One Hour That Changed Everything
In a shift pod in the desert, under the influence of an “ally”, fifty years of trauma poured out in a deluge, freeing me from a lifelong cage and returning me to wholeness. This is the story.
Ted was gently insistent. “I felt bad that you didn’t get to have the experience two years ago.”
He was referring to the fact that two years earlier, while on a retreat in the California highlands with 30 other people—after a life-changing evening under the influence of Cambodian mushrooms, followed by a horrific night spent gripped in psychosis, about which I wrote about in a piece called 24 Hours in Hell, and which had landed me in a county lock-up after running through a freezing landscape all night—I had missed out on our third and final “dive”.
5-MeO-DMT—the most powerful psychedelic medicine of all—had been on the menu.
So here we stood two years later in Black Rock City, with Ted—a seventy-something sonorous man, gentle in his demeanor and very experienced—telling me he thought that I could benefit from experiencing “the toad”.
I was nervous.
While two years had passed since my ill-fated psychotic trip, I had no wish to repeat it…
