Lenny_

Hey there, I don’t really know how to begin this. I grew up never really experiencing anxiety. After I finished school I became addicted to weed and got a psychosis that I didn’t even know I ever had until a few months ago. To me, all that I was experiencing in that time was just real. Back then I quit smoking weed and left to Australia for a year, when I came back to my old environment I suddenly experienced extreme anxiety attacks. I didn’t tell anyone about it, and started to take ashwaghanda instead. That’s a supplement meant to help with sleep and relieve stress by lowering cortisol, but I figured when I take 10-20x the recommended dose, it helps extremely well with my anxiety. Now, half a year later I’m just dependent on swallowing plenty of pills every morning and still struggle with anxiety. There’s one other thing that I think I can handle, but I still want to share it to not make a secret out of it any longer. I’m an exhibitionist and my mom hates those, I overheard her talking about this from time to time while I grew up. So I was (and still am) very ashamed for my sexuality, but I came out of my shell and started to engange in the local bdsm scene where I can talk open about it and not getting judged by the people there. That’s already helping me because I get positive real life feedback instead of meditating on my shame without actually making results. I haven’t told anyone about going to those events and my sexuality yet, but I’m planning on outing myself to some close friends. Now back to my anxiety. Unlike my sexuality I have nothing tangible to work on or I don’t have a clue what it is. I’m already jounaling about the time of my psychosis and trying to write down as much memories as possible. I also know, that the main emotion I relate to that time is shame. A lot of it. Taking psychedelics in higher doses is not an option for me, I can’t handle them right now, they make me suicidal. I’m curious about holotropic breathing as a tool to release emotions, but I’m also very cautious to not make things worse. I am also thinking of going to psychotherapy, I probably should but I never really admitted to myself that my mental situation is severe enough that I really need to. Do any of you have experiences with psychotherapy, does it help with emotional issues as well or only with severe mental illness? The final step that I will take but I’m still extremely afraid of, is to do an MDMA session with my parents and just radically talk about all of this because I never did so with anyone. I’m still locked up in fear right now hoping to make progress in the future. I just want to reach out with my situation, maybe some of y’all are going through similar phases or have some wisdom to share with me.

@Pudgey okay, thanks for your time. I‘m considering to participate an ayahuasca ceremonie in a few months when I go to thailand. I‘m looking forward to it, hopefully some more things will reveal itself.

Hey, I‘ve had some intense trips from weed before but yesterday it gave me a straight up lsd type of headspace so I want to share that. I think it‘s pretty cool. I apologize for my potential not perfect english because I‘m not a native speaker. I will just start to tell the story by sharing my chain of thoughts that I wrote down as soon as I could after, but before that I want to clarify one thing. This post is not biased against sciene nor do I want to make fun of science, it‘s just the thoughts that wanderd through my mind and led me straight into an egodeath. So I‘m not a regular weedsmoker anymore, I maybe just it once a month for personal insights so my tolerance is pretty damn low. I started off with just a few tokes and wrote down some things in my diary. After a while and some more tokes a thought catched me: Why is the fundamental science that studys the mind not acknowledged as a real sciene? -Psychology. Because science can‘t grasp it. Science measures, notes down, concludes and calculates. The mind can not be measured, noted down, concluded or calculated. That‘s why science ignores the mind. And science is trying everywhere else to understand the universe using all kinds of methods. But it will never find an answer because it is impossible. Science, something that is trying to grasp itself but it can‘t because it is looking within itself. In my experience I became completely merged with these thoughts. I had a vision of the perspective of someone looking at a desk with scientific papers in front of him trying to figure reality out with no chances of understanding it while being reality itself. You are all of reality and at the same time it is impossible for you to understand yourself so it‘s a never ending play of new discoveries that lead to new questions. This felt like a perfect balanced cycle with no beginning and no end. I really felt the beauty of it with no fear at all. I would have never expected such insights from just smoking weed and it kinda took some fear of tripping from me. I had an intense unpleasant lsd trip around a year ago that gave me depression for a few months and completely scared me away from continuing the use of psychedelics but this may be a new start. Let me know what y‘all think of this.

@vibv @OBEler Thanks for your answers! @Pudgey Can you explain what do you mean by ego backlash? I‘ve heard the term before but never really understood it especially in the context of a trip. Does anxiety always arise from trauma or can it also originate from general bad experiences? I actually discovered a very dark side of myself that I am now embracing in my life but I don‘t see any correlation with this and my past trip. I mostly had a nice childhood in general, I wouldn‘t expect any trauma coming from there.

@OBEler @vibv It was jut a Trip I‘ve done in a bad setting, because it was the only day that I knew for sure I could take it in the next few months. I was very young and still lived at my parents house and I was alone there for for two days. The problem was there were construction workes in our garden that I didn‘t knew about when I planned the trip. I still decided to take it because my last trips were amazing and I finally wanted a breakthrough egodeath experience. So I took the highest dose I‘ve done so far, about 200 micrograms. Usually I spend the time in the garden, on the balcony or walk through different rooms of the house when I trip but now I was kinda trapped in my room because I didn‘t want to be seen by the contruction workers. I really wanted to see the nature but I couldn‘t and after about 2 hours I‘ve had a feeling that sth very serious is about to happen. So I layed on the floor and felt that I was dying. I had ego dissolutions before on lsd but they were more gentle and less forced. I knew all the theory what to to, just relax and to let it happen and I thought I did that in the moment but looking back I actually showed resistance without knowing it. When I sat up I was just looking through the room trying to figure out what I am. I didn‘t felt connected to anything, there was no sign of spirituality or love or unitiy anywhere, it was just a bubble of consciousness desperatley trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I was too much attached to the idea of god and that psychedelics will lead me there (also because of my previous trip) and when I felt nothing of that on my egodeath I felt like nothing of this is right and I have nothing to believe in anymore. That was a big thought loop I remember, me just walking egoless around and having nothing left to believe in. But that wasn‘t even that bad, I kinda relaxed myself after that and a few hours later I sat down in front of a huge window when the workers were gone and watched the garden. My optics went crazy right there and I slid into another more mystic egodeath. I notice that this post is getting too long so I will hurry up a bit. My main insight from that second egodeath was sth like life has no meaning, because if it had a meaning, that would mean you could fulfill it‘s purpose and then life would stop, but life never stops so there can‘t be a meaning. The meaning of life is to search the meaning but you never find it. (similar line of thought like my weed trip) After that I spent just endless hours in the comedown (lsd last about 20 hours for me) and I was confronted with everykind of fears that came up especially social fears, so at the end of the night I just felt like life is an infinite torture that‘s only about survival and fears with no meaning and there‘s no way to stop this. The next morning I woke up with emptiness in my chest and no joy towards life anymore. But I managed to get back to my old self I‘m now traveling in another continent and enjoying life mostly again so to anybody who feels like I did, there‘s a way out I promise. And sry for bad english again