Microdosing & Meditation: A Double Dose of Peace - A Mindful Approach to Dementia & Psychedelics

Microdosing can be many things. One possibility is that microdosing can be looked at as the new mindfulness. After all, mindfulness doesn’t just get you to pay attention on purpose, or to be aware and be more proactive and less reactive. To me, mindfulness is closer to what Thich Nhat Hanh wrote and I quote in my book, Teaching from the Heart of Mindfulness: Mindfulness is to become completely alive and live deeply each moment of your daily life. Mindfulness helps you touch the wonders of life for self-nourishment and healing. Cultivating mindfulness invites more spaciousness of mind and expansiveness of heart. The outcome is a growing, embodied sense of peace and well-being.

Microdosing can do the same.

Let me explain.

In my case, practicing mindfulness, mainly through meditation practices, over many decades has brought me to a place of deeper well-being. I am also more skilled at conscientiously redirecting my thoughts and emotions to choose a more peaceful, grounded way of being. Even in my recent state of overwhelm as a caregiver, I was able to bring mindful awareness to the situation, name it, and not get sucked up into it; well, at least not for too long!

I was not always so skilled, nor did I live from that ground of well-being throughout the day! I would easily dip deep into meditation only to re-emerge sometimes even more reactive to my surroundings and daily tasks. For many years there was a disconnect between meditation practice and daily life. It took several decades before the two began to blend into a less-defined difference. It took decades more before I lived in a more seamless mindful way of being.

Yes, I wrote DECADES!!! Who has decades of practice these days? Unless you have removed yourself from daily life and retreated into a religious order, it seems nearly impossible. I give gratitude and deep thanks to my husband who is such a steadfast practitioner of one hour each morning and one hour at night. His discipline has helped me stay on this path of inner contemplation for over half a century. Even as Alzheimer’s overtakes his cognition, his practice continues. When he goes inward, an aura of peace and calm comes over him. It is palpable to everyone around him.

Here is a description of a recent morning when I microdosed at my upper end of an effective dose, almost a mini-retreat day:

Today promises to be a hot day. Yet the early morning still wafts a cool breeze in the waking hours. It is a beautiful summer day in Vermont. I am at our homestead at the end of a dirt road. The view is vast, no houses in sight, the hills of Vermont glistening in the pink of the morning light.

In these early hours when the world is just waking up and the quiet of the day embracing, the sun not yet in the sky but the break of dawn emerging, I prepare the water to boil for morning tea. I take this time to ingest. I then sit in meditation, the mushrooms beginning to stir. Like I recommend to my clients who have a daily meditation practice, microdosing mushrooms prior to a morning meditation is a natural combination. As I have written many times, mindfulness and microdosing enhance each other.

I take my cup of tea down the 5-minute walk to the pond at the forest edge. Diving into the cool water wakes me to the day and to a second meditation ahead.

I sink into the old Adirondack chair, sipping my tea in the most luxurious setting one could ask for! Just luscious! Awareness begins to sharpen, I begin to sink into a more interior space. A deer darts out of the grass just feet away. Startled out of my reverie, I hear the croaking of the frogs on the pond with a sharper awareness. I hear beyond normal hearing as my attention feels more in unison with the Northern cardinal calling from the other side of the pond, high above on a dead pine branch. A plane drones in the distance. Surprisingly, the man-made sound does not break that peace or flow as it did on my first high-dose journey with psilocybin several years back. Then, the plane’s sound seared through the marrow of my being, a sharp staccato cracking into my nervous system, eroding the peace and calm. But not today.

I feel the mushrooms making their presence known. The invitation is to go inward; a natural turning of attention to an interior space. Today my meditation temple is nature. An invocation of its beauty. Somehow the confines of my meditation nook inside the house, though comfortable and filled with palpable peace and grounding, feel somewhat confined. Nature oozes into my being.

I scan my body before settling deeper into meditation practice. There is a sense of boundlessness, not a firm awareness of where my body ends or starts and the air and sky around me, with the end of summer’s gentle breeze, begin. Dissolving into being.

Deep I go in the meditation practice, an interior space, one so familiar yet always new and unique in its limitless possibilities.

A thought arises. It is not just a distracting thought like something on a shopping list. No! It is a BIG idea. One that came with total CLARITY. AAH, this is the mushrooms I know. They helped this come to be.

Microdosing brings focus of attention and greater clarity, one of the most commonly reported benefits. When it pops up in meditation practice it is usually from a deep knowing. I let my mind follow the big idea just for a bit even though the clarity was immediate. Then I navigate the attention to let go of the big idea and return to the meditation at hand.

Awareness is aware. A clear light of understanding. The mind codifies the experience: deep peace, grounding, nothingness, ego shedding. Whatever it is, the sensation and thoughts arise from a deep ground of well-being. How do others codify this?

I do not follow a Buddhist deity practice, but I begin to imagine if I did, Avalokiteshvara would be what appears. The compassion that this deity imbibes is manifesting so strongly. The thousand arms of compassion reaching out for all. Guan Yin then comes to mind. A more female manifestation of boundless compassion.

Perhaps the love of Jesus, or that of Mother Mary, is similar for Christians? How it pours over them in prayer.

Muslims, I think, as I continue to feel great compassion being generated, pray to Allah, the Prophet. But there is never an image. I contemplate this formless connection.

Those of the Jewish faith have no intermediaries when praying to God. Formless again.

This more formless sense of wonder, awe, pure light of awareness resonates deeply in me as I continue in this morning meditation. A more non-ordinary state of being.

The growing compassion within a formlessness experience feels extremely embodied. In fact, one of the most impactful benefits of microdosing while meditating is embodying the practices in a more felt and sensed way. I can also go deeper in my practices, and do so more quickly when microdosing.

This morning the practices are embedded in every cell of my being and beyond. The Hindu concept of the koshas (also known as sheaths: physical, energetic, emotional, wisdom, and bliss bodies) comes to mind. This is similar to a Buddhist concept of gross and subtle bodies, energy channels, nadis, wind channels, and other elements that make up who we are. Many indigenous traditions around the globe have similar regard for the elements.

Yes! In this simple one-hour morning meditation practice, microdosing deepens the connection to my truer nature, the more Buddha-nature in us all.

As I remain in this emptiness, I also sense the energy of the mushrooms coursing through my skin, my veins, throughout my physical body. I also feel the subtle bodies and the mushrooms’ relaxing, soothing nature streaming through. The mushrooms are clearly sentient—a living sentient intelligence as an embodied wave felt beyond the mind.

The felt awareness of this intelligence, this energy emanating from the mushrooms, is now me. There is no separation.

I am brought back to one of the biggest intellectual conundrums I faced when spending lengths of time in Dharamsala, India, seat to the Tibetan government-in-exile, when doing doctoral research. I was attending a teaching at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. The kind and learned Rinpoche asked us to consider the table in front of us as not existing, then explained how its form has come into being. Dependent Origination. At the same time, he had us consider that it is sentient. “Even a rock is sentient,” he stated.

In this very moment of my meditation practice these understandings are felt and embodied.

I remain longer than usual for a morning practice. Hard to think of the day ahead and all the activities before me, I discipline my focus of attention to emerge and transition to the outer world. With it comes a joie de vivre, a joyous bubbling up from where I’ve been. I know this level of positivity can also be attributed to microdosing, mood elevation being a main benefit reported. Microdosing also afforded a more embodied meditation practice; thus the qualities of mindfulness magnified. I believe mindfulness or meditation practice combined with microdosing is like having a double dose of peace!

I know that this felt, embodied positivity, bubbling up from deep within, invites me to be in this world in a more uplifted way for myself, with others, and in all I do. My thoughts, words, and actions feel deeply connected to this ground of well-being. I recommit to writing and sharing about mindfulness and microdosing in the hope others may experience benefit to their mental health, emotional health, physical health, and especially to help live from a place of greater spaciousness of mind and expansiveness of heart, cultivating more mindfulness.

- Lauren Alderfer, PhD.