Thailand & Cannabis: Amsterdam of the East
Visiting Thailand is a spiritual gift no matter how you look at it and the addition of cannabis enhances it!
Cannabis
What lurks behind your stress?
“I am so stressed, I am stressed all the time!” Miguel lamented.
“Can you tell me more about what that means?” I ask. “Would you say you’re anxious or fearful about something?”
“I don’t know,” he says shaking his head, “I’m just really stressed!”
Miguel is typical in that he uses the word “stress” as a place holder for what he’s feeling – because he doesn’t have the language to apply to what he’s actually feeling.
If “Anxiety disorder” is a mental illness, then are most of us mentally ill? Enter Cannabis.
Back in the day, anxiety was the wallpaper and furnishings of my mind. I (somehow) soldiered through, but living in anxiety was a way of life for me. I’d panic in social situations, I’d worry about upcoming events (that paranoid feeling of suspicion and mistrust of people or their actions without evidence or justification), and I’d ruminate – focusing on repetitive thoughts of catastrophe.
Is THIS the Secret Emotion that you struggle with?
I have a friend who by any measure of success has “made it”. He’s an acclaimed authority in his field; he makes good money and others clamor to work with him.
Yet, he feels as if he’s never caught-up. As a perfectionist he’s nose to the grindstone working nights and weekends but seldom claims victories.
Are there shades of this in you? If so, you may have a form of depression, what’s called cold depression, that’s the opposite of what we normally imagine depression to be.
For real? Demons, entities and psychedelic plant medicine
Demons – or spirit entities are a very real thing in the beliefs of indigenous cultures. And one of the beliefs is that whenever a person is in a state of altered consciousness, a portal can open for these malicious entities to “possess” a person – and maybe hang around long after. Having said that, we know that when a person takes psychedelics they are entering an altered state of consciousness.
My pivot to cannabis & spirituality
“Oh no, microdosing psilocybin won’t do a thing for me!” he exclaimed, in total disbelief during our initial discovery session. He went on to tell me he was wrestling with grief and depression from his partner dying a couple of years ago and trauma from an abusive childhood. “I need something stronger to knock all that out!” he declared.
In our take-a-pill-and-feel-better culture, people just want relief by taking that pill – or a whole bunch of them. Of course, if that was an approach that worked, we wouldn’t have an epidemic of anxiety, depression and despair in our Western world.
Rinse & Repeat: War on Drugs?
Did you see? Last month the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and state police nabbed a 23-year old man. Well, I really want to call him a kid but of course I’m a woman of a certain age – so everybody seems pretty young these days to moi (that is eu in Portuguese, where I’m now living;) Anyway, the cops and DEA in Connecticut arrested 23-year-old Weston Soule for growing whopping amounts of magic mushrooms in his house.
Do you prefer a tumor?
“I never get angry,” says a character in one of Woody Allen’s movies. “I grow a tumor instead.” This is a hilarious line but a poignant reminder how profoundly emotions can affect our human physiological functioning. Yet, as a culture, we generally place our physical well-being over our emotional well-being. We see it all the … Read more