Longer and Stronger

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021 this had more than doubled to 71 years.*

My dad turned 94 yesterday. After surviving a heart attack and cancer, he lives independently in NYC with his girlfriend who is five years older than him. They walk a mile a day.

Yes, he won the longevity lottery, but humans are generally living longer and stronger these days. We used to have one career and then hang it up, retiring somewhere around fifty or sixty years old. Now that won’t do. We would get bored during the latter half of our lives and due to our lower birth rates and longer lifespans, we need to support ourselves longer. We need to support others longer.

To live and work longer, we can’t rely on that initial inspiration that birthed our first career in early life. We need to be birthed again into our original career with new inspiration or into a new career altogether. Otherwise, we will spend 20-30 years feeling stale and uninspired. 

One of the chief differences between the dawn of our original careers and rebirth at this later stage is we have so much previous experience - so many memories of trauma and earlier dramas. Our sprints are wrapped up in our previous stories. We must somehow put these previous successes and failures further into our pasts to free up space for our longer futures.

The psilocybin mushroom experience rapidly helps you see these previous struggles for what they were. It creates distance from them in your mind and offers a new perspective. You reemerge astounded by how much mental capacity and psychic space you have to recreate yourself. You have increased energy and excitement without those ghosts of your life past leaching your vitality.

This is what you need to create the new life you want. This is what you need to be reborn into the latter half of your existence.

* Life Expectancy

The Full Weight of What Is

Recently, I embarked on my annual vision quest, wrestling with my concerns about turning 50 this year. A recurring theme arose for me: Have I been a financial failure?

I have never made very much money. However, I have grown my little bits of money and stretched the dollars skillfully. I have never gone into debt with my little non-profit. I even bought property in my early thirties after investing the money I made with a gardening company I ran while in college. Yet, the weight of the struggle over the past 25 years—to make ends meet to support my artwork and myself—was palpable. I could feel how much effort, time, and attention it took. I wept for all that effort and focus.

Throughout my life, I thought so much about money and made so little of it. I wept because I didn’t want to lead my children into an industry with so few resources.

Psychedelics allow you to feel the full weight of what is, and once you sit with that, you can decide what to do about it. So much of our lives is spent coping, pretending, and avoiding what is. Psychedelics, free of judgment, allow us to fall into the full weight of what is. This is why there is often crying in the journey. Once you fall into the full weight of what you bear, you feel your pain. This is cathartic. You can admit to yourself what you have been holding up and how that has felt. Then, you can decide whether to do something slightly or massively different in the future. Even slight changes can have massive results on the surface of your life.

Paramvir, my husband, says that I was wildly successful as an artist. I made a ton of quality creative work. I was an inspiration to many. I supported hundreds of artists. I survived on my work. If I had been in a more resourced industry, I would have been rich. Yet, as a soon-to-be fifty-year-old, I have to admit that I never made more money than a recent college grad.

During this journey, when I reflected on my life, I couldn’t imagine what I lacked. I have had amazing peak experiences, and a lot of them. I have created work I am very proud of. I have had a lot of colorful, entertaining, and lovingly kind friends. I have nurtured a family. I have lived a charmed life in so many ways. Why was this abstract concept of money important? It eventually dawned on me: It wasn’t that I wanted for money. It was that I had wasted so much of my life trying to make it.

This is my midlife crisis. This is the moment when you look back at your life and your work and wonder what it was all for and where it all went. The past simply disappears. We only have remnants. We have relationships with history. We have memories.

Was I feeling regret? Or was this simply sadness that this is what it took to achieve these goals?

Coming out of the journey, I realized that I am in the process of reinventing myself. I am rebirthing myself. This is hard work. I noticed all my tendencies that were put in place for a different goal. I need to shed them and find new ones that apply to this version of my life and self. Neuroplasticity is very useful for this. You see with fresh eyes all that you do without awareness because it is usually entrenched in habit. When you are no longer operating on habit, you can see it.

I came out of this difficult journey ready to move forth. I came out of this difficult journey with a clear image of the service I want to provide to the world and its importance. I will take as many people as will trust me by the arm and guide them tenderly into the depths of their souls to confront themselves, their lives, and their place in this living biome of Earth. Sure, it can be hard, but ahh… at least we can do this. We can transform.

New Problems

My sister said many years ago, “Why would you break up with one partner just to find a whole host of new problems with another?” Then we both looked at each other and said, “Exactly.” 

New problems are so much better than old ones. New problems are more work but they are more exciting, more alive, more intriguing. Our brains wake up and say, “Wow, what to do about this one?” 

We need our patterns to make progress in a given direction. Walking is very repetitive. We have to do the same motion over and over again to get anywhere. But then we get to where we are trying to go and it usually isn’t quite what we expected. Usually, it's a bit of a disappointment in one way or another. Since we have been walking in that direction for such a long time, we may forget that we have options and can try a different direction to find new problems to work on.

I am doing this in my art practice. I am aiming toward a new city and a new creative culture. I have been committed to San Francisco since I arrived in 1997. I have toured nationally and internationally but I have been married to San Francisco as my home base and as the cultural environment that birthed the vision of my work as the combustion point between art, science, and technology. Now I am curious about LA and its creative culture. I am interested in art with commercial potential and broader audience appeal. Art thrives where there are resources. This isn’t surprising. Gardens grow best with an excess of water, sun, and rich soil. Art is a living thing.

I don’t know how any of these opportunities will arise. I don’t know how I will get anywhere. But opening my mind in that direction, noticing the attraction, means that I will notice opportunities and invest more of my precious time and energy to those opportunities when they arise. The rest is a mystery unfolding.

We are fed narratives of utopia - the promised land where all of our problems disappear and everything is better. In some ways these are true. I have reached the promised land in my home. I LOVE my home life. Every morning I am grateful. And it contains a steady stream of problems to be solved. 

What problems await if I succeed in producing creative content in LA? What new sexy problems will I get dirty with there? 

Psychedelics have been shown to increase conviction and decrease fear of risk. These are two qualities necessary for changing your problems. Let's locate some new problems for you.

If someone you care for has been stuck on the same problems for a while, suggest they talk to me. I might be able to help.

Celebrated

I woke up this morning thinking about how I want to be celebrated. I want to make something so great that everyone regards and thinks, “Wow, she’s a genius!” I realized that this is something I have been waiting for my whole life in some way. Then I had to ask myself, ‘Where is this from?’

Objectively, I know that no one really cares a whole lot about anyone else. We have so much to process just being ourselves. Did I miss a window in my psychological development when my father was supposed to give a shit and he didn’t, and no matter how much he affirms me now, it will never be enough? Do I need some major corrective over-the-top experience to fill that hole?

What is celebration anyway? One of my very favorite Ballet teachers, Augusta Moore, used to follow her brilliant sermon about how we have to activate the spot where our bra strap crosses to hold our arms correctly, with a flip: “Let’s celebrate with plies!” Everyone would be so energized to do the most basic exercise that has begun every Ballet class on Earth for the last five hundred years! 

How do we celebrate each other, ourselves, and minor wins so we don’t have to do something so amazing that we ruin our lives chasing a goal that isn’t as good as what we can give ourselves today? Maybe I will be celebrated in some big way one day. Maybe my contributions will be recognized significantly. Maybe I am selfish and I have already been celebrated a lot. 

But for now, I can celebrate myself. I did a good job at that conference last weekend. I gave a talk I was proud of and performed well even though I was annoyed with the tech support. I didn’t burn it all down and make enemies. I kept my cool and gave my best. I asked my husband to celebrate me with a box of chocolates. He did. I celebrated myself chocolate by chocolate - so proud.

Later that day, my daughter Phoenix told me, “Mommy, that solo you were working on… your talk before that solo was amazing.” She saw me practicing it for the neighbors and remembered a week later. Well if that isn’t the best possible celebration, I don’t know what is! That’s what I was looking for.

Psychedelics can allow you to see the expanding and contracting of the ego as separate from yourself. The ego is doing what it does - adjusting to all the internal stories and external occurrences in our lives. You can observe it and realize that you have some choice. You don’t need to tether yourself to its whim, but you can feed it when it gets hungry.

Prosocial Behavior and Group Dynamics

Researchers studying MDMA often refer to the prosocial behavior that accompanies the MDMA experience. The internet describes prosocial behavior as, "the intent to benefit others,...a social behavior that benefits other people or society as a whole...such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering."

I went out dancing all night in LA a month ago with a group of nine people. My good friend had found an all-night underground party for us to go to. This is important because you don’t want to embark on this sort of journey and be interrupted by fluorescent lights and a bouncer saying ‘Get the f*** out,’ at 2 am. You want to go home when the sun comes up. 

I have been bringing groups of people together for MDMA journeys since the late 90s. It has been a theme in my life. It has led to great feelings of group cohesion and belonging, gratitude, and a sense that I am appreciated for who and what I am.

This group of nine who went out together didn’t all know each other. Three members of the group I had met just that night. I was prepared though. I gave everyone the supplements that I do to help everyone recover from something that can be mentally taxing if it isn’t proactively mitigated with vitamins, supplements, and antioxidants. We all got on the same schedule - the same train. 

Seamlessly, I connected with everyone in our group. They could see me and I could see them. Not the surface but the spirit. It is easy to make a safe, satisfying physical connection in this headspace. MDMA is not sexual. It describes pure light energy. It makes it easy to give safe touch and receive safe touch. A side hug. A dance on the floor. A sit on the lap. This alone is profound to experience in a world where there is so much harmful touch.

You don’t feel like judging on MDMA because why would you? You are happy and happy people don’t judge others. The channels to connect are open and it becomes obvious that in our daily lives, we are either putting up walls to block connection from others or are too afraid to reach out boldly to connect.

It isn’t hard to consider the group while on MDMA. It is obvious and feels good to the individual. You look out for one another without trying. I was plugging my ears on the dance floor and a stranger came up and handed me a brand new set of earplugs. Thank you. 

This is why I fell in love with the Rave scene in 1995. We as humans have this capacity. I have experienced it. I hope you get the opportunity to experience it too.

Sensitive Artist

I have often heard the phrase, "You are a sensitive artist."

It never made sense to me before. I thought it was a stereotype. But the reason why multiple industries need artists is because we are sensitive. We notice what things look, feel, and sound like - what the experience is like. It is our job to be sensitive. It is our job to notice things. 

My mother would draw to see. I recently found three of her large sketchbooks from her time in New York City in the 1950s. Through her sketches, I can see what she saw. Men working on the pier, naked bodies in figure drawing sessions, and musicians igniting the night in jazz clubs. She was seeing on a much more detailed level than I see as I walk around.

I’m a choreographer, director, sculptor - I have developed my sense of feel. This keen sense of feel informs every aspect of my work, regardless of the industry. I rent out a loft and every decision I make—from choosing furnishings and colors to selecting the property itself—is guided by my intuitive feel for the space. When managing this property, I focus on the tenant's experience, employing my sensitivity to enhance their comfort in the space and the interaction. This approach is versatile and applicable across various roles and industries. Understanding the sensory impact of design is essential, and I emphasize this in every detail, even down to the tactile quality of my business cards. The atmosphere of events, like our Winter Party, is crafted with this same mindful attention to sensory experience.

When I'm in the mushroom mind, I notice many things about the mushroom mind. I notice what I am drawn to, what it wants, what it feels like. This is how I have developed my program - meticulously, over time, through experiences.

Sensitive artist.

The Moment of Impossibility

In the creative process, there is always a moment of impossibility. This is the moment in which the project seems unachievable. It will never work. The sculpture will never be fabricated. The dance will never be choreographed. The product will never launch. The company will never achieve momentum. 

This is a hard moment. 

You question everything. Why am I doing this? Why did I try? Why did I ever stop watching Netflix? 

During every one of my ten full-evening shows, I had a moment like this. For me, it has meant fantasizing about all the movies I wished I had watched rather than trying to make my own work. Laziness is elevated to a holy place where I lament if only I had the wisdom to see how perfect that laziness was!

It is not clear how long the moment will last. I have found that it is best to admit it when it arrives. Accept the defeat of the moment. Yes, this feels impossible. Yes, this feels unsurmountable. Yes, this totally sucks and I am completely lost as to how to fix it.

And then, almost magically, it passes. Something shifts and hope arrives again. There is a tiny spot of light that might lead out of the cave. You don’t get a ‘Yes, this will work’ usually, but you do get a ‘huh, this might just work!’ That ‘might’ feels profound. 

Expect the moment of impossibility. Welcome it when it arrives. Go down and into it. Feel the hopelessness, the overwhelm, and seriously consider the possibility that all of this might be a waste. 

And then move forward.

Tomorrow Doesn’t Exist

My brother died when I was in high school. He was eleven years older than me and just short of 28 when he passed from Leukemia. I learned something that day. 

His second child had just been born. He was finishing up a degree in architecture.  He took a circuitous route so his life was just beginning. 

That day, I learned that everything you plan and train for is irrelevant when your time is up. From that day forth I put a lot of stock in peak experiences. I wanted to LIVE. I wanted it all to happen NOW. I was impatient. Tomorrow never comes and now I knew this.

At some point, I had to acknowledge that this way of being created stress in my life. It was like an inner voice forever screaming NOW NOW NOW. I couldn’t seem to achieve things fast enough. I wanted to be touring nationally and internationally with my company before I was thirty. I was. But I wasn’t ready in some ways. I hadn’t learned to edit well enough and was beholden to performers who didn’t serve the overall vision.

Well, age will mellow you out whether you do anything or not, and I have mellowed. Having children helped too. Somehow it isn’t all about me and my moment anymore. But it still holds that tomorrow doesn’t exist. It is an idea. It is a fantasy. It is a concept.

Psychedelics pull you into the now. When you take a high dose of psychedelics, concepts like money and tomorrow are the first to go. They simply make no sense to the mushroom mind. You can’t relate to them. When dropped heavily into the now, you have to contend with what it truly feels like to live your life and sometimes that can be hard.

Untouched Nature vs Human Constructs

Mushrooms want you to be part of the living biome. Mushrooms want you to be interwoven once again into the fabric of nature. In the mushroom mind, you have no interest in human constructs. For some reason, you don’t want to look at them. They don’t look beautiful. Even the Golden Gate Bridge in the mushroom mind is not something you want to look at. I don’t know why this is. But I know that it's true on the experiential level.  It is not a philosophical or ideological concept. It is a practical one. It is where you want to look. You are physically uncomfortable and agitated until you rest your gaze on some natural process…waves crashing on the rocks. Trees. Dirt. 

Creative Journey is about the in-person, the physical, the face-to-face, hands on the body in nature. I can write a blog to share my ideas with a broader audience but it is really about the real, the here and now, the body living on Earth in the living biome.

Pre and Post Integration sessions can happen remotely. Creative Journey assignments can be sent on Signal. Creative exercises can be made and submitted from anywhere. Messages can be sent back and forth. But the crux of the practice is live, in the body, in person, tactile. It is not scalable. It is intimate, real, organic.

Push It Out

A board member on my non-profit Capacitor likes to call me a get-shit-done-er. Some of my psychedelic clients have called me a psychedelic doula. If the creative process involves taking something from inside your mind, heart, and spirit and putting it out into the world, then what is the mechanism for making that transition? It is a portal. It is a birthing canal. It is often somewhat painful and messy. But to make things in the world, sometimes you have to push hard to get it out.

This is where I come in. I have pushed all sorts of things out into the world - dances, sculptures, companies, shows, blogs, films, designs, and humans. I am going to take you by the fist and help you push that creation out into the world. Maybe it is you who you are rebirthing. Maybe it is your start-up. Maybe it is your concept of home. You are going to bear down and I am going to stare into your eyes and give you the strength to get that fucking thing out into this world. Pure intention. Pure action.

Push. It. Out.

Right Now

Anyone who has spent much of their life creating has probably noticed that there is a difference between the quality of their creation and how the world received it at any given moment. Joan Rivers used to talk about whether her work was going to hit. Whether what she was making was going to go from irrelevant to relevant. The artists who have lifelong careers seem to be good at recreating themselves. Because the world is in a constant state of change, your work may hit for a moment, it may line up with the rest of the culture but that wave passes and that creation doesn’t match the next moment.

There are inconstants and constants in life. Your relationship with yourself, if you remain present, can be a constant. Your home is hopefully a constant. Your immediate family, a constant. But whether your concerns line up with the waves of culture, well, you're outnumbered. There is not much you can do about that. You can put your creation, your art, your app, your film, your book, your vision, your performance, your event, and your private club out into the world, but if a large number of people don’t agree at that moment that it is important to them as well, it will feel irrelevant. This is not your fault. You are outnumbered.

There is a lot of ‘You create your own reality.’ ‘If you can see it, you can be it.’ ‘You have to expand your vision of yourself to become larger.’ All these self-empowerment ideas keep you from getting in your own way, but at some point, it is you against the world unless you are riding one of its waves.

There are moments in my life in which I felt a wave coming. More felt than saw. I got in good alignment. I began paddling like hell to gain speed early so that when it hit, I was already going fast enough that it would take me. When it works, this is a good high feeling. It feels inevitable. It feels powerful. It just happens to you. What you are making is meeting the moment and it is so much larger than you and you feel, and are, huge.

Other times I have done the same thing, been a very early adopter, made something gorgeous with tools that were still hard to get ahold of, and the wave turns out to be a small swell by the time it passes: VR.

If you are a lifelong creator you will know the full arc of creating. You will know when your work hits and when it doesn’t. 'Right now' helps me weather the various moments of relevance. ‘No one seems to care about my work…right now’. That is separate from ‘My work is…’ Know yourself. Know your work. And maybe one day it will hit. But right now it is meaningful to you. And that is something.

It Feels Good

When I was a dance major at SUNY Purchase, I used to sing, “It feels good, baby” to myself between classes. I was reminding myself that dance for me wasn’t a line or a look but a feeling. 

In my artwork, it is all about the feeling. I like to make things that feel good. A sculpture that feels good to the touch or helps you feel good in your body. A dance that feels good to perform, especially one that feels good in a surprising way…did you know it would feel so good to pretend to eat another dancer in my dance carnivore? A psychedelic journey that feels good in the body. A community that feels good to be a part of. A party that feels good for all attending. A home that feels good to inhabit. A garden that feels good to spend time in. Architecture that feels good to frequent. A sport that feels good to play. Money that feels good to deposit. Food that feels good to ingest. Clothes that feel good to wear. Friendships that feel good to simmer. A family life that feels good to pass the time. A challenge that feels good to meet.

We get very distracted with how things look in our society and even how things sound. But feeling…we have to listen in for feeling. We have to let people know that feelings are important - maybe most important. Maybe the money is tight. But maybe you are rich in love, rich in warmth, rich in experience, rich in feeling.

Nature Wastes No Energy

Our society chooses what is important and then creates the institutions that perpetuate those values. Through the process of creating The Perfect Flower show in 2008, I thought deeply about beauty, colors, scents, and attraction. My conclusion was that nature wastes no energy. If beauty, color, scent, and attraction were not important, nature wouldn’t waste energy on them. If the fittest could survive without these elements, they would be in greater numbers because they would be more efficient and have more energy for hunting, gathering, and processing food.

Our medical system has decided that scent, attraction, and unconscious compatibility aren’t important. We have sperm banks and egg adoption systems that don’t include any processes for evaluating scent. There is a photo and a bio, but what about all those other indicators that may have more influence on genetic compatibility than looks and a resume? In the donor systems, the powers that be have decided that legally and personally it is cleaner if no one ever meets. It is less emotionally taxing and complicated.

What if you were given a worn t-shirt from the man who donated the sperm so you could smell him? What if you were allowed to meet the egg donor to see if you feel drawn to her? That could be a useful indicator of whether your sperm and her egg would collaborate well in generating a human.

Psychedelics help you see outside the Matrix. You can see what is a human construct and what is nature’s tendency. Nature is practical. Nature is clear. Nature is efficient. If it doesn’t make sense, it will evolve out of the population. Human constructs are amazing for a nascent species that is just beginning to understand what is happening around them. Our work is to look to nature for cues rather than thinking we can even compete with its wisdom.

It’s not happening.

I used to spend a great deal of time and energy trying to craft my critique for performers and collaborators. At some point, I found it exhausting and hard to do well. So I stopped doing it. I began to use the power of vagueness. Instead of saying I didn’t think something was working and then giving all the reasons, I began to say, “That’s not happening...let’s try something else here.” It wasn’t a permanent rejection of the idea because it may very well work at another time, in another place. But it also kept us from wasting any more time on it at this moment. No feelings got hurt. No egos were involved. It just wasn’t happening for now and we could maintain our momentum and flow in the studio. 

The long pause that happens as one tries to let someone down easily is very painful. It makes the creator feel weak and self-conscious as they wait with bated breath for a verdict. Creativity is a river - it has to be moving and inflow to work.

Pretty soon, performers and collaborators began showing me what they were working on, asking, “Is this happening?” And I could say, “Yes” or “No” or “Let’s try this…” or “This part is happening…” Or “Holy shit that is sooo happening!” “That is it.”

When they got an air guitar serenade, then they knew we were definitely keeping it and the room would vibrate with laughter and excitement. We liked ourselves. We liked each other. We liked what we were making together.

Give Them the Minimum

Some dancers need a lot of guidance. They want to know what facial expression to make at each moment in the piece. Some dancers need almost no guidance. I give these dancers a list of requirements and let them solve the problem on their own. 

I always aim to give my dancers the minimum direction necessary to achieve a goal. This way they are maximally engaged with the project. They are creating. I am treating them as the artists they are rather than insulting their intelligence by spoon-feeding them every move. I am asking them to take bold risks in attempting to solve the problem of the motion sculptures I design. They must solve the problem with their bodies and minds.

If the performers are not finding a flow of movement easily on their own, I jump in. I work rapidly. I just get it done. I can always do that. I have been doing this longer than anyone I am working with but I want to give them the chance to do it first. If I give them the answer every time, they may become risk averse and feel paralyzed to try things, waiting for my direction every step of the way.

Sometimes, my jumping in and getting dirty in the process is inspiring. They see me go for it and then they want to go for it. Action is fun. Action is energy. Action is excitement. I love going from 0 to 100. All in or all out. Fully in observation mode or fully in creation mode. Nimble. Give plenty of room for your collaborators to solve it their own way. You don’t always want your solutions because you have probably already seen those approaches. Focus on making the sexiest creative problem for your brilliant team to solve. Then let them solve it. 

Be confident in your offering.  If they solve it, they will get to take credit for that work and they will be more committed and invested in the project. Give them the full opportunity to be geniuses. Then they will always come back to you and your projects because they get to be their most amazing selves in your work.

Seeing Beyond the Matrix

Artists are especially good at seeing the world outside the established systems and structures. This is true because artists build worlds. Therefore we are more aware of what is constructed. What is constructed can be deconstructed. Is it time to deconstruct the industry you are in and see if there is a more efficient, elegant, and even beautiful solution to the problem you are attempting to solve?

It is also something that comes with a lot of psychedelic exploration. Psychedelics melt constructs and allow you to experience life without them for a time. Human constructs seem irrelevant when in the psilocybin mind. Psilocybin is only interested in nature’s structures. This is why it is so profound. We are reminded that we are a piece of a greater whole and a small piece at that. 

This refreshed perspective makes it impossible to accept the status quo for more than it is - a temporary construct that could be replaced by a better one. 

Sometimes this is a problem. I have often been in the position where I don’t see the reason why this world is separate from that world. I don’t know why a beautiful sculpture, can’t also be fun to move on, good for exercise, lovely to stretch on, describe a profound aspect of nature, and considered collectible art. Each of these worlds has its own rules. The Playground, fitness equipment, high art, science education, and the performing arts are all supposed to be separate. If they bleed together, people in these various worlds don’t like it and will not sell or buy it. There will be no place for it in their constructed world. 

Sometimes this way of thinking wins. I applied for an Irvine Foundation grant every year for at least twelve years. I began in the year 2000. Each year I wrote about how science and art could help each other and why, and each year I was turned down. The review committee didn’t believe that a dance company could work with scientists to make great art. The grant manager, who read my proposals year after year and saw my work samples, believed I could do it and that I was doing it successfully because she saw that each year I proposed something, the next year it came back as a work sample. But the review committees were never there the next year - they were compiled fresh each cycle. 

I was bringing scientists into the dance studio and I was going to their research sites, then making shows inspired by what I was learning. It was also crucial for the creative teams I was building. I liked to build diverse creative teams of new media artists, costume designers, composers, dancers, circus artists, martial artists, singers, musicians, DJs, fabricators, set designers, software engineers, and sometimes animators. I believed that the creative team would never make a cohesive product (a show in this case) if we were not eating the same diet of information and inspiration. But I didn’t want to simply spoon-feed the creative team what I was learning and have them create from second-hand information or second-hand inspiration. So I created the Capacitor Lab - a monthly think tank of scientists and artists that would meet for six months before creating a new show and new set of sculptures. I usually began with a question or a curiosity and we would all work on it together - using our various disciplines to describe our perspectives. In this way, the projects seemed to create themselves. I only needed to make sure that all the parts fit together smoothly.

So I never did win an Irvine Foundation grant, but I won in the end because the world changed and the world decided that scientists and artists could collaborate successfully and create great and moving art together. Now it is considered an obvious given with an entire category of art called art/science collaboration.   What is constructed can be deconstructed.

Honoring

How would our lives transform if we remembered to honor the people in our daily lives? The people we get so used to, we stop seeing them. My son drones on…am I even hearing his words?

Fatigue. Relationship fatigue. Everyone is tired. No one has a reserve of internal resources. That’s the time to let everyone off the hook and accept that we just aren’t at our best. Let’s get ice cream. Let’s watch a movie. Let’s go outside.

Last week, I put together a dinner for someone I met in my field. I began by honoring the engagement. I drew on women’s work - making home and feeding people. This can be so powerful when mixed with business. It is primal. We feel loved. We feel warm. We want to be close to the furnace. Mothers know this.

This morning, as my husband and I were shuffling the kids out the door for school in a kitchen littered with crumbs and sticky stuff, I thought, maybe we could honor each other with tea together. Recently, busyness has taken this important ritual. So I cleaned the kitchen, readied the tea, and invited him home again for tea together. He is not just someone in the space we share.

Yesterday looking back at a decade of photos on my phone, I see our lives together. I see the kids. In the images, you don’t see the exhaustion and all the minor stresses that cloud our experience of these precious moments. What if I didn’t let them? 

I honor the children each morning as I make their beds and use the time to reflect on what they each need. Is it a theater camp or help with phonics? My job is to notice these things and I can’t notice them if I stop honoring them with my focus.

All the relationships in my life are more gratifying when I can honor them. If I can’t, I should shed them. If I am unsuccessful at transforming them, I should let those relationships go. Of course, there are some relationships for which you need to do that extra work!

When your construct melts in the psychedelic journey, it can feel like you’ve lost everything. And in a way, you have. For that period of 4-5 hours, you may not know who you are, how you got there, where you are, or that you have children. 

But when you come back to yourself, it is as if you get it all again for the first time and the level of gratitude people can feel is immense - for the people and relationships they may have forgotten to notice even the day before.

Your Brain is a Bonsai

I wake at 3am these days. Sometimes, if there is a perceived threat in my life, I feel that. But often I feel pleasure from the waves of cerebral spinal fluid bathing my brain. It is true. I can feel these things. 

This morning early, I thought about my thoughts. I was pruning them. I was deciding which branches of habit were not useful to me. This was a real kick. My brain is a bonsai. I craft it. I order it. I design it. 

I know it sounds controlling. And maybe it doesn’t always feel possible. Maybe it is a big full tree and I simply cut off the dead branches. 

I love pruning my garden. I love pruning my mind. I love letting go of repetitive, disruptive, consumptive thoughts. Sometimes it takes more information. Mysteries are wildly tempting. I am a creative problem solver. I want to solve the problem. Like a riddle, my brain keeps returning to get it done. 

I had been haunted by the riddle of a professional relationship recently. My mind couldn’t seem to let it go. Why did this situation feel so wrong? What had I done to offend this person? Why could I not make this collaboration work? Was this person putting me down behind my back? Was that a paranoid thought? Could I protect myself in some way? What were the correct actions I could take to make it better? 

My husband had zero interest in hearing this story. He had heard too much already. I knew he was right. But my brain….arggg….wanted to solve it.

Then I received an email from this collaborator. It was quite confusing. Jumbled. But at 3am, I was able to decode it in its entirety. Mystery solved. I get a lot of my best thinking done at this hour….

I realized that it wasn’t so bad. Someone connected to this collaborator had felt close to me and then a bit rejected. I realized that the collaborator, probably out of an impulse to protect his friend, wanted to hurt me. It didn’t work. I responded to this jumbled email with the warmth I generate in my heart and a clarity of language to describe my position and the reason for my actions.

Once I sent the email, I reduced the experience down to one word. Done. Such a good word. I was free. Now I could move on with my more important ambitions. Make make make. Sell sell sell. Be be be. 

A day with myself was again a pleasure. I floated between projects. Smooth. Relaxed. In dialogue with my feelings and my intentions.

Thank you.

Sometimes people are stuck in the clutches of a negative relationship or even the memory of a relationship, for years. All the branches of their tree lead back to it because this branch of thought is so powerful, so established. It is very very hard to get off this branch with willpower alone, even if you know it is dead.

I was able to solve this one with a moment of clarity and a well-crafted email. Sometimes a psychedelic journey is especially helpful. It takes you off the usual bough and leaves you in a mess of mind without your usual foothold. After this dislocation and disorientation, you return to yourself and notice what is dead and what is vital. Psilocybin mushrooms only care about what is alive. The old route was circuitous, inefficient, and ineffective. The old route was dead. It now seems obvious what you should prune and you have the ability to do it. 

I love delivering this mental revelation. Prune your bonsai.

In my Dreams…

I am premenopausal and I have been noticing all sorts of shifts. One of which is the intense depth of emotion I am experiencing in my dreams of late. I have had multiple dreams in which mine or other people’s children die in various ways. I fall to my knees and weep. I feel the most intense emotional pain I may have ever felt. In the dream, I guide myself - don’t run from the pain. It feels like a deep hallowing - a scooping out of my heart and soul. 

And then I wake up. Grateful that it was only a dream. But also aware that this is a pain that many hundreds of thousands of people are currently experiencing around the world at this moment. This is not just a human condition. This is a life experience. An animal experience. We share this pain with all creatures who walk the Earth.

You have read this far. Thank you. No one seems to want to listen to someone else’s dreams. No one seems to want to listen to someone else’s psychedelic story. They tend to end with, “I guess you had to be there,” either spoken or unspoken.

One of the powerful aspects of working with a psychedelic guide is that there is someone with you at least in body during your journey, who is tuned into what you are experiencing. They are invested in your journey. Once the journey is over - they want to hear all the ins and outs of what you experienced. This isn’t just due to the job description. It is how it works. If I hold space for you, I am genuinely interested in where you have gone when you return to yourself.

The psychedelic mind is similar to the dreaming mind, from what I am reading from the latest research. The processing afterward is similar too. Why did my mind generate that experience for me? What is my deeper self trying to tell me? Where am I now? What am I going through?  

Let’s look at that.

All the Way

I’ve known no greater joy than feeling fully in my body. To have my entire being present and engaged, is to feel the full power of my life force unified, working in concert to achieve an outcome. Every cell feels activated at once.

To fully inhabit the body, is to be truly alive on Earth.

It takes some moxie, but I have experienced this on the dance floor of a nightclub when I let the music take over, in the arms of a lover when no one is leading or following, when drawing the audience’s attention to me while performing on stage, when holding a child in the pure light of love, and while skiing down a hill. 

We learn to hold back. We learn to check ourselves. And these habits keep us from going all the way.

This is the thrust of all the work I do. I make sculptures that are meant to be touched. I design them to insinuate specific human movements. The sculpture is an invitation to the public to engage physically with a novel form with which they have no prior reference or skill. The creative problem of a sculpture makes the participant aware of their bodies and their own greater potential for physical expression. Who is hiding inside the movement that is locked inside their bones and muscles? Move differently - feel different - be different. Wonder who you even are anymore.

In our lives, we rely on a very limited repertoire of movements. We don’t exploit the full potential of our intricate machinery. We rarely do anything physically that we haven’t already done millions of times.

The world is a complicated, busy place. Once something becomes habitual, we stop noticing it. How often do we notice our walking, standing, typing, or lying down? We can try to notice such things through meditation, but this takes great effort and focus.  Effortlessly, novelty brings the movement of our bodies to the fore - to the center of our concentration. 

All we have to do is change the choreography of our daily lives, even briefly, to become more physically present.

Sports that require a certain amount of risk-taking do this too. Skiing fast down a hill, you have to keep your brain on, as I like to say. You need to pay attention to the features of the snow that are continually in flux. You have to be aware of all the other moving bodies on the slope. You have to make micro-adjustments that affect your timing, form, and speed.

In Creative Journey, as a lifelong dancer/choreographer, I offer a more embodied approach to the psychedelic experience. Psilocybin is very physical. It can make you feel very alive and it can be pleasurable in your body. I feel all my capillaries and the blood rushing through them. 

This physical dimension of psychedelics can easily be missed if a traveler is not prepped to welcome the physical experience. If they hold back or fear the feelings, they can shut down potential sensations. I begin every psychedelic experience by helping people fully inhabit their bodies so that when the compound shifts their physical experience, they notice and welcome it.

Inhabiting the body allows you to go fully into whatever you are attempting. My working philosophy for living this is “If I am going to go, I’m going all the way.”

If we are going to go, let’s go all the way.