Something to Do During Lockdown: Talk to Yourself

This lockdown time for us who take psychedelics has reduced access to the usual fun and games, since ceremonies are not going to happen for a while and home alone trips without a guide or sitter are not always the best idea. This makes it a good time to extend the internal work we may normally do between sessions and develop it into more of a practice. One such activity is deliberate self-talk.   

I have found that during a psychedelic experience we can sometimes listen more carefully and skeptically to the ongoing negative self-talk that is so often the background music to our lives. That self-talk is like bubbles coming up through the water of a deep pond and we don’t notice them until they pop up on the surface, or we don’t consciously notice these nasty little messages at all. With psychedelic, we can sometimes go down under the surface, catch a hold of the bubbles and say something new like, “be at peace,” or “I accept myself.” Stuff that a spiritual being having a human experience might find palatable.

Once the trip is over it’s so easy to forget that this method is perfectly usable in regular consciousness. Here’s how it goes: I take a few words, or maybe just a single word, anything that sounds useful and true. Then I think of that word or words for each of five mindful breaths. My favorite word right now is “calm,” and I say that inside myself as I breathe in and as I breathe out. Sometimes I send it to a particular part of my body that seems to want that message. It’s a kind of a pause, and a reminder of what I wish for myself.

Some other messages I have used are, “I am okay,” “well-being,” “strength,” “heart be well,” “listen to the stomach,” “allow everything,” and so on. You can make whatever you want, based on your own needs and wishes. Originality is not important, just make it kind, and make it pretty short and sweet.

My aim is to take this pause at least one time for each hour of the day. I have found that a good support for this is to keep track of the hours I have done the exercise, otherwise I l get lost and the whole thing starts to feel a bit messy. So, I send myself a text for each hour that I’ve done the practice.

I generally don’t actually send the text until I have four hours collected together, and at the end of day then I write down my total in my calendar book. Not because I care about the record keeping, but because this is what seems to keep me on point. For you it might be a quite different system, maybe a much more elegant one on an app, or no record keeping at all.  And if you forget to do it for a few hours – no big deal, there are no prizes, no competition, no brass band at the finish line.

I think that when we say something kind or something soothing to ourselves, we relieve the world of one tiny droplet of the stress and self-harm that is needlessly driving us all crazy. As people take to the streets to demand social justice and the rollback of entrenched institutional cruelty, we can also take a march down our internal streets and let it be known what it is that needs to happen.