Psychedelics, Birth, and Yoga Nidra: Part 1
Road Tripping with my Cats
I recently listened to Michael Pollan’s latest book, “How to Change your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence”(1) while driving my cats from Florida up to New Hampshire. I needed a book that would be engaging enough to distract me from Bridgette’s incessant yeowling but not so exciting as to raise my heartrate or distract me from the road. One of my Dream Circle participants had mentioned Pollan’s book so I decided to try it, having never read any of his previous books despite their popularity.
I have never tried psychedelics personally but I have close friends who have journeyed with ayahuasca and mushrooms and have described to me the details of their trips. Additionally, as psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy becomes increasingly popular and accessible, I occasionally have clients who are using ketamine or psilocybin to support their healing and have unintentionally found myself in the role of providing preparation and integration sessions. Relatedly, Dick Schwartz, developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy has been very outspoken about his support of using Ketamine, MDMA, and psychedelics in general, to help quiet protector parts and increase access to Self-energy (for example in this episode of “The Psychedelic Podcast”), and IFS has proved to be one of the more compatible modalities for post-journey integration. All that’s to say, while I have not tried psychedelics personally, it is a subject that comes up relatively frequently in both personal and professional circles.
In listening to Pollan describe his personal experiences with LSD, psilocybin, and “the toad” (a.k.a. bufo) as part of his research for the book, I noticed multiple internal reactions. I had parts that were more curious to try psychedelics than ever before, perhaps bolstered by a greater appreciation of the history of psychedelics and the role they have played in our culture, as well as a deeper understanding of the neuroscience behind the subjective experience of “ego dissolution”–the experience of losing one’s sense of individual or separate identity and merging into a blissful state of oneness with the universe. I am a systems thinker and someone who really likes to understand something from various angles as well as in the historical/social/cultural context before giving it a try, and this book does a nice job of that.
While hearing about Pollan’s and others’ mind-expanding and heart-opening experiences, I also had parts that were like, “Oh, yeah, we’ve experienced that too and don’t need drugs to get there.” This reaction was curious to me and caused me to reflect on what my parts were referring to. “What have been my most profound mystical experiences and what conditions allowed them to happen?” I wondered. Three experiences came to mind. The first one that came to mind was in the weeks following the birth of my daughter in 2016 when I was riding an oxytocin high and undergoing the significant rewiring of the brain that occurs during the postpartum period.(2) The second was when I did a holotropic breathwork session during my yoga teacher training in 2011 and the third was yoga nidra meditation, which is something I have practiced regularly since 2007.
Birth and postpartum as a psychedelic journey
I remember like it was yesterday, holding my infant daughter, gazing into her tiny face, and feeling my heart expanding in my chest as I experienced a kind of merging into an ocean of unconditional love more deep and wide than I had ever known possible. I cried so much during the two weeks postpartum, sometimes from utter exhaustion and sheer panic at the thought of having to survive another sleepless night, but other times it was tears of awe from the overwhelming sensation of being held in the cosmic womb of existence while being able to see, smell, and touch God in the form of this tiny miracle of human that I had pushed out of my own body. Even though she was outside my body now and the physical cord had been cut, energetically we were still entwined, and as I held her, nursed her, and gazed into her face, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and her body began. We were one, and one with the divine.
Have you ever smelled a newborn’s head? It is common knowledge that the smell of a new baby’s head is legit yummy.(3) Science says this is nature’s way of facilitating mother-baby bonding and ensuring the baby is accepted by the parents as kin. The baby’s smell activates neural circuits of pleasure and reward–the same pathways that light up when we eat delicious food, so like I said, yummy. I remember deeply inhaling the smell of my baby’s head. The intoxicating scent was so familiar but it took me a minute to place it. Then it hit me–the top of her head smelled exactly like the incense used at the ashram where I had completed my yoga training. I don’t burn incense at home and wasn’t sure what the exact scent was but I took this as evidence that she had indeed come from sacred realms and that the veil between worlds was so thin in these early days of incarnation that I could literally still smell heaven wafting from her crown chakra.
Holotropic Breathwork: A return to the womb
In 2011 I completed my 200-hour yoga teacher training at the Amrit Yoga Institute in the Ocala National Forest. One night we were invited to the house of one of the assistant teachers to participate in a Holotropic Breathwork session. Holotropic Breathwork, a technique for inducing a psychedelic state of consciousness without drugs, was developed by Stanislav Grof, the founding father of transpersonal psychology, in the early 1970’s after the use of LSD was made illegal. Holotropic Breathwork uses a combination of deep and rapid breathing and evocative music to induce an altered state of consciousness caused by a decrease in CO2 saturation.(4)
I can’t remember what we were told beforehand in terms of what to expect during the session but at the time I had never heard of Stanislav Grof, Holotropic Breathwork, or his contribution to the development of perinatal psychology. I had no prior knowledge that over the course of his career Grof had guided over 4,000 individual psychedelic journeys, primarily with LSD, and had observed that his patients could access and work through traumas and experiences that happened before they were even born, including conception, time in the uterus, passing through the canal, and birth itself.(5, 6) I had no expectations or intentions of returning to the womb–I literally had no idea that was a possibility.
A group of approximately ten of us gathered in the living room and lay down on our yoga mats. The teacher instructed us on how to breathe–a continuous rhythm with forceful exhalations–and turned on a playlist of primal, rhythmic drumming tracks. After some unknown amount of time, the intentional and conscious breathing pattern became automatic and I no longer had to try to breathe a certain way. I soon found myself floating in a dark, warm, underwater world. I was alone in this cozy space and yet I felt connected to life, surrounded by love. There were no words, only sensations. Simultaneously some part of me realized, much to my amazement, that I was no longer breathing at all. I was breathing without breathing…or was I breathing water? Such freedom! Such delight! I felt a sense of utter contentment. My most basic needs for oxygen, food, and water were all being met without my having to DO anything. I could simply BE, without any struggle, floating effortlessly in the primordial waters of creation, in the cosmic womb of the Great Mother, the physical womb of my human mother. I was one with existence. I was a spiritual being, a blissful baby being, in the process of becoming human.
[Continue reading Psychedelics, Birth, and Yoga Nidra: Part 2]
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