Altered states (when your mind gets weird on you)

So. It’s been a pretty weird couple of weeks.

A lot of what I write on this site tends to focus on the more well-known parts of the big feels spectrum. Anxiety. Doom Town. Shame Caves.

But as I’ve written about before, I also make occasional visits to what might be called the kookier parts of the big feels neighborhood. Experiences I can best describe as ‘uninvited altered states’.

Less ‘states of woe’ and more ‘states of whoaaa hold on what the hell is happening here exactly?’ 

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve had these sorts of experiences. Until last week that is.

Losing your grip on reality (not as fun as it sounds)

12 years ago, not long after my 23rd birthday, I had a really terrible drug experience.

The drugs were nothing too racy (currently legal in the nation’s capital) but they turned out to be less 'recreational' and more 'traumatically redefine your ability to trust in the basic reality of the present moment for months on end'. 

Nice.

For months after, I had periodic flashbacks where time and space would seemingly fall apart out of nowhere, sometimes for an hour or more. The littlest things could set it off. The smell of someone smoking a joint. Or even just seeing a particularly weird movie (thank you, Christopher Nolan).

And then there was the unrelenting terror. Intense anxiety that had suddenly become my baseline, day in, day out.

What followed all this was a long, long road of relearning how to be in the world. Learning how to take small but meaningful steps outside my virtually non-existent comfort zone. Learning how to surf the occasional waves of weirdness that would resurface every few months.

But fast forward a few years and all this was behind me. I was still a relatively anxious bean (as I had been before all this happened anyway) but the terror had long since receded. And I stopped worrying about random flashbacks where time and space would fall apart.

I thought that whatever door I’d accidentally opened at 23 had finally closed.

Blowing my own mind (again)

And then last week, I sat down to meditate.

I’ve always had kind of an exotic experience of meditation. Sometimes I sit on the cushion and spend the whole time just chasing my own thoughts. But other times I can get into these amazingly spacious states of mind. This time I was experimenting with a kind of breathwork that deliberately brings on that kind of big energy - something I’d done before, but didn’t fully understand.

It started well enough, but before long things got pretty intense. 

I felt a surge of wellbeing as my whole head opened up into the world at large. For a half-hour afterward I was in this state of just delightful happiness, smile the size of my face, filled with a beautiful feeling of connection to a pure, non-discriminating love.

Well that all sounds pretty good, yeah?

And then there it was, the conspiratorial whisper. The nudge that brought the whole thing crashing down. 

'Hey, is this allowed? What if I’m getting... too happy?'

I was flooded with instant panic. The gut-felt dread of realisation: this is not a normal amount of post-meditation niceness. There is something wrong. 

And there I was again - back in that place where time and space fell away. Still here in the world but somehow desperately cut off from it. Wanting nothing more than for it all to stop and go back to normal.

The perfect dilemma

At times like this I would usually go and talk to Honor, and get her to remind me in soothing tones that I would, in fact, feel normal again, and probably quite soon. 

But right as I was upstairs losing my bundle, she had a friend over for tea, a friend I had only met once before. I was not super confident I could come across as a regular human just right at that point.

Oh don’t mind him, he’s just losing his mind. That happens.

It was the perfect dilemma. I could go downstairs and try to carry on a regular conversation with Honor and her friend, all the while feeling strange and scared. Or I could stay up in my room alone, becoming increasingly afraid of my own brain. 

It’s a trap! They’re both terrible options!

I did my best to try option two, try to chat like everything was fine.

It's impossible to explain just what's happening for me in these moments. I can still think straight - I know time and space are still there - but it's like I'm somehow stuck in this endless, infinite present.

Try listening to a story being told to you by a perfectly nice new acquaintance when you're in this state. You have to listen to each individual part of the sentence - the beginning, middle and end - each of which seems to go on forever, flowering spontaneously into its own independent infinity. You then have to manually stitch each part of the sentence back together in your head, to make sense of what’s just been said to you. All while trying not to look too much like you are losing your shit at how strange this all feels.

Apparently I can do this quickly enough to hold a normal conversation, even if I feel like it’s all happening in slow-mo. (Neat party trick?)

But after five minutes of this, I needed to get out of there.

Stop the ride now please, I’d like to get off?

When in doubt (or full-blown panic) call Gareth

I rang Gareth, my friend and long-time feelings mentor. Thank god he picked up. We proceeded to have one of the more profound conversations of my life, which could fill about twelve newsletters, but for now I’ll share just a couple of standout tidbits. 

‘The thing about people like us mate? We’ve got range.’ 

He said this after sharing some of his own experiences that, while different to mine, also fit in the ‘not your usual big feels’ part of the spectrum. Gareth’s point was this: for whatever reason some of us have access to states of mind that, for most people, only come about through concerted effort and ingestion of illicit substances.

These states can be terribly scary, sure, but for those of us who can go there, they’re not wrong. They’re not even weird exactly. They’re part of the human experience, even if not everyone has the range to go there.

Or as my dad once said to me, in a way that I found only mildly comforting: ‘people pay a lot of money for experiences like these you know. You get them for free!’

‘You need an exit strategy.’ 

By this Gareth meant that, while these experiences are indeed part of the rich tapestry of being human, they’re also really intense in case you haven't noticed. They are not to be entered into lightly. 

Just as you wouldn’t normally drop a party pill on a Thursday afternoon then plan to get back to work twenty minutes later, those of us with ‘range’ need to create space for these sorts of mind-blowing experiences.

Now, I didn’t realise I was getting myself in for any of that - hey I just sat down to meditate, like all those self-help books say anxious types like me are supposed to! And yet, I could see Gareth’s point. If I’m experimenting with exotic types of meditation, likely to stir big, intense reactions, I need a plan for looking after myself after. Activities designed for that altered state of mind.

And also, I might want to be a little more mindful about when I undertake potentially mind-blowing activities.

What if I wasn't so afraid of this?

Simply talking to Gareth helped me calm down a lot.

Most of our conversation came back to this: I was scared. Scared of my own brain. Scared of my ‘range’. Scared it wouldn’t stop, and I’d never feel normal again.

The same old fears I’d had every other time these experiences had popped up out of nowhere, back when I was younger.

And all this fear was making the experience awful. 

What would it be like if I could feel this way, without being so afraid of it?

There is no deep end

Whenever I’ve had these experiences in the past, whether they’ve lasted for a few minutes or, as in this case, a few hours, the fear is that it won’t end. That this time will be the time I go completely off the deep end and don’t come back.

Gareth gently reminded me, there is no deep end. I am the deep end. Whatever’s happening, it’s part of me, and I can handle it, even when it’s scary.

What would it be like if you could feel this way and actually enjoy it?

I got off the phone after an hour of talking. I began to feel exquisitely calm. More than that, I felt high, in the most gentle, beautiful, unscary way. 

I put on some music, I made dinner, I texted Gareth: ‘I feel awesome. Sincerely, thank you.’

Me, Honor and Gareth on stage at last year's Melbourne show. Not at that time having an existential panic attack 👍

Find your tree

In the days that followed, I still felt pretty unusual. 

While I’d woken up the next day feeling fine, I kept thinking it was happening again. For instance I sat down to meditate again - deliberately going as gently as possible - and this time within just two minutes I started feeling like time and space had begun to drop away once more.

I couldn’t tell how much of this was the lingering after-effects of the initial event, and how much of it was just anxiety at the idea of it happening again.

So I went for a walk.

It was bucketing down, full on Melbourne thunderstorms. I soon found myself sitting on a boulder in the middle of a creek, as the water rushed past me and the rain fell. I was still feeling very anxious, my thoughts moving at speed. 

I remember thinking, ‘see how this water rushes past the rock just as quick as my thoughts, but the creek isn’t worried? Maybe I can be like the creek.’

When the rain got too much I took shelter under a tree, and put my back against it, taking a few deep breaths. In. And out.

It was a revelation. Leaning against the sturdy trunk, it was like my body just needed to know there was something bigger than it, something firmer, that could hold its weight. My shoulders dropped, my breath slowed.

'Maybe I've found part of my exit strategy', I thought.

I still haven't tried meditating since, but I have visited Tree every day. (Gosh it's a Good Tree.)

So... is this just me?

I’m still working through what these experiences mean to me. I’ve had them labeled a few different ways over the years. Extreme anxiety, manifesting in unusual ways. HPPD, as a result of that traumatic drug trip all those years ago. The signs of a spiritual awakening.

Each of these ways of seeing it has been useful at different times, but right now I don’t know. It all feels terrifically undefined. Up for grabs in a way that both scares and intrigues me.

What helped the most about talking to Gareth wasn’t getting some explanation for what was happening, it was getting a great big reminder that I’m not the only one with this kind of 'range' (even if I don’t always want it). 

So I’m curious, how many of you have had experiences like this, or your own flavour of what Gareth might call 'range'? 

How many of you have visited the 'altered states' end of Big Feels Town?

If you’re interested in sharing with me, I’ve made a little anonymous 3-question survey.

Purely for my own interest. Plus I might collate some of the responses in a future newsletter, depending on what comes through.