What do psychedelics and minding your own business have in common? You'll meet yourself deeply. And what a trip that can be.
We spend so much time consumed by things external to us that we can become almost unrecognisable to ourselves. Not in the mirror, not in our thoughts, not even in our damn fantasies. Meanwhile, we're hallucinating all over the place. Not the fun, walls-are-breathing, God-is-in-the-lampshade kind. I'm talking about the everyday hallucinations constructed from assumptions, projections, memories and stories we've repeated so often they've acquired the texture of fact. I'm too much. They're judging me. I'm not ready. That's just the way I am. I know exactly what they meant by that. Some are true. Some are bullshit. Some were true once and nobody bothered to update the software. And some have been hanging around for so long you don't even remember a version of yourself that didn't believe them.
Sometimes the only way to tell the difference is to go In. Consider it a trip without the drugs.
THE FURTHER IN YOU GO, THE STRANGER THE FLOOR PLAN GETS
The conscious mind is a wonderful receptionist. It knows your name, why you've come and the version of events you'd like everybody to hear. Walk past reception and you'll find the familiar rooms: your preferences, opinions, memories, personality traits and the stories you tell when somebody asks why you are the way you are. I've always been independent. I'm just not very emotional. I work better under pressure. Relationships aren't really my priority. Lovely. Keep walking. The subconscious is considerably less interested in maintaining your brand.
This is where things that look completely unrelated can turn out to have rooms beside each other. Memories sit next to beliefs. Beliefs share walls with habits. An old embarrassment has somehow acquired a connecting door to the way you behave at work. Something somebody said when you were eleven has been quietly redecorating rooms ever since.
But before I make your internal world sound like a psychological haunted house, there are some gorgeous rooms in here too. There's the room where your imagination has been making things without giving a single shit about whether they're realistic. The room containing memories that can still make your body smile. The fantasy suite, obviously. Rooms full of things you haven't created yet, desires you've barely allowed yourself to want and versions of you that haven't had much daylight lately.
Somewhere in this strange internal property there may also be a room where you feel completely safe. Maybe you've been there before. Maybe your mind builds it when you arrive. Your grandmother's kitchen. A beach you've actually walked on. A hotel bed with impossibly white sheets. Somewhere that has never existed outside your imagination but somehow your body knows exactly what to do when you enter it. Shoulders drop. Jaw softens. Breath gets deeper. Going In isn't always excavation. Sometimes it's refuge. Sometimes it's play. Sometimes the outside world has simply had quite enough access to you for one day.
And then there are the rooms you weren't expecting.
You open one and find your inner child sitting on the edge of her bed holding a battered photograph of your father. Except when you look closer, transposed across his face are the faces of every man you've ever loved. Fuck. Across the hall is the boss you swear you hate standing in exactly the same position as the teacher whose approval you could never quite win. Somewhere else, the compliment you keep rejecting is sitting beside the childhood nickname everybody thought was hilarious. Your inability to rest has its feet up next to an old belief that useful people get loved.
None of this means every difficult relationship is secretly your father or that your procrastination definitely began in Year 4. It means the mind makes associations. And sometimes the pattern you're living today has roots in a room you've forgotten exists.
SOMETIMES THE STATE ISN'T THE PROBLEM
This is where In becomes particularly interesting to me, because sometimes you know exactly which state you need and still can't fucking get there. You want to go Up. You know the moment requires visibility, confidence, fire, yet the second attention lands on you something reaches for the dimmer switch.
You want to go Down. You're exhausted, you have permission to stop and nothing urgently requires your attention, yet the moment everything becomes quiet some internal security guard begins rattling door handles. Y
ou want to go Out. You miss people. You want connection. You would actually quite like to be touched. But when the opportunity arrives, retreat suddenly feels delicious.
You can keep trying to force the state – another affirmation, another breathing exercise, louder music, a better morning routine – or perhaps it's worth walking the halls and finding out why that particular door keeps locking. What looks like laziness in one room may have fear living next door. Indecision may share a connecting door with an old loyalty you don't remember making. Procrastination might be perfectionism in disguise. Your supposed lack of confidence might make considerably more sense when you discover the room where you learnt that being visible came with consequences.
And yes, sometimes you haven't done the thing because you simply can't be arsed. Not every locked door contains a formative psychological event. But when the same door keeps locking, I'm getting the keys.
HYPNOSIS HAS A KEY
Your subconscious doesn't communicate exclusively in beautifully organised sentences. It works through associations, imagery, memories, sensations, expectations and patterns that can sit outside your immediate awareness while still influencing how you respond. Which is one of the reasons I use hypnosis.
A HypnoShift uses focused attention and suggestion to change the way we engage with some of that internal material. Sometimes that means noticing an association that wasn't obvious before. Sometimes it's rehearsing a different response. Sometimes it's using the mind's capacity for imagery to create an internal experience that gives you access to something useful: safety, confidence, pleasure, possibility, calm. A place to retreat to that doesn't require a passport.
And hypnosis doesn't have to involve kicking open the door marked TRAUMA: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. Sometimes we're not looking for what's wrong. We're building somewhere good.
No swinging watch. No involuntary chicken impersonations. Although never say never.
What interests me is the gap between what we consciously know and what we automatically do. You can know the presentation isn't dangerous while your body prepares for public execution. You can know your current partner isn't your ex while reacting to them as though they've inherited the role. You can know you're allowed to rest while some part of you remains convinced that if you stop holding everything together, the ceiling will cave in.
The memo reached reception. Apparently nobody forwarded it to the other rooms.
Going In lets us deliver it personally.
THE DARK HAS EXCELLENT DRAMATURGY
Spend enough time exploring the internal world and eventually somebody will mention shadow work, the dark night of the soul or, everybody's favourite, ego death. Very dramatic. Excellent cape potential.
These ideas come from different psychological, spiritual and philosophical traditions and they aren't interchangeable, but they all circle something humans have noticed for a very long time: meeting yourself beyond the version you consciously maintain can be deeply uncomfortable. Some rooms aren't cute. There's jealousy in one. Grief in another. Anger you've been calling disappointment because it sounds better in polite company. Desire that would make life considerably more complicated if you admitted it. Shame wearing something from 2003 and refusing to throw it away. There's a room containing the person you've spent years blaming. Open the next one and you may find yourself. Rude.
There are identities in here that expired years ago but are still paying rent. Rules written by people who no longer have access to you. Defence mechanisms doing jobs that haven't existed since the original employee left the building. An ego death doesn't have to mean dramatically annihilating your entire sense of self. Sometimes something smaller but equally disruptive happens: a version of you simply stops making sense.
Maybe I'm not who I thought I was.
That can feel like losing something. Sometimes it is. But a vacancy isn't always a bad thing.
SOME OF THE GOOD SHIT IS LOCKED UP TOO
This is the part of going In that interests me most.
We make a strange assumption about inner work: that if we're opening locked doors, there must be something terrible behind them. Trauma. Shame. Fear. Pain. One spectacularly inconvenient memory you've successfully avoided since Year 9.
Possibly.
But we don't only suppress pain. We suppress power.
Open another door and there's your confidence, still wearing the outfit somebody called attention-seeking. Next room: your sexuality, packed away after somebody taught you there was something dangerous about being desired – or desiring. Further along you'll find the voice that was too loud for the house you grew up in, the ambition that threatened somebody else's comfort, the softness that got hurt and decided armour was more sensible.
Keep going and it gets better.
Your imagination is in here. Your ability to play. The ridiculous idea you dismissed before anybody else got the chance. A memory of yourself before you started making everything so bloody sensible. Your capacity for pleasure. Your curiosity. Your appetite. The part of you that used to make things simply because making them felt good. The version who knows how to flirt. The one who trusts herself. The one who rests without negotiating for it.
And there may be rooms you've never occupied at all. Places your imagination can build for the person you're becoming. Somewhere safe. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere you can practise being louder, softer, sexier, braver or simply different before you ever have to do it with the outside world watching.
Whole parts of us can become unavailable because expressing them once came with a cost. After enough time, we forget we ever had them and start making declarations: I've never been particularly confident. I'm just not very sensual. I'm not creative. I'm naturally quite reserved.
Maybe.
Or perhaps you've been robbed by somebody with your exact fingerprints.
This is why going In isn't an archaeological dig for evidence that something is wrong with you. Sometimes you're remembering. Sometimes you're retrieving. Sometimes you're creating. Sometimes you're meeting a version of yourself you haven't met yet.
There is more of you available to you.
Some of her may be waiting in a room you've never thought to open.
DON'T MOVE IN
There is, however, a point at which self-exploration becomes its own trip. Another journal, another reading, another wound, another label, another explanation for why you are the way you are. You can become so fascinated by your own interior that you forget there is a front door.
That's why psychedelic culture talks so much about integration. A profound experience isn't automatically a useful one. Something has to come back with you.
The inner child doesn't need you staring at the photograph forever. She needs the adult version of you to live differently because you finally understood what it meant. The desire needs daylight. The idea needs making. The voice needs using. The confidence needs somewhere to go. And that beautiful room where everything inside you softens? Leave that one exactly where it is. You may want to visit again.
So mind your business. Walk the halls. Open some doors. Meet yourself in places you haven't visited for years. Have a look at the hallucinations, but don't spend the whole trip searching for monsters.
There are beautiful rooms in here too.
Find the ridiculous ones. The sexy ones. The peaceful ones. The rooms containing things you'd forgotten belonged to you. Find somewhere safe enough to take your shoes off and stay awhile.
And if you eventually reach a door with your name written across it in gold?
Go in.
See what's yours.
Then decide what you're bringing back.
