I love to write. I need to write more than I realize. I want to work towards writing every day. It’s one of the best ways I can process my emotions and thoughts. I excel more at doing so through writing than I do through speaking, and since I’m an introvert it works better for my needs than it does through speaking. My inner life is so rich that I should definitely be writing the stuff down that goes on inside my head. My inner life is much more active than my outer life so it’s best if I make use of that through writing.

I frequently think about how I want to want to improve myself. I frequently think about how I want to get back to having good, productive daily habits that are in line with my values and strengths. I was reminded of something I learned about years ago when I went to the training I went to last week. The speaker brought up “Flow Experiences” and I was reminded of how they really do increase your happiness levels.

Flow experiences are experiences in which you are fully engaged in what you are doing because you love whatever you’re doing. You end up losing track of time and are completely in the moment. Typically flow experiences result from doing things that you are passionate about or strong in, and so they are truly fulfilling experiences. Multiple Positive Psychology books talk about how the more often you engage in Flow Experiences in your day to day life, the greater your happiness levels will become. This is one way to slightly improve your baseline happiness levels.

My flow experiences include hiking, writing, reading, creating music, making art, and meditating. If I were to do these six things regularly, or atleast a few of them every day, I know I would feel happier. I would be doing the things that I truly love and am good at, and would be living a life that’s more congruent with my values.

One good thing is that for the past several months, whenever I have a day off, going hiking is a priority of mine. I don’t always make it since the daylight is gone by about 4:30 pm lately and I have a second-shift schedule, but I atleast have the internal motivation to atleast strongly want to go hiking on my days off. I also want to get to a point where I go hiking or atleast walking before I go to work too.

I forget what year it was in college but I think it might have been my first or second year when I started to really get into meditating. What motivated me to do so was when I start to get panic attacks a lot, and I also had tripped not long before then so that reminded me of just how spiritual of a person I truly was. Before then I was an atheist. During that trip I was opened up to the spiritual plane and it was the most amazing experience of my entire life. I actually saw energy itself, in everything. I saw the energy fields around the people I was with, I saw how people had different aura colors that were more predominant than other colors. At the time I didn’t really know what energy fields or auras were but I got really into them after that.

Everything in the room I was in, which was filled with creative/abstract/psychedelic art, was alive. All of the pictures were animated. The room itself was filled with this translucent yet multi colored goo type stuff that filled the room starting from the ceiling and was formulated in large cylindrical coil shapes. I understood this as matter itself, which I then learned that matter itself was composed of energy, which is primarily spiritual. This experience felt more real to me than any other “sober” experience I had ever had before. My ego was torn away and I was exposed to the spiritual realm, which was directly in conflict with the reality that the ego had formulated and controlled for all of my life before this.

I did experience “ego death” before the highly positive/spiritual part of the trip began. The ego death was the scariest experience of my life. It was like a panic attack times 10, and when I looked in the mirror I felt completely dissociated. I was sure I was going to die, so my panic got worse and I puked a ton. I didn’t know it then but what truly died at that time was my ego, and it’s scary as fuck when it happens because it questions your entire perspective and understanding of reality. The ego convinces you that are in complete control, that you are the center of everything, and that nothing is real except for concrete/factual based information. Ego death reverses all of that programming and so your mind and emotions are given a complete shock. The ego re-gained control later on, but this trip changed my perspective on life for good.

A bit later I went to get Reiki done. Reiki is a spiritual practice in which imbalanced chakras are balanced, blockages are opened up, and repressed emotions are brought to the surface. Your spirit is interacted with in a way that can be felt strongly, even physically. During this Reiki session my Reiki practioner told me that I was an Indigo child. At the time I didn’t know what that meant but I looked it up later and it made *so* much sense. The way that I had experienced my entire life was finally clarified and so instead of feeling like an outsider/alien, I felt like I was here for a reason, for spiritual and healing based purposes, and so I felt special. Again this was a complete turn around from how I felt for all of my life until I was given this information and this experience. After this session I started to meditate daily or every other day for a few months. I felt amazing and my external circumstances didn’t control my emotional state anymore. I felt at one with everything and that was exactly what I needed.

I want to start meditating every day again. I want to start writing every day. I want to start making art every day, like I did after my trip for awhile. I want to hike as much as possible, in as many new places as I can possibly find. I want to re-remember that these are the things that I am here for, these are the things that truly matter, and these things are what make life worth living. Of course having deep connections/relationships with others and spreading as much love and understanding as possible are equally important, but the aforementioned passions are all internal/individually based things that fulfill me the most without depending on any other people to do so.

So I just looked through a couple of years worth of photos I took (of myself during those times, pretty narcissistic I know), and it made me think of a lot. Thoughts that summarize what happened during those years–my 4.5 years at college. Thoughts about what changed and what didn’t. And what lead to me being the person I am now from the way I was at the beginning of my time at college, what influences and circumstances altered and molded me.

I used to be healthier, physically healthier that is. I smoked a lot of weed during those 4.5 years but I also took an entire year off and a few half-year or so breaks from it entirely as well. I experimented with acid and ecstasy. Those things altered me and also helped me to find myself a little bit more. But I won’t say that it was a smooth ride, because it sure as fuck was not.

My small experimentation with acid changed me probably the most in terms of learning the most about myself and what was at the core of me. At first I had a major panic attack/ego death at the beginning of my first trip. I ran to the bathroom when I started to feel severe panic, I puked a bunch, I stared at myself in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize the person in the reflection. I felt separate from my appearance. And I think this was also ego death. Yes it was severe dissociation but it was also the completely shocking and scary as fuck realization that my true self is not my ego. All of the defenses I had been putting up, all of what I thought was my identity, was too centered in my ego.

In a way I think dissociation is not just a response to trauma, but I think it is also a small glimpse into the truth that is: We are spirits, composed of light/love, we are simply held inside our physical bodies, our shells. The first realization of this is so scary, because our egos don’t want us to figure that out, and they fight like hell to convince you out of it, which may be the main source of severe anxiety that occurs during dissociation. Here you are, realizing the separation of your soul and your body, while you have just spent your entire life believing that you are just a physical being.

Acid didn’t make me just freak out, it made me face all that I was repressing, and all that I had repressed for many, many years, came to the surface, and reared its ugly head in the course of a few minutes. It was beyond words actually, and as much as I describe my experience, I cannot explain how exactly it uncovered all of that that quickly. Basically acid forces you to face yourself, completely, and your ego loses the intense control it usually has. The ego’s primary purpose is to keep control, to make sure you reason your way out of anything that isn’t based on reason, so that you can be safe. But this is limiting because in doing so it keeps you from truly changing, from truly viewing things in a holistic way, from letting go and realizing that you are not the center of the universe and there are forces at work that you will never be able to fully explain through reason. It’s human nature to want to explain everything and to relentlessly attempt to learn all that there is to know, thus knowing everything about everything. What people don’t want to accept is that there are so many things that we will never be able to fully figure out or have the answers to. And this scares the shit out of people so they usually avoid it all costs.

One major benefit of using psychedelics is that you can no longer hide behind your ego, you can no longer keep trying to think everything is based in science and reason and facts. It forces you to lose control and to realize that letting go and opening your arms to new experiences and even scary experiences is the key to growth.

Psychedelics are also the reason why I know for sure that at my core I am an artist, a visionary, and a highly emotional/healing type person. When I tripped, after I got past the shitty part, it started to go entirely the other direction and everything started getting mind blowingly awesome. I started to see lines of color coming in from the corners of the room that met at the middle, and these lines of color were both matter and energy, and they were made of the primary colors. They were not only in the room but stemming out of all of the people that were around, and the colors were different in terms of which ones dominated for certain people. One guy that was in the room had sooo much red in his energy field, and I remember telling him that and I think he just laughed ha.

The reason I say that I found out I’m a visionary/healing type person is that not everyone sees these kinds of things when they trip. My trip was incredibly spiritual and artistic, very visual but also very visceral. And this totally makes sense because those are the very elements of my core self. Not only did I begin to draw later on in my trip, but I also continued to draw everyday, just for myself, from then forward for a long time. My work was the most creative it has ever been, the most colorful, the most abstract and full of energy out of anything else I had previously made. I basically couldn’t stop drawing. It was like I realized that art and creating art was such a strong and important part of me, and though this wasn’t conscious, I know I did it a lot because I felt inspired *and* like I absolutely had to express these creations/visuals. I had to capture them, because in doing that I was becoming more in line with my true self. I also got very spiritual after I tripped, and I began to research chakras and meditation a lot. I bought a book on all of the chakras and it had meditations in it for every one of them. I began to meditate every day as well, and I could totally feel my spirit when I did so. I’d feel this tingling and warmth rushing to my feet, and I *felt* like I was energy. I felt like I was so much more than just my body and even my mind.

The interest in Psychology has always been there for me but even though it has to do with emotions, it is still pretty based in reason. There are so many categories and definitions in psychology, and then there are so many logic-based responses to dealing with disorders once they are diagnosed. You are to go to therapy and talk it through, you are to take medication that will chemically alter your brain. Even though Psychology is the study of the mind, it is less connected to spirit than my strong connection to art and meditation. But, psychology has the great intention of *healing* souls. The word souls isn’t used very often in psychology, but it certainly is about healing damaged emotions, and emotions are very much a part of our souls.

So during this whole time I’ve been talking about I was majoring in both Psychology and Art, and I was really getting into drawing and meditating. I didn’t choose the best period of my life to decide to take on the intense experience of tripping, as my family life was incredibly fucked at that time. So initially I had a lot of good revelations and I came more into myself, but then a few months later I began to spiral downward. I’m sure this was for a combination of reasons, but mostly I was just so exhausted, and so not prepared to take on college at that time. I could barely handle my family life. I also felt very isolated at college and at home. So basically I was left to face all of these huge changes on my own. And so I fell apart. Uncovering my artistic nature also lead to uncovering the dark side of my unconscious. There’s no way to avoid uncovering your unconscious feelings when you’re working creatively.

So I began to come down from my amazingly great feelings time to return to what my unconscious contained. There was a lot that was not dealt with well, because I had no outside emotional support and I internalized nearly everything that happened in my dysfunctional family. There was no one to tell me otherwise, and I had no real escape or way to live my own life, other than by going inward more into my imagination. So you see what I’m saying? As I learned so much about my core self and what I was here on earth to do, I also learned just how deeply I had been damaged by my family, and by my long-term feelings of being inadequate, a lone wolf, the one who doesn’t fit in with anyone or anything. So I got very very depressed and was for a long time, I stopped being able to be creative because I was so depressed that I turned numb and hollow. I couldn’t sleep like at all, I felt like I had no identity at all and I lost every single bit of that spark I had previously. I lost that confidence and enthusiasm. I never would have come out of that dark pit if it weren’t for starting Wellbutrin, which I’m still on.

So, identity. That’s what I thought a lot about looking through those pictures too. My identity is so fluid. I could be anyone or anything. I am so many different things, I have so many different interests, I have a couple different selves. Throughout that time I went from Hippie, to Indie, to Formal, to Hippie, to Nothing, to Punk/Hippie. It was pretty much in that order, though I would also change my style and interests dramatically between these various scenes. I would often take on the identity of the people around me. I think I still do that to an extent now, but not as severely as before. I know who I am a lot more now, but I don’t *feel* it as much as I did for that period after I tripped, I don’t meditate or make art everyday anymore, and I haven’t been able to put my psychological skills into use yet either.

I guess I never got to the stagnation element that I intended to write about. Basically I am a very fluid person but I am also rather stagnate. There are some things in my life and within me that have been the same for a very, very long time, and I still don’t know to change those things and struggle with doing so to this day. Then there are the other things about me that continue to change all of the time, and I am pretty fluid in thought and beliefs. I get sucked into people’s stories when I read them, I get sucked into movies when I watch them, I begin to feel like I am those people or I am also a part of those stories even though I’m not. That is part of the fluidity, but it’s also that I am very empathetic and highly sensitive.

Ok this post is way too long, but I hope some people read it. I think I will be writing in here more often.