tingles ~ an experiment with shamanic journeying

I just finished experimenting with my first shamanic journey, and [at 9:39am] I feel very relaxed and at peace, which is a distinct difference from the depression and anxiety I’ve been feeling for the last however long it’s been since I felt normal. I feel like doing yoga again, for the first time in ages. I don’t feel like reading or otherwise using the mind to distract myself from the painful reality that consensus reality is painful sometimes. I feel like blogging though ~ I feel like expressing myself. The instructions I read for the journey include finding some way of expressing the experience. So here goes.

I set up in bed with a headband for an eye mask and some lavender oil for the relaxation feels. I started by trying to think of an ‘anchor place’ and eventually settled on a campsite I found at the beginning of my Canberra–Brisbane cycle tour last year, a truly idyllic place that could as easily have been a setting in The Lord of the Rings as it was an old creek bed somewhere between Canberra and Yass on a dirt track called Horseshoe Road. With my phone on airplane mode I used the Prana Breath app to do the “Box Breath” recommended in the same instructions (a 4:4:4:4 inhale:retain:exhale:sustain ratio).

(This is what I talk about when I talk about “technoshamanism” … for me it has nothing to do with raves and smacky ‘ecstasy’ pills.)

After seven minutes of this I was ready to slow my breathing pace down a bit when I pressed play on the drumming track I had downloaded. I cruised along with the simple beat, feeling my body as it moved with a naturally rising and falling breath, but before long I felt like keeping pace with the drum beats and I was breathing fast again, remembering the rapid-breathing used in holotropic (and other types of) breathwork sessions, and I started to feel tingling sensations throughout my body, stronger than the tingling I am familiar with from breathwork.

Intrigued, I slowed my breath down and the tingling went away. The pace of the beat could not have been faster than the pranayama ratio of the Box Breath, yet I was experiencing what I suppose are symptoms of hyperventilation these tingles and an increased body temperature only minutes into the drumming track, so I’m guessing the drums combined with the breathing had a distinct physiological effect.

I don’t mean to over-analyse it too much, but that’s what I was doing during the journey anyway, so reporting on that is valid here too: I have an over-analytic mind as it is, and I haven’t been doing any mindfulness practice at all for months, so it’s not surprising that my mind would be racing to keep up with these new experiences, skeptically writing them off as merely symptoms of hyperventilation.

I suppose that when I become more accustomed to journeying and if I combine the practice with a regular mindfulness meditation, I will be able to let go of my conscious reasoning more and enter deeper into the unconscious.

Another interesting element of the experience is that the lavender oil on my skin smelled remarkable reminiscent of three olfactory hallucinations I have experienced during breathwork and love-making, which I have generally referred to as experiencing the ‘scent of the buddha’, a phrase/concept borrowed from the teachings of Osho …

… I can’t go into the details of those hallucinations right now, and it is enough to say that

I am only now beginning to learn that we can hallucinate with our noses as well as with our eyes and other sense organs. I mean, I have had the above experience of these, but I am just now beginning to learn that these are verified elements of hallucination. I’m wary of the term ‘hallucination’, and it would perhaps be better to say that I ‘imagined’ the scent of the buddha during my earlier experiences,

but anyway, the scent of the lavender oil on my skin today was the same as those imaginary smells of my three earlier experiences.

Those three times I was almost certain there were no essential oils involved (the first two times were with therapists who might have been using oils ~ the third time was with a lover who definitely wasn’t, and neither was I), so I had pencilled them up as hallucinatory or mystical or divine or something.

Now that I’ve experienced the exact same smell when I know for sure that I was using lavender oil, I feel uncertain about my former conviction that oils were not used in the first two instances.

Basically, this olfactory element amounts to another experience that challenges the reliability of the senses, which was a major theme of the insights I had during my spiritual emergency in January 2017.

Ultimately though, the most resounding element of the experiment was how it changed my state of mind from being anxious and tired to being relaxed and energised ~ it was like a super-charged meditation! Actually it was more akin to being yoga drunk ~ I don’t think I’ve ever emerged from a seated meditation session feeling as profoundly transformed out of stress into relaxation. Maybe the purpose of shamanic journeying is not to relax, but surely relaxation is a fundamental pre-requisite of successful shamanic journeying, the same as it is for good meditation and yoga.

So there you have it ~ my first brain dump about my first experiment with shamanic journeying.