God, Grief, and Psychedelics

It was two years ago. I was mentally propped up by strong antidepressant medications from the VA, my marriage was falling apart, I was suffocating an emotional swamp of shame, and felt like a shell of a man.

I was laying in my bed looking up whether my life insurance policy would cover my suicide. I thought the best “gift” to my ex-wife and children was to remove myself from their lives and make sure they were financially set for the next ten years. At that moment, I genuinely felt that ending my life was the best (and only) solution for my internal torment. 

Two years ago I felt powerless to the circumstances of my life as one thing after another began to fall apart. 

As much as I hated every aspect of my life during that time, I’m ultimately grateful for that low of lows because it led me to where I am today. It helped me become desperate enough to begin looking beyond everything I had come to know to be true. 

To say the last few years have fundamentally changed the core of who I am would be an understatement.

God: 

Like so many Christians, I had done all I knew to “grow closer to him” and “be radically abandoned for His call on my life”... so much so that I lost my ability to identify and connect to my own strength. My old version of God had become a crutch I used to limp forward in life hoping, with fingers crossed, that He would come to rescue me from my misery. 

As painful as it was, the journey of losing everything I had anchored my faith in, opened me up to finding God in so much more than the box I had been taught to keep Him in. 

I stripped away everything I thought I knew of God and held on to the one truth I knew would stand the test of time. 

God is love. 

I began asking questions I was afraid to ask. Questions like, where can I find this God of love when I’m not bound by any religion or personal expectation of what it may look like? 

While scary as hell, I slowly began to see Him in ways I was blinded to. I began to see Him deep within my own being as well as everything and everyone around me. 

Grief:

At the same time, my perception of God was crumbling, I was going through a divorce. Divorce was one of my greatest fears, and the source of pain I hadn’t personally experienced up to that point.

I told a friend that if grief came in waves, I had managed to ride the waves off the coast of California on a sunny day. My divorce felt like being dropped from a helicopter into the crashing super waves off the coast of Hawaii when a storm was brewing. 

I felt ill-equipped to handle the waves. When each wave would crash, I didn’t know if I was ever going to come up for air again. Eventually, I would surface only to gasp for air long enough to see the next wave cresting with a force I wasn’t ready to embrace.

My heart felt empty. My spirit felt dry. My soul felt like it was on life support. 

I was tired and felt hopeless….

Psychedelics:

That desolate and barren place led me to plant medicine. It was my last attempt at trying something different in hopes of helping me turn a corner. If they didn’t help, I felt as though I would slowly lose my mind, the one thing I felt was hanging on by a thread at the time.

I started by choosing to microdose psilocybin and THC while slowly coming off my antidepressants. It was scary as hell for a few reasons… 

I had been taught that psychedelics were something to be scared of. After all, psychedelics were opening me up spiritually to the demonic, or that people can quickly lose their mind and never get it back. (Thank you Church and a now obviously failed war on drugs in the 80’s and 90’s)

Also, I had tried to come off antidepressants in the past. Doing so only led to me falling deeper into depression and contemplating suicide. Something I was almost sure would happen again but was willing to risk.

Needless to say, I was terrified, but I was also desperate. 

To my surprise, I slowly began to feel my mind heal. I felt my heart connecting to empathy, compassion, and hope…. and realized there was another path that I could go on. 

It’s hard to put in words how empowering it feels to know there is something available that offers a pathway for you to heal yourself. While overused, “Healing” is the only word that comes to mind. 

Unfortunately, this journey has cost me greatly. I’ve heard everything from “You’re going to lose your mind” to “You’re being deceived by the devil '' to “You’re talking to demons” to “You’re a bad father because you’re not protecting your children ''... and the list goes on. 

In hindsight, I realized it was nothing but other people’s fear being projected onto me. Some people have said I was courageous for pushing beyond their fears, but I was desperate enough to ignore them because I had tried everything else. 

Over the last two years I have sat in ayahuasca ceremonies (you can hear all about my experience here), microdose psilocybin regularly, macro dosed psilocybin for personal journeys, used rapé regularly, had a deep emotional release with MDMA, and the list goes on. 

In that process, I have found healing for my heart and mind, found a deeper intimacy with my children, gratitude for those who chose to remain in a relationship with me, and slowly began rebuilding my life again.

There is still a considerable stigma attached to so many plants that can help you heal yourself. If you’re interested in plant medicine, please reach out to me.

You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) be on your journey alone.