Surrendering to the Slog After a Psychedelic Journey with Justin Baker – SMJ 007

An Upfront Note

If you're looking for a recap of my first experience with psilocybin – also known as magic mushrooms – you won't get it here and now. You'll hear me mention how I symbolically found God in a laundry room and temporarily became Beach Jesus. Those are stories for another time.

What I'm offering is a bonus session with the medicine and experience facilitator, my wonderful friend, Justin Baker. I actually find the integration process for this specific psychedelic experience equally intriguing as the psychedelic experience itself.

There's a chance that this bonus episode will be irrelevant to you, your current life, or possibilities you want to explore. It'll be confusing at points because you aren't me and weren't there to experience the journey. You're essentially a fly on the wall for a one-on-one integration conversation between me and Justin.

You're About to Learn …

• What my psilocybin integration was like in practice.
• How my guided imaginal journey helped me instantly recover lost energy.
• Why you don't always need to make meaning from medicine.
• How surrendering to discomfort can be its own form of expansion.
• Why group psychedelic journeys carry unique trade-offs and gifts.

Hear It Here

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Resources and Items Mentioned in This Episode

Websites

• Trish Blain
• Alive Edges
• Luna Wolf

Where to Find Justin Baker Online

• Mindful Power

Timestamps and Topics

• [00:05:32] Four days of heaviness after psilocybin.
• [00:11:50] Accessing other realms without medicine.
• [00:17:41] An interrupted journey – close it off or go through it?
• [00:20:22] Wormholes, deserts, and a fetus: following the unfinished trip.
• [00:24:05] “Instantly, I felt like myself again” – reclaiming full Joel-ness.
• [00:25:38] Why you don't have to make meaning from a psychedelic experience.
• [00:43:31] Finding God in a laundry room and becoming Beach Jesus.
• [00:55:02] Control issues meet surrender and holding both at once.

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Transcript

Justin: So let's set up the goals of these sessions from my perspective, and you can totally share your own. Right after we did the trip, I was telling you guys that day that the best thing you can do today and the day after is consolidate memories. What are the experiences you had that you want to remember that were notable to you? Those memories can fade over time, and talking about them with other people can help consolidate them.

Justin: The integration process is literally what the word says. What are those experiences that you remember? What from those experiences do you want to integrate into your life? Make a part of who you are. And then maybe what are ways you can do that? What are some intentional ways you can keep integrating those things into your life?

Justin: It's a tricky tightrope with a psychedelic experience because you don't want to get into grasping and attaching to experiences. That's sort of antithetical to the whole experience. But it's worth setting an intention to explore what those things might've been trying to teach you and to continue to explore those things and see if there are things that you can bring into your life. So that's sort of the three-step process as far as I'm concerned. We did step one, but if you want to do more memory consolidation, we can talk about those things too.

Joel: I don't think I need to. I have my 25-minute rambling audio note that I recorded before I totally and completely crashed on Saturday night because I just could not keep my eyes open despite the fact that I didn't actually fall asleep. So that's good. And then I think what might be interesting – both intellectually, maybe philosophically, and perhaps practically – is the post-journey slog that I had for four-plus days and my session with Trish Blaine to essentially get my mojo back that had been misplaced or lost along the way as part of the journey. I know you're very curious about that.

Justin: I'm super curious about that. Definitely want to touch on that. So where I think we should start is since the last time I saw you was when we parted ways at your house on Sunday. How about you just kind of fill me in on what's happened since then? Just kind of in a basic narrative way.

Joel: I'll go roughly chronologically, I guess. The overarching feeling that I had was just a state of heaviness. That started on Saturday night, roughly eight hours after consuming the psilocybin, and then just stuck with me until Wednesday afternoon. It was a bit of a roller coaster. I wouldn't actually start feeling good. I'm used to having such a high baseline of energy and love and gratitude, and I just could not – if the rickety old wooden roller coaster with me being the single passenger was actually going up, it was just creeping up along and then I would hit a plateau and then I would go back down. And by down, I mean just feel super tired. Bone-weary tired. Need-to-lay-down kind of tired.

Joel: I wasn't expecting that at all. Because all my other experiences, which was only with ayahuasca up to that point – the afterglow, the post-journey experience – is oh, man, it's sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. It's good. It's basking. And this was the opposite. This was hard and heavy. And I thought, well, that's interesting. I didn't want to draw any conclusions about it. I've only been with mushrooms once. So I didn't want to think, is this the way it's always going to be? No, it's just the way that it was.

Justin: All right, so that is really interesting. The first thing I would say is that's a little unusual. Fatigue is not unusual. Heaviness is not unusual. For it to extend for days and days is a little more unusual. I've definitely seen it happen. But the experience is a lot, as you know. There's a lot of energy coursing through you. That's a big, overwhelming hit of serotonin to your whole nervous system. So fatigue is definitely one of the potential things that can happen afterwards. My question for you is, so the energy level being low, that's pretty clear, but when you say heaviness, I'm curious what you mean by that experience.

Joel: I feel a lot of energy in my forehead. Oftentimes when I'm on some kind of medicine or even doing some kind of THC type thing, I will initially feel it as almost a widening in my forehead. It's the same spot where I get migraines, and I've had migraines for 40 years or so. It's just a very prominent spot for me to feel heavily and intensely – in the center of my forehead. And sometimes it spreads in a circle. Sometimes it spreads in a horizontal line out like this.

Joel: When I mentioned the heaviness, that spot in my forehead just felt – it wasn't like I couldn't keep my head up, it was forcing my chin down to my chest. It wasn't that kind of a heaviness. It was an energetic heaviness and weariness that went beyond just my head. If I were to point to a place where it was centered, I would say it was centered there, but then it flowed out from there and just made me feel slow and weak. Foggy.

Justin: Okay. So when you say it spread out from there, to your whole body?

Joel: Yes.

Justin: Interesting. And you're saying that this sensation was not unfamiliar to you, that you've had it for years. You said something about migraines.

Joel: Yeah. When I get migraine headaches, it's just my head that hurts. It doesn't spread to my entire being. But this kind of heaviness was a full-body, full-being heaviness.

Justin: Oh, wow. So the quality of the sensation was similar, but the pervasiveness with which it hit your body was unusual.

Joel: Yes.

Justin: Interesting. Have you ever – pardon me for dwelling on this. Is it okay if we do that?

Joel: Let's dwell.

Justin: Okay. So I didn't know that until just now, that it's a sensation you've felt before. I'm wondering, have you ever interrogated this sensation in any of those previous times in your life, and have you learned anything about it before now?

Joel: I have interrogated. I have not discovered anything useful.

Justin: Interesting. Okay. So you're feeling this on and off for four days?

Joel: Yes.

Justin: Okay. I'm having a moment where I would want to flag – I'm sure there are lots of other things you experienced in your mushroom journey, but I want to go back to all the other things you experienced later. Let's just go with this one for a minute.

Joel: Yep.

Justin: Okay. So it sounds to me from what communication I had with you, it sounds like you had no additional understanding of what this feeling was – this thing that I'm just generically referring to as heaviness.

Joel: Additional understanding. You're talking about the heaviness after the mushroom journey or just any kind of relation to the previous heaviness that I may have had? Although that's not the word that I would have used. If I'm having a migraine, my head hurts and it hurts bad. I'm sensitive to light. I don't like loud sounds. I just want to crawl in bed for a couple of hours and have the world leave me alone.

Justin: Yeah. No, I'm asking just from Sunday to Wednesday. So you're having this feeling in your body for that four days. Was it just a mystery to you the entire time?

Joel: Yes.

Justin: Okay. And then you mentioned – and we texted a little bit – and then you mentioned something about this conversation you had with Trish. So start me off with who's Trish?

Joel: Trish Blaine is an amazing human. I met her at the World Domination Summit in 2018. We gravitated towards each other. We had a wonderful meal at a Japanese restaurant and became good friends. I have done the relationship action plan with Trish whenever I meet a super rad human at an event where I want to be intentional and cultivate the relationship. I had done that for a few years where every six or nine months I'd send her a message being like, hey, let's get on Zoom. Let's talk. Let's be friends. She lives in Massachusetts. Here I am in the center of the continent. So we haven't actually been in person since 2018 when we met.

Joel: Trish is a lot of words. She is what some people might refer to as an intuitive. She reliably experiences non-ordinary states or ecstatic states without the use of plant-based or mushroom-like medicine. She can not necessarily conjure these states of consciousness on demand. Sometimes they're spontaneous. Sometimes she activates them. But she exists in different realms of consciousness that humans don't typically know exist or can't often inhabit without the aid of something like –

Justin: Well, modern Western humans don't.

Joel: Okay, yeah, yes. I don't know if this is helping give you some context, and this is the way that she's always been. It's not like she just woke up at age 31 and she's like, holy crap, what's this new way of being or thinking? No, she's been this way her whole life.

Justin: Yep. Nope, that's helpful. I know many folks who might fit into this category. So is she practicing and does she refer to herself as any particular type of practitioner?

Joel: I'd have to look at her official bio on her website to know for sure. My sense is no. She's involved in so many things. The whole concept of four forces being the thing that guides all human interactions and all human development, connection, expression, growth, and purpose. I'm starting to believe more heavily that it is that simple and complex at the same time. That's the underlying framework for everything that she's trying to teach and educate people on. But we're not actually getting to – where's the official Trish bio where she describes what she does? She doesn't really describe what she is or how she has her powers, for lack of a better word. Her intuition, her –

Justin: Okay. I'm just curious. Kind of what her – I mean, I know many intuitives, and they'll use different conceptual systems or traditions to describe what they do, and that'll often give me some clues as to the kind of work she might be doing with you. But it's not terribly important. You could probably describe it to me and I can work with that.

Joel: Well, I could explain the guided journey session that she took me on four days after my mushroom journey.

Justin: And I'm definitely hoping you will. But you said something – you said that you were on some sort of group call that she was on, and some interaction took place there.

Joel: Yes. There is the Alive Edges team, of which I'm a member, helping get this thing launched. I'm going to be doing some community elements of it. And what she calls her core community of practice – there's a number of communities of practice. It's a training community where people are learning about Eros, using the energy of life or sexual energy in non-sexual, general-purpose ways. There is something called the Grove, which is focused on psychedelics of a variety of types. There's a number of things, and I'm working on the core piece, which is these are the fundamental skills – the foundational skills for you to enhance who you are and what you can do as a human.

Joel: So this team call that I was on, the Tuesday, three days after our mushroom journey – Trish and also Marcia, another person on the team, they described me as my energy being fuzzy. They're used to feeling me as a very vibrant, very clear person. And they both picked up on the fact, even before I told them about having my first psilocybin experience – they both picked up on the fact that I was just really fuzzy. That was, I think, the word that best described it.

Justin: Yeah, did that word resonate with you?

Joel: It did.

Justin: Okay. And then as a result of that, Trish messaged me after the fact. She said, we should do a session together.

Joel: I've done a couple of just general-purpose sessions with Trish around her way of knowing and being and helping me learn some things. But this was the first time – the next day, Wednesday – where there was an explicit goal, which is help me figure out what the heck is going on. Because now I'm on day four, and this is weird. I don't want to continue to feel this way.

Justin: Okay. So then you guys booked a session, and that was Wednesday?

Joel: Yes.

Justin: All right. Is there anything I need to know about between that conversation and the session?

Joel: No.

Justin: All right, well, let's hear about it.

Joel: The short version is Trish helped me realize that there was a particular part of the mushroom journey that was interrupted. I may have mentioned this to you on our drive home on Sunday morning, where thanks to my amazing friend Jesse and her vibrancy during our group journey, she may have pulled me out of something that I was about to go into. Something was interrupted. And I don't say that in a judgmental way. It's just a seemingly factual thing. And Trish said – oh, you want to say something about that?

Justin: Oh, no, it's just that's one of the potential dynamics of the group journey.

Joel: Yeah. And I love it that way. I would much rather be in a group than any kind of one-on-one thing. And of course, there are trade-offs. There's trade-offs with everything in life. So Trish said, well, let's explore. Let's go back to the point where you were interrupted during your journey. I can help you go back there, and let's follow that where it may have gone.

Justin: Can I ask you a quick question here before we do that? Is there anything I need to know about how you landed on that being the thing to focus on?

Joel: There was a sense that whatever was going on with me was a direct result of psilocybin exploration. The fact that the heaviness started after the medicine had more or less run its course, eight hours after ingesting, was not totally clear – a pretty clear correlation, if not causation.

Justin: But how did you land on that specific instance within your trip – that there was the thing that got interrupted?

Joel: I felt that. I felt that when we were coming back from Duluth and we were driving back as a group. And I felt that – I'm not sure if Trish asked a question that made me think, yeah, this is something that's unresolved. This is something that I either need to tie up into a neat little bow and say that nothing can happen with that and therefore I'm basically closing off that potential exploration point, or she gave me the option. She's like, do you want to try to close this or do you want to try to go through it? Do you want to see what was on the other side of this interrupted part of your journey? And I said, I would like to keep going.

Justin: I'm glad you said that.

Joel: So now I tell you about –

Justin: Yeah, way to take the invitation. Let's see where this invitation takes us.

Joel: So Trish said, I'm going to be behind you or alongside you. I'm going to be close. Close your eyes and go back to that point in time where you felt like you were interrupted. What was about to happen? And I said, I felt like I was going to go through some kind of a wormhole.

Joel: And maybe it felt like a wormhole because Trish had said before that my energy up until that point was almost like Star Trek, when they go through the transporter and there's the light that goes through and over the course of three to five seconds, you materialize or dematerialize. She explained my energy level as not fully materialized. There was something that hadn't fully reestablished itself or come back. And as a huge Star Trek nerd, that really resonated with me. So maybe the whole science fiction Star Trek thing is why I thought where I was going to go was through a wormhole.

Joel: I started in the wormhole. And it wasn't just like two ends of the universe where I just popped in one side and then instantly came out the other. It was kind of like that roller coaster thing where I felt like I was going down, down, down, down, down, but then a loop back up. And then it turned back around on itself and went in some crazy twisty turny ways.

Justin: And essentially – you want to say something? So when Trish is guiding you, you're reliving the wormhole.

Joel: Well, I'm not reliving it because I'd never experienced it in the first place.

Justin: Okay, gotcha.

Joel: Yeah, I'm going for the first time. This is the interrupted piece that I'm continuing.

Justin: Gotcha, okay. Thank you.

Joel: And it dumps me out into – our planet, another planet, I'm not sure – a desolate place, a desert. And I was wondering, what is going on? Why am I here? And Trish was prompting me along the way. Where are you? Why are you here? What do you feel called to do? These were really helpful questions, because I was disoriented. I thought, I don't know what's going on. So Trish was there both physically over Zoom, but also energetically following me through the wormhole.

Joel: And then she said, well, what do you see? What do you hear? And I said, I think I hear something. And I looked down and there was almost like a fetus – a sense of a fetus being on the ground. I don't know if that was supposed to represent me or something else. But I crawled down on the ground and got into the fetal position and put my ear to the ground. And I could hear what I could best describe as a whooshing sound, almost like the sound of – if someone has ever seen or heard an ultrasound, there's the whoosh, the flow of blood through the umbilical cord. A whooshing.

Joel: She's like, okay, what does that whooshing represent? I closed my eyes and I felt into it more and I thought, it feels like there's a rhythm of life that is here. She said, okay, well, what can you do with it? Or what's the purpose of it? And I realized that I needed to return to a certain rhythm of life. That there was an energy there that was for me to rediscover or claim and bring back into me. And all the while, Trish is asking questions and I'm fumbling around because I've never experienced something like this before.

Joel: And when I made the decision – yes, there is something here to take back with me – I took it. And I kid you not, this probably won't surprise you, although it did surprise me – instantly. Instantly, Justin. I felt like myself again. Full Joelness. And it's been that way ever since. From that moment where I rediscovered or got something that was lost. And oh my gosh, it was one of the biggest reliefs of my life that I was able to get my mojo back, for lack of a better way of saying it.

Justin: So does that conclude your session with Trish?

Joel: Yes.

Justin: So by the way, that's awesome. I should stop and say that. I'm really glad you got to go on a journey like that. I'm really glad you got to experience doing something like that in the imaginal realm and feeling the healing power of doing a journey like that. That's really fantastic. I'm glad you had a good guide for that experience. That's super helpful. And I'm curious if there was any postmortem between you and Trish – if you spent any time maybe doing some meaning-making or interpretation of what that experience was, or you just left it purely as an energetic experience and you felt better and that was it.

Joel: I couldn't have any other experience other than relief and full aliveness. So even if she said, hey, let's stick around and let's do some more exploration about what just happened here, I don't know that I would have been capable of doing that. I was just so grateful and relieved.

Justin: I can totally understand that, and that's fine. And I think this is a good lesson for all psychedelic experiences. You don't have to put concepts or meaning around stuff like that. It's obviously – the lesson is obviously in your body and it doesn't have to go beyond that. This is something I was saying to another one of our friends who was with us last weekend – you can, the Western cultural tendency is to want to label and give words and concepts to everything. And that can be helpful for the learning process. It absolutely can. But it is not 100 percent necessary. And if you feel great and it's in your body, just giving you full permission to not go further than that.

Joel: Sometimes I feel like, where did my curiosity go? Shouldn't I be asking myself more questions or asking other people to prompt me and challenge me and guide me further? But the more that I experience expansive states – whether it's through ayahuasca or psilocybin – the less interested I am in making meaning from it. The experience is enough. The group dynamic is enough. When I journey, I don't necessarily even do it for myself. I'm doing it almost on behalf of the group or the natural world. So yeah, I'm getting less and less curious about what does this all mean. How am I changing as a result of it? I'm just more interested in expanding as a result of it and just letting it percolate however it will.

Justin: Cool. And it's not my place to push you to go any direction with it. But I do have a couple of questions. So when you got to the desolate place – I assume Trish was also asking you these questions – I wonder if you can recall any more detail about how you felt being in that desolate place.

Joel: It was familiar. Again, I'm using imagination here.

Justin: Well, this is in the imaginal realm. So by all means, close your eyes, take yourself into the feeling.

Joel: I don't need to close my eyes on this one. It was almost like the lower realms of a shamanic journey. I had my first shamanic experience at Burning Man last year. And maybe it was because I was in the Black Rock desert that when I journeyed and I put my roots down into the ground and I came to my clearing, if you will, it was essentially the environment of Burning Man – desert with purple mountains. Although at that point in time, there was a solitary tree, like there was a feeling of life and growth there. So this was familiar, but it was just desert. Initially there was no sense that anything had ever happened there or would ever happen there. So yeah, I didn't feel – I felt a level of familiarity, but also, am I on a shamanic journey right now? There's just a lot of confusion.

Justin: Yeah. And this is why most practicing intuitives are anchored in some sort of tradition or conceptual universe, such as shamanism. Because it can help give shape and understanding to these – for people like us raised in the modern Western world, we have no conceptual universe for experiencing these other realms of consciousness. We just don't. Every traditional culture worth its salt that has ever existed on planet Earth does. We're basically the first lineage of human beings who does not have very concrete conceptual systems for navigating other realms of consciousness.

Justin: So then what you're describing is very analogous to what most practicing, shamanically trained people would call a shamanic journey. You traveled through something – wormhole, staircase, whatever – and you ended up in another Earth-like place but wasn't. That's a very prototypical shamanic journey from the middle realm to the lower realm, what you did.

Joel: I didn't want to say that word, but you said it, so now I'm going with it.

Justin: Very typical. And so yeah, one of the first questions is when you get there and you're being shown this different place, how does it feel to be in this place and what reactions arise from you? So Trish is also asking you very prototypical questions that I was curious to know about myself. So you said it was a little bit familiar – so that's the external experience. In your body, are you feeling the heaviness when you're there, and does it feel like there's any relationship between this realm and the heaviness you're experiencing?

Joel: No, I did not feel it, and it didn't seem like they were related in any way.

Justin: Okay. So another prototypical experience of a shamanic journey is this is your spirit, and you've basically exited your body so that you can travel to this lower realm. So the experiences that are attached to your body – that heaviness – won't necessarily be with you when you go there. Now tell me more about – you said you became aware that there was a fetus nearby.

Joel: Yeah, it seemed like it was curled up on the ground at my feet.

Justin: Did you sense it or did you see it?

Joel: I saw it.

Justin: Okay. What did it look like?

Joel: It looked like a six-month-old bag of human goo that would be cooking in the oven of a person.

Justin: Okay. Did that feel familiar at all? Did it feel relevant to you, or was it just a strange fetus sitting there?

Joel: I think what it was trying to prompt me is – hey, you get down in the fetal position on the ground so you can literally put your ear to the ground and hear the rhythm of life that you need to hear again. That's how I interpreted it.

Justin: That's really cool. And then – sorry for all the detailed questions.

Joel: Keep going.

Justin: How would you describe that whooshing sound that you heard? And how would you describe the experience of hearing the whooshing sound?

Joel: I can't describe it any more than just a whoosh.

Justin: I know these questions are kind of ridiculous, but –

Joel: The feeling of the whoosh – initially there wasn't any sense that this was important. It was just a sensory experience. It was like, I am hearing a whoosh. It was just something that was happening. It didn't take long for me to understand what the whoosh was representing or what the whoosh was offering, which was energy. Mojo.

Justin: So when you got your mojo back – I think your words were, I felt like my Joelness again, like I was back to being Joel. Is the Joelness you felt after this journey different than whatever your Joelness was before?

Joel: Before the –

Justin: Before the psychedelic journey. Before the mushroom journey. So we get up there Friday night and you're typical 100 percent Joel. And then you take the medicine and you have this experience and you have the heaviness for a few days after. And then Trish takes you on this journey and now your mojo is back. Are you exactly the same Joel you were Friday, or is it a new and better Joel? Different?

Joel: I don't know necessarily better. One thing that I can say is after laying in the grass – I told you this – having the peak experience of mid-afternoon sun in the grass with Lake Superior a hundred feet away from me and the gentle wind blowing on me, that was unbelievable to have all four fundamental forces of nature with me all at once.

Joel: And I can say that maybe it's because we're in May and it's Minnesota and as the sun gets higher in the sky, you feel it more intensely, especially the last couple of days. The feeling of being in the sun, the just the glory of being in the sun – earlier today, I was outside and I'm just trying to find reasons to be outside. Oh, I think I need to go pick up dog poop again in the backyard. I just ran Sunday. Yesterday I was like, well, maybe there's more because the sun's out.

Joel: The weather has been incredible. I'm going to go eat lunch outside, which is something that I do often in the spring and the summertime on the back patio. And then I'm going to take a little bit longer walk than I normally do. That feeling is different in that my level of sun worship has heightened from an already very high level, to the point where it was hard – so hard for me to go back in walls where sun could not be directly on my skin. And again, I don't know if that's as a result of our journey or a general trajectory I'm on or the time of year in Minnesota or the fact that it's been particularly sunny the last two or three days, and I can't attribute it to anything.

Justin: I'm a little torn right now, I'm not going to lie. I have some pretty strong feelings about this loss and recovery. But I also want to honor your wishes to just be in the energetic feeling and not layer any meaning on top of it.

Joel: I'm okay with it. I think I'll know whether it is real or true. You say what you want to say. Don't worry about me creating some kind of narrative that spins in a weird way. I'm pretty self-contained in that way.

Justin: Okay, just checking. I do think sovereignty is very important in the experience. But yeah, I trust that you can hold onto your sovereignty regardless of what the hell I say. But I did want to check on that first, my bud.

Justin: So I was feeling – as you were describing that journey – I was feeling pretty strongly that there was an almost primordial energy that you were being called to experience. And when I say primordial, I just mean something that is elemental to the life force, something that humans for millennia have had access to, but that all of us – and when I say all of us, I mean modern Western humans – we've lost contact with a little bit.

Justin: And the fact that you had to travel through a wormhole to the lower realm and you had to meet this fetus messenger says a lot to me that this is something that's been lost, and it takes a little bit of a journey to recover it. And it is a fundamental connection with life force. So as you've often said, it's not just for you, right? This is something you're getting back into touch with for all of us.

Justin: However, I feel a mirror to this experience somewhere in your life. And I think that also is very old in this body. That fetus is also telling me that there was some – there was a little bit of a loss that happened very early in your own life that mirrors the loss that we modern Western humans have also experienced. So it's a parallel. And you don't need to do the therapy thing where you go back and you find the time where you were three years old where something happened. That's not necessary. Your body already knows whatever that was. And I don't even know if it was really one incident.

Justin: Let me just paint a picture here. Our bodies, which are full of this beautiful cellular DNA, which is billions of years old and knows everything – it knows this primordial energy – and then it's born into a house in the suburbs. And it says, what the hell am I doing here? I'm not in the sun where I belong. I'm sitting in a basement staring at televisions, playing Nintendo, and all of your cells are screaming, saying this is not right. And we're kids. We don't know what to do about that. So we just keep yelling at each other and playing video games.

Joel: Sounds like my youth.

Justin: Right. And so that experience of all the cells in our bodies screaming and saying, no, this is not the right place – we don't know what's happening – it just builds up and becomes an overall sense of loss in our bodies. And we feel that our whole lives, unless for some reason we start to wake up later in life. And we start to reclaim our relationship with the sun and the moon and the wind and the water and the earth like you have been. And you start to find the pathway back to that primordial energy that is your body's birthright. And maybe one day you're having an expansive psychedelic experience and you're a hundred feet from Lake Superior and the sun is on your body and the wind, and it's waking those cells back up and saying you can reclaim that energy.

Joel: I don't know what I think about what you just said. But if that is true, then I'm happy to go a week or a month of heaviness to what feels like reclaiming and restoring a naturally high baseline that may actually be some kind of enhancement or expansion. I don't feel that yet, but having the primordial, billions-years-old, evolutionary part of me – that's worth anything to be in alignment with life force or the history of life on this planet. And to honor that in whatever way that I can in this human form – that's worth pretty much anything.

Justin: Yeah. And again, I don't want to – it's not my place to put meaning on your experience. But that was what I felt when you were telling me about that journey. And by all means, it sounds like you know exactly how you're integrating this energy into your body and you're totally comfortable with it. And again, not that you need my advice, but if I were to give you any – hey man, just sit in that energy and just keep being Joel. And for my curiosity, I would just say, hey, can I check in with you once a week or so and just hear how that's happening for you?

Joel: Sure.

Justin: Okay, cool. Because I'm really curious about this.

Joel: You can be along for the ride. That's the way that I kind of feel in most of my life the last year-plus – I'm just along for the ride. I'm enjoying being in the sidecar of other people's journeys and experiences and grateful to be invited to certain travels and adventures. And I'm happy to have somebody else be along for the ride.

Justin: Excellent. Okay. So shifting gears just a little bit. You said that you had 25 minutes of audio notes that you took on Saturday night. So I'm curious – thanks for indulging me and telling me all about that week following and your journey with Trish. Is there anything else from Saturday or Sunday that's noteworthy or worth sharing?

Joel: Probably nothing new to you. The actual experience was so joyful and delightful and surprising. I mean, I probably will at some point in time have more fun in my life, but that wasn't what I was going for. When I take medicine, this is not a recreational thing. This is an intentional thing. And I'm looking to open and expand. But just how incredibly joyful the experience was from start to relative finish was so, so cool. Finding God in the laundry room, becoming beach Jesus – you can't make this stuff up, man.

Justin: So the beach Jesus thing – and I feel like, can we break the third wall for a second on the chance that somebody listens to this?

Joel: Sure.

Justin: So one of our companions who was also on this group journey felt the need to go down to the laundry room at a certain point. I accompanied her. She wanted to talk about something she was going through. And at a certain point, she decided she needed to lay down on the floor and, in her words, have a moment with God. And then she laid down on the floor and I said, do you need to be alone with God? Do you want me to stay here? And then she pointed at the ceiling and said – I forget exactly what she said – but she pointed. She's like, you have to see this. There's God right there. And sure enough – if anybody's familiar, it is right from the Sistine Chapel, Adam's finger reaching for God's finger.

Joel: God's fingers, right?

Justin: It was like a little cutout of just the frame of the two fingers. And it was on one of the ceiling panels. Somehow the owner of the house – and we still don't know why it was there. I don't know if there was a leaky panel or a crack in the ceiling. Who the hell knows?

Justin: That happened. And then when we all went back outside, this same person decided to – I don't know. You were just laying in the sand with your arms outstretched.

Joel: Yeah, arms outstretched.

Justin: And she started decorating you as though you were Jesus on the cross and calling you beach Jesus.

Joel: Yes. Which strangely was not the first time I had heard the term beach Jesus that week.

Justin: Oh, I didn't – I didn't tell you guys that at the time.

Joel: A really good friend and mentee of mine had just recently moved to Florida and had been hanging out on the beach, and apparently there is a guy who spends several hours a day just walking up and down the beach, and if anyone stops to talk to this person, apparently he starts preaching the gospel of Jesus. And so she had been telling me all about beach Jesus.

Justin: That's great.

Joel: I know. Beach Jesus sightings or references in one week. Beach Jeezye? What's the plural of beach Jesus?

Justin: I don't think there is a plural.

Joel: Well, let's come up with one.

Justin: Okay, I'll leave that up to you.

Joel: Yeah.

Justin: Okay. So is it at all possible or worthwhile to elaborate on why the experience was so unexpectedly joyful for you?

Joel: Part of it was the novelty of a new experience, being with new medicine. I love new experiences and expanded states of consciousness. This felt very different than my mama ayahuasca experiences that I'm very comfortable with.

Justin: Can I ask you about that part? I was really curious how you experience the difference.

Joel: I may have mentioned this when we were doing integration on the drive back on Sunday morning – when I'm with mother ayahuasca, she fills me with the largest quantities of love and gratitude that I can possibly imagine. I'm a conduit for cosmic love and gratitude. It's been that way for six straight ceremonies pretty much the whole time. That is always the backdrop for anything else that I experience. And there's an energetic and emotional feeling of communing with mother ayahuasca.

Joel: I didn't feel like I was communing with the mushrooms. I didn't feel like they were infusing me with some essence or energy or emotion. That was different. I wasn't necessarily expecting that or wanting it. It's just that I'm used to there being some through line from my previous experiences with ayahuasca, and there was no through line. It was very this way and that way and these shapes and these colors, and it was just – each segment, if I were to take cross-sections of the experience over five or six hours, each one would feel fairly different than any other one.

Justin: Okay, so I did kind of stop you in the middle there. You were in the middle of explaining why the experience was joyful.

Joel: Oh, well. I know you keep mentioning other people with us. I've already said a name, so I'm going to keep saying a name in case we do decide to publish this. Jesse – whose last name shall not be revealed unless she says at a later point in time, oh yeah, Joel, you can totally say it. I'm getting a sense that Jesse's okay with me saying Jesse right now.

Joel: She's been one of my best friends for 30 years. And yeah, we had some marijuana brownies a decade ago at my house and that was kind of fun, but I wanted to have some kind of enhanced experience with her for a long time. I love her so much, and she's so – she's over the top in ways that I'm very familiar with. She's very intense, very big energy. These are things that I also see in me. And I don't typically have other people in my life that share that same kind of energetic presence.

Joel: To have that be multiplied by at least 10, if not 50, both on her side and my side – the feeling I mentioned this word – this is my big word the last couple months – amplification. I felt like we were amplifying each other. She would take a big sigh and breathe out and I would catch it. I would catch her energy and move it through my body. That's when you saw me shaking and wiggling and moving out. We were so in tune. I think it was more on my side than her side, but that feeling of partnership without being totally merged while still being simultaneously with you in our converted garage or the carriage house and by Lake Superior. Just –

Joel: Yeah, I'm used to it being dark and being in essentially the basement of a church when I do my psychedelic experiences with ayahuasca at the Luna Wolf Lake Harriet spirituality community. So to have this be in the daytime with the sunshine and I can roam – and you told us, don't go into Lake Superior, that's a bad idea. And I did mostly observe your guidance until towards the end, which I felt like I was in charge of my capacity, my faculties enough that I could charge in there up to my knees. And oh gosh, that was great.

Joel: So I think part of it was just I want to be in natural environments and I want to be in expansive states. The combination of those two and the fact that Jesse was added to it and we were so well loved and guided by you – there are so many different variables that made up such an incredible experience.

Justin: Yeah, I'm really glad you got to experience nature in that way. Mushrooms love nature and vice versa. And the fact that we got to do it in such a beautiful setting on Lake Superior – that is a peak first mushroom experience. I'm really glad you got to have that.

Joel: Yeah.

Justin: Yeah. And you and Jesse – you two are a trip together. The level of ridiculousness was incredible. I cherish all those moments of just utter ridiculousness.

Joel: Yeah, the amplification was real. It was great.

Justin: Yeah. As a facilitator, I was like, oh man, I don't know what I'm going to do with these two. I was grateful that you were able to go inward for a little while at least.

Joel: Yeah, so –

Justin: You seem to be a really good sport about the fact that you had this really joyful experience and then it became heavy and difficult for a few days after. Did that ever bother you?

Joel: No. It's just that's the way it is. I do hard and uncomfortable things. That's something that I say to myself every morning. That's one of the mantras after I do my loving-kindness meditation. I'm a person who breathes and does things that benefit future us. I do hard, uncomfortable things.

Joel: I say this a couple of times every day. And I like being the kind of person who can do hard, uncomfortable things, who doesn't have to shrink away from them or harden myself or close myself off – even if I can't understand why it's happening – or to bring the level of curiosity or expand into that state of heaviness the way I can with other types of states. Just welcoming it and surrendering to it and being like, it's not here. This is not my new way of living. I'm not going to live the next 30 or 40 years of my life like this. It's temporary. This too shall pass. The nature of the universe is impermanence. So weird, but also whatever.

Joel: I don't have any major work presentation that I need to do or major life commitment that this is really interrupting me for. There was a level of gratitude – hey, this is hitting me really hard and this kind of sucks. And also this is a perfect time for this to happen. I'm looking at my calendar over the course of those four days and there was nothing really that was planned of any significance, any commitment that I could not fulfill as a result of it.

Joel: That would have got me a bit worked up if there was some relationship or commitment that I was not able to fulfill as a result of the heaviness. Then I would have probably explored it more or then I would have maybe judged more. But the fact that I was just rolling with it, because my life is so flexible that I could just roll with it.

Justin: Yeah. And again, if anyone does happen to listen to this, this is one of the reasons I suggest giving yourself some time to ease back into life after having a psychedelic experience, because you don't know what the days following it are going to be like. I know that another one of our companions took a half day of work on Monday and took Sunday completely off and was extremely grateful that she had made that decision for her future self.

Joel: That's really good to hear.

Justin: So another curiosity, and this might border on – I'm challenging you, Joel.

Joel: I like being challenged.

Justin: Yeah. You've mentioned that one of your personal challenges or traits that you sometimes need to work on is your need to control things. And I'm – yeah. So I'm surprised that – I'm glad to hear that you were so accepting of what could have been a difficult experience over that four days. Did the controlling part of Joel come up at all and want to change the experience anyway?

Joel: No.

Justin: Really?

Joel: If it felt – I mentioned that this was sort of like a migraine headache in terms of where it was localized in the center of my forehead, but it felt very different. The only central medicine thing that I've used for 30 years – I don't take pills for pretty much anything. But what I will do is Excedrin. Ever since my best friend's mom taught me about the existence of Excedrin when I was 12 years old, when I got a migraine at their house and it made my migraine go away, I was like, this is a magic pill. Amazing. So that's the one exception that I've made for roughly 34 years – if I got a headache, I'll take some Excedrin because I don't like it and I want it to go away and Excedrin will make it go away.

Joel: There could have been a point where I thought, okay, this is not that – what I'm feeling is not a migraine headache. But maybe Excedrin could help. And I mean, I did have that thought ever so briefly on Sunday, and I thought, no, what's the point? I want to feel this. I don't want to numb whatever's happening here. I don't want to numb my senses or my energy to whatever's going on. I want to let it run its course and maybe learn from it or explore through it. It was just a continuation of the expansion that I was trying to have through the medicine itself.

Justin: Yeah, I love it. And that's – I do feel like if you had not done other psychedelics, that you would not have been so embracing of that experience.

Joel: You're right. Having some experience does inform you in significant ways about –

Justin: Yes, I still have control issues. I experience them on a day-to-day basis in large ways and small ways. And this might seem like this can't possibly be true – you still have a lot of control issues, and you're also really good at surrendering into various experiences. Both are true for me. I can hold both at the same time, where there's certain experiences where I'm just like, cool, I get it. All I can do is accept and surrender and not close myself off to it.

Joel: So this was one of those things where I thought, instead of trying to control this, the better path was to surrender to it.

Justin: Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons you and I get along. I can identify with holding both of those traits. So one little – moderate challenge to you – is over the next 10 to 30 days, just take some mental notes on how that urge to control surfaces and if that's behaving any differently than it did before the trip.

Justin: There's another little voice in my head that suspects that the controlling part of you was – how do I say this – in some way related to this whole experience. And when you say this whole experience, you mean the heaviness that you felt from Sunday to Wednesday.

Joel: Okay.

Justin: I think there's a relationship between the controlling reflex in Joel and that heaviness.

Joel: Okay, challenge accepted.

Justin: Good. So to bring this kind of back to where we started, I don't think there's necessarily a lot to consolidate here, but do you have any particular motivations about how you want to integrate all of this stuff into your life over the next 30 to 60 days?

Joel: No. I don't have any intuitive sense of it. And I'm okay with some external force – you, for example – coming along and saying, may I suggest, or you might want to consider. I really appreciate it when – again, this kind of goes to curiosity – there should be some things that I should be really curious about. I feel that. And also I feel like, well, what's the point? What am I trying to achieve here? What kind of story am I trying to craft? I don't need to really craft a story. I don't have any healing that I need to do.

Joel: A lot of people experience various types of medicine because they're looking to heal. I'm one of the rare types that is not. That's not my primary reason for doing it. I'm looking to experiment and expand. So I feel like I was able to do both of those during the journey and even after the journey. Having some kind of way to take pieces of it or components of it and come up with a new mantra other than “if it's important, put it in a spreadsheet” that I can have in my life – it's just –

Justin: Joel, don't stop making spreadsheets, man. If you're not making spreadsheets, I don't know what's true about life anymore.

Joel: Okay.

Justin: I'm going to raise the challenge flag. You did have a healing experience. You can call it whatever you want. You had a profound healing experience, a deep healing experience – the kind that happens infrequently in a person's lifetime, or infrequently in multiple people's lifetimes, frankly.

Joel: What was healed? Who was healed?

Justin: That is the question to sit with for the next 30 days, 60 days, six months, a year. And I know there's no danger that you're going to forget that experience, but something pretty profound moved within your spirit and your body. I felt it when you told that story in a way I've never felt in anything you've described to me in any of your psychedelic journeys. As we're sitting here – admittedly on Zoom – your Joelness is back, but it's different to me. There is a – I can only describe it as a softness to your energy. Which is new to me.

Justin: And I don't want to say more than that right now, but that's the question I want to leave you with, my friend. And yeah, you don't have – that's not a question that you need to journal on or anything like that. Just let it vibrate within you for the next couple of months. I think it will reveal itself to you slowly and in ways unexpected and at times unexpected.

Joel: I'm open to it.

Justin: Yeah, I don't think you're going to have a choice.

Joel: Okay, cool. Good thing I'm open to it.

Justin: I mean, I suppose we all have a choice, but I think you're way past the point of no return for this one.

Joel: Yeah. Thanks, friend. I didn't know what a one-on-one post-mushroom integration conversation could be like. And now I have a sense of at least one version of it.

Justin: Yeah, I mean, they're all wildly different. And to be honest, I don't think I've ever had one like this myself. Usually the person I'm doing it with does not have the support of an entirely different other intuitive person to facilitate the critical post-trip journey. So I'm excited to meet this Trish person at some point.

Joel: Yeah, your orbits will collide, and if they don't naturally, then I will help them come into alignment.

Justin: As you often do, Joel.

Joel: Yes, you know I love introducing you to super rad humans.

Justin: Yeah. Well, I'm really happy for you, Joel. I'm glad that your first mushroom experience was joyous and also challenging in ways that were good for you. I'm glad – I'm always nervous when I'm introducing somebody for the first time. It can be challenging, and it sounds like yours has been in an interesting way. Thanks for being open to the experience. Everyone who knows you and cares about you, I'm sure, will benefit.