Hi there
Hope you have had a good week… I have been having a calm one after the mayhem of Egypt and our mega Divorce Research launch (I did several articles and three big radio interviews last weekend so it was busy…)
In my week of pausing, I’ve had some time to reflect: it’s exactly 6 years tomorrow since I went to Jamaica on my life-changing psilocybin retreat with my great friend Decca (she wrote about it for me when I was editor of The Sunday Times Magazine and it won the BBC’s prize for the best long-form article of the year).
I remember setting off for Montego Bay feeling terrified, convinced I was going to be brought home in a padded container having lost my mind. The reality was intense – three heroic doses of magic mushrooms in a week – but also one of the most enriching experiences of my life, up there with giving birth. We went because we had both read the Michael Pollan book How to Change Your Mind and Decca had had PTSD – the psilocybin was supposed to help and she wanted to try it. (You can listen to her talking about it on this podcast.)
The science behind psilocybin
Psilocybin, so the science says, enables the brain to make different connections to usual, described to me by a neuroscientist as like a fresh snowfall on a ski slope. Rather than going down a metaphorical piste where the moguls are big and the turns already clear, we are given a tabula rasa, a clean slate, a fresh run of untouched snow where we are free to make different turns, different decisions, new connections. It’s as if your brain had returned to its embryonic childlike state and was newly flexible and open again.
The theory says that if you take enough psilocybin and the set and setting are conducive (we did a meditation before each dose to set the mood and were supported by an eager cast of trip-sitters, or psychedelic ninjas to keep us safe during it) you reach a state called ego-death.
Also in this email (be sure to scroll down):
- How will the Budget affect you? Don’t miss our webinar that will tell you!
- Sign up for the Twixtmas Online NOON Circle
- The latest job openings on the Jobs Board
My moment of revelation
That, for me, took place after the third trip, under a palm tree, listening to Bob Marley’s One Love (on repeat for about 45 minutes, time takes on a different dimension when on mushrooms). In the meditation beforehand, we were told to “throw away anything you no longer need in your life”. Completely instinctively, I blew up my career at the Sunday Times, my hectic life as a newspaper executive was thrown off an imaginary cliff.
Decca wasn’t happy when I told her: “You can’t do that,” she said, “You’re my boss, I need you!”. But it was done.
In the aftermath I felt incredibly buoyant. At one point I lay down under the palm tree, beside the sea, watching the light come through the leaves. It was like time stopped. I felt the version of myself I had always known fade away. Instead I felt like I had become everything, light itself, like I was floating in a bowl of golden cream – I remember murmuring mmmmmmm, in a rapture. I felt like I was being recharged by the universe, plugged into some massive force which was filling what had been ‘me’ (a word that no longer really applied) with golden light.
I felt it in my body and mind
It was a feeling of total bliss for body and mind but most of all a sense of an overwhelming feeling of intense connection with everything. Not just a realisation, but an embodied total knowing that everything is connected – us, plants, animals, planet, sky, sea, sunshine. It was all the same. And that a golden life force pulses through all of it. That indeed, that pulsing life force was IT, the point of everything.
That sense has never left me. When I returned from Jamaica, in an attempt to return to that state, to refind that neural pathway to bliss, I took up meditation and Qi Gong, went on silent yoga retreats and started to swim every day in the cold pond. Why? Because all of those things trigger to varying extents that same feeling of connection, of bliss. In silence, in nature, in the water, I feel that same sense of connection – of the golden light suffusing everything. It reminds me of what is most real and true.
It was a spur of the moment decision
Last week I was thinking about it all, particularly the decision to go on that trip – which was pretty random. Logically it made no sense. My husband was mystified, I’d never been interested in taking psychedelics before. But I can remember vividly Decca telling me that she wanted to go and how I just felt an enormous sense of calling to go with her: Every fibre of my being was urging, “This! NOW! THIS. JUST DO IT”.
Sometimes we just get that sense. Now I might say that feeling was my awakened self calling to me through the manic fog of my life back then. Certainly when I was whacked from that job a few months after we returned – in a way I had asked for it, but it certainly didn’t feel like that at the time! It was the memory of the golden light, of the connectedness and OK-ness of the macro that kept me going in those very dark times.
The retreat gave birth to NOON
Indeed, it was in that ego-death golden light trip that I had the idea to set up what eventually turned into NOON. It was in the aftermath of that trip, lit up with a sense of boundless possibility that I decided I wanted to run retreats, to change my life and show others there really was much more to come.
Each dose on that trip was followed by a day of integration with the 12 others on the retreat: I’d seen on that week how truly life-changing the experience had been for so many. It made me want to help people change (but without the psilocybin). I had an amazing experience but it is really not for everyone. It can be terrifying and disorientating and that world is full of cowboy operators.
I am not writing this in any way to imply that others should do this. But it did inspire in me a profound sense that we could have a second act.
The dark days of loss of identity and terror about what I would do next (after I was made redundant) were made manageable by the sense of golden-ness I had been shown, the oneness I had experienced in Jamaica.
Jamaica + goldenness = NOON
I am writing about this today because of the anniversary but also because I was on Paul Hargreave’s 4th Bottom Line podcast last week talking about some of this. That was a big moment: coming out as a very different kind of person. The fact that I now write and speak about this and a sense of spirituality more publicly reflects the huge shift in my life over the past 6 years.
Since that moment of goldenness, I went down into the depths, and then came back out of it: I feel so much happier, more authentically myself and more purposeful now.
It is that sense really being able to move into a better next chapter in midlife which underlies everything we do at NOON. I want everyone who is having a tough time – everyone who feels like what they were has been annihilated and doesn’t know what to do next – to know there really is Much More to Come.
Next week is my birthday!
I’ve also been ruminating on this because next week is also my birthday. I’ll be turning 55 – my husband turns 60 just after Christmas. I have a bit of age vertigo, that sense of looking down the years and wondering where they all went. Layers of memories are swirling around, with memories of past and present sometimes jumbled together.
I’ve always loved throwing a party. I’m having a birthday bash in my new house as well as our big NOON Xmas party in the next fortnight. But there is also a tension here; as the nights close in ever earlier, I feel the urge to hunker down. Often I want to go to bed and it’s not yet 9pm. Our mammalian urge to hibernate as the days shorten is in tension with the Christmas run-up mania of parties, lights and razzle-dazzle. It’s important, I think to do both.
This week I’ve been hunkering down, sleeping, reading. (I devoured the Booker winner Flesh in 48 hours; it’s an easy read crammed with big questions about morality and money, relationships and how we process our feelings…or how we don’t. Buy it as a Christmas treat.)
My recommendation this week: The Lee Miller exhibition
Relaxation for me often involves culture – so I led a NOON Pro expedition to Tate Britain to see the Lee Miller exhibition. Do go!
Lee began her life as a model in New York in the 1920s, then moved to Paris where she was a lover and collaborator of the surrealist Man Ray and began taking her own exquisite photographs. In pictures taken a century ago, she looks so modern: short cropped hair, see-through chiffon/lace skirts, trousers (shocking!) and mannish leisure shirts. Her image was even used in an advert for Kotex, sanitary pads. She hung out with Collette and Picasso, was friends with my hero, the great female journalist Martha Gellhorn.
In the ’30s she married an Egyptian businessman and travelled up and down the Nile and through Syria, Turkey and the Levant – taking pictures of many of the places we went on our NOON tour last week.
Then she came back to Europe, falling in love with Roger Penrose (who went on to be Picasso’s biographer) and took the photos she is most famous for, of Europe as World War II ended. She was Vogue’s war correspondent, her art takes no prisoners. Her pictures of the Blitz, of the siege of St Malo (wonderful if you have read Anthony Doerr’s book all about it) and most shockingly of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau are beautiful, devastating and essential. They are hard to look at, but as the survivors of that terrible conflict die off, it is incumbent upon us to really look at her photographs depicting piles of bodies, mounds of redundant possessions.
The horror that the Nazis inflicted, Europe and London ruined and be-rubbled. Her mental health never recovered from what she had seen and witnessed. I am not surprised. The horror is real, and endless. We owe it to her and all who died not to forget.
Lee embodies Queenager vibes
Truly Lee Miller had a front row seat at many of the 20th century’s big moments and hung out with its most important seers and artists. I love the shots of women flying planes, joining in the war effort – of London devastated but not cowed. Lee left 60,000 negatives; many of the photos in the exhibition were never published before and are seen here for the first time.
To walk around the exhibition is to see the century through her wonderful eye, as women began to flex their power and claim their rights. She is a Queenager icon – don’t miss this.
(And if going to amazing events like this with fellow Queenagers sounds good to you, consider joining NOON Pro – it costs £35 a month, includes free London Circles and other meet-ups including a cultural one, a special Eleanor Whatsapp and much more. Why not try it out?)
That calm feels ever more important now; both as an antidote to Christmas, Black Friday, consumer madness and freneticism. But also as a way of acclimatising to a new way of being in the world
Oh my stars!
Also, I don’t usually write about astrology – my former self is raising her eyebrows and shaking her head at me as I type this – but if you follow it just a little, then you’ll know that the heavens are making quite the line up. We’re meant to be in a time of profound transformation and transition, where the existing status quo falls away to be replaced by something different, at a higher vibration.
Whether that chimes with you or not, I know lots of us are feeling stressed out at the moment, beset by anxiety, restless… that is also a good reason to reach for stillness. Be intentionally calm. Lie in a hot bath or on the sofa and clear your mind. Shut your eyes and just try to be as calm and quiet as possible. Maybe listen to your favourite most calming and beautiful music. Light a candle. Be peaceful. Try and check in all your troubles and mind-irritation for half an hour; leave it intentionally behind and see if you can sink into a restful state.
When I do this, I feel a deep sense of being anchored – a still point in the crazy world.
We need that calmness now
That calm feels ever more important now; both as an antidote to Christmas, Black Friday, consumer madness and freneticism. But also as a way of acclimatising to a new way of being in the world. More open, more relaxed, more loving – which has been the big shift in my life in the last few years. We can’t change anyone else, but we can change ourselves and how we react and feel about things. And in doing that we really can change everything.
So give yourself a moment of peace today – and try and build that in as we head towards the end of the year. We’re going to be talking about how to navigate this time of year with minimum stress and maximum boundaries and love in the NOON December Circles. I know lots of our Circle hosts have got jolly things planned for you – plus we’re opening up new ones in the Cotswolds, Cheshire, Nottingham and Colchester in the new year.
Do email me eleanor@noon.org.uk if you’d like to know more about that. We’ll also be doing a Twixtmas Online Circle on Monday December 29th – a time to check in with Queenager friends and take a pause before the New Year begins. I thought some of us might need that!
xxxx
Eleanor
