Pre-Ceremony Jitters

I wanted to talk a little bit about the art of doing yoga while you’re afraid.

Before ceremonies I often get waves of dread that are really unmanning. They make me want to have nothing to do with what I’m about to do. I get a sense of the abyss of madness I could fall into. Part of me just quails, and I really have to discipline myself to not turn tail and run. It requires a lot of courage.

Even when it’s not that bad it settles into a knot in my heart, a sense of constriction in my chest. What I try to do is just breathe into it. I try to feel that sense of energy moving through my body which could just be tingles representing the activity of my nervous system, but I choose to interpret it as the energy of life, consciousness, Spirit, the God/dess—all those things being synonymous.

Taking calm breaths while your body is locked in fear is an interesting challenge. You’re trying to relax while your body is in revolt. The tension can be really intense—almost unbearable.

As it increases, your ability to focus on that sense of calm diminishes. You can’t help but attend to that tension. It’s like…somebody could tickle your foot. And you ignore it. But when someone applies a lit match to the sole of your foot, it gets harder to ignore, and if they bring out the blowtorch and start searing your flesh away from your skeleton, you won’t be able to think about anything else.

Only a person of the greatest achievement could remain calm when subjected to that level of stress. And I’m not a yogi at that level. I understand that it’s possible. That level of achievement is symbolized by the image from the gnostic Gospel of Judas of the crucified Christ laughing. Jesus is on his back on the cross, the Romans are pounding the nails through his wrists and feet, and he’s just laughing uproariously. He feels it, but he’s utterly above it at the same time.

That’s the goal, but it’s not easy.

Of course, that experience of miserable tension can happen in ceremony, too, and that’s what you’re dreading: that experience but amplified a hundred times by a huge dose of psychedelic mushrooms. That’s where the rubber meets the road. And even though the benefits that accrue from that are wonderful, it’s okay to dread that. It’s okay. Why wouldn’t you have second thoughts about voluntarily entering an experience of such intense misery? In which the suffering is potentially bottomless?

That’s the thing—it can get so awful that you are effectively in hell. You’re barely hanging on against pure disorienting despair and this screaming urge to crawl out of your skin and get away, get away, just get away from this, and you just can’t. The only thing you can compare it to is the ordeal that Paul Atreides goes through at the beginning of Dune, when the Bene Gesserit makes him stick his hand in a box and he feels his flesh being roasted away in a fire. But under threat of instant death if he withdraws, he overcomes himself.

But this is somehow worse, because it’s not just a matter of physical discomfort, although there is a tremendous amount of that. It’s that sense of damnation, that sense of “This is more than I can bear, and it’s never going to stop, ever” and that threatens to crack your mind. It’s like having your consciousness transformed into a Bosch painting. All that madness that he depicts becomes your lived reality, the wrongness of it, and maybe even worse is the sense that something or someone is inflicting this on you, and enjoying your misery so very much. So you’re so humiliated.

Phew! Boy, that’s a lot to look forward to. But now it's time to get work.