I was lying on a plush mat on the floor of a large room, an eye mask pulled down to block out the light. The nurse placed her warm hand on my shoulder, tightening it ever so gently as she leaned over and whispered, “See you soon.” She’d just administered the ketamine I’d been prescribed as part of my training in psychedelic medicine.
She stood up then, and I knew from my experience a couple days prior that the effects would start soon. I tried to relax my body, but I realized I was holding my breath and my hands were gripping the small blanket that lay over me. I took a big breath in and reminded myself that I was safe and could let go, that I was ready for whatever experience soon would be mine.
I wasn’t sure if all of the parts of me believed this, but it didn’t necessarily matter. In a few moments I had the sensation of a dark black blanket dropping over my visual field, and off I went.
I’ll diverge here to say that trying to recount a psychedelic experience can feel a lot like trying to describe a meandering dream to a kind friend. They reassure you that they really are interested, but by two minutes in, their raised eyebrows tell you that you’ve totally lost them.
Psychedelic experiences, like dreams and maybe even the feeling of new love, are the definition of ineffable. They defy description for a lot of reasons. One is that our normal processes for storing memories, particularly for details, are somewhat impaired by the psychedelics themselves. But perhaps more relevant is that we are limited by language when trying to capture the feelings, images, and insights of an experience that is so vastly different from those we have day to day. There really aren’t words.
If I did try to tell you about the experience that I had that afternoon, I’d tell you that what I could describe was less important than what I seemed to instantly know, outside of language, as soon as the experience began. As I was traveling along this surrealist path, sort of floating as a field of energy rather than a body, a thought occurred to me with maybe the strongest conviction I’ve ever felt. It went something, profoundly, like, “Oh, yeah. Duh. Nothing is actually real.”
If this sounds like some eye roll-worthy hippie ridiculousness, let me tell you that I get it. I literally cringe myself as I write it out. And yet, it was an awareness so visceral and deep that I have to report it honestly.
It was, as is so often described by people who have had these and similar experiences, a sense that everything that I’d felt to be so literal and true was… not. I realized I’d assigned so much more concreteness to things that were actually just constructed by our limited human minds. I thought about days and months and years and how I’d used these units of time to rule my life as if they were sword-wielding giants instead of abstract concepts. I thought about my profession as a psychologist and how I too often treated that identity as something so defined and material, losing touch with the inherent relationality and ineffability in it. I thought about how I’d spent my life feeling separate from other people when in fact there was no separateness, that my aloneness had been a mirage.
As I wandered through this weird psychedelic world, what I experienced more than anything was that my sense of self – at least as a distinct, individual entity – was completely gone. I remember it first feeling jarring, and there almost being a grief there in my self’s absence. But just as soon as I felt a loss of the sense of being me, I felt an even stronger sense of acceptance. And more than acceptance, it felt like the deepest relief.
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We talk about the ‘self’ with such a sense of reverence these days. It’s been positioned as the holy grail of all that is worthy of pursuit: self-care, self-awareness, self-compassion, self-discovery, self-actualization. We are instructed – and usually sold – all of the ways that we should be pursuing a more defined self.
The self-assessment industry is worth over eleven billion dollars and growing, a small indicator of how hungry we are to know who we are. We want to nail down our attachment style, our personality type, our colors, our values, our parenting approach. We have our individual feeds curated by algorithms that are constantly analyzing our specific preferences. AI promises even more individualization of everything from the websites we visit to the books we read.
None of this is inherently wrong or bad, to be clear. I’ll be the first to suggest that self-awareness is both power and responsibility – that we owe it to ourselves and to others to know our triggers and reactions and patterns. But the cultural dominance of self highlights how pulled we are to create something concrete and definable from our essence. We think about our ‘self’ as a manifestation of what is unique and separate from others.
And at the same time, it may just be this attachment to self that makes us most miserable.
Consider for a moment that when we are at our lowest – our most anxious or depressed states – we are the most highly focused on self. I don’t just mean that we are thinking a lot about ourselves, although that’s known to be the case. I mean though too that we are operating in our worlds, usually stuck deep in our thinking brains, ruminating and obsessing, cut off from a sense of connection with others. In these states, our thoughts get stuck in loops that are self-referential – we worry about what we did, who we are, what we’ll do, how we’ll make it. We get self-critical and sometimes self-pitying. Self, self, self.
This type of self-focus isn’t what we call selfish, and the point here is not about feeling moral guilt. What happens when we are experiencing many of the mental disorders we’ve defined is that our Default Mode Network is essentially too active. I’ve talked about the DMN before, but to summarize, it’s a group of interconnected brain regions that take over when our attention isn’t immersed in some other task – essentially, it’s what happens when we’re hypothetically “at rest.”
But as those who have experienced anxiety or trauma symptoms or mood disorders or ADHD will tell you, there can seem to be no such thing as a resting brain; it’s always active, and always spiraling. The thing about the DMN and its spirals is that it and they are highly self-oriented. Again, it’s not a bad thing given that the DMN is what allows us to remember the past, to self-reflect, to process our emotions. These are important tasks, but of course they can be taken to the extreme. That’s what happens when the DMN is overactive.
If you know intimately the experience of an overactive DMN, you’ve probably had thoughts like, “I am so tired of myself,” or “I would give anything to get out of my own brain.” Feeling stuck in self-oriented thought is literally exhausting. It’s also very lonely.
One of the hallmarks of depression is an abiding feeling of alienation. There is a sense of being cut off from others in ways that lead to the characteristic despair and hopelessness that make depression so profoundly awful.
And beyond our own feelings of disconnection and potential for misery, a world full of people too focused on self has some other pretty serious implications. We’re living out many of them as we speak. When we operate as individual entities, not perceiving our connection to each other or nature, we naturally make choices – and policies – that serve only individual needs. We are seeing the grave implications of those choices as we watch the hoarding of wealth and the destruction of our planet in real-time.
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There’s a story I heard told by the author and teacher, Sharon Salzberg. She recounted meeting the Dalai Lama in California on a rare visit to the U.S. In a group of western teachers, the Daila Lama was asked about how he would help people deal with self-criticism and self-hatred. As Salzberg tells it, His Holiness asked them to repeat themselves several times, as he did not comprehend the question. He said, “I thought I had a very good acquaintance with the mind, but now I feel quite ignorant. I find this very, very strange.”
The concept of self-hatred, a daily experience for many of us in the western world, for him was so incomprehensible. He could not fathom an experience of holding hatred toward self. This was not only because the idea seemed sad or pitiful, but because in his worldview we are not distinct beings, separate from the larger world. We are interconnected, an integral part. And how could one hate the world, in all of its beauty and goodness?
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This tyranny of self could be thought of as one of the targets of psychedelic medicine. It appears that we can actually explain how this happens too, given the way that psychedelics reduce the activity of the Default Mode Network. During and after their administration, the DMN seems to quiet. A patient of mine described the experience this way, “It felt like there was suddenly more room inside my brain. For the first time, I could see myself in a more expansive way.”
What’s vital to note is that these effects can also come via other avenues, ones that don’t require a substance outside of one’s self. We can lessen our attachment to self through experiences that help us get quiet, internally expansive, and connected to others or the world.
One of the most common ways, though not always easy, is through meditation. A regular and deep practice often induces feelings of spaciousness, timelessness, and a loss of ego. By focusing attention and suspending judgment, meditation can help foster that expansiveness.
Yet another way is the one that might be my very favorite, because of both its power and its accessibility. That way is through the experience of the emotion of awe, which renowned emotion scientist Dachner Keltner has been studying for decades. He defines awe as being in the presence of something vast that challenges our way of understanding the world. It’s being struck by thousands of glimmering stars or stunned by the generosity of a stranger. It’s getting caught up in the collective effervescence of an amazing concert or being wowed by the birth of a child. And in that moment, we lose ourselves.
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Jane Goodall, now in her early 90s, had a deep love for animals and the natural world even from her early childhood. She recounted reading Dr. Doolittle as a kid and deciding that one day she would travel to Africa to study the wildlife that fascinated her. Goodall found her way there by early 20s, spending much of the rest of her life in Tanzania. With both a PhD and a fierce love for her study subjects, the chimpanzees, Goodall became a renowned scientific expert.
Not long after the death of her husband, Goodall spent a number of intense weeks in the U.S., focused on fundraising for her conservation efforts. When she was finally able to return to Gombe National Forest, she was hoping she might find some healing among the trees she loved. In one of her books, she recalled setting out early one morning with a family of chimps as they made their way up a mountainside. There was an intense storm, forcing them to take shelter until it eventually subsided. Goodall and the chimps made their way back down the mountain and into a grassy area, where the sun was shining through the clouds and creating a sparkling effect on the lake below. Goodall described being overcome with an intense feeling of wonder at the beauty before her, and a feeling of wholeness that she struggled to put into words. “Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness,” she recalled.
And then, “It seemed to me, as I struggled afterward to recall the experience, the self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and the trees and the air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself.”
Goodall would go on to share the way in which this experience of awe would continue to intensify her awareness of details, like colors, shapes, and patterns in the world. The feeling of wholeness and connection she felt would also serve as sustenance.“(It was…) a source of strength on which I could draw when life seemed harsh or cruel or desperate.”
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What Goodall experienced has been given a name by researchers. They call it the “small scale effect,” and it’s an aspect of the emotion of awe that describes that distinctive sense that we are not nearly as central or important as we often feel.
Just like in my ketamine experience, for many people the small scale effect is deeply relieving. The vastness experienced puts things in a perspective we wouldn’t have otherwise had. As David Elkins, a psychologist, wrote, “Awe is a lightning bolt that marks in memory those moments when the doors of perception are cleansed and we see with startling clarity what is truly important in life.”
I’ve been diving deep into my own study of awe recently as an emotion and concept, and you’re going to hear lots more about it from me in my writing this year. It’s taken its hold on me because of both its fascinating science and its own ineffability.
The research on awe is literally awe-some, demonstrating profound physical and psychological benefits. As a small taste of the wide research findings, scientists have shown that awe is associated with lower levels of markers of inflammation, which is what drives chronic disease. They’ve also found awe to increase critical thinking, improve mood and anxiety, reduce the feeling of time stress, make us more cooperative, and reduce materialism.
When scientists try to understand how awe has these profound positive impacts, they attribute them in large part to awe’s evolutionary function. When we experience awe, we are drawn out of ourselves and towards connection. We are fueled by curiosity and openness.
What I might love most about what I’m learning about awe is that while we usually think of awe-inspiring experiences as being rare – these transformative moments like Goodall experiences – everyday awe is just as powerful. In fact, scientist Keltner explains that cultivating awe should be a part of our daily self-care practice. One way he suggests doing this is by going on “awe walks” in which instead of distracting ourselves with a podcast, we slow down, pay attention, and use our senses. Another is to look for what he calls “moral beauty,” the most common source of awe. Moral beauty is the wonder we feel when we see someone doing something courageous, virtuous, or amazing. Other everyday sources of awe can be found in spiritual practices, music, and art. Within any of these experiences, we can find the profound pleasure of losing our sense of self.
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Since that afternoon of the eye mask and the medicine-induced dissolving of self, I’ve found myself looking for ways to lose myself a little bit each day. Like many experiences, once you have a baseline for how relieving it can feel and your ability to get there, it facilitates a drive for creating more of it.
I’ve been going on awe walks and letting myself be more moved by the moral beauty around me. I’m listening to more music without lyrics so I can really feel it and spending more time being wowed by art and nature. It would be easy, particularly in our current climate, to gloss over any of this. There’s a way in which it can all seem futile when it feels like things are burning.
There’s also a way in which we are driven to be more self-oriented in times of collective fear, falsely believing that isolation and feeling separate from those people will keep us safe.
But I’ve come to believe that the antidote to what ails us – both mentally and societally – is truly less self. It’s less alienation. Less rumination. Less certainty.As Goodall experienced, just us and the earth and the trees and the air… seeming to merge.
