Weed Healing

It's been a REALLY long time since I've written here, not for lack of exploration, but for excess of distraction and lack of the need to record.

I usually write about the mind/body connection on weed, my physical experiences, etc., but there's something bigger going on, that started when I first started smoking, four years ago.

Weed is a change agent, not only for my body, but for my entire life. It's like learning to kayak, when all there is is rapids. I've got my paddle jammed into the river bottom, because being swept by the rapids, especially in the beginning, promises to be chaotic, frightening, and even painful. And yet, somehow that kayaker senses that if I stop holding on so damn tight, and let the river take me, I can learn to ride the currents, no longer get bruised by the rocks, and really learn to travel (even if that travel is not totally within my control).

If I'm that boater, then the letting go, although recognized as useful, is difficult because every time I hit a rock, my habit is to go "ouch" and grab again for the anchor. It's like when I was a kid, learning to swim, trying to convince myself to peel away from the side of the pool, or like when I bungee-jumped, and, despite my awareness of safety, all the parts of me cried out "NO DON'T JUMP!!!" The jump, of course, was even sweeter, because of my fear.

Of course I'm not talking about full immersion into the weed, deeper immersion into addiction. The term "addiction" is one of those bruising rocks, the freak-out "ohmigod I've become this disease," when I know full well that my relationship to weed is just one more area of "clusminess" in my life, and that when I learn to accept my errors in that realm is when the power diminishes.

What I'm talking about is nothing less than self-dissolution, the systematic wearing-down of who I thought I was, and why I thought I was justified in being me. I honestly (and cerebrally) believe that there is no such thing as a "correct" perspective on the world (check out "What the *&!@# do we know?" for a quantum explanation, or extend Einstein's theory to human behavior for a relativistic one). What we experience of the world is a confab, pieced together from perception (i.e. belief/prism-refracted sensation) and a learned world view. Nothing is "real" because there is no such thing as objective reality. All "reality" is observed, induced, and assumed by living beings, totally absent of true moorings.

Back to my river. What weed offers me (among so many other things), is the chance to loose the moorings just a bit, get jerked out on my anchor's rope a little more, bang against the rocks (with ever-diminishing concussion), and say if I'm not "right," if I don't "know" what's going on, there is more freedom, albeit less certainty. Certainty is comforting, but I don't think I'm going to look back from my death bed and say, "I wish I had more comfort in my life."

The death bed test (as honest and important as any internal criteria that I've ever heard of) brings me to a sweet and sad epiphany. Sad because the epiphany was prompted by the death of an acquaintance, comedian Freddy Soto, at the age of 35 (one year younger than I). But sweet, because I had to ask myself, could I die now? Would I feel monumentally cheated if I realized I was going to die in one hour? I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to begin my life: I'll travel more when I have more money, do this when my career is further along, date more when, love more when, have more friends when, feel more when... But when I asked myself, could I die now, my voice replied "at least you have these last four years. At least you explored, you questioned, you dug and rooted up and wrestled and freaked out but kept going. I've had a really fucking great time over the last four years. I feel larger, inside and out, than I ever thought I could be, and I have more real hope than ever before. That is not the story of "addiction," but of a faustian bargain, where the deal is, your eyes will begin to open, and you can choose to stop from looking further, but you will never never forget what freedom feels like.

And freedom is not escape from others' bonds. It is escape from my own.

I rarely include external material in this blog, but this article from my alma mater seemed too pertinent not to post. There's no mention of weed, nor any reason to believe the athlete uses the substance, but I am convinced that his internal mode is not dissimilar to what I achieve through the use of weed. It really is less about muscle mass or strength, and more about coordination and internal cooperation:

Junior sets world records
McGowan lifts weights with his mind

Author: Tim Jones
Source: W&M News
Date: Mar 23, 2005


On a good day, the William and Mary student’s mind can begin to lift the veil from the cosmos and elucidate even the most elusive matters of particle physics. It can answer, with logical preciseness, some of the most profound quandaries of the world around us.

On other days, it can deadlift more than 400 pounds.

Well, at least junior Andrew McGowan’s mind can. At first glance, McGowan doesn not look like much of world-record-holding weight lifter. He stands a solid 5 feet 8 inches and weighs a mere 165 pounds. Appearance, though, is minor among McGowan’s atypical characteristics. It is his approach—calm, focused and methodical—that is most surprising. And it is his approach that proves the mind is, without at doubt, the strongest muscle in the body.

“A lot of people lift with a very externalized concept of lifting, so they’re thinking about pushing the weight. But it’s almost a meditation for me. I lift with my mind rather than with my body. I’m not a very big guy, but the strength comes from my head. So it’s an exercise in focus,” McGowan said.

Those skeptical of the technique need only look at the results. In his first attempt at setting world records, the 17-year-old McGowan claimed the all-around world record for his age and weight class in the trap bar deadlift, the Steinborn squat, the one-arm snatch (right and left arm) and the two-barbell deadlift. With the exception of the trap bar lift, McGowan did not know he would break any world records. Considering that he had never tried a few of the lifts before that day—including the Steinborn squat, a record he surpassed by 75 pounds—his records came as even more of a surprise. But his Zen-like focus and uncanny internal awareness made up for lack of experience.

“Technique is strength. That’s the one thing about lifting with your mind. There are a lot of guys with stronger muscles, but it’s a matter of how to properly use them,” McGowan said. “Most people are capable of using only somewhere around 25 percent of the potential in the muscle because the connection between the brain and the muscle is not there, so what a competitive weight lifter can do is recruit more muscle fibers.”

Strength gains come through embracing the symbiotic relationship of the mind and body. The key, said McGowan, is simple: Lift heavy with both.

As he pursues a double major in physics and religion—subjects that in a general sense seek the structure of the universe and the meaning of life, respectively—McGowan admits an interest in everything. He is as passionate and enthusiastic about intellectual discovery as he is about weight lifting. He talks about papers as “exciting” and “promising.” Earlier in the semester, McGowan’s father called to ask how an ambitious project tracing the relationship between physics and religion was progressing.

“I told him, ‘Well, if I’m this confused this early in the semester, then it’s got to be great,’” McGowan said. “The greater the confusion for me at the beginning, the better the papers seem to turn out.”

In the same sense, problem-solving for McGowan mirrors a heavy lift. It begins with an overwhelming question, progresses to intense thought and focus, then culminates in a single “leap of intuition.”

“There’s a moment in a heavy lift when I’m really pushing myself. There are these things called sticking points where the bar wants to stop and you can’t let it stop. You’ve just got to keep pushing. There’s that moment that’s just—there’s no time, no space. It’s almost a mystical experience,” he said.

McGowan also teaches yoga at William and Mary. While not a common regimen among record-holding weight lifters, yoga provides yet another way for McGowan to enhance his awareness of the relationship between mind and body. The physical benefits also come in handy during the more complex lifts McGowan is learning, including the bent press, which requires as much flexibility as strength. He likely will hold a world record in that too, come October at the next world all-around weight lifting meet.

Before his next world-records competition, and before he enters his final year at William and Mary in the fall, McGowan plans to spend the summer in China. With the 2008 Olympics set for Beijing, it seems wise for McGowan to become familiar with the country, but he insists that medals are only in the back of his mind. Still, the thought is in his mind, and there is plenty of time to recruit his body.

There is still much study to be done, even though, as he acquires more skills, acquisition becomes easier, McGowan said.

Graduate school awaits, and with it, plenty more heavy loads. What he will study is still a question, maybe philosophy, maybe physics, maybe both. But he will study, and he will train, and it will make him stronger and wiser—perhaps wise enough to re-author the record books someday from beginning to end.


 

Ultra-Chill is the term I have for smoking and doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It's a meditative state wherein I am dancing, but on a microscopic level with extremely low muscle tone. Some evenings, especially after Juice, I love sitting or lying on my futon with the lights out and my iPod on, and disappearing.

There are two basic realms in Ultra-Chill, just as in the rest of my highs. Most of the time I start off in a detail thought realm, introspection about work, my girlfriend, my addiction, my family. After three years of an audio journal and tons of cassette tapes, I finally bought a voice-activated Digital Voice Recorder with a lavalier, so I'm merely documenting my self-therapy dialogue (I do tend to think aloud). I'm still having a hard time letting go of the “obligation” to the recorder, the need to make sense or complete my sentences, but there is an a huge difference if I do. When I have the journalistic need to notate what I'm thinking, it takes the conceptual into the concrete, and my inner-notetaker, the one who sees what happens around me and through me and divines it for MEANING, pulls me back into detail, which is the world of definition.

That thought/detail realm is still good for my body, however, since my brain is experiencing DISTRACTION, one of the top tools for freeing the body. As long as I don't step outside to judge, I can follow the white rabbit of thought, and my body will continue on its own dance, rocking or shaking or shivering to loosen itself up.

The other detail realm is when I listen to sensation. On a more pedestrian level, it's feeling the crick in my neck without trying to do anything about it. With patient listening, the sensation I experience is of the tight painful area dissolving, the knot untying. It's easy to fade back into thought, because the AIM to listen to a very small body part often overwhelms the listening. Still, this careful listening to one area of the body during ultra chill is one of the surest ways to achieve the fluid state.

But the most amazing way into fluid from ultra-chill is when I am no longer seeking out a body part, but listening to ALL available tactile sensation without distinction. The body map, and the sense of distinct body parts laid out in a certain configuration, gives way to a formless storm cloud of roiling energy. The sensation is very similar to that I get from a head rush, standing up too fast, but without any unpleasantness.

This is the part of weed use that I would equate to what I hear is the rush of heroine or speed, a fervent but ecstatic realm where pain is absent, there is no gravity, and nothing is impossible because nothing really exists. I also believe that this is where the healing happens, and what I believe dreams are supposed to be for us.

Like a head rush, I find my mind wants to come back quickly from this fluid realm, and moor itself to my habitual self, just as it's hard not to come back as soon as possible from a Salvia Divinorum trip. But I've come to the conclusion that, with practice, I can stay in that realm almost as long as I want, or until the conclusion of the high.

Last night I went bobsledding on my Ultra-Chill. I was lying down on the futon, lights out, eyes closed, iPod on, and the voice recorder forgotten. I was invited in by some sensation, I think in my facial sinuses, and disappeared. Only a few thoughts remained, and they were: you don't need to come up, you can stay here. Time disappeared with my body, so I don't know how long I remained there, but it felt like the first time ever that I was able to remind myself not to come back.

I discovered that there is the potential of metaphors within that realm. When high, I often feel like my body is too small for me, and last night that sense took the form of feeling enclosed by a box, or draped by a heavy canvas. Then I found a “switch,” a small shift I could make, and then I became the box or the canvas, empty and open, with no sense of imprisonment. Likewise there was a shift I could make from feeling “outside” to feeling “inside.” This was my first exploration with those metaphors, but they felt extremely promising.

Finally, after being totally without a body, I became aware of my eyes again, although they remained largely fluid. I became a mound of body, with two eyes in the center of the mound, two eyes which traveled independently of each other, one left-right while the other up-down or revolving separately. My eyes opened, and my bodymap remained mostly transparent as I watched/invented frenzied and amazingly detailed mandalas crawling across my ceiling from the street lights out my windows. (At a recent ultra-chill, I meditated for minutes on the pulse of blood through a vessel right behind my right eye-ball. My eyes are at the center of one of my favorite areas of discovery, but that's another blog).

After that, my eyes vanished and my jaw blew up, becoming light and expansive. My anus became the sole anatomy while the rest of sensation curled into a cocoon. My throat and lungs had their own desires and dances until my own vocalization woke me back into detail (I have a slight vocalization phobia, due to years of others telling me not to sing). Finally, I stirred, chilled from an hour of total stillness, and moved to my bed, where of course I fell asleep immediately.

I have, from my parents, the misapprehension that doing nothing is wasteful, but my experience tells me that by doing nothing, I am doing one of the best things my body could experience. Dancing and other gross movement continues to be my true love on weed, but ultra chill serves as the perfect counterpoint.

We have not one brain in our head, but two. I believe that the two hemispheres serve not only as emergency back-up to each other, but also serve to create “binocularity” of thought and personality. We all have the fluid / right-brain / creative / imaginative half, as well as the detail / left-brain / logical / literal half. How these two halves complement and balance each other out makes us each unique.

Furthermore, like looking through two out of whack binoculars, where we see a dual image, and one eye is forced to take over, we have to learn to focus this binocularity, so that we enhance the three-dimensionality of our understanding and decision-making and see it as a clear balance that incorporates both sides. Otherwise, having both strong left and right, but un-integrated halves leads to indecision and confusion. Without integration, I get stuck on the realization that seemingly opposite positions are both true at once. With integration, I realize that most truths are like that, and that dualism is the pattern I project on the Universe (if X is right, then -X must be wrong).

When I first smoke (like when I'm sitting out in my car, preparing to go in and go dance), I go through a pattern of fluid and detail that feels like the binoculars trying to achieve focus (the intensification of stimulus and initial disorientation extend the metaphor). I first hit a wave of detail with concurrent nausea, racing pulse and the feeling like my body is shoved into a container a bit too small for it. I think this is the system going through an initial “freak-out” as the body and mind suddenly get drastically more relaxed. If I stay relaxed, the initial wave of detail “conks-out” into a wave of fluid, which is usually my deepest amnesia of the high, when my body gets so relaxed that I have to negotiate with fingers and toes in order to get moving again. By the time I'm on the dance floor, the two sides come together, the hardwood is pliant and welcoming, the available space appears vast, both fear and pain fade, and the distinction between inside and out is irrelevant. I'm in the hybrid clear state.

Later during the high, however, the binoculars start to get out of whack again. I may devolve into a period of detail-heavy self-recrimination (freak-out), or conk-out into a fluid crash. The clear periods resurface again as the three parallel waves of energy, fluid and detail wax and wane, augment and cancel each other out, during the cycles of the smoke.

It's all about freaking out. That is the single least efficient, most wasteful activity; it is the source of muscle pain.

I have a broad definition of freaking out; it's not just what happens when you do too much 'shrooms and watch the surgery channel. It's what we do in everyday situations when we startle or flinch or panic or yell at another driver or have muscles go into spasm. In each case, the reaction is an "uneducated" and inappropriate response to (often sudden or novel) stimulus. By uneducated I mean inefficient, chaotic, and clunky. A running back can get clobbered and dust himself off, but many of us get brushed in the subway and fall to pieces.

My freakouts include (in order of intensity and intractibility):
historic muscle spasms in my lower back, calves, and glutes (and in lesser form in my feet, neck and shoulder muscles, etc.),
intense self-degradation for certain mistakes (humiliation, forgetfulness with consequences, job or money screw-ups, the utterance of anything that later strikes me as arrogant, and more),
a strong negative reaction to blood, surgery, etc. (tho' that is a nausea freak-out, instead of a contraction freak-out, and I think it's a different mechanism),
infrequent road rage (and my usual form of it: road pissiness),
other quick spikes of anger (when feeling cheated, ignored or condescended to),
occasional free-floating irritability (or feelings of being stressed-out),
and more I'm sure I've forgotten or haven't realized yet.

I think freak-outs usually take the form of some violence, but in me at least, that violence is usually self-directed (when I have hit something, it has usually been a wall, which bruises my knuckles only), or unconscious (muscles spasms, stomach aches, etc.).

I believe that all of the above freak-outs come from the same basic mechanism, and I would extend that mechanism to include things we don't usually consider freak-outs, because they are part of everyday life. For example: if a car swerves toward me, I might freeze, hold my breath, and tighten up. Or I stub my toe and the pain is overwhelming. Or I get swept up in jealousy when a girlfriend talks glowingly about another guy. Or I quickly look away when meeting a stranger's eyes. Or if I experience cold as pain. Or responding competitively at others' good fortune. Or becoming xenophobic in the face of hard times. Or leaping to defend my position, to prove I'm right. Even the everyday aches and pains of growing older I attibute to the freak-outs of my body, where muscles fight with muscles instead of cooperating as one system.

I believe that all of these are childhood-programmed responses, a primitive flail or freeze (the inbred cousins of fight or flight), that have outlived their usefulness but still act as if they're there to protect. They are largely, if not entirely unconscious (e.g. most people would disagree with me about stubbing one's toe, but my experience tells me that the intense pain reaction is as much a result of my mental state as my physical state).

What then, is the solution to freaking out?

It's not simple relaxation, because sometimes that leads to the freak out (think of the procrastinator's cycle of let it go, freak out, let it go, freak out, or of a charlie horse in the middle of the night. In fact, when you tell yourself to relax a charlie horse, or if someone commands you to "calm down," it often has the opposite effect).

There is a different kind of relaxation than the one where you command yourself; it is the kind you feel when you focus on your breath. In fact, I believe that gentle loving focus on any internal (or external?) stimulus, (as compared to the kind of skittish focus wherein the stimulus quickly overwhelms the senses and leads to freak out), will lead to this second kind of relaxation. It is not so much a mental discipline that leads to this kind of focus, because discipline usually resides too much in the other realm. It is an act of pleasure, a hedonistic focus that gives rise to this joyous state where there is no or little pain. It is the choice I want to make once I realize that the freak-outs, which define and even spawn most of the pain and anger in my life, are self-created.

Before I mentioned that the perception of physical pain arises when my body does not work as one system. It perceives pain as an invader, and thus fights itself. It's like certain diseases that cause the immune system to attack the body, except we all have that disease, and it's making us older. When we age, we become set in our ways, which means our habits are more rigid, our responses, more brittle, and the freak outs to new or sudden stimulus, more common and intense. Dissolve the habit, calm the freak out, relieve the sense of pain, and slow down (or temprarily reverse) aging.

Later: the opposite phenomenon - the conk-out.

I haven't blogged for a great while, because that only happens at work, and I've been trying to be good. But I'm way ahead today, so...

The "weed multiplier" from the last post was both reality and fantasy. Fantasy because I didn't discover a new "method" to getting higher faster. Like everything else on weed, you don't make it happen, you allow it to.

But my standard dose for going out dancing has been cut in half, with great results. I'm clearer, more socially active, and yet all the cool things happen. I'm probably "out of my head" less, and I miss that, but neither am I stuck "in my head." It's a nice, bright, largely painless in-between state, where I'm still following the whims of the "bodymind," and relaxed, even ignorant, as to the outcome, but where the inner/outer worlds live in better harmony.

Another result, at least from the last couple of weeks, is that more of my time out is spent up, with top-level dance arising from the high. What that means is that usually I'd go in and spend 45 minutes to an hour doing what would be impossible to me sober: one-handed handstands, upside-down spinning, leaping and rolling without impact, etc. Then I'd crash for 5 minutes, be a little less up for 30 minutes, crash for 10 minutes and so on, in a descending entropic sine wave (with brief spikes of hot stuff up to 3 hours later). Lately, however, the crashes have been much shorter, and the quality of the successive highs better.

So what's changed? Again, there is no method, but there are some common through-lines.

Patience is #1: if, later in the high, I don't worry too much about trying to accomplish the trick, but just explore the movement (often through repetition), then suddenly I find myself surpassing my earlier "trick." This is a sign of the crash being mental exhaustion as much as physical; it's my head getting in the way when I tire that makes me try to perform, instead of discover.

Social Awareness: later in my fade, I used to avoid social situations that might challenge my high, like meeting new people, etc. and that's still not as fun when I'm really crashed. But I'm a lot more relaxed about it now, and it's working like the dance has for me thus far: if I don't try to make it happen, it just comes together.

There's more to it than that, but that's sensation, difficult to put into words. But it follows the above ideas and the weed lesson of dynamic chill.

A weed multiplier?

I've managed, twice over the last couple of days, to get very high off of one toke, literally to the point I would expect after 1-2 bowls.

I know I'm prone to superstitious reasoning when I smoke, so I'll try not to get too attached to these results, unless my subsequent experience supports my hypothesis. But it's too cool not to mention, and the result, smoking less but achieving more, is exactly what I want.

This is the difference. Nearly every time I smoke, I feel an initial wave of discomfort and slight nausea immediately after the first toke. Perhaps it's my body's protest against smoke in the lungs, although I prefer to think of it as the high body "standing up," with the infusion of weed. The analogy is to the times I stand up after squatting for awhile, only to find that my feet, ankles, and knees are achey, and that I need a transition period for my circulatory system to catch up. The sensation that follows the first smoke is similar, and the analogy makes me feel better about it, if nothing else.

Usually my response to the discomfort is to ignore it. This contrasts to my high reaction to discomfort, which is to patiently wait and listen to it (in the same way I might try a novel food item with patience and curiousity). The discomfort is (at times) such a barrage of "detail" that it's hard for me to approach it the same way I do when high (i.e. with listening, which is a "fluid" action).

So the difference was, I listened to the first sensations. Literally before I had exhaled, I felt the wave washing over me, but rather than turn or run from it, I said "yes" and let it in. Soon I was feeling the blood in the vessels on the bottom of my feet, coursing through, and following that, the dissolution of flesh and of detail sensation, from my feet up. So it was not just a high, it was a great high, and when I finally remembered the water pipe, I was shocked to see that most of what was in the bowl was still green.

In both cases, I left the pipe at that point, trusting that if I got that high, I wouldn't need much more, and in both cases the high lasted for at least a couple of hours afterward. Nor was this exceptional weed; it was the dregs of what I'd been smoking for the last couple weeks.

Again, two times does not a trend make, and yesterday I pushed through my first smoke, ignoring the first detail wave because I was in a hurry (nor did I have the same results as when I did listen). But the implications for getting more for less (a philosophy I espoused early on, but lost as I became used to smoking more), go far beyond the economic. Obviously, any less damage to my lungs and nervous system are very appreciated, as well as the possibility of lighter hangovers, more modest amnesias, etc. Plus, my desire now really is to find more and more balance with the weed, and if I can't do that by smoking less often, maybe I can smoke less each time instead.