Mushrooms & Fairytales : The Medicine of the Liminal

The Otherworld

You are on an ancient bridge.

On one side lies the mundane world and the life you know you’ve outgrown. On the other side, the Otherworld shimmers, alight with promise and possibility. You are invited to cross the ancient bridge - to transition from one place to another, from one way of being to another. You are in a liminal place- a place between stories - where the old story fades and the new one waits to emerge.

The trolls beneath this bridge do not ask for trinkets or gold or favor in crossing.

They ask a question, demanding only an honest answer:

Are you ready for things to fall apart before they get better? 

In every psychedelic journey and ceremony I have been a part of, fear enters the room. This question is placed on the altar of the heart and prayers are prayed to both the old gods and the new. As the medicine approaches the lips, there is the desire to run back to the other side of the bridge. There is a sense that the medicine is already doing its work, long before we know what it means.

This trepidation is the soul's response that attends any genuine encounter with the numinous. The sacred is not optimized for the ego's preferences, and does its work partially by engaging dimensions of the self that have been atrophied. In the face of the numinous, the ego is called to surrender whatever scraps of power it has been holding — willingly, or not, and we are ushered into the Otherworld.

What follows can be a tectonic shift in understanding, in priorities, in the felt sense of who you are and what matters. It is a suspension of belief and certainty, and an emergence of what has been longing to take form. Some traditions call this a mystical experience or a form of ego disillusionment. What I know from my own journeys and from sitting with many others through theirs, is that, at the very least, it’s a reckoning with something larger than the self.

The Bridge

In fairytales, bridges are places of the in between, connecting worlds, and spanning chasms that hold a clear before and after in their crossing. In many ways, ceremony is like undertaking one of these mythic adventures. For thousands of years, sacred plants and fungi have carried people across the threshold between worlds, into the place where the familiar loosens and the unseen draws near. In ceremony, the walls of the ordinary grow thin. Time bends. The self we have been so carefully holding together softens, and something vaster rushes in.

In both psychedelic experiences and in fairytales, we navigate uncertainty and develop intimacy with the mystery. We are put in touch with forgotten capacities such as creativity, intuition, imagination, grief, wonder, interconnection, and embodied knowing. They are both vessels of collective and generational memory that illuminate patterns, aspects of the self, the questions we carry, the wounds we tend, and possibilities yet unknown.

In the liminal places of consciousness that both plant medicines and ancient stories inhabit, we are invited to wonder about the workings of a universe where not everything is as it seems, awaken our regard for the miraculous, and evoke a profound awe for life as an unfolding process that we could never have imagined. We see the impossible become possible, and are given hope in hopeless days. The story never ends when it ends; the ending is the true beginning. These medicines are both agents of remembrance, awakening us to the greater conversation happening all around us and beseeching participation from our instinctual, wild natures.

The Unseen

Stories are portals into the liminal places that psychedelics inevitably carry us.

They are living medicines for the psyche as ancient carriers of wisdom and technologies of meaning making.

They are guides in the realm of symbol, perspective, beauty, and wonder.

They support the development of mythic sensibility, and grow our capacity for nuance and paradox.

They offer orientation to the cycles of transformation, and help us see beneath the surface of things.

They give us frameworks for navigating the Otherworld, and bolster our encounters with sacred medicines by teaching us how to speak with the language of the soul.

Both on the bridge and before the altar we hover on the brink of profound transformation. To embrace the opportunity fully requires us to fully embrace uncertainty. Both safety and discomfort are needed to endure change. We are called to believe in the possibility of a new world and a new life, and in the new story that’s calling us. All liminal places are the standing ground of the holy.

Undertaking this crossing can feel like wandering through fog with a lantern that lights only six feet ahead at a time.

The soul is content with six feet.

The mind wants the entire itinerary.

This is the generative tension of liminality. Where we remain curious, provoked, and mystified. Where we are given opportunities to change, and are stretched to be able to hold a new shape.

Take a step, and the next one will appear.