Recovering from 5meoDMT derealization

Brynja Magnusson is an artist and writer with many years of experience working in ceremonies with plant medicine. Here she shares stories of two difficult psychedelic experiences, the extended difficulties they led to, and how she recovered and learned to live with these experiences. 

Brynja

I’m 31, I am an artist, an entrepreneur and a writer. I self-publish books about archetypal systems. And now I'm creating art for ceremonial work. I grew up in upstate New York, but I spent summers in Iceland. My dad is Icelandic, so I have a bit of both of those cultures. Iceland is such a small country you don't really expect to find what you're looking for there, but I have recently found one of the most remarkable teachers of psychedelics in Iceland. I'm having this beautiful, flourishing experience of art and ceremony and learning through Icelandic psychedelic culture. 

CPEP  

Tell me about the first challenging psychedelic experience. 

Brynja: 

It was in my early 20s, I was living with a shaman and his wife in the Basque region of southern France, and working as his apprentice, running vision quests for his wealthy clients. I lived there for three years, until it went sour – a whole story I won’t go into now. 

While I was there, a guy came to visit and he was carrying the toad medicine [Bufo / 5-meo-DMT] from a tribe in the Sonora desert. We had circled up to take the medicine one by one. I wasn’t feeling ready because I was quite new to psychedelics. I was called first to take the medicine. I was so terrified, I felt like I was going to pass out. But I’d been told this medicine is so rare, that I’d never get another chance to do it. I breathed it in and then essentially blacked out for the entire thing. It was like being ripped in and out of my body. I could hear myself trying to scream while it was happening. That turned into a very intense vibration, like every cell in my body was being rung like a gong. It was unbearable and there was no escaping from it. Eventually it evolved into this orgasmic vibration. To everyone watching, it looked like I'm having an orgasmic experience. But for me, it was not a wonderful experience. It was quite terrifying, against my will. 

I woke up from the Bufo and everyone’s giggling – most of them are people that I don’t know. A few people approached me afterwards saying ‘oh you had such a nice time’. But I was shell-shocked, I had no idea what just happened. I think shell-shock is a good term for it. It was like a bomb had gone off and I wasn’t really there. 

It just so happened that the next day I was going home, back to New York.  On the plane home I felt dissociated in a way I’d never experienced. Sometimes with psychedelics it’s like you peel back the veil of reality to peek through. Afterwards it sews back closed and the veil is still intact. But with the Bufo it was like the veil had vaporized and came back. It was in tatters.

I felt so completely disconnected from anything spiritual or grounding for me, I felt like I was completely alone. This went on for about two weeks, and I knew something was really wrong with me. I tried to reach out to the few people I knew who had done plant medicine to say, hey, you know I'm not well, do you know what I should do? I couldn't get in touch with my teacher. Everyone else that I knew who did psychedelics was at Burning Man. 

It got so bad, this detached feeling, I started to feel like I might kill myself if I keep going like this. I felt so confused, unwell, freaked out, like I'm going to lose myself.  I was really alarmed by this, and I didn't feel I had any resources or anyone to talk to about it. I decided this is now an emergency, and I have to take some emergency action to figure this out. I decided to put myself into a vision quest and see if this will clean me out, because fasting, spiritually and physically, it burns off excess. It can burn off stuff that's weighing you down, emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually. So I put myself into a fast in my favorite wilderness with the intent to stay there until this clears out. 

CPEP

So where was your favorite wilderness?

Brynja

I guess wilderness is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a large state park in New York called Harriman State Park. I went there, found a place to set up my tent, and I stood facing into this beautiful forest. I said to it, ‘I'm not well. I'm really not well. Something has gone really wrong. I need help. I don't even feel like anything is listening to me right now, but I'm having an emergency. Please help me. Please help me. Please help me’. I crawled into my hammock at night. I started to feel like noises were approaching the hammock, and I was terrified. I thought there was an animal outside, and I had this feeling, this sensation, almost like hands pushing in on the tent. I instantly fell asleep, and I woke up two hours later, and I was no longer in that dissociated state, I was miraculously rescued from it. I realized, ‘oh my God, I know what's wrong. I've just been scared. And I've been dissociating because I'm terrified, this has all been a fear response’. And it lifted in that moment, and I realized I just needed to go home and get comfort. It was fixed in this moment, just like that. This has happened to me a few times in my life. It's hard to explain.

CPEP

What’s happened to you a few times in your life?

Brynja

That there's been kind of an emotional, mental crisis, and I ask for help, and it's lifted in a way that doesn't make sense. You know, there was no therapy. It just kind of was pulled off.

CPEP

I guess there was an asking for help to the spiritual world. 

Brynja

That’s a really interesting point, because this does seem to be the premise of a lot of massive psychological relief, whether or not you believe in religion or spirituality, that the human psyche sometimes cannot bear certain loads, and the load is so great, you have to surrender it to something else.

CPEP

Yeah, in our research, one of the most common coping techniques for post psychedelic difficulties is meditation or prayer, which includes all kinds of different things, but one of them was just praying for help. 

Brynja

Yeah, it seems to do something psychologically, it relieves a load that is crushing, that you alone can't seem to lift. And I'm not implying that means necessarily that there is something greater. But it's almost like an emergency flip switch for the human psyche. I really respect people that are doing 12 step work. Part of the whole process of getting rid of an addiction requires that flip switch of saying you gotta hand this off to something else because you'll be crushed under the load. 

CPEP  

So then you mentioned another very difficult experience with iboga? 

Brynja

I did Iboga about two or three years after the Bufo experience, around 2020, and I didn't know anything about Iboga before hand. I had been invited on a whim. I was feeling confident in psychedelics use by that time. I thought, you know, I've got a good handle on this. They're all relatively similar in intensity. 

Immediately into the iboga experience, I realized this was not going to be anything like anything that I had ever done before, which up to this point had been Ayahuasca, San Pedro, Mushrooms, and Toad. One of the traits of Iboga is that it brings you to work on ancestral issues. It seems to be a very universal experience, and that is what happened for me. During the experience I was suddenly carrying my mother’s emotional load of my grandmother's suicide, which had happened when my mother was quite young. It felt as though I had gone back in time to the moment that happened, seen my mother’s face as she found out, and retroactively took the pain off of my adolescent mother so that I could carry it with her. I was in my own grandmother’s body, felt her depression, and watched her take her life. As a sorrow, it was indescribable. I've never felt anything like it. If I describe the spectrum of my emotions as a staircase from 1 to 10, this was like going down to level one, finding a door and going down another 13 steps. It was just sorrow beyond belief. 

CPEP

How old was your mother when her mother died? 

Brynja

She was 12. Almost the whole Iboga experience was related to this, to my mother’s grief, and also a profound fear of death. Something Iboga does is it makes you look non-stop at something. And so, from other stories I've talked to of people who've done Iboga, they come out of it feeling like they've matured, in a way, because they've spent so much time being forced to look at something that they've always been able to avoid looking at. 

It was really challenging. The ceremony ended, and I was in pretty rough shape. I would burst into tears about every 20 seconds, I was having a kind of extreme memory loss during the ceremony, it took two or three days to come down off the medicine. I was still unable to drive for about two or three days afterwards, I actually had to call my parents to take the long journey upstate and pick me up from the ceremony, because I couldn't leave on my own power. And thank God they were there, I was really in need of very loving care at that time. I was unable to comport myself without crying for weeks. I was debilitated for weeks with inconsolable sorrow. 

I spent quite a lot of time in my mother's arms trying to comprehend grieving what felt like my own mother’s death while laying in my living mother's arms. It felt like I had lived her memory with her. She was so understanding. But this pain persisted. Just because I got it under control externally didn't mean that it wasn't there. I was having a hard time rationalizing how a sorrow this profound could exist, why it was affecting me so much. Previously, when I heard people saying, ‘I'm having ancestral trauma come up’, I had felt like, well, that's not really a thing, right? You're dealing with your own trauma. And then here I am, having an immensely difficult time dealing with something that did not happen to me, that felt like it did, and I can't even go back to the memory and deal with it.

I came out of this iboga experience with this massive amount of information to share, which I had no idea what to do with it. I've never had this happen through any other plant medicine. This was like ‘something has to come out of me, and I don't even know what to do with it’. And for about two or three years, I was bouncing around with this pain, not knowing what to do, and I decided eventually, I have to write it down, I have to put it outside of myself in order to deal with it, because it's not going anywhere. 

To a degree, it felt like I was writing my thesis of spirituality. I've written a couple of books and usually I try to make them practical and useful guides and references. But this was just me putting down a theory. It's my weirdest book, and I eventually had to self-publish it to get it out, because it was eating at me on the inside. The book was called Yin Mysticism, and it was a theory of operating and understanding through the unknowable dark, Yin, paradoxically dual feminine side of things. And it really helped me rationalize everything that I was confused about into this understanding of the universe, including the sorrow. I figured out where the sorrow and the grief fit into it. I figured out where the motherhood dynamic fits into it. It still helps me figure out everything that is confusing to me. And it helped. Once it was out, I felt a lot better.

CPEP

So you found a framework to take something that felt mysterious, and cripplingly personal. You found some kind of framework to comprehend it and accept it as part of the duality of the universe. And somehow, the process of writing this book helped you to make meaning of it and maybe get some distance. 

Brynja

Yeah. There was a lot of transformation. That is something you also see when people do iboga  - it really shakes things up. You can see people come out of iboga and make really big changes in their life afterwards. I don't know the mechanism of it, but the few people I've talked to who have done it have had that experience. But it's still there, the pain. I'm still working on it.There's a lot of layers over it, and at the point that it's at now, it's a little bit mystical.

There were some strange changes that happened after I did iboga, physiologically, mentally, emotionally. The most prominent thing was that my sensitivity to all other plant medicines fundamentally changed. I was already very sensitive to plant medicines and that just went through the roof, like exponentially more sensitive, to the point that it was starting to become traumatizing to take any amount of any other plant medicine, because the experience was so powerful that I would felt like my body was gone and I was suffocating, and I just couldn't do it anymore. So I had to stop all plant medicines for a couple of years after doing iboga. To this day microdoses feel like full doses.

On an emotional level, something had changed with my relationship towards grief. If I see someone else experiencing grief, I start crying with them. It reminds me of what happens to a person when they become a parent. You become a parent, and maybe before, you were ambivalent to kids. And now, if you hear a child crying, there's like this visceral response that you're always caring, you have to care for them. That's how profound it feels. I have this deep connection to grief now that wasn't there before. I can't always get a handle on but it's beautiful. Maybe you could describe it also as an open wound, but it feels like more than that. 

The last and most mysterious thing that happened was I became intolerant to music. I was never a huge music person. I liked music, I wasn't raised in a super musical household, but now, every time I listen to music, it's too painful. Especially music that came out of the 60s, which was around when my grandmother died. It feels to me like music holds the memory of all the pain that the instruments have witnessed through thousands of years of human suffering.  It’s like I can feel the pain of all these lifetimes in any instrument, it’s overwhelmingly painful. So this has been a difficult thing to navigate. How do you go out and enjoy life when music makes you feel sad and upset and you want to avoid it? It's become almost like music in itself is its own drug that I'm too sensitive to take.

This is something I'm trying to figure out, because that still persists. It’s been five years of this , and it's not something I really share like, you don't want to tell people hey, I can't handle music.

CPEP

Do you think there was a point to the post-iboga challenges you experienced, a spiritual lesson? Do you think this is just something that happened? Or do you think that this was something that you were meant to go through? 

Brynja: 

I'm not holding that too tightly - that this happened for a reason. But first of all, it's an incredible resource. I can now relate to someone going through this. I love talking to other people who have done Iboga, because so often there is something intangibly difficult to work through afterwards, and there's a camaraderie there. And also it forced me to develop a thesis putting together mysteries of the universe that have plagued me, things that have terrified me about how our universe works. It’s helped my fear of death.  And I think that that thread of grief, as difficult as it is, is doing something very valuable. I just don't necessarily know what it is yet. If nothing else, it has connected me to my mother and grandmother, because my mother is my first spiritual teacher. I now have a palpable thread that runs backwards into the foggy past of my grandmother’s death and forward connecting to myself in the future where my own mother will one day pass.  All these moments of motherly life and death life are now connected for me.  I find this to be deeply mystical.

If we look at what trauma is, trauma is memory. Memory is supposed to get filed away in your brain, into a filing cabinet and stay asleep until we need to call on it. When you go through trauma, your memory won't go to sleep. It stays in a Yang state, and it starts bouncing around in the mind. And so I think comfort is a tool to inquire about - comfort as a Yin spiritual tool for grief and or traumatic experiences. This kind of came to me through being in an inconsolable state of grief, and laying my head down on my mother's bosom and seeing, wow, this woman's bosom is like the grief antidote. You come out of the womb, ripped from everything you've known, have a traumatic experience to be born, and the first thing you get is a evolutionarily designed body part to comfort you and feed you, to keep you living. I think bosom therapy should be a standard treatment for anyone going through massive trauma or heartbreak, to lay your head on comfort.

But this is a part of a greater idea around how spirituality takes so many flavors. Sometimes the flavor is belief-oriented, like many religions. Sometimes it's transformational or occult, like recovery, therapy, or divination. But I think the neglected side of spirituality is the mothering side, the deep comfort side of psychedelics or spirituality. And so much of the exposure that I've had to ceremony has been male led and intense with the intent to shatter. For some people, that’s great, especially I think for men. Men do really well with more intense, impactful exercise, lifestyle, and spiritual experiences. And maybe that doesn't necessarily need to carry over to women. 

I think maybe part of the difficulty I was having with psychedelics for such a long time was that I would go into a ceremony and say, “I've kind of learned where my limit is. I need less. I really need less than everybody else is having. Can I do that?” And the person facilitating says, “No, I know what you need. The medicine has told me you really need to have your ego shattered. You're asking for half a dose? I'm going to give you two doses, I’m going to give you quadruple what you know is your limit”. And when you have enough of these experiences, that's a trauma in itself, because you've lost your autonomy, yeah? And you've come to expect that you won't have the ability to say what you need. And so you lose your power. 

As I've started back into psychedelics after taking a long hiatus, I'm much more aware of this now, of wow, I'm kind of afraid to go into ceremony with any kind of psychedelic when the attitude, which is a very traditional attitude, is everyone in this room has to be on a certain level. And if you say that you don't want to, we're going to make you do it anyways. And I really avoid that now, and I'm kind of shaping my practice around going more to the feminine side of things, and I've had some really interesting experiences with that. And one of the people who has who is really embodying that is this woman I mentioned earlier in Iceland. She is holding psychedelic practice in Iceland with the most beautiful, therapeutic, spiritual, feminine, community based practice I have ever seen. And what's so unique about it is that Iceland is so small, the community is so small, that she is pulling in everyone to work with her. She's working with politicians, with the police force, with criminals, with anyone who wants to come in and work. And her whole ethos is that she wants to create the safest, most mothering, feminine space to be held and really get that comfort side of psychedelics. I'm just so blown away by her. She is so phenomenal. Her name is Sara Maria with the Eden Foundation.

CPEP

So, finally, you’re working with art in ceremony at the moment? 

Brynja:

It feels like it's been circling back around to ceremonial work, but doing things really well is so important to me and before stepping into a role like that. I think of the Visionary Art I am doing now as a vehicle. It's a vehicle that's driving me back into ceremonial work and bringing me closer to the right people for it. In psychedelic art there's different tribes of artists and art styles, and what resonates with me is the art that depicts the nature-based, earthy, spiritual, reverent ceremonial work - shamanic work. Painting can be like a goal, intention, or a prayer, like a precognition that it's on the way towards you. There are some artists that are incredible medicine men and the art is also their vehicle to bring their medicine out into the world, in the style that fits their kind of therapeutic treatment. And that's what it feels like for me, a vehicle to find the type of ceremonial work that aligns with the shamanic, feminine, and sensitive approach