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Psychedelic Healing Stories from Australia: John’s Experience with MDMA, Psilocybin and Ayahuasca

Man in Nature

 

In this blog series, we are sharing some of the healing stories from our recent book: Psychedelic Healing Stories from Australia. In this blog, we share the story of Maree and her experiences with psilocybin and LSD.

 

What led you to seek healing through psychedelic medicine?

I was bored with life.

I had money, a decent business, good friends, good health, a great lifestyle (I lived overseas for ten years) but despite all that, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t feel fulfilled or alive. I felt like life was basically meaningless. It was empty.

As a result, I drank too much alcohol. I smoked cigarettes. I took risks with my life, like racing motorcycles through the mountains of Northern Thailand and taking recreational party drugs. Anything to feel. Anything to feel alive.

I was disconnected from myself, disconnected from the people around me and I was not making the most of my potential as a human being. I was not contributing to society and to life in any meaningful way.

What was your psychedelic experience like?

I’ve had several psychedelic experiences and every single one was incredibly healing.

They showed me that I was totally shut down emotionally. There’s a lot of trauma in my family. Sexual abuse, physical violence, emotional abuse, drug and alcohol use, depression, anxiety, and more. My parents also got divorced when I was seven years old.

All of this led me to feel incredible pain when I was a child.

As a result, I shut down emotionally without realizing it. I totally disconnected from myself. Psychedelics showed me that this was why I wasn’t happy, this was why I wasn’t fulfilled. I’d lost parts of myself, and I needed to get them back. I needed to remember who I am.

That meant I needed to feel all the pain from the past. I need to turn towards my pain instead of turning away. I needed to embrace it and work with it, and in that embrace, I realised that I had the power to liberate myself from it. I had the power to heal.

How have you been able to integrate this experience? How has it contributed to your healing process?

I’m happier than I’ve ever been. More fulfilled and more alive. I rarely drink alcohol anymore, and when I do it’s usually only one glass. I quit cigarettes. I don’t use recreational drugs like I used to. I’ve never been on better terms with my immediate family. We’ve resolved all kinds of things from the past and I feel so much closer to them now. I feel lighter, as though I’ve let go of a massive weight that was on my shoulders.

It’s impossible to put into words how powerful and how positive psychedelics have been for me and my family. I think it’s a tragedy that these substances aren’t more widely available, and I hope that more people can experience what I’ve experienced.

Curious to read more? Read the Stories of 53 Australians That Experienced Psychedelic Healing, In Their Own Words.

This book will show you the deeply human side of the effect this medicine can have, and give you hope, inspiration, and clarity around what is possible for Australians when we get fair access to these breakthrough medicines.

Psychedelic Medicines: How My Journey Into The Jungle Changed My Life by Dr Alana Roy

 

My name is Dr. Alana Roy and for those who know and love me, Lani Roy. I am the National Practice Manager of Mind Medicine Psychological Support Services and the Co-lead on CPAT (Mind Medicine’s ‘Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies’). I am a Social Worker, Psychologist, Counsellor, Researcher, Teacher, mother, and wife.

I am also an Ayahuasca dietero* a psychedelic and plant medicine advocate… And I am finally ready to share my story.

When I turned 30 years old, I was a decade into my career as a sexual abuse and suicide prevention therapist. I had always loved my work and had enormous energy and joy for my clients and projects.

During this time, I was completing my PhD, raising my two young sons, growing my private practices, and working multiple roles in the community. Slowly but surely, I began a descent into what I can now see as a “spiritual crisis and emergence.” Over a two-year period, I experienced extreme levels of existential anxiety, fear of death, and excruciating levels of suffering – suffering for all the women, men, and children impacted by sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. I began to lose hope in the current treatments offered by mainstream mental health services, which contributed to occupational burnout; an endless revolving door of wounded souls taking far too long to feel relief. I felt that I was failing them.

Over this two-year period as I completed my PhD, navigated complex trauma cases, and attended parks and playgroups with my children, my body, mind, and spirit began to shut down. I plummeted into a dark, dense black hole of nothingness – I would oscillate from feeling nothing to extreme terror. I tried everything – meditation, mindfulness, hypnotherapy, exercise, therapy, supervision, spending time with friends and family. I had resources, support, and a happy and loving marriage of 18 years, but the suffering deepened. People did not know how to help me. My psychologists were running out of ideas and the capacity to hold my darkness.

I finally understood the suicidal mind. I had supported people with suicidal thinking my entire professional life. Yet, I never quite grasped their level of pain until I experienced my spiritual emergence.

I also gained a deeper respect for myself as a woman and a mother during this time; I was able to compartmentalise my pain and keep significant levels of joy and happiness flowing in my household for my children. However, this was exhausting, and something drastic needed to happen. Death and panic met me each morning as I made my children’s cereal and kept me awake all night. In the late nights, as my beautiful family slept, I fell apart. I began researching alternative treatments for over a year. I explored topics ranging as far and wide as atheism, panpsychism, physics, cosmology, theories of space and time, neurotheology, and of course nihilism. Somewhere in this rigorous, yet desperate search, I found Ayahuasca.

I remember looking at my husband and saying, “It is either I go to the jungle or a psychiatric ward.” The next day I booked my ticket to Peru.

Getting on that plane alone was the bravest thing I had ever done. My psychologist told me not to go and that I was making a mistake. I felt fear and trepidation at letting go of my consciousness and what little sanity it had left. In my mind, I said goodbye to my husband and children. I felt that I was approaching death, and I was right. Something did die, my fear.

My first night drinking Ayahuasca was both the death, and the birth of me. I sat down in the dark and drank two big cups; with cosmic levels of fear, I pulled the psychedelic trigger. During this journey I processed memories of my past sexual abuse and domestic violence; my ego and sense of self dissolved; I experienced the most fear I have ever experienced in my life; I died; I was born; I purged out global, archetypal, personal, and client traumas. I also experienced realms, dimensions, spirits, downloads, and the external feeling of being known and held.

After this experience, I was sent into isolation to hang with the monkeys and the bats for five days to participate in a mapacho (tobacco dieta). Each day under strict supervision I drank mapacho and spent time in deep meditation; grounding, integrating, processing, and healing. Over the coming weeks, I went on to do San Pedro cactus and more Ayahuasca ceremonies.

Both medicines worked synergistically for me. Ayahuasca expanded me beyond my biggest and wildest fears, whilst San Pedro helped me experience the drumbeat of the natural world; I could hear the animals, the trees, the jungle, and in a sense the beat of my own heart and all the aspects in my life which connect me to a sense of meaning and purpose. San Pedro grounded me back into my body, my heart, and my practical and rational mind. This ultimately helped me to process many aspects of my Ayahuasca journeys, which for me, remain beyond language, space, and time.

San Pedro

I will never forget the feeling of jumping into the Amazon River with no fear. As I swam with excitement, I could see my new sense of self emerging. I drove out of the jungle on a little rusty boat in the darkness of the early morning, into the light of the bustling city of Iquitos, and knew I was ready to return home. However, were people ready for me?

On my return to Australia, I was left to integrate these experiences alone, with no professional support, and no community to understand me. I felt a deep sense of reverse culture shock. I retuned with eyes that could see the environment that our modern world can generate; the disconnection, mass consumption, greed, sheer lack of depth and empathy for others.

Few people wanted to engage with me on the epistemology of plant spirits, or could tolerate the notion that my most life changing experience involved losing my mind in the dark with an exotic brew. Professionals didn’t trust that my progress would last and were not willing to engage with me in discussion regarding the huge potential of psychedelics and mental health.

My family and friends saw the changes in me and would often say “Lani, you look and sound so different, how did you get better?”

It took me a long time to be able to say, with confidence and without censorship “I went to the jungle and drank Ayahuasca, San Pedro and spent a lot of time alone with a master plant, that’s what changed me.”

I am an Ayahuasca dietero

I am a Psychologist/ Social Worker

I am a Scientist-Practitioner

I wear all these titles and more, embracing paradox and complexity with pride. Can this make people uncomfortable? Yes…. But progress and growth are often uncomfortable.

Each day I wake up with a new mystery and adventure to explore. My ability to hold darkness and trauma has expanded beyond what I could have ever imagined

In a few short years, I am now running Mind Medicine Australia National Psychological Support Services and helping to grow a national community of professional experts who are skilled in harm minimisation, preparation, and integration services for people seeking out psychedelics in legal clinical trials, as well as community and overseas contexts.

I have revitalised hope for the mental health system as we, as a global community, pioneer the clinical use of psychedelics. I work each day providing clinical support to people who have had similar experiences. After 15 years of working as a trauma specialist, I am finally seeing fast and deeply transformative results with psychedelic medicines. The clinical evidence can no longer be ignored. Our policy and lawmakers need to move beyond the stigma of psychedelics and listen to the science.

I have the privilege of walking side by side with a team of wise, humble, and skilled academics and practitioners in the Certificate of Psychedelic Therapies and together, with you, and the wisdom of these plants and molecules… we will change the mental health system.

This is only one chapter of my story; there are many layers and journeys left untold.

I am growing as a wife, mother, friend, leader, mentor, teacher, researcher, medicine woman. I have so much to learn, but with my plant teachers by my side and the support of professionals with integrity, I will do my best with what time I have on this earth to generate as much healing, joy and dreaming as I can.

 

*Ayahuasca is taken in combination with other ‘master plants’ is referred to as a shamanic dieta (Gearin & Labarte, 2018). The term ‘dieta’ in Spanish simply means diet. However, in this context, a dieta encompasses a range of dietary and behavioural practices in which apprentices make lasting relationships with the spirit/essence of the specific plants, including ayahuasca, over a number of days.  

Dr Alana Roy

Ph. D Psychology, B. A Social Work (MHSW)

Dr Alana Roy is a psychologist, social worker and therapist and has spent the last 13 years working in mental health, suicide prevention, trauma, sexual abuse, family violence and the disability sector. Alana has worked with borderline personality and dissociative identity disorder in various roles in the community such as: Rape Crisis Centres with victims of ritual abuse, childhood and adult sexual assault, supporting women in the sex industry, survivors of human trafficking and now as a psychedelic integration specialist.

Alana focuses on harm reduction, community and connection. She is dedicated to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and plant medicines. She has engaged with, and provides integration therapeutic support services for communities across Australia. Alana works at several universities as a Research Fellow and supervisor of students on placement. Alana passionately advocates for public policy, community education and legislative changes so that these treatments are regulated and supported by a strong, connected and skilled sector.

Learn more about Alana’s experiences in: Psychedelic Medicines: How My Journey Into The Jungle Changed My Life

My Awakening… by Simone Dowding

Here I was a successful entrepreneur living a millionaire lifestyle. I had made it! Or so I thought. But something was missing. I didn’t feel the happiness that I’d been promised by society. I felt lied too, that I’d been somehow tricked.  The success, I had valued and strived my whole life for, had left me empty and in a marriage that had died in the process. I don’t think anyone can describe the loss of a marriage. The loss of the family you had always wished for, the loss of everything you essentially knew, the look of despair in your children’s eyes, the dreams you had created together. Your combined friends, family and memories.  They all disappear. In the midst of all the trauma, change and never-ending tears something else dawns on you too.

I am now…alone.

In my aloneness, I grew afraid. The world had lost all meaning and I felt completely disconnected from everyone and everything. Nothing bought me joy and I was trapped in extreme suicidal ideations that left me unable to work and be social. My family was unable to understand me, and I was gradually losing all my friendships. Leaving me more disconnected and isolated. For 3 years I struggled through, tortured by my thoughts and grief. I went to every western Doctor and tried various medications that made my symptoms worse. Then I tried yogis, naturopaths, psychics, body somatic work, acupuncture, counselling, hypnosis and meditation. I even went vegan and moved to the beaches of Byron Bay. You name it, I did it. I was desperate!

Synchronistically, in a yoga class, I met a girl that had just come back from the Amazon and said she had been healed of her depression.  She told me that what I was experiencing, in shamanic terms, was what can only be described as a ‘dark night of the soul’ and that the mystics before me spoke of an experience that is likened to a deep spiritual depression or existential crisis that was necessary to live an authentic life.  They saw it as an initiation. A rebirth. A transformation from the old self into a profoundly liberated state and new way of being in the world. Could this explain my intense and prolonged suffering? The reason why I’d divorced, why I’d lost everything?  At last, I felt understood, I felt hope, I felt called into something greater.

Within 3 months, I was sitting in the Peruvian jungle at the feet of a renowned and very powerful shaman.

The Amazon is not an easy place to be. But It’s hauntingly beautiful with the most ancient lush green trees. The tallest I’ve ever seen. With beautiful hummingbirds and colourful butterflies that land on your arms. You are also dangerously aware that there’s anacondas, tarantulas and piranha around too. But I had nothing to lose, because I already felt dead. So what was there to be afraid of?

I was wrong.

I was living with an indigenous tribe in very poor conditions. The shaman spoke no English but was so welcoming and kind. He told me in Spanish that my spirit was very sick and my energies needed to be realigned. I had ceremonies in which he sung icaros (their magical songs) and gave me various plant medicines including Ayahuasca (the vine of the soul). The first night was one of the most frightening nights of my life. I was confronted with all my grief and trauma and challenged to find my power within it. I felt the shaman and medicine, training me to be strong, resilient and face all my fears. I’d had an initiation that was sacred and profound.  I felt new, clean, strong. Most importantly, I had been given the ability to dream again. I could actually see a future. I had direction, I had hope. I was ready to dream my new life into being.

But the greatest gift of all was that I wanted to live.

Words can’t describe the sense of freedom and possibilities that I now felt. I realised the key to my mental and spiritual health was the complete letting go of my old life, past, ancestral history, culture, trauma and subconscious programming.  It was more than a psychological healing though. I had awakened into something new. It was like choosing the red pill in the matrix.

“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more”. Morpheus

I’d chosen a different path to others. I wanted the TRUTH. It was a far cry from Western medicine and taking a pill to fix things quickly.  I don’t believe in a happiness pill. There is no such thing. I’d worked hard for my mental health. I’d fought hard for my life. And it was all without a doubt for my 2 boys. I had to get well for them. The greatest loves of my life.

My way is not for everybody. I’d searched for my own truth, and worked out what was true for me. In the process, I was profoundly connected with something greater than myself. The realisation had dawned on me that I was never ……alone. It really was a divine journey that had been orchestrated by a divine force to lead me back to my authentic self, to bring me home.

How lucky am I, how blessed to have taken this path that others would traditionally interpret as a descent into mental illness. It was far from that!! I’d reconnected with life, humanity, my divine purpose. I guess it’s in times of crisis that we finally yield and discover who we really are.  I have a peaceful acceptance of my past now, as painful as it was, and I realise that nothing happened by accident. I see clearly now why I had to go through that suffering. I felt like a warrior returning from war into a bright, new world filled with possibilities.

On my return from the Amazon I worked for World Vision Australia as Head of Social Enterprise, which enabled me to economically empower women globally.  I was then voted in the top 50 Business People of the Year in Australia by Inside Business magazine for my contribution to humanity. I am currently CEO of a national organisation and a guest lecturer for Monash University. Most importantly I am a loving and present mum to my two gorgeous boys.

Big love Sim

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