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I am a conscious drug user.

“Wait, what?” you might ask. The words “conscious” and “drug” in the same sentence? How does that go together? What does that mean?”

It means that I use drugs to expand my consciousness, to get to know myself better, and to understand how we create our own reality—as well as the world we live in. Since I started taking drugs for those reasons, my self-awareness has catapulted into unimaginable highs, and my life has improved tenfold.

Even though my experiences can be highly entertaining and fun as well as they are deep and profound, I do not play around with drugs. I use them with intent. And I do not just use any kind of drugs, but only mind-expanding substances that allow me to understand myself and the universe.

Entheogens.

I use entheogens to answer questions that I have a hard time answering in a normal state of mind. I use them to liberate myself from old emotional baggage and move forward to create and live the life that resembles my truth.

And it’s working.

I have never felt more clarity about who I am, what I want and need in life, and even though I went through very hard times when I first started to get to know myself in such a profound way, I have never felt better. That does not mean I am not facing hard times anymore, but it means that my life feels more in alignment with my truth.

You might ask: so I just need to take a few drugs and my life will get better?

Unfortunately, it is not always that easy. The way I take drugs does not always lead to the most pleasant experiences. This process has involved going through all of the pain that I have repressed since I was a child. Like most of us, I grew up in a highly toxic culture that does not allow the freedom of being who we are.

To fit into society, we have to adapt to what is expected of us, or we suffer isolation instead. I have observed how many parents often confuse control with love believing this power struggle is needed to prepare their child for “the real world.”

As a child, I went through many traumatic experiences. When I say trauma, I do not only mean major events like war, or physical and sexual abuse. As doctor Gabor Maté explains so well, “Trauma is not what happened to you, but the disconnect of the self that happened as a result of what happened to you.” This disconnect of the self happens not only in obvious major crises but also in moments of emotional neglect or emotional abuse.

Emotional abuse is any act, including confinement, isolation, verbal assault, humiliation, intimidation, infantilisation, or any other treatment which may diminish one’s sense of identity, dignity, and self-worth.

And there were many such instances in my life…

Getting to know myself means reconnecting to all of those hurt inner children that are still stuck in the moment of trauma. Those aspects of myself that were not allowed to express their emotions or thoughts need to literally dive into all formerly suppressed feelings—sometimes all at once. The feeling of being alone, the experience of being isolated, the perception of not being allowed to be who I am—all of those memories need to be relived in their full intensity in order to be released.

To do that in a normal state of consciousness is not impossible. I have done that many times and it worked. But when I started using drugs as the gate-openers to my subconscious mind, this process became 100 times easier. So many conditioned beliefs make it hard to access what’s underneath them.

On ayahuasca, I needed to face my deepest fears. LSD helped me remember how isolated and alone I felt when I was a small human. MDMA taught me how to express my emotions. Mushrooms showed me how deeply programmed I was and how to deprogram my mind. Kambo taught me how I confused freedom with escape. Yopo helped me to befriend my mind. Iboga reset my brain.

And every time I come out of such an intense and often painful journey, I feel a thousand times lighter than before. These hurtful memories are stored in the depths of our beings and influence our every move if we do not become aware of them.

But it is not the drugs that do it for you. Taking the drug is just the tool to open the gates. It is your willingness to go there that will set you free: to open yourself to all the hidden aspects of the self, to go through all of your emotions and mental confusions. It does not work without the intention of seeing and feeling yourself fully. It does not work if you do not continue looking at yourself after the experience and commit to integrating the insights gained from the experience into your daily life.

If you just want to see colourful patterns and have a crazy, fun time, the drug will give you exactly that. That can be a lot of fun, but it gives you a completely different outcome than the way I love to experience them most: I get high to let atypical states of consciousness teach me how turn my life into a whole new high without drugs.

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Author: Alice Dea
Image: Wiki Commons
Editor: Travis May
Copy & Social Editor: Nicole Cameron