How to Change Your Mind

molly is going back to college this fall!

A while ago I dangled some bait in this here newsletter that I had some *big news* coming, and I’m finally ready to share it. 

No, I’m not running off to join the circus. Well actually kind of, while keeping my day job. Enhancing my day job, let’s say.

Photo by William Fitzgibbon on Unsplash

I’m going back to college! Specifically: to get a certificate in psychedelic-assisted therapy from the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. I’m going to learn the skills and ethics necessary to sit with people using psilocybin (magic mushrooms) as well as other “empathogens and entheogens” for self-healing. 

What does a psychedelic chaplain/therapist actually do? I thought you’d never ask. Three main things:

• they help people ready themselves to use these medicines (addressing medical or emotional concerns & forming intentions),

• provide safe space, sit with them and support them emotionally and physically through the experience (“setting”)

• and: a day or more after the experience, help them integrate what came up for them (including addressing any negative experiences or “bad trips” while taking the medicine).

With attention to set, setting and integration, as the terminology goes, people can do deep soul work, heal themselves, and re-wire their brains for good.

You’ve probably heard about the renaissance in using psychedelics for healing from a variety of conditions including:

treatment-resistant depression, substance use disorder including alcoholism and smoking cessation, intractable grief, end-of-life issues, PTSD and more. They’re even running experiments with psilocybin to heal long COVID!

Maybe you read Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind when it first came out 5 years ago. Or seen his Netflix show. Or watched Fantastic Fungi. Or have had a friend or family member come out to you as having microdosed for mood, or tried ketamine or magic mushrooms under the care of a therapist to address longstanding mental health struggles. Suddenly mushrooms are everywhere.

The psychedelic revolution is poised to hit the mainstream, 50+ years after promising research was halted because a few unethical leaders like Timothy Leary* ruined it for everyone. [*it wasn’t just Leary’s fault. The Nixon administration vilified and criminalized use of psychedelics in a concerted campaign–who needs consciousness-raising when there’s an unpopular war to find soldiers for?]

You might think I’ve gone mad hippie. You’re not wrong. But that’s not how it started for me. 

When I read Michael Pollan’s book 5 years ago, I wasn’t initially moved by the promise of consciousness raising, greater creativity, empathy or enhanced well-being for people who were already functioning decently. Instead, I felt something much more basic: hope for the hopeless. 

One of my chief reasons for going into ministry (besides the obvious “God told me to”) is because I love, no–I need to have a front row seat to human transformation. And I have probably seen more than my fair share of it. But here in year 25 of parish ministry, I still work with far too many people who are suffering and stuck in pernicious and debilitating patterns that nothing seems to shift. 

My middling counseling skills don’t help them very much. Prayer doesn’t help. Church attendance, even at a pretty good church that manages to bring people to “collective effervescence” on a semi-regular basis, doesn’t help. Their SSRIs or other prescription drugs might mitigate the worst of the symptoms, but they sure don’t cure the underlying conditions of: depression, despair, disorientation in an increasingly chaotic and fragile world. 

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

And more and more of us are finding ourselves at Camp Hopeless, not just the particularly sensitive or vulnerable folk. As Matt Haig said in his wonderful book Reasons to Stay Alive, depression is actually a normal response to abnormal conditions, our ancient mood system colliding with the “highly novel operating environment” that homo sapiens has created. 

In other words: our brains haven’t evolved to keep up with the world we have created (and the world we are also destroying). 

Whether it’s climate grief, old-fashioned biochemical depression, family systems crud, epigenetic trauma, addiction, or a swirl of all of the above, a lot of us are having a really hard time. We need solutions. And they don’t have to be novel. There is ancient wisdom and medicine we can resurrect, with respect.

Last summer I met a dear soul, an Episcopal priest improbably named Hunt Priest. If he sounds like a character from a historical novel, I assure you he is very real. He was speaking at a workshop on Christianity and psychedelics at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. Hunt founded an organization called Ligare, A Christian Psychedelic Society. [I love that he named it “A Christian psychedelic society”–not The Christian Psychedelic Society. As if he expects it not to be the only one. So humble!]

He talked about what the science is showing so far, and in particular how even a one-time high-dose experience of psilocybin, with attention to set & setting and accompanied by a good guide, can be as efficacious as years of talk therapy. 

When the talk ended, a man asked him, “isn’t it cheating, to use psychedelics for healing instead of going to therapy and doing the work?” 

Hunt answered simply, “Isn’t life hard enough? Why would we make people take longer to find relief?” 

The man’s question struck me as laced with a particularly Puritan kind of theology–the idea that there is virtue in “doing the hard work.” But who’s to say that going on a psychedelic journey, and doing the integration work afterward, is not work? (I’ve practiced with plant medicine myself so I can be a more credible and experienced guide, and let-me-tell-you it is still hard work. More on that in a future missive). 

Maybe a dozen or so times in my life, God has been abrupt and absolute with me: “this is the next thing I want you to do.” And five years ago, when I publicly preached this sermon to my congregation (see sermon text at the end for you who would rather read than listen), God was privately telling me this was what She had in mind next.

Here’s a snippet of what I said in the sermon: 

It took me five years to actually get around to getting this training, because reasons. 

I had kids in the house who wouldn’t understand this was not just about “Mom doing drugs.” Also: having to hustle at work to minister through a global pandemic, a campus rebuild after fire, a capital campaign and more. 

Also: a little bit of anxiety, maybe more than a little. I tried psychedelics in college, and didn’t have a bad trip, but wondered: am I too old to crank open my brain in this way? What if the medicine showed me something I couldn’t unsee? I was not naive enough to think I could just learn about entheogens clinically, theoretically, and then ask people in my care to do what I was not willing to do myself. I had to have some first-person experience. 

One of the gifts that came between my epiphany and now, counterintuitively, was my own bad romance with depression. God didn’t send that disaster, but God is using it. It cracked me open to try microdosing psilocybin–taking a minute dose of powdered mushrooms every few days, small enough that I felt no psychoactive effects. Microdosing gave me clarity and focus and energy. It made me feel like me again. 

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

I’m changing, and not just my mind. I’m calmer and quieter than I was 5 (or 10 or 20) years ago. More interior. More introverted. Less concerned about, oh, everything. Less jealous (a lifelong vice), less controlling. I’m not quite ready to assume crone status, but I do imagine myself someday wearing multicolored caftans, burning a little incense, making my yurt beautiful and welcoming for the next guest or group seeking out healing and the More that William James speaks of. 

Starting this September I’ll undergo 200 hours of classroom learning, plus homework, mentoring and a research project. My hope, when I’ve finished, is that I will be able to put these skills into my pastor’s toolbox, working 1:1 and in groups with people in my congregation (and a few outside of it) through already legal means to altering consciousness, like high-dose cannabis and holotropic breathwork, until the FDA or Congress approve psilocybin and other medicines for therapeutic purposes. 

I can’t wait to begin. In a really gentle, beautiful and deeply good experience of psilocybin I had a while ago, this epiphany came to me: what I want for my life, for the rest of my life, is: to help other people feel glad to be alive.

Ask me anything in the comments section! I love to talk about this stuff, and if I don’t have an answer, we’ll learn together. 

And oh, if you have any caftans lying around that you aren’t using…send them my way. 

The Sermon aka Theological Rationale for All This Hippie Stuff: 

from July 18, 2018 @ First Church Berkeley UCC

I am calling this sermon “How to Change Your Mind,” after the new book by Cal professor Michael Pollan which just blew mine, and as a cheeky update on the scripture from Romans you just heard. What I really wish I could preach about is how to change other people’s minds, but despite working hard at it both personally and professionally for last 48 years, I’ve decided that Dr. Phil was right all along: the only mind I can change is my own. And even that is a dubious proposition, going by the prejudices the dog me, the bad habits I can’t seem to let go, and the myths I still stubbornly live by.

As for the other minds I want to change, they may not be the ones you would think. Yes I wish Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would wise up, but I suspect it’s their hearts that need changing, or breaking, more than their minds. When it comes to minds, the ones I wish I could change are of some of those closest to me, people I love who suffer from illnesses of the mind, including addiction, and treatment-resistant depression, and other mental health issues. As a pastor, it is galling to me that some of the people who most need help I am least able to do much for, other than listen, comfort and pray. And the mental health industry doesn’t seem to be able to do much for them, either. There are some wonderful success stories, of people who have healed in triumph from the chronic pain of trauma, or addiction, or whose meds really work for them. But there are scads of others who can’t afford treatment, or who are misdiagnosed, or overmedicated, or undermedicated, or incarcerated, or just plain thrown away.

So imagine my joy when I picked up Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind, subtitled “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.” Thesis: promising research shows that, in controlled settings led by a trained clinician, and often with a single high dose, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, XTC and other drugs can heal trauma survivors, help alcoholics and addicts get and stay sober, release terminal cancer patients from their fear of dying, and more. Pollan tells story after story: a young man with cancer who was able to die joyfully, a lifelong smoker who returned from an LSD experience having decided that smoking was “irrelevant,” even Bill W, the author of the AA movement, who credits his sobriety to a spiritual awakening after taking the hallucinogen belladonna.

This new science is really a continuation of old science that got repressed when young people in the 60s, some of whom are doubtless sitting in this room today, started using psychedelics recreationally. They discovered a higher authority beyond that of church or state, direct access to a consciousness that led them to rebellion against the draft, outdated sexual mores and constricting female undergarments. We can’t have that, said the powers that be, and promptly banned psychedelics.

I read Pollan’s book in a few short days, with zealous joy. Was this an answer to prayer? Could these spores and leaves that a wild God invented millions of years ago, tempered by humans, be the magic wand I was longing for to help people in deep psychic pain? I was thrilled to discover that one of the main research groups trying to bring psychedelics back into the mainstream for therapeutic purposes is right here in the Bay Area (naturally), and they are actually recruiting clergy to train as guides for when the FDA begins to legalize these tools again, which may even happen in the next few years.

In case you are starting to worry that in my enthusiasm for giving people access to a REAL religious experience in church today I have doctored the Afterparty beverages, fear not. This may be Berkeley, but last I checked, many of us still identify as Congregationalists. I suspect the majority of us will stick with Liz’s skills on pipe organ as our path to transcendence.

But my joy persists at this new possibility, and also an epiphany. The principle by which psychedelics, or as some practitioners delightfully call them, entheogens, work, is the same regardless of diagnosis. They release us from our ego boundaries, which in turns helps us let go of our story about ourselves. And they put us into direct contact with a quantumly different level of consciousness. They help us talk to God, and experience the unity of all created things in the Cosmos, and realize the persistence of life beyond this plane of existence. They literally change our mind, in ways that endure long after the drug experience itself is over. As to whether the experience of the Divine is real or “only in our minds,” I turn to the Gospel of Harry Potter, in which Harry has died and is talking to the wizard Dumbledore. “Is this real? Or is this only happening in my head?” to which Dumbledore replies, “Of course it is happening in your head, Harry. But why on earth should that mean it’s not real?”

Call it awe in a pill. Of course, some of you may feel that it is cheating to take a pill to experience awe, and crave more organic means to a mystical experience. But the fact remains: awe IS our medicine. Transcendence is the cure for so many things that ail us. In wonder we rise above the small self into an entirely new altitude of existence, from which we have a much broader perspective, one that frees us from our limited, anxious thinking and striving.

Paul put it this way: “do not be conformed to the world. But be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” We are living in very spiritually distressing times, Church, Amen? It is not a stretch to say that the Body of Christ has treatment-resistant depression. In the face of traumas done daily, we are trying to hold to a path of calm, engaged resistance. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy to be joyful. It’s not easy to sleep through the night. It’s feeling more and more difficult to relish the good gifts of this life without feeling guilty because of others’ rampant suffering or fearing for the future.

We don’t want to be conformed to this world. We don’t want to normalize the cruelty and greed by checking out or numbing out. But we’re getting worn down. We read the news till our eyes bleed, and we go to a protest or write a postcard and that makes us feel a little better, but our hope is intermittent at best, the commercial breaks in the very boring television show of our angst. We combat fake news with better stories in the marketplace of ideas, but this is not the renewal of our minds that Paul called for. We long for transformation. Freedom, and liberation into a durable hope. We long to know that God had got this, that this pain is temporary.

But it’s hard to get that transformation. God may have articulated through Paul that God longs for our minds to be renewed, but that’s not how God made them. God made our minds, in fact, to make judgments about reality based on what we have experienced in the past. This is an energy-saving measure for our brains. Pollan writes “by adulthood, the mind has gotten very good at observing and testing reality, and developing confident predictions about it that optimize our investments of energy, mental and otherwise...our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience.” These so-called Bayesian inferences are a timesaving device and a survival mechanism. But they also screen out unexpected possibilities and alternate realities. They construct narrow, confining worldviews.

Pollan says the only humans immune from this way of perceiving, it turns out, are: young children, schizophrenics, and progressive people of faith! Just kidding. Young children, schizophrenics, and people on high doses of psychedelic drugs! It occurred to me, reading that, that Jesus preferred to spend time with young children, and sought out the company of people likely in the grip of schizophrenia. Was this why? Were these the people who could perceive Jesus’ mindblowing possibilities of how we could live and be, because they weren’t trying to fit his wisdom into the neat reality their minds had already constructed about the world?

Someone from church called me this week and said, “How do I stop being so angry about everything, Molly?” I said something like: you should be angry. The things that are happening in our world should make you angry. But you can’t be angry all the time. You won’t be any good to anybody, certainly not your family or to the movement. Steep yourself in joy. Get your awe back.

We can’t be angry or scared all the time, Church. We can’t be despairing ANY of the time. Well, maybe for five minutes. In private. But despair is not God’s intention for us. Despair is small-self thinking. Despair denies God’s power, and ours. Anything can happen, and does all the time! A 28 year old Alexandra from the block beat the white male incumbent Congressman in the Bronx! 14 teens and their soccer coach were rescued after living in a cave with diminishing oxygen for two weeks! Croatia could win the world cup!

Beloved, if we prematurely close our accounts with reality, as William James said, we will miss out on so much. God longs for us to move high above the small self with our little ideas of left and right, and right and wrong, our fear and anger, our two-inch high perspective on all that is moving and shaking in human history right now. God longs for our transformation, in the Greek, metamorphousthai. And how we transform, how we fundamentally change our minds, might be a lot easier than you would thing.

Another Cal professor did an experiment in awe, just two blocks from here. He led his students outside. One group he set in a eucalyptus grove, and instructed them to look up. Another he had stare at a brick wall. Then he had random people walk by each group and drop pencils as if by accident. The awestruck tree-watching students helped the clumsy passerby. The brick-walled students didn’t. Even a temporary experience of awe makes us more altruistic--by pulling us out of the small self. Real transcendence always moves us from I to WE, from the small self into the great sea of humanity, and then out to a place past pronouns altogether. Where there is no more us or them, or even I and We.

I kind of wish I hadn’t told you that story, Church. You might, next week, show up at a eucalyptus grove instead of to worship. I’m working myself out of a job here. Well, so be it. We need to take our awe wherever we can find it, and let it change us altogether, ALL together, forever.