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Ep. 1 - The Birth of Midnight Water with Katherine MacLean & Eileen Hall
492 Plays1 year ago
Once upon a time, a scientist and an artist came together to open magical, wondrous portals into the underworld, and now they want you to come explore the labyrinth along with them! In this inaugural episode of "Midnight Water: Dialogues in the Labyrinth", research scientist Katherine MacLean discusses the major themes of her debut memoir in conversation with Eileen Hall, who is the book's cover artist and also one of its main characters.
Midnight Water: A Psychedelic Memoir by Katherine MacLean, Ph.D. is a story of grief and redemption by a groundbreaking scientist who led the way in psychedelic research. Midnight Water is not only a personal story of psychedelic healing but an inspired vision for a psychedelic future that positions women and family caregivers at the center of home-based healing, from birth through death. Available June 27, 2023.
The Scientist: Katherine MacLean ~ www.katherinemaclean.org
The Artist: Eileen Hall ~ www.eileen-hall.com
The Music: Kate Fleur-Young ~ www.katefleuryoung.com
Podcast Editor: Josh Leonard
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the first episode of Dialogues in the Labyrinth, inspired by the first book by Dr. Catherine McLean, who joins us today, called Midnight Water, which is her psychedelic memoir. My name is Eileen Hall, and I am a Scottish Ecuadorian visual artist, creative director, and explorer of inner and outer landscapes.
00:00:59
Speaker
This conversation was really a way for Catherine and I to bring everyone into more the depths of this book that she's so lovingly crafted for people to enjoy. Now it is in writing, I suppose, this wave of this psychedelic renaissance that we're all currently living in.
00:01:21
Speaker
I kind of looked this up briefly and saw that there's about 100 clinical research trials taking place across the world as we speak compared to zero just a few decades ago because everyone was so scared of
00:01:37
Speaker
drugs or substances that alter our minds.
Psychedelic Research and Personal Inspiration
00:01:40
Speaker
But they have been labeled as the next big breakthrough in our mental health crisis. And so with that in mind, we have someone who was involved in that world, in the clinical research world, who has decided to open up the mystery cupboards of her life and bring us right into the heart of her own healing journey.
00:02:03
Speaker
with these amazing compounds that hail so much promise. So Catherine, welcome and thank you for agreeing to do this. This is a way for us to be able to really share more of the wisdom that you've been able to bring forward through your work as a scientist and also
00:02:23
Speaker
as an explorer of the inner spaces. And so, would you mind just telling the audience briefly what the book is about and really why you wrote it and how it came to be?
Life Events and Book Themes
00:02:37
Speaker
Sure. It's so fun to be in conversation with you, Eileen. We have been exploring this territory for the last 10 years since we met at Breaking Convention in London. Huge psychedelic conference that I ended up attending somewhat unexpectedly the year my sister died.
00:02:56
Speaker
And I was fresh with the inspiration from that experience. I was ready to leave my job at Hopkins. And one of the seeds that was planted that year was this book, Midnight Water. The book was inspired by the experience I had with my sister in the hospital. It was a very challenging experience, as anyone can imagine.
00:03:20
Speaker
But it was an initiation into a much deeper and profound understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be born, to live, to die. And in the moment she took her final breath at midnight, I remember seeing around the room all of these half-filled cups of water.
00:03:43
Speaker
And two things kind of went through my mind at the time. The first was a memory from a meditation retreat I had just been on. And the teacher was telling us about how she tried to escape a peyote ceremony, an indigenous peyote ceremony, because she was in too much pain. She wanted out. She was done.
00:04:02
Speaker
And at the break at midnight, which is called the midnight water break, she fled the teepee. She went to hide in her car and the road man who was in charge of the ceremony went to find her. And he said, you have to come back because the ceremony cannot continue unless everyone is back in the teepee. And she shared this story at the meditation retreat I went on a month before my sister died.
00:04:27
Speaker
I heard her lesson echoing in my mind as my sister was dying, you don't get to decide whether to leave the ceremony. No matter how much pain you're in, no matter what is happening, you have to finish the ceremony. The book is my way of finishing the ceremony that was interrupted when my sister died. How do I finish the ceremony of life? How do I go on without
00:04:53
Speaker
my sister, my mirror, the person who's been with me as long as I've been alive nearly.
00:05:02
Speaker
You know, Midnight Water is about psychedelics. It's about death. It's about birth. It's about grief. It's about reckoning with our childhood, becoming an adult, what that looks like in the modern era. And it's about family. It's about how we relate to the people who we are born with, born into, the people who we choose as family later on, and the people we give birth to.
00:05:27
Speaker
whether it's through actual childbirth or through the ideas in the world, the people that we call into our lives. And, you know, Midnight Waters, it feels like another child to me. It feels like something beautiful that came out of a really tragic circumstance. And I hope that other people are inspired when they read it to embrace the difficulties in their life and make beautiful things out of them.
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, amazing. And so again, a little bit of background even between us. So Catherine and I, like she mentioned, met at Breakin Convention in 2013. And at the time, again, you were one of the few females in the clinical research space for psychedelics, working at Johns Hopkins under the guidance of
Backgrounds and Shared Interests
00:06:14
Speaker
Roland Griffiths.
00:06:15
Speaker
who was doing his end of life studies and you were studying meditation and psilocybin effects in people at the time. And I had, you know, I came up to you because I was still obsessed with, you know, my father had died and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I've had all these crazy kind of mystical paranormal things happen since he died. And then I was convinced that psychedelics were one of the answers for my own grief.
00:06:42
Speaker
for my own pain and to help me initiate myself into adult food in many ways. And so I was so happy when we got to connect and there was so many things in common that we had to share both our pain and our love of life. And we always, you know, we always laugh that the mushrooms must have been having a great old time behind the scenes with all the connections that they brought together between us. And so this dialogue, this conversation is also a way for people to
00:07:12
Speaker
to come and be part of these topics that you and I have excavated into over the last decade in different ways and had pulled, especially I love your work and the way you have navigated your own story because of the amount of
00:07:29
Speaker
poetry that comes out of it among wisdom and insight and ways to grapple with both the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the things in between that we go through as humans. And so do you want to also just give people a little bit of an introduction to also back then, like what you were studying as a psychedelic side? Just briefly, you went from studying meditation to then studying psilocybin.
00:08:00
Speaker
Sure. So I went to a very small, very high achieving college called Dartmouth College. It's in the woods of New Hampshire. The motto for Dartmouth is Vox Clementis Indeserto, so a voice crying out in the wilderness.
00:08:20
Speaker
And in a way, midnight water is part of that legacy. For a long time, I wondered what drew me to Dartmouth. Dartmouth was my cosmic proving ground, as I call it. It's the place that I didn't understand why I was being drawn into that particular place in time, but what found me there were all of the chemicals that I became obsessed with afterward. And so a big
00:08:45
Speaker
I think approach in my life is that if I find something that's fascinating, I want to try it. And if that's meditation, if it's home birth, if it's death, and certainly if it's psychedelic drugs, I want to try it myself and see what happens.
00:09:02
Speaker
And so at Dartmouth, I was busy excelling in my classes. I was training for the heptathlon and track. And then a series of injuries basically sidelined me from my athletic career. And what emerged is an equal fascination with the mind and the brain.
00:09:22
Speaker
And I remember telling my undergrad advisor that I wanted to eventually study the neuroscience of ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle when I grew up. That was my goal as a career scientist. And he said, you know, stick to monkey brains, they're easier. And, you know, there wasn't really an opportunity to become a psychedelic scientist at the time, or so I thought. Most of the labs, there was Hopkins that had just begun their work in 2000, and there was a Swiss lab
00:09:50
Speaker
that had been doing some work in the late 90s. There was Rick Strassman, who had done some work with DMT out in New Mexico. But really, everyone was kind of scattered, small teams, medical researchers, and none of the research was really getting any public awareness.
Researcher to Psychedelic Guide
00:10:07
Speaker
the Imperial College Studies hadn't even begun at that point. And so my dream was a bit far reaching. And so I ended up landing at UC Davis to study meditation. And that was an amazing experience. It was called the Shamata Project. And it really laid the foundation for why I got hired at Hopkins. It turned out that Roland Griffiths is a longtime meditator. So when my email arrived in his inbox, he took it seriously because I was a meditator and because I had done this meditation study.
00:10:37
Speaker
Interesting how the pathways ended up bringing me to him, but when I arrived at Hopkins, the first psilocybin study had just been published in 2006.
00:10:48
Speaker
I graduated in 2009, so just a few years later. They had been conducting some other basic, it's called psychopharmacology, where you basically look at whether the effects that you're interested in are dose dependent. So does the mystical experience from psilocybin increase the more you increase the dose of the drug? It does.
00:11:10
Speaker
Can you blind the drug sessions from an active placebo like Ritalin compared to a dose of psilocybin? You can pretty well blind it. Not as many people have a mystical experience on Ritalin, but some do.
00:11:25
Speaker
Can you influence the experience through other factors? And that was where I arrived. We were looking at whether training people in meditation before and after their psilocybin experience could enhance the long-term effects. And so that was called the spiritual practices study. It was privately funded. There was no government research funding at the time unless you were studying the negative effects of psilocybin. So if you wrote a grant,
00:11:53
Speaker
that said, and I'm paraphrasing, drugs are bad, this drug is bad too, and we're going to show you how bad it is. Those are all the grants basically from the government. It's changing now. But yeah, I arrived at Hopkins unprepared for what my new role would be. I thought I was going to be a researcher, and yet I became a psychedelic guide. I got to train with two of the best guides in the world, Mary Casamano and Bill Richards.
00:12:20
Speaker
And so I hold the very unique trophy of being one of the only head psychedelic guides in the world who doesn't have a license, is not a therapist, and is not a medical doctor. And the rest, as they say, is history. But yeah, it was a very lucky opportunity at just the right time before all of the psychedelic Renaissance took off.
00:12:45
Speaker
Amazing. And so it was that those studies also became quite fundamental to the rest of the research community because they were looking at this space of meditation, mystical experiences and mental health all combined. And again, what I find really interesting about your story is
00:13:04
Speaker
Not only in the last 10 years have you lost a sister, a dad, and given birth to two children, but you also had all these kind of what you would label mystical or paranormal experiences start happening to you outside of the psychedelic research space.
00:13:22
Speaker
That's right. I mean, at Hopkins, the model in the medical world is that the guide or the therapist does not ingest the substance with the participant. The participant is the one who receives a pill with some amount of some compound in it, and then we assist them throughout the day. Indigenous societies
00:13:45
Speaker
often the healer would ingest some amount of the medicine, the compound, the plants, the mushroom, and use that space that they went into to negotiate, to dialogue with, to understand what was going on with the client.
00:14:04
Speaker
It's quite a different model. Traditionally, it was not seen as a medicine so much as a method of acquiring information and negotiating within the spirit realm. And in those early days, we really had to wear two hats.
00:14:21
Speaker
On the one hand, we had to be completely present in our own state of body and mind in order to sit for other people. We had to become expert guides, even though we didn't have indigenous mentors, we didn't really have a full team or the culture around psychedelics. So we really had to kind of create
00:14:40
Speaker
We had to create the model, really. What's interesting at Hopkins is that there was never any training for us as guides to navigate our own consciousness vis-a-vis the participant. And yet what happened for me, whether through natural ability or through my own propensity to want to enter interesting states of mind, maybe from meditation, but I found my own mind changing as I sat more and more with people on psilocybin.
00:15:10
Speaker
I also felt the effects of the psilocybin in the room. I don't know how to explain that. It might be a form of empathy. It might be a form of mirroring my brain, mirroring what I'm seeing in the environment.
00:15:22
Speaker
And that was fine until my mind really started changing. And so there was a pivotal moment where I met a meditation teacher at a science conference. I was there to present my openness findings, which were groundbreaking at the time. We showed that psilocybin can change personality.
00:15:40
Speaker
It can make people more creative, imaginative, tolerant to other people's opinions, open-minded. And I was there with Robin Carhart Harris with his very first brain images that took over the world in a very short period of time, psilocybin in the brain.
00:15:58
Speaker
And I met a meditation teacher and I remember the teacher said, you know, just go sit down and ask yourself, where am I? I had never I never asked that question before. Where am I? I sat down. I started breathing. I was outside by a waterfall.
00:16:13
Speaker
And when I asked where am I, everything exploded. I became nothing. I was shot out into the outer reaches of the galaxy. I saw everything, including my family, the Earth, all my ideas, everything that made up my sense of reality just completely disintegrating.
00:16:32
Speaker
And it was terrifying. And then I remember coming back into my body and, you know, being so happy to have a body, being on earth, there were plants, there were animals, there was the desert. But it really shook me. And I said, well, how can that happen when I didn't ingest anything? When I didn't, there was no previous trigger. There was no thing to occasion that experience.
00:16:53
Speaker
And so when I came back from that experience, that was really when I decided I had to leave this research world. I couldn't hold these two understandings and I needed to understand the personal dimension before I could continue guiding others. And then shortly after that was when my sister ended up in the hospital. So it's interesting, the hospital experience
00:17:21
Speaker
I drew on everything I knew from Hopkins, how to sit with people going through a difficult experience, how to embrace a mystical experience, how to see beyond death. But the sober experience I had and meditation is what prepared me to leave. And so it was kind of like two different things coming together to inspire me to kind of birth myself out of the academic track that I had been on up until that point. Right.
00:17:49
Speaker
And do you mind telling us a little bit about this openness paper as well?
Openness Paper and Community Impact
00:17:53
Speaker
That was so, again, crucial to your understanding of how these compounds work, but also how it interacts with just the general premise of connecting to reality.
00:18:08
Speaker
So openness is a facet of personality. There's certainly debate about how to best measure personality, but at Hopkins, they had used one of the gold standard measures. It's called the NEOPI, 240 items, and then it gets broken up into five different categories. So the categories that people are commonly familiar with are like extroversion, so how outgoing you are.
00:18:33
Speaker
neuroticism, which is an old term, but it actually just means how moody, anxious, depressed, angry you are, basically, and agreeableness, which is kind of like, just as you might imagine, are you willing to follow rules and order? Do you prefer being obedient and kind of going with the flow? Are you perceived as like an easy person to get along with that kind of thing?
00:19:03
Speaker
I looked at all of the personality measures. When I arrived as a postdoc, the data had already been looked at in every possible way, and they had actually concluded that personality didn't change.
00:19:18
Speaker
I was like, well, that's interesting. You'd think that something would move a little bit. I looked at the data in a slightly different way, and then I combined the early study that they had done in 2006 with the dose effects study that came a little bit later. We had more people. As a side note, the thing about personality measures is you need a lot of people to see if there's a real effect. There might be an effect, but you can't see it in 36 people or 40 people. I took as many people as we could,
00:19:47
Speaker
And what I found is that openness increased, but it was specifically in the people who'd had a complete mystical experience.
00:19:56
Speaker
The increase in openness depended on the kind of experience you had. It wasn't just good enough to give someone psilocybin. They actually had to have that mind-blowing spiritual experience to be inspired to become more open. It totally makes sense. This is what the hippies have been saying since the 60s with LSD. Across modern history, there have been different groups that have said, no, I don't think things should be the same way as before.
00:20:21
Speaker
like the hippies, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. These all tend to be more liberal, progressive ideas, but it's because our culture happens to be more conservative. When I found that openness increased, I submitted the paper to a psychology journal, one of the top psychology journals that I had already published a paper in on meditation.
00:20:45
Speaker
And the editor, this is very unusual, the editor refused to send it out for review. And he said, it is impossible for a drug to change personality. The premise is faulty. And I'm not agreeing to send this out for review.
00:21:00
Speaker
It's like, oh, that's not how I thought science worked, but okay. So we ended up publishing the paper in a psychopharmacology journal, thinking, okay, this will be interesting to psychedelic researchers, maybe some drug researchers, and it exploded. It hit every major news outlet. Bill Marr mentioned it on his late night show at the time. I mean, it was a really huge moment for me because I had just done this, what I thought was a very scientific kind of nerdy statistical analysis.
00:21:30
Speaker
And what it meant to people, I think, outside of the science world was like, oh, personality, I get that. Open-mindedness, I get that. Creativity, I get that. And it became a bridge to the public. And so it's hard to say which papers helped fuel the psychedelic renaissance now. I think certainly Robin's work in neuroimaging, my openness paper, and Roland's mystical findings,
00:21:56
Speaker
are very responsible for the increased interest that then just kind of kept growing and growing since then. Yeah, wow, that's amazing. And so great to see, again, the workings of the space itself, because it has been so difficult to quantify because of its mystical qualities, or its kind of quite fluid qualities that the psychedelic space can have about it.
Integrating Insights into Life
00:22:21
Speaker
And so now there's just more and more research, more and more theories, more and more people getting involved and starting to pick apart the mechanism of what this could be from kind of quite secular views of, you know, it's all in the brain, down to these more poetic or spiritual views of it. And also this recognition of the indigenous wisdom that is also being kind of
00:22:49
Speaker
ancestral knowledge that's been brought forward through centuries to do with these ceremonies and the use of these mind-altering substances. This book again to me is also helping people peer more into the poetry behind the research, the animism behind all of the philosophy or all of the insights that have been gained so far and again the kind of
00:23:16
Speaker
complex weaving that takes place as you integrate any insights that you've received through that healing space or that mystical space or that psychedelic space, that many layered experience of our psyches.
00:23:55
Speaker
Again, I come back to the personal stories, especially your personal stories being the place where people can in more detail understand
00:24:03
Speaker
the wrestling that happens, the back and forth, the questioning that, am I crazy for believing this? What's going on? And then how you would then ground it into a useful, practical way of being in your life. Because, you know, again, as far as I understand, in shamanic culture is really altering your mind is for practical purposes. So shamans take psychedelics in order to help
00:24:28
Speaker
the tribe navigate practical matters better so they will know how to get food, how to get water by ingesting various plants, then they know how to heal people or how to work with the spirits in their lives and in the environment to lead a healthy life. But the hard part of our modern lives is because we don't have this
00:24:50
Speaker
communal structure to support our spiritual anatomy or our esoteric anatomy, which is what we're built with. Dreams is one of the places that you can look at this without going into psychedelics. What is that? How is it that we can be these kind of very solid beings creating things in this realm, but also travel
00:25:09
Speaker
Let's call it to other places or other dimensions. For anyone that finds this taboo, if you've dreamt, that's also a way of altering your states. That's a way of traveling beyond your body. And now that we see more of this research come and I, especially also around near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, everything seems to be piling up into
00:25:30
Speaker
a more comprehensive array of resources that we can all access to understand our experiences because they will be very varied according to each person's history, cultural makeup, and also where you want to go. Because what happened when you went through your death experience, first of all, with your sister and also you felt like you were dying in and of yourself as well.
00:25:55
Speaker
it woke you up to a different version of your life, which then became more focused around, again, these bigger questions, your spiritual nature, but also your family connection to nature, connection to music and art and other things beyond what you had been growing up in.
Grief and Transformational Experiences
00:26:16
Speaker
You know, it's interesting when I think back, there are a couple, you know, if you look back across your life, you could see the seeds of certain, um,
00:26:25
Speaker
experiences. I didn't learn how to actually grow flowers until the very end of my journey. But I think about people that I met and ideas as seed. So my mom was my first seed. She taught me how to dream. She always asked me about my dreams. She taught me how to recollect my dreams, to talk about them. She has a very vivid dream life. I think she was probably a healer or a magician or a shaman in another life.
00:26:53
Speaker
So my mom taught me how to dream. Certainly the meditation teachers taught me how to enter a dream space of consciousness through breathing, through energetic work. At Hopkins, I learned how to navigate the space of being near someone who themselves is crossing boundaries. And I think that that's a skill that can be developed. If anything, as people are learning how to be psychedelic therapists,
00:27:19
Speaker
They are learning how to be in that space with someone else who is themselves navigating, but without messing it up, without interfering. And that's a skill. Certainly some people are gifted in that, but you can learn it. And then with my sister, I learned about the death space.
00:27:37
Speaker
What happened after I met you is interesting because right about when I met you was the end of what I call the afterglow of my sister's death. So I was in a space of total love and safety. I felt her energy with me all the time. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling it, and I thought, this is it. I'm never going to have to do anything hard for the rest of my life. I've got Rebecca, I've got God, I've got this love.
00:28:05
Speaker
And sometime that summer after breaking convention, it's like everything cracked.
00:28:11
Speaker
And what I understand that to be is on the spiritual journey, you can be shown the light. You can be shown all of this loving, positive energy, maybe first because it's easier. And then there's no difference between that and the darkness. We think there is. So that when that light starts to show its other face, it feels like it's collapsing, like it's breaking, like I've lost it.
00:28:37
Speaker
And right about that time is when I went to Nepal. And I went on a journey through the Himalayas. I released my sister's ashes at a beautiful nunnery close to the Tibetan border. And then tragically, at the end of that journey, one of the young Nepalese who had been a medical translator and a guide, he drowned in a river saving the life of one of the women who was on the journey.
00:29:03
Speaker
In a way that death was harder for me than my sister's death because it seemed meaningless, pointless, avoidable, tragic, sad, all of the classic emotions around death. So when I came back from Nepal, I was in a deep, deep depression. And I don't say like depression, like a mental condition. This was like absolute sadness, grief, abject loss.
00:29:28
Speaker
And I couldn't understand how what I had felt with my sister could be related to what I was feeling with the death of this young man. And right around that time was another seed. I had met a woman who was skilled in foraging, crafting plant medicine, collecting plant medicine from the wild, and she
00:29:50
Speaker
For better, for worse gave me all of the tools I needed to understand the next 10 years of my life all at once. And I think, you know, some people would disagree with her approach, but I think she thought, you know, this is a life that's about to be lost to this darkness. If she doesn't understand and befriend this, she's, she's going to be, you know, in, in that, um, it's like, imagine if you're walking into a deep wood.
00:30:15
Speaker
And it's like I could have just been wandering, not understanding the shadows, not understanding the fear my whole life. And so what came out of that experience with multiple plant medicines in a very short period of time was I knew that I could not just keep seeking the afterlife. I couldn't just want to go where my sister was and be in that space dissociated from my body. But I also couldn't just be wallowing in my own misery and pain.
00:30:46
Speaker
And so that at that point is when I started therapy, I started somatic experiencing therapy and I started exploring some very old memories that I was very confused about, but I suddenly saw them with clarity. And, you know, it's hard for me to remember how terrible that following year was. You know, we spent a lot of time together that year.
00:31:09
Speaker
If not for you and a handful of other friends who are equally eccentric, not afraid of death, and very patient and loving with me. I don't know how well I would have gotten through that year. You know, there were many points that I reached a point and thought, you know, I can't go any further. I can't take the next step.
00:31:29
Speaker
And then you, my friend Sarah, our mushroom teacher Patrick, many other people, my therapist, my family kind of said, hey, we'll walk with you. And so if I could kind of think about like one
00:31:45
Speaker
piece of advice for someone who's navigating difficult terrain is just find the people in your life who are willing to take that next step with you. And don't think about 10 steps ahead. Don't think about 10 years from now. Just think about how am I going to take this next step, even if it's painful, even if I don't want to be here anymore, even if I can't.
00:32:04
Speaker
stand the thoughts that are coursing through my mind, all of these memories, all of the concerns, just take that next step and just be willing to surrender to becoming a different person. And so what those experiences in 2014 taught me was that I had to let go of Catherine up till that point to become who I was being asked to be.
00:32:29
Speaker
And now that process took a very long time, but 2014 was when I committed to saying, okay, I'm willing to let go of who I was before this and figure out who it is that I'm becoming. And then
00:32:43
Speaker
That's when I left Hopkins. You'd think that it would be obvious, right? I was so busy navigating all of this, but there was a lot of pressure to just go back and just kind of buck up and make some quick meaning out of my experience, move on, settle down, get my head focused on my career, keep doing great work. And I just knew in every fiber of my being that that wasn't what I was here to do on this planet.
00:33:11
Speaker
I'm grateful that I resisted all of the pressure to just return to my old life. Right. And also, you know, at the time we were both through that and covering this topic of trauma, you know, like how it's in us and how we carry it and how it unfolds and how we heal it. Now, you know, we don't need to go into the depths of such a large subject, but
00:33:35
Speaker
within that you know it was the same for me in terms of having friends and people that as my life was unraveling you know i was studying architecture at the time and also wrestling with leaving this this this uh career that i had been in for for a while and but i knew there was a different life for me.
00:33:54
Speaker
And for me, it also came through these tragedies. It was through the death of a close friend a few years after my dad's where I was like, I need to get out of the life that I feel boxed in. I don't know what's happening next, but I just know I need to follow it. And again.
00:34:11
Speaker
You became, you know, I say to people, you've been my, not just my best friend, but my mentor through all of that, because as you were wrestling with the new Catherine and figuring it out, not only just, you know, again, with the death, with the depression, with your new life, leaving this job, and also kind of the trauma journey that you were going through, you were
00:34:33
Speaker
kind of bringing out these nuggets, these kind of very interesting ways of seeing this journey and this mystery which to me were massively helpful and useful again within a culture that wasn't quite open to discussing these things and now I think it's getting much better now that everything seems to be
00:34:54
Speaker
you know, now being covered in the media so much more, but back then it was kind of still cowboy territory, you know, we're all just like, how
Life Changes and Family Dynamics
00:35:02
Speaker
do you do this? Well, you know, piecing it all together in this very eclectic manner, because, you know, the thing I find really interesting, again, about your journey were all the people that started showing up the moment you said, actually, no longer, I'm no longer the scientist, clinician.
00:35:18
Speaker
you said, okay, mystery, I'm yours. What do you need from me? Then, you know, you've got plunged into hell and you're like, oh, thanks for that. But actually, you know, thanks for that. But, you know, it helped you face some really interesting, hard truths about yourself, about life. But then you met all these wonderful new beings, you know, along the way that became this kind of part of your, your adventure was not just
00:35:43
Speaker
all the stuff you were grappling with, but also the people that you were learning from along the way. And again, those lessons have been quite, quite invaluable. And I, you know, I love hearing the stories about all the different people within, within your book as well. Well, and of course, we can't forget that one of the people who showed up was my daughter. So in my very first mushroom experience, and I talk about this, I think it's in chapter two,
00:36:09
Speaker
And then it moves into chapter four with you, with the journeys with Eileen. But a little girl had started appearing to me in dreams, in visions, in different psychedelic spaces, the energy of this little girl. And it was a version of me that I needed to learn to love and listen to and really hear what she remembered.
00:36:36
Speaker
But it was also the spirit of my daughter, Frances. And so she emerged out of and into my body after that second mushroom experience. And when she was born,
00:36:50
Speaker
I just felt that the universe had given me its most sacred gift. And so it's fascinating that the universe gave me someone who could understand that mystical territory and also incarnate in a body just like me and literally walk this phase with me. She's now turning eight years old this summer.
00:37:12
Speaker
And I mean, it's the most precious thing. And then, you know, of course, then, you know, once she arrived, she called in reinforcements, she called in her brother because she said, okay, this is, this is way too hard. I don't know if anyone prepared us for this. We need, I need some help. And a lot of Midnight Water, the middle part of the book is about becoming a mother, birth, and exploring that space of creation that could happen after destruction.
00:37:40
Speaker
new friends, new energies, and new ways of understanding that I just feel really lucky, you know, that I had all of that help.
00:38:39
Speaker
Yeah. And again, what an epic tale. Again, you saw you were studying psychedelics at this prestigious university being hailed and now they have this big center and that was your life until the veil opened up.
00:38:56
Speaker
You were plunged into the depths of this hell realm, this destruction from which you were able to birth your children, you know, in your new life, which again, like I said, you know, you lived in a farm with your husband and your family. There was a lot of getting back to nature and the basics of
00:39:12
Speaker
of life. And that was the main thing I kept, you know, learning from you and hearing from you is like, don't get caught up in the shininess of the psychedelic space. What really actually matters is that you're a good person, you show up for your family, for your friends, and you connect to nature, which is what feeds us in the first place. So, and again, learning from you this perspective of how
00:39:33
Speaker
There's a function to pain and suffering. And it's something that you and I have like really kind of navigated together as friends for a while. And it's been really quite a beautiful as far in your right, it's been so hard and I've watched you
00:39:49
Speaker
both of us who have gone through long periods of feeling anxious, depressed, not knowing. But that was our makeup regardless of psychedelics or not. We were both given a healthy dose of suffering in our lives. So the psychedelics to us were intense, but actually just as intense as the pain that we'd been through. So for us, it was like, OK, I'll try anything. And again, I always really admired the way you had faith in people.
00:40:16
Speaker
not always the experts, you know, and there's a there's a place for having wisdom, guidance and knowledge. It's good for someone to be able to tell us like, this is how much, you know, how much of a psychedelic you take, this is the general set and setting, you know, and learn about the psychology, because we really are birthing this language of the inner space for each of us and what that means within this very chaotic realm. But again, you know, I watch you kind of
00:40:44
Speaker
take everyone down from a pedestal one after another, you know, you were surrounded by people that were easily put on pedestals. I put you on a pedestal before you were just like, hang on a minute, don't do that, you know, like I'm, you know, nobody's got it all figured out. And so you had access to some
00:41:03
Speaker
You know, you had access to some very kind of well-known teachers of these subjects. I'm not going to mention their names that, again, disappointed you in different ways or you were able to see their humanity. And then beyond that, what again I admired about the way you saw it, you were also able to forgive some pretty hard stuff. You were able to be like,
00:41:24
Speaker
They are so wrong. I don't like them. They've done this damage to me or they've done this damage to other people. But then you were able to see it from this larger perspective of like, everyone has their flaws. They are human. They're going to mess up. So how do we bring in these values and virtues that are more loving to be able to navigate these very painful moments? And again, you did that so well with, you know,
00:41:50
Speaker
I really admired the way you handled your dad's death for that reason. People will get to learn more about that story in the book, but he was a difficult character for you to handle in your life. And he also represented the kind of pinnacle of this American individualized dream of acquiring
00:42:13
Speaker
you know, kind of wealth, status, individuality, intelligence, like, you know, scientific know-how, like, you know, you come from a very well-accomplished family that lived the American dream, and that kind of structure started again crumbling around you, you know, and your dad was kind of this symbol for that.
00:42:35
Speaker
who caused you a lot of pain, but also gave you so much. And so again, you grappling with how much that, I don't know how to call it, that kind of capitalist Western system that you grew up in,
00:42:50
Speaker
kind of set you up to fail, gave you some things to learn from, but yet ultimately, again, you were able to find the gifts in that and the ways in which you could let that system die in your own life. You know, you had to let that system go.
00:43:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, there's so much. The gifts that I have received through having my dad as my dad, as a teacher, as someone who harmed me, as a representative of the patriarchy, as an archetype, as the kingly archetype. I mean, there's so many ways that I can see him now. And it's coming up on four years since his death.
00:43:33
Speaker
I consider him to be one of my greatest teachers. I couldn't say that 10 years ago. Instead of a teacher, he was more like the villain. Thank God for all of the friendship and the mushrooms and the other plant medicines and especially MDMA for showing me that that was a very limited worldview that I had of who a person could be.
00:43:58
Speaker
And my deep, I guess, wish for Midnight Water is that people will begin the story, really feel the hatred, the pain, the betrayal, all of the difficult aspects of that hell roam, and then see through to the arc of the rebirth at the end.
Forgiveness, Growth, and Music
00:44:20
Speaker
There's no other way I can tell the story except by my own personal journey through it. And everyone will have their own version of that story, unless people have a really easy life and then congratulations. But I think a lot of us are navigating that territory. What does it mean to forgive someone? I didn't know how to do that. I had to learn how to do that. And it's not as easy as just saying words. It's not as easy as a therapist helping you say the words in a therapy room.
00:44:49
Speaker
For me, I turned to MDMA. I think it's a great medicine for forgiveness, but even MDMA didn't tell me how. I had to learn how, and I'm still learning how. You had to figure out, yeah, and again, I'd like to stress actually coming back to the point of, because there's so much glitter around psychedelics everywhere we go, it's kind of again, you're saying people
00:45:14
Speaker
are capable of figuring this out on their own with or without psychedelics. You just so happen to use them, but this is possible to be done. And that's one of the main lessons again. And you taught me this because I was doing the same at home. I wasn't going, you know, at the time there was nowhere to access them anyway. So I had to do these things at home on my own with music as the guide. And you teaching me, you're saying, hey, you can do this. And it was your belief in me that so many times
00:45:41
Speaker
helped me through that. Actually, your spirit would come into my sessions every time and remind me, remember, Catherine says you can do this. And so I would be able to. And that just even, you know, I could I could do a whole podcast on the power of friendship for that reason, because for me, our friendship was as powerful, if not more than a therapy. I didn't feel like I didn't I didn't have a therapist for a lot of that. I didn't feel I needed to, because my friendships then became this place of real understanding and
00:46:09
Speaker
sharing our struggles and sharing our wins together. And then I figured this side, why don't you try this, you know, making this art and science place, but it's really a socio-poetic space. It's a mythopoetic space. It's not one to be having absolute rules and structures all the time. We need some structure to not like, you know, going to complete mayhem, but actually we're all living into a mystery all the time. So again, these, anything to do with,
00:46:40
Speaker
psychedelics, therapy, other people, those are supplements to your own sense of self and where you're going. So this is what I've learned through other great teachers in the space is again, you know, my friend Alexander calls them supplements for that reason. And he calls them meditations, not ceremonies. You're off to meditate with a supplement to figure out your own gnosis, your own knowing.
00:47:06
Speaker
And between me and you, that's where actually music came into its full glamour power as the therapist in the room, because a lot of these studies kind of will say, all of them use music, and they will say that the music is as important as the therapist in the room. And then through your book, we could argue it's the only one that you needed in so many places, like the music was your therapist.
00:47:35
Speaker
Oh, it's so true. I was thinking about that moment. And again, it's hard to remember the depths of my despair in that moment. But on a particular evening when I felt like everything had been taken from me, I surrendered to an MDMA experience by myself.
00:47:59
Speaker
and you had given me a playlist and you just said, I think you had said turn it on after a certain amount of time, but I didn't listen and I turned it on right away.
00:48:07
Speaker
And so for anyone who's listening, sometimes that first 45 minutes to an hour of MDMA is hard because if you have anxiety, it'll enhance anxiety. It makes you feel uncomfortable. You're kind of like not really sure what's going on. It's not necessarily the best time to listen to music. And so what was interesting was that first hour of music, I was like, this is wrong. This is terrible. MDMA doesn't work anymore. I'm a hopeless case. And I almost gave up.
00:48:36
Speaker
but I just kept remembering my intention. And of course I had brought the most difficult intention to the space, which is I wanted to understand how my dad and I were the same. And so that's a fascinating question to ask. If someone has harmed you or if they're difficult, ask how am I like this person? It will show you the parts of yourself that you might be trying to kind of keep in the shadows or parts of you that you don't love or parts of you that you're ashamed of.
00:49:04
Speaker
So I had a hard intention. I was at the depths of despair. I was turning on the wrong music at the wrong time. And then at some point I just started praying for my idea of my sister, God, a helpful, beneficent energy to come back into my life.
00:49:22
Speaker
And at that moment, I won't reveal because it's an amazing part of the book. There was a particular line of a particular song that answered my prayer. It literally gave me the answer. And I was just floored. And in that moment, you can't even describe in words, but to know that the universe is answering you, literally with words,
00:49:47
Speaker
in the exact moment that you're asking for help, it could not have been planned. It could not have been orchestrated. If I had turned on the music when you told me to, those words would have happened sometime else.
00:49:57
Speaker
And so in that moment I felt I am cared for. There is a mystery here that does love me. It wants me to get through this, but it's not going to drag me through it. It's going to walk with me until I'm ready and I understand what's happening. And so that turning point was when I understood
00:50:19
Speaker
To be with my dad as an equal, I needed to befriend him. I needed to stop hating him. I needed to stop judging him. And I had to imagine if I were in my dad's shoes, what would I need? Even if I was a terrible person, even if I had hurt people, even if I was hard to be around, I would need love and care and friendship.
00:50:42
Speaker
And it was just an amazing turning point. And the last couple chapters of the book is about learning how to befriend the most difficult person in my life before he died. And so it's possible. That's all I can say. It's possible. If there's a difficult person in your life, I promise you, you can learn to love them, befriend them, and forgive them.
00:51:04
Speaker
It's one of the ways in which you've impressed me the most as a human being living into that whole philosophy of life can be benevolent and you can't access that love space or that place where you can find a resolution beyond what we project as this horrible hell realm.
00:51:26
Speaker
for anyone that's really struggling with really difficult things in their life or stories that go round and round and round, they can watch you, they can see you do that in the book and then they can see you pulling through. Again, I think about, on the one hand, losing someone that you really love is hard.
00:51:49
Speaker
Losing someone that you've hated, I think is harder because you are left to grapple with everything that you've repressed, that you've hidden away, that you haven't ever been able to talk about.
00:52:03
Speaker
You know, I didn't get to have the final conversation I wanted to have with my dad. I didn't get to forgive him when he was still in his body. But the miraculous thing was that I was able to continue having that conversation with him after he died. And I think that even though it's possible to do that without psychedelics, I think psychedelics allow us to open up to the possibility that, again, life doesn't end with bodily death.
00:52:27
Speaker
We
Creativity, Art, and Healing
00:52:28
Speaker
can have conversations with people after they've left us, either we're estranged from them. I know a lot of young people now are like, oh, I'll just cut that person out of my life and be happy. But you're still carrying the connection with that person into whatever you choose next. So if you don't heal that connection, then it's just like a wound that's just going to keep festering. So this idea of death cutting off, death
00:52:54
Speaker
problems ending with destruction, it just keeps going. Actually, my favorite part of the book is the very end where I talk about the aftermath and how writing the book and creating art out of the story was the continuation of that conversation with my ancestors, with my sister, with my dad. So much healing happened in the course of creating
00:53:22
Speaker
art out of what we had gone through together. And I know you're an artist, you're a visual artist. You taught me how to paint. That's also kind of an amazing thing. I like painted a children's book after I took MDMA and decided I was going to forgive my dad. It's like, how did the universe know that I needed to paint?
00:53:39
Speaker
to learn how to do this very intellectual thing. So I learned to plant a garden and grow flowers. This is not the kind of person I am. And so it was just fascinating to me how when you ask a question and then psychedelics help you get a little bit more open-minded to the point that you're like, oh, maybe I don't need a physical conversation with certain words shared with a person and words coming back. Maybe I need to paint.
00:54:08
Speaker
Maybe I need to write. Maybe I need to make music. Maybe I need to play in the mud with my kids." It's also a bit of a joke. I think the mushrooms like to play around with this idea of like, you think you're so serious. You think you have all this trauma.
00:54:25
Speaker
crying and belly aching. Why is it so hard? It's like, well, stop making it so hard. Do something fun. Play it in the garden. Play with your kids. Paint a painting and don't care who says that they like it. Write a whole book and don't care who buys it, which is funny. I wrote a book for myself and I love it so much.
00:54:47
Speaker
And you crafted this beautiful cover that we love so much. And it almost doesn't matter what people think of it because we know its value and we know how amazing it is. So I always just tell people like find that thing in your life that you're going to love so much. It doesn't matter what anyone says about it. And then you will have discovered why you're here.
00:55:21
Speaker
So now we've come to the end of this particular journey into the labyrinth and given you all just a taste of what it's
Book Launch and Access Details
00:55:29
Speaker
like. And we will be creating other episodes and dialogues with other guests to explore also this idea of the labyrinth a bit more. And you'll all get to learn that as we go along. We hope you'll join us for that. And thank you all for joining us today.
00:55:47
Speaker
And so as we have reached the end of this particular dialogue, I hope that your interest is peaked. I hope that you're excited to read Midnight Water and dive into the deep end that Eileen and I can promise you is very fun to swim in once you learn how. And we'll be having some in-person launch events that hopefully some of you will be able to join. So on June 24th, we'll be having a launch event in Wilmington, Vermont, which is near where I live.
00:56:17
Speaker
And it's in collaboration with Psychedelic Sangha, which is a Buddhist inspired community of psychedelic and consciousness exploration out of New York City. And this lovely vibraphonist named Chris Dingman, who created a bunch of music inspired by his dad's death and his experience helping his dad prepare for death. So there's a lot of, um,
00:56:41
Speaker
mirrored themes between my experience with my dad and what Chris went through. So we'll be doing readings and music in Vermont. And then I'll be traveling to Bermuda and doing a private launch event there at Spirit House on Sunday, July 2nd.
00:56:59
Speaker
in collaboration with an elder friend named Charles Lawrence who has helped me in so many ways explore the ceremonial space of death and how to lovingly and with purpose enter these liminal spaces to better understand our relationship with our family, our ancestors, and ourselves. On Thursday, July 13th, Eileen and I will be in conversation in London at the Love Shack
00:57:29
Speaker
We'll be collaborating with the Psychedelic Society and Kate Fleur Young, and we'll be putting on a very exciting and fun night of dialogue, readings, and music, and a bit of socializing at the end. The Love Shack is a really cool place. They have non-alcoholic mushroom adaptogen drinks and all sorts of kind of fun things for you to try. And if you come to any of these lunch events, you'll get a signed copy of the book.
00:57:58
Speaker
So make sure to RSVP and sign up so we prepare adequately to bring enough copies of Midnight Water. And the best place to buy your pre-order copy is my website, kathrynmclean.org.
00:58:13
Speaker
You can, of course, buy it through Amazon or Bookshop.org, any of these major book distributors. But I would love for you to either pre-order from my local bookstore, which is woman owned, or to find the bookstore in your area and physically go in and ask them to order five copies of Midnight Water, because then not only will you get a copy, but other people will get to hear about it who might not normally be tuned in to this kind of thing.
00:58:42
Speaker
If you prefer listening to books, the audio book of Midnight Water is coming out in September. You have to wait a little bit. I just finished the recording this month. I narrated it, and so you get to hear the whole story in my voice, which is quite fun. There's certainly a different emphasis that I put on certain things in the way that I experienced it, which can only be heard and not read.
00:59:06
Speaker
And finally, Eileen's art is also going to be up on my website, art that was inspired by the book, inspired by our adventures together, and especially inspired by water and the ocean. So please head to catherinemclean.org and jump into the deep end with us.
00:59:45
Speaker
you