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Tell me about your salvia trips
14 years ago
I've always been really fascinated with the effects of salvia. From what I've heard from people/experienced myself, I've found that there are a lot of aspects of the trip that stay the same from person to person. Anyways, while I take forever to compile a journal with refs to all my characters, I want to hear from you drug fiends out there. I don't want to influence responses, so I'd like to read responses from people before I share some of my ideas about salvia.
But here are a few questions you could possibly address:
1. How do you consume salvia and if you use an extract, what level do you use?
2. What do you feel like when it begins to take effect? During? Coming down?
3. How would you describe your mood throughout and after the trip?
P.S. I don't think salvia is necessarily for everyone. Be smart, be aware, be safe.
But here are a few questions you could possibly address:
1. How do you consume salvia and if you use an extract, what level do you use?
2. What do you feel like when it begins to take effect? During? Coming down?
3. How would you describe your mood throughout and after the trip?
P.S. I don't think salvia is necessarily for everyone. Be smart, be aware, be safe.
and it last about an hour on a higher end of the trip and it decrescendos slowly
better than weed
BUT ON SALVIA I CAN, IT SWEARS TOO MUCH
dont compare salvia with lsd. they're completely different.
i tried it without stuff and it turns out i made it wrong.
so i added some special stuff to the mix
not one of my better choices
1. How do you consume salvia and if you use an extract, what level do you use?
I have only smoked extracts, 20x, 30x, and 40x. To be honest, the 40x doesn't seem any more potent. If you fill a nice bong bowl with it (hide it under weed and break your friends minds!) and take the hugest hoot you can. When you have to breathe out, immediately hoot again, if you aren't already gone by then. Some people are mysteriously immune to it, but it trips me out so hard, that despite always having some, I am actually a little apprehensive about using it. It's serious business!
2. What do you feel like when it begins to take effect? During? Coming down?
It takes hold quickly. The level of trip depends on your tolerances and hooting ability, but I find it is a powerful spirit, and quite ruthlessly rips you from your default state, and often directly into a dreamlike world. I have a few good trip tales to describe the varying degrees of intensity...
My first salvia trip. Kind of a one foot in, one foot out experience at first. I was in my room at the time with my man, and I smoked a bunch of 20x extract. It's like falling asleep, you never notice it happen, but then the world has changed entirely, and you're somewhere else. You don't remember who or what you are even! I was just seeing a misty valley with exaggeratedly high mountains poking up through, like nibelheim from ff7 or on the emperors new groove, ya know? and then on one huge hill, there was a huge tripped out structure. As I watched the clouds move around, I noticed I was swaying in perfect rhythm, side to side, and thought I was a metronome. As I swayed, the clouds and scenery slowly turned back into my room, and as I remembered who I was, I was instantly back again, sitting on the bed, only feeling a mad head buzz. I said one foot in one out, cause the crazy scene I saw was only the colors of my room twisted and fucked, so I wasn't completely gone. X3
Second salvia trip, on a couch with many dudes in a basement, watching tv... mario or something. Smoked the 40x, and all I could see was red curtains, and the couch swallowed me. Despite that sensation, I still didn't feel so far gone.
another time, I smoked a bunch more, of the 30x. That time, for whatever reason, I was gone completely. I found myself lying on my back looking at a sepia-ish scene, but with dark green spruce and pine trees. I was at some kind of camp, and the counsellor or whoever, was yelling at me but I couldn't understand him, and I couldn't get up.
The experiences are always short, luckily. You wouldn't want them to be much longer. It is often really unsettling, as it's hard to predict what will happen, but if you brace your mind, meditate or whatever, and whatnot, you usually do fine and come out with a sweet tale to tell.
3. How would you describe your mood throughout and after the trip?
It's unsettling. Some plant spirits are friendly... I find Salvia a little less so. Maybe with perseverance you could win her affection. Anyway, she scares me, but I'll try it again regardless. It's not a drug designed for good feelings, but they can certainly be had if you can keep yourself happy throughout. Fear will ruin it for some people.
I tried extract three times early on at seventeen, before I had more psychedelic practice under my belt to truly enter into the Shepherdess' deeper dimensions. The first two times where just its body highs, that pulling gravity feeling and nothing further. The third time was more delirious, I remember my ceiling becoming a long spiraling yet geometrical staircase, and I was hearing what sounded like a parental argument, two parents discussing my potentials, saying I wasn't ready, that I was too lazy to perform proper tasks or something like that. Then I had this energetic charge that lasted about an hour afterwards. After that, I hadn't done it until about a year and a half later.
By this time I was more initiated, practiced and receptive toward plant teachers, as I had spent that year and a half with the more forgiving and careful psilocybin mushroom, which "eases" the initiate into its dimensions rather than yanks him/her there. I had spent the day dancing at a drum circle, with completely cleansed energies and a smooth intoxication with quality cannabis smoked throughout the day. That night, I had gone outside into the woods, lit one candle, I had just smoked a bowl of cannabis and had a sitter there to watch over and observe. I took the hit of the Salvia (a 10x or 15x I believe) and immediately felt like a conveyer belt or a river moving onto me and into me, this conveyer belt/river made of little luminescent orangish eggs, little laughing pellets/BBs, thousands of them. They rushed into my heart and all over my skin and body. When I looked down at my body, I was covered in forests, miniature terrains of abundant forest, and the terrains were evolving, shifting like the land/tectonic plates would over millions and millions of years, but were happening in matters of seconds on my body. This intense sensation hurt a little, but not too badly. Eventually this process of rapid evolution showed me little blue eggs appearing in these trees on my body, and the eggs hatched into these little blue people that became one with the process of evolution going on in this forest. In fact, they became participating members of the evolution, and they were dragging the forests all along my body. It seemed that this process was teaching me about sentient symbiosis, or rather how conscious creatures become symbiotic with nature as a whole. It was showing me what we could be, how we could harmoniously participate in the changes of the forest. After that vision ended, I became incredibly vocal, I was rapidly verbalizing what was happening to me to my sitter. The candle created this element where it seemed like we were an oasis of soft light floating on nothingness, and that him and I had come to this pivotal meeting point. While the intense vision was gone, the tripping effect lasted for an hour afterward. I remember more faint and disturbing visions after that, things of a more daemonic nature, like my lungs had become a beehive, and I even felt this shadow of a daemonic entity moving onto me. I tried explaining this to my sitter, but it disturbed him somewhat. He is of strong Christian faith, so he had difficulty accepting the idea that the Daimon is meant to be owed respectful attention to, and possibly even embraced and integrated rather than "banished" or "cast out". I also remember an occasion where he was telling me that he sensed a cancerous growth in one of my aging cats, and I shamefully got a little angry with him for bringing up this topic while I was going through this, and that I said, "There is sickness in this house. We know there's sickness. Don't bring it to such startling attention" or something like that. In retrospect, I wish I could have been more receptive to what he was trying to tell me.
About a week later I tried the same Salvia again, this time without that day-long energetic cleansing and without the precursor of cannabis. It did not go as well. It is in the woods again, but during daytime. I felt what I came to call "The Boss", this extruding growth that seemed based in the left side of my head, that was being magnified, intensified, and basically being just that -- a punitive, demanding "Boss" that was trying to boss my trip around and keep it from a natural flow. It's as if I was experiencing, in a hyper exaggerated form, my own neural metabolism that was attempting to fight off the Salvia, and even though I did not consciously desire to fight the trip, its as if this Boss figure which is some innate censor or defense mechanism had become differentiated from myself and in its own way felt like an extraneous influence. I remember feeling a confusion as to what to do, do I go with this? Is this Boss the Salvia teacher? It doesn't feel like it. It feels like a resistance that I have no say in whatsoever.
I didn't try Salvia again until about a year later. At this point I was in the later stages of a rather self-destructive phase in my life (one of many hehe). This next trip was by far the most difficult and jarring experience that I had had. It was again with 15x extract, lying down in my bed in my room and it was my first experience with what many have called "the salvia machine". I made the mistake of trying music with this occasion. I would never recommend music with Salvia, though it guides and helps many trips on other substances, it hinders and confuses the salvia experience. It felt like every musical note was a blade piercing my skin, and eventually I felt myself completely cut apart by these sharp blades, and yes it was very painful. My body was broken apart into small cubes and I felt like I was on an assembly line (maybe disassembly line is more appropriate). I could feel my consciousness becoming fragmented into seven different little consciousnesses, then I remember becoming only one of those seven, and pulled out from the other consciousnesses. I remember trying to relate something, say something to the Salvia, something with a snide, arrogant feel too it, like I was reproaching her (her meaning the Salvia teacher) for extracting the wrong consciousness, that it had taken out the wrong 'me' from the fragments and should have taken one of the other 'me's. Nonetheless, I felt like this little 'me' i had become was being carried down this "disassembly line" (which now felt a little bit more like a canoe being carried down a very fast river) into a large mirror, but as I was going through that mirror, the burning pain on every nerve of my disassembled body caused me to just simply demand, "STOP!! TOO MUCH!" The salvia granted my request and released me from her grip immediately. I was depressed for the rest of the day, pretty much, and if I'm not mistaken I think that was a day in which I started smoking cigarettes again after being off them for a few weeks or so.
Later that summer, I had some dried leaves rather than extract. And I remember another occasion where I was being self-destructive, no idea with what to do with myself, and even though consciously I knew it was horribly stupid idea, I smoked some of the leaves anyway… but then, as I would have never guessed (I was sure I was going to be cosmically spanked), I was uplifted immensely. I was not tripping, but put in a mentally euphoric state in which I could feel the interconnectedness of all the going ons of mind, the oneness of all thoughts. The thoughts weren't separated, they had become one, one made of limitless possible parts. I was under the moon and feeling excellent. This was a new side of Salvia to me, to attempt lower doses for the purpose of companioning meditative perspectives and incentives. I became in love with this side of Salvia and continued to explore it. The next time I tried this, it was that same oneness, but this time it wasn't centered on thoughts, it was centered on emotions. Now I felt all emotions become one. And no matter how ugly an emotion might seem when its isolated, like aversion or anger or bitterness, when the whole spectrum of emotion fuses into one substance, it is always beautiful, always euphoric, and always healing. Around this time I think I came to start smoking it rather frequently, once a week, and I tried for more but tolerance wasn't helping. Eventually the dried leaves upped the ante a bit and brought me trippier places. I can't remember all these experiences unfortunately since this was a time of frequent usage, but I recall about three of them, and I'll relate one of them.
The most significant one was one where I remember almost being surprised that I was being brought back to higher level of Salvia intensity after it being such a gentle meditational companion for a while. In my room on my bed again, it was like a huge shifting dodecahedron (or some prefix plus '-hedron', there's no numeric specifics), it was a forest. A forest with no up or down, a fluxing four-dimensional shape made of cone-like trees. And I felt this feeling that at the moment I began to realize had continuity in almost all my salvia experiences, and it was the feeling of being a "blubbering infant". A crying child. As I realized this, the Salvia began to show me, in a way that felt less like a trip and more like guided active imagination, that the reason I felt this way was because Salvia was bringing me to "the one instance that is my life". It had removed linear time and shown me that my life was but one instant, and that I as much here on Salvia as I was crying for mommy in a crib or climbing the food pantry as a toddler looking for treats or any other occasion of my life, that I was always living all those moments simultaneously in one moment. This is why deja vu is such a constant factor in our lives, it's because we're never not experiencing the same moment as before. This active imagination showed me a way to relate it. It's this huge suspended orb covered in tiny little pods. Each little pod contained a unique moment of my life, but each pod was attached to the One Orb that was suspended in but One Moment. So of course I feel like a blubbering infant. Because I was one, I'm always one.
I think it was around this time that I wrote a poem called "The Salvia Visitor" attempting to portray how it made me feel:
Ageless motion of organic light
spun and cut and switched and folded
folded, cut, switched and spun out
puts back in and turns again
the wheels and tumblers, chaotically synchronized
in a fluxing vegetable engine as the Self
a machine made of living machines
violet flowers blooming, thousandfold, sever skin
A forest of moving Mind in a hyperphysical storm
Revolving blades digest like scintillating enzymes
catalyzing the transformation of energies
in the sonic river frequency, raging
singing infinite voices in a harmony of endlessly imperfect, rhythmic geometries
chanting the machine alive
as One
turns again and is put back in
Now we come to the autumnal equinox of 09 when I attempted an extract sublingually, resting it under my tongue for thirty minutes. This was a peculiar occasion in which preceding the salvia I had a disturbing dream in which I had found a hidden room in my parent's house, obviously centered around my mother though she wasn't in the dream, the room was filled with office furniture and shelves and shelves of junk food. Like I saw all the junk food that my mom had bought to feed us throughout our whole lives in one room. And it had this nasty, detached from life feeling to it. Like I could feel all the energy-sucking, vacuuming blackness to this food, and somehow the absence of my mother was associated with it. When I awoke, I felt a profound nothingness in me. This nothingness, having no conscious or directive intention, tried the salvia as I had planned. I had gone outside and it was night, and the salvia only exacerbated what I was already going through, catalyzing it. Because of my mindset, I didn't really get the opportunity to distinguish this new method of oral intake from smoking it. It was just where I was already times 10. I had become Nothing, the world around was Nothing, and there was Nothing to it. The external universe was just a holographic projection of empty stuff full of Nothing and as a veil over Nothing, and I felt One with that external universe, as all the trees I was looking at was an outward projection of the pure Nothing in myself. I was Nothing and walking around a universe made of Nothing. No implications arose from this, as I just felt Nothing. I remember thinking, "Since this is Nothing, I can make it whatever I want it to be, but it wouldn't matter, because it would still be Nothing." Very strange experience.
I didn't try Salvia again until I was in Arizona in April of 2010. This was easily the heaviest and most profound experience I've had with Salvia. It was 100 percent an OBE. And, most importantly, it was a return to the "Salvia Machine" that I referred to earlier, but unlike the last instance, I did not resist. And hoooboy where do I begin? We climbed a small mountain in North Phoenix. I was with a friend who would be partaking with me. It was the predawn hours. I chanted and meditated for about a half hour before actually smoking it, and as soon as I did, I remember putting my hand on my friend's knee and saying "I'm gonna need a little help with this one." I felt lost for a moment, as I couldn't see at all anymore, just these rippling waves of purplish/pinkish light that had taken over everything. I felt I had seriously screwed up and gone in way over my head. But my friend grounded me by asking me a question that I forgot what was, then saying, "The Shepherdess has something to tell you." Then I felt folded and unfolded simultaneously, and though I had no body at this point, I did have a voice. And this voice was rolling out a frantic glossolalia, this urgency of expression that was carrying me through this folding/unfolding to one point of light decreasing until it was gone, until all there was was this one blinding instant of becoming completely a vegetable engine, an organic engine that was alive and humming in its constant churning out of novel, creative energy. There was no "I" at this point, just that, a living cosmic machine that was feeling itself in all its extreme complexities. When that was broken, I began singing. And I was singing in english actually, purely pronounced and articulated and originating out of a deep, passionate, urgent desire of complete union with the immensity I had glimpsed so briefly. I felt such a profound longing to achieve that unity with the plant, and I sang and sang and sang that longing like my life depended on it (and that was a theme of this, that my expression of these overwhelming emotions was essential to my survival somehow, and that if I didn't express I was to be "burned alive" by this magnitude of a machine). I can't remember the words, but a friend recalled one line that said, "Why can't we be one within ourselves?" or something like that. Then during the process of the come-down, my friend had become the voice of the Salvia teacher, saying things like, "the Shepherdess is benevolent but she is strict. She is like a mirror, showing you the most unwanted elements of your self, and passing you through them." As he was saying this things, I was seeing a lightshow of images that went with his words. Next thing I know, at the snap of a finger, I was back in reality, back on a top of a mountain with the scarred earth of North Phoenix lighting up the valley below. It offered me no time to integrate. Out of this universe completely and back in it the next. This jarring element had me feeling weird for most of the rest of…uh…my life since heheh.
That was my last experience with it. Overall, I think its necessary to move past smoking it and to find fresh leaves to chew on. That way the come-up wouldn't be so sudden and there may be a longer period of integration. Chewing leaves rolled into quids is how the mazatec shamans did it.
Anyway, here's a couple links that might be helpful for you as well. This is the chapter on Salvia Divinorum from a book by Dale Pendall called "PharmakoGnosis and the Poison Path": http://www.sagewisdom.org/pharmakopoeia.html it's beautifully helpful if you're going to the plant with the intent of contact with the plant's inherent teacher entity
and this is a really great forum discussion on recurring motifs of Salvia space, such as "the Salvia machine": http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=392699
The thing that first stood out to me was your description of "The Boss." While I have encountered several spirits/entities in the Salvia world, I've never really met this one. But I have a friend that had a run in with a similar being he calls "The Conductor," and that it was controlling a sort of carousel of existences. "The Conductor" noticed my friend and started laughing at him in a very mocking manner. My friend actually believes that upon leaving "the carousel," "The Conductor" purposely sent him back to the wrong reality and that he is currently in a nearly identical but different universe. He's smoked Salvia since then, but I think every time has been very unpleasant and he gave it up.
I'm also interested in your eggs/trees/tiny people/demonic possession trip. I generally snap out of my trip immediately and then have about 10-15 minutes of reorienting myself with normal reality, but there was one time where I had a similar experience of trippy effects lasting for a good 30 minutes after the intense stuff. I can't fully remember the first few minutes, since I was fully out of my body and just "watching" some abstract scene. When I became aware of my body again, I got up and started wandering around the room with a very strange feeling that something was trying to occupy my body. At that time, I was physically upstairs, but I was also somehow looking around downstairs, like I had overlapping vision. But that feeling of a sort of demonic being trying to enter my body through my spinal column was really really odd.
I've also been made very aware of times when I wasn't supposed to be visiting the Salvia realm. In fact, the last time I did Salvia, over a year ago, I was actually kicked out of my trip. I feel like I have a decent relationship with the Lady (as I call her), because it was a fairly gentle removal. Still, I had to endure some amused beings poking a bit of fun at me before a gentle watery sort of being told me that now wasn't a good time and I should return for a visit later. I promptly snapped back into my body and became somewhat agitated by the sounds of my housemate playing World of Warcraft.
Anyways, I feel like Salvia has been a good ally to me overall. I've also been shown "the one instance that is my life." Personally, I've found that she prefers me to come to her "alone" and Salvia is the only drug I'll do without cannabis by my side.
I'll probably have to reread your response (again), but my brain is getting slow and my tummy is getting hungry. Thanks for all your insight! You're someone I'd want to visit Salvia land with.
One of my friends had an experience similar to yours where he actually 'fell' of his body and walked around his apartment for a while. Haven't had anything like that myself yet. I do want to clarify that 'daimon' does not necessarily imply 'demon', a daimon can have demonic traits but is more ambiguous, and can even be a muse, and can already be inherent to you, not necessarily extraneous.
The Conductor you describe doesn't sound much like The Boss to me, as the Boss didn't give off any mischievous or 'master manipulator' vibes, it was more just a mean big-voiced control-freak. Not to make fun of your friend, but I can't help but be reminded of a Steven Wright joke by his condition. "I had come back to my apartment to discover it had robbed; everything was stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I asked my roommate if he knew what was going on, and he said, 'Do I know you?'"
I may IM you sometime if you don't mind, as I appreciate all the psychedelic correspondence I can get :)
And hell yeah! I'm down to chit chat most anytime, though I can be a little quiet and reserved sometimes.
So don't be fooled by duration. Salvia Divinorum, to me, is trickier and more intense than LSD and more experience with psychs recommended before you try it.
LSD is actually rather gentle and therapeutic when doing it alone if you don't take too much. Sometimes it can be kind of electrically charging and make you wish for others not out of fear but simply out of energy level. Psilocybin mushrooms is still my favorite psych for lone trips (which is generally six hours depending on potency) :)
I also vote for mushrooms!
Any ways, when we got home we sat in the back of Greg's (brother) van. I was the youngest and did not get a hit off the first bowl. Greg took a hit and then Nick took a hit and I cleared the chamber. We then stepped out of the van and I began to feel like I was in boy scouts and became vary nostalgic. Since we only took a little hit each we did not get the full blown affect.
We then went to the front porch or my parents house and sat down. I did not take any more at this time but I did watch Greg stand up, pick up his rocking chair and then sit it back down.
Latter that night I did it right. I took three full hits and held them in for the full length of time. After I exhaled my third hit I handed my brother and mumbled "Take this". I then fell on my back and the most I remember for my first full true trip was that the world became bright pastel colors and my brother became god and nick the devil and Greg kept telling nick to let me be and not take this one.
It was intince.