were telling me what to put in it. I was also convinced that the tea would protect me from Covid (and would later learn, to my amusement, that many of my ingredients were also on the World Council for Health’s “Spike Protein Detox Guide”.)

By early June, the mushroom dealer I’d been buying psilocybin off of ran out of stock. After about a week, I was determined to find more and messaged Zach on OKCupid. A scruffy-looking Jew who worked as a clinical counsellor with people in addiction and played guitar and sang in a reggae band, he seemed like someone who would know where to find more magic mushrooms. We’d been talking online almost every day until I’d started hero-dosing, upon which I ghosted all my conversations for about three weeks. He’d stuck out to me for a handful of reasons (besides the good odds he’d know where to find more shrooms); he was handsome, smart, and funny, he played guitar, his profile picture radiated kindness, he consistently kicked my butt in online Scrabble, and we were a rare 99% match according to OKCupid’s algorithm.

The lockdown restrictions had been lifted by then, and so we agreed to meet at a restaurant downtown.

We hit it off. I told him how I’d been healing my health issues with magic mushrooms, but my dealer had run out and I was desperate to find more. He told me he had a bag in his bedroom closet. So I invited myself over.

Back at his place, I brewed my mushroom tea and we both drank a moderate dose (I can’t remember how much, but we didn’t hero-dose so it was probably around 3-4 grams each), which, naturally, promptly caused me to vomit up the dinner he’d just bought me in the tiny ensuite bathroom of his (extremely messy) bedroom.

That first date lasted two-and-a-half days. I walked home, deliriously happy, with plans to meet up with him again the following weekend.

We met on Vancouver’s seawall for our second date; he brought a thermos of mushroom tea and so began our second psychedelics bender. At the end of the weekend, I told him I didn’t want to go home, and, to my surprise, he invited me to stay with him until my ex moved out at the end of the month.

Over the following couple of weeks, we did a lot of psychedelics (mostly mushrooms, but we experimented with ketamine, MDMA, LSD, and, of course, marijuana, as well). Near the end of June, I had my first “bad trip”, when I combined a high dose of psilocybin with too-many weed edibles. I became paranoid that I’d become too thin, and was starving to death (while I had lost more weight hero-dosing mushrooms so often, this was, to put it mildly, blowing the situation a little out of proportion). Bad trips can drive positive behaviour changes, however, and after that I cut back on how often I was taking mushrooms, and focussed on reintroducing foods into my diet that I’d struggled to eat since the antibiotics in late 2017, and on trying to regain some of the weight and muscle I’d lost while I was sick.

By the month’s end, Zach and I had both said “I love you”, and decided he would move in with me after my ex left (he basically ended up kicking my ex out). I felt like I’d been brought back to life. I could eat normally again. My chronic pain had alleviated. My stomach was no longer bothering me, and, I would eventually realize, my chronic migraines were gone. Zach had essentially trip-sat and nursed me back to health, and given me shelter from my ex — in my mind, he was the hero to my damsel-in-distress.

As it turned out, we’d actually saved each other. A couple of weeks after our first date, he confessed that he’d spent the last six years in addiction. But between the psychedelics and the distraction / motivation of having me around, he’d stopped using — and, still, hasn’t used since the afternoon before our second date.

He moved in with me, and we continued to experiment with psychedelics over the summer. This prompted several lifestyle changes for both of us; we both more or less quit drinking alcohol (except on rare occasions, now), and removed processed foods and refined sugars from our diets (again, except on special occasions). I quit taking Ibuprofen — my migraines were gone, but mushrooms don’t alleviate muscle-related issues, so I still had shoulder and neck pain and occasionally got tension headaches, but I’d discovered that combining a low dose of ketamine with yoga and stretching significantly helped this issue, and I was in far less pain than I had been since I was a child, possibly ever. I deleted my Twitter account (a connection to Canada’s literary scene) and stopped writing, choosing to spend my time with Zach, going outside, doing yoga in my living room, doing psychedelics, and reading many of the books I, years later, would discuss on this Substack.

Neither Zach nor I had really believed in God prior to 2020, but the influence of mushrooms had led us both to question whether there was some sort of higher conciousness, or Great Spirit, and the nature of such a being if one did exist. Our spiritual transformation was slow, and only just beginning, and ranged from philosophical speculations based on “downloads” from mushroom trips to silly dance parties to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Book of Mormon. By the end of the summer, I’d formed a loose impression of “God” (i.e. “Spirit”, “Gaia”, “Elohim”²) as being both singular and plural, both masculine and feminine (and neither male nor female), complex and powerful beyond our comprehension, but limited. Just as each human is made up of billions of gut bacteria (etc) that together create our conscious experience, so too did all the plants, animals, and fungi of the earth contribute to the microbiome and consciousness of God in a fractal relationship. Magic mushrooms opened the communication channels one fractal level up and down, allowing us to communicate — wordlessly, through emotion and images — with both our gut and the Earth. What hurts one will also hurt the other.

None of these insights were original; all are present in various religions and wisdom traditions, including Judaism (in particular Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism), Hinduism, Buddhism, and various Indigenous spiritualities, among others. I, however, was woefully ignorant of world religions and spiritual traditions prior to 2020, had rarely stepped foot in a church or other house of worship, and had grown up in a secular environment where people joked at the expense of religious (e.g. “can God microwave a burrito so hot even he can’t eat it?”) — and so this was all new and mind-blowing to me.

In early fall, during a late-night psychedelics party with his best friend, Zach impulsively proposed and I impulsively accepted. We eloped two months later, in late November, in a park in Vancouver, with four friends present as witnesses.

I wore the same dress I wore to the GG Awards two years earlier.

A month later, on New Year’s Eve, on another psychedelics-fuelled night, Zach got me pregnant.

And so ended part one of our psychedelics journey.

You can read part two here.

1. I believe that hyperphantasia — or the ability to clearly picture and rotate objects in one’s mind — may be an underlying cause of both mathematical talent and a vulnerability to visual hallucinations. I was very good at math as a child, in part because of this skill. See this Psychology Today article, “The Mad Genius Mystery”. As well, mathematically gifted people may be more vulnerable to developing perception disorders after using marijuana or psychedelics — this article by poet and author Curtis LeBlanc, who was also mathematically gifted as a child, provides a case study.

2. Throughout this multi-part essay, I will use “God”, “Spirit”, and “Elohim” interchangeably to refer to the entity I believe is the Great Spirit of Earth, or one fractal level up. If the fractal hypothesis is correct, then there would be one or more additional fractal levels of consciousness above the Earth (e.g. the Universe, or outside the Universe). Truth be told, I cannot know which consciousness I encountered in the opening scene, and am only speculating that it was the Earth (several people have disagreed with me and asked why I am so convinced it was not a higher God, the Universe etc, and my only answer to that is that I cannot imagine I am interesting enough for the Universe — or beyond — to pay a visit to). I am not sure whether it’s possible to speak directly to the higher Gods (or higher levels of God?), but if it is, I do not believe I have. Honestly, the more I learn and the more I encounter this entity on mushrooms, the more confused I am. I’ll get into this more in the following posts.