As an angsty teenager trying magic mushrooms for the first time on that fateful Halloween in 2003, I never dreamed that I would see the day when psychedelics transformed how we approach mental wellness. These days, there are mushroom stores on block corners and news platforms are constantly sharing articles about the benefits of psychedelics in the healing process. Meanwhile, my own psychedelic integration clinic is attracting the increasing attention of Western North America. What a time to be alive!
As a provider of safe psychedelic medicinal experiences, you would think that I’d be riding off into the sunset right about now. That’s partially true, and I’m certainly happy to see the growing body of evidence supporting my lifetime of experience that these psychospiritual plants and compounds help humans wake up from unnecessary suffering.
I am concerned, however, with how product marketing and journalism are packaging and presenting psychedelics. Rather than providing an accurate depiction of what psychedelic healing looks like, more often than not they give us the western medical-style presentation. That is, snapshots related to curing pesky symptoms: Reduce anxiety! Enhance creativity! Restore energy and focus! Now mint-flavoured and better than ever!
We sometimes call this the “McHealing” approach, which reminds us what we are afraid of before letting us know that there is a quick and effective solution. We are taught that we can control and customize our inconvenient feelings by taking a pill (or a stem or cap). If a drug is not the solution, we just need to find the right expert with the best answers to fix what is broken. Thanks to Google, we don’t even need to feel whether a service provider resonates with us, since something close to a five-star rating tells us everything we think we should know.
But why is that a bad thing? Isn’t the western scientific medical approach of finding a disease and cutting it out with a scalpel just what we need in this age of anxiety and depression? Just what is it that motivates me to take the fun out of the psychedelic renaissance?
In this article, I want to help you deepen your awareness of how our North American medical lens is centred around a “put things into boxes and fix them” model. To be clear, I will not be critiquing modern medicine. There are too many game-changing benefits of medical science to even start naming. What I will be doing, however, is sharing how the “select and cure” model of modern medicine 1) underscores how we tend to think of everything, 2) creates a sort of rigid and false sense of control that disconnects us from our intuition and personal wisdom, and 3) how psychedelic medicine really doesn’t fit well with this way of thinking (even if your microdoses are chocolate covered and can “cure ADHD!”.
My hope in writing this is to reframe how we view and use psychedelics. I’m not just giving voice to my personal values around consciousness-altering compounds. It is my sincere belief that in making room for the lens that I will share, we may ultimately shift our view of reality, from one of constant problem solving and struggle to one of trust and synchronization with our bodies, with those around us, and with the entire cosmos in which we are embedded.
We Label and Troubleshoot
First, I want to provide some background on the sort of thinking that tells us health is about troubleshooting errors that our body “isn’t supposed to have.” Our style of thinking is so automatic that we need to very consciously step back and observe what we are doing.
If we turned the camera back on ourselves, we would see fairly frantic eyes darting about, looking for everything that is wrong with a particular situation, paired with an anxious sensation that tells us we need to take action, otherwise we will be swept away by our worries. We turn to labelling and troubleshooting. Worry tells us something isn’t right. Our inner dialogue says, “Oh no! It’s anxiety! That’s bad. I shouldn’t have that and it means something has gone wrong.” This “anxiety” label makes us further analyze the recent days and weeks, determined to find the reasons why this dreaded anxious sensation has appeared. Not once do we consider that the body might actually know what it’s doing and that feeling anxious is part of the process of feeling better.
“I looked insecure at the meeting, my mother-in-law was overly critical, I ate gluten and didn’t work out today.” Phew! The world makes sense again! Labels have eliminated all mystery and ambiguity, restoring the sense that we can control and customize every sensation in our bodies with the same flexibility of organizing apps on our home screen.
Alexander Fleming’s use of the systematic method to discover penicillin was one thing. But taking this sort of thinking to every ache and pain with a tyrannical need to control our bodies is quite different, and likely not what the forerunners of modern medicine had in mind. It’s certainly not what the shamans have in mind. Our tendency to categorize goes so far as to create endless feedback loops in the meta-cognitive internet where everything is neatly labelled and controlled, and where all of life’s troubles can be explained in The Six Reasons Your Relationship Is Failing, or The One Trick That Has Personal Trainers Scared For Their Jobs!
With so much awareness of the realities of others, so many new ways to label and categorize reality, and so much information at the tip of our fingers, life must be great, right? If we can identify and name more problems and have become so great at troubleshooting, shouldn’t we be enjoying a worry-free standard of living? How’s that working out?
It is helpful to consider how things got like this.
Evolving A Left-Hemispheric Bias
In terms of the whole “becoming human” thing, this trend of categorizing and labelling everything is pretty new. It is only over the last hundred thousand years or so that we have become the think-y and judge-y creatures that we are. The massive growth of our frontal brain and the constant use of our analytical left hemisphere shifted our worldview into one where we draw a lot more lines between things, leading us to feel like individuals, able to distinguish “this thing” from “that thing,” and to even consider that there are “things” in the first place (meditate for 10 days in silence or smoke 5-MEO-DMT and you may realize that there are no things at all, but just one eternal and inseparable process).
As a species, we were pretty jazzed about this evolution since it enabled us not only to experience reality as other animals do, but also to symbolize it by imagining it (as in images), plan our next move based on thought experiments, and translate the world into language and art. We became the most successful animal on the planet, able to create safe and complex societies in which our thoughts became things. How exciting to be “free” from our base instincts, as opposed to animals who can’t anticipate the future to their advantage. Not like us, creatures that can think. And think… And think.
Not only did we conquer the world through our thinking ability, but so-called first-world regions like North America now had the basic safety and leisure to develop entertainment. As if it weren’t enough to symbolize reality through thoughts, language, and art, we began to meta-symbolize the world through digital avatars via smartphones and social media. How fun! Symbols on symbols, baby! Animals are slaves to their base instincts, whereas we have built such safety that we don’t even need to be in the moment. We can design our own moments through cropping photos, applying filters, and amending them with inspirational quotes that Einstein or the Buddha may have said (they probably didn’t though).
Judging, labelling, and fixing—these are the products of thought that built the modern world. This pinnacle of human evolution replaced intuitive and spiritual experience with the mastery of controlled and rational thought. Something to hang our hat on, truly.
One problem, though: Why are we all miserable?
Thinking: The New Toy We Just Can’t Put Down
Thinking is responsible for our warm buildings, delicious meals, and the dopamine machines that we call phones. It’s not hard to understand why we would embrace thinking, judging, categorizing, and fixing as the be-all and end-all of how to go about life. But is there a point of diminishing returns to all this?
The post-90’s technology curve was exciting, and the vast majority of us were thrilled to have our first smartphones. But it just kept going. There was a certain stillness in the 90s between phone calls, communications, and thoughts that was so yummy. These days, it takes concerted effort to put space between things and it most often feels like a chore. The endless thought process of seeking and solving problems is too addictive, especially now that our dopamine systems are wired to respond to all the rewards manufactured by company algorithms.
What we largely fail to realize is that we aren’t using thinking so much to serve our needs, but we are worshiping thought itself. Even if you are an atheist, you are in fact a devout worshiper of symbolic reality, placing such trust in it that you rely on rational systems of plumbing, scientific medicine, and sanitation to prop you up. Thinking, structuring, organizing, craving, consuming is so automatic that it would take its collapse—and all the ensuing panic—to even realize that we have come to worship at the church of the intellect.
Despite a certain mastery we developed over reality by symbolizing it through cognition, we failed to realize the costs of obsessing with our new toy of thinking. We had no idea that living in our heads would detached us from tangible reality, continually pulling out of the present moment. Despite the present being the only moment that actually exists, the majority of our time would be spend in imaginary pasts and futures. We began to develop an ever-present sense that something wasn’t quite right and that we should try to fix it with continual effort.
We Gave The Finger Too Much Power
Remember when the Buddha told Ananda that the finger is only meant to point the way to the moon, but not be the object of worship itself? I’m not asking this literally—I understand that you weren’t there for this conversation. The point of this observation was to remind Ananda that, once we have seen the moon, we no longer have a use for the finger. The finger, and all Buddhist teachings in general, is not truth itself, but a roadmap to help us get there. Yet somehow we’ve gotten so lost in thought we are looking for answers in symbols instead of actual reality.
In modern society, we love the finger. The irony here is that the answers to every dilemma we’ve ever experienced are available if we were open to receiving them, but instead we have learned to barter for them through our convoluted cognitions. This is too bad, really, because a finger that points the way is a fantastic tool to have at our disposal. A tool. Not the goal of the journey itself.
As McGilchrist noted in his masterpiece The Master and His Emissary, symbolic thought is supposed to support our more intuitive, connected, and creative self, not steer the whole ship. We have a neural (or “energetic,” depending on how you see things) design such that we are supposed to let our feelings determine our direction while our thoughts simply nudge us a bit to the left or right. As Allan Watts put it, “Thinking is a good servant but a bad master.” Nonetheless, we have embraced thinking to the point where we don’t even know when we’re doing it and are content (but not really) to experience reality through a form of simulated dreaming.
Why don’t we make the consequences of staying asleep in a form of overthinking proto-reality a little more obvious? Here are some of the outcomes of merging with symbolic thought. And no, the irony of me deconstructing judge-y categories by creating more categories is not lost on me.
1. We Can’t Stop Thinking
Instead of using thought to our advantage, as a mode we can access when needed, it has become our default way of being. We forget what we were looking for in our house. We can’t sleep because the stories in our heads keep running amok. We lose the mental well-being of having space between thoughts. Taking time to meditate feels like a chore and we aren’t crystal clear on why we are even doing it. Life takes on a sort of numb and distant quality and it always feels like we need to be doing something very important, and it feels very uncomfortable to think of doing otherwise. Gone is our access to presence, joy, and the feeling of being home.
2. We Think Our Stories Are Real
Because our thoughts are constant storytellers and problem-solvers, we begin to imagine details related to others and the world. “My partner’s avoidant attachment style isn’t actually his own stuff—it’s about me and it is evidence that I’m not good enough.” “The reason I’m not happy is that politicians are corrupt.” “Nobody will ever know how to take care of me.” A ceaseless barrage of storylines that switch on anxious emotions gives us the sense that the world is dangerous. We organize the story in such a way that it makes us feel helpless and convinces us that if two to three things would change, we’d finally be OK.
3. We Feel Separate From Greater Being
When our left and right hemispheres are working together, we can see the world in terms of its bigger picture. Just as a cell exists within a body, we know that we exist within the vast organism of nature with all the privileges that come with connection to something bigger.
When we are primarily viewing the world from the think-y and judge-y left hemisphere, we label, categorize, and put things into boxes. Inevitably, we end up drawing lines between us and broader existence. We are no longer hooked up to the cosmic battery. Instead, we are an animal fighting to survive existence. We are a subject within the universe. We must swim hard upstream in order to not get swept away. And boy are we swimming hard.
4. We Lose The Wisdom Of Greater Intelligence
Our so-called unconscious brain is connected to the vast knowledge of all of existence. The force that makes your heartbeat and your breath follow a pattern is the same force that draws in the tide and rotates the Earth around the Sun. Identical principles of physical law regulate all systems within the universe. This is a big machine! It is smarter than you or I will ever be. It knows what it is doing.
When we identify only with our intellectual and problem-solving mechanisms, it’s as if we have decided we don’t want the guidance of greater intelligence. We are saying, “I can do better” to the entire macrocosmic history of evolution. We must struggle through endless problems, from morning to night. Then we wonder, “Why am I depressed and anxious?” This is the equivalent of refusing to stop and ask for directions blown up to the grandest of scales.
5. We Imagine We Have Control Where We Don’t
In something similar to Skinner’s pigeon superstition, we dream that reality could be free of pain and we go to great lengths to try to control it and put everything in its right place. We simultaneously believe that we are capable of accomplishing this and that we are responsible when things go wrong. As time goes by, we spend longer periods in fight or flight, up at night worrying about how we must accomplish A because God forbid that B and C don’t fall into place.
But what if, instead, I told you that we neither have control over the vast ocean of reality nor should ever want it? What if it turned out that the process regulates itself and it turns out we are just along to gracefully play our part? What if, even more so, it turned out that most of our mental pathologies stemmed from thinking it was our role to try and control the universe? Whether this leads to a crisis or a sense of tremendous relief, you are going in the right direction.
6. We Think Problem Solving Is Reality
Once again, the left-biased frontal brain evolved to imagine the future and solve problems. While this made society as modern as it is, we also need to recognize it does so by constantly seeing and solving problems. This prefrontal trouble-maker (and solution finder) is what we most often call in spiritual terms the ego.
My favourite definition of the ego is that which resists what is true. And hey, why not? By saying “no!” to whatever is happening, our big western personalities have created a lot of great devices. I love my exercise bike, indoor grow lights and kettlebells—all items that emerged from the idea that “Hey, reality could be better.” Again though, the issue is switching the problem-solving mechanism off. We suck at this.
In fact, we think the constant internal dialogue is our very self. If the Buddha said life is suffering, he meant that in terms of resistance to the present moment. And yet that is how we choose to live, in constant resistance, worshiping the symbols of existence instead of taking lovely, restorative breaks and remembering that, through the eyes of the universe, everything is not only perfect but it is the only way it has ever been and ever will be. There isn’t even anything to let go of, because there was never even anything to hold onto in the first place.
In short, there is a much more profound reality underneath the cognitive chatter of searching for what is wrong in the moment. Yes, Buddhist emptiness and impermanence may seem like a bummer, but we’d better get over our disappointment so we can actually move on to what is meaningful and enduring.
Is This Article Still About Psychedelics?
So, how does all of this pertain to psychedelics? If we were to view them through the lens of the troubleshooting, left-hemisphere, front dominant brain, we would say, “I have anxiety. I will take magic mushrooms and they will cure the anxiety and I will feel better.” I dare say this is the narrative that the broad public is experiencing right now, largely due to newspaper articles touting them as a cure for trauma and depression. The issue is exacerbated by the structure of post-positivist science itself, designed to observe the outer effects with minimal care regarding the experiential nature of how change happens. We see anxiety lower during a study and we conclude that a particular drug predicts positive change.
But is that really the full story? With traditional antidepressant medications, this explanation appeared to be enough. We were content to stop the train by finding a substance that increased serotonin as a result of blocking reuptake, which appeared to reduce depressive symptoms. The symptoms were reduced, and what more could we ask for? But this “take a pill and fix it” attitude is endemic to left-brained Western thinking. It is akin to breaking an arm and putting it in a cast.
Mental well-being, however, is vastly more complex. Bringing it into balance requires we involve the greater systems in which it is embedded: lifestyle, metabolic health, quality relationships, financial security, safety to be vulnerable, exercise, sunlight, time in nature. Yet even now, I am guilty of isolating mental health into parts. How left-brained of me!
Here is a thought that may scare you: parsing your well-being into pieces can only get you so far. You can make a checklist of all the aspects of wellness that you wish to control, and do your best to put things into their right place. But, for the most part, attempting to label, categorize, and control reality through your intellect is part of the machinery that got us into distress in the first place.
Psychedelics work differently. They actually deactivate the parts of our brain associated with our rigid, persistent concepts of reality that make us convinced things work a certain way and act accordingly (including the default mode network popularized by Michael Pollan). In this sense, they are a medicine far more advanced and effective than any we’ve come up with through checklists and categories of what “healthy” is supposed to look like. Instead, they give us the chance to listen to our bodies and to our surroundings.
Well-Being Can’t Be Bought
If you wanted health, you would sit quietly with your body every day. You would learn to put space between your thoughts. You would use that space to listen to the sensations, feelings, and emotions coming from your body. You would scan the sensations of your muscles and organs. You would gently ask it what it needs. Your frustration and confusion would steadily give way to practiced mastery, and you would learn what you need to be healthy. You would stop asking Google why you’re sick (which is the equivalent of asking an out-of-town friend why your neighbour keeps giving you dirty looks), and start asking your body instead.
Can you imagine the confusion your body experiences when it is constantly trying to tell you what it needs and you choose to ignore it? How baffled it must be as you choose, instead, to read through WebMD and blog articles? As if the most complex organism on the planet requires a “how-to” manual written by someone hungry for likes and views?
If you would stop and listen, you would slowly wake up and realize that you are connected to the most advanced (and only) bioecological process of perfect clockwork, one that knows how to heal itself. You would come to learn that anyone who tries to sell you the truth is equally disconnected from it. You would wake up and realize that well-being is not bartered for, it is accepted without condition from a superconscious universe that has eternity to reach perfect bliss—and infinite time to be playful about it.
We are terrified of our own nature, however, so we block the space between thoughts, identifying instead with the problem-solving part of our brain. We fill in the gaps by looking for problems and their solutions. We buy products, hire experts and go about life with a desperate sense that its brokenness can be fixed just as long as we find the right answer. We have embraced this fear narrative so much that, ironically, even psychedelics—which emerged from the perfect consciousness of nature itself—are being touted as the outer answer to our fears: “Microdose capsules can heal you WITHOUT having to feel dreaded anxiety! You can feel joy without sorrow!”
Reframing Our Understanding Of Healing
At Thrive Downtown Counselling Centre, we are attempting to talk people out of a “drug” oriented approach to psychedelics and to healing anxiety, depression and trauma. Instead, we encourage them to look at mushrooms as a medicine with which they must form a relationship. If you really like someone and enjoyed a coffee with them, you don’t say to them, “Hey! I’d like to get to know you more. Where can I read articles about you?” Instead, you spend time with them, enjoying the thoughts and feelings that come through your connection.
Mushrooms are very much the same. By looking at them as a friend that wishes to help you see the bigger picture and help you heal, you can begin to form a positive and optimistic relationship with them. You’ll come to respect them, rather than attempting to colonize them as something you can control, in order to use them to control and colonize your own feelings. You’ll learn to say, “Show me what is true. I want to see it. I want to know what feelings and pains I have buried. I want to learn to love my body so that it tells me what it needs. I want to know what I’m avoiding and the parts of myself I have abandoned.”
The revelation here is that while mushrooms may indeed eject trauma from the body and reduce anxiety, the mechanisms by which they do so are present awareness, keen attention, and the building of internal trust. People heal the most when they form an ongoing relationship with a medicine, slowly letting it connect them to themselves and start to learn the ways in which their lifestyle is mismatched to their deeper character.
People may indeed have a powerful first session, release profound grief and anger, and feel better after. But I’ve witnessed the real magic happen when they steadily realize they want to redecorate their house, they need to go to couples counselling with their partner, to have a fun morning routine, to spend time doing activities they had forgotten due to prioritizing work, to make more time for their favourite friends, to make meals more delicious, to meditate with intention instead of as a chore. That’s how true healing unfolds.
Moving From Symbols to Reality
Yes, symbolizing reality helped us build houses that stay warm in the winter, but as long as we continue to identify with the problem solver in our brain, we will never find peace. How could we? Its very nature is to find and solve problems!
If we want peace, we’ll need to identify with the part of our brain that experiences reality in its perfection. Doing that requires us to (a) reduce pain in the body by listening, attending and releasing, as well as changing lifestyle/work-habits, (b) recognize that we exist beyond our constant thoughts, (c) learn what it feels like to have an open heart—or to view the world with positive affect, if we’re using more clinical terms—and (d) learn that instead of desperately trying to control reality, we can choose to surrender to something a lot smarter than our limited intellectual processes (and trust me, this is a great relief).
The more you are symbolizing reality, the less you are in it. Symbolic problem solving is meant to be a tool, not the default mode of existing. Psychedelics put you back in touch with your body and surroundings, where the real first-hand answers are—they show you the moon, not just the fingers pointing at it.
Coda
I don’t want you to have read an article. I want you to have felt something. Remembered something on the fringe of your awareness. Heard the faint whispers of something you thought was a dream, even if on some deep level you know it was true—your hintergedanke towards a deeper path.
I don’t care if you’re an atheist or if you start your day with sun salutations in a sea of crystals—you are embedded within a reality, and ignorance of its nature will never guide you to wellbeing. The fierce, graspy try-hardness of the left brain is not reality, it is just a symbol. So long as you search for cures and answers from a place of logic and reason, you will remain asleep to the much stranger and more magical reality of interconnectedness. Psychedelic medicine may be touted as a new way of “curing PTSD,” but the reality is much more profound.
Psychedelic healing—and all deeper healing—is about learning to trust the process, enjoy the journey, and make healing itself a lifestyle rather than hoping for a fix that will make life magically good again. It is about no longer thinking of depression and anxiety as something gone wrong, but viewing them as part of the dance of life instead, one that we can approach with curiosity. It is about taking a chance to form a deeper relationship with the medicine, with ourselves, with one another, and with the cosmos. And once this happens, life can never return to how it was before.
If you are ready to wake up, 100 mg of mushrooms are a gentle baby step. But remember, this is about a way of being. If you’re too focused on the destination… well, you’re probably overthinking things.
Carson Kivari is a total weirdo and prefers it that way. He spent over a decade treating trauma in military veterans while growing his clinic—Thrive Downtown Counselling Centre—which now specializes in psychedelic integration counselling. While these projects continue, Carson is returning to his creative roots of music, writing and exploring humanity and the cosmos.
That was a great read, thank you Carson.
I particularly liked that you pointed out our troubleshooting method as finding errors that our body ‘isn’t supposed to have’, because that’s exactly how we approach mental health and our existential suffering. For example, say you sit in an office in front of a computer and your posture starts deteriorating. Because you can see what’s going on, you can choose to make modifications to your workplace or start a movement habit. But when it comes to mental health, we are much less likely to listen to our bodies and our emotions - our intellect thinks it knows what we need. That is, we approach the problem with the predetermined assumption that we wish we didn’t experience X emotion at Y situations in our life, that there is something wrong with the signals in our consciousness. The endless gaslighting we do to ourselves means that signals for help from the psyche and the body are buried deeper each time we do so. Eventually we get to the point that we not only don’t know how to interpret the signals, we are hardly aware that they even are signals.
One of the surprising directions my self-guided psychedelic journeys have taken me is recognizing the need for reconciliation between the body and the mind. This process is calibrating my mind (which used to wander endlessly) to my body, and calibrating my body to nature and the presence of others. Currently some the most important work I do, funnily enough, is dancing - on my own, at parties, and even clubs. Letting go of the judgements of others and surrendering to the wisdom of my body is difficult, ecstatic, and deeply meaningful. And the effect I can see it having in the moment on people around me is so fun to watch!
Anyways I can’t seem to stop writing, so I’ll stop here. Looking forward to learning more about your clinic and reading future publications. Also excited for your talk with Rav Arora later today!
Cheers