I continued my hapé practice throughout the retreat weekend, sitting either in the tea room or in the classroom space during the breaks. After the changa ceremony on Saturday, February 10th, I went into the tea room to do my sit and Jess was there. She looked like she was trying to pull herself together and had come there to be alone. I may have thought briefly of doing my sit somewhere else, but I stayed, reasoning perhaps that she wasn’t asking me to leave and I’d just be sitting there, head down, eyes closed.
Jess had been in a small group with me for a space-holding exercise earlier that day. If I recall, she’d asked the group to (mentally) hold her with love and to regard her as beautiful. So that’s what I did during that hapé sit. Then the group joined us in the tea room for the evening’s closing circle.
Early the next morning at my lodging (I stayed with local friends) I sat with hapé and cannabis. I remember thinking about my mother – she was born in the Bay Area – the redwoods and the fog and the morning birdsong – and had a good cry.
Why did I do it? Intuition? Integrating the changa experience? To process more grief?
I believe I first tried the hapé-cannabis combo on October 28th, 2023. I texted my PSIP therapist the next day. We’d concluded our work together with a 4-ACO-DMT assisted session on October 19th. I said “I sat with hapé yesterday immediately after a 90 min cannabis + 100mg ket meditation and…wow was it powerful….”
I’d experimented a lot with it in the following months, mostly weekly, but in the month or so before the retreat I did it daily, in the morning, for maybe seven to ten days straight (without the ketamine), playing with the timing of the combo. It’s certainly not something I’d recommend to everyone, but it helped me move a lot of energy, and when I sit with it now – much less frequently – nothing much happens.
It’s probably essential to have a solid somatic pathway established in one’s system – the capacity to tolerate a lot of activation – things like sobbing, trembling and other autonomic movements and sensations – and an internalized sense of relational connection – the ability to “hold” and “be with” one’s experience. In the PSIP work they say that cannabis helps to “crack” dissociation and bring body sensation online. The way I like to describe the process is: if the nervous system is like plumbing…the cannabis loosens the crud stuck to the pipes, and then the hapé comes in to flush it through. Psychedelically – if that’s the right term – it can give you massive bang for the buck. You can let go of a lot in a short period of time, without the challenges – legal, physical, and whatnot – that come with other medicines. But establishing that somatic pathway is hard work and I probably could not have done it without the support of my PSIP therapist.
Anyway I finished my sit on my friend’s deck in Oakland and an hour or two later one of my cohort-mates picked me up and we went to the retreat breakfast. Back in March, when I was possibly prepping for a lawsuit around all this, I wrote this account of that morning:
We arrived at the Wat Mongkolratanaram Thai temple in Berkeley around 10am. I was still a bit stoned, had no cash, and the token system for purchasing food was unfamiliar. I joked about needing someone to help me figure it out. While I was mildly overwhelmed by the situation, the social milieu, the token system, and the diverse food offerings, I would not say that I was especially high, and certainly not impaired. I enjoyed a breakfast of fried chicken and sticky rice.
At one point after breakfast, while still at the temple, Shankin approached me and pointed to a group of people sitting on the ground in a circle. “Those are the cool kids,” he said. “Go tell them there’s only two genders.” He made a couple more jokes along these lines, a theme that might be described as “triggering things to say to a group of Bay Area leftists.” I joked that I would tell them I was a fan of Jordan Peterson. He pulled me aside and told me that I’d “freaked people out” by expressing my affection for Peterson in the signal group back on September 5th. He confessed that he agreed with some of Peterson’s ideas, appreciated Akira the Don’s remixes of Peterson’s talks, and wished that the conversation around these things was less polarized.
We probably arrived back at the Alembic around 11:30 or 12. The “integration circle” began shortly thereafter and lasted for about three hours.
I’ll add a quick word about the Jordan Peterson thing. It’s curious that people got freaked out behind the scenes when I said that I’d found his work helpful. I’ll likely write more about this later when I discuss my experience in the program between October and February. For now I’ll just say that, even if you think Peterson is the devil himself, freaking out about him in the context of psychedelic integration is…I don’t know…ironically reactionary? Peterson has spoken about his personal psilocybin experiences, and written extensively about the bible – I think I remember him positing a theory that the Book of Revelation is a mushroom vision – world mythology, Jung, alchemy…all things that would hypothetically be of interest and at least worth discussing on the topic of psychedelic integration.
Anyway, I guess the last thing to say for the purpose of this post is that, during the course of the three hour integration circle, I disclosed that I’d been stoned that morning, in a reflection on someone else’s share, expressing appreciation to the woman who’d helped me navigate breakfast at the temple. I didn’t think much of it. I guess I felt safe and didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. (The day before, another cohort-mate had apologized to me for being quiet in a discussion that we’d had on Friday. He’d been stoned, he said.) Nobody expressed any concern. By the time the poem encounter happened, roughly seven hours had passed since I’d smoked the cannabis.
At another point during that weekend, it may have been after the poem incident on Sunday, Robin Alexandra said to me something like “you seem to really enjoy working with the hapé.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “It’s been amazing.”
“I’m so glad you have that practice,” she said.