people watched, cheering for my death. I felt drenched with guilt, just
terrified. I was in a hell realm. And I remember Bill asking, ‘What’s going
on?’
“‘I’m experiencing a lot of guilt.’ Bill replied, ‘That’s a very common
human experience,’ and with that, the whole image of being hanged
pixilated and then just disappeared, to be replaced by this tremendous
sensation of freedom and interconnectedness. This was huge for me. I
saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would
let go. A little older and wiser, now I can do this for myself.”
Some time later, Charnay found herself flying around the world and
through time perched on the back of a bird. “I was aware enough to know
my body was on the couch, but I was leaving my body and experiencing
these things firsthand. I found myself in a drumming circle with an
indigenous tribe somewhere, and I was being healed but was also being
the healer. This was very profound for me. Not having that traditional
lineage [of a healer], I had always felt like I was a phony doing plant
medicine, but this made me see I was connected to the plants and to
people who use plants, whether for rituals or psychedelics or salad!”
During a subsequent session, Charnay reconnected with a boyfriend
from her youth who had died in a car accident at nineteen. “All of a
sudden there is a piece of Phil living in my left shoulder. I’ve never had an
experience like that, but it was so real. I don’t know why he’s yellow and
lives in my left shoulder—what does that even mean?—but I don’t care.
He’s back with me.” Such reconnections with the dead are not
uncommon. Richard Boothby, whose twenty-three-year-old son had
committed suicide a year earlier after years of drug addiction, told me,
“Oliver was more present to me now than he had ever been before.”
The supreme importance of surrendering to the experience, however
frightening or bizarre, is stressed in the preparatory sessions and figures
largely in many people’s journeys, and beyond. Boothby, the philosopher,
took the advice to heart and found that he could use the idea as a kind of
tool to shape the experience in real time. He wrote:
Early on I began to perceive that the effects of the drug
respond strikingly to my own subjective determination. If, in
response to the swelling intensity of the whole experience, I
began to tense up with anxiety, the whole scene appears to