Imagine yourself walking towards the same destination and along the same route over and over again. You get to know the route by heart: You know all the cracks in the pavement, the holes to avoid, the trees and plants that line the way, the cranky neighbour who shouts at passersby. Whenever you take that route, you never think about where you’re going. And you always know what you will encounter when you arrive at your destination. It has become a habit, a pattern.
If you follow the same route over and over again, the tracks that you leave in the ground will become deeper and deeper, and so it becomes even easier to always follow exactly the same route. This makes life easier: You don’t need to think about it; you just follow the tracks! There is, however, a downside to this: it limits you from thinking that other routes or destinations are possible!
Now imagine that one day, instead of just heading off in the usual direction, you stop and look around you. As you do so, you realise that there are many other possible routes. You take one of them and discover a whole new way of arriving at your same destination, or maybe you end up discovering an entirely new destination! By being able to see different options and making a choice to explore them, you widen your perspective of what is possible and open up to different experiences that can come up in life.
This story illustrates how our brains usually work and the impact psychedelic substances can have on us, bearing in mind that we still know very little about how our brain works. Our brain creates simple scripts of what reality is like, who we are, how to relate to people, what life is about, etc., in order to make it easier to process the countless amount of information that is constantly bombarding us. This is helpful for energy efficiency as it takes less time and effort to process all of that information.
There is, however, a downside to this efficiency because it ends up constraining our perspective and we end up getting stuck in the patterns that we have created. Similarly to how a muscle grows the more it is used and wastes away when not used, the pathways in our brain that are lit up whenever that pattern is activated get reinforced while the other pathways waste away. As a result, our brain ends up structuring itself in such a way that reinforces what it has experienced and loses the possibility of other options. We end up knowing very well the road we’re used to taking but miss out on all the other routes.
Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that alter the way the brain functions for a period of time. When under the effect of a psychedelic substance, you enter into an altered state of consciousness where different pathways in your brain to the usual are activated. This allows you to ‘see’ more what you might have usually avoided and so widens your perspective of reality. This can have an impact on your usual patterns, allowing for change that before seemed either impossible or you weren’t even thinking about.
From a neuroscience perspective, psychedelics interact with various neurotransmitters, primarily with the serotonin receptors, leading to changes in neural activity. Studies have shown that psychedelics increase connectivity between different regions of the brain that typically do not communicate with each other. This results in a breakdown of the usual rigid neural pathways and allows for more flexible and novel patterns of thought and perception. Under the influence of psychedelics, the part of the brain that focuses on your sense of self and ego (the default mode network) becomes less active, leading to a diminished sense of self and greater interconnectedness with the world around you.
Psychedelics are not a magic pill. They are strong facilitators of awareness and change. But the longer-lasting change comes from inside you. In a way, the psychedelic experience is like going to a theatre knowing that the play is about you but not knowing what you will actually be watching. You might have your preferences – maybe you would like to watch a comedy, a musical, a ballet, or some hip-hop dancing. What the psychedelic substance does is draw open the stage curtain and then a stream of actors comes onto the stage, each actor being a different part of yourself. The performance might be similar to the theme you had in mind, or it might be different altogether.
If you are open to whatever is happening on stage, the deeper and the more powerful the experience can be and the more you can take out of it. Our role is to help you navigate that and to help you do the necessary internal work to integrate what comes up for you in the most fruitful way possible into your everyday life.
If you would like more information about psilocybin, the substance in magic truffles that we use at our retreats, you can have a look at this information sheet.