A Culturally-Centered Healing Journey, antidepressant effect of DMT.

The retreat is  the brainchild of Imani, a Jamaican-American therapist who believed that healing required rooting. “You can’t just treat the individual psyche,” she’d said during our initial video call. Antidepressant effect of DMT However, her braids framing a face of serene intensity. “You have to treat the soil. You have to acknowledge what happened in the ground you’re standing on.”

Now, I was standing on that very ground.

 Retreat house is a restored great house. Its whitewashed walls and veranda belying its brutal history. The hillside sloped down to the Caribbean Sea. As well as postcard-perfect turquoise that seemed to mock the horrors this land had witnessed. The other six women arrived from different cities, a healer from Atlanta, a poet from London as well as teacher from Brooklyn. We were all fortresses of our own design, offering each other polite, cautious smiles over ginger tea.

A Skeptic’s Reluctant Transformation.

On the third day, after two days of sharing our stories, meditating, and preparing our intentions, we walked down to a clearing in the forest. a place Imani called the “healing circle.” The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and blooming jasmine. An altar was set in the center.  Adorned with shells, candles, and a framed photograph of a Black woman in shackles, her eyes staring defiantly at a camera from over a century ago. Antidepressant effect of DMT . The weight of her gaze is immediate and immense.

Furthermore, each drank the tea made from psilocybin mushrooms, a bitter, earthy brew that tasted like the soil itself. Then, we lay down on our mats, wrapped in blankets, as the sun began its slow descent, painting the sky in shades of tangerine and violet.

However, for a long time, nothing happened. I felt foolish, lying there in the dirt. Then, a subtle shift. The breeze on my skin was no just longer air; it was a whisper. The green of the leaves around me became impossibly vibrant, pulsing with an inner light. And then, the ground beneath me began to breathe.

It wasn’t a hallucination. It was a felt sensation, deep and rhythmic. The earth is a living chest, rising and falling. I pressed my palms into it and felt a heartbeat—ancient, slow, and powerful. Additionally, It was the heartbeat of the island, of my ancestors. As well as everyone who had ever worked, wept, and died on this soil. The static in my head, the constant hum of control, fell utterly silent. For the first time in my adult life, I felt completely, terrifyingly safe.

Insights from a Psychedelic Sitter.

The tears came then. They weren’t sad tears. They were the tears of a locked door finally swinging open. I saw myself, not as the successful lawyer, but as a little girl learning to be small, to be quiet, to be perfect so she wouldn’t be a burden. I saw my mother, her own light dimmed by the struggle, passing on her armor as a gift of love. I saw a long line of women stretching back into the darkness of history, their strength my inheritance, their pain my cellular memory.

Furthermore, this journey continued for what felt like hours and seconds simultaneously. I felt myself dissolving into the soil, becoming one with the roots of the ancient trees, with the minerals and the memory. I felt the spirits of those who had come before me rise up, not as ghosts to be feared, but as a welcoming committee. They wrapped me in an embrace so profound, so unconditional, that it shattered the last remaining stones of my fortress.

However, i am learning to be a branch of that ancient tree, even here, in this city of glass and steel. I am learning that healing isn’t about forgetting the past, but about remembering who you were before it told you who to be. And sometimes, you have to travel across an ocean, to a soil that remembers, to find your way home.