Meditation+Mushrooms?

[TheReadyAwakening]

A buddy of mine told me a story of a time when he tried meditating on mushrooms and said he entered the astral plane completely on accident.

I have trouble meditating even while sober, as I have a hard time holding my concentration, and I can't even imagine trying to do it with mushroom thoughts running wild in my head.

Anyone else have any experience with meditation on mushrooms (or any psychedelic) and possibly any tips for calming ones mind, tripping or not?

 

[benzyme]

5g aborts + meditation > any amount of molly

meditating is the best thing one can do on mushrooms, it gives the most amazing visuals and euphoria

 

[pau]

Meditation + Cactus .... well there's a reason they call it San Pedro!

 

[teotenakeltje]

I think that meditation goes very well with most psychedelics...meditating is just going with the flow, and that's always best, sober or on entheogens.

 

[vovin]

meditation does work on psychadelics quite well except for DMT. f course the lack of motor control and the short duration of the trip makes meditating difficult. Meditating while under the influence is not the same as when you are in your 'regular' state of mind. I personally would not place them in the same category.

Here's a recipe for blowing your mind during a meditation while under the influence:
First you'll need some exstacy and a warming balm anything that gives a heating sensation on the skin.

While under the influence of the magic little pill figure out a way to apply the balm from the base of your spine all the way up to your hairline. Go into a dark room where there is no air circulation. The goal here is to remove any kind of stimulus that you can attach to. The drug heightens sensations so even a small one will be highly amplified. Now you can perform a chakra meditation. The warming balm gives this a sensation the drug and visualization drastically heightens it and the result is downright orgasmic. Since your body is lacking other stimulus you will focus on the sensation far more than normal.

 

[Samadhi-Sukha-Upekkha]

We aren't defining "meditation" here. There are sooooo many ways to meditate. If you tried to do vipassana or shamatha meditations (two types of theravada buddhist meditation) on psychedelics, you wouldn't be likely to succeed. However, simple focusing on the breathing might be a great idea, or deliberately immersing oneself into sensations. Drinking water comes to mind! That could be considered meditation too.

 

[TheReadyAwakening]

Reminds me of an azurescen trip SWIM had where he sat down on the floor with a popsicle...

My taste buds have never been the same =)

 

[Ginkgo]

The most wonderful experiences I have ever had is with high-dose mushrooms and meditation. I have tried a lot of different techniques, but this is what I generally like to do: I keep the focus at the breath while in the lotus position with hands facing the ceiling. After 5 to 10 or so minutes of this I put both hands in gyan mudra (tip of thumb and index finger together), and while still in lotus I place the right hand in my lap and the left over my heart.

I then start to visualize that every breath in I take with my third eye. You can think of a bic pen pointing in through the center between your eyebrows, and you should in fact feel some pressure at this point after a while. Each breath out goes to the top of my head, but not out through the crown, just conserving the energy within the top of my head. The effects are absolutely amazing. Extreme euphoria, absolutely stunning visuals far beyond what I have ever experienced with DMT, and if I want, a visit to the astral plane. Safe travels!

 

[arimane]

We aren't defining "meditation" here. There are sooooo many ways to meditate. If you tried to do vipassana or shamatha meditations (two types of theravada buddhist meditation) on psychedelics, you wouldn't be likely to succeed. However, simple focusing on the breathing might be a great idea, or deliberately immersing oneself into sensations. Drinking water comes to mind! That could be considered meditation too.

I agree, vipassana it's hard and, in my experience, useless.
But Pranayama, and in general the diaframmatic control of breath, concentrating on that, it's ad interesting way of going. Depends what you're looking for, I guess that can be pretty harmful, in the wrong person.

 

[Samadhi-Sukha-Upekkha]

I wouldn't call vipassana useless. Rather, it has a specific purpose -- to cause a person to go through the stages of insight as mentioned in Buddhist texts such as the visuddhimagga. It's not useful for much else, and the stages of insight don't yield valuable results until someone actually achieves the fruition for whichever path the person is on. In other words, vipassana puts the meditator through stages and at the end of the list of stages is the "moment" when all the hard work bears fruit and the meditator has "done" that level of enlightenment. However, it's not going to look like the enlightenment commonly discussed and sometimes parodied, where a person lives in constant bliss. Rather, it's more like suddenly being able to see the world in a different way that results in less suffering, but it certainly doesn't stop life from being life. Rain falls on the enlightened and unenlightened in equal measures. Really, if I didn't have to, I wouldn't even use the loaded term "enlightenment" in the same breath as "vipassana" because of the wide gulf between the real results of vipassana practice versus what people commonly imagine enlightenment to be.

For someone who is just looking to have an enjoyable experience, vipassana is definitely not the way to go because it can bring up some pretty nasty stuff, especially for the huge proportion of people who aren't warned that the nasty stuff is going to come up, and they get blindsided and think they're doing the meditation wrong. Then they give up before ever getting a path! So I would definitely agree that vipassana is often frustrating and it's definitely not appropriate for "calming down." But it does have its use.

Pranayama is pretty cool. I've done that before, meditating on the four parts of the syllable "OM" (broken down into AH, OH, MM, and silence) as corresponding to parts of the breath. It can become a pretty blissful form of meditation, one that I expect would go well with entheogens. For anyone interested in that sort of meditation, just google "pranava yoga" for explanations that are much better than what I could provide -- though they tend to be from Hindu religious sources. The meditation should work whether or not a person is Hindu (I'm not, and it was great for me).

 

[DavidB]

Meditation, in my experience, is as simply as is possible, watch your thoughts and emotions, with complete and utter surrender and impartiality. Observe the arising and the subsequent dissipation of thoughts, ideas and emotions as they flow through your consciousness, attaching no sense of self to then as they arise and vanish.

Meditation is the art of de-person-alisation. The key here, is no person, no self.

 

[nabster98]

i have to go against david8's advice of watching your thoughts. Control is yet another form of the evil ego. The key to meditation is just going with the flow, letting thoughts flow through you, dont linger on. You must surrender yourself to the power of the drug and try to think about nothing. After you reach this state of relaxation then it may be good to study your inner psyche depending on what the purpose of your journey was from the beginning. A good technique is being aware of your breathing and count up to 4, then go back to one. This allows you to center yourself again and if you find yourself counting up past 4 just go back to one. Also you can try imagining your third eye, its about and inch above your eyes, in the center of your brain. Now as you breathe, life enters through the floor, pumping your third eye with energy, power and life, as you breathe slowly out imagine this energy being released out of the top of your head and back into the earth.

 

[The Traveler]

The key to meditation is just going with the flow, letting thoughts flow through you, dont linger on.

There are many forms of meditation. Some meditate to go with the flow while others try to reach an empty mind and so on. All have their own uses for specific moments, persons, places, etc.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[polytrip]

It's probably different for everybody, but i find that meditating on shrooms is dificult at the onset, but absolutely wonderfull once you've fully taken of.

When the mushrooms start to work, meditating always seems to amplify the trembling and shaking that sometimes happens at the onset with shrooms. Once that phase is passed, meditation easily leads to OBE's and a great sense of euphoria.

 

[MooshyPeaches]

A dark room with 5g's of shrooms is one of the best expriences I have ever had. Coming out of meditation and looking into the darkness you can LITERALLY see beings of energy infront of you.. but you can't touch them. It's like its information trying to represent itself to you; a 3d being, by projecting itself to look like they are there infront of you, yet i get the feeling that they are actually apart of me....very interesting.

--Story Time--
Once these beings (or they were more like statues) were infront of me all gazing into the distance (im in a dark room) and i couldn't tell if they were supposed to be living beings or statues, so i asked, and they made it clear they were 'alive'. One of them, a little girl, pointed me in the direction to look, so i saw past them. I looked at what they were staring at and saw this vortex, it was like this energy collapsing and spinning around itself in such a way that it was infinite energy. Like it gained momentum off of itself and was this constant infinite source of itself. I was told this was at the center of the galaxy and is also a part of every cell within us. Soon after this realization I felt a burst of energy from the base of my spine explode up through my back and up the top of my head, and i could feel this vortex/tornado like energy coursing through me.

After this I decided to get up and go outside. Turned the light on, removed my T-shirt from my digital clock (its bright) and saw 11:11 staring back at me. Was a little dumbfounded-numb for a bit.

 

[rOm]

This blue is hurting my eyes Mooshy ! Plz ! Do something, you don't need this color to stand out

 

[damiana]

Beautiful mooshypeaches, inspires SWIM to meditate on shrooms. SWIM has recently tried his new mckennaii mushrooms using a lemon tek and it was amazingly strong, SWIM only had .78 grams. Can't wait to make up some honey and meditate. Also, I like vovin's idea of using balms to add sensation to the spine. I am definitely going to try that.

 

[Samadhi-Sukha-Upekkha]

Friend's report:

Lemon-tekked an eighth of cubes on a full stomach, never having shroomed before but having a good deal of DMT experience. Had an hour of fun walking around doing stuff, then an hour after that was over, stomach and mind are miserable despite vomiting. Cognition was far too disrupted to meditate, and barely intact enough to allow constant self-reminders that "this is just the effects of a chemical, and it will go away in a few hours, and you'll be fine."

Meditation was attempted but the degree of effort required was exhausting. It was a waste of mental energy that was better spent elsewhere; a lot of cognitive shifting was necessary to avoid catastrophizing and freaking out like with that horrid pharmahuasca experience.

Shroom hyperspace was approached for about 45 minutes, but never entered into. (Note: friend has an unusually low body weight. An eighth, even lemontekked, shouldn't do this to a normal person.) It's like if you get about 35-40 mg of DMT and you can see hyperspace-ish stuff (noises, visuals) starting to happen, but you're clearly not IN hyperspace. The auditory hallucinations were pretty noticeable because of being in a dark room and trying to sleep -- the CEV's could be ignored, but the sounds kept me from falling asleep. It sounded like I was in this Telephone remix.

So, this experience was completely incompatible with meditation, unfortunately =(
Should I advise him to try less next time, like maybe just 2 grams, NOT lemon-tekked?

 

[PsilocybeChild]

That is a huge dose for a first time. There's no rush. start low and work your way up. build a relationship with the mushroom. I've shroomed many times and my dose of preference is a gram. I would not be able to enjoy 3.5 grams for my first time either. Keep using the lemon tek it only enhances the experience. Sure, it could do that to a normal person. everyone's different. some are more sensitive than others.

 

[Samadhi-Sukha-Upekkha]

He says,

Very helpful, thanks! I always hear that an eighth is supposed to be a normal dose, and perhaps I confused "normal" with "medium." DMT is still more intense than anything I encountered with mushrooms, but something that lasts for 4-5 hours is a different kind of intense. I hadn't planned to work with mushrooms again because of that experience, but your advice to start with a gram and build a relationship seems like a good plan. If I encounter mushrooms again, I think I'll meet them with a bit more respect next time, and get to know them more patiently.