Reflections from a parched field

I’m just back from giving a talk at Boom festival in Portugal. Boom takes place in what feels like a desert, the ground is parched and the sun relentless. At the heart of the site is a shining lake, and in the unbearable afternoon heat those sparkling waters restored us.

The ethos of Boom is ecosystem renewal, for trees and for people, and attendees come from all over the world to embody a week-long prayer together. Being part of such a community, just for a few days, felt like dipping into a lake after a long time in a parched field, a feeling of deep hydration after long withering, the cellular relief of coming home. It was this feeling that I spoke about in my talk there. That, and apple trees.

In recent months I’ve been preparing materials for the ACER Integration community process. Every month we focus on a particular lesson from a tree- these twelve trees are our teachers. The tree for August is the apple tree, which represents the process of nourishing the ground upon which we stand in order to create fertile generative soil in which we can bear fruits. The apple orchard is a community of purpose, and cross-pollination.

At Boom, I shared an apple tree guided visualization, and spoke about integration and what the apple tree represents in ACER. This piece is a modified version of that talk.

Integration is the process of nurturing important ideas and feelings we may have encountered, so that these ‘life changing insights’ can actually change our lives. During my time working as a psychedelic therapist, I witnessed first-hand how psychedelic insights can be precious gifts, the seeds of change. But when you plant a seed in over-extracted, depleted, cracked soil, the seed does not grow. It may crack open, a tiny green shoot pops out and searches for the light, a tiny root fibre starts to push down and searches for water, but there is no water, and the seedling withers.

The day after the psilocybin session, in the initial integration meeting, we used to sit with participants while the psilocybin session playlist played quietly in the background. We’d listen as they recalled vague impressions of that deep dive down to the sea bed, the spiky shells explored and opened, and the pearls discovered. The participants would make commitments to plant their ‘pearl’, their key insight, as a seed. And the pearl was connectedness, in some form or another. Connection to self, to others, to nature, to the universe, to source, coming back home, coming back to belonging.

During that first integration meeting we could see, for many, the shine was on their faces, the glow on the cheeks, the softening of the eyes. But then I saw over and over again that 6 or 12 months later that glow had faded, the heaviness returned to those faces. Those pearl- seeds, those insights, the bright shining seeds of change, radiant potentiators of connection, were withering in the toxic soil of our disconnected societies- the isolated, exhausted, disempowered numbness of our daily lives.

For nearly all of our participants, the depression came back in a matter of months. And this shouldn’t be surprising, as that Krishnamurti quote goes, “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. Sometimes, having been cracked open and tasted that feeling of connection, of feeling all that life can be, of experiencing what we are at our core, it can be even more depressing for people to return to “business as usual”, the over-extracted, depleted, and cracked ground of much of modern society in the Western world.

ACER Integration is intended to be a little patch of fertile soil in that parched field, a place of connection and growth where the ground gets richer and deeper with each year that passes. The patch will start small, and I hope it will expand. It will be a place where our insights can take root and flourish and cross-pollinate, where together we focus on how our learnings can change us, not just change our minds but change our lives.

These insights don’t have to come from psychedelic journeys, they can also come from profound life events like the birth of a child, the death of a friend, the loss of a job. They often start to arrive when we stop numbing ourselves so much, and start to feel our feelings, let some of that pain in. Pain is the great teacher, but it’s hard to hold it alone: sometimes it hurts too much for us to be able to listen to its message.

The inspiration to start such a community did not come from a psychedelic experience, it came from pain about what I thought was ‘wrong’ with the psychedelic field. I have a tendency towards being moralistic, throwing stones from my own glass house, and a propensity to dissecting what I see as wrong instead of examining more closely the parts of myself that are reacting. Acceptance, Connection, Embodiment: this is my personal journey and I do think we create in the world what we most need ourselves. My friend Carys, who is always teaching me things, sent me a Rumi poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. (Rumi, A Great Wagon)

I wanted to be able to stop getting angry about the problems I was seeing, and just lie down in the grass. But the grass was withered. In psychedelic therapy we often talk about surrender. Just trust the unfolding. Lie back. And that’s important for a psychedelic therapy session. Being in resistance during a psilocybin journey is pointless and often excruciatingly painful. But after the session, after we have surrendered to the depths and gathered our pearl-seeds of insights, and we realise that the ground on which we stand- the field in which we grow- is parched, do we surrender or do we resist? How can we embody resistance of water, the undeniable, unrestrainable flow of connection that brings nourishment to the depleted, over-extracted ground?

The apple tree teaches us about action. Orchards do not just form without input, they have to be cultivated. A lone apple tree cannot bear fruit, but a carefully cross pollinated orchard will bring a harvest, and a diversity of tree types are required for this to happen. Also, root stocks have to be grafted: young apple tree saplings are planted in the established root networks of the strongest oldest trees. It takes a lot of organising, but I find it inspiring.

No matter how overwhelmed we may feel by the problems in our personal and collective lives, we can cultivate our orchards step by step, set the compass towards connectedness and inch along . No matter how cracked the soil, or how depleted we feel, we can pick up a watering can, even just a few drops. Even a tiny action in service of our purpose can revitalise the ecosystem, and helps us remember why we are here: “she who has a why to live can bear almost any how”.(Nietzsche)

I think we need compassionate communities of purpose like the desert needs the lake. The expanse of things to worry about and despair about is enormous, but when we can listen, with the support of community, to the deepest ache in our hearts, it shows the way to the particular little patch of ground we want to improve, our unique offering. In our anger we find our purpose, and in our grief we find our love, they are two sides of the same coin.

In ACER, the apple tree teaches us about finding a local issue that bothers us, breaking it down into steps, finding local allies, and making a change, whilst having our online community to support us. The particular focus will be completely individual to each person, these seeds of insight about our own purpose are unique treasures. And our connection to each other is the sprinkler system.

We hope some people in ACER will find purpose in offering nurturing care to others in the community. Once members have been around the calendar once, they can apply to become a sharing circle facilitator within the online community, and more broadly, in their local community as well.

I’ll cherish those memories of being in “Boomland” for a little while. It must have taken so much devotion and care by the organisers to make it happen. I think it was a transformational week for many of us, and we awaken back in our own homes with new seeds of insight and purpose in our pockets. Let the watering begin.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
(Rumi, A Great Wagon)