Psychedelic Purge
In 2018 I began experiencing a severe form of agoraphobia, which is the fear of losing control typically felt in vast, open spaces or large public places. This manifested for me particularly while driving. The first time this happened was when I was driving to a conference in New Mexico from our home in California. Once I reached the desert, I had a major panic attack. My heart was racing, I was sweating profusely, and I had this uncontrollable urge to drive my car right off the freeway into the sand. This quickly turned into crippling anxiety when driving down any steep grade or over a bridge. By 2019, I was almost unable to drive. Leslie and another friend encouraged me to try hypnotherapy, and it helped tremendously. It felt so life-changing that after I quit the priesthood and left Christianity and the Church in 2020, I decided to get my certification as a hypnotherapist. I graduated from HMI (Hypnosis Motivation Institute) in early 2021 and immediately opened my private practice in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Through my time at HMI and during that first year of working with many clients, I learned so much about the subconscious mind and how humans are locked into lifelong conditioning from when they were young. It was such exciting and rewarding work for me. The more I tried to help others with their subconscious issues, the more it revealed my own conditioning and fears.
I continued to see my own excellent hypnotherapist, as well as practice hypnotherapy on myself. The work was powerful, but by 2022 I felt like I needed something else to take me deeper inside myself, so I could purge myself of decades of conditioning. Psychedelics were nowhere near my radar, and I’m not sure I would have ever even thought of this modality had Leslie not brought up the subject. She had just finished Michael Pollan’s seminal work on psychedelics called “How to Change Your Mind.” She was open to it, and so was I. In 2022, we were not only both turning 50 but also celebrating 30 years of marriage. So, we decided to honor all of this with a trip to Esalen (a famous center offering workshops, training, and retreats for healing and growth) located right on the mystical cliffs of Big Sur, where the Esalen tribe once thrived. A wonderful Canadian shaman taught us and led us in meditation. At the close of the week, she guided us in a liquid tobacco ceremony. This was our entrance into plant-based medicine. It was a profound experience that gave us a taste of what might be possible.
Over the course of the next year and a half, I went on multiple medicine journeys and each one helped me to purge years of conditioning. I worked with quite a lot of different medicines, including psilocybin (mushrooms), ayahuasca, huachuma, MDMA, LSD, tobacco, and cannabis. My experience was that these medicines were helping me to purge much faster than I would have with traditional therapeutic modalities alone, probably by many years. Initially, it was incredibly exciting. I dove straight in and all in! By early 2024, I felt my body telling me I had done enough. It was time to integrate. Little did I know that the integration period would be the most challenging experience of my life.
Our society is obsessed with normalcy. I see this as the age we’ve been living in for the past couple of thousand years. In astrology, this period is known as the Age of Pisces (we are currently leaving this age and entering the Age of Aquarius). Conformity is one of the hallmarks of the Piscean age. So this has been our challenge as a species. Every field has been affected by this compulsion to conform and fit in, including psychology. Anything not deemed normal for humans on the psychological level is given a label, typically under the umbrella heading of neurodivergence. Labels help reinforce identities. Perhaps the most important thing all of these medicines did for me (especially huachuma or San Pedro) was to collectively strip me of my identities. Like peeling the layers of an onion, one eventually gets to the core. The beginning of this process was thrilling for me because I had so many identities I’d accumulated over my life, and most of them I no longer wanted. But as the saying goes in the psychedelic journeying world, “The medicine knows what to do.” At some point, personal identities were being taken from me that I wasn’t sure I wanted to part with.
Oh, and there is another thing about these medicines that I didn’t realize before taking them… they keep working long after you’ve taken them! While each of my journeys was quite intense, they each ended with a kind of euphoria. For me, initially becoming aware that there is only oneness, only conscious awareness, was like being enveloped in a blindingly white light of love. I felt free in my body, in fact, so free in my body that for the first time in my life, I was able to dance. But by early 2024 I began experiencing that same oneness (that same reality that conscious awareness is all there is) as complete emptiness, darkness, void. I had entered into the most profound midlife crisis or dark night of the soul. As an astrologer, I prefer to call this my Chiron Return Awakening. I’m not quite out of it yet. Astrologically speaking, I won’t be out of it until 2026.
It’s nearly impossible to describe in words what I’ve experienced and continue to experience. Virtually everything and everyone I’ve identified with has ceased. Rupert Spira’s metaphor has helped me to express this more clearly. There is only conscious awareness. That is what we are. It’s like we’re the screen, and all of our thoughts, feelings, sensations, beliefs, and identities are a movie being played on that screen. The film colors the experience of awareness, but it’s not who we are. These days, I am experiencing myself more and more as just that naked screen. Again, it’s difficult to describe the sheer terror of feeling that kind of nakedness for the first time. It’s like waking up to realize you’re standing in the middle of a crowded plaza completely naked. Time + meditation/stillness has been a valve that has slowly released this fearful pressure. The final thing that is leaving is not really the fear of death, but the fear of the extinction of Chris. Now I’m realizing more and more that the blank screen is not something to be feared. It is a blank canvas to display new films.
I AM reinventing Chris. It takes time and stillness, you know? And at 52, I hope I get to reinvent Chris at least a few more times before I return to that magnificent void of pure consciousness.