This past Sunday I had one of the best float tank sessions I’ve ever had. Typically, I go to the float tank twice a month for one hour. It is a time for quiet mindfulness meditation that alternates with reflection. Usually the float tank is refreshing. This past Sunday, my float was a major mental course-correct.
For the first time, I decided to microdose with psilocybin for my session, taking about half a gram two hours before I started floating. Through the combination of sensory deprivation and the widened perceptive capacity enabled by the psilocybin, I was able to touch base with myself on what felt like a deeper level than I ever had before in the tank. One major area of reflection was regarding my relationships with my partner, family and friends. Another area was my personal motivations. First, I’ll share my experience reflecting on relationships.
Between meditations in the tank, I found myself revisiting questions and concerns I have held about my relationships recently. These are questions and concerns that play on my mind as life normally happens, when it can be difficult to slow down enough to give the idea the attention (and skepticism) it deserves. In the tank this weekend, I re-examined some of the beliefs I have been holding onto about relationships in my life. I recognized fully that many of these beliefs may be holding me back from truly experiencing the good in them or distorting my perception of them for the worse. In the dark stillness of the sensory deprivation tank, I looked for a renewed perspective that I maybe hadn’t considered before, perspectives that might be more appropriate and fruitful lenses through which to view my world.
For instance, I have become more and more focused in the past year or so on learning more about two topics: the brain/mental health and history. These are topics that I love exploring and that excite me. And while my partner is supportive in my pursuit of them (and interested in herself), her enthusiasm for them doesn’t always match mine. For some time now, this unmatched enthusiasm has been a source of occasional irritation for me. “Why doesn’t she think the year 1959 is as interesting as I do? Doesn’t she get that in 1959 Americans were simultaneously inspired by the potential of space exploration while terrified of an impending nuclear apocalypse. Isn’t that neat??”
While she clearly means no harm in not wanting to follow me down certain rabbit holes, I had begun to perceive it as a distaste for learning instead of simply recognizing that our interests are different. And that’s fine. However, I had lost track of the bigger picture and had developed tunnel vision for the things I was focused on. It would, at times, lead me to withdraw from her…
During the float, I looked at what is going on there and fully realized that I had become far too focused on what I wasn’t getting in our relationship and not being truly appreciative of what I was getting. For example, Lauren (my partner) has and continues to teach me a ton regarding emotional and spiritual intelligence, an area where I fall significantly behind her. She is also a source of inspiration for me regarding love for family and friends and I have always aspired to her ability to nurture relationships. In the tank, I realized that by becoming too focused on why she wasn’t matching my level of intrigue on certain topics, I was missing out on the other lessons she was teaching me. This is an easy thing to think of but truly knowing it and accepting it in your core I think is different. I had let a completely normal thing in relationships (varying levels of interest for certain topics) become more important to me than everything else. Whoops…
That is just one example of a reset regarding relationships I experienced in the float tank. But now I would like to move to the other main area of reflection for me during my microdosed float tank session.
Another topic I examined was this aforementioned desire to learn more and why do a podcast on it (mental health and not history, that is). I have been increasingly aware that I know very little about the topics which I explore through the podcast. Lately, I have begun to put more and more pressure on myself to expand my textbook knowledge since my lack of knowledge can often be a point of shame for me. And while learning more is never a bad thing, it was beginning to close me off to the pure, indescribable beauty of it all. I mean to say that science can describe the parts and processes of the brain, for example, but it doesn’t (it can’t) address the pure wonder that it is even a thing in the first place. Science tells us “how something works” but rarely can it answer the deeper “why it works” or especially “why is it”. I was becoming too reductionist, too eager to learn the details while forgetting to appreciate the bigger picture. I was also putting too much pressure on myself to play catch up in my knowledge gap.
This self-revelation was undoubtedly helped along by my recent exploration of the work of Iain McGilchrist for an upcoming podcast. If you have ever been curious about what role the brain, specifically the right vs the left hemispheres, may play in the way our species has formed society, his work is worth checking out. See the animation below for a quick explanation.
In addition to thinking about why I am eager to learn while floating in the darkness, I also revisited why I wanted to share my journey in mental health through a podcast. “What exactly am I trying to achieve?” Yes, I want to learn more and yes I want to share all that, but what is the ultimate goal/purpose? Then I remembered one of the fears I had when I started recording and realized that I still very much hold onto it. It is this fear that fired me up to do this project in the first place.
The fear is that as the world becomes more complex and more dangerous (nuclear weaponry, climate change, AI, social media, gene editing, sharp increases in partisan politics, etc etc), we as humans are seemingly becoming less and less self-aware. This insight (whether true or false) comes from my own experience with depression. I had been depressed for about a decade before I truly realized just how depressed I had become. I hated myself and had begun to think it was a normal way of being. To me, hating who you were was how you motivated yourself to be better. That was a belief I sincerely held until I started to put in the work to right the ship. A trauma I had forgotten about was steering me astray and it seemed likely to me that there were others out there who may be experiencing something similar.
But this insight – that humans are generally less self-aware than ever, and more concerned with the daily grind than the inexplicable wonders inherent in being alive – also comes from a beginners level understanding of history (and I mean human history, not recent history). Look at any of the ancient cultures of the world, like Egypt, to see how completely our focus as people has shifted. Egyptians, though they had faults of their own (they owned slaves, for example), held a deep and inspiring respect for the afterlife and the unknowns that come with being alive. Clear examples of this can be seen in mummification, tomb building and of course, the pyramids themselves. Another example I love of this ancient respect for the universe comes from a National Geographic documentary called “Chasing the Equinox“. This 45-minute program details how ancient civilizations built temples and palaces around the globe to mark the equinox, each precisely aligned with the sun’s location as it rose or fell on this single day of the year. It seems to me today that this former reverence for the workings of the universe has shifted to reverence for things like the workings of the economy. Is this a healthy shift?
Before creating this project, as I was coming out of my own self-destructive depression, I wondered, “How many decisions had I made that were completely influenced by the loop my depression had sent my brain into? How many others might be going through the same thing and not know? And in its most extreme and scary form, what happens when that person who is unaware of their deep trauma has access to the nuclear codes?” These were the concerns that drove me to start this podcast and I have lost touch with those recently. As mentioned above, I have become too concerned with increasing my own knowledge while forgetting what the purpose of sharing these conversations is. This is something I will get back in touch with as I continue to record.
I am thankful that this past weekend, for just one hour in the float tank and with the help of a small dose of psilocybin, I was able to address these beliefs and course-correct myself. Today, I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders that, once again, I didn’t even know I was under. That being said, I have decided to remove all previous posts of a political nature from my Instagram account and will cease to make any future posts that don’t pertain to my core belief – that only by addressing what is wrong within ourselves can we have any hope of a better future together here in an increasingly complicated society. (I will still continue to post occasionally about free speech, however, since that is why I can do this in the first place.) I do not want to make my message political and by inserting myself into conversations that can be polarizing, I fear I could potentially alienate people who may otherwise be receptive to the central ideas I explore and care about.
Thanks for reading!