When I first started Cheechable in 2017, I had just basked beneath the glow of totality in one epic solar eclipse. This moment of standing in a flowing river while the world appeared to stop was transcendent. I had been experiencing a creative block after a particularly rough year of traveling the country during the 2016 US presidential election. My mission was unrelated, but if you were in the United States between January 2016 and March 2021 you know Trump and the MAGA movement was prevalent in every conversation. Politico is exhausting at best, and after year one of this new administration, I was over it. I wanted to create change in my personal environment and inspire folks to claim agency over their environments as well. I knew it wouldn’t be as effective to put out a systems textbook or a bunch of saccharine positivity, how-to, trauma bonding content. I had to be prolific to get a lot of information out and discretionary to be sure I didn’t add to the litany of false information that was already widespread.
Cheechable started as a content experiment with an Instagram account, shortly after, a small run of publications covering the personal experiences of a cannabis strain or relieving the stress of surviving an industry that has barely begun to make traction; and yet has been established for over a thousand centuries. My personal passion for sensations and philosophical explorations have always brought me closer to nature and the ceremonial aspects of Earth. I wanted to encourage the free exchange of cultivation and representation through the musings in Cheechable. Shortly after, I started experimenting with the grey areas of the regulated market, events. At the time there were a few small venues and a couple larger venues to gather, network, and collaborate. There were also emerging challenges with advertising and promotion. As I was not a licensed venue, or plant touching cannabis company, I was able to take risks as a private studio that most plant touching organizations could not. These risks paid off! Not only were we finding new ways to gather around the plant, but we were also building genuine community in this space.
Time and again I opened myself to experiment with podcasts, film, music and comedy guests. We hosted a lot of entrepreneurs, and along that path SESH Creative was born. Full transparency, it was not easy. I have a background in design strategy and marketing with a tool kit to measure and calculate risk and return. However, there is always an unknown factor, right? As we learned from a global pandemic and what is being deemed “the great reshuffle.”
Between 2019 and now, psychedelic therapy was becoming a major topic of conversation amongst the cannabis industry and mental health practitioners in my network. In the vein of experimentation, I wanted to learn more about the experience of psychedelic therapy and push the edge a little.
My first psychedelic experience was when I was 14. I ate a tab of acid and set off on a trip with a couple of my friends. We had no clue what to expect and we were met with some interesting challenges amongst our 10+ hour excursion into our subconscious minds. The hallucinations were strong. I remember, at one point, trying to talk to my mom and feeling like my skin was dripping off my body and creating a puddle on the floor. It was a wild ride and something that turned me on to a different way of thinking and being in the world. I had since favored mushrooms over LSD for the shorter commitment and, for me, mushrooms feel like a warm hug and LSD, depending on where it’s from can feel like your head is being slammed in the truth bucket. To each their own though. Like cannabis, people are going to align with a psychedelic compound that works for them.
In my earlier experiments, substance was approached with a cavalier attitude, and I was open to unexpected consequences. In retrospect, that was reckless behavior, but I wanted to experience life and all its wild offerings. Fast-forward to contemporary psychedelia, we have popular culture and professional research widely available on these subjects. We can be more intentional with our experiences and know that set and setting have a major impact on our journey. I wanted to know what psychedelic therapy was like, and managed to connect with a few practitioners to facilitate talk therapy, a deep dive psychedelic session, and an integration period.
This was the end of 2020, I was experiencing another creative block. Perhaps election years are triggering? Either way, the COVID-19 pandemic had brought up a bunch of internal and external challenges I had been facing. I lost my home and creative studio in the spring of 2020 and was forced to reinvent some processes and ways of being. To process my emotions, I worked with cannabis and mushrooms paired with long form meditations and talk therapy. At the close of the year, I went in deep, 5g psilocybin combined with MDMA to mellow the come up and then later bursts of DMT to revisit the peak sensation and close my experience with gratitude.
My experience was truly an awakening within. I had seen the bond between love and shame deep in my heart and was able to pull them apart and mend that shame void with acceptance. Because I have had several prior experiences with hallucinating and altered states, I was mostly lucid and holding conversations with my facilitator. From time to time the peak cycle would come through and I would breathe through it, sometimes cry, and mostly listen with my heart space. My facilitator, a somatic practitioner, also performed energy and body work through some of the more intense processing moments. This truly was a safe space with music and soft lighting; I could be myself and felt accepted.
I went home and was exhausted. I was advised to take the supplement 5 HTP to mitigate serotonin depletion from interacting with MDMA. I slept for a very long time and when I awoke, I experienced the lightness I had been craving, the afterglow. I was also advised not to make any big changes until 5 or 6 months after the experience, as one might make decisions based on symbology rather than logic. The afterglow effect with this experience is still being integrated into my actions to this day. Because of this great energetic shift, a lot of significant changes occurred without very much prompting. I lost about 40 lbs. of stress and my atrophying relationship ended after 15 years. As a result, I was gifted a fresh start and continue to advocate for myself with a growth mindset rather than a people pleasing or shame-oriented position.
Because I worked on integration for a full year after my experience, I was also able to uncover some real mental and physiological blocks. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t instant. I am still processing new ways of being and approaching life. The biggest takeaway from psychedelic therapy has been how important the integration component of the experience is. It is not enough just to be dunked in the truth bucket, the real work comes from deeply connecting to the source of your wounds and misconceptions so you can modify your environment and behavioral responses to create change.