EP 161 PROTECTING YOUR SENSITIVITY AFTER PSYCHEDELICS

I have always been a soft little nougaty human. In my childhood, I got my feelings hurt and heart broken constantly by the mean girls in school. Do not get me started on the boy chasing.

I was melancholy and emo before it was cool, listening to Depeche Mode on repeat and making mixtapes with names like ‘Anywhere But Here‘ and ‘Unrequited Love.’

My feelings always felt like too much. I was too much. Too emotional. Too hysterical. Too loud. Too big. I became a people pleaser. A performer. A chameleon who could follow the rules and get everything perfect for everyone else. I was a master self-abandoner. I developed perfectionism and overfunctioning as protective masks to hide my deep insecurity.

I began to self-medicate. I found relief and solace and pleasure in food, alcohol, drugs, sex, and unavailable, avoidant people. I took risks and walked the edges of life, while remaining highly functional, employed, and having it all together on the outside.

I believed I was misunderstood and unlovable. But the truth was, I never let anyone get close enough to really know me. Because I didn’t know me. All I knew is that there was something really wrong with me. And I didn’t want anyone else to see it. But I also desperately needed to be liked and loved and included.

I hid my creativity and leadership skills because I was so tender and unable to take criticism. When I was rejected, I blamed other people, while also using it as proof that I do indeed suck.

I chased the highs and ran from the lows. Shoving all the unruly, too muchness down deep inside. Where it stayed and quietly transformed into an ancient volcano made of rage.

I perfected the victim/perpetrator cycles of addiction. Self-loathing and escape. I put on 80 pounds. I hid inside myself. Life hurt and I was lost.

My distractions and numbing and running ultimately led me to a crossroads. The drugs stopped being fun and started dropping truth bombs on my armored heart. The mushrooms whispered, then sternly spoke, then slammed the door in my face and said, “Do not come back here. Go see your Grandmother.”

I became willing. Willing to stop drinking. To stop running. To look into the shadows. I decided to run toward them instead. Spirit began speaking to me and somehow, I heard her.

I began to open. I became inspired. It was so fast. I received visions from the desert to the mountains to the sea. I began to listen to the trees. I felt part of the intelligence of Nature.

Ayahuasca and San Pedro called me home and gave me hope. They reminded me that life was actually magic. I remembered I had known this all along. I landed into a new reality that felt so true I could see and feel and hear and taste and touch the dream. It was real. I was a rainbow this whole time!

Psychedelics snapped me from asleep to awake so fast that my body and nervous system couldn’t keep up. The consciousness expansion arrived in a body that wasn’t ready. That never felt safe to feel. And I had no support or guidance on HOW to embody this new truth.

Plant medicine led me to the center of the volcano. The hot rage lava that had been buried and left inside to fester and boil. I went back into the mountain of myself again and again. Each time feeling a little more. And yet I had no way to anchor this journey into my body. Because there was no map. No guide teaching me about walking with it all. I had no idea how to integrate.

So I just kept going into the mountain. I took so much medicine I became completely destabilized. Spiritually and emotionally so aligned. Elevated. And physically struggling. My vessel literally did not have the capacity to hold all the expansion. My trauma was protecting me. And so I became my own enemy.

My sensitivity was back, and amplified. No longer drunk and sedated, I became hypervigilant.
Constantly scanning. Checking. Criticizing. Making sure I’m doing it right. I became a spiritual overachiever. Determined to prove my integrity and worth. Performing my healing instead of allowing it to teach me.

Pain and symptoms became my new distractions. Solving the mysteries of my wounding became my literal job. I was determined to help myself and stop this experience from happening to others. I was a master researcher. I learned everything about mindbody medicine as the true path to healing. And went down every rabbit hole and tried every treatment and doctor and homeopathic remedy I could find. I experimented on myself. I healed the unhealable. Again and again.

Every healing created new symptom dragons to fight. And I always landed back squarely in the same uncomfortable truth: It’s ALL your nervous system, babe. My brain/body/gut pathways had become corrupted by hypersensitivity. My whole body was trained to overreact, hyperfixate, and worry. All as protective measures from a worn and weary system that was just doing its best.

When plant medicine becomes destabilizing, we often just keep going back looking for more answers and downloads and messages. Because we are so overwhelmed with our own inner experience, and we lack the tools and wisdom to land and soften into a supportive rhythm. We are so conditioned to believe that we should just “power through” that we ignore our nervous system cries for simplicity and consistency.

Because the medicine feels good when real life doesn’t.
But this isn’t true healing. It’s more escapism.

Sensitivity is magic. It is sacred. It is power. And we are so numb and armored we feel threatened by this beautiful, natural expression of our humanity. When the body thaws, it often freaks out because it believes it left you alone. It doesn’t ever want to miss anything ever again.

You are not broken. You are not doing medicine wrong. And you are not failing at integration.
It’s your nervous system, babe.

You are remembering your sensitivity in a world that is loud, fast, and overwhelming. And sensitivity needs protection, compassion, and understanding. It needs rhythm and time and community. It needs joy and pleasure and delight.

The medicine I gathered inside the mountain is how to make the mystical tangible. Edge medicine. The medicine of the wounded healer. The heart warrior. How to embrace your limitations and allow life to be lifing while also doing magic. How to hold paradox. How to walk dimensions and see in the dark. How to carry beauty in one hand and pain in the other. How to hold balance inside when everything is screaming. To look inside yourself and say, “Only love lives here.”

Some of us are here to root, not fly. We carry bridge medicine. We cross people over out of the underworld back into embodied Earth. Because sensitivity in service is our gift. We cannot heal alone with the mind. We can only heal in the body, led by the heart, guided by Spirit. Surrounded by family.

What I didn’t understand back then is that nothing was ever wrong with me. My sensitivity wasn’t a flaw. The medicine wasn’t too much. I wasn’t failing.

My nervous system was overwhelmed in a world that doesn’t know how to care for open, tender humans. That my systems are divergent and miraculous and wise. And I was trying to do something that was never meant to be done alone.

What actually changed my life wasn’t more insight or more medicine. It was learning how to live inside my sensitivity without fighting it. Learning how to slow down enough for my body to feel safe again. Learning how to be held while I learned how to hold myself. And that this takes a long time.

That’s what my work is now. Links to work together are below.