My Psychedelic Journey
“[My guru] said, ‘Your medicine, meaning LSD, would allow you to come into the presence of Christ and have Christ darshan [the beholding of a deity], but you could only stay for two hours, and then you’d have to leave. It would be better to become Christ than to visit him, but your medicine won’t do that.’ So what I heard was that the medicine was an astral analogue of emptiness rather than emptiness. But to me, that was still pretty useful along the way. I still like having two hours with Christ.”
Exploring psychedelics and psychedelic (non-ordinary) experiences as a tool for the past 20+ years of my life and being very fortunately surrounded by amazing psychedelic communities and gatherings have taught me invaluable perspectives that have inspired both my life and Psychedelic Reiki Massage. Psychedelic experiences have taught me important learnings, like being present in the moment, allowing whatever to arise to arise, going with the flow, trusting your intuition, creating a sacred container & safer space, deep awareness, ritual, universal love consciousness, compassion, empathy, non-judgment, and protection & grounding… elements I synergize into every session.
I am eternally grateful to have lived the eight years of my post-university 20s container (2008-2016) in San Francisco, the perfect psychedelic and healing incubator where everything you ever wanted to experience was available at your fingertips in the highest quality, greatest abundance, and most fruitful & informed environment.
It was here I began my Reiki and massage training in 2011 and experienced Burning Man for the first time (2010, 2011, 2013, 2014), which blew my heart and mind wide open, so much so I spent the entire 8-hour car ride home my first year crying to my brother-from-another-mother, Isaac, about the awe of and gratitude for the human experience.
It was also in San Francisco where I embarked on a heavy LSD phase circa 2010-2011, which ultimately led me to question “why?” I do anything I do and begin to cultivate a much deeper awareness of the general state of Everything. I ended up going vegetarian (trying veganism but my body didn’t like that), exploring my then-addiction to coffee, getting deep into yoga & meditation, and stopped wearing makeup, stopped using non-bio products, stopped shaving, and stopped straightening my hair… cause f*ck societal beauty standards.
In 2013, I “happened upon” Moontribe Collective, my chosen family who have been gathering under the full moon in the Mojave Desert and have remained non-commercial & underground since their inception in 1993. One day out there could feel like 13 lifetimes in your learnings, reflections, connections, and experiences. With their mantra of “Live in Love,” Moontribe is all about loving yourself, one another & the earth and ultimately taught me that I could be a freak but a functional one. This understanding was crucial in that I found Moontribe while coming out of my own intense two-year healing journey, where I was reevaluating and re-calibrating all aspects of my life, especially my relationship to the “party scene.” But Moontribe is less of a “party” than a “celebration.”
Via several incredible synchronistic events and powerful visions in dreamspace, I was called to the Amazon to sit for four ayuhuasca ceremonies over the course of eight days in May 2013. It was easily one of the most healing & psychedelic experiences of my life and helped me to let go of some of my deepest layers and unravel the stories I’d been programmed to tell myself due to past deep childhood traumas. I have not yet worked again with this medicine, as I haven’t felt the call, and firmly believe in the importance of honoring, respecting, and only working with medicines (plants especially!) when it’s in the flow & there’s a resonance.
In 2014 & 2015, I had the great honor of offering donation-based Reiki treatments at the 8th & 9th annual Women’s Visionary Congress, a women & women allies' gathering of visionary researchers, healing practitioners, activists, and artists from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Also at Burning Man 2014, I gifted a Reiki Share Workshop as part of the Palenque Norte Visionary Lecture Series, while gifting Reiki treatments at Sacred Space’s Temple of Activation and camping at Soft Landing, a substance-free psychedelic harm reduction space with 24-hour tea service.
In September 2015, I visited Berlin for the first time for five days and decided I needed to move there. Later that year on 11/11 at 5:55, I purchased a ticket to my first Boom Festival in Portugal for the 2016 edition. Then, everything flowed so that I moved to Berlin in April 2016 and had my heart and mind blown open again in that process & experience and also at Boom in August. I even met someone on the last day of the Boom Utopia After-Landing then met him again in India in January after knowing him less than 24 hours ‘cause… #yolo and #berlinwinter. That partnership flourished nearly 2.5 years.
In May 2017, he invited me to the Negev Desert to build and experience Midburn, Israel’s Burning Man, and it was crazy cool to experience how this side of the world does it in the psychedelic expanse of that desert. After volunteering for Berlin festivals that summer/fall, like Nation of Gondwana, Garbicz, and Berlin Atonal, I served as one of three core organizers and a speaker (Reiki Share Workshop) for the first-ever Altered, a two-day, 500-person conference exploring psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. It was deeply humbling and completely surreal to reach event capacity and touch so many souls from Mexico to California to Ireland.
In June 2018, that past partner and I returned to Portugal to help build Boom Festival for two months. Our main project was to build Lugu Test Area’s interactive, multi-story playground next to the Dance Temple and Daniel Popper’s Emergence (goddess). I also served as a Reiki massage therapist for the crew for the first month. It was extremely fulfilling and inspiring to work alongside the most brilliant, creative, and psychedelic people from all over the world to co-create arguably one of the most transformative psychedelic gatherings in the world.
With Jupiter exalted in Sagittarius, 2019 was the Year of Psychedelic Reiki Massage at Events. I massaged at 38 events that year (14 in 2018; 4 in 2020) and served as the resident Reiki Massage Therapist for the legendary Rummels Bucht and Panta Rhei, their monthly underground progressive psytrance & psy techno gatherings; BeHome, Beate Uwe’s bimonthly live music + downtempo gatherings; psy labels xXETEXx & Zenon Records' Berlin gatherings; and the crew for Bucht der Träumer, a Rummels Bucht + Rebellion der Träumer festival collaboration.
My main intention with bringing Psychedelic Reiki Massage to the party was to offer psychedelic harm reduction, healing & grounding vibes, a safer space, and an opportunity for self-care & option to do something other than take drugs and party all night. Of course I was always sober while doing this (having taken a long nap before 😉), and it was such a fun and fulfilling experiment I intended to conclude with Bucht’s planned closing at the end of April 2020… Corona beat me to the punch, natürlich 😅.
After sitting for my first 3 Kambô sessions in one moon cycle of spring 2019, I decided to commit to this spring cleaning ritual annually, alongside a 3-week deep cleanse where I basically only consume vegetables, fruit, oats, rice, legumes, water, and tea. Though non-psychoactive, Kambô helps me to purge what no longer serves me, connect deeper to my heart’s deepest truth & intention, strengthen my immunity & vitality, and remember everything is fleeting, from the most intense discomfort and pain to the most ecstatic euphoria and feeling of connectedness. Spring 2020 was an especially powerful ritual, which helped me to reprogram so many aspects of my being — only after letting go of so much and creating space for all the transformation. In 2021, I began also working deeply with Huachuma & other plant medicines I feel called to, and this work has been very gratefully monumental for my familial, ancestral, and personal healing especially.
As I mature experientially, I’ve found (like many) I actually don’t need substances to reach altered states of consciousness and that existence itself can be quite psychedelic in and of itself (Timothy Leary once joked you have to eventually graduate from LSD, hey? 😉) . One of my favorite explorations thus far has been 14 months of sobriety (including caffeine) starting in April 2020 (from psychedelics in October 2019). However, comprehensively exploring psychedelics and understanding this incredibly valuable context and perspective have been such important tools for my work and my own healing, self-development & evolution and thus the healing, development & evolution of the collective consciousness… and of course I am open for more exploration only when feeling the call 🙂.
On 31st December 2020, I embarked on the most profound and deeply transformative experience of my life to date, My 14-Day Solitary Darkroom Fasting Retreat (Dark Therapy), where I discovered the Ultimate Quantum Healing Cocoon and explored so deeply and intimately a truly next level of patience, observation, self-love & compassion, humility, presence, resilience, and endurance over a very extended amount of time. Words cannot truly capture the amount of gratitude, awe, and reverence I feel for the Darkness.
I will always be a student in this lifetime (and all past & future ones) and honor that healing and experience are actually not linear at all, only perceived to be. I primarily relate to life experientially and am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to experience so many magical, healing, and psychedelic things. Infinite gratitude for all the tools, teachers, perspectives, resonances, reflections, communities, connections, conversations, and this journey. With a full heart, resonant soul, and curious, open mind, I journey forth (in the spiral).
Moontribe Collective Full Moon Gathering: undisclosed location, Mojave Desert, California, USA - by Marc Evans Photography