Letting Go as a Super-Power for Conscious Aging - and Psychedelic Journeying
Opening Up to Grief and/or Joyous Liberation
I’ve been thinking about how, over the course of our lives, we tend to come back to the same lessons over and over again. If we’re lucky, our path is like an ascending spiral, where each time we return to an issue, ideally it’s with greater wisdom and skill.
That upward trajectory is made possible by shedding ballast along the way.
Letting go – of stories, beliefs and habits that don’t serve us – so we can live with greater authenticity and alignment - is one of the hallmarks of conscious aging.
It’s also a fundamental feature of psychedelic exploration.
Developing the skills of a psychonaut in older life, including maintaining a light touch on what we hold to be true, is an opportunity to hone that super-power.
Loss, Letting Go and the Need to Grieve
Losses take many forms in older life: the presence of loved ones, the work that defined us, our physical and mental acuities… They may touch us in different ways, but they are a built-in and unavoidable.
While losses may be outside of our control, the ability to let go, accept the new reality, and move forward is well within our power. Mastering that skill can open a wealth of possibilities and pleasures in older age.
As my friend Nina, observes, if you live life with your head facing backwards, depression is likely to follow…
Nina is a psychologist in her 70s who had her first psychedelic experience in graduate school in the late 1960s. To this day she supports clients using psychedelics.
Making peace with the natural losses of aging, according to Nina, often requires a process of mourning. But some people hold on tight and refuse to release their love object, as if they could somehow dodge the painful bullet of grief.
These rigid sufferers are often the clients who come to Nina for support.
“Psychedelics can help you become aware of the painful places that are not fully processed. Psilocybin is especially good at bringing embodied emotions to the surface and releasing them via self-expression, with tears, memory, imagery.....
Letting go allows you to fully inhabit the grieving process, while trusting that over time the pain will lessen. There will be fewer waves and they’ll be further apart.”
The Joy of Letting Go
Happily, letting go in older age can also be a chance to jettison life’s jetsam in a joyous act of liberation.
My friend David’s first psychedelic experience when he was in his late sixties allowed him to loosen the grip of his decades-long role as the “responsible person” so he could inhabit himself more authentically:
I feel like the medicine gives you a glimpse of a possibility– enough to think, ‘oh my god, it could be like that… that might be who I am…
As he shed his responsible persona with judicious use of psilocybin and MDMA, David was able to liberate an upbeat, impulsive part of himself he’d been repressing for years*.
Reawakening “that little guy inside that was the jumper and mover” was the first step in reclaiming what he describes as “a certain embodied aliveness.”
As a child, my mother used to tell me to stop dancing in the kitchen . . . So I knew I had to rein myself in and make myself a smaller version of myself… My little bouncy guy, if he had to go undercover, it was because of shame.
Shame is one thing David is delightfully working to be free of.
It’s not just the youthful parts that David is interested in reclaiming, but all manner of limitations he’s striving to set to the side.
I don’t know if you would call all of this letting go. I actually think it’s more like kicking out – an active rejection of some of the noise that’s been filling my head…
Preparing for the Mystery
Being able to consciously let go is one of the cardinal skills for psychedelic journeying. We are encouraged to relinquish fear to make room for curiosity; shed expectations so we can accept what is; and give up the illusion of control, so we can trust our capacity to negotiate whatever arises.
For me, the feeling of submission that comes as I begin to feel the effects of the mushrooms taking over – the trepidation and excitement over the unknowable journey that is about to unfold – is a sensation I aspire to feel so comfortable with that, hopefully, when the time comes, I’ll be able to enter death in the same spirit.
In the meantime, Nina shares one of her favorite observations from Mary Cosimano (the veteran psychedelic facilitator from Johns Hopkins) - that the instructions for working with psychedelics - to relax, let go, accept whatever comes, and then learn, grow and change as a result of it - are actually good instructions for life at any age.
As David recalls, “When I was in my 60s, I had fully confirmed that I would not be taking psychedelics. That was the first thing I had to let go of – the idea that psychedelics were bad. And that opened the doorway…”
* David’s work with psychedelics is featured in my forthcoming book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging.
Abbie, so well-written..