How to Change Your Mind

It’s hard to say exactly what put me off working with Andrei, but oddly
enough it was less the New Agey spiritualism than his nonchalance about
a process I still found exotic and scary. “I don’t play the psychotherapy
game,” he told me, as blasé as a guy behind a deli counter wrapping and
slicing a sandwich. “None of that blank screen. In mainstream
psychology, you don’t hug. I hug. I touch them. I give advice. I have
people come stay with us in the forest.” He works with clients not here in
the office but in a rural location deep in the woods of the Olympic
Peninsula. “Those are all big no-no’s.” He shrugged as if to say, so what?
I shared some of my fears. He’d heard it all before. “You may not get
what you want,” he told me, “but you’ll get what you need.” I gulped
mentally. “The main thing is to surrender to the experience, even when it
gets difficult. Surrender to your fear. The biggest fears that come up are
the fear of death and the fear of madness. But the only thing to do is
surrender. So surrender!” Andrei had named my two biggest fears, but
his prescription seemed easier said than done.
I was hoping for a guide who exuded perhaps a little more tenderness
and patience, I realized, yet I wasn’t sure I should let Andrei’s gruff
manner put me off. He was smart, he had loads of experience, and he was
willing to work with me. Then he told a story that decided the matter.
It was about working with a man my age who became convinced
during his psilocybin journey he was having a heart attack. “‘I’m dying,’
he said, ‘call 911! I feel it, my heart!’ I told him to surrender to the dying.
That Saint Francis said that in dying you gain eternal life. When you
realize death is just another experience, there’s nothing more to worry
about.”
Okay, but what if it had been a real heart attack? Out there in the
woods in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula? Andrei mentioned that an
aspiring guide he was training had “once asked me, ‘What do you do if
someone dies?’” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but Andrei’s
reply, delivered with one of his most matter-of-fact shrugs, was not it.
“You bury him with all the other dead people.”
I told Andrei I would be in touch.
The psychedelic underground was populated with a great many such
vivid characters, I soon discovered, but not necessarily the kinds of
characters to whom I felt I could entrust my mind—or for that matter any
part of me. Immediately after my session with Andrei, I had a meeting