Birthday Bane – Mushroom Boon

“Goodbye, everybody, I’ve got to go,
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth
Mama, oooh
I don’t want to die,
I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all”
–Freddie Mercury

For many years now, I have found my birthday week a very difficult time to process. I am anxious, cranky, oversensitive, and want to hide and disappear. People who are close to me know I don’t want to be wished on this day. I have almost always wished I was never born. In a world where there are rules and there is a need to tame the wilderness inside of us, I find myself a misfit. The fearless state of being vulnerable, expressing, and experiencing is often determined by how others outside of you will feel.

Last week, at a gathering, someone offered to go trippy on mushrooms. I was advised to receive the mushrooms in a spiritual, natural, and ceremonial way. With my birthday around the corner, this seemed like the perfect gift to mark the completion of my 42nd year and welcome the gift of life for another.

On Ceremonial D-Day

A dear friend facilitated the much anticipated ceremony. After a gentle spiritual cleansing, we consumed the magic potion of carefully weighed shrooms and reflected through a meditation exercise. A soft melody began to play. My stomach was churning a bit.

Tripping the trip

As the day was ending, twilight was alive, and soon the colours around me became enchantingly enhanced. The stars in the sky, moonlight through the clouds, layers of red in the bonfire, flying sparks of fire and the vibrance of people around me were all intensified. It was better than an 8K HDR surround experience.

Another level of the journey began after putting on a blindfold. I transcended into an extraordinary world of rule-less formations and colours I had never seen before. With the sense of space, time, dimension, and direction lost, it was a free flow. I wanted to further explore that alternative virtual space. The closest comparison I can think of is an extrapolated version of the dancing screen on an iPod when playing music.

My Kind of Celebration

Laughter came easily, even with a difficult stomach. The palms of my hands and my feet had separate identities. I felt disintegrated into the ground with no sense of the rest of my body. “Now I get it” and “Now I know” ran through my mind a few times. It reinforced my belief that godliness is inside of us.

I recall reaching out to my grandmother.I saw her younger self in a very abstract form, her struggles with birthing and raising my father. There was a moment where I was questioning the human idea of wanting to capture Mars, and if the life of music and art are formations.

The visuals I saw with the blinds on and off were very different and both worth it in their own right.

Birthday Party

My sense of gratitude for allowing myself to experience this, under the gentle facilitation of my friend, was soul-fulfilling.

It was great to wake up with no hangover or side effects and to be able to remember most of what I experienced. I celebrated my birthday with a grand party in my head. A party that was just mine, thrown by me for me.

The humble mushroom helped me celebrate the day of my existence to its fullest worth without shame or guilt for who I am.