How Does Entheogenic Alchemy Work?
Insight Distillation & Nervous System Grounding
Entheogenic alchemy is a type of psychedelic integration that aims to empower the liberation of consciousness while facilitating spiritual wellbeing and personal growth. Through a series of meditation practices encompassing alchemical symbolism, integration becomes an embodied awareness that we can use in our daily lives.
After the ritualistic or ceremonial use of psychoactive sacraments, long term integration is extremely crucial because insights may fade. If we don’t establish a way to integrate our psychedelic experiences properly, then our egos may inflate and we miss all the potential benefits when they could become a portal to a profound process of continuous inner transformation.
While the different practices may sound simple in their nature, they’re often not simple to maintain or establish a routine doing in the beginning of our practice and take time to develop. Ranging from body scan meditations, to visualization meditations, to mindfulness meditation, there are many different practices we can learn.
However it’s important to realize the number of meditation methods you use don’t matter as much as your intention doing them.
While the term entheogen (generate the ultimate divine experience within) is relatively modern and has Greek origins, it is widely believed that the Greeks may have adopted alchemy from ancient Egyptian alchemical practices. Many scholars and historians see Egypt as the birthplace of alchemy, while it’s wisdom influenced spiritual traditions around the world.
Humanity has an ancient partnership with entheogenic substances for spiritual purposes, with archaeological and historical evidence pointing to their use in many indigenous cultures all over the world dating back thousands of years to communicate with the spirit world, for divination, spiritual healing, and religious ceremonies.
The West was introduced to entheogenic experiences when American banker R. Gordon Wasson attended a ceremony with respected Mazatec healer (curandera) Maria Sabina.
So how does the spiritual alchemy happen?
Over the 9 years since my first journey, I have learned the importance of set, setting, and integration. Long-term integration of our experience is crucial for effectively improving our mental health, reconnecting our souls to what western society disconnected them from, and understanding the mind by going within ourselves.
Entheogenic alchemy (the internal transformation of consciousness through meditation and psychedelic integration) is about using certain practices to continuously transmute our fears, angers, frustrations, jealousies, and anxieties, into healthier, joyful, and blissful states of awareness for ourselves and others. After directly experiencing this psychedelic filter help dissolve certain cultural, social, and self-imposed barriers, I truly felt interconnected with all of life like never before.
From this new and comedically strange point of view, I was able to transmute my alcohol addiction into embodying a healthier life that included many things I never thought I would be doing. Including painting.
It turned out that quitting drinking alcohol and learning about a passion for painting, was the tip of a very immense iceberg of creative problem solving efforts I had discovered within myself. I truly believe these medicines can have a profound benefit for our lives, but only if we have a map to properly navigate the psychedelic ocean of experience itself as well as the integration our experience afterwards.
Entheogenic alchemy has been that map for me.
When approached with a certain reverence and sacredness, entheogens or psychedelics, can offer us a portal to the deepest part of ourselves. They can also offer us a glimpse at the ineffability of the divine, sometimes even turning atheists into worshippers.
However, it doesn’t always require an ego blasting, time warping, cosmic space traveling mystical experience to make something an entheogenic journey. Even at smaller doses we can have profound interconnectedness with the world.
It doesn’t require a “heroic dose” for incredible insight and awareness that feels like a library of information has been downloaded to your brain’s hard drive. If you feel that you have had an indescribably profound and positive life changing experience with psychedelics that leaves you awakened, transformed, healed, enlightened, inquisitive, attuned, intrigued, and astonished, then I would call that an entheogenic experience.
When we feel and understand that we are all truly interconnected, the principle of working on ourselves allows us to help others from a place of mental clarity. As a result, helping others with clarity and focus uplifts the spirits of everyone involved.
By having a sacred and ritualistic relationship with a combination of entheogens like psychedelics and cannabis, I feel that I was gifted this practice from the entheogenic experiences. This further developed over 9 years into my own psychedelic integration meditation and mindfulness practice.
Ultimately, I believe the overall purpose of entheogenic alchemy is intent on elevating our awareness, insight, unity, love, understanding, wisdom, courage, and compassion.
I firmly believe that entheogenic alchemy was a precious gift from elders of the past because of my willingness to be open and surrender fully to the message from the medicine. Through a deeply revered relationship with entheogenic substances, which I understand have been part of both western society’s achievements and atrocities, I feel that I have been able to reconnect with certain lost wisdom that wise ancestors want us to use to help humanity in our current era.
So it has become my duty to encourage the transmutation of the poisoned western ego starting with myself, and carry the torch from the previous generation to the next generation through meditation and integration. This generation of psychedelic explorers must not take their experiences lightly and be willing to continue planting trees that future generations can enjoy shade from.
Entheogenic alchemy helps to connect us with that version of ourselves that is seeing us and is going, “one second, they’ll figure it out” when we’re looking for something in our lives. This is where our meditation practice can help us to be aware of our own awareness.
Through mindfulness, you can see yourself with compassion for making a mistake or being wrong and then laugh about how you thought you could never be wrong and you thought you knew everything. Oftentimes we have to remind ourselves healing doesn’t mean we need to know everything, it means we just need to know when to laugh.
From my very first experiences with entheogens, I knew right away that there was something incredibly profound about the spaces they allowed me to enter and that they must be studied further. But I believe that these sacramental substances only act as a mirror for revealing the deepest truths within ourselves.
There are some crucial things one must consider before embarking on a psychedelic journey, just as if you were creating a map. I don’t think you can ever fully prepare yourself and cover all scenarios.
However, I do think if we know certain things about what may happen and that changes may occur that we are unsure of yet we must be ready to address appropriately, it can lessen the initial, “what the hell is happening?” phase that we’re sometimes greeted with.
It is my hope that entheogenic alchemy can be a mindfulness and meditation practice that is as helpful to others as it has been for me.