Sad, Mad & Medicated: Part 2

The path to a slap in the psyche with a cosmic sandal (for my own good)

A Small Disclaimer from the Edge of the Spiral.

If you read Part One, welcome back to the spiral. Please ensure all limbs are inside the existential vehicle at all times, mind the gap, and do not feed the inner critics.

If you haven’t read it yet, no worries. Just know that I was emotionally constipated, spiritually bankrupt, and functionally dead inside. You’ve arrived just as things began to move. Where books fell off the shelves like divine Post-it notes. Where psychedelics crash the party and start rearranging your emotional furniture. Where ayahuasca, the interdimensional jungle oracle, descends into the abandoned caverns of your visceral entrails and announces:

“I’m going to show you what you really are. If it feels like dying…that’s normal. Puke buckets on your left.”

It begins, as most awakenings do, at 2 am, sleep-deprived, emotionally anaemic, and staring at the ceiling like it might offer a refund.

Told You It Was All Bollocks

When the conventional means of recovery weren’t working, I began to find comfort in nihilism. It didn’t ask anything of me. It didn’t judge. It just sat there, sipping lukewarm tea, smugly affirming,

“Told you it was all bollocks.”

Meaning seemed like a con. Beauty? A marketing scam. Hope? A naive illusion. The world felt rigged, and my ideals were snake oil. Somewhere deep inside, vultures were pecking at the putrid leftovers of any optimism, and I was letting them. Partly out of manners. Mostly out of apathy.

I didn’t want pills, side effects, and sick notes anymore. Like most people, I just wanted to feel better. Or at the very least, a strongly worded letter from existence explaining why none of this was in the brochure.

But instead of divine correspondence, I got radio silence. So I did what any emotionally exhausted human would do. I became a fortress, double-glazed against feelings, surrounded by towering, barbed-wire-wrapped boundaries with an entire psychic security system operating on high alert. Laser grids for eye contact that lingered too long, CCTV programmed to sound the alarm at the first signs of suspicious tenderness, unscrupulous kindness, or unsolicited softness. There was a strict no-entry policy for vulnerability. Permit revoked. Access denied. Feelings could quite frankly take their pathetic whinings elsewhere.

Eye of Sauron from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson’s adaptation

Inside? Bitterness, suspicion, and resentment were growing like mould behind the rusty fridge of my psyche, devouring any ideals that used to be nourishing. Safe? Technically. Alive? Not really. Ability to feel joy without bracing for impact? Like asking a hippo to go trampolining.

Then a Book Fell Off a Shelf

It would be wrong to say that therapy didn’t help - it did, quite a bit, but it was limited. So as a last-ditch effort not to disintegrate entirely, I started researching. Because if you can’t feel your feelings, you might as well intellectualise them into oblivion in your own way. One night, unable to sleep and suspicious that my curtains were judging me, I reached for a book I’d forgotten about. It fell off the shelf with all the grace of a walrus in a collapsing deckchair.

Man’s Search for Meaning. By someone called Viktor Frankl.

Sounded like a stern Viennese man who wore too much cologne and didn’t believe in bean sprouts. I gave it a go. Turns out, Viktor Frankl was a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. He endured Auschwitz and several other concentration camps. He lost his wife. His parents. His brother. Almost everyone he loved. And out of that devastation, he wrote about meaning. Which, frankly, felt like overachieving.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

I blinked. Breathed. Re-read it. That line hit like an anvil wearing steel-capped boots. Somewhere in the fog, he helped me to remember choice. I’d forgotten about it, despite being introduced to it in a mindfulness-based CBT course about 6 years prior.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That space. I hadn’t seen it in years. I’d been sidelined by stimulus > panic > alienation. But something in me shifted. Here was someone who had endured the unendurable, who had lived through systematic dehumanisation and still claimed that freedom remained. Not outer freedom. Inner. He wasn’t saying it was easy. He was saying it was possible. And for where I was at the time, it was enough to keep me from slipping under.

And he was a climber. What a hero.

Johann Hari Told Me I Wasn’t Broken, Just Socially Malnourished

A short while after the crisis peak had passed, I read Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Hari reframed depression as a signal rather than a glitchy brain. It was a pretty straightforward, logical, and well-researched message, essentially saying,

“Mate, this isn’t working. You need connection. Purpose. Vitamin D. Maybe a hug.”

No shit. In Lost Connections, Hari lays out nine key causes of depression and anxiety, most of which aren’t chemical imbalances, but disconnections from meaningful work, from other people, from values that feel real, from the natural world, from a secure future, and a sense of status and respect. Even from hope itself.

“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness,” he wrote. “It’s connection.”

When I looked back at the darkest hours, I realised: the loneliness wasn’t around me. It was inside me, as a way of perceiving reality. Hari didn’t cure me, but he gave me a half-decent start at mapping the terrain. It turned out I wasn’t lost, I was just a few galaxies away from my own humanity. So I followed the signal and continued down the rabbit hole.

Dr. Ben Sessa on Tripping, Crying, and Talking About Your Childhood

I soon stumbled across Dr Ben Sessa and psychedelic-assisted therapy, and went to one of his public lectures in London where he echoed exactly what I knew instinctively: “there has to be a better way”. Sessa is a consultant psychiatrist, researcher, and one of the key figures pioneering the reintroduction of psychedelics into mainstream psychiatric treatment in the UK. His studies focus on how these substances, combined with carefully structured therapeutic support, can actually help people process and release trauma rather than simply manage its symptoms.

“With the right support, trauma can be processed, not just managed.”

A bold statement, especially in a country where “managing trauma” usually means pouring another gin and tonic, bottling your emotions, and joining a Facebook group about sheds. Basically: get traumatised people to take MDMA or psilocybin in a clinical setting, then hold their hand while they sob into a beanbag and realise that their father’s disapproval wasn’t their fault.

Sounded a bit far-fetched. But after everything else had fallen flat, I was willing to experiment with altered states of consciousness and cry into a beanbag if it meant finally feeling like a person again.

And that’s when I found Gabor Maté.

Gabor Maté

Dr. Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-Canadian physician, author, and expert in trauma, addiction, and all the feelings you thought you’d successfully buried. He speaks softly, like a friendly Grandparent, and has a knack for gently dismantling your entire worldview over a quick Worther’s original.

He helped me see trauma differently. Less as an event, and more as a lingering imprint, an invisible fracture that forms when you’re too overwhelmed to cope.

“Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you when you’re overwhelmed and alone.”

It all kept making more and more sense. All this dysfunction…they weren’t defects. They were plausible adaptations, albeit outdated now, but at some point, they’d provided a sense of safety.

Then came the part that caught my attention: ayahuasca.

He spoke about it with reverence and precision, as a medicine with ancient roots, rather than a quick fix or spiritual spectacle. Used ceremonially in Indigenous Amazonian traditions, this strange jungle brew had the potential to reach places that modern medicine and psychological therapies couldn’t access. According to Maté, it could surface the unconscious material we spend decades hiding from, and give us a chance to actually feel it, integrate it, and heal.

He made it sound like less of a hedonistic trip and more of a psychedelic reckoning, with his compassion and grounded sincerity. One part emotional surgery, one part spiritual intervention. Where language falters, this strange brew moves in. Where intellect circles the wound, ayahuasca goes straight to the marrow. In the right conditions, Maté explained, it can make the invisible visible. It can help a person consciously embrace what they’ve spent a lifetime unconsciously avoiding, held by the container of ritual, nature, experienced curanderos, and trained facilitators who understand the gravity of the work.

So, after a couple more years of research and preparation, I packed a bag and headed for the Peruvian Amazon.

Ayahuasca: A slap around the psyche with a cosmic sandal (for my own good).

There’s no delicate way to say it - ayahuasca obliterated life as I knew it (in the best possible way). It was a plunge into the depths, a dismantling of everything I thought reality was. I believed I was dying (several times). And in a way, I was.

What started to unravel was the scaffolding I’d spent a lifetime constructing: the need for control, the armour of cleverness, the sneering self-judgement dressed up as discipline. All of it dissolved. And in the wreckage, something else emerged. A silence. Still, yet dancing, boundless and infinitely connected. That’s when I first encountered what I can only describe as divine grace, beyond a concept, as a visceral, direct experience. As if I were being held by something that had always known me, even through all the forgetting.

Nothing needed fixing. There was a clarity beneath it all, a simplicity I had overlooked for years that was lovingly waiting to be remembered.

In those ceremonies, I began to see beauty in places I didn’t know existed, woven into the cracks, glimmering within the grief, resting gently in the soft folds of my own longing. An innocence threaded through the mess, an undiscovered perfection unhurried by striving, knowing that all comes to term in its own time. It didn’t ask to be improved; it only asked to be seen.

And something unexpected happened in that seeing. Forgiveness stopped making sense because when perfection is revealed in all that ever was, there was nothing to pardon. The pain still mattered. So did the harm. But within that light, everything that once appeared malevolent was felt as fundamentally innocent. Even the missteps. Even the damage. Even me. From that place, there was no urge to fix. Only a deep impulse to love.

Once blame had loosened its grip, something else moved in. The resentment I’d carried towards others, towards life, towards myself, began to soften. Through the cracks came gratitude, like morning light through threadbare curtains. Compassion landed gently behind it. And then, empathy, I began to feel life through the eyes of others close to me. Fears, wounds, and the stories they were given. It neither condemned nor condoned anything, but it allowed everything to be embraced as it was. And in that understanding, connection could begin again.

Wawa Q’inti by Geenss Archenti

Ayahuasca peeled back the layers until I could feel what had always been the essential core of “me”, in a way I’d never learned so explicitly. A wholeness I’d never clearly seen. A truth too ineffable to explain, yet undeniable in its presence. The human ideals that I thought I was grieving, like beauty, truth, and goodness, weren’t what I thought they were in the first place. They never needed “reaching”…rather just the eyes to see that they were always here, through everything, as everything.

I returned lighter. Not with a load of jungle selfies or a story that makes sense in a single sentence. Lighter in the way that comes from no longer dragging a sack of invisible, unresolved grief through every moment. From laying something down that was never truly mine to carry, and reconnecting with the transcendent beauty that was here all along.

Frankl once wrote:

“The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

I think I understand that now.

Of course, not everyone can, or wants to, bugger off to the Amazon to drink a vine and vomit into a bucket under the stars. Fair enough. You don’t need a jungle to meet the mystery (but it does help). That’s partly why I write Journeys Beyond. Because what ayahuasca showed me wasn’t some exclusive jungle secret, it was the very fabric of life itself, present in every moment. In the laughter of old friends. In the ache that refuses to be numbed. In the way a dusk light hits the washing up at 4 pm, and suddenly everything feels strangely okay.

These reflections are my way of tracing that thread. Of saying, peace is here too, even when it feels like it isn’t. Because the real medicine is everywhere, if we learn to see it. And sometimes a well-placed sentence is easier to access than a cup of bark-flavoured oblivion.

Mother Medicine, Felix Pinchi Aguirre

Thank you for reading

If this piece resonated with something in you, whether tender, tired, or hopeful, I’m so glad you’re here. Journeys Beyond is where I gather the peculiar treasures unearthed from inner and outer journeys, and offer them up if they’re helpful.

If you’d like to receive future reflections, stories, and soul-proddings straight to your inbox, you can subscribe below.

And if you're up for it, I’d love to hear from you. What did this bring up for you? You can share in the comments, I read and appreciate every one.

☕️ If you’re already a subscriber and want to support this work with tea money, you can do that here.

Wishing you a peaceful, wonder-soaked Easter - however you’re spending it, wherever you are.

Until next time,

Charlie x

Affiliate Links: If any of the books I mentioned are piquing your curiosity, you can find them below. Using these links won’t cost you anything extra, but it helps support my work.

Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl: [Available here]

Lost Connections - Johann Hari: [Available here]