Loss, Separation, Despair

16th August 2024

Images generated by DALL.E except where indicated

Five months ago, in mid-March 2024, I had my first LSD experience. Yup. Really.

Out of respect for the medicine, I like to write out, at least once, the full name: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.

Okay – LSD from now on.

LSD is a powerful hallucinogenic substance that alters the mind’s perception of reality. There’s exciting recent research into what small doses of the substance can do for people – specifically around depression, anxiety, cluster headaches, creativity, concentration, and much more. I am particularly interested in how LSD (and, indeed, myriad other psychedelic medicines) can play a supportive and transformative role when someone is faced with a devastating, terminal diagnosis, or gently moving towards end of life. More on that budding interest another time.

At risk of sounding a bit of a “user/abuser” of substances, over these past five months I have had four experiences using LSD – starting with a “moderate dose”, then a “mini dose”, another “moderate dose followed by MDMA”, and finally a “micro dose”. I also had my first Holotropic Breathwork experience, which was “quite something”, if also different.

It’s taken me five months to write about all of this, I think because there’s been so much processing to do. Each LSD experience has been so unique, that I have had trouble integrating, drawing themes across them. Much came up each time – I might write a short piece for each session. We’ll see.

For now, Time One – I will name Loss, Separation, Despair (geddit?) Doesn’t sound great, does it?

I went in with my intentions and specific questions – not that I hold them too close, but I do write them down beforehand:

• How do I continue to release pain to make space for more love, joy and peace?
• What do Mike, Julia, Edward and Don most want for me now?
• How can I dive fully into pure love for Julia and all she has to teach me still?
• What gifts in me are still unopened – whether regarding loss, love or life?
• What else wants to heal in me?

As for my professional life, enquiries were about my ever-unfolding, ever-deepening work, and the contributions I want to bring forward in these vitally significant times.

“What the fuck was that about?!”

These are the first words I wrote afterwards, as I sat in bed at my friend’s house. Even small doses of LSD have strong and long-lasting effects. Best not drive home afterwards!

Words can’t convey most of what happened during the experience, but re-reading my notes – written that evening, during the night as I woke, then over the coming week – there’s a feel of “opposites”. A sense of two distinct and different experiences – one kind early in the process and one later on – though it was less clear cut than that. I have a sense of:

• Nothing Much Happening and So Much Happening.
• Full on and active, then barren, empty wasteland.
• Having a very physical experience, feeling pulsated by life, then quick as a flash, being clear, crisp and sharp in my head. Feeling “heady”.
• Feeling utterly underwhelmed by the whole experience, while also utterly devastated and bereft.

I don’t know when the dose took effect, but it was as though a switch flipped. A flick from feeling “nothing much”, being in a state of observing myself (as I am wont to do), to sensing I was being “danced by the music”. Not “dancing to” the music but “being danced” by the music.

The music rolled over me and through me – my entire body shuddering with it.
Sexual yet not. Just full-on full body energy flowing.
Eros.
Life force.
Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. All these energetic taps open. Flowing. Gushing. About as far away from Mental as I could be.
I had lights going wild inside, outside, all around me – vibrant oranges, pinks and greens – flashing and pulsing behind my eyes (even though they were closed and covered), travelling through my body, arms and legs and beyond.
Music, energy and psychedelic-coloured lights vibrating through me.

If, afterwards, someone had said to me, “Emma – you got up, stripped off, and danced naked… you danced up the walls and then hung from the ceiling”, I would have believed them. As it happens, I remained lying down, clothes on…

(Some days later, scribbled in the night as I awoke, my diary says I had a dream where I was dancing way out in the galaxy).

I have no idea how much time passed, but the music genre shifted, and one song, then much later, another, made me sob so very deeply as I sensed into a tug of war in my life. I felt I knew the songs, from long, long ago. I couldn’t name them, but they were familiar to me (*). My body was shaking with the sobbing.

I sensed Julia and Mike standing by, observing me, coolly.
Immobile. Uncaring. Distant. Cold.
Separate.
I felt such loss. Such longing for them, yet there was an invisible yet impenetrable barrier between us.  
I was utterly devastated, despairing, bereft.
I felt physically torn. Torn in half. My life was torn. I felt ripped out of the fabric of life.
Mike and Julia too were ripped out of the fabric of life. My life. Their life.
Simply Out of Life. All of us.

Image by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I heard/sensed/felt the words: “You there, Me here.”
We are not together. They are not with me. Not physically. But also not emotionally, nor spiritually. It was rough. I felt as though all the “good work” with MDMA evaporated.
I sensed a tug of war between Mike and Medjool. They were pulling, tearing at something (me?) Not fighting, but pulling, tugging at something, energetically.

Perhaps I am being invited to let go of Mike and Julia. To linger less on my longing for them.
Perhaps there is too much fight, tension, conflict, between me loving both Medjool and Mike.
Or in me being alive, in life, while also loving dead people so deeply.

Reflecting over the days that followed, it felt as though a message might be for me to “decide which side I am on. I cannot be in both places at once. Pick one”.

I don’t know if it was about me and my life, Mike and Medjool, or something utterly different, but the tension, the pulling, felt violent. A real tearing, a ripping up of life.

As my guide has told me on various occasions now, “With LSD you don’t necessarily get what you want. You get what you need. The medicine can bring up something you may not even be aware of – a deep-seated fear, for example. With the substance, you zoom right into it, magnify it, blow it up, so you have to take a look”.

Sometime after the “dancing phase”, again as though with a flip of a switch, I seemed to snap out of the experience. I moved to the central altar containing beautiful ceremonial objects. They were made of quartz, obsidian, wood. I held them, observed them intently. There was movement, life, in these apparently inanimate objects. A spent a long while with the quartz skull – representing death. The grain, the flaws, the lines in the quartz, shape-shifting, waving, flowing with life.

I held the skull gently, turned her this way and that. I felt total respect for the skull. I had no fear.
Yes – we will die. We have to die. We will all die. It’s all we need to do, in fact.
Death will happen. Fact. Truth.
No emotion about it. It just is.
Respect to you, Death.
And thank you for being there.

Later, in our closing round, I said I missed the cosy warmth, the fluffy pink bunnies, of MDMA.
This was brutal, harsh, unforgiving. Provocative. Unsettling.

Questions I take forward with me include:

• How can I be more in the world, in this life, committed to my one precious life, while I am still here?
• How do I hold Mike and Julia close without so much attachment, longing and sadness?

I need a new image of what it means to have Mike and Julia with me, alongside me, while I still breathe.

(*) The songs were both from The Alan Parsons Project – “Time” and “Old and Wise”. A band Mike loved, that we still have vinyl records of. As I recall the lyrics, they seemed to be about being separated from those we love, from those we have loved. Perhaps never to see them again, but loving them still, and remembering them with such love and warmth. The songs felt like they came from Mike to me, with a clear message:

“Goodbye my love, maybe for forever.
Goodbye my love, the tide waits for me.
Who knows when we shall meet again?
If ever.
But time keeps flowing like a river,
On and on, to the sea”.

Lyrics from “Time” by The Alan Parsons Project