An introduction & possible night journey

[FayingWorlds]

Greetings DMT Nexus,

I've been a "lurker" as they say for quite some time but have recently decided to make an account and start posting. This seems like a great community, so thank you all for making it an interesting and informative place.

I'm not much for labels myself, but I do fancy myself a psychonaught. I have experience with various psychoactive plants and so am not a stranger to exploration of altered states of consciousness.

It has been quite some time now since I've take any kind of entheogen. I've been enjoying my sobriety, though also suffering from relatively chronic pain. My feelings lately have been more open and moving towards reintroducing certain substances into my life. I'm hoping that joining here will be an excellent choice that will allow me the kind of grounding supportive space to share my experiences, prepare and continue to educate myself. I always enjoy reading the trip reports and hearing the interesting perspectives of other people here.

Seeing as I'm new here and can't post in other sections just yet, I'll add a kind of addendum for this post related to what I'm considering lately related to entheogenic journeys. The main substances I'm interested in currently are DMT and Salvia Divnorum. I am aware of their immense power, and by no means do I take them lightly.

At the risk of sounding like I'm rushing into things, it so happens that I've been preparing to lightly explore Salvia again. It is a risky endeavor in my mind, as my previous experience from a number of years ago was nothing short of reality shattering and terrifying. I'm aware that this kind of intensity and potentially overwhelming terror is practically the nature of these things; and this is not so foreign to me.

I'm also well aware that it was one of my first experiences and I was not in a good state of mind nor environment to be doing such a thing, and in "overdose" amounts as well. (As unfortunately many others seem to do) I have certainly learned much since then, had other experiences with various substances, and as I briefly mentioned before have remained sober for a number of years now.

I have been preparing and may reintroduce myself to Salvia tonight if everything seems appropriately settled and calm enough. My intent if there was one for this night's hopefully "light and exploratory" journey is to make peace with this sacred and powerful plant teacher and to learn from the experience/s whatever they may be. I do honestly fear a little bit for my sanity, and I am still in a kind of considering processes which may or may not flow into an experience with this plant tonight.

For those of you who are curious as to my methods of ingestion and dosages or strength... It would be what is apparently a 5x extract. (They didn't have the leaf, so I asked for the lowest extract) Which could be smoked through this little vapor genie. I assume this will work sufficiently despite my feelings that it may fail due to a lack of heat, reverse tolerance, and any other factors unknown to me.

Any advise, ideas, words of support, or anything else you all may have to offer is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading. May peace be with you all.

~FayingWorlds

 

[Julz]

Welcome to the Nexus! I'm new here too- it's such a great resource w so many helpful souls.

Personally I have no experience w salvia, but hope that your approach and experiences bring you what you're looking for. Do you think it might also help with your chronic pain, or maybe more the coping aspect? I'm interested to hear more, as I too have dealt w chronic pain for awhile now and find smoking helpful just to sleep, but not really with Life's journey.

Hope you're well today!

 

[FayingWorlds]

Hello,
Thank you for the warm welcome! Welcome to you as well!

I hope you will find relief for the chronic pain that you experience. Thank you for your kindness. Today is going quite well and I'm feeling like the experience was very good overall.

Since I still can't technically post topics in most other places (which, I assure you, is not a problem dude... )I hope you all won't mind if I post a trip report and other personal writings here. I'm definitely here for community, not just to rant or express my own feelings and opinions. So please feel free to chime in on things, ask questions, and whatever else you'd like to do and find appropriate. Thanks!

Current State of Mind / Experience
I must say the experience seems to have been integrating with or relating to my daily life, in a sort of this is actually helpful, meditative sort of way. I believe this is what we call integration, yes? A kind of journey in itself.

I'm currently listening to the crystal method and it feels incredible. It has been about 12 hours since the Saliva trip "ended." I feel like it's been a kind of journey of bumping and sliding softly back into an integrated and new perspective on life experience. I feel like there's been a good shift in how I've learn to open up to life experiences more fully.

Theories / Analysis of Personal attributes / Concerns
To some extend I wonder how much of my fears about Salvia are just my own psychological experience and how much danger there actually is in this substance. I feel that I could see myself getting overly cautious about it's use. I could also see going a totally different way of using it in an entirely appropriate and healthy manner like a tool for exploring my own experiences in life. I'd prefer the latter.

In order to actually bring something like this into my life, I think it would help me to know for myself a good dosage and get a good feel for how it's actually affecting me. My biggest fear that comes up with or on Salvia is that I'm going to change my brain in some crazy weird way and end up freaking out for the rest of my life.

I wonder as to the actual depths of Salvia, and what it does or can do. I feel like it's a very powerful tool, which like any powerful tool can be immensely useful or incredibly destructive.
So when Salvia goes "it's ok, here you can just feel these things instead of thinking about them" I am able to go with it, but sometimes I end up freaking out because I'm losing the control I only thought had in life.


--Brief Psychoanalysis, Community, Connection and the Calming effect of others
I feel like I hold to things more than I'd like to think I do. And in all honesty I do sometimes feel like I get fairly paranoid and hold to strange ideas. I used to freak out a lot on weed, (at least inside my own head) usually at the simplest things like the experience of having an idea. And then I'd have this uncontrollable fear that somebody would find out that I was having an idea. (OH GOD! SOMEBODY WILL KNOW!) Haha, At some level it's just really funny and is also probably fairly common in people who smoke cannabus.

I no longer smoke weed, although I may start again soon, as a medicine. The reason I don't attribute this with weed is that some of my friends back then never got that, and I still feel these kinds of things personally. To the degree that it's like a comet crashes into me psychologically every few seconds. This kind of thing was particularly obvious when I went out for the walk to the store to get the Salvia before the last trip. Perhaps I'm just kind of a paranoid person, and I have to learn to accept that and love myself even more than I already do.

What's interesting is that the presence of other people or the relatability in sharing with them, even online, is something that I find is a kind of antidote to this. It's like a fear of isolation with respect to my own headspace or psychology. I find that I am quite different from other people, and even identity as Genderqueer. Being around other people that I can relate with usually helps me feel more grounded about things. So that's one reason I'm thankful to be here in this community. I feel it's a wonderful thing of us all to explore such things as consciousness and life and to be so open as to share our experiences and perspectives with each other.

--Trip Report
So I ended up vaporizing a decent amount of the 5x I had last night. It was actually quite a good experience and did in fact help with the pain. I think what it ended up doing for me was to kind of allow certain feelings to be extended out more, and experienced from a kind of familiar sightly strange dissociative state of mind. It was more of a body boundary dissolving or changing experience if that makes sense. I still felt quite near the ground which was nice for me, but it served to free my energy up from a lot of things.
It kind of greased the gears and let the slick carts go so to speak. It was a kind of freedom that I feel like I actually need in my life and hadn't really realized to this extent or in these ways. It let go of the confining boundaries of what I experience in and around my physical body.

In a strange way I felt like it was just shifting my perspective on my life a little bit so that I could stop being so anxious about everything. Excellent really, and I think it may be of use for addressing different mental discomforts which manifest and affect my experience of life. So in that sense I think it could actually address some of the mentally related aspects of my experience in the long term. It may also address some of the physical pain in a temporary relief kind of way.

All of these effects I would say came about due to being respectful towards the plant itself, opening up to the experiences, as well as having an explorative and careful approach to the dosage and effects.

--Meditative aspects and relation to my life
I get a sense of what I'm doing is not what's important, but how I'm relating to life. Much like how I could be so averse to things as to cause a kind of emotional overwhelm from anything, when in fact acceptance is the way to go.

It is most certainly a helpful and powerful plant. I'm starting to see it as something that could possibly be integrated with my life and be a tool to help help me to work through some things.

One of the most interesting things it did was to allow me to see very clearly where my aversions were happening, to accept them during experiences and thus understand that aversion is painful and it's perfectly ok to accept whatever is experienced including the aversion. Not that it eradicated all aversion, but it has made it resoundingly clear to me that aversion isn't particularly helpful and just how much suffering I cause myself by running away from things or scoffing at the things I dislike experiencing.

I also get a sense of "writing track..." Which I think is a kind of acknowledgement of the newness of what I'm experiencing in the moment. I've been feeling afraid of new experiences, afraid of new things, but I also continue to learn that it's ok to let go, move on and have a happy life.

So that's my trip report and how it relates to my life so far. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

~FayingWorlds