Julian recounts the wild and touching journey of four close friends in a self-directed spiritual group therapy session—super high on Ecstasy.Content Warning: this story includes accounts of traumatic events.
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I had a favorite guided relaxation, non-dual awareness recording by a teacher I knew who was in his late 60s.
He had been with Rajneesh in the 80s.
He called himself an aware-apist.
So we started off lying down, fireplace crackling, lights dimmed, listening to Bernie's soothing voice as we waited for the pure MDMA capsules we had ritually swallowed together to kick in.
You are a center of pure awareness with no separation between you and the world.
When you see a flower, you are that flower.
Each moment is an opportunity to be filled with love and light.
There is no need to make life happen.
Life is already living through you, breathing you into existence right now.
Just be the witness who observes the play of reality with a soft smile.
It starts with this incredible tingling surge of pleasurable warmth.
It's like all your muscles relax simultaneously and a sense of everything being perfectly okay, beautiful and pleasurable washes over the whole world.
Really being tuned in to your body and deeply relaxed is a perfect entry point.
The first thought I would always have once it started to take effect was, why don't I do this all the time?
And then This is really just not a drug.
It's something else.
It's being more in touch with our true selves.
On opening my eyes, everything was softly radiant and appealing.
As always, I had a mixtape prepared with my favorite dreamy ambient music sequenced carefully to support the journey.
Once the drug had taken effect, the first 45 minutes or so was always magical, revelatory, appropriately enough, ecstatic.
Smoothly we climbed toward a peak.
It was the strategy amongst those who did this kind of medicine work to take another half dose at around 90 minutes after the first dose.
So, as you might be starting to imagine, we were very, very high for at least four hours before the slow descent into a more ordinary state of consciousness began.
Within the first 10 minutes after sitting up from the deep relaxation, Billy suggested we get naked.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
But that's not where this is going.
It was more of a Garden of Eden than a Temple of Caligula.
Utopian.
Earnest.
Innocent.
Definitely not a group sex party.
We took turns having the others hold space as we explored what we had prepared during our six months of identifying and sharing what we wanted to work on.
Billy went right in.
He wanted to resolve the trauma of his mother's suicide.
He knew that it had created fear of really loving a woman deeply.
He sat up tall in meditation posture, his piercing blue eyes now containing enormous black pupils, and then filling with tears as he talked to his mother, as he called on her to be there for him, told her sobbingly how much he had wished she was there for so long, cursed at her with frothing spit gathering at the corners of his mouth in red-faced rage, Fuck you for abandoning me.
I was just a little boy.
I needed you.
We empathized and sighed and bore witness to his catharsis.
One of our pre-arranged rituals was to use these chimes to anchor moments of breakthrough or insight.
It was really just a little wooden base on which rested three silver cylinders of slightly different lengths alongside one another and then a striking stick with a little knob at one end.
Each cylinder produced a different resonant tone when struck.
Bong, bong, bong.
I needed you.
We all recited in chorus after Billy had said it.
Then he got really calm and closed his eyes.
I forgive you, Mom.
I forgive you for being the one I chose to teach me the lesson that who I truly am can never be abandoned so I can wake up in this lifetime and remember This part of his belief system always rang false to me.
But I loved Billy and this time I could let it be how he needed it to be.
Bong, bong, bong.
We fumbled around a bit with which part to recite and then settled on, I want to remember who I am.
Bong, bong, bong.
Billy grinned and opened his eyes, resting his piercing gaze upon me.
And I forgive you, Julian, for being the one I have chosen through multiple lifetimes to teach me to trust myself by telling me I am wrong.
