3 Powerful Lessons Plant Medicine Can Teach Us About Life

Psychedelics make you a better human, period

Despite the resurgence in clinical research and mainstream media coverage, psychedelics are still a fairly controversial topic.

In my belief, the controversies largely stem from misinformation or lack of knowledge. Psychedelic literacy will be instrumental in accelerating the paradigm shift around mental health that is ahead of us.

Plant medicines and other psychedelics have improved the quality of my life as drastically as very few other things (which I can count on one hand). I know they can and will help a lot of people, but for that to happen, we need to explore, educate and experiment.

It Was A Combination Of Curiosity And Desperation That Led Me To Discover Psychedelics

I became interested in psychedelics around three years ago. Being immersed in the mindfulness and meditation space before that, the topic of consciousness had already sparked my interest previously.

After educating myself on psychedelics, I was hopeful that they would help me heal my eating disorder, depression, and other compulsive behaviors none of which seemed to improve through conventional treatment.

Before I touched a single psychedelic drug, I spent around a year absorbing all the resources I could get my hands on, both from credible researchers and cultural leaders. I learned about various first-hand accounts before diving into the first psychedelic experience myself.

Within the broader group of psychedelics, the most common psychoactive substances are LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ayahuasca (a DMT-containing brew made from two different Amazonians plants), mescaline (contained e.g. in Peyote cacti or in San Pedro), and several others. I have journeyed with the first three, but for the sake of this article will refer to “plant medicines” to bundle all naturally occurring psychedelics. There are also several other synthetic psychedelics in addition to LSD, such as MDMA.

Below I’m sharing the three main learnings that have been a common theme through all of my psychedelic journeys over the past two years.

Lesson #1: The Way We Perceive Our Reality Is Only One Way To Perceive Reality

When we have a psychedelic experience, our sense perceptions change. The way we feel, what we see and hear, and how we think are altered.

One may even have a powerful mystical experience. But even looking at hallucinogenic effects as “simple” as perceiving the grass on the ground to be breathing, or seeing energetic fields around objects in nature or people — it makes you think:

Is what I’m seeing during a trip not real, or do I simply not have the capacity to fully perceive what is real during my normal waking consciousness?

There’s no way to definitively answer this question, we simply don't know. But I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I do not believe that what I see, feel, hear under the effects of psychedelics is contained in the physical substance itself.

Rather, I believe that we have our five senses, and a brain with a certain capacity, which we’re not even able to fully leverage in our regular states of consciousness. Many of the most fundamental physical concepts, such as the fact that we all consist entirely of energy, are scientifically proven but cannot be perceived with our raw eyes. I believe that our five senses act as a filter, in order for us to be able to process the information we absorb from the world around us with the machine we’re equipped with, our brain.

Psychedelics have taught me that what I perceive is not necessarily all there is, since taking a substance that only slightly changes my brain chemistry can so drastically change what I perceive.

Lesson #2: Practicing Unconditional Love Towards Ourselves And Others Is The Great Task Of Our Lives

The topic of love is an underlying theme that without a doubt comes up in all of my psychedelic experiences. Every single time.

I’m not alone, this is the case for many. The stereotypes are true. Let’s just think of the 70s hippie sub-culture, they all wanted love and peace — and so do I, ever since becoming a psychonaut.

Psychedelic journeys have been incredibly healing for me because I desperately needed to reconnect with the feeling of love after numbing myself for years, living a life disconnected from myself and others.

There are different ways the theme of love may emerge during a psychedelic journey in many different ways. For some, it’s the full-body experience of euphoria they physically feel as psychoactive effects peak during their trip. For those who journey with other people, it may be looking at the person next to you and simply realizing you feel nothing but love for that person in this very moment. Psychedelic experiences are always entirely free of judgment.

They may bring to light all— or some — of the barriers we build up against experiencing love, such as anger, hatred, jealousy, resentment, or greed. If these emotions come up during a trip, they only come up for you to recognize that they are a construct of your mind that is neither real nor helpful.

What’s real is that we are all loving beings, and that love will always be the primary binding force that connects us to each other.

So many of us are struggling with self-acceptance and strive for the inner freedom that comes along with it, but we don’t know how to get to it. I’ve personally spent the majority of my 20s trying to learn to accept and love myself, and despite years of therapy, hundreds of yoga classes, and daily positive affirmations — I never got there. Enter plant medicine.

Psychedelics can move us from the space of knowing that we should fully accept and love ourselves to showing us how. They remove the need to try and strive for acceptance, and instead they remind us of an inner knowing that’s always been there:

We already have all it takes to love ourselves — and every other human being on the planet too, for that matter.

The experience of love during psychedelic journeys is not limited to other people or yourself, but also usually extends to nature. Many psychonauts report feeling a deep appreciation and awe towards it.

During my most difficult psychedelic experience, I re-lived a traumatic memory during a painful Ayahuasca ceremony. My shaman was carefully observing the pain I was going through and instructed me to “ask the plants for help” if I needed to.

And so I did. I asked the plant medicine to help me to forgive and show me how to love again.

What happened next is the most transcendental moment of my life: I was led outside under the star-filled sky, and, laying down, with one long, deep inhale, breathed in “love from the universe” that poured through the stars right into my heart.

This magical moment was followed by the realization that there is always more where this came from. We scientifically know the universe is abundant, infinite, and expanding.

My heart has been “full” ever since.

Lesson #3: It’s True What The Yogis Say, We Really Are All “One”

At higher doses that allow us to access “altered states of consciousness”, that’s where the real magic happens.

That’s when we transcend the purely entertaining effects of altered sensory perception and experience full-blown ego dissolution.

What’s that you ask?

Your perception as an individual “Self” dissolves, and instead, you experience “oneness” with the universe. As you can imagine, it’s pretty hard to explain what that feels like, so I won’t even bother. This type of experience has infinite expressions and is experienced by everyone differently.

Famous LSD psychiatrist Dr. Stanislaf Grof explains this phenomenon through his analogy of “the holotropic mind”. Just like in a holograph, in which every individual light beam contains the information to recreate the entire holographic image, our minds are holotropic in a sense that the entirety of consciousness is accessible to everyone who has a conscious mind.

“We are not a drop in the universe, we are a universe in a drop.” — Rumi

I know this is hard to grasp if you haven’t experienced it. But this has probably been the most profound teaching for me personally, and a fundamental shift in how I view the world around me.

When you’ve had multiple psychedelic journeys with different compounds that all teach you the same one thing, and you experience the same insight without substances through breathwork and meditation, it becomes very hard to ignore the possibility that the separation created by our egos is an illusionary construct that simply does not reflect reality.

The realization — or for skeptics, adoption of the belief system — that we are truly all one has made me a much, much, much better person. Rather than feeling better or worse than others all the time, I feel a sense of belonging, to both humanity and nature, that is incredibly comforting and humbling. And last but not least, it has undoubtedly made me a better citizen of this planet. Because when you feel that you and the nature around you are at one, you treat it with much more love and respect.

The Best Thing About Working With Psychedelics Is That Learning Is Experiential

These three lessons have trickled their way from being recurring themes during my trips into being recurring themes in my life.

They have challenged my belief system, replaced limiting thought patterns, and made me a happier, healthier, and more connected human.

The best thing about working with psychedelic medicine is that learning is experiential. It’s not some abstract theory you read in a book and choose to believe or not. Some monologue from a self-help guru that you objectively judge to be helpful and true, but seem to forget as soon as things get tough.

You experience these teachings personally and vividly, and as a result, you get to decide firsthand how you want to interpret them.

Finally, I believe that — if approached with intention— it’s very hard to walk away from psychedelic journeys without some sort of profound mindset shift.

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