Boop.

A headspinner about psychedelic therapy, spiritual warfare, and what we might do next.

Like many of you, I’m obsessed with the show Shrinking, about three therapists in private practice played by Jason Segel, Jessica Williams, Harrison Ford (their chemistry is as electric and fun as you can imagine), and the patients/people in their world (hint: the line gets real blurry between patients and people).

Ok, if you haven’t seen it yet, skip to the arrow past this spoiler:

One of Jason’s (aka Jimmy’s) patients is a woman who can’t extricate herself from a verbally abusive relationship. If she can’t leave, Jimmy counsels Grace, maybe she can shift the terms of that relationship, starting with a little nudge. He complains about the coffee you made him? Flick that coffee cup right off the kitchen table with a little *boop.* A shift in the power dynamic can be that subtle. It doesn’t have to be an armed revolution.

Grace finally finds a moment to boop her abusive partner. It’s just that it happens to be when they are hiking, and he is standing on the edge of a cliff, in the middle of a scorching rant at her…and it is not a cup of coffee that she boops, but him: right off the cliff.

BOOP.

Photo by kaleb tapp on Unsplash

I had one of the most magical God-dates of my life this past week, at a 5-day ketamine assisted therapy (KAP) training program in Portland for spiritually-oriented leaders.

It was the most love-festy week of church camp EVAR combined with powerful intellectual, emotional and experiential learning. For those who don’t know, ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic (if you’ve ever had general anesthesia, you’ve likely had ketamine in the mix) that in other doses and settings can act like a psychedelic and be used for treatment-resistant depression and other disorders.

It’s also totally legal in all 50 states, as long as you’re working with a legit prescriber (doc, NP, PA). [For a bit more about ketamine, see the p.s. at the end of this piece]

There were 5 incredible teachers and 24 trainees: 2 pastors, 2 chaplains, a nurse and 2 doctors. The rest of us were working therapists.

[Excursus: Gosh I love spending time with therapists. I learn so much. And am so de-cynicized about people. Here’s a secret: if you are in therapy, your therapist REALLY loves you. At least the ones I met do. They told me at the water cooler. They’re genuinely interested in helping you feel better. You’re not annoying to them. They want you to do hard work, good work. Work that only you can do. And as long as you’re willing, they’ll help.

Also, please remember what day and time your appointment is. There are apps for that. They are not your Mom. And you’re not a teenager. Well, maybe you are, but there are still apps for that. Consider it an invitation to practice autonomy and better executive functioning.]

In between mini-worship and learning and art and movement exercises, we all took turns taking ketamine and supporting other people in their medicine experiences (e.g. practicing psychedelic guiding). It was deeply tender, vulnerable, transformational, holy work. Weeping, wild laughter, shadow-boxing, channeling, screaming, reckoning with other dimensions and ego-death, the end of everything and the beginning again.

Suffice to say: I’ve been BOOPED bigtime, right off a cliff. Some of the descent was bumpy. But I had the softest landing imaginable, into the arms of my comrades, each with their own unique wisdom, warmth and wounds that they put into the service of others, á la Henri Nouwen.

It was hard to think of leaving that space. To give you an idea of what it really felt like, one of my church members is a lactation consultant, and when she talks about what her group work is like, she visibly expands and glows. “Can you imagine just being with all that oxytocin?” she says. It was like that. I was in the basement of a retreat center for 5 long days with a bunch of nursing mothers.

Also quite significantly: for 5 days I didn’t read the news (and what a 5 days God picked for me to miss it). But coming back, there it all was on the phone I had broken my addiction to: Pete Hegseth. RFK Jr. Workplace raids. And the ultimate betrayal, gutting billions in grant funding for a zillion programs that keep our country and the world from experiencing even more suffering, pain and chaos than it does already.

Too much abuse for a *boop* to correct, right? Maybe if you are federal judge or a civil servant who can afford to stay in a hostile workplace. But where’s the *boop* for the rest of us?

I was pretty intentional about easing into the world my first day back. I had an early appointment with my surgeon (total hip replacement surgery on the docket next week! Expect some posts as I’m laid up!), and decided to ignore my overflowing inbox a little longer and go for a walk in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

Home of Eternity. I finally found it! Above a blank sandwichboard. How feisty.

It’s never a bad idea, when you don’t know what to think or how you feel, to go for a walk in a cemetery. Well, not if you’re feeling actively suicidal. But if you’re emotionally safe enough, it’s very clarifying. Especially if you’ve recently spent time in a pretty shocking spiritual place, exposed to death or the Here-After or just had your reckoning with reality seriously messed with. Go while the brain is still plastic, before it cools and hardens.

Walking with the dead will not only make you feel grateful to be alive, it will also remind you that we’re all only here for a little while, and what we do matters. It will ALSO ping you that in the grand sweep of history, the most any of us can manage in our impact on human civilization is a humble little *boop.*

That takes some of the pressure off this moment. What to do, Is it enough, Getting it right, Being on the side of good and not evil, when it seems like we are pawns getting played in a massive game of spiritual warfare.

Everywhere I walked was full of wonders. The ketamine or my new community (likely both) had exfoliated the gray film off of the world.

Cheeky photo from Mountain View – a curly-headed angel with a stone book on its lap, stone stars on its chest, and a single real red apple on its knee that I did *not* put there. Calling all angels!

The other thing being in a cemetery can do is remind us of what Heaven looks like, should we be lucky enough to believe in some kind of conscious communion in the Here-After. Even a liberal intellectual place like Berkeley/Oakland once redlined Black people into kettled neighborhoods, incarcerated Japanese-Americans in open-air prisons, and functionally enslaved new Chinese immigrants for decades.

But in death, those lines are erased. We share one turf. There’s no segregation in a cemetery–at least not this one.

Two souls, one grave. Wilber Wei Liu, beloved husband, father, grandfather, 1925-2021. Mary E. Matthews, Mother, 1853-1946

All those souls, folded together into one batter, a cake of mourning and celebration. A wide range of religions and races. 94-year-olds with a host of heirs. Four-year-olds deeply mourned by their parents. A surprising number of people who died in their 20s, 30s and 40s…or maybe not that surprising given advances in science (Future Secretary of Health and Human Services, hear our prayer!)

As I walked, sounds of children playing rose up from a schoolyard in the canyon below, appropriately heedless of what lay before them. Their song mingled with the strong pull of all those who had passed on. I stood between the worlds, as I had just two days earlier on ketamine.

It hadn’t been my intention to experience ego-death in one of my medicine sessions. It just kind of happened, and it was, frankly, hard. But I came back. And now, because of that:

The volume dial on my “it’s fricking amazing to be alive in a human body!” is turned up to 11, and

I can believe in almost anything these days, but I can’t believe in Nothing. Ever again.

I walked to the top of the steep hillside toward the newest part of the cemetery, passing porta-potties and pick up trucks, moving through the open gate of the construction fence at the peak because nobody was there to tell me I couldn’t. Into the Here Be Dragons part of the map. The blank space that will someday house the earthly forms of souls currently walking around down below.

Me, not booping myself off a cliff, and the panorama of Mountain View with SF, Marin and the Golden Gate Bridge deep in the background.

As I stood on a little cliff, I thought back to the end of my second medicine experience, and a conversation I had with my friend Rob as I was coming back into the world. I had been to a very bleak place, and from there had moved to a beautiful place. That’s all I want to say about that. It made me philosophical.

“What a fucking gem, a rare gem, this planet is. It’s SO beautiful, and it gives us so much, and asks so little–just that we enjoy it and not ruin it. And we can’t even do that. The billionaires building their bunkers: do they fucking know what life in a bunker is going to be like, when almost everybody else is dead? And Elon Musk on Mars? Why would you want to live on fucking MARS when you could have EARTH?

“What if Trump is the Grand Executioner we hired to deliver the coup de grâce? To hasten our own demise? And if he is, why do we want THAT instead of fixing THIS?”

I’m sorry to say all that out loud to you. I know I’m a Pollyanna by nature and profession, but I also have Doomsday in my title, and I figure it’s better to acknowledge what’s swirling in my own depths and maybe yours. Naming it aloud is the only way to release ourselves from the fear of that potential reality (and it’s only potential).

That which we can’t speak about becomes our God in place of God. That which cannot be named grips us, robs us of agency, paralyzes future possibilities.

When we give in to the God of Fear, and let that god paralyze us, we miss chance at the cute little *boop* that might change everything. Remember Road Runner, whose MO was stepping out of the way at the last second, leaving Wile E. Coyote to plunge off the cliff himself and into the trap he had set below? One simple little step to the side changed everything. A kind of reverse-boop.

My medicine mind meandered on and I said to Rob, “Maybe the revolution isn’t going to require a counterforce of equal size, and widespread destruction, collateral damage. Maybe, like in martial arts, if we just attend, stay balanced and rooted, we’ll know when and how to *boop.*”

Steve, one of my teachers from this past week, reminded us of the extinction burst: the “temporary increase in unwanted behavior that occurs when the reward for the behavior is removed. It’s part of the process of extinction, which is when a behavior goes away after it’s no longer reinforced.”

Maybe it is the humans who will go extinct, and not the bad behavior. But maybe-just-maybe we are on the cusp of a new reality, a new “co-creation” as my mentor Harvey puts it, and what we are witnessing is the last gasp of the Self-and-Other-Sabotaging Fearmongering Force of Destruction ™ that calls itself God.

Watch and wait for your *boop,* Loves.

(but don’t literally push anyone off a cliff. That goes without saying).

Yours,

Molly

Spring is coming. Magnolia in bloom in front of a small Gothic chapel at Mountain View Cemetery.

~

PS: Ketamine is legal as an adjunct to therapy or therapy all by itself in all 50 states, as long as you have a prescriber. I don’t recommend doing it alone. Get a guide, someone who won’t leave you alone with it. It’s a wily molecule, much less straightforward and gentle than psilocybin in my limited experience. It’s more accessible and affordable to more people, which is good (insurance will even pay for it in some cases), but word on the street is a lot of KAP clinics just want to take your money and aren’t really treating you with tenderness or trauma-informed care. If you know you’re ready to do some KAP, I recommend with my highest stamp of approval the stellar folks who ran my training: Polaris Insight Center in SF (Harvey, Eric, Veronica) and Dr. Steve Rosonke at Rainfall Medicine in Portland OR.

Also it kind of pisses me off that ketamine, which actually can be addictive, is legal because of a technicality when psilocybin mushrooms, which are not addictive, are still illegal and very taboo in people’s minds…but that’s our health care business system.

And if you’re thinking “Ketamine! Eek! Look at Matthew Perry!,” it’s been well established that he died by drowning, not by ketamine overdose. He had a known history of addictive behavior, was being prescribed it by totally unscrupulous and predatory people, and took it alone. Rest In Peace, brother Matthew.