Hippie Visa
What happens after you change not just your mind but your heart and the physical structure of your brain?
When I was 37, I learned I had hepatitis C. I’d been infected with the virus for 31 years at that point. When I was 6, my appendix burst inside my body, the result of a missed appendicitis diagnosis, and migrated behind my colon. My lower abdomen went septic, and during the emergency operation—I tell people it was 12 hours long but that may be me writing a movie about the experience—I received two blood transfusions that saved my life. This was the early ‘80s, and they did not yet have the screening technology to detect hepatitis in blood. (Later my parents would be terrified by the AIDS epidemic and get me tested in the event that blood was contaminated with HIV.) When I got the diagnosis, my doctor told me, “Now is a very good time to have Hepatitis C.” I wanted to punch her, but she assured me that, while punching her wouldn’t be effective, many of the new treatments in the FDA approval pipeline were. To just wait and see.
She was right: the next year the FDA approved a drug called Harvoni. My insurance approved it, a box appeared on my front doorstep with bright green stickers to BRING IN IMMEDIATELY (a month’s treatment cost like $38 grand or something), and 12 weeks later, I was cured. I have maintained SVR—sustained virologic response—ever since. More a change of liver than a change of heart, but you get the point.
Speaking of hearts, when I began thinking about the kokoro of this essay, I thought hard about the connection between changes of heart—the decision to swerve into another lane—and choice. I thought about the pun Michael Pollan uses for the title of his well-researched personal exploration into different hallucinogens, How To Change Your Mind, and how that pun prepares you for his thesis that you can, indeed, physically change your brain such that YOU change—for the better, with regard to PTSD, addiction, depression, or anxiety, to name a few.
Underneath changing one’s mind is willingness, or openness, an attitude of reception—Pollan isn’t going to write that book as a 60-something square Boomer dude unless he drops some acid and eats some peyote buttons. So, given that volition is part of the whole changing-one’s-mind process, that means choice is involved.
Right about here’s where things could get very cliched but instead I want them to get very mind change-y. The typical train of thought, the received wisdom of unchanged information passing down what we already claim to know would be, roughly, some vague idea about free will and whether it exists and what do we do with it if we have it and so are we really choosing our choices and blah blah blah. Or that’s my best guess, anyway.
All I know for sure is where my brain goes, namely: that the central paradox of any choice is that I cannot fully make one without acceptance. This paradox rings true precisely because acceptance almost always comes—for me, anyway—as a result of realizing I have no choice at all. It is at that moment that I am most free to make a choice, and it has been at those moments—usually moments of acceptance of mortality, or more loosely, endings, in one way or another—that I have found myself making my most profound choices.
Tune into June 2022. We are slowly trudging as a species out of the swampy muckmind of social isolation—a condition antithetical to our evolution—brought on by the COVID pandemic. I am four years into a new career at a natural hair care beauty brand founded by a dark-skinned, Muslim Sudanese-American woman. We are struggling, but I’m hanging on, having just been promoted to Director of Operations. (This isn’t as prestigious as it sounds—we were down to five employees, which left me responsible for handling manufacturing, fulfillment, accounts payable and receivable, the list goes on.) I got a modest raise despite our tanking financials, and was finally feeling competent at certain skills: managing my team, building a healthy and sustainable company culture, mastering the art of the supply chain through lessons in negotiation, external relationship-building, logistics, and the subtle art of not letting contract manufacturers screw you over.
My father had also worked in manufacturing, albeit on a much bigger scale in corporate America at tanneries that supplied leather for car seats, so he was very proud of me. He was also dying. Since being treated with chemo for colorectal cancer, he suffered from a rare blood disorder called Myelodysplastic Syndrome or MDS. He had been given another chemotherapeutic drug to manage the disease, but its efficacy had waned. MDS, like Hepatitis C, affects the blood—the patient’s bone marrow produces a certain percentage of mutated blood cells that enter the bloodstream and can, in some cases, lead to leukemia, whose prognosis is fatal. Unlike Hepatitis C, however, there was nothing in the pipeline that promised a cure. He had two options: weekly blood transfusions, ironically enough, which caused panic in my father due to his phobia toward needles, or the more risky route of a stem cell transplant.
He chose risk, although from where he was sitting it probably didn’t feel like much of a choice, and pursued the stem cell transplant option. This meant finding a donor. The likely closest match genetically for a stem cell donor is either a sibling under the age of 65 or a rando donor. Children sometimes offer a better match than a rando, so they took some of my blood to find out. My dad is the oldest of 11, with 7 of his siblings surviving, and 4 of them under 65. I figured it would be Larry, or Peter, or Patrick, or Carolyn.
You know what happens next, because Larry, Peter, Pat, or Carolyn aren’t writing this essay. I was the one. My genetics were so close to my dad’s that the nurse who informed me I was the best match made an unwitting incest joke about my parents’ genes being so similar.
This also didn’t feel like a choice, although it was presented as something I could opt into or out of (oh yeah—I’m gonna not try to save my father’s life). Long story short, on June 28, 2022 I went to the Cleveland Clinic at 7am to have an 8-inch catheter injected into my jugular vein. By noon, two tubes hooked to a machine with a centrifuge had filtered out of my blood, dialysis style, 10 million stem cells, 5 million of which were implanted into my father the next day. Before this he had been dosed a blast of high-test chemo to destroy his immune system, and after transplant he received a final round of chemo, this one lighter, to suppress my stem cells so they would not attack his body. Then we waited to see if my cells would take root and rebuild my father from the inside out. If they didn’t, he would live out the rest of his short life essentially in a bubble, with no immune system and with the constant knowledge that any disease he contracted could kill him, never again experiencing that empowered ease of recovering from an illness.
At the same time, I had made the choice to go off the 10 mg of Lexapro I’d been taking for a year for anxiety (mostly centered around work stress). I had been reading about Acceptance Commitment Therapy, which essentially advises you to lean into your mental illness and become integrated with it (this is a massive overgeneralization but you can learn more about it on your own if you wish). I had tapered from the Lexapro per my doctor’s instructions, but nonetheless the withdrawal resulted in me showing signs of what later was determined to be a hypomanic episode for most of July and August. My fiancée and I had hosted a big 4th of July picnic with family and friends just five days after the transplant because my mom was in town, and I had taken to calling myself the Electric Jesus. The stress of my mom’s visit so close on the heels of saving my dad’s life (their divorce had been gut-wrenchingly messy) put my brain into what I described then as tilt—like when a pinball machine has been knocked too far off kilter by its player and simply shuts down.
Needless to say, I wasn’t accepting much of anything—the potential for my father to die despite my best efforts; the potential for my father to be impregnated by his son with a second life; the fact that, a decade earlier, my father had asked me to show up weeks after my mom found out he’d been cheating on her for 12 years to help him move his stuff out of their house while she was there. (We all had lunch together with her realtor; I developed a strange skin infection on my right nostril that deformed my nose for a while and still flares up under intense stress, like whenever my mom and dad were in my life in proximity to one another, like they were that first week of July.) Without doing the work of accepting and integrating these emotions, I wasn't making choices so much as letting others choose my life for me—all while my mind was starved for the serotonin it had grown dependent on for the past year. Being hypomanic leaves one making many decisions at lightning speed, it turns out, with almost no reflection on whether they are good ones, which led to me losing a few friends and spending a lot of money I didn't have (sidebar: as I lost serotonin I lost my annoyingly long attention span—an attention span that leads to the annoyingly long sentences you are reading right now—which really got me thinking about all the attention issues in human minds in societies wired into high-stimuli environments like ours). I learned quickly that impulse control and the stress from whatever unfinished emotional business I had in my heart were closely linked. So I went in loops of negative behavioral patterns, thirsty for anything that would trigger a pleasure response from my neurotransmitters. Nothing was acceptable so something always had to be done. It was one of the more harrowing experiences in my life—like being both rabid and chained—and gives me great compassion for those who suffer from bipolar disorder.
Another choice that didn’t feel like a decision I had the right to make, born as it was out of duty, was visiting my dad in the hospital, though I was feeling hopeful about our relationship. In my head this was a chance for a fresh start. Since the divorce I had struggled with his efforts to “restore normalcy” in our relationship, which is another way of saying he wanted things between us to be the same despite the fact that I’d found out he was a potential sex addict and was doing none of the work to recover from that addiction. He had apologized after the divorce, but refused to speak on any of the events of the previous 12 years (an inconsequential decision on his part as so much came to light once my mom and eldest brother decided to start looking at what he had been up to all this time). Now, though, my thinking went, we could heal! Finally, we were anew: he not only had a new physical life, but had a shot at a new emotional life.
Then I went to see him. He was in great physical pain from the aftereffects of all the chemo: his teeth were brown, his lips and mouth covered in sores. He could barely eat and was in the bathroom with diarrhea nearly every hour. I was sick with how sick he was. And not just physically. I looked around his hospital room, where he had been about 10 days and likely would be another two weeks. There were no flowers (not allowed), and only one card, from the church he and my stepmom go to. The only other objects in the room were a laptop he couldn’t get to work, a lottery ticket tucked diagonally into it, and a hand drawn spreadsheet with a list of stocks he owned on the Y axis and a list of dates along the X axis, with prices of each stock filled in for every date cell. My father, with all his trauma from growing up without enough to eat and without enough love—all those siblings I mentioned, and an alcoholic abusive father whose blows he took to protect the younger ones, eventually becoming a boxer to defend himself—from seeing his younger brother, Tim, after whom I’m named, die in his sleep from an undiagnosed heart condition at 16, from joining the Merchant Marines at the height of the Vietnam War only to be pressed into military service (he only talked about it one night after drinking a fifth of tequila, and the story involved him, a weapon, a tunnel, and a Viet Cong hiding inside it, with the understanding that only one of them was going to emerge). All these overwhelming circumstances mutilated the emotional circuitry of his brain, denied him access to any emotions beyond fear and anger. A dull, deep coldness underlied most of his waking life when he did not feel these other things, and a desperation to tune out overstimulation and maintain a sense of humor in a destructive, unfair world.
He was on pain medication when I visited, and his inner shadows were on full display. He was mean-spirited, repeatedly misgendering and misnaming my nephew, who had transitioned a year before. When he told me he had been watching baseball on TV he called the Cleveland team the “Indians.” When I reminded him they had changed their name to the Guardians, he gave me a hard stare and doubled down in his snarled tone: “Indians.” Eventually I drew a boundary regarding him misgendering and misnaming my nephew, he crossed it, and I left the room to find my car and sob into the steering wheel.
Over time something dawned on me, the thing that’s guiding this entire essay: my father not only was not going to have a new life emotionally, but he could not do so because he could not change. His heart was granite-encased, mineralised into an inert substance born out of years of hiding its hurts from the world so he would not hurt the world around him. This was a devil’s bargain, to be sure, because alongside it he also was stuck in a position whereby he could not process any of those hurts and move past them. He had, in social media terms, found his brand: an emotionally unavailable and deadened PTSD victim who channeled his need to feel any kind of pleasure into sex addiction (or at least that’s the story I tell). And now, years past any remote ability to pretend that he could function sexually, his brand had become a curse, a mark like the literal brand the word derives from on a steer’s haunches, burned into skin in an unchanging pattern of identification.
Sitting in my car that day, I remembered touring the tanneries with him when I was small and he was big. So were the machines: big and fast and unmistakably dangerous to anything with flesh and a nervous system. Most of all I remembered the smell: a rich, deep, pungent stink totally incongruent with what the senses would expect looking at hulking metal machinery lubricated by grease and other petroleum products. It was an intimate, animal smell, the smell of skin leaching out its oil—an ancient smell that stretches with little variation across the entire human world and far back into time, when tribes of humans treated animal hides so that they could become roofs, winter clothes, waterproof linings of vessels. That smell, still deep in my nose, guided me, lingering and reaching like infinite squid tentacles into the far depths of understanding the unchanging nature of my father, and the inevitable need for me to confront and accept the resultant unchanging nature of my relationship with him. There would be nothing new for us, no changes of heart, no ability to decide to break a new path.
My heart eventually healed, and so did my mind. I stabilized in September, and by October I was preparing to visit a friend I hadn’t seen in a decade in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place I’d been meaning to get back to since I had first visited it at 25 on an epic six-week road trip with my best friend at the time. After the transplant I had a profound sense that I was enough, that the whole program of original sin the Catholicism of my upbringing instilled in me was violently off track from what I felt in my heart—which was acceptance and love of who I was as someone who was flawed, but not fundamentally so. Attendant to this enoughness, per the thesis I am trotting out, I started making choices: I turned away from my job, gave it less of my attention and time. Instead, I picked up a copy of The Artist’s Way, a book written by Julia Cameron framed around creative recovery. The owner at my favorite yoga studio, Abide—themed after the film The Big Lebowski—invited me to hold monthly poetry gatherings teaching gogyohka, a Japanese form of five-line poetry I had learned back in Brooklyn in 2009 when I met the form’s founder, Enta Kusakabe. Something was shifting, and I needed to move.
Before booking the trip to see Faye in Santa Fe, I had known she was an ardent advocate of the hallucinogen Bufo, which Michael Pollan experienced and writes an account of in his book. It’s also called “toad,” as the psychoactive compound in the entheogen, 5-MeO-DMT, is released by smoking the dried venom secreted by the skin of the Colorado River toad, species name Bufo Alvarius. Though my conscious mind was fully oriented toward the romance and adventure of revisiting the southwestern desert and the dry snow on scrubby mountains dotted with yellowing aspens—my Airbnb was an adobe ranch with cottonwoods, vigas stretched across the ceiling of my bedroom, and the Santa Fe River trail a short walk away—my unconscious found itself calling and receiving phone calls from Faye whose contents mainly centered around questions about the Bufo experience.
You know where this is going, although I almost didn’t get there despite clearing the intake process which Faye carried out in advance of my arrival, despite me following the day-before protocols around fasting, and despite Faye doggedly locking down a location for the ceremony after two failed attempts. My conscious—my ego, really—was clinging tight, feeding me the worst fears around the experience: that I would shit myself, that I would scream in terror and pain, that I would go nuts, that I would be faced with something I could not bear. Ultimately I discovered these were all smokescreens for what my ego feared most: that I would make a choice that would lead to the realization that it—my ego—wasn’t the only game in town; a realization that, if integrated into the rest of my life, would be a major demotion for the self-appointed CEO of my consciousness.
CEO and founder, however, are not the same thing. And the business of my ceremony, once conducted, revealed that the Universal Source Material of oceanic, boundless love, the glue that binds us into unity has no bounds or limit, not even of the human forms of our species, our country, our city, our parents, our friends, our siblings, even our children, and thus is immediately, ubiquitously available. It’s a stunning awakening, one that Mike Tyson had after he smoked Bufo. Tyson explains that he actualized “the fighter” inside him as just one persona, one piece of the puzzle of himself, and that he chose instead to identify with that part of his being that loved. In accepting the fighter, the violent, ego-driven heavyweight champion, he gave himself the ability to choose a change in self.
Every experience with Bufo is different, I’ve heard—I’ve only had one, to date—and each experience is unique to an individual. This may be why Faye discouraged me from putting too much stock in Pollan’s harrowing description of his experience, in which he essentially relates that the best part of the journey was that it ended. One can only imagine an author as successful as Pollan has his own heavyweight belts of ego wrapped tight around him in all their sparkle-in-the-sunlight splendor. It was too late for me to unread Pollan, so Faye supplemented my data points with other written accounts, and shared her experience with Bufo.
None of it was enough to keep me from having multiple panic attacks the night before my ceremony—incidentally on the first day of Dia de Los Muertos—and getting maybe four hours of fitful sleep. None of it was enough to keep me from nearly backing out hours before.
But I showed up, in borrowed linen pants—light-colored, loose-fitting clothing is encouraged—and a colorful striped hooded affair that I’d ordered for the ceremony but which didn’t arrive until about 20 minutes before Faye picked me up. I showed up, inhaled deeply, and disappeared, only to be reborn.
The essential quality of a profound spiritual experience is that language cannot comprise it, and so-called breakthrough Bufo experiences (ones in which you lose consciousness) are often described as Samadhi, the sanskrit word from the Yogic and Hindu traditions that roughly translates to “integration.” That’s not a bad approximation, but I don’t think it gets as close as the Buddhist concept of Sunyata—an even tougher concept to translate, but which can be understood to mean that emptiness is what gives rise to form, and thus is fundamental to existence. The bowl is most real when it is empty, because that’s when the essential nature of its form is revealed.
Tomato, tomahto. The important point is that for seven minutes my prefrontal cortex powered down: I was both there and not there. Long lines like when Han Solo and Chewbacca engage light speed in the Millennium Falcon appeared and stretched down, down, likely in concert with my body being led down onto its back by Faye and her assistant Ben. When I came to I begged for care, for comfort, and Faye and Ben were there, rubbing my feet, blowing sage smoke over my face, and breathing great whooshing breaths to remind me I was alive, I was here, I was coming into the world in a new way. And I made sure this birth was less violent than my first, that the undifferentiated consciousness of my infant mind, which had only known the unity of wombhood, could, this time, ask for help when it felt the ripping apart of unity into separation: that moment when the infant gasps for breath it has to breathe itself, the moment when one becomes irrevocably felt as two. The gaping maw of air between your infant body and your mother’s womb reveals itself as proof that taking form is, first, an emptying out, not a filling up.
Since I was lucky enough to have as a guide an old friend, I asked Faye if she would snuggle with me, if I could touch her hair, and I asked Ben to lay his head on my chest, like a weighted blanket for my fluttering heart. I saw a single aspen out the window, shivering yellow in the blue breeze, and followed the sunlight all the way down to Faye’s hair, and saw the dust motes and other particles ever present in the air which surrounds us. When I was a boy I remember picking up somewhere the term “Brownian motion,” which led me to sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the sun streaming through my window. Once I’d caught the light’s contents I'd remain rapt in a place without time. I caught that feeling again at about 11:45 AM Mountain Time in Santa Fe on November 1, 2022.
In the weeks that followed I began thinking with my body, feeling my way through the way I moved, through my physiological functions. Bufo is primarily somatic as a hallucinogen, with few visual effects like the hallucinations of peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, or LSD. Instead, I felt Truth—later I told folks that after Bufo I understood why the word gospel means “good news,” that I had tuned into the impulse that inspires religions to be formed. It is primal and permanent, and I wouldn’t take nothing, as the old gospel song goes, for my journey now.
So where am I on that journey now, a little over three months later? Where did this decision to experience ego death and rebirth, this facilitated intimacy with unending acceptance that opened me up to the foundational truth of total unity through formed emptiness beyond any human system, take me? What happens after you change not just your mind but your heart and the physical structure of your brain?
The best way to put it is that I’m leaning—without total tilt—toward being rather than doing, making rather than producing. I just finished my second month of yoga teacher training at the Big Lebowski-themed yoga studio where I host my gogyohka parties—the training is titled, aptly, “How to Abide.” The owner, Hope, freely gave me the training, and I’m beyond grateful. I’m flying to Tokyo this spring for 11 days to stay in my sensei’s house, see the cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji, celebrate his 85th birthday, and learn all I can about this poetic form that has meant so much to me for so long. I’ve never been to Japan—I’ve never been anywhere outside the US beyond Canada and the UK—and feel both terrified to travel alone and thrilled at the prospect of transformation.
In addition to learning to lean, I’m learning to float. I’ve been exploring the tingling experience of acupuncture, bodywork that uses sound vibrations in addition to traditional massage, the space-making of the practice of Yoga Nidra (or yogic sleep), and seeing what’s behind my consciousness with a Jungian therapist. Once a week we talk about my dreams and listen to what they are trying to say about who I really am.
Making space for more than my ego has been enormously generative: after a particularly floaty Yoga Nidra session, which was about 30 minutes of guided awareness through layers of semi-consciousness, I came back and saw the light through my living room capture the dust motes in Brownian motion. This is the first time since Bufo I’ve been able to wear these goggles. Then a gogyohka came:
Opened a doorway
to a tapestry of twilight
Shifted—opened my eyes
to dust motes getting devoured
by a sunbeam
Recently I was talking with a friend and, in a cynical moment, called the folks who were really into Bufo and integrating its teachings into everyday life a “cult.” I went on to explain I was just “a tourist in the hippie world”—after all, it’s not just yoga nidra and Tibetan singing bowls on my vagus nerve: I still see a psychiatrist in a big concrete building who dutifully and legally gives me addictive drugs on a monthly basis. The lifeline for my company has turned out to be a retail launch into Walmart. After coming back from Bufo, one of the things I said was, “Bear with me, I’m a capitalist.” I have more than a toe in the square world—I’d say more like an entire leg.
But I was wrong to say I am a tourist in the re-emergent counterculture. I am learning to accept the distance from my parents’ influence toward conformity while deciding to nurture a deep desire to “drop out” from time to time and tune into something new. Faye recently invited me to a small low-dose Bufo retreat in the Pacific Northwest over Memorial Day weekend. When I left Faye and New Mexico I had a perfect plan to revisit the medicine and her in a year. But now my impulse is toward taking the medicine sooner, toward more frequent visits. Things seem to be shaking out more like I’m applying for a hippie visa. I mean, visas often lead to vistas, right? And the more I see the more I know—even if the knowledge consists in knowing I have to unlearn a need for permanent security in order to have the true freedom to choose, not just freedom from a choice that could be wrong.