Did the Internet Steal the Void?

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

— Kahlil Gibran

When I was in the art school of SUNY Purchase, I had a group of friends from the visual art and philosophy departments. They lived in a house off campus called The Golden Nugget. They threw the wildest dinner parties where something had to be broken each night. Once it was a five-foot-tall glass bottle. After being in the precious, clean, narcissistic dance building all day, I relished their wild creativity and the richness of ideas.

One of the themes of this group seemed to be discussions about the Void. The Void was the emptiness. It was something we all assumed was part of life - part of the creative process of life. First, there is a Void, then you fill it with something. You may not enjoy the Void, but it was useful and necessary. 

Recently I realized that it has been a long time since I have sat in the void. I don’t get that much time to myself as the mother of two small children - could that be it? But then the more I think about it, the more I realize that the internet stole the Void. If there is ever a moment in which I find an emptiness, there is endless content and activities to distract - endless ways to be ‘productive’. There is always something to do. There are always many things you can say need to be done. 

Has our society lost its ability to be in dialogue with the Void? Is the void even a thing anymore? If so, what have we lost along with it? Musician Bob Frankie and poet Kahlil Gibran certainly felt like we needed it.

I usually have had depth to my work. Is this because I have had a relationship with the Void? Is this where I get my base? Is this what I help other people locate in my Creative Journey practice? Is this where I usher people on the psychedelic journey?

I understand the desire to fill the Void. I get why you might even want to destroy it.  But I believe in exploring it - safely - like very careful deep sea diving. You make sure you have the tools to survive and then you go in.

Since it is no longer a given, I will make a point of making room for the Void in my and my children’s lives. I will continue to draw on this depth in my art practice and my Creative Journey practice. I won’t let you, internet, steal my Void!

Buffer

I have been noticing patterns in the reactions of my various clients. One is that after the psychedelic journey, clients report that there seems to be a buffer between them and the challenges of their worlds. Instead of being thrown by every pleasant or unpleasant occurrence or difficult relationship or situation, there is a buffer. They are not thrown. They feel more steady, more stable. One client reported being able to separate psychologically from her distraught boyfriend and her troubled 8-year-old son. She wasn’t experiencing any toxic dependency anymore. Another client reported feeling a bit removed from her daughter who suffered from suicidal ideation and had recently had an incident. This may not sound nice, but it meant that she was able to be present and effective with her daughter rather than depressed. She didn’t feel like overeating sweets. A creative director I was working with said that after the journey he felt smoother, like things just didn’t bother him to the same degree. In his role which entails a lot of responsibility, high stakes, a lot of personalities, and a lot of ever-shifting factors, this sort of smoothness was a revelation for him. He hadn’t experienced this sort of surfing through life’s dramas before.

A buffer is a space between the dramas of your life and your reaction to them. This is crucial to being able to actualize change. If you have even a moment between the event and your habitual response, you can make a choice. You can decide what response would be more effective to run. You are empowered to choose your next move rather than riding a train that feels out of your control. 

This perspective shift, even if temporary, allows you to see yourself experiencing your world - which can make you the artist of your own living art project. With psychedelics, it isn’t a thought. It is an experience.

Don’t Do Everything Together

There are many ways to journey with psilocybin. Many people think that it will be a bonding to journey on psilocybin together. If your goal is a lighter, more social experience, I agree. If you want to do a deep dive, have a transformational experience, or go very far in - that other person is going to be a distraction. The only person who is going to go fully into the experience is the one who feels the effects first. The second person will usually fall into a caregiving role at that point and not experience the compound as acutely. 

If you are working with a guide, schedule two sessions. Your partner can be there as support but again, that too may be distracting. The best approach is probably to be available for the day after when your partner or friend is making sense of their insights.

If you are not working with a guide, take turns. This gives the journeyer all the resources without being pulled out of themselves to check in with the other. To be attentive and present with another person is a great gift. If you decide to do this for your partner, minimize your agenda and ego. Be at service. Follow their impulses. Take away all the distractions or physical barriers between your beloved and their own soul. It isn’t about you. If you want it to be about you and your relationship, choose an Anniversary Refresh or another compound. Psilocybin is for meeting nature, G*d, or the muse. It is beyond your relationship or even who the traveler is. Don’t ask the traveler to narrate their experience for you.

I have been called a psychedelic doula many times. I am here to help you give birth to yourself. If you feel capable of doing this for your partner or friend and your relationship has room for this particular orientation, get a to-go kit.

As we enter a new year, I am planning my own vision quest. Are you?

Death of Ambition / Birth of Curiosity

I took a spritzer of LSD at a party a few weeks ago. I was dancing in the fog with the lights and the beats and had a strange feeling. I wasn’t sure what it was. I sat with it a bit longer…What is this strange feeling? And then I landed on it - I was experiencing a death: the death of my ambition. All the people in the room, most of us middle-aged, dancing to songs from our younger years…there was a dissonance with ambition..what on Earth is next for us? Is it too grim to consider?

I see the ambition in my daughter. She has a drive to achieve, to contribute, to do something important. Even at six, this is evident. I have known this lens my entire life. I let it down during Shelter-in-Place as many people did - but then I picked it up again. It is how I know what to do. I get super clear about what I want and then I set out, step by step, to achieve it. I am so good at postponing pleasure for the rigor of the now. But what happens when you know that whatever comes next is probably not as awesome as what is here now? It gets hard to muster the ambition, especially when you have been around the block and have experienced that things you want often don’t feel the way you expect. 

But curiosity...curiosity doesn’t pull you from the now and ask you to sacrifice for an uncertain future. Curiosity asks you to be willing to improvise with whatever comes. You do need to keep moving down the road one way or another. You do need to employ some strategy. But can’t you employ strategy by asking, ‘Hmm…I wonder what will happen if I do this…or that?’ Without a sense of urgency or need, your future and your observations are more honest. Without the weight of a strong agenda that says, ‘It must be like this or else…’ you can more easily try things. Plus you don’t have to do it with a sense of desperation. Not with an ‘I will be okay if I can achieve this next milestone…’

I don’t want to miss my now. I am 49. I am cresting my hill. I want to get a kick out of whatever is to come, but I don’t want to hold my breath to get there. 

Curiosity...I can live with that. I can live from that. That makes sense. That doesn’t feel delusional like ambition does these days.

Socrates said ‘Know Thyself.’ Well, the self is always changing. Psychedelics help you know yourself right now. You let go of who you thought you were and are again left wondering who you might be. To be reborn in middle age into your now is the gift of the intentional psychedelic journey. With fresh eyes, you see your habit as separate from you. What is left without my ambition? Hmmm…maybe curiosity.

The Boredom Indicator

I often say that boredom is important for the creative process. When you get bored your brain starts coming up with stuff to entertain you. That stuff is often art.

Recently I have been thinking that boredom is an indicator of something else though. Our neurons bundle more tightly the more we follow the same train of thought. Repetition. Neurons that fire together wire together. Maybe boredom is an indicator that we are following the same trains of thought too much. Maybe boredom is an indicator that we need to change our thoughts, our approach, and our story so we can solve our problems in new ways.

I grew up in Connecticut. I believe it's a symptom of the long, cold winters there that I emphasize delaying satisfaction, working hard, following through, sticking with it, and putting my nose to the grindstone. This work ethic has probably helped me a lot in life. I don’t abandon projects when they get difficult: I grind through them.

But I wonder if the other side of this quality is a practice of sticking with an approach long after it has proven to be ineffective. What have I continued to do, repetitively, expecting and hoping that if I do it long enough, it’ll pay off eventually? When I look at my art/dance company Capacitor, I see that I have survived. I see that I have made a ton of creative work - ten full-evening shows of original bespoke content. I see that I stayed in relatively the same place…making fringe work for fringe audiences. What would have happened if I tried radically different approaches? What will happen as I try radically different things - approach different audiences and industries and open my mind to the unfamiliar?

In my early career, I simply had to actualize some ideas. I had to create something in the world, outside of my mind, that I could share. Now, I have a lot of this material. Can I play with it, now that it exists, and see where the most gracious audience lies for this particular offering?

The psychedelic experience shows us that there is a lot of room…room to do things in different ways, room to move about in the world. Our narrow constricted habits bore us for a reason. 

What is Creativity?

I have been hosting a monthly salon for the past seven months called the Capacitor Lab: Psychedelics and Creative Process. I have been inviting scientists, artists, therapists, and activists to share what they know about psychedelics. I share what I am learning and discovering about creative psychedelic guiding. We also show some repertoire from Capacitor - my arts non-profit - as examples of what psychedelic-supported art can look like.

After last month’s Capacitor Lab, I thought I should write about what creativity is since psychedelic research and the neuroscience of creativity are nascent fields and this question needs to be answered before they can measure it.

I have a pretty broad definition of creativity. I believe that the life force is creativity. Nature is a life force. The energy that courses through various life forms, is creativity. Nature grows and reproduces. After death, it grows again into something else. Nature is creation.

The psychedelic journey unblocks life force. The psychedelic journey unblocks creative flow. During the journey, you may or may not have a vision. But afterward, you should be unblocked, at least for a while. Then you will find yourself more creative - more in the state that you were as a young child before you acquired blocks, issues, inhibitions, habits, limiting thoughts, and narratives.

I know this isn’t an easy concept to measure in a lab.

Or is it?

Creativity is growth and growth is change. Maybe change is the vector that we need to measure in the lab. How much professional, personal, experiential, emotional, and living change occurred in the weeks and months following a journey? Maybe co-workers, family members, and friends are interviewed after the journey as well to capture testimonials and gather evidence of real change.

I will soon be working with psychedelic researchers in Europe who are tackling the question of whether psychedelics make you more creative. I can venture forth with confidence that I have a clear theory and perspective on the matter based on my own experience, those of my creative collaborators, friends, and the clients I have been working with for the past years.

Stay tuned for more findings!

Chronic Pain

It all began with a mosquito bite.

In 2016, just after the premiere of my show “When We Were Small”, a few good friends decided to take advantage of the cheap plane tickets to Maui and sit on a beach to celebrate. My son was two years old. I was about to get pregnant again with my daughter. My friend came down with a very intense fever after getting bit by a mosquito. If I knew then, what I know now, I would have taken him to the hospital immediately. It turns out that our brains can’t handle temperatures of 106 degrees, which it was at times. 

This fever led to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) or ME/CFS - more commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In his case, ME/CFS presented as joint pain, orthostatic intolerance, and post-exertional malaise. A person who used to surf, climb, hike, camp, dive, and run with me could not imagine doing more than the absolute minimum physically. It was hard. It was super sad. 

He found it was hard to keep his spirits up when the pain never seemed to leave and the activities that were the most fun seemed unachievable. The tension would develop in his face as the body aches grew. It was hard to be patient. It was hard to be fun. It was hard to do everything. 

Many doctors, specialists, and wrong diagnoses later, he decided that there wasn’t much for him in the currently approved medical treatments. The drugs offered didn’t help and delivered lots of unwanted side effects and long-term health risks.

In 2019 I read some studies about the success of LSD in treating alcoholism. I noticed he had developed a habit of anticipating the pain - and that was causing him to walk and move awkwardly through the world and stay continually tensed in a way that caused additional pain. I knew it was a stretch, but if psychedelics could break habitual drinking, maybe they could break the habit of pain expectation too.

I offered to support him in a psychedelic protocol to reset his pain thresholds. With quite a bit of trial and error and various preparation approaches, we came up with a schedule and a program that has helped. Drawing on release technique, focused intention, light bodywork, and guided internal body scan, I guide him.

This is the only therapy that has had any significant impact on his pain. People who suffer from chronic pain develop well-defined pathways in the brain that get stronger and recruit other muscles to support these patterns. This leads to more tension and therefore more pain. Psychedelics offer a vacation from the pain in the moment, which is helpful, but it can also get a person off the pain highways of mind afterward.

Set, setting, preparation, and intention do matter. Interestingly, when he takes psychedelics recreationally, those journeys don’t have the same effect on his pain.

I was recently at a conference at Stanford and was pleased to see that this is now an active area of research - psychedelics for chronic pain. I’m hopeful that we’ll discover more about why it works.

It has been some years now and my friend considers himself not cured but well-managed. His life has returned to normal for the most part. He is not climbing and surfing again but he seems more at peace with this life shift. Before any large event or when the pain begins to creep back, we revisit the psychedelic space for a reset. We have a rough schedule of every four months. These journeys are not fun - it is work and with ME/CFS it can be hard to save up the energy to do the journey. But in the end, there are no side effects and no long-term health risks. He has his life back. He has joy back. He has the loving, patient, and kind relationship he used to have with his kids back.

The Earth provides.

IF/THEN

When I was new to the Bay Area, I was looking for live/work lofts where I could live and create shows. On our way back to SF from a warehouse party in Oakland, we drove through Jack London neighborhood one rainy night and saw a handwritten ‘for rent’ sign in one of the warehouse windows. We copied it down and called. We met with the owners of the Greeno Mattress Factory building. This 750 ft studio was rectangular with tall ceilings and two skylights. I would later call it the Sky2Tank.

The old Italian man who owned it was a bit emotionally unstable, but he was taken with me when I began to dance in the studio to test out the hardness of the floor. After our meeting, all I could think was how much I loved this studio and how I could make dance, including aerial work in it. I made a deal with the forces that be - an IF/THEN agreement. If I was offered this loft, then I would sweep the floor almost daily and not even complain. I put myself in alignment with a particular outcome with a commitment that helped me feel deserving - and showed that I would value this gift. 

I was invited to rent this studio that we kept from 1998-2005. We created four full evening works there. We rehearsed, created, and performed there. The act of sweeping the floor over and over again connected me to my sense of gratitude for the space.

I use this trick of the mind still. If there is something I truly want, I think, ‘If I get this, then I will give that.’ Getting this right feels important to me. Maybe it helps me clarify what I truly want and what is a fleeting desire. Maybe it helps me continue to feel grateful for the things I achieve.

I spent two and a half years finding my now husband. It was a lot of work. I went on what felt like hundreds of dates. The desire for a good loving long-term partner was so strong, that I cut a deal. I said that if I found this man, then I would tell him that I love him every day. I would not take him for granted.

I have stayed true to my commitment.

In Creative Journey, I also made an IF/THEN commitment. If my practice were to thrive, I will continue to do my own creative work to maintain a clear, light heart. I will do the work of listening to my own deep whispers so my vision and presence aren’t confused for the traveler and so I don’t forget the pain of actualizing ideas in reality (as in childbirth, there is often some pain involved in creating). In this way, I put myself in full alignment with my goal. I am clear about what the goal will ask of me. I feel grounded in this potential reality.

Call Your Spirit Back

In any large project or life event that takes a lot of your internal resources to achieve or complete, your spirit gets wrapped up in the details, nuances, and dramas involved. I like to make a point of calling my spirit back to my body after these events. It is hard to do the next thing or even live your daily life without your full spirit in your body. If your creative work is going to evolve, you need to call your spirit back to reflect, integrate, and refocus before your next project.

I know I probably just lost some of you there, so let me explain through a story.

A few weeks ago, I was preparing to load into the California Academy of Sciences for the premiere of my new work ‘Cross-Pollination’. Preparing for a premiere is really nerve-wracking. You have never done most of what you are attempting to do. I always tend to be understaffed and overworked, and involved in a 24/7 mental meditation about what could go wrong and how to fix it before it does. I wake up in the middle of the night worried and come up with solutions that are actually crucial. This painful, exhausting period is truly necessary.

It takes me years to develop the ideas that result in a premiere. I designed this particular sculpture during Shelter-in-Place in 2020. Then I had to refine the design, get the 3D drawings done, write the grants to fund the fabrication, find the fabricator, negotiate the terms and the compromises with the fabricator, then line up the venue, raise the grant money to pay the performers, hold auditions, line up collaborators, organize a composer/musician, figure out agreements and travel plans, and contract everyone and everybody. Documentation, costumes, transport, sculpture repairs, etc. And this is all besides the art part - the choreography and direction of the work. And then you add in my educational program and the other choreographer creating a dance on the sculpture and you have something quite insane happening in my brain.

When all is done and the shows have all been performed, the sculpture, costumes, flooring, and random items have been loaded out - it takes time for me to recover. It can take weeks. I still have to finish paying everyone and organizing the documentation, but I spend some time on home projects as well. This is all part of calling my spirit back. I became present in my home again. I organize drawers - rearrange furniture - get rid of things we don’t use - clean. I get more present with my kids again. I may even begin to work out again.

Regardless of how successful the project was, I need to call my spirit back to my body or else I feel empty and depressed. Because, guess what? Until I call my spirit back - I am empty.

Sometimes we need to reach, extend, and push beyond our known boundaries. It is not only okay to do this at times - it is good. But then afterward, you will have many hard days if you don’t call your spirit back to yourself.

In the psychedelic journey, the most crucial period is after the psychedelic experience. Initially, there is the coming back to oneself on the day of the journey after your spirit becomes untethered. And then there is the long integration for the weeks following when you can call your spirit back to you and see how it sits in your new perspective, your fresh consciousness with new boundaries and awareness, where the edges are possibly in a different place. The right guide can help you call your spirit back to your body, to your life.

Avoid the Void

My kids have been taught in school that they have a bucket. They are taught to fill their buckets so they have the internal resources to be effective students. I like this metaphor. I like that they are being taught to manage their emotional lives.

I used to take MDMA with psilocybin because I was afraid of the Void. I was trying to have a good time after all and being thrust into a zone in which nothing I was work-a-holicing toward was worth it - well, it wasn’t a good time. 

Today I felt super disenchanted with everything in my life. I had to really sit with this because I really don’t feel this way often. An existential crisis of emptiness. Is my usual enthusiasm for just about everything I am doing blind? Is this the truth that I am somehow covering up with ‘good’ neurochemistry most days? 

I went to sleep, awoke in the middle of the night and began to polish my empty spiritual bucket. Let’s assume that nothing I am doing is worth it. Let’s assume that everything is meaningless. Let’s assume none of the effort I am putting out will come back to me with any real value. Empty, empty, empty. I am cleaning out and polishing this emptiness. It is so clean of hope, belief, meaning, faith, commitment, integrity, effort. I could walk away from absolutely everything in this state of mind and it would be … uneventful.

But then I come home. My daughter shows me a book she wrote about a Queen who lives in a castle with her daughter. They throw parties together. Okay, I’ll put this in my bucket. This is undeniable. How special to be so special to her for this period of time. Then my son decides to take a shower because I’m taking a shower and hugs me, ‘I love you mommy.’ Okay, this gets to stay too. 

At the workshop I taught to Highschool students today - I thought, maybe I’m not a natural teacher. I found the students annoying initially, holding their phones while standing on my sculpture in shoes. But there was this one emo student, a moody sixteen year boy. He seemed to think this workshop was a pile of shit. But then I saw his curiosity peak out. His interest grew. He was resonating with my motion sculpture. By the end, he said we was surprised by how much he liked this process. It was new. 

I am not sure if I will continue to teach, but connecting with someone through my artwork, that is a very sweet nectar. I will keep that.

Tomorrow I will slowly begin to add other things to my polished, clean-of-hope-and-faith bucket. I wonder how my living art project will transform as I reevaluate the elements in my life. If they don’t fill my bucket, they should probably not be in my life.

This is what psilocybin, on its own, is good for. It can drop you into the Void. It can put you in your emptiness. And it may not be fun in the moment, but it can be a really useful part of cleaning up your life. 

Recently there was a study on how taking MDMA with LSD or psilocybin can help guard against psychedelic distress. Are we making the same mistake we so often do? We are softening the edges, taking away the challenge, and expecting to get all the benefits anyway. I agree that it is more pleasant, more fun. But I don’ think the results will be as deep or meaningful. I don’t think you can gain the benefits of facing the Void without sitting in it for a bit - shutting down the meaning-making machine for a while so it can restart again and locate what is actually fulfilling.

A Body of Work

When looking back at my body of work, 28 years of choreography, sculpture, and direction, I can see how my parallel psychedelic practice was informing my creative work all along.

Despite my Eurocentric training in Ballet and American Modern and Jazz dance, I was creating a different kind of movement. I was doing extremely organic grounded movement that had not been part of my training or background. I was wrapping horizontally around other dancers on the ground as a vine. I was sinking and falling to the bottom of the ocean. I was eating other dancers in a group carnivorous ritual. I was humping the crowd like primordial soup. I was sucking on ears as an alien right of passage. I was feeling up water-filled bulbouses. I was designing sculptures for humping upside down. I was designing sculptures about self-pollinating Perfect Flowers that were basically making love to themselves. I was making steel structures for aerial balls of humans. I was designing fiberglass balls full of holes for an octopus to explore with her tentacles. 

I was out there. 

I didn’t even realize how out there I was. I thought my work was simply a new take on the old form. I thought I was doing what all artists were supposed to do - innovate - say something that hasn’t yet been said. 

I took my work very seriously. I was a serious artist. I was an insane workaholic even. I tried to get the presenters at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to take me seriously around 2000. I received my press kit back in the mail with an accidental message. Someone had forgotten to take the post-it note off my folder that had written in pencil, “Looks like a bunch of Ravers on Ecstasy.”

I was shocked and dismayed. I was offended. It didn’t matter that literally every cast party at that time was an ecstasy party. It didn’t matter that we were taking magic mushrooms during our Tahoe retreats and were literally performing at raves. I was a theater artist - a theater-quality artist, and I had trained my entire life to do this work. 

How dare they write me off as a Raver on ecstasy!

It reminds me of the time I was first dating my now husband. His mom said to him that he needed to beware of artists. They often do drugs. Again, I was super offended. It didn’t matter that the first thing I did was introduce him to all of the psychedelics I used to explore my mind.

I guess Mama, an immigrant from India, with her strong accent and apparent disconnection from current culture, somehow had me pegged…even before my husband did.

It turns out that we are all probably moving through the world on impulses and chemical influences, not fully aware of what we are doing - our egos sensing just the smallest piece of the fabric of space-time.

It turns out that psilocybin brings out the organic, connecting, primal, existential level of my art-making. I have a hunch that that is just what it does. It brings us all down to the Earth and reminds us from where we came. It lets us know that we belong here on this planet - a part of this biosphere, regardless of what and who we think we are.

Cautious - Confident - Cocky

In Ballet class, I am very aware of my ego. You can be too cautious and hang back. No one will see you. You need confidence to go for it and not hide...to get on your leg and present. But once you get cocky, it's a mess. You throw your alignment off and your pirouettes are too forceful - you start to fall, get tense, and lose your focus. Such a difficult balance!

A good guide can proceed with confidence - never projecting fear. But they need to beware of cockiness as no one knows what is about to happen. You need to be ready to roll with whatever occurs and have respect for the power of the compound. You need to be ready to say ‘Yes, and…’ no matter how crazy things get.

Maybe it is like surfing. You need to go for it when you see the wave coming, but you also need to have a healthy respect for the immense power of the ocean. The more you work with psychedelics, the more confident you become that you can ride whatever wave comes at you. But no matter what, anyone can be thrown at any time. This is part of understanding the situation as it is. And in the case that you are thrown, you need to let go, knowing that it will pass, the wave will recede and all will again be calm. Let go.

Sound of My Love

There is a song that I play for my six-year-old daughter when she is falling asleep. We have been playing this one for a long time …probably since she was four. I hold her and she falls asleep in my arms. It is Svefn-g-englar by Sigur Ros. I was told that they make up the words - they are’t in any language. It sounds to me like they are saying “It’s You……” over and over again. I hold her and she hears, “It’s You…”

This is the sound of my love. It comes out of my heart, wraps around her body, and harmonizes with her vibration to create a very strong hum. This is what artists do. They give shape, sound, and form to ‘Things Invisible to See’ - the title of a book I read in high school that I never forgot. 

Is gravity real? Is heat real? Is attraction real? Is love real? Is resonance real? Is synchronicity real? Is growth real? Is peace real? Is scent real? We put shape, sound, and form to these things as a way to better understand them - as a way to draw them closer. 

Psychedelics are sensory amplifiers. I heard the air displaced by the wings of a bird. I saw a depth of color in snow….purple, crystalline blue, so complex, so deep. I felt how I was connected to all the life forms around me. The mountain lion must have eaten the mushroom and then gone hunting - ears perking up and eyes able to distinguish the subtle shadows that are usually invisible.  

Psychedelics allow us to see the world more fully and allow us to understand it more completely. All becomes more clear. It is a whole and we are part of that whole. We give up our small sense of self for a much greater one that includes all that encompasses us.

My traveler lost his house -  lost everything he owned in a fire. On the journey, he stared up at the charred Redwoods, imagining all the small creatures, birds, and trees that burned. Tears came pouring from his eyes. ’Dear forest, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

Find the Floor

In Release Techniques in dance, I learned that to go up you must go down. You need to find the floor first. Then you can push against it to jump. You can push against it to stand. You can push against it to lift your leg or your body. Earth is first.

Psilocybin knows this better than anything. The traveler can’t seem to get close enough to the Earth. If there is a choice between a more ergonomic, cushy bed and a thin, flat Thermarest, the traveler will take the thin flat Thermarest every time, no matter how much chronic pain they usually have in their joints. In the Psilocybin mind, they can’t get grounded enough.

At our last Capacitor Lab on Consciousness Blooming, we were discussing what creativity is and how researchers studying creativity and psychedelics are attempting to define and measure creativity. It is a worthy pursuit. How else will you be able to prove that psychedelics are a benefit to creative output and development?

But how do you measure it? How do you quantify it? How do you grade its strength comparatively?

I appreciate the exercise. Before we can answer all of the above, we need to start with ‘What is creativity?’

I realized that for me, it is helpful to do what I do in release technique. Find the floor. Creativity is creating. What creates nonstop? Nature creates nonstop. We are born into nature. We are part of nature. We are born creators. It is our natural state of being. Life, fear, trauma, stress, and confusion block us and we lose this natural state of flow.

The role of psychedelics in creativity, in my experience, is to unblock that flow. So psychedelics don’t make you more creative. They get what is blocking your natural born creativity out of the way. They are an agent of flow.

What is art then? When thinking about art, I have to do the same thing. I have to find the floor.

I don’t think art is some sort of clever response to a puzzle or brain teaser as many of the research models would suggest. I believe art is the most obvious expression, the most direct translation of a feeling and personal experience that a person can muster. What is obvious to the artist looks interesting to the world because it is not what is obvious to everyone else. I don’t believe the artist is trying to be different or tricky. The artist is trying to enter the now by externalizing what is hidden, mangled, confused, beautiful, and obvious within.

I have often said that my best artworks are pieces that I almost don’t bother to make because they just seem too obvious. But my obvious is different from your obvious so you might find it interesting, engaging, surprising.

Not all psychedelics are the same and they can be used differently. They are tools. LSD may actually help us visualize invisible or conceptual content, or the metaphysical realms. MDMA may help us find and feel our love and gratitude. Psilocybin may help us contend with our existence and our place in nature’s web.

I enjoy helping travelers find the floor, sink into the Earth, so they can emerge in flow - a rich creative flow state where the answers to what they should do or where they should go can seem suddenly obvious.

Don’t Know. Can’t Know.

I just got back from the forest with a dear traveler. Her revelation, “I don’t know. I can’t know. And that is okay.” 

By the time we get to be middle-aged, parents, or leaders in our fields, we are expected to know everything. We are expected to hold the weight. Take responsibility. This is exhausting, especially because it isn’t true. We are engaged in a duet with fate and a million elements we can’t predict or control. It is an improv. 

When the mushrooms dissolved her usual construct, this is what this traveler was left with. I massive sigh of relief. There was a limit to what she could know, what she could control, and what she could take responsibility for. With her usual loop gone, she could see this. She could feel this. This seemed suddenly obvious.

I can fix it. I can make it beautiful. I can get it to work. I am empowered. 

These statements all sound really good. And they are not always true. 

One of the great gifts of psilocybin is it folds us into nature’s web once again and we can sense that we are part of this great fabric of time, space, and circumstance. We are part of the living biome. We are a thread in a much larger system at play. You can let down your egotistical fantasy for a while and feel what it would be like to know your own limits…the limits of your selfness and the limitlessness of nature.

She spent hours staring up into the redwood trees, feeling that the great mothers above her were laughing down at these silly apes, us, below. Our blip of life - they see us come and go. They stand tall and strong and weather fires. And they keep growing up towards the Sun’s love. Structurally hopeful.

“I am part of that.”

The Woods

My parents met in NYC in the 60s. She was an artist whose second husband had recently died of cancer. He was a scientist working at Columbia having recently done the deepest dive in the Bathyscaphe Trieste before Don Walsh took the vessel to the Mariana Trench. They were living in neighboring lofts.

My father was a Brooklyn-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants and a mid-thirties bachelor. My mother was a midwestern gal who was first married at seventeen and divorced after deciding to go to art school to live in a sweatshirt and a pair of corduroys for the next two years - not even wearing shoes or underwear. An unlikely pair, they had one major thing in common. They both wanted to raise children in the woods. 

My Uncle Sam and Dad had bought 85 acres of swamp land in Connecticut that no one seemed to want. They could have bought 500 and until this day, this is one of my father’s greatest regrets. He got a grant from the federal government to rent bulldozers and dig out ponds to drain the land. This was great fun for a city boy - a revelation really. I don’t think he has ever gotten over the joy of playing with Earth-moving machines and power tools. 

They moved to the land with my oldest brother when he was a baby and lived in a homemade tent structure with no running water or electricity. This they both loved. I was born six children later. 

Now my father is in his nineties. After founding and running a biotechnology company from the 60s through the 2000s, all he cares about now is the land. His greatest love in life was making stone walls, digging ditches, battling the beaver, and cutting down dead trees. All he wants to know is that we will come to the land regularly to toil. He never wanted us to come to the land to relax. We were to work.

In many ways, our father views labor not just as a necessity, but as a source of deep satisfaction and fulfillment. His relentless dedication, bordering on workaholism, is a trait that some of us have certainly internalized. If there is one thing our father would like us to take from him, it is this.

I can see now that all of my life’s work is connected to the land. I made a dance company that works with scientists to create highly visual, sculpturally integrated full-evening works about wild nature. I make sculptures that are inspired by nature - all the while knowing that no human can compete with nature for beauty, complexity, and profundity. And now I am a psychedelic guide, focusing primarily on the compound that helps people connect the most deeply to nature - psilocybin. Not only that, I design nature retreats. 

I hadn’t noticed it before, but I guess Dad got what he wanted from me in the end. I did dedicate my life to the land. I toil for the land. Just not only his acres and not in the way he imagined. I don’t build stone walls, cut down dead trees, and clear the old logging road into the woods regularly. I scaled up. I dedicate my life to Earth’s wild nature. 

As a servant of the mushroom, I follow its message to support human consciousness blooming. One person at a time, I reintroduce travelers to the fabric of nature so they can feel a part of it again. Ah, bliss.

Shielding

I’m away on vacation, but just before I left, I attended the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference with about 12,000 other psychedelic enthusiasts. I spent the first two days in an intensive Grof Breath Workshop. I was really floored by how powerful this work is and I am sure I will reference this workshop in multiple posts. 

For my Breathing journey, I had a pretty terrible sitter. Perfectly terrible. I learned so much! I sat with her the first day and we went for lunch afterward. She is training to be a guide for 5-MeO-DMT. I thought she was nice enough - friendly and grateful for my attention. But I didn’t know her. I wouldn’t have guessed she would be so terrible.

When it was my turn to do the breath journey, what struck me is how more than input, I felt that I most needed shielding. The world comes at us all day long. It is incessant. Getting a little psychic space so you can hear your own thoughts and meet the parts of you that are often overpowered by the sonic and conceptual static in our world is so valuable. 

I didn’t want my sitter’s influence or encouragement. She said, “You are doing a really good job!” My inner voice said “I wasn’t doing a job at all. And I certainly don't want to do a ‘good’ job!” I didn’t want to involve my ego in this process. After that comment, I had to pretend that my ‘performance’ wasn’t being evaluated so I could focus on my own inner visions.

Additionally, she couldn’t seem to put her own desires in service of my journey. She left partway through my breath journey because ‘she was called’ elsewhere. That’s new-age for ‘I got bored’. The organizers were shocked. I wasn’t. It is actually very hard to remain present when you are asked to take so few obvious actions - to be still with and for someone else. Everyone at the workshop reflected on how hard this was. If you are only used to relating to yourself in terms of winning, losing, succeeding, etc, your ego is going to go crazy when you are engaged in a process that really isn’t about you but requires your full focus.

Despite the sitter, I was able to go on a pretty amazing journey and gather important information. I found that I didn’t want her to attempt to heal me or project anything on me at all. I wanted all of the inputs to stop. I wanted a pod of protection around my body so I could meet my inner healer/vision/voice/memory without distraction. 

What I needed was a shield.

This experience made me reflect on my own guiding techniques. I know that in my practice, it is important to take the time beforehand so we all understand the intentions, goals, and preferred level of engagement - how much contact; how much healing work; how much intervention is desired. It is both unnecessary and even intrusive to project anything at all on another person even if you think it is ‘good’ or ‘positive’ if that is not what that person is looking for from you.

The question I often ask myself in Creative Journey is, ‘How do I continue to move toward pure kindness and uncontaminated support?’ This could come in the form of a shield, light, holding, or words of support and originates in respect for the traveler’s creative process.

Listening

In 1999, I was working on a piece called HUMP. I was inspired to work on this piece because I was hearing a lot about reproductive technologies. Dolly had recently been cloned. IVF, designer babies, and test-tube babies were in the media. My question was, ‘What would happen to the most joyful, animal, exhausting movement in the human repertoire, the Hump, if we didn’t need it anymore to reproduce?” I set out to make all the choreography possible from the hump motion that I could. By doing this, I ended up in the swamp.

HUMP led me to a piece about primordial soup, the slimy life forms that emerged from the swamp and began to slither over one another and eventually hump each other. The piece became about the beginning of life on Earth.

In the early days, I thought being the director meant telling people what to do and having them do it. I thought I should have a vision, know exactly what everything should look like, and push that vision out into the world.

Then I met Todd. 

Todd was very tall and slim. He was pale white. He was ungrounded in his movement…or at least not much of a contact improv dancer who might be more into the ground. He had begun to dance in college but was very committed to his new life as a dancer. I can’t even remember how he ended up in my company. But here he was. Enthusiastically trying to slither and slime across the floor. It was not working at all. I wasn’t sure what to do. I must have already accepted him into the piece but I hated how this was looking. There was another dancer in the cast who also was struggling with the texture of this primordial movement. Jennifer. She was a very sweet, very beautiful ballet dancer.

So I listened. Rather than compromising the piece or cutting these very committed and talented people from my cast, I decided to create a new character for them. I asked my costume designer to make them a two-person leotard. I ordered white unitards for them and bought white pancake makeup. I decided to make tall taller and white whiter and ungrounded less grounded. I created the Digital Creature - a male/female pokey, pointy, linear, sterile computer character to counterpoint the slithery, slimy, organic humping characters.

This decision made the piece. The Digital Creature, who was being eaten by a hungry computer, is eventually overtaken by the Swamp Creatures. It described the conflict of the first dot com boom - when the piece premiered. Seemingly overnight, we were all working behind computer screens all day and our animal selves were being forgotten. I wanted the swamp to win. I wanted the human animal to thrive. At the end of my imaginary world, the Digital Creatures are reinitiated into the Swamp world.

If I had pushed forward with my agenda, my original more limited vision, I would have missed the primary drama, the rich juxtaposition, and the greater meaning of this work. Listening wins.

I recently guided an Anniversary Refresh program for some wonderful, stressed parents. At the end of the journey together they said that they were surprised by how well I listened to them. As a director, they expected me to lead and not listen necessarily. A good director works with what and who is in the room. A good director doesn't try to make Todd into a Swamp Creature. A good guide listens intently to the needs, impulses, and personalities of her clients and creates that experience - not the one designed to work for most people, but the experience that these two people need for their relationship to bloom. Once I hear who they are and where they are, I can guide them in the direction of what they want. Deep listening is primary.

The Gift of Silence

When I came home from the hospital after I was born, I was greeted by my sister who is two years older than me. She was Deaf. No one knew it at the time, but she wasn’t connecting to the three older brothers and sister that she already had or the sonic chaos that she was immersed in. She had not begun to make words - something that usually happens around 12 months. She was living in a silent, non-verbal world and instead of feeling pushed out of my mother’s arms when I arrived, she was relieved to no longer be alone. I entered her profound, silent space. On some level, she saw that I was for her.

Two years later, they would put tubes in her ears and she would begin to hear and soon after that, begin to talk. I too ended up getting the second round of tubes with her. I don’t think my ears were ever as affected as hers, but we did tend to need things at the same time.

We both went on to get BFAs in Modern Dance from SUNY Purchase. We became masters of non-verbal communication. We grew up intertwined - some might say immeshed.

In my one-on-one Creative Journey practice, I hold space for people who want transformation in nature. Much of what I do is hold space in silence. So often, in the hearing world, we have to be alone to experience silence…to turn off the endless streams of words coming at us. In my practice, I stay with people in silence, letting them have the space to explore their inner landscapes without being pummeled by words and yet, not being abandoned either. Maybe I am giving them the gift I was given at the beginning of my life when I came home to a Deaf sister.

Character Flaws

I tend to deliver sermons to my children. I never went to church so this is sort of a guess as to what a sermon might be.

This morning’s sermon was about character flaws. I told the children that everyone has character flaws and if we are aware of ours, we can manage them and not act them out all the time. Not only that, it helps us notice other people’s character flaws. It helps us forgive them for not being perfect but also to not be surprised when they act them out.

We were on our way to a friend’s house in Tahoe. My son doesn’t get along with their daughter, who is one of my daughter’s best friends. How do we manage the incompatibility between their characters? We discussed. We shared what we thought each of our own character flaws were and what character flaws we can see in others.

I wish I had had this framing growing up. Basically I was aware that I tend to get excited about my life and my ideas and can easily get carried away with my projects in conversation. It is a character flaw that I often felt ashamed of. But now I realize that it is a symptom of excitement and that in all honestly, I am also a very curious person - so when I remember to ask other people about their lives, I am truly interested and get just as excited to listen.

Guiding has been all about listening. After a quarter century of focusing deeply on my own creative process, I decided that it was time to focus at least in part, on other people’s creative process. Creative Journey is my answer to that desire. I am amazed at how engaging other people’s living art projects can be. I had no idea.

If we can empathetically see our strengths and our weaknesses, we can find pockets of energy and excitement that we have been denying ourselves with our habits. Psychedelics help us find these pockets of potential. They can help us see the connection between our human frailty and everyone else’s relieving us of shame. Once free we can be effective problem solvers and locate more balance and human connection in our lives.

Sounds easy enough but feels pretty amazing.