Journeys into the somatic trees of psychedelia keep returning me to one subject: identity. Personal identity, ego, self: the words carry shame in our culture. We’re encouraged to know our place, to not be full of ourselves, to avoid even the appearance of selfishness. And yet anyone honest with themselves is selfish to the core, and cannot be otherwise. The valuing is always ours. What we’re not told is that this selfishness can widen: past family, tribe, race, species, without ceasing to be ours. That is the difference between selfish and sovereign: not whom the circle includes, but who is doing the drawing.
So the self is managed, promoted, negated, glorified, canceled, according to the weather of the moment. It is still our vehicle through the relative. And what the trees have taught me is that its power was never in the trunk. Not in defense, not in permanence, not in being recognized by others. It’s in the roots finding water. I feel it as a settling in the spine, a tuning, the way a body stands differently when it stops bracing. When you align with the raw potency of your particular existence, this time, this place, this skin…something in you rings. It rings in a way that cannot be repeated, because no one else is standing here.
This isn’t inflation. Inflation is the trunk mistaking itself for the forest. And it isn’t surrender either. The self is not to be relinquished, nor clung to, nor defended. It is to be aligned. That is what the somatic trees have taught.