A curious side effect of psilocybin
If you’ve followed this blog, you may have noticed that I keep pointing out the differences between my model for working in altered states (spirit based) and the predominant model which is psychology based. By “pointing out”, I really mean screaming from the rooftops about how important spirit and animist models are.
As a member of a mostly therapist-filled psychedelic community here in Portland, I get to be triggered pretty regularly, and it happened just recently.
The other day, a facilitator posted in an online group thread about what she called a curious “side effect” of psilocybin during a session with a client. The side effect was involuntary full body twitches that caused his body to powerfully move around on its own and lasted throughout the whole session. The movements weren’t painful, but disconcerting because they were outside of his control.
There was a wide range of responses of what it could be– from clinical (serotonin syndrome or toxicity) to physio-emotional (neural pathways opening to allow constricted muscles to relax), or somatic (releasing deeply held trauma).
This “curious side effect” is the primary thing I’ve been exploring for the past 30 years since my own initial “full body twitches” started happening and opened the doorway to the intoxicating and revelatory Spirit.
30 years ago, there were no online forums so I had no idea what was happening! The first real explanation of these things came from my teacher Swami Muktananda and his tradition of Kashmir Shaivism which named it as the kundalini energy. This tradition not only explains the movements but has a deep and ancient foundation of texts and pracitioners who have worked with this energy for centuries.
I then found my capoeira teacher and learned about axé, where this same twitching means (among other things) that Candomblé practitioners are about to embody a God (orixá). Another old and rich tradition, but with many stark differences between it and Kashmir Shaivism.
Look around at different spiritually intact cultures all around the globe, from traditional South African healers to the shaking shamans of Siberia to even the Shakers in America and you can see the same ecstatic shaking. Sometimes it was called the arrival of a Goddess, sometimes as the Goddess, sometimes the Holy Spirit, sometimes the spirits of ancestors or nature. It has been used by practitioners since prehistory for healing and power.
When I was younger, I (like the original poster) thought the shaking was a drug side effect, so I’d explore ways of accessing it without substances. I found out that things like psilocybin magnified the shaking, but that there were other ways of accessing it. Nowadays people explore it through holotropic breathwork and Trauma Release exercises.
What we’ve now done in Oregon through legalizing psilocybin is to open this particularly intense doorway to Spirit and train people as facilitators who don’t understand the deep spirit connection at its root. It is more than a trauma release! It is (or can be if you go deeper into it) a vibrational ecstatic communion with the Goddess at the heart of creation and the doors she opens are tremendous. Are we going to be able to handle the deeper ramifications of this?
If you ask a modern practitioner of Kashmir Shaivism or Candomblé if you should take a substance to activate this Goddess shaking they will generally say no. They usually say the type of power that gets activated can potentially overwhelm the person’s body without them going through traditional ritual protocols. We in the modern West of course see traditional ritual protocols as mere superstition, aside from things like naming our intention and having a set and setting. These are all good things but we need more.
One of the things that someone said on the group thread was that this shaking needed more “documentation and research”. Well, there has been a tremendous amount of “documentation and research” over the centuries in diverse places throughout the world, naming and describing this very process. Much of that is oral, or in a different language, and doesn’t come in a peer reviewed scientific journal based on objective methodology.
Another thing that was said was that the person’s “symptoms ended after the journey concluded.” I’m sure that made everyone feel better. That shaking can make us scared because we are not in control of it, which is the point if you listen to the old traditions. The shaking is the descent of power that by its nature overwhelms us, takes us and puts us on our knees in humility, devotion and prayer. Ritual containers were held in temples and in communities to allow the devotee to take the time they needed to be able to work with such a force, and then to integrate what they received back into the community.
The hallmark of modern society is an almost religious devotion to mechanisms of control. They are woven so deeply into our body that we can freak out when the shaking comes. And if it goes away at the end of a session with no other effects, great! But what happens next time when that person’s shaking doesn’t end, and instead a deity shows up to ask the client what they want?
All the documentation and research in the world won’t help a facilitator answer that question.