I Died On Magic Mushrooms

What I learned about surrender, gratitude for life, and what it feels like to die.

ALIVENESS

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I need to start with an important warning before I tell you this story. If you ever work with psychedelic plant medicine, do it with experienced guidance and people around you. Working with these medicines deserves the utmost respect and proper integration.

Artwork by Oliver Barnett

My one-man magic mushroom ceremony began at 8pm on an autumn night in 2020. I was at home in Somerset, UK. My wife and children were visiting family abroad so the house was still. I had fasted during the day and spent time in reflection and prayer, setting my intentions for the session.

After consuming a ‘heroic dose’ (coined by Terence Mckenna) 5g of fresh, locally picked liberty cap mushrooms, I was in my bedroom. Lights off apart from a candle.

I had done a sacred mushroom ceremony the year before on my own. I had crafted a ritual for myself, set meaningful intentions, and it had been one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. In 2018 I had a similarly transcendent experience with Ayahuasca where I was gifted the exquisite memory of being in my mother’s womb.

I thought I knew what to expect. How to be with psilocybin (the psycho-active molecule in the mushroom). But as many medicine people say, the experience can be very different each time, and you will always get what you need rather than what you want.

I lay down on my bed, feeling the effects of the mushrooms beginning to come on. And then an unexpected question popped into my head, the way questions sometimes do in those states, not summoned, just there. The same question that has followed me for much of my life.

Should we be scared of death?

At that point in life I had had a couple of near death experiences and had been pondering mortality for years. Like many people, I thought I understood my relationship with death. I thought I had made peace with it. I thought I wasn’t scared of it.

The mushrooms answered my question immediately and silently: To answer to this question, you will die now.

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What followed was not a vision. It was not a metaphor. It was four utterly excruciating hours of dying.

The physical sensation was of my body beginning to shut down. First a weakness I had never felt before, not tiredness, something deeper, something that felt like systems going offline one by one. My mind began to go with it. Then stomach cramps. The boundary between mental and physical pain dissolved and what was left was just anguish, formless and total.

I tried to vomit but nothing came out. I turned on the lights and paced the room. I just could not shake this growing physical and mental feeling that my body was shutting down. Every cell in my body cried out with the certainty of dying.

My good friend who had picked the mushrooms from an ancient magic mushroom field earlier that day is a fungi expert. He had told me that he suspected he had found a new species of bright orange liberty caps not yet recorded in any mushroom books.

Remembering this, I wondered if I had eaten poisonous mushrooms. Or perhaps I had just eaten too many and it was now killing me. Either way, it seemed I was dying of an overdose.

I had killed myself.

How stupid.

What a waste.

What a total f**king idiot.

After thirty minutes of this I did the only thing I could think of. Be responsible. Tell someone. Get help. I woke up my flatmate who was sleeping upstairs, a lovely Argentinian guy living with us at the time on the Workaway traveller programme (I will keep names anonymous for this story).

He had been a guide in the Amazon and had been around people on mushrooms before, so he was calm. But my conviction was so absolute, My body seizing up, the certainty that I was dying so complete, that even he was shaken. He wasn’t sure either. I watched him trying to stay calm for my benefit and I could see in his face that he wasn’t certain I was wrong.

I telephoned my good friend who had picked the mushrooms. He drove over. And for three hours there were three of us in my kitchen in the middle of the night. I was lying on the floor. In total agony. Time began to distort. Breathing became laboured, my body forgetting how to function. I watched myself from a distance, feeling panic yet curiously detached, as if both present and fading.

But I eventually told them both to say goodbye to my family. I meant it.

I was grieving myself. Grieving that I would not see my children again, my wife, my friends. Grieving that this was how it ended, not meaningfully, not peacefully, but foolishly, on a kitchen floor at forty something years old because I hadn’t been careful enough. The shame was almost worse than the fear. I had done this to myself. I had done this to everyone I loved. As I confronted my death I realised this event would bring shame onto the whole family once I was gone.

The ‘ego death’ is something I had heard about but never understood until that night. It is not a philosophical concept. It is visceral and animal and desperate. Every cell in your body screaming, not yet, not now, not like this. The ego does not go gently. It claws and bargains and rages and refuses and exhausts itself completely before it finally accepts that the fight is lost.

But eventually even the Ego lets go. After four hours I had no more fight in me. In floods of tears, my surrender into death happened on the kitchen floor.

The resistance simply ran out, not a decision, more like a battery finally dying, and I stopped. And in that act of surrender, something extraordinary happened.

It felt like a big bang going off in my chest. An explosion of something that was not pain. A new universe born inside me. I could see myself living in multiple dimensions, multiple versions of myself across multiple timelines. And it all felt, I don’t have a better word for this, wonderful.

The terror was instantly gone. The shame was gone. The grief was gone.

What was left was a gratitude so complete and so physical that I lay there on my kitchen floor in the middle of the night, my two friends sitting quietly beside me, and simply felt it. I let them know how grateful I was for their support.

The candle was still burning in the bedroom upstairs. The ordinary world was still there, waiting. A few hours later I was asleep, and the next morning’s dawn light was a welcome friend.

For months afterwards it was hard to make sense of what had happened. It didn’t fit the narrative I had built about plant medicine being beautiful and transcendent. It didn’t fit the careful, philosophical relationship with mortality I thought I had developed. It was ugly and shameful, torturous and frightening and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Then slowly, a year or two later, something shifted. I was going through a crisis at work. I experienced panic attacks for the first time. The feeling of dying returning, uninvited. And somewhere inside that darkness a question arrived… what if I wasn’t supposed to resist my mortality? What if I was supposed to work with it? With death. With the fear of it. With what I had learnt on that kitchen floor and in every other brush with mortality I had survived.

That was the moment my purpose deepens and I decided to wholeheartedly step into this work, training as a Soul Midwife, sitting with dying people, studying mortality and building more of what would later become the ‘Aliveness’ philosophy.

And as time passed, the lesson of my torturous ego death became clear. Now I see it as an incredible blessing. I had been shown something that cannot be taught any other way.

I had felt what it actually feels like to die. Not as a concept. Not as a meditation. As a lived, bodily, four-hour experience of my own ending. I had felt the ego’s terror and its fight and its exhaustion and its final surrender. I had felt what is on the other side of that surrender.

I had discovered, this is the thing I could not have understood any other way, that everything I thought I knew about my relationship with death was still partly performance. Partly philosophy. Partly a story I was telling myself.

The mushrooms cut through all of it. They showed me the real thing.

The truth is, our fear of death is baked into our DNA. It often lies dormant. Silent. Many people say they are not scared of death. But what I learned was that when death is suddenly thrust into your face, that fear surfaces. And boy is it brutal.

And the real thing was, beyond the terror, beyond the fight, beyond the shame and the grief and the exhaustion, something that felt like coming home.

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That experience gives me confidence today. The memory of that night is sharp. I think about it when I am with someone who is frightened of dying. I think about it when I talk about what Aliveness actually means, not the philosophy, not the practice, not the framework, but the felt truth underneath all of it.

Because you cannot live fully until you become aware that your life is finite. Not as an idea. As a felt reality.

Most of us will not have four hours on a kitchen floor to figure that out. But we have other thresholds. Other moments when the ego is asked to loosen its grip. Other invitations to stop fighting and simply surrender into what is.

The ego will resist. That is what it does. It has been doing it since the first human became aware of their own mortality. But on the other side of that resistance, every time, in every form, is the same thing I found on that kitchen floor. Something that feels like the beginning of everything.

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One question this week.

Where in your life are you still fighting something that is asking you to surrender?

Not give up. Surrender. There is a difference.

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Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

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