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benex78 · 3 years

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Forgive our Sins

5 years after the events of Immortality, Sara and Grissom are living back in Las Vegas when a ghost from their past reappears in their life forcing them to face some old decisions. GSR of course! Enjoy it! I hope you like it and please review it! (Sorry if there are mistakes but I'm not a native English speaker and a special thanks to my friend LuLu for reading it)

PART 1 They went through a lot together during their 16 years long relationship. She left him and the sin city, he went to Costa Rica for her, they got married, they got divorced, she went to San Diego and sailed with him. They hurt each other more than once, but their love never stopped. In the end, they gave up their carriers to stay together, got married again and now they were finally living happily together. Grissom and Sara are back in Vegas, living in a small house in the university district. While Sara works as a consultant for the crime lab, Gil is a part-time professor of entomology who tends to stick his nose in his wife’s forensic cases. 14 years have passed since the miniature killer events and Natalie Davis is still in prison. In her cell she keeps a collection of miniatures and she is now working on a new one. She interrupts her work on the miniature to write a letter. It’s a difficult one: she had tried to write this letter so many times without success, in fact there are a few ripped sheets of paper on the floor. This time is different, she manages to use the rights words and, once done, she sends the envelope to the Las Vegas Crime Lab. It’s addressed to Sara Sidle. What does she want from Sara? Does she want to make amends? Does she want to go after her again? PART 2 A car is parked outside Sara and Grissom's house and the driver is observing Sara. One day on her way to work, Sara notices him and tries to run away, but suddenly she’s caught in an incident. She is brought to the hospital where a frightened Grissom arrives. Fortunately, Sara is fine, she only has some bruises and she is soon allowed to leave the hospital to go home with her husband. Sara tells Grissom what happened and now they fear someone is chasing them. Thanks to the street CCTVs the police finds and arrests the stalker, however the man has nothing to do with the accident. Thus, he is released, but not after securing a conversation with Sara Sidle. He is a private detective and he needs to talk to Sara because his client, a woman named Kelly Ross, wants to meet her. Sara asks the detective the reason for this meeting and he responds that Mrs. Ross instructed him to reveal only in which part of Vegas she lives and, most importantly, that they have someone in common. Sara is caught off guard as she doesn’t know what to expect from this. However, she can’t help but feel curious. PART 3 On their day off Grissom drives Sara to Mrs. Ross, but he waits outside in the car. He is worried but he respects Sara’s decision to go in alone. When opening the door, Mrs. Ross welcomes Sara with a warm hug then she lets her in. Gil Grissom observes the whole scene speechless. When Sara comes back couple of hours later, she is in shock and immediately askes Grissom to take her home. He wants to know about the meeting, yet Sara begs him to give her some time to put her thoughts together. That evening in their kitchen Sara tells him a story she kept for herself for far too long. FLASHBACK:13 YEARS EARLIER The miniature killer had changed everything: the team had found about her relationship with Grissom, she had to join swing and above all she felt something inside her had broken and no one, not even Griss, could do anything to help her. She was so depressed that she decided to leave Vegas and the love of her life. She was in L.A. visiting her mom when she started to feel unwell. It took her a few days to even conceive the idea that she could be pregnant. She went to the nearest drugstore and paid for a test that she took directly in the customers toilet. She waited in there for almost an hour with the result in her hands: POSITIVE! How could it be? She didn’t want a child and Grissom neither. They talked about this at the beginning of their story and even more recently when he proposed. They (she and Griss) were the only family they wanted. How could she tell Grissom something like that? At least by phone she could avoid looking into his eyes and see his disappointment. She went back to her motel room and waited for the morning to come. She didn’t sleep all night, she kept looking at the clock on the wall. When she was sure Grissom could be home from work, she called him. He picked up almost immediately. She heard him giggling at the other side of the phone, but his joy faded at the news. Sara was so depressed; their relationship was stalling and surely, he wasn’t ready to be a father. Thus, they both agreed to end the pregnancy. Grissom offered to come to L.A. to be close to her, but Sara declined. She wanted to do it alone and he didn’t complain. She had just booked an appointment at a private clinic, when her mother got sick, so she had to postpone the whole thing. When she finally got there 3 weeks later, it was too late to proceed with the abortion. She had no another choice but to contact the social services to find a family for her unborn child. She never told Gilbert she carried their baby and that he was put up for adoption. To him, this was a dead story. Just 10 days before Warwick’s murder she delivered a healthy baby boy who she held only briefly in her arms before giving him away. When she came back to Vegas, Grissom was so devastated he didn’t even notice her body didn’t have the usual silhouette and she kept the secret for herself. Until now. Sara’s confession is very painful, she fears Gilbert’s reaction. She fears he will hate her and never forgive her for taking his son away. However, Grissom isn’t angry. He seems quite relieved instead. Grissom reaches his hand out across the table and places it on top of Sara’s, giving it a gentle squeeze: - I don’t begrudge you honey. In the end, you did what we had decided. At the time we didn’t want a kid and you didn’t keep it. Honestly, I’m quite happy it went this way. – Sara raises her head: - Really? – Grissom admits: - Yeah, because now, 13 years later, we are talking about someone we created, someone who has our genes and who probably is still alive. Even if he is somewhere, we don’t know where and who raised him – Sara reveals: - Gil, his name is Dylan, he is here in Vegas and Mrs. Ross is his adoptive mother – Grissom is astonished: - What? He’s in Vegas right now? Did you see him? – Sara shakes her head: - No, he was at school - Grissom: - How did Mrs. Ross find you? – Sara: - I can’t explain it, but since I had decided for an open adoption, she must have assumed a detective to find me. - Grissom: - But why now? – Sara: - Because she wants to give us a second chance – Grissom: - Sorry I don’t get it – Sara: - She is dying, she has terminal cancer and her husband has died of Covid last year. She fears that once she’s dead her boy will end up living in an institute until his 18th birthday. - Grissom’s heart starts beating fast, he can’t bear it any more. Maybe it’s his age but he wants to be a father now. However, he knows everything it’s up to his Sara: - Can we…? What do you want to do? - Sara: - Honestly… I don’t know – Grissom: - Sara, we are his parents! – Sara’s answer is firm: - No, we lost that right a long time ago Gil! – Grissom corrects himself: - You are right, but we have to do something. Don’t you want to get to know him? To see who he looks like? – Sara: - Of course I want to, but I am also terrified. I abandoned him. For all I know he could hate me. – Gil replies: - He could love you. - Sara gives Grissom a sad smile. Grissom tries to lift her spirit: - He could be a geek like us - Sara announces: - Gil, he is a special boy, he is not like the other kids – Grissom asks: -What do you mean? – Sara: - Mrs. Ross told me Dylan can’t hear, he has a genetic disease that made him almost deaf 5 years ago. Grissom is hurt, he can’t find the words to express his feelings. Sara notices his reaction and she gently touches his leg. Sara: - Are you ok? – Grissom nods: - I just don’t know how to feel about this: happy because I have something in common with my son or sad that I passed this pain to him It's all my... – Sara raises Gilbert’s chin, she cuts him off this time, shaking her head: "No, it's not. and it's not right to put the blame all on you. We both made stupid decisions in our relationship that lead us to where we are now." She takes a breath and speaks again more softly. "Now, I just want to put all of that behind us and start over..." Grissom clears his throat and asks in a more serious tone: - So... what do you think? – Sara takes both his hands in her and smiled a little: - I think we are going to speak with Kelly Ross and arrange a meeting with Dylan. Ok? – Grissom nods satisfied. Sara: - Let’s see what happens but we have to keep our hopes grounded – Grissom: - Ok… Come here – and takes Sara in his arms: - I love you, no matter what! – Sara leans towards him. She looks him in his eyes and responds with a tender kiss on his lips whispering against them "I love you too”.

PART 4 Sara spends the week working and thinking, thinking and working. Tension and expectations building up every day, more and more. In her mind Sara has imagined their meeting with Dylan at least 300 times, she has repeated all the possible things she could say to him, but every time his reaction is bad and the meeting goes wrong. Even Grissom is anxious; nonetheless he tries to distract Sara: he invites her to see one of his lessons at the university, he proposes a trip on a boat over the lake Mead and he takes her out to dinner. The Italian restaurant they go to is one of their favorites. They eat a very good lasagna and they drink a little more than they usually do, just to relax. Once at home, they go to bed. They face each other but, thinking of the day ahead, they can’t sleep. Grissom: - It’s gonna be fine – Sara: - You can’t know that – Gil caresses her hair: - No, but we have to stay positive – Sara takes Gil’s hand and brings it to her cheek: - I don’t know what to tell him – Gil’s finger brushes her lips: - The truth! If he asks, we’ll tell him the truth - Sara: - But? – Grissom: - Honey, if we want his trust, we have to be honest. We can’t lie. - Sara: - I am scared! - Grissom: - Me too – and he slowly kisses her. She returns the kiss as they are taken by the passion of their bodies, entangled in one. Their minds are lost in the rhythm of that primordial act of desire, they know so well. They are just flesh and skin, sweat and moans. PART 5 It’s afternoon and they are sitting in a park near Dylan’s school. The sight of the boy approaching them with his mother takes their breath away. Kelly greets them from afar and points them to her son. They stand up and walk in their direction. Sara and Grissom stop when they are in front of Dylan and Kelly. 4 souls, 4 people meant to be a family finally together. Dylan is a mini version of Grissom. He is not so tall but he’s slim. He has short curly brown hair. His eyes are blue and curios. Behind his left ear he has a hearing aid. Kelly addresses them to Dylan; she gestures in sign language and tells him: - They are the friends I was talking to you about. – Grissom takes courage and speaks first, gesturing his words: - Hi Dylan, my name is Gilbert and she is my wife Sara. We are happy to meet you. Your mother told us a lot about you. – Sara: - Hi, sorry but my sign language is a little rusty. I will try to improve. – Dylan: - Don’t worry, I can hear you (he indicates the implant to Sara). Moreover, I’ve learned to read lips. You, (he addresses to Grissom) on the other hand are very good. – Grissom: - Thanks. My mum was deaf, she taught me – Dylan nods pondering the answer. Sara tries to break the silence: - How was your day? Do you like school? – Kelly intervenes: - He is the best of his class – Dylan gives her a little buff on her right arm: - Mum please! – Kelly smiles: - He is shy, he doesn't like to brag – Grissom and Sara, grinning, exchange a look of complicity mixed with pride: - We can imagine – Dylan fixes them and he asks abruptly: - Why don’t you tell me who you really are? – Grissom and Sara almost choke: - What? – Kelly scolds him: - Dylan?! – Dylan continues: - You are my real parents, aren’t you? Sara feels responsible and wants to give him an answer: - You are right, I’m your birth mother and he is your father. – Dylan insists: - Why are you here? – Kelly: - I asked them to come – Dylan turns to his mother in shock but Kelly goes on: - I have to know that you would be safe, cared for and loved when I will be gone – Dylan: - How could you think that I would stay with someone who abandoned me? – Kelly interrupts them: - You three need to talk, you need to know each other. Dylan please, you have to listen to them – Dylan: - I don’t want to – and he runs away. Kelly touches Sara’s shoulder, she feels her pain and apologizes for Dylan’s reaction: - Give him some time. He is a good boy… he’s very smart – Grissom sighs: - I see – Sara is ashamed: - He is right, I made a mistake. – Kelly tries to soothe her by saying: - We all make mistakes, Sara – Sara: - But he is the one who’s paying the consequences of that mistake – Grissom: - We had our reasons, dear– Sara locks her eyes on Gil: - and why does it all seem so wrong now? – Kelly: - Let me talk to him – Sara replies: - No, I want to try - Sara goes to look for Dylan; Grissom follows her but she turns and stops him: - Give me 5 minutes – Gil nods; she approaches the boy. He is sitting on a swing. Sara asks him permission with a soft voice: - Can I? – Dylan shrugs his shoulders and Sara sits in the swing next to him. The boy leaps down and faces her. Sara: - I’m so sorry for everything, Dylan. I’m sorry for your mum, for your dad, for your earing problems, and above all I'm sorry for what I did to you. – Dylan: - Why did you leave me? – Sara tries her best to formulate an answer: - It’s complicated.... I wasn’t feeling very well. Something bad had happened to me. – Dylan interrupts her: - My father? Did he hurt you? – Sara: - No, absolutely not. He has always been kind to me – she invites Grissom to join them and he moves in their direction. – I was, I still am a Crime Scene Investigator. Do you know what it is? – Dylan nods and Sara continues: - I was working on a case, and a serial killer kidnapped me and left me to die. I managed to escape, your father and other members of my team saved me – Dylan listens very carefully. – But after that, nothing was the same. I was broken and unhappy. I wasn’t myself anymore and I couldn’t stay there. I went away from your father, from this town, from my old life. I could not be a good mother for you, you deserved more. – Dylan looks at Sara and then Grissom and says: - You are married now – Sara declares: - We got back together 5 years ago. – Grissom kneels in front of Dylan: - We're not here to be your parents, you already have them – Dylan states: - My mum is great! – Grissom agrees: - It’s true. We just want to know you, Dylan! – Sara teases: - Can you give us a chance? – Dylan thinks and then asks Sara something that has always intrigued him: - Did you give me a name before.. you .. ? Sara affirms instantly: - Arthur, I named you Arthur –

LITTLE FLASHBACK OF 13 YEARS EARLIER Sara was holding her baby when a nurse entered the room to take him. The social assistant was waiting outside. The woman checked the papers she had filled in. On the birth certificate she had written her name, Gilbert’s, and a new one: ARTHUR. She gave her baby a kiss on the forehead and passed him to the nurse who left the room, closing the door to a crying Sara. Grissom turns towards Sara, surprised by her admission. Sara looks at him directly in his eyes: - It’s your father’s middle name! – Dylan chuckles, satisfied by the answer: - It’s my middle name too – Sara is grateful that the Ross in some way had kept the name she had chosen for him. Dylan remarks: - My father was a pastor, he always told me to forgive the others. I’m forgiving you! – They give him an appreciative smile before Grissom touches his head saying: - He’d be very proud – Dylan nods and walks over to an emotional Sara. He wipes a tear from her face, similarly to what Gilbert would have done. She whispers a thank you to him, then they return to the bench where Kelly was sitting, watching the whole scene.

PART 6 Grissom and Sara start seeing Dylan every day after school. Their bond gets deeper and deeper. Dylan looks more at ease with them. He loves spending time with Gil, making experiments, going fishing or sailing. They find a new balance in their lives. Every once in a while, he even spends the night with them. The guest bedroom has become his room now. Kelly’s cancer on the other hand gets worse and she ends in hospital. It’s a Wednesday morning when Sara picks up Dylan from school and brings him to the hospital to give his mother one last hug. Kelly Ross dies at 2.00 PM of that same day and Dylan cries in the arms of Gilbert. At the funeral he stands between Sara and Grissom. He is brave but silent. Over the last year, he has lost both of his parents and found two new ones. It’s strange how life takes an unexpected turn sometimes and turns up the way it should have from the beginning. In fact, before her death, Kelly had arranged things so that Sara and Gil could have full custody of the boy and become a family.

PART 7 Sara is in a hurry; she greets her boss and some other members of the team as she prepares to leave the office. The receptionist at the desk calls her back and gives her some correspondence. She doesn’t have time to read it, she will do it later with calm. All she wants to do now is to go home to her boys and to enjoy the evening with them. After dinner Dylan does his homework in the living room, Gil prepares his lesson and Sara tidies the kitchen up. She suddenly remembers the letters in her purse, so she takes a break to read them. An envelope without a sender attracts her attention. She rips the envelope and her jaw drops.

Dear Sara Sidle, I’m Natalie Davis, you probably remember me as the miniature killer. I’ve been thinking of you very often lately. I know, I don’t have the right to write to you after all this time, but my journey here in prison made me reflect on my actions and on what I have done to you and to the other victims. I’m so sorry Mrs Sidle, I can’t change the past and my apologies can’t relieve your pain or what you’ve lost. I was angry and I seeked vengeance for no real reason except because I couldn’t accept the daemons from my past. I should have known that that wasn’t the answer but I was too lost. I hold Mr Grissom responsible for the death of Arnie Dell and I tried to take you away from him because of his love for you. However, and now I know this, it was not his fault and you were a collateral damage in my inner war. I don’t deserve your forgiveness; I’m not searching for redemption. I’m just happy that you are alive. I also hope life has been kind to you and that Mr Grissom is still by your side. Sincerely, Natalie Davis

Sara confronts Grissom about the letter and what to do next. They are concerned, still they decide to go to the county jail to see Natalie in person. As CSI they get a special permit to meet her in the interrogation room. The door opens and a guard escorts Natalie Davis inside. She is handcuffed and she’s wearing an orange suit. For the first time in 14 years she, Sara and Gil are in the same room. The guard moves to stand in a corner and Natalie sits at the table. Natalie is surprised by this visit: - I didn’t expect you to come. - Sara: - I didn’t expect your letter either. - They contemplate in silence for some time. Natalie clears her throat: - Anyway, thank you. Your presence here is very important to me – Sara replies: - I’m here because I wanted to look you in the eyes, to make sure your words were true and your regret sincere. Natalie: - Mrs. Sidle, I don’t know what to do to prove it to you - Sara: - You wrote you don’t deserve forgiveness… – Natalie: - No, I don’t. I’m a sinner and I need to be punished for my sins! – Sara: - Hmmm. It was not easy to understand it but now, now I’ve got it. We have different backgrounds, different stories but we have one thing in common – Natalie looks confused. Sara continues: - We are survivors, Natalie! We are women with physical and psychological scars. I could have surrendered to the difficulties that life put in front of me, as you did, but I decided to move on and I’m still doing it – Sara grabs Gilbert’s hand and squeezes it. They exchange a tender look. They both smile before Sara shakes her head and goes on: – Therefore, I forgive you! – Natalie is incredulous: - Why are you so good to me after all I’ve done? - Sara: - I’m not good, I just think this place and your sense of guilt are enough for me. We cannot live in resentment forever, and you know what? I’ve learned such an important lesson from a very mature 13 years old boy who has been through hell in such a short time. Goodbye Natalie. - Sara and Gil stand up and leave the room, Natalie and her nightmares behind. Dylan will be home soon with some of his friends. Tonight, they will go to the Luna park, they will ride the rollercoaster and then eat pizza. Their future is definitely bright.

THE END

#csi crime scene investigation #csi vegas #fanfic #fanfiction #sara x grissom #sara sidle #gil grissom #gsr

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msjr0119 · 5 years

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What took you so long?

Part 5 - Betrayal and Memories

Liam had been assassinated, Drake had left Cordonia before this. He had heard from Savannah about his friend- he felt guilty not returning. Someone had blackmailed him to not return, with only his sister knowing the truth. Leo had taken over the throne in place of his brother due to there being no heir....

*CHARACTERS BELONG TO PIXELBERRY*

{Drake x Riley}

Tags: @annekebbphotography @burnsoslow @drakesensworld @kingliam2019 @bbrandy2002 @butindeed @bascmve01 @drakewalker04 @pedudley @captain-kingliamsqueen @duchessemersynwalker @insideamirage @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @kozabaji @texaskitten30 @ibldw-main @kimmiedoo5 @nikkis1983 @dangerouseggseagleartisan @gnatbrain @walker7519 @lodberg @cmestrella @hopefulmoonobject @addictedtodrakefanfic @angi15h @liamxs-world @rafasgirl23415 @notoriouscs @yukinagato2012

******

Olivia waited impatiently for Liam to respond to her. When they found out that she pregnant during the social season she witnessed his eyes light up with visible happiness and delight.

The day they found out, was the day the court arrived at Lythikos. Whilst ice skating, she whispered to Liam about the possibility that she was expecting. Before she could elaborate, Riley and Maxwell bounded up to them. “I’ve got a test- I will get them all settled in the lodge later and we will take it”, she whispered in his ear - before Maxwell dragged her away from Liam and Riley. Her guests were sat comfy in the lodge and were sipping steaming hot chocolate. Warming themselves up by the fire- the smell of wood-fire as it burnt, left a faint fragrance to reassure them that they will be comfortable in the bitter weather this Duchy surrounded. Olivia stormed through the door like a tornado, interrupting the silence there once was- she couldn’t resist having a dig at Drake regarding the disappearance of Savannah Walker. “Now as charming as this has been, I’ve got to get back to Prince Liam. I’ve promised him a private tour of the Lythikos Castle” - lies she thought. But she didn’t give one fuck.

Olivia waltz into her room, and noticed Liam pacing the floor. Pulling the test out of the top drawer of her dresser- she went into the bathroom. Whilst waiting for the result- she walked back into room and saw Liam sat on the edge of the bed with his head held in his hands.

“What’s up Li?”

“I can’t believe you are doing a pregnancy test! During my social season!”

“It takes two to tango DARLING!”

“I know, I’m sorry Liv. We shouldn’t have been so careless. This is why I didn’t want the social season in the first place. Since we were children, my heart always was for you.”

“Liam, it’ll be fine. If I am pregnant, we will inform your father and Regina. And he will have no choice but to call the social season off.”

“What do you hope for?”

“You tell me Li.”

“To be honest, I’ve always wanted a family. I’m nervous. But I’ll be thrilled. I just wish we could have planned it.”

Olivia’s alarm began to buzz. It was time. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath- she stared at the result. Positive. Her jaw was agape- she was carrying the heir to the Cordonian throne.

“Li. We’re having a baby!”

Liam looked at the test, shocked to begin with. Eventually his lips curled upwards. Picking Olivia up- spinning her around, he didn’t care what was going to happen with the social season. He was going to be a father, nothing could wipe this smirk off his face.

“I’m sorry Liv. It’s just a bad memory to think of. I’m so sorry. I will never forgive myself for any of that. I should have stood up to my father for many things. But we have this second chance- our new beginning.” Liam kissed her bump, he was excited. He wondered if Liam Jr would enjoy being a big brother.

“Liam, your father was a horrible man. Look at all the distress he has caused.” She was still heartbroken with how the King and Queen reacted to their news.

The court returned to the palace after their time in Lythikos. Liam’s main priority on their return was to talk to his Father and Step Mother about the heir he was already providing the country with. However, the next event was the Regatta- King Constantine’s favourite event of all the social seasons. Liam had informed Olivia that he couldn’t tell his father about their news today. He promised he would tell them when the court arrive at Applewood- the next location of the social season. At the regatta, Constantine informed the press that he was abdicating the throne earlier than planned and that Liam would become King soon. As the court arrived in Applewood it was the beginning of the Apple Blossom Festival. Before any events began, Liam and Olivia went to visit the King and Queen, walking into the room hand in hand- Constantine’s face was now full of anger. He hated the Nevrakis’. And anyone associated with them. Olivia’s parents had betrayed him- and had attempted to overrule the throne.

“Father, Regina. Myself and Olivia have something we would like to tell you...”

The Majesties eyebrows both rised up in sync.

“We are having a baby.” Liam said proudly. Holding Olivia protectively, his baby blues glistening with happiness.

“No you are not!” Constantine was beyond furious. Hoping that this was some kind of sick joke.

“Excuse me!”

“You heard me Duchess! My son will never be involved with a Nevrakis! You wasn’t even invited to attend the social season as a suitor. But I bypassed it. You will never be Queen and heaven forbid that you will carry our heir!”

“Bit late for that Connie!” Frustrated, Olivia didn’t care about her manners anymore.

“Duchess Olivia- I suggest you skip the events for today and arrange an emergency termination of your pregnancy.” Regina said sternly supporting her husbands.

“This is our child you are talking about! I love Liv. I always have done. No matter how much of a vendetta you have against her.”

“Liam. It’s Drake’s birthday today. Take him out to celebrate. We will sort Olivia and her problem out. We are not discussing this any further! You are due to be the reigning monarch of this country and have already caused a scandal! I’m so disappointed in you. I could expect this from Leo, but you?”

That day, Liam had lost self control. He went out celebrating his friend’s birthday. Whilst he left Olivia terminating their child’s life on her own. Constantine and Regina had some paperwork written up quickly- a non disclosure form for the clinic staff to sign. Guilt ridden he couldn’t stop thinking about what she must think of him for allowing this to happen. A coward. A rubbish partner. A shit King to be. Could he lose her? Olivia didn’t speak to Liam properly for a few days, she was constantly crying and depressed. But she always performed that resting bitch face and kept her head held high throughout the rest of the social season- even though she was breaking down deep inside. Every time she saw Constantine and Regina- she had considered committing treason and murdering them with her stiletto knife. How she got through without doing that she will never know. How no one in court realised the pain that was constantly stabbing her in the heart. She was pleased when Constantine passed away- hoping that he was rotting in hell.

******

Upon waking, Riley snuggled herself into the warm, soft sheets. Rubbing the remainder of sleep from her eyes - the sun shone through the cracks in the blind. She couldn’t remember how she got into bed- never mind how she ended up undressing herself. Scrutinising the room, she noticed her clothes neatly folding up on the chair- Drake must have taken me to bed. She had realised that Liam Jr wasn’t with her- just assuming he would be with Drake. Dragging herself out of bed, she put yesterday’s clothes on. Ambling into the kitchen- it was the same picturesque situation she saw yesterday morning. Drake with her son - her heart filled with happiness.

“Mommy. Go back to sleep.”

“Why?” She walked over to her son and kissed him- the usual routine she would do every morning and every night. Confused as to why her child would insist that she went back to sleep was beyond her.

“We was preparing breakfast in bed for you Brooks, I don’t think you want to break his little heart. Just pretend that you’re asleep.” Drake winked and whispered in her ear. Before kissing her discreetly on the cheek. He didn’t want to be publicly affectionate with her in front of Liam Jr. Riley faked a yawn- smirking at Drake.

“Baby, mommy’s still very tired. I think I’ll go back to sleep.”

Before walking back into the bedroom, she saw out of the corner of her eye- Drake high five Liam. Liam let out a mischievous giggle before hugging Drake. Whilst waiting in bed- she couldn’t help but think what her future was going to involve. Was this her and Drake’s second chance? Would he accept Liam Jr as part of their relationship now Liam was back? Would Liam Jr accept Drake and Olivia as his step parents? Who knows? Only she could write her future. She was knocked out of her thoughts as Liam Jr walked into the bedroom, carrying a tray- assisted by Drake. On the tray, was a bowl full of fruit and a pancake. Next to the food, was a single red rose. Drake carried her a cup of steaming coffee- he didn’t want to risk the young prince scolding himself.

“Morning Mommy. Love you.”

Liam Jr crawled into bed with his mom, placing a sweet gentle kiss on her cheek before squeezing her tightly.

“Uncle grumpy said.. Mommy’s like to be loved... and that they like flowers.” Her heart was melting- she could feel tears forming but held them back. Drake was turning Liam Jr into a charmer like his uncle Leo and a marshmallow just like him. Riley now knew that her son was going to be heartbreaker with the women.

“Did he now? Thank you darling.”

“Can I play with my toys?” Riley didn’t like Liam constantly playing with his toys all day long but with him being a sweetheart she was going to allow it. She enjoyed reading to her son, and teaching him things about life, helping him count. The usual things a good parent would do to bond with their child.

“Of course you can.”

Liam Jr went to collect his toys- lining them up before letting his imagination run wild. Drake slipped into bed next to Riley.

“You’ve got a bit of flour on your cheek, grumpy. Let me get it off you.” Riley wasn’t lying- she removed the flour, then kissed him on the cheek. She noticed a little blush appear.

“You know if you just wanted to kiss me, you should have just asked Brooks.”

“Can I kiss you my Marshmallow?”

Drake kissed her softly on her lips. After parting he couldn’t remove the grin off of his face. Liam came and joined them on the bed.

“When are we going to the beach?”

Drake rubbed his neck, before confessing that he suggested they have a day at the beach to Liam before. Furrowing his eyebrows- he believed it was a stupid suggestion, and that Riley would reject it. The little bugger, he thought - not realising that he had planted a seed in the Prince’s head. He just assumed the young boy would forget.

“Sounds like a fantastic idea. We will have to go and get a change of clothes though.”

Liam jumped up and down on the bed. The excitement nearly made him fall off the bed before Drake’s reflexes caught him, and pulled him into the middle of the bed to keep him safe- preventing him from becoming an accident prone.

“Yeah you don’t want to look like a dirty stop out.” Drake seductively said, Liam looking confused at Drake and Riley with the phrase that was just said. He just shrugged his shoulders, climbed off the bed and began to play with his toys again.

“I suggested the beach, I thought he’d like it. And it’ll bring back some memories. The way you used sun safety as an excuse just to feel my muscles. The race and the Seaweed excuse. The Americano barbecue. We can do it again, and create new memories?” Drake gulped, hoping that she wouldn’t criticise him for being so presumptuous about creating new memories. They hadn’t discussed what was happening between the two of them. Whatever it was just spontaneously happened- that magnet that they had always had forcing them together over and over again.

“For a start. Sun safety really is important and not a joke. Secondly you are never going to let it go that I’m a better swimmer than you, are you? That barbecue that you had no input into- or should I say your denial of the idea? The beach is a brilliant idea Drake. Thank you, marshmallow.”

#theroyalromance #choices trr #riley brooks #drakewalker #kingliam #olivia nevrakis #drake x riley #drake x mc #liam x olivia

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t-al-damiri-phd · 6 years

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hey, I just saw [ tereik al-damiri ] walking down the streets of crownsville. they’ve lived in town for [ a year ], and you can catch them around town working as an [ archaeologist ]. I hear they’re known to be [ intelligent & charismatic ] and [ awkward & dramatic]. if asked, they would say their aesthetic would be [ wrinkled suits after a long commute, well-loved history books, replicas of ancient statues, & quiet shy smiles ]

//Hey guys, I’ve been playing T on and off for a few years and I’ve actually played in this RP before, ages ago, but I wanted a new start and I’m really looking forward to getting to know you all and getting T out there! Feel free to message me for plotting, wanted connections, just to chat, anything!

Things to Know

Tereik is the youngest of 7 children and is his parents’ only son. His six older sisters are some of his best friends and they all stay in touch with each other, but he’s especially close to his oldest sister, Huriye, and his youngest sister Kamilah, who lives across the street from him with her 15 year old son.

T had a very loving childhood, but was in very poor health from birth until his mid teen years. He was born with a condition called Ebstien Anomaly, which required an intense heart surgery when he was seven, and he was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of three. Once his heart problem was fixed, his overall health began to improve, and his seizures lessened in frequency, going from 1 to 2 dozen a month, to 2 to 3 a month until he was 33 when his health took a turn again.

In 2014, Tereik was working alone in tomb he had discovered several years earlier when he had a seizure that resulted in a serious concussion, but because he was alone, he wasn’t found for several hours, leaving him with severe heatstroke as well. He’s never fully recovered from this illness, and has to battle not only with more frequent seizures, but with being underweight and slightly immunosuppressed as well.

From mid November 2011 to July of 2014, Tereik was in a relationship with a woman named Gyda Lance and he was head over heels in love with her, but she blamed herself for his accident (claiming she should have checked up on him sooner) and left him just days after the incident occurred.

Following his illness and breakup, Tereik’s mental health took a dive, and after Adult Protective Services was notified by one of his older sisters that he was unable to care for himself alone, he spent two months in a kind of watered down mental hospital. There he was diagnosed with Clinical Depression (and learned that he’d actually been experiencing symptoms of this disorder for most of his life, he just hadn’t realized it) and started on some medication that helped him get back on track.

In August of 2017, Tereik received word that his father was terminally ill and wanted all his children to be close to him at the end of his life, so T left his apartment in Cairo and his job as an archaeologist, and moved back to Atlanta

After he arrived in Atlanta, he got in touch with a few friends from his school days, and once suggest he look into getting a service dog, which wasn’t something he had any idea was an option, but he looked into it and was paired with a German Shepherd named Meeko, who’s been his sidekick ever since, and has saved his life a dozen times since they met.

Following his father’s death, Tereik dealt with his grief by doing a complete overhaul of his life. He bought a house across the street from his sister in Crownsville, got a job at a museum in Atlanta, and got back together with Gyda. It was dramatic, but he’s glad he did it, because those changes are what led to their upcoming wedding.

Work/Career Stuff

T has been fascinated with ancient Egyptian history for as long as he can remember, which is what inspired him to pursue a career in archaeology and then move back to Egypt as soon as he was able.

One of the biggest moments in his archaeology career, was being chosen to be part of a team that was going to do a series of CAT scans and DNA tests on the mummy of King Tutankhamun. He was the youngest member of the group, so the exciting work went to the more experienced archaeologists, but he couldn’t complain about that, he was honored to be allowed to participate at all.

His fascination with King Tut is largely due to the symmetry he sees in their lives. They both had six older sisters, fathers who expected them to follow in their footsteps but they couldn’t, and were both in very poor health for most of their lives.

The incident that brought him the most notoriety as an Egyptologist, was the discovery of a small, but totally untouched tomb. He applied for a position as the head of a dig and was awarded it, despite not yet having finished his PhD, and most people believed there was nothing for them to find, but a sudden sandstorm covered their original dig and while inspecting the area, he suddenly fell down a slight of ancient stairs. His tomb (called KV65) was the burial place for a nobleman, rather than a royal, but it was a major find and made him a household name in the Egyptology world.

After the discovery of KV65, Tereik was thrust into the spotlight in Egypt and was talked into writing a book about his rather extraordinary career. He called it “Fool’s Errand” in honor of the people who told him he’d been assigned an area that had been searched for decades with no discoveries. The book sold very well in Egypt, but hasn’t been sold in America before, but an English version is going to be released in the next month or two.

After the death of his father in early 2018, Tereik applied for a position at a museum in Atlanta. They were looking to open a new department and were taking suggestions from applicants who wanted showcase their area of expertise, and after several interviews, Tereik was awarded the position. He developed their Egyptology department with only the help of three unpaid interns, and they opened on October 1st of 2018. So far, the exhibit has been a completely success and he is very happy working there, though he still remains undecided on whether or not he’ll ever return to doing digs again.

Wanted Connections

Close Friend/Driver/Groomsman- Due to his inability to drive and the commute he has to do, Tereik has hired a full time driver to help him out. This man would be someone he spends a great deal of time alone with, but also someone he has to trust with his life, so the two have become very very good friends and Tereik chose him as one of his groomsmen for his wedding in May. If you’re interested in making this person, it’s posted as an official wanted connection, so just let me know and we’ll talk it out.

Old Friends- This one is less intense than the last one, but Tereik lived in Atlanta from 1993 to 1999 and attended a fairly prestigious boarding school (though that doesn’t have to be how they know each other) and he would like some friends that he could have known during his school days that he could reconnect with now.

Work Friends- Tereik works as the Head of Egyptology at the Atlanta History Center, but he’s met plenty of people though his work there, even if they don’t work in the same place. These could be people he’s met during his lecture tours, or the book tour he’s planning for after his wedding, it could be museum workers from any museums, or even interns who’ve worked with him before.

#crownsvilleintro #I was here as T's sister Kami ages ago #but life has calmed down a little #so here I am!#tw: parent death #tw: epilepsy #tw: mental health #tw: mental illness

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shultzing · 6 years

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Dream Log 2018

dream Kaleb died

dream a friend of a friend (P.) was my human pet dog. after watching a bdsm mini documentary lol.

dream Dad came to school to say Christian had a terminal illness

dream Chris C grabbed my arm and said very sternly “we’ve become very good friends.”

dream Gianna pointed out that I mistakenly called her Jan.

dream I ran into Haley and she acted excited to see me and I said Dad’s old line: If you actually wanted to see me, you could’ve contacted me whenever you want over all of these years.

Dream about Keith and I getting Starbucks

Dream that Sherri Bemis had a stillbirth (she’s actually due in less than 2 months.)

2 very short, unsubstantial/boring dreams about a current crush

Dream I befriended a cop and took him to BFF and felt really guilty for being friends w/ him but didn’t know how to get rid of him, and felt like I was going to get BFF shut down. Thinking back, I think the cop was a guy who is actually a member of BFF that I think is really cute (initials: T.M.)

day of spring finals, another dream about crush. do not have much of a crush on crush anymore, but day before sent me a pic that i guess got under my skin.

Dream I got an oriental kitten

Dream a friend (K.C.) got into sex work and I was trying to make her feel better about herself but doing a horrible job and making everything worse

Dream now-former crush had something important to tell me, woke up before he could say it

Dream most recent ex-friend started texting me like everything was normal and i was in the middle of deciding exactly how to communicate “don’t you dare” but then woke up

missed several dreams in summertime

Dream that I realized I was bisexual... i think it was a sex dream but i can’t remember. About how hot boobs are?

dream that I ran into Gianna at some random event and was so happy to see her that i screamed and she looked like she was doing really well and introduced me to her new wife.

Dream about making out w/ M

dream that i was getting drinks at a bar and got roofied and found out the whole bar got roofied and was all passed out around me and i had to struggle to the door/figure out how to open the door and then gary came in and started punching the guys who drugged everyone and i woke up

dream that one of M’s friends was assaulting me and M walked in and saw and assumed I was cheating on him and when i tried to explain that it was nonconsensual M didn’t believe me and the guy assaulting me got mad and began attacking me and M just stood and watched bc he was mad at me and then my fam appeared and also didn’t believe me and just watched.

dream in which i bumped into a recent ex-friend who wanted to hang out, so came w/ me on whatever errand I was running and was acting really chummy and then she said something about having not seen me for a while and i went IN on how i felt about her sudden and complete absence in my life and lack of response to invitations etc and the last thing i remember from the dream is watching her collapsed on the ground crying and feeling guilty and knowing that she thought I was being unfair/that she thought she hadn’t done anything wrong

fell asleep thinking about falling asleep on top of M, began dreaming about sleeping on top of R. At first, was so happy thinking “I’ve wanted this all day!” and then realizing it wasn’t M and getting confused/upset

night before an exam, had a dream that I got the wrong exam time and missed it completely. this actually happened to me once this summer, for the record. but today, woke up, and had not missed the exam.

dream about antifa, don’t remember details

dream about befriending a cop to protect/save victor and conceal my identity. had this dream after going to M’s and there were cops all over/talking about cops w/ M

another dream about realizing i’m gay? what is this? this one was a lot longer and more in depth and has lingered w/ me throughout the day. I don’t remember many details -- i just remember that i agreed to some type of threesome w/ two other girls, and one of the girls I was neutral about being around but i was excited overall bc the threesome was going to give me a chance to hook up w/ this other person (a nonbinary female anarchist i know through fb but not irl.) so then we all hooked up and i thought it was brilliant and amazing. and then somehow it switched scenes to my mom screaming at me for something and I was sitting there thinking how much more she’d be screaming at me if she knew i’d just been w/ two women. idk. the night before I had a 3 or 4 hour conversation with a communist rad fem former sex-worker about how fucked up men are and how much they fuck women up and had fucked us up. it was a really depressing conversation that got way too real for both of us, talked about all kinds of abuse and conditioning etc and she said she was wondering if she was gay and i was like “what woman doesn’t wonder that??” so I guess that’s where the dream came from.

-___________- dream about julia and haley lol. specifically, talking to Julia, idk why, on fb and her saying we should catch up w/ haley and me asking what haley would say if i contacted her and julia said she’d be excited and want to smoke weed. I was about to do the whole spiel about being ditched/them being fake but i woke up too soon.

two dreams in one night: dream #1: Robert Tate was my boyfriend and I was embarrassed to tell Victor

two dreams in one night: dream #2: I had a wart growing on my hip and all of the skin around it died and i peeled the skin off in huge chunks

i can’t remember what this dream was about i just remember that M was far away and i called his name and he turned around.

four dreams in one night: first dream was dreaming M’s text back to the goodnight text I sent him irl. dreamt he sent back a text that was a little tooo nice, but it was still a nice dream.

four dreams in one night: had a dream about Haley and I hanging out, I don’t remember the context or if it was good or bad. knowing the pattern of these dreams, probably bad lol.

four dreams in one night: had a dream about Christian and I needing to carry some wounded animal or person. It was very small, I don’t remember what it was, but it had a broken hip. I kept trying to instruct Christian how to carry it w/o making the break worse and he was very frustrated w/ my directiveness and wouldn’t listen and ended up dropping his side of the animal and not caring. lol.

four dreams in one night: I had a dream that an acquaintance of mine, Celine, was going off kind of generally, not at me, about how she was a capitalist and how that didn’t mean she didn’t support colin kaepernick. Probably bc irl I was feeling stressed about calling capitalists grubby-handed in a fb comment.

dream about a professor i like, don’t remember it but don’t think it was bad. think maybe it was about getting a pop quiz?

I had a dream about Victor when he was a toddler and just learning to form complete sentences. wearing that pink shirt with bananas on it. don’t remember what he was trying to say, though.

Another three dream night: R came over to my house to talk to me, but he was naked, and i had to yell at him to get out until he had clothes on.

2nd dream of that night: My roommate’s cat tried to attack my kitten and punctured her paw.

3rd dream of that night: I got lost on my way to clinical and I forgot my shoes.

I’m always hoping to run into/spot contrapoints somewhere and i had a dream that i finally did at a busboys and poets event. She was so nice at first and we were talking and i was telling her how amazing she was. Then she tried to rape me. I’m assuming this dream is connected to the kavanaugh hearing stuff that’s going on rn but WHY DID MY BRAIN PICK ON CONTRAPOINTS? I love her! But the dream was pretty scary.

Dream that my eyebrows were so bushy and they had always been so bushy, i had just never noticed, and i was appalled

dream that i was sleeping through meeting deborah for breakfast. wasn’t.

dream that i somehow ended up having a sleepover w/ me and all of the old friends from Ledo’s. i thought it was finally my chance to see if Grady was into me (he wasn’t) then turned to jamie (he was). Everyone looked like high school, hadn’t aged.

stats so far: 15 dreams out of 29 were negative, 5 sexy, 6 about whoever i have feelings for at the time of the dream, 9 on theme of relationships

#i don't plan on doing these often #i just keep having weird dreams about people #usually people who aren't really in my life anyway #like k #c #g #and they're all kind of bad #except the one about Chris #i couldn't tell whether that was supposed to be good or bad

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/yoga-meditation-and-psychedelics-would-you-take-drugs-during-your-practice/

Yoga, Meditation and Psychedelics: Would you Take Drugs During Your Practice?

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

ANDREW BANNECKER

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journey weekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

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This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” section below for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

ANDREW BANNECKER

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,” says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

ANDREW BANNECKER

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and MultiDimensional Yoga and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

ANDREW BANNECKER

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation… This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

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#Ayurveda #Women #yoga basics #yoga for beginners #Yoga Exercises

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cedarrrun · 5 years

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Psychedlics are having a moment. Psychiatrists are administering magic mushrooms in medical centers while yogis host ceremonies with psychoactive tea. This resurgence in research and recreational use may have something to teach us about spiritual enlightenment. Here, we explore the potential role of psychedelics within a yoga practice or as therapeutic treatment.

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

Another Trip with Psychedelics

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Going Beyond the Veil

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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chocolate-brownies · 5 years

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Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?

Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?:

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journeyweekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

Another Trip with Psychedelics

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Going Beyond the Veil

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in theJournal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

To Journey or Not to Journey?

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

0 notes

krisiunicornio · 5 years

Link

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

Another Trip with Psychedelics

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Going Beyond the Veil

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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amyddaniels · 5 years

Text

Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

Another Trip with Psychedelics

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Going Beyond the Veil

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

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remedialmassage · 5 years

Text

Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

Another Trip with Psychedelics

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Going Beyond the Veil

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

from Yoga Journal http://bit.ly/2RHZqFV

#Yoga Journal

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psychotherapyconsultants · 6 years

Text

The Hardest Part About Living with Depression

Depression is different for different people. Writer and author Therese Borchard once told me it feels like “being encased in a glass table in the middle of your living room, able to see what is going on, but claustrophobic and suffocating, wanting so desperately to get out, but being locked inside.”

Author Graeme Cowan described depression as “terminal numbness.”

For some people, depression is draining and exhausting. They feel their sadness on a cellular level. For others, like Cowan, they feel nothing, not a neutral nothing, but a lack of feeling that terrifies them. For still others, it’s none of these things.

But whatever the specific symptoms, and like any chronic illness, depression is difficult to live with. We asked individuals to share how they navigate the hardest parts about living with depression—and how you might, too.

Not Feeling Like Yourself

For Theodora Blanchfield, a health and fitness writer and blogger, the hardest part is not feeling like herself. Which manifests in many different ways: She feels foggy and acts detached. She doesn’t have the same amount of energy for her workouts, and she can’t work as much as she usually does.

When this happens, what helps is being gentle with herself. “I always remember something my therapist told me: Treat yourself like you’d treat a four-year-old. You won’t berate a four-year-old for having a hard time getting through work. You’d be patient with them. (I also usually interpret this as I need a cookie, too.)”

The Loss of Hope

Deborah Serani, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist who specializes in mood disorders, finds that the hardest part of her depression is the hopelessness and despair. Depression has a way of making you feel like things will never get better, that you’ll stay inside the darkness forever.

“Time has shown me that I always, always, feel better, but when those really tough moments hit, it can be a real struggle.”

Sometimes, Serani knows what’s exacerbating her depression—a loss, stress, seasonal changes—and other times there’s no recognizable reason. “It just is what it is, and I have to deal with it.”

She relies on several skills she learned years ago in her own therapy, skills she also teaches to her patients today. For instance, she uses supportive self-talk, such as: “Don’t let a bad day make you feel like it’s a bad life.” “Baby steps get the job done.” “I will feel better soon.” “This is part of my illness, it’s not the whole of who I am.” “Shower. Dress. Go.”

She supports her body by taking a bath or a nap, sitting outside, and if she’s not sidelined by fatigue, taking a walk.

“I also tell my loved ones that I’m having a bad day or two, and ask for their help, sometimes to check in on me or give me some added TLC,” said Serani, also author of three books on depression.

The last component focuses on soul-care. Serani feeds her senses with music, comedies, uplifting stories, aromatherapy and comfort food. “[O]ne of my go-to’s is watching videos of babies or animals on the internet. I know it sounds a bit goofy, but it gets me laughing, and it really helps shift my mood. A good cuteness-overload does wonders for me.”

The Allure of Isolation

“I think the hardest part for me is the constant desire to isolate myself, not talk to anyone, stay in bed, sort of shut everyone and everything out of my life,” said Caroline Kaufman, author of the poetry collection Light Filters In.

Initially, she thinks closing the blinds and being alone will help her to feel better. But it usually does the opposite, sparking a toxic cycle: “The more I stay in bed or isolate from my friends, the worse I feel, and then the stronger the desire gets to continue doing it. And then the next thing I know, it’s been three days and I’ve barely eaten or left my room.”

This is why she tries to make plans to do something or go somewhere with a friend, like a lunch date. Knowing that someone is waiting for her motivates her to get up. “And then after, even if we only talked for half an hour, I’m already out of bed and in the world, already out of that cycle and I will feel so, so much better for the rest of the day.”

The Unpredictability

Fiona Thomas, a writer who shares her honest account of living with depression and anxiety, said that the unpredictable nature of the illness is especially difficult for her. “Even though I’ve become quite good at recognizing my triggers and symptoms, it doesn’t make it any easier when it pops up out of nowhere.”

It’s even worse when she feels depressed during a “happy” occasion such as Christmas or a beach vacation. “It can make you feel like you’re a party pooper and ruining it for everyone else, or that you have no right to be feeling sad when you’re doing something so lovely,” said Thomas, author of the forthcoming book Depression in a Digital Age: The Highs and Lows of Perfectionism.

A real comfort for Thomas is being around people who truly understand her and understand her depression. She schedules some alone time, too, to recharge. She also reduces her stress, and tries to get more sleep. She takes walks and practices yoga.

Handling the Everyday

Candace Ganger, a writer and author of the YA novel The Inevitable Collison of Birdie & Bash, has lived with depression her entire life. For her, the hardest part is getting through everything she needs to do each day. “As a working mother of two, I don’t have the luxury of sinking into a dark hole.”

When Ganger feels overwhelmed, she asks for help. “The biggest realization I’ve had is knowing I can’t get through these periods alone. No matter how difficult, I have to find a way to reach out or it’ll only worsen the symptoms.” Talking to anyone about how she’s feeling is hugely beneficial.

Sometimes, she’ll tell her husband she isn’t feeling like herself—and he knows this is a cry for help. When she’s in a full-blown depression and can’t tell anyone else, she tries to find a person online who truly understands. “Even if it’s a simple Tweet or email, a blog post or article from someone who’s been through it, I find a way to stay connected.” She also finds it helpful to take a day or two off to decompress.

You Are Not Alone

“Depression likes to make us feel like we are isolated and that no one else could possibly feel the same way we do, but it’s exactly the opposite,” Kaufman said.

Ganger agrees. “It sounds cliché, but you’re not alone. A lot of people live with depression in a high-functioning way—like myself—so you may never know what’s going on beneath the mask.”

Stigma keeps many silent. As Kaufman said, it’s easy to believe that no one else struggles with depression, because no one talks about it.

“On the outside, you can still be high-performing and smiling but in so much pain on the inside,” added Blanchfield, who said she shares her mental health struggles openly in hopes of beginning to chip away at that stigma.

Ganger encouraged readers to share how you’re feeling, even if it’s in an email. “Depression is lie-based. It wants you to believe you’re all alone and no one cares. It’s wrong.”

Serani also encouraged readers to reach out, so others can “help you move from the dark to the light again.” And she stressed the importance of learning the when and why of your depression: “Is it situational? Is it related to family? Work? School? Is there an anniversary event on the calendar that is particularly painful? Are you taking your medication regularly? Are you skipping or missing doses? Are you eating well? How’s your sleep?”

This helps you to tailor treatment and techniques to your specific symptoms and triggers. Sometimes, you can answer these questions on your own, and sometimes you need therapy, she said.

If you’re feeling frustrated and having a tough time, Blanchfield wants you to know there’s always hope. There’s always “another medication, a different kind of therapy, a differently lifestyle change you hadn’t thought of. You won’t always feel the same dire way you do now.”

“Every time you relapse and recover, you need to remember that this is proof you’ll continue to do so as time goes on,” Thomas said.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-hardest-part-about-living-with-depression/

#World of Psychology

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