Chiara's First Psilocybin Experience

Speaker: Chiara Burns

Chiara Burns: Hello, my name is Kiara. I am 28 years old and I live about 30 minutes outside of Sedona Arizona. And today I would like to share my first psychedelic experience, which was some time ago, but as I was kinda going through the mental rolodex of um psychedelic experiences, I've had this one felt like is the most appropriate one to share.

Chiara Burns: I had been on the healing and spiritual path for a number of years before my first encounter with psychedelics and it was always kind of on the periphery, but I never felt called to utilize it as a tool until I did. And it was kind of funny because once I resolved that I was going to explore that a mushroom bar of chocolate, like more or less fell out of the sky and into my lap. Uh That's the short version. And that happened like a week after I was like, I think I'm gonna go this direction and I decided to go that direction because I'd heard a lot of things uh positive anecdotes and testaments that psychedelics are great for personal transformation, for healing, for mental health. And so my first experience was solo, which I know isn't advisable. But I had spent so much time in altered states of consciousness that I was like, I, I've got this, I was like, I was pretty confident about it. So it took 1.5 g and I set the intention uh for anything unconscious that was holding me back to become conscious. Because if there's one thing that I've learned in healing work. It's that the hardest thing is figuring out the unconscious stories that we're telling ourselves, right? We have these limiting beliefs, we have these patterns we get stuck in. We have this conditioning um and all this bullshit that is unconscious and a huge part of healing and a huge part of personal transformation is making the unconscious conscious to quote young. It's bringing that stuff to light so that we can change the stories that we're telling. So we can become conscious and like actually choose our destiny in a way as opposed to just being like slaves to all of this unconscious stuff that has been uh programmed into us since childhood. And so I expected the shri gods to show me all the ways in which I was fucked up so I could go fix it. I just thought the blinders would fall off and all of a sudden, I would see all of my shit dredged up and then I could like take notes and then take care of it in the integration phase or whatever. And that is just absolutely not what happened. It's not what happened. What happened is I experienced self love for the first time in my life and I did not know what that was. It was like, it was such an alien concept to me. I remember first time I heard it was in college, I went to an all women's university and So people were always using that word and I was like, y'all just sound conceded. It was my impression. But then I had the experience of it and I remember like, I mostly just cried my first trip, but like, like a cathartic cry, kind of a sad cry. But also just like, it was more relief. I remember going and standing in front of the mirror and being like, there's nothing wrong with you Kiara. Like you are not fundamentally unlovable. You are not like uh so yeah, everyone human is flawed, right? But like you're not fucked up, you're not fucked up. And like you came into this expecting uh to be shown all the ways in which you're not enough. And I had the experience of feeling like enough. And so it was a really powerful experience and after that, I definitely paid more attention to self talk and the stories I told myself around my value and my personal worth. And so that was a big part of the integration for me after that first experience.

Chiara Burns: Positive impacts on my life were just the incredible, like the depth of emotion. And it made me realize too. And this is something I continue to work on. But I've kind of lived my life in Monochrome and the human experience, it's meant to be lived in full color. But we kind of or at least I to an extent have kind of numbed out. And so psychedelics for me remind me of like what it feels like to be fully alive and more and more moving in that direction in my like waking sober life. So not using it as an escape, but just like, oh right, that potentiality exists and right now tapping into it for the first time, like the way that emotions just move through me and I'm so present with them. So that was really positive. The experience of self love was positive. I don't get a lot of visuals with stuff. Um sometimes, but that time I did not, I will say everything looked beautiful and I had set up my uh space. So there were like a bunch of like um cool light fixtures and like star projectors and stuff. And so like that, that was fun. That was positive and like the tactile experience uh negative aspects of the journey. I mean, I cried so much. I got a headache so I ended up taking some Tylenol for that. Um Well, it was mostly just the crying which wasn't even negative. Like man, a good cry just it feels good sometimes.