I had my first psychedelic experience roughly 2 years ago. I had spent a week tracking down reliable spots for liberty caps, a bit of an adventure in itself really. Naturally, in the spirit of an amateur mushroom picker I ate them raw, being far too impatient to suppress the rather strong taste in the form of a tea. From what I had read about them, the things that appealed to me most was the deep thought and change in perspective that people seemed to achieve from solo tripping, so I decided to do the same. Somehow they did exactly what I hoped for. I left my trip with a strong sense of being connected to the world, a few ideas on how I want to improve myself, and an urge to surround myself with beauty.
A lot has happened in those 2 years. I finally got around to getting myself into University. My father passed away. And a week from now I will hopefully be standing on Europe's tallest peak in Russia. (Mt Elbrus, 5642m)
I'm not quite sure how the idea of the seven summits (the tallest mountains in each continent) got into my head, but Elbrus seemed like a reasonable task compared with the other continents. As it turns out, it still requires a fair amount of training, and as someone that previously only hiked isolated and relaxing trails while high as a kite, it took a little bit of time for this idea to settle well. Actually it took me back to psychedelics. Although not liberty caps, I had an interesting turn of luck and managed to get my hands on some real LSD. 8 hours of introspection, pretty colours, writing, and odd patterns later, I was ready to make some changes.
I decided that the benefits of not eating meat outweighed the slight euphoria of eating 3 big macs after a night of heavy drinking. I wasn't convinced with being a vegan yet, so I settled for vegetarian. I decided it was time for a consistent sleep schedule, no more 24 hour rambo sessions of any kind. I wanted to feel fresh in the mornings. Finally, I decided on my training regime. The gym has never really been for me, but I have plenty of mountains surrounding where I live in Ireland. I'd use those to train.
Being me, not all of these changes happened right away. In fact, I can look as close back as last week, where I left my house fairly late on a Friday and didn't return until early Sunday. The hangover was as bad as it sounds. Whatever.
I did well on the rest of the objectives and I feel pretty great in general now. My fitness, self-awareness and appreciation of the world has all vastly improved. I take daily hikes, always making sure to have a bit of variation so as not to dull any of the views for myself. I can't complain.
I have to wonder about the influence that psychedelics have. I find them more of an aid, helping you find what you want, but nothing more. I don't feel like using psychedelics again at the moment, and probably won't for while yet. Anyway, that is a brief insight into the series of events that helped me turn away from depression despite how easy it could have been for me to slip further. The aim of this post is to help pull away some of the stigma surrounding psychedelics. If there is interest I'd happily write about some the experiences themselves in detail.