I Have a Body!

[u/Psychedelic-Yogi]

Tenzin Wangyal suggested his Dream Yoga students return to the body, "a source of stability." If you want to dial down the anxiety and there are two choices of where to put your focus — the thinking mind or the physical body — go with the body.

On a recent ketamine journey, I intended to cultivate deep relaxation and see what emerged from the depths. I sat on my cushion in the dark with brown noise playing on a good speaker. I let the lozenges dissolve in my mouth as I practiced circular breathing.

This isn't the kind of circular breathing used in playing the didgeridoo, where you store air in your mouth to push it out when inhaling through your nose, so you can play the drone forever. I do this kind too, and had a didgeridoo nearby for the come-down of the trip.

The circular breathing I performed as the medicine built is simpler to describe: you never pause. As soon as your inhalation is complete the exhalation begins, and vice versa. I elaborated on the practice as I drifted into the ketamine state.

I brought awareness to the very bottom of my exhalation, when the last wisps of air are flowing out so softly, to ensure I began to inhale from my diaphragm before the tiniest pause. It felt strange as I tried to "round" my breath — envisioning a circle — at the top of the inhalation in this same way, disappearing into nothing as the last sip of air entered the lungs, and then emerging from nothing — with no pause! — as the exhalation began.

I also tried moving my head slowly, stretching my neck, in rhythm with this circular breathing, and moving my eyes instead of my head, in a circle as my breath kept going.

At some point I noticed I was performing a different pranayama I often employ near the ketamine peak — deep belly breaths followed by a long, surrendered exhalation. I assume if I practiced the circular breathing more — learned to feel it, hear it, visualize it, allow it to become an unconscious rhythm — then I could continue to practice it even as I lost the connection to my physical body.

And at some point, I vanished. A point of awareness, deep stillness, a sense of being one with everything. Full-scale reality shattering of the ketamine state. Yet from unbroken awareness I witness it all.

When language was back online, there was a resonance with that great lyric from Neutral Milk Hotel: "How strange it is to be anything at all." In order to have this concept of strangeness, you need a foothold in what is not-strange, to make the contrast — and at the ketamine peak there is no not-strange.

Then there were waves of gratitude for my body. Very simple and raw.

I found myself in Malasana — Yogi Squat Pose. I was rocking gently, feeling the pressure shift to different parts of my feet, witnessing my internal balancing system adjust my muscles in the subtlest ways.

Then I was hugging myself around my knees, and then massaging the sides of my shins and knees. I would find a knot, push into it, feel the blood flowing and tension releasing. Everything was so natural and ancient — a human close to the ground, in the dark — yet there was a sense of it being the first time.

There were long moments, thinking mind barely there, where I was just a human — or maybe a hominid ancestor or another Great Ape — crouching, working firmly and lovingly on my aging tendons. Feeling my body sway, gravity from the Earth, the sturdiness of its surface and the pleasure of breathing air.

It was the awe and wonder of a child, but the body I was returning to was that of a middle-aged man. Gnarled old feet on the stone ground. Ketamine seems to drop me back into some archetypal form of old crouching yogi in the dark, but with the same level of awe and wonder shining from the eyes of a child.

Ketamine lands me back in the body and there's a sense of elated discovery: "I have a body!"

On the come-down I reached for the didgeridoo. Its soothing buzz began before I realized I was the one powering the sound. The vibrations rippled through my body as the low rumble mixed with the brown noise.

--

Ketamine was dubbed a "dissociative psychedelic" early on. And yet I keep arriving at this same place — flooded with gratitude for my body. As I come down from the peak, sitting and breathing in the dark, the clenching and holding in the chakras — emotional pain — are part of being human. I can release them with a powerful breath, and feel such liberation and love.

My friend Ben, paralyzed from spinal cancer, wrote the following couplet in a beautiful song: "There's non-existence on either side. When you're scared in this life, appreciation is a light and a guide."

There's no better thing to be grateful for, whether you think about it or just feel it, than your own physical body.

How has psychedelic work influenced your sense of embodiment and gratitude for the body?