high on love: exploring intimacy in altered states

I’ve always been drawn to rituals that help us slow down enough to actually feel. Feel our bodies… Feel our connection… Feel our desires…

So last Tuesday me and my boyfriend experienced our first magic mushroom trip and it made me reflect on all of the different ways you can explore and experience intimacy— also by entering altered states of the mind. I’m not someone that feels safe and comfortable to explore with drugs, outside of occassionaly smoking weed and drinking alcohol. This because my first ever xtc experience was one of the worst. I wasn’t guided on the effects and had most likely been given an overdose that night. As someone that is diagnosed with depression and mood disorder, aside from also being highly sensitive (HSP) the amount of distress and anxiety I experienced that night was terrifying. The one friend I deeply relied on made me feel like I was overreacting, so the lack of a safe space and the entire wave of extreme emotions made me back off of ever exploring chemical drugs again.

But despite 6 years of rejecting pills whenever friends offered it to me, when I met my boyfriend last July and the amount of safety I felt with him the longer we dated and spent time together, on his birthday I felt less hesitant to trying it out once again, this time in a different setting. Just the two of us, in my home = my safe space and with guidance of someone who truly cares deeply for me. And our experience was beautifully intimate and amplifying our deep emotional and sexual connection. When I started getting overwhelmed and taken over by fear, he was there for me and gently guided me back to a state where I felt comfortable and calm again. So after our initial experience, we did xtc a couple more times together, all very ecstatic experiences. And while I enjoyed the closeness it offered us and the release of only lovey dovey and horny feelings, afterwards I always immediately fell into a massive dip. Xtc sucks all of the serotonin out of your body and with me it didn’t gave me a second to adjust. The days after I felt empty, emotional and depressed, which made us realize that xtc was not something I could emotionally handle and we decided it would be best to just enjoy our love and intimacy sober.

Whenever I try out something new, I immediately share it with my closest friends. So sharing how my xtc trips were going, a couple of my friends recommended me to switch xtc with magic mushrooms as it’s not chemical and would probably have a better effect on me. So when I was running errands to pick up different sensual and erotic items for my goodiebag for Lovers’ Soirée, Newside Erotic Shop (an erotic shop I collaborate with for 2 years) showed me these magic mushroom chocolates and offered a set on them for free, after me sharing I have been wanting to try out shrooms.

So I waited, extremely excited, for the day I was going to see my boyfriend again. And same as me, he too was open to explore this together. We both took 1 chocolate, which contained 75mg of psilocybin and we decided to watch a movie. After 15-20mins I suddenly started feeling highly aware of my surroundings and my breath and bursted out laughing. For the next 15 minutes I kept laughing and tried my best to continue watching the movie but I couldn’t, so I just surrendered to the feelings and played music in my airpods, while my boyfriend commented he didn’t feel anythin at all and just thought I was funny. What I experienced was a sense of calmness, joy and confidence in myself, as I never had before. As if I was able to release all ego and Earthly fears and just fully be in the moment and enjoy these waves of happiness. My boyfriend started feeling uncomfortable and to protect his privacy and the details of the trip, I will not get into details of what happened after, but what I can say is that we entered a different layer of intimacy and understanding, which was pure and raw.

I was able to meet his inner child with softness and calmness, while creating a safe space for him to be seen in his vulnerability. I also witnessed our ancestral lineages, as I am Surinamese and he Moluccan, and how our cultural backgrounds play a role in our lives but also how we could bring healing to each other through these. So we were seeing each other from a soul-level and it was something we still in these after-days receive spiritual and emotional insights from.

Drugs or alcohol are often used as tools to socialize and therefore also present in a lot of intimate experiences while dating or in a relationship. People feel they can let loose and enter states of themselves where there they experience less fear, less shame, less restrictions and more connectedness. Since high school we are constantly being made aware of the dangers of the usage of drugs and alchohol and this is also surely not a promotion to do drugs/alcohol or me advocating that drugs/alcohol are needed to explore intimacy. But I do believe that there is a lot of insight to be gathered from these altered states and what they can show us about ourselves and our partners, if approached from a place of conscious awareness and not from a place of escapism.