imo_incolae
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2022
- Messages
- 192
If you experience anxiety anyway maybe that is where you should start, not the psychedelics. If you experience anxiety in your life without tripping, there's a story behind that anxiety. Anxiety doesn't just happen without there being a belief behind the anxiety. And the belief will have a story which triggers the behaviour. It might not have anything to do with psychedelics at all. Could be completely unrelated. But it probably will be buried fairly deep if today you don't seem to know why you become anxious. Subconscious mental content goes beyond our everyday waking consciousness yet they can still be modified through accessing our belief systems.
Anxiety doesn't come on for no reason. Anxiety happens when we believe something is going to happen to us in the near future. Its a process we go through to prepare to either fight, flight or freeze. Even if its the biological changes in the brain when you come up on the psychedelics (something you attribute to something you don't control) there will be a story there ie something is changing and I don't feel in control. Its not concrete though and can be unpacked. Although it appears so, an experience psychedelic explorer will tell you its not concrete. Letting yourself go and going with the experience and not seeking to control it weakens the grip it has on you until you naturally float into the trip in a more open and accepting way.
You might not be able to control the fact you get anxiety prior to the peak of psychedelics. Your brain chemistry IS changing and that WILL affect your mental state. Its normal to get anxious on many drugs before the peak. But you can seek to understand and discover what those changes are telling you in regards to your personal story, because it is your personal story that is projecting the reality in relation to the anxiety. Its not just anxiety. Its anxiety manifesting with a story. It could be tied to all sorts of things, like times in the past where you didn't feel in control and things didn't go well, or when you couldn't predict certain events, felt powerless, maybe even vulnerable. It could be based on your personality as what makes you who you are in terms of behavioural traits determines how you respond to certain things. There is a underlying narrative.
I know there's a lot of literature about how our experiences with psychedelics can relate to different stages of our development as psychedelics unlock areas of our psyche we haven't accessed for perhaps a lifetime. Maybe you are opening the valve somewhat and letting in content that you find uncomfortable or even alien belonging to past stages of development or past experiences in general. You also mentioned you don't take high doses too. Perhaps you haven't had the opportunity to reach deeper into your psyche to make these connections and understand their relationship to your experiences. Usually after a few heavy doses you learn your paranoia is attributed to X, anxiety to Y. Everything has its place. Certain themes will play out unique to each individual.
I always find I'm running with a certain theme. I change these themes by addressing them in my life. If its anxiety you face on a daily basis, embark on discovering what this means. You will notice particular settings, situations, people, places etc spur on the anxiety. There's where the work begins. After a while you can retrain yourself to approach and respond to these events that trigger your anxiety and instead of negatively responding doing so positively. This will over time rewire pathways in the brain which will change how you respond. With anxiety, and especially disorders, the anxiety is not disconnected from the psychedelic experience. You don't feel anxious in life but this be separate to the anxiety you experience in a trip. They are both the SAME thing. We can compartmentalize "normal" reality with the realities we experience on psychedelics but what we experience during our psychedelic experiences are intrinsically linked to our "normal" realities, the valve is just opened so that more mental content exists in our awareness. We are flooded with mental content. The important stuff comes out for us to face. Granted, some content will have zero meaning. But a lot of it will and its tied to your life story you carry around with you. You don't trip in isolation to everyday reality. You bring your everyday reality with you. You bring your body with you, your mind, your memories, your conditioning, your story. And you bring your baggage too, for better or for worse.
Much of the hard work is done when you're not tripping. Anxiety and learning to deal with it and transform it is a therapeutic journey in itself and one that spans longer than any trip. The benefits though will be progression towards having less anxiety and/or having better coping mechanisms for them when you identify what is going and then integrate what you learn. Learning to live more healthier, more mindful, more self caring, compassionate, more open to change and possibility, dealing with issues and trying to correct unhealthy ways of living etc. Its all connected.
I hope this makes sense?
Anxiety doesn't come on for no reason. Anxiety happens when we believe something is going to happen to us in the near future. Its a process we go through to prepare to either fight, flight or freeze. Even if its the biological changes in the brain when you come up on the psychedelics (something you attribute to something you don't control) there will be a story there ie something is changing and I don't feel in control. Its not concrete though and can be unpacked. Although it appears so, an experience psychedelic explorer will tell you its not concrete. Letting yourself go and going with the experience and not seeking to control it weakens the grip it has on you until you naturally float into the trip in a more open and accepting way.
You might not be able to control the fact you get anxiety prior to the peak of psychedelics. Your brain chemistry IS changing and that WILL affect your mental state. Its normal to get anxious on many drugs before the peak. But you can seek to understand and discover what those changes are telling you in regards to your personal story, because it is your personal story that is projecting the reality in relation to the anxiety. Its not just anxiety. Its anxiety manifesting with a story. It could be tied to all sorts of things, like times in the past where you didn't feel in control and things didn't go well, or when you couldn't predict certain events, felt powerless, maybe even vulnerable. It could be based on your personality as what makes you who you are in terms of behavioural traits determines how you respond to certain things. There is a underlying narrative.
I know there's a lot of literature about how our experiences with psychedelics can relate to different stages of our development as psychedelics unlock areas of our psyche we haven't accessed for perhaps a lifetime. Maybe you are opening the valve somewhat and letting in content that you find uncomfortable or even alien belonging to past stages of development or past experiences in general. You also mentioned you don't take high doses too. Perhaps you haven't had the opportunity to reach deeper into your psyche to make these connections and understand their relationship to your experiences. Usually after a few heavy doses you learn your paranoia is attributed to X, anxiety to Y. Everything has its place. Certain themes will play out unique to each individual.
I always find I'm running with a certain theme. I change these themes by addressing them in my life. If its anxiety you face on a daily basis, embark on discovering what this means. You will notice particular settings, situations, people, places etc spur on the anxiety. There's where the work begins. After a while you can retrain yourself to approach and respond to these events that trigger your anxiety and instead of negatively responding doing so positively. This will over time rewire pathways in the brain which will change how you respond. With anxiety, and especially disorders, the anxiety is not disconnected from the psychedelic experience. You don't feel anxious in life but this be separate to the anxiety you experience in a trip. They are both the SAME thing. We can compartmentalize "normal" reality with the realities we experience on psychedelics but what we experience during our psychedelic experiences are intrinsically linked to our "normal" realities, the valve is just opened so that more mental content exists in our awareness. We are flooded with mental content. The important stuff comes out for us to face. Granted, some content will have zero meaning. But a lot of it will and its tied to your life story you carry around with you. You don't trip in isolation to everyday reality. You bring your everyday reality with you. You bring your body with you, your mind, your memories, your conditioning, your story. And you bring your baggage too, for better or for worse.
Much of the hard work is done when you're not tripping. Anxiety and learning to deal with it and transform it is a therapeutic journey in itself and one that spans longer than any trip. The benefits though will be progression towards having less anxiety and/or having better coping mechanisms for them when you identify what is going and then integrate what you learn. Learning to live more healthier, more mindful, more self caring, compassionate, more open to change and possibility, dealing with issues and trying to correct unhealthy ways of living etc. Its all connected.
I hope this makes sense?
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