Trip Report 2025-11-27 MDMA

prayer to relieve me of pride

can the whole body breathe? can I attend to the dan tien? to the nose?

anger, boundaries. what is it like to be friends with anger?

being spanked

dad is pathetic

the self-like parts that need to figure out how to heal everything

what kind of discipline is good to submit to?

what am I afraid of?

fear of being seen

fear of people seeing that I put myself above them, see connection as degrading me

fear of having to explain my absolute patheticness

call the bodhisattvas. let them work

I'm struggling to prepare for this session. I don't feel like I have a clear intention. I don't feel like I've even been able to spend a lot of internal time clarifying things.

It felt a little bit like fear - I'm afraid to see myself. There are things I'm avoiding. I hope they can be loved.

1:50pm: here we go

it's a bunch of days later (Tuesday). This trip took a lot out of me. I didn't feel like writing and spent a lot of the weekend in bed.

during the trip itself: the peak was good (more below), but at around the 3hr mark, I just got the feeling that "we're done here". I was drained, there was no more capacity to look at hard stuff. I felt uncomfortable - a bit of a headache, generalized contraction. It still felt okay for a few hours (because MDMA), but I was very ready for the comfort of dinner, and eventually ketamine. Even the ketamine didn't feel great - of course the deep parts were easy, but as it wore down I continued feeling contracted and a bit woozy.

because the contraction hit so early, I don't think it was just that I had a 'bad hangover' reaction to the drug. there might be some of that, but it felt like I maybe just delved a bit too greedily and too deep, and unleashed some difficult energy that overwhelmed the waxing MDMA high. And maybe not even "too greedily" - just normal digging, sometimes you hit something big, and it works its way through, all part of the process.

the sense of self: I'd just come away from the retreat with the intention of asking the spirits to "forgive me for my pride" in thinking I'm separate, in building walls and an isolated sense of self. the mental motion feels like somewhat dissolving the self, turning control back over to the universe. But on this trip, that didn't feel right. I could feel the sense of self arising, and it felt like it needed love. It's not right for it to be forcibly dissolved, or worse yet, ignored or gaslit into pretending it doesn't exist (the move 'forgive me for my pride' move can easily just become another move executed by a controlling self, wrapping itself in clothing of selflessness). The sense of self is necessary, helpful, and the more it trusts that the whole mind understands and loves it, the more that it can trust its full range of motion. It can trust that when it dissolves, it will be re-formed; the rest of the mind will welcome it back. A hated tyrant can't let go of power for an instant; a beloved leader returns from vacation and is welcomed back with celebrations and open arms.

My instinct on MDMA is always to try to trust the spirits as much as possible, ask the alien surgeons for what I need. That's almost always seemed like the best approach. So I was conflicted about spending so much of the trip with my sense of self. The best intuition I could get was that there was a real choice point for the trip - I could go down the path of loving the sense of self, or I could try to 'turn over control', and both were valid options. But it felt 'right' to work with the sense of self, and almost easier - like it was the natural, more surrendered way for the trip to go, and that trying to force the trip to correspond with my expectations of how I 'should' do it selflessly would actually have taken more effort.

being a 'good kid': I went back to my dad spanking me, and the sense of feeling that I was bad, needed to be punished. I actually don't remember fully all the emotions there except that there was quite a lot of anguish - I feel like maybe there's still quite a lot there that was more than could be processed in one session. There was definitely anger, I'm not sure at what (my dad, the parts of myself that behaved 'badly', the situation?), and a sense of 'wrongness' - the punishment was not fair, it was unexpected, I hadn't consciously "been bad" but now I was being treated as bad. "this isn't right", "this isn't fair". it was unjust. and there's an aloneness - a bad thing had happened to me but I couldn't go to my parents for help, because they were the source of the bad thing. so I'm left to go cry in my room. I don't know if I felt my way all through the grief and confusion of that time, but I certainly felt a lot of it.

I also flashed to the playground in 2nd grade, seeing other kids make fun of Christine (the fat kid). In retrospect, that must have been really painful for her; of course it's not her fault that she's fat in second grade; she was just a kid who needed love and friends like anyone else. But I absorbed the social narrative that she was pathetic, disgusting, and instead of standing up for her, I tensed up wanting to avoid people thinking the same thing about me. I internalized that social acceptance was dependent on not being fat and disgusting, and that other kids were the arbiter of who was good and worthy - if I had confidence in my own internal sense of worthiness, I wouldn't have felt cowed by observing this bullying, and I wouldn't have needed to implicitly hold myself above Christine ("I might be weird but at least I'm not the fat kid who everyone hates").

the common thread here is not believing that "I" am inherently good - that goodness is conditional on my parents' judgement, other kids' judgement, and of course my own internalized judgement.

I also kept asking the question - what am I afraid of? What am I afraid of people seeing in me? If I connect, go on a date, what am I afraid will happen? I don't know that I got a verbal answer. But there were definitely a variety of somatic feelings, some of which maybe softened a bit.

in the past, trips have been focused on 'me' (the self) loving the body, accepting the body, trying to be less self-oriented. this one felt like the body, or maybe the 'big self', loving the 'little self' as a somatic structure. seeing that hierarchy and coordination are necessary, that leadership of the internal society is a responsibility that someone has to shoulder, and that I really do want to be the sort of person with a functional self who can coordinate around doing things.

I could feel my head shifting and relaxing in strange ways during all of this. Somatically, I felt huge wells of anger at the neck in both directions: the body was angry at the 'self in the head' for ignoring / suppressing it for so long, while the 'self in the head' was endlessly frustrated with the body for not cooperating, for being so useless and needy and leaving the self in the head to figure everything out on its own, for leaving it so stressed and isolated and unsupported. there are decades of grievance there, and I'm sure there's more left to work through.

taking ketamine at the end of the night also felt pretty intense. I'd been tired and contracted, but when the ketamine hit there was a ton of deep stuff that felt like it wanted to move. I put a bunch of Frightened Rabbit on the playlist - ordinarily it might have felt too busy and agitating, but I wanted something personal and comforting and with the MDMA still operating I didn't feel the need for something super calming --- I trusted that emotional stuff would move regardless. There's something about psychedelic therapy music which feels impersonal, self-denying, while Frightened Rabbit felt self-affirming.

Since that day, I've felt exhausted and sensitive - for the first couple days I could barely reply to messages, certainly didn't want to 'meditate'. Mostly I just lay in bed, alternating between feeling the body and numbing out with my phone. There was no clear awareness of specific emotional 'parts' or anything I could 'work with' - it just felt like more generalized contraction, energy rearranging, fragments of not-okayness. At the same time, something about my head and body felt (and feels) quite a lot more open and connected than previously. And I've felt moments where I expect to cringe in self-judgement, where it doesn't happen any more. (there certainly still is plenty of self-judgement, but some deep version of it seems to have softened a bit)

My so far is that this is important 'progress', but it's also taking a while for me to adjust to operating in this more open somatic space. Even as I feel 'better' in some ways, I've also been kind of disabled, sensitive, just lying in bed seeking comfort.

I did see gay-Slack friends for a late Thanksgiving on Sunday, and it was pretty unsatisfying. The meal was good, and it was nice to be around people, especially Thomas and David. But as usual the conversation was superficial, dominated by Michael and Eric and Phill, talking about inane things, pop culture, etc. No one really asked much about how I'm doing. It felt like I went hoping for connection and left feeling basically unseen and lonely.

On the other hand, I think I reacted differently to this than I might have before. I didn't blame myself as much. I was able to cry a bit afterwards - to acknowledge that I wanted something, that this environment didn't provide it for me, and that sucks. There was less of a sense that I 'should' have been different, that I should care about the pop culture stuff, been more outgoing or socially present. I resent it when Phill talks a lot, but underneath that is this pain that I really miss David - his happy energy, his aliveness, his affection. I miss having him to myself, of course, but even in group settings, I miss the connection with my friend. We're both a bit quieter, less assertive, so whatever connection we had one-on-one doesn't have room to exist in a group setting. I wish there were a way to get this back, and maybe I will find one, but it's also possible that there's just not - it's not that I'm doing something wrong, the world has just changed and something I valued is no longer available in the same way. I really miss him.