In my work as a facilitator and guide for 5-MeO-DMT, clients sometimes ask me what 5-MeO-DMT feels like. I usually avoid answering this question directly, because I don’t want to color or otherwise influence their experience on the medicine. All earth medicine is so intimate, so personal, and so integral to the person who takes it, and 5meo is no exception. One metaphor that fits is that of medicine as a mirror: when we each gaze into it, looking for something external, we end up seeing only ourselves, though at first we don’t always recognize ourselves looking back at us.

That said, I think there are some things that can be said about this mirror, about the special way that 5-MeO-DMT reflects back at us. At this point, my partner, Helena, and I have served nearly 100 clients in deep intimate dives into the medicine in our private facilitation, and many in group ceremonies too. We’ve also developed our own relationship with the medicine over the years, exploring it with different intentions, at different dosages, and at different points in our personal processes. And humbly, I’d like to take a stab at saying a few words about this sacred mirror that we work with, from what I have experienced first hand and heard from our clients.

One place to start is to point out that this mirror is not overwhelmingly visual (here the mirror metaphor begins to break down). Unlike some other earth medicines that can take us through brightly colored fractal patterns, rich landscapes, and encounters with entities, 5-MeO-DMT is not predominantly a visual experience. For some people, the visual field is blank, and for others it can have a vague dreamlike quality. For some people that can have a strong association that psychedelics should induce visual hallucinations, this lack of visual content can be quite surprising.

Instead, the perception that does come through is far richer than visual experience allows. We are given an experience of being ourselves fully. In vision, we are confined to the paradigm of subject and object, seer and seen. But in the 5-MeO-DMT experience, the dichotomy of subject and object begins to collapse, and we are able to glimpse a unity of perceptions. We get to feel what it is like to be ourselves, feeling sensation and emotions in their full rawness and intimacy. And most importantly, feeling ourselves, in a way that feels both new and deeply familiar.

The way that 5meo reflects us back at ourselves is also dose dependent. The lower doses, say around 1-2mg smoked, are, for most people, predominated by physical sensations and energetic awareness. There can be a sense of energy moving through the body, or being pent up and blocked in certain areas. Sometimes the movement focuses on the primary energy centers of the chakras, and sometimes it focuses on the location of a trauma, whether in this life or ancestral. We have had African-American clients discover (and release) the energetic blockage around the ankles at the locations where their ancestors were forced to wear shackles.

As the dosage increases into the mid-ranges of 4-7mg, the experience becomes much more all-encompassing. Whereas at the lower doses we are able to maintain a sense of being who we ordinarily are having these non-ordinary perceptions, as the dose increases, our sense of who we are begins to become challenged. In my own experience, I often experience this as layers of my identity being pulled away. Those layers are all the things that we confuse ourselves into thinking that we cannot exist without–the stories we have about ourselves, the pain we carry, our beliefs–and in that few seconds, all that is peeled away like the layers of an onion.

At these medium doses, we often get left mid-onion. Perhaps there are too many layers for the dose that we took, or one layer feels particularly sticky. Our clients find themselves in places of deep grief, or deep despairing, or deep rage. I have often felt a tender vulnerability of my heart, a bittersweet pain and ache that is both subtle but all-encompassing. Sometimes there’s a fundamental fear of annihilation as if saying “I cannot let this piece go for without this my world will end.” But as we sit with those strong emotions, beyond all rationality and customary limits on our ability to feel, they begin to metabolize. The energy trapped in them has an opportunity to transform and loosen the armor around ourselves. What in one moment was a terror too great to fathom, at the next moment we may laugh like a child at what we were so afraid of a moment ago.

As we persist with the process of peeling the onion, either through repeated visits at the same dose or higher doses that bring more energy into the peeling process, we may sometimes get to a very still and very simple place in the center of our heart, and at the same time, at the center of the heart of the universe. I have experienced this place as the oceanic well of love from which everything emanates. That beyond all the shells and boundaries, there is nothing left but ourselves, and that we are nothing different than the totality of all of existence.

Though I have accessed this place of source on the medicine a few times, I also feel that the real practical gift of the medicine is that it shows us how to be a little bit simpler and more connected to our heart every day. This isn’t a medicine of moralizing life lessons or stern to-dos. It won’t whip your life in order for fear of punishment. Instead, it’s the most direct no-nonsense tool I know for coming into direct felt-sense contact with who we fundamentally are, and helping us shed and metabolize anything that stands in the way of that clear knowing. At the lower doses it’s a gentle reminder, a re-orientation toward the most basic things that we as busy-minded monkeys are so often apt to forget. At the higher doses it brings an incredible and incisive force of clarity stripping away everything that is not us and leaving us face to face with ourselves.

I have deep gratitude personally for this medicine, for the clarity it has brought me, and it is a deep honour to be doing this work serving this medicine to others. I see this work as sacred, and approach it with the greatest reverence, care, and love. And that in itself has been its own practice and teacher for me.

This post was written as part of my commitment to writing a monthly article as part of my role as a Flying Sage Community Leader. The The Flying Sage is a Vancouver-based community organization centering around psychedelics.