One participant's carefully-kept notes from a clinical dose.
I had done my reading. I knew about receptors and network connectivity. I had rehearsed the phrase 'the experience is not always comfortable' until it sounded manageable. None of it prepared me for the first forty minutes.
What I want to say is: the reading was accurate and beside the point. Accurate, because everything that happened was, in some sense, described somewhere in the literature. Beside the point, because reading about a wave is not standing in one.
The session was clinical. Eye shades, a curated playlist, two sitters I had met the week before. Whatever archetypes visited me were, I noticed later, quite culturally specific — no surprise. What surprised me was the calm underneath the intensity, and the deep sense that this calm had always been available and I had simply never gone looking.
Weeks afterwards, the change I could point to was small and specific: I had stopped picking at a particular thought, and had not started again. This is not the transformation the literature promises. It is the transformation I received. I am, on the whole, grateful.
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