S1 Ep10 - Confessions of an Itchoholic

Shedding Skin Podcast

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S1 Ep10 - Confessions of an Itchoholic

Acceptance

Nick Gilpin

Nov 06, 2024

This is a serial podcast episode in 10 parts that you can listen to above, or with these links:

Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, Youtube Podcasts here

Or you can read this episode as a piece of writing below:

Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic

Episode 10 (of 10) - Acceptance

Subheadings:

* Answers

* Covid Calamities

* Chronic Again

* Ill Health and Suffering

* Scar Tissue

* War

* Gratitude

* Don’t Wish Your Body Away

* Veneer One Last Time

* Altered States and Spirituality

* Parenting One Last Time

* Co-dependency

* Self Honestly and Shedding

Chapter 10 – Acceptance

This is getting old and so are you
Everything you know and never knew
Will run through your fingers just like sand
Enjoy it while you can
Like a snake between two stones
It itches in your bones
Take a deep breath and swallow
Your sorrow
Tomorrow
Mike Patton, Last Cup of Sorrow
Faith No More (1997) (79)

Answers

We find ourselves all the way back to the present, with a man who can barely breathe through his scarred skin, has an abusive relationship with his own body temperature, is suspicious the sun is out to kill him (it is), is allergic to mould and dog hair and pollen and the exhaust fumes from his 4-stroke lawn mower (I recently bought an electric mower and there is no going back!), and whose scarred nipple tissue makes them look perpetually erect (I’m really not that horny).

A man who’s own 8-year-old son, when asked to write something his Dad is ‘good at’ for a Father’s day worksheet at school, wrote:

‘Hurting his back’.

This is the episode where I provide to you the solution to suffering because I an now arisen and awakened and enlightened, the alternative therapy that solved my problems, and the perfect combination of psychedelics and supplements you need to consume to copy my meteoric rise from sick Nick to a healthy man who has his body ‘under control’. This is where I complete the hero character arc, show you how I live a life free of chronic impediments and existential sufferings, how I have awoken to a new reality, and how you can follow me to your salvation as your newly awakened ‘chronic health guru’!

Only, this isn’t a self-help podcast. I’m not going to sell you any supplements. Or say you should do breath-work (I do, and it’s great, but it may not be for you). Or encourage you to try float tanks (I use them sometimes when my skin isn’t too torn, they can be helpful to calm my angry nervous system). Or, god forbid, recommend you try psychedelics to heal your mind (if it happens to be as dysfunctional as mine turned out to be, they may help).

I won’t do any of that because I don’t have any solutions for you. I’m not certain enough of anything. As the complexity of these next few stories may show.

Covid Calamities

In February 2022, my family and I all tested positive to Covid 19. As the 4 of us isolated at home for the 2 weeks that was mandated at the time, we ordered a delivery from our chemist of a few things we might need – Panadol to help with fever, a few more rapid antigen tests so we could check when we had cleared the infection, tissues for blocked noses etc.

Deep down, I was worried that covid would knock me, an immunocompromised bag of walking ill health, for six. Or worse. I wrote out a long document to be automatically emailed to my wife Cate after a certain amount of time with all the passwords to our insurance and superannuation and telco accounts, just in case I deteriorated quickly and had to say goodbye to her and my kids over zoom with a ventilator mask over my face.

Heavy.

Included in the chemist delivery were 2 syringes of a biological monoclonal antibody called Dupixent to treat my eczema and asthma. My dermatologist and I had been anxiously waiting to get me on this medication for over a decade – it was always coming, just down the road, as a potential aide to help me reduce my steroid use. Finally, a targeted medicine that reduced specific inflammation markers in skin – not just skin on the outside (eczema), but also skin on the ‘inside’ (asthma). The work and time and effort required to bring this medicine to market; trials, approvals, the regulation of its sale and then its listing on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme (meaning it wouldn’t cost me more than my house mortgage to use it) inside Australia, is a monumental scientific and administrative task that took many years.

It turns out that people with chronic health issues that were taking Dupixent had better outcomes for covid infections than those that weren’t. (82) After waiting many, many years to begin this treatment, it was handed to me over my fence whilst my body battled the very virus that had been sweeping the world.

The chances of this occurring seem at least as remote as me existing in the first place.

My body did not like covid. At all. Did immediately injecting myself with Dupixent save my life from covid and allow the writing of this book?

Who knows, it’s possible.

Dupixent as a treatment is having much success the world over in relieving the suffering of people with severe skin disorders. For me, it seems to work a bit - it’s a treatment, not a cure.

A year earlier, in 2021, I was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland insufficiency that means I live with chronic fatigue like symptoms. The meteoric amount of effort required to (firstly, get out of bed, and then) face this disorder has been challenging beyond words. Despite only being officially diagnosed in 2021, I had been suffering its effects for many years. My wilted adrenal glands are most likely caused by my 2 decades of steroid use. Recall the Doctors warnings from my early 20s, with them saying there will be long term consequences to gobbling steroids and suppressing my immune system for so long? The Addison’s diagnosis is in some ways reaping what the Nick of my 20s and 30s sowed by choosing to ‘live now and suffer later’.

I still take cortisol tablets every day, my daily ‘accelerator’ to suppress my immune system so that I can function in the world as an Addison’s sufferer. I’m stuck constantly upping and lowering my doses to balance out energy levels, my body’s immune response to a world of viral illnesses, the exhausting load of parenting and my sleep cycles. The nauseating hydrocortisone ‘roller coaster’ (previously the prednisone roller coaster) is a ride I am forced to go on many times each year.

The point of these recent health stories is to underline this idea - I seek answers and healing and assistance from the mainstream medical establishment, and sometimes alternate therapies (like ice baths or meditation.)

As the Indigo Girls sang in 1989’s Closer To Fine – I go to the Dr, I go to the mountains.

Chronic Again

More importantly, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Except, like everyone, my ‘best’.

Chronic health management, much like parenting, is confusing, complex, challenging and requires nuance and much attention. There is no fundamental, absolute truth that can be adhered to resulting in a perfect outcome. There is too much complexity. An Instagram influencer’s green-juice parasite cleanse is of no help here. Turmeric will not save any of us. The one thing I have going for me, is I am honest about that.

What I can offer in this final episode is my answer to this question:

What does it feel like to realise you are not deficient, after a lifetime of feeling just so?

It feels like coming home to a place I have been before, yet I left in hurt and confusion. It feels like coming home to myself. The acceptance of my physical abnormalities, especially those that cause my social quirks and neurotic reflexes (calculating shade percentages anyone?), my desire to hide, are simply the unique and somewhat remarkable elements that constitute me and no one else. It’s all me. And it is all ok. This is where personal acceptance lives. (Drop By Sometime) The facing of the terror of my own body (which was and is a placeholder for the general terror of my mortality) ironically delivered a feeling of empowerment, sitting in vulnerability paradoxically created strength.

I can also answer this question:

What does it feel like to face the terror that has haunted me for the bulk of my existence – the terror of being seen, the terror of facing my vulnerabilities, the terror of facing my mortality?

It feels like what I was, in some ways, born to do. It feels meaningful. It feels purposeful.

It feels like laying down the burden of always fretfully seeking someone else to tell me how to be, how to live, always morphing into a way that I thought other people wanted me to be. We all do this, looking for modelling on how to live; peers, celebrities, gurus, friends, marketing, the constant comparisons (that transform into judgements). Finally, I could listen to myself more and find the confidence there to carve a unique path.

To accept that the hatred of myself started at my skin, of course it did, and then it went in from there. That my fear and horror at what I was eventually seeped into all parts of my body, including everything underneath that is felt, all the feelings, all the sensations, all the mind-made stories.

Once I began shedding some of my old stories, it felt like I was finally ready to move from a life of (seeking) pleasure (as escape from pain) into a life of meaning (even though that life still has pain, and even though I’m still figuring out what that meaning and purpose is.

What you might find if you end up having such an awakening as I did, is that you'll get the opportunity to reconstitute yourself as a person, and redesign and revaluate all your rituals and your habits and your obsessions and your addictions (all those things existing on a continuum), and all those things end up being what you do most of the time when you're alive (and therefore who you are).

For me that looks like reconstituting myself so that I'm not out of my body, so I can flow in the world a bit more as my life happens, especially when it comes to parenting.

Waking up to oneself doesn't happen in its finality, it is a matter of degrees. Coming to understand myself as an amalgamation of what is happening right now (the state of my body and mind) and what has happened to me (how I learned to be in the world as passed to me by my culture and the way my parents were) has been crucial to comprehending why I act the way I do and why my patterns of living are the way that they are. I can choose the best way to be right now, but I still don't have full control over that, because my body is an overcooked shish kebab barely clinging to the skewer of existence, and the coping strategies in my mind (as inherited by my past) are often like stale tahini sauce that has started to turn (or, let's face to, went rancid many moons ago). Emotional objectivity is my ability to 'watch' myself, self-reflect then hopefully continue learning more about myself and increase my ability to self-regulate.

Woe be the man who thinks his personality is set, that 'he' is final with no updating to do. That man is stuck in his veneer.

Ill Health and Suffering

Another question that I’m still searching for the answer to:

How to live a life in a body that is breaking down constantly?

This is something we all need to think about as we age, not just people with chronic health probs now. How to navigate the high seas in a faulty vessel that is constantly taking on water? Through all the pain and suffering and loss of inhabiting a fleshly system determined to invert and infect and poison and disrupt - what is the process I need to choose in order to survive this?

Part of the answer, for me, is to dance.

Dance with my disease, my discomfort, my pain. Lean in and Waltz with the unwieldly partner of my suffering. Treat it with respect, soften myself, be malleable and flow like water, minimise the energy I use working against, and be forgiving but firm in cooperation and opposition. Create the container for my collaborator to express itself, and they in turn, with some practise, will create the container for me to express. Most importantly, don’t work against my jiving colleague.

This my allegorical way of speaking of embodiment. Dancing has to happen right now, in this moment. It’s a flow state, accepting. If I cannot easily reside in my body, if there is pain and illness there and it’s preventing me from fully inhabiting my experience-giving carnal lifeboat, then I am going to have a tough time. Getting back into my body, noticing it, feeling it, concerning myself with its patterns, has been life altering.

For many decades I set myself in a reactionary war footing against my ill-health, summonsing a tremendous amount of energy to will a difference upon myself, a mind made veneer that could not accept. This required a fundamental rejection of the truth - that there was something painful and it was difficult to face. The version of myself that I dreamt of, the perfect skinned, indefatigable, fit and healthy man didn’t exist (doesn’t exist), instead that mirage was used to beset myself, using it as a weapon to bludgeon my psyche with shame, dislocation and dejection.

Chronic health is a tumultuous relationship with yourself, not a win / lose binary.

The answer for me on how to survive in this body and with this mind, I believe is the same as the answer for any person, chronic suffer or otherwise. Because we are all in the same leaky, suffering boat, ferrying our Dharma across the ocean of life. No doubt some people’s boats are sturdier that others, and I’m sure many can and do ignore the water seeping in for a time - but we’re all getting wet eventually.

I still find myself regularly facing ‘the Horror’ (as Kurtz put in Heart of Darkness) (84) - my own personal horror was (and still is) that my body is permeable, that the world forces it's way in and causes havoc inside, that the very outer limit of my extremities, my skin, are an inadequate protection from being constantly attacked.

Yet I’ve found solace in knowing that If I want to tango with life, I have to Waltz with pain. If I want to Samba with the incomprehensible mysteries of existence, I have to cha-cha-cha with my own suffering. Even if it often feels out of tune and discordant and broken, I can still seek and find a beat and a rhythm with the carnal instrument I’ve been given.

OK, I’ve taken that metaphor as far as it will go.

But metaphors are used to explain things - the etymology of the word metaphor is meta - beyond, and phero - to carry, so all uo ‘to carry across or to transfer’.

Anna Spargo Ryan again here on the impossibility of speaking to doctors and putting our experience into words when asking for help:

"...be clear about something impossibly speculative! Objectively describe your subjective inner world! Use the metric system to tell me how bad it is!". (24)

The paradox of self-reporting and finding words to describe our subjective experience of pain, fatigue, mental confusion, obsessions is real, and it reflects the eternal battle against alexithymia inside ourselves. As she says, "Finding the right care relies on undoing a lifetime of hiding from language.”

I reckon that finding ‘self-care’ relies on that too.

Scar Tissue

Time for another metaphor!

When our skin gets hurt or torn, it responds by building back the skin thicker than before in the form of a scar, repairing the wound. This thickened skin is more rigid and doesn't stretch, doesn't breathe as easily, and doesn't allow movement. It is stronger (it’s made of fibres not skin cells) and less likely to tear again, but it loses its suppleness and its flexibility – it doesn’t sweat and regulate temperature normally. Despite being figurative, Hemingway was literally correct when he said “Many are strong in all the broken places”, (81) at least as it relates to skin.

This is analogous to what our mind does when we get overwhelmed by fear, suffering or rejection, especially in our formative years when we cannot easily understand our experiences. The veneer (the word that I made up to describe the filter we see the world through) is your personal scar tissue. It (the mind) protects us by creating patterns of though, rigid structures that help us survive, but that lock us in just a little bit more on pathways that are not easily changed. Of course, these structures are not ‘bad’ – they help us survive! Yet these pathways can preclude us from experiencing the more awe-inspiring elements of life, because they are in a way obsessive - we return to them instinctively, unconsioulsy, because they are the mechanisms we have learnt to survive, to get through, to make sense of reality.

Scar tissue doesn't shed as easily, it remains to toughen, strengthen, and protect. As it is with these protective patterns of the mind, the veneer if you will, they are not as easily let go of because they serve a strengthening purpose, hardening us against a world full of challenge. When you do let go of the patterns and the stories that were setup so long ago to comfort your inner child, it is possible to inhabit yourself more fully.

Hemingway goes go on to say “The worlds breaks everyone….and those that will not break it kills”, so I’ll choose the option of being broken and scarred thank you very much Ernest!

War

While I was writing this book, I attended the 50th anniversary memorial for Operation Ivanhoe, which was the last battle Australian soldiers took part in towards the end of the Vietnam war. In 1971 the Australian Prime Minister Gogh Whitlam announced that Australian troops would be withdrawn, and it was this announcement that telegraphed to the North Vietnamese that an opportunity to attack was at hand. During the battle Private Maxwell Lachlan Roades was shot and my dad, Private Mike Gilpin, was sent out to recover him from the field. Private Roades was still alive but badly wounded when my dad got to him, and he was loaded onto a medivac helicopter, where he later died. He was the last Australian casualty of the war in Vietnam.

It was a blustery September day as my dad, mum, my dad’s younger brother Tom and I leaned into the breeze and looked on as Maxwell Roades’s sister laid a wreath in remembrance to him on the lush green grass below the ANZAC Square memorial in Brisbane’s CBD.

As I stood listening to the stories of this battle, and the broader story of this war, surrounded by the men who were there 50 years prior, I felt the heavy weight of the experiences they encountered half a century ago. I could sense the sleepless nights, the uncontrolled tempers, the need for solace but an inability to find it, to escape from the images, sounds and memories that must haunt them. These sensations hung in the air around them, the traumas they experienced, like the final battle of Nui Le, carried in the bodies and minds and nervous systems of these men, and by defacto the wife's and partners beside them.

They had carried on, for 50 years no less, many of them having families. I was the youngest person at the memorial, a (at the time) 40-year-old son of a 71-year-old veteran, a man who was 21 when he happened to find himself on foreign soil on that day in September attempting to save Private Roades’s life. They gathered there because they couldn't, and shouldn't, forget what happened, nor forget who was lost.

The pain encoded in those bodies, I could see it, feel it. Too much for one body to hold, their pain was also born by their wives, their children. The outer limit of their bodies was no limit at all in containing the years of confusion and chaos they felt inside, their frayed nervous systems unable to easily carry their burdens, eventually leaking out into the lives of those around them, passed on by patterns of behaviour, ways of thinking, ways of coping.

These men, including my Dad, who’s best mate Bernie was killed in action, deployed their own compulsions, obsessions, even addictions, patterns of coping and the thickening of their skin into scar tissue in an attempt to regulate their nervous systems over time, to reach for the future, carrying the heavy burdens of the events they experienced in war. Just as their own veteran fathers had passed to them. My Dad’s bird watching, the time spent in nature, the need for quiet (something impossible to attain if you have children!) was his spirit seeking, his attempt to understand his life and to sooth the ongoing clanging of his mind and his body.

A family is like a giant nervous system, interconnected through time and generations. Neural signals are sent into the system as opinions and judgements and rituals and cultural undertakings and coping strategies and addictions. Pain is spread throughout the system in an attempt to dissipate it because it is very hard to hold close and impossible to hold alone. Burdens are shared, suffering (and joy) are communal, they cannot be isolated to one part because everything is connected.

Scar tissue can be generational.

Gratitude

My understanding of the word and concept of gratitude was limited for most of my life. It was always a thing that I had to do, like a task, to force conscious gratitude for the good things in my life (of which there were many).

“Be grateful”.

Ok, I’ll do that now, before I move on to something else.

I now recognise gratitude is a feeling, a sensation, an experience emerging from the body that rises from deep within like a wave carrying forth the wondrous joy and appreciation of all the things that I have that make my life so incredible – up to and including the fact that I am alive and can have any experience at all. I haven’t been able to make gratitude happen by willing it – it’s like believing in God, (which I don’t), it’s not a decision I can make. Gratitude occurs, like grace falling on me. It doesn’t contain any information about how to carry my challenges or how to best suffer through pain, all it offers is a brief respite from those things and an expanded sense of wonder. Like the inexplicable gratitude that I feel when I realise my head contains 2 tympanic membranes (eardrums) that can vibrate at the precise frequency of the 90s rock song that I happen to be listening to on my stereo.

There was much to be thankful for back in my formative years, yet it seems I was unable to experience true gratitude because my mind was stuck in the suffering part, running unhealthy loops, unable to feel the type of gratitude like that David Whyte explains in his book Consolations – as an understanding that ‘the gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing.’”

Some moments, like when I'm unable to breath after battling for many weeks with a virus, contain deep suffering. It seems to be built into me to long for the suffering to ease, to move to a place where there is less, where instead of pain there is joy or happiness. Yet the moments that I'm forced to stop, slow down, breath between conversations or mild exertion, contain within them as much chance for me to reconnect with my body. My desire to have things easy, to be hedonistic, to chase the good sensations, is always thwarted eventually by the suffering that arrives as an inevitability. So, a better thing when pain, suffering or illness comes knocking is to sit in it and accept it, navigating it with as much grace as I can muster. It is what is happening in that moment. The suffering, which will eventually ease, is the flip side of the coin of joy. I can't only have access to one side of it.

Don’t Wish Your Body Away (Soul needs a Body)

For many of my formative years I would imagine what would happen if I was in a car accident, fantasizing that everyone would gather around my bed in the hospital, ala The Bold and the Beautiful or some similar daytime soap, offering me their attention, concern and love. Such an imagined car accident would be a violent event with bodily impacts that are clear to see and easy to understand. Dreams of acute blunt force trauma were dished up by my brain as a contrast to the unseen, unrecognised and ongoing chronic ailments that assaulted me, and the lack of care and attention and recognition that this mode of suffering evokes in those around me that didn’t experience it hence couldn’t understand it. The hospital scene and the worried looks on the faces of my loved ones represented the care and attention that I felt I needed but wasn't getting.

I was absolutely shocked to find whilst researching that this is an actual thing – it’s called the hospital fantasy, and many other have had it too.

That completely blew me away.

Every day, feeling so ordinary.
Every day, I get on with it.
Stuck in a loop, feeling so ordinary.
Every day I get out of it.
I'm my enemy, I'm not gonna be.
All this stuff's so ordinary.
From the song My Enemy (2005)
by Cog

Veneer One Last Time

If you could briefly return to a childlike state, and experience the world with fresh eyes, simply have a moment of ‘being’ without setting your own projected identity against it, would you try it?

The veneer, the psychological phenomenon that I completely made up, represented by our neuro-rigid ‘coping’ brain, hides how sacred and rare things are, allowing us to abuse ourselves and others. It becomes almost impossible to treat ourselves and others like bags of shit when we are in the middle of having our veneer torn to shreds (like a psychedelic journey, or gazing at a newborn, or in a flow state, or listening to Bach, or whatever turns you on and tickles your fancy).

We are just love and compassion and calmness and presence and awe.

Once the veneer returns, we get to go back to othering people and skipping over their humanity like so many stones over the surface of a pond. It's just so much easier to ignore people's humanity! It's less 'expensive' cognitively in a world that has a high price of admission to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, we still need a veneer - brain structures and modalities to orientate us towards action and purpose in the physical world - it’s just if our particular veneer is destructive (like mine was) it could use some tweaking.

Remember, the Veneer isn’t a real thing. I’m gesturing towards something because I want to name whatever it is that changes, gets reduced, gets removed, when immense internal transformation occurs. It could be our brain’s default mode network, the part of the brain that houses our sense of self and ‘conducts’ our experience, controlling and restricting.

It's what's hiding behind the veneer that is the magic and the awe, the great mystery of our unbounded minds. The part concealed behind the veil is the part I always longed to find. The veneer is the shadows on Plato’s cave that represent the entirety of reality, right up until you leave the cave and have your mind blown about how much more there is out there.

Suppressing your veneer can create transformation, and people do this in myriad ways. Some run marathons, others play music, some study astrophysics, some people paint, others play cricket with their kids in the backyard. Some loons swallow cactus juice. Whatever gets you into a flow state can temporality dissolve your local-eye-view of the world, then you may see that:

· Everything is interconnected (the antidote to separation)

· That there's beauty in the struggle that constitutes all people's lives (the antidote to judgement)

· Any one human's life is very short hence very valuable (antidote to nihilism)

· People don't really know what they are doing (antidote to certainty)

· Egotistical posturing is empty and representative of a disconnected person (antidote to status)

· We live in a hyper-novel environment (tik-tok anyone?) that our ancient bodies can struggle to survive and adapt to (said even though I love technology!)

· We are always changing

Our understanding of the world is a constant dance between separation and connectedness - we separate things from their environment in order to name them, understand them and control them, like a newborn baby described by scientific facts, but we intuit that everything is connected, and the separation is an illusion created by our mind. And it is. A separation required to understand an infinitely complex world so we can be in it to operate and survive. Yet simply surviving is not our only purpose here. We long to thrive - which requires a deeper understanding of the way things are connected.

Psychologist and author Scott Barry Kaufman says “Our brain is a prediction machine, when we're children our brain operates like a weather forecast for our future, so if we grow up in an unstable or uncertain environment our brain creates that as our world view. If we have learned the fear when we're young, we need to go through the process of unlearning when we’re in a different and perhaps safer context.”

When you’re able to ‘get out of your own way’, even for a brief period, like if your ego dies when you’re rotting in a hospital bed saying your name and date of birth over and over, your sense of self no longer becomes the filter through which your experience of life is passed. Through these ‘mystical’ or transrational experiences we can feel a greater sense of connection, opening, amazement, gratitude, and above all, hope. Dr Nicole LePera speaks to how we often gain insights into ourselves and life “through suffering, living through confusion and sorrow on our way to finally becoming conscious. An awakening is a rebirth of the self that involves tearing down parts of who you were when you lived in an unconscious, autopilot state of existence.” (62) (p207)

These sensations do not tell you how to live, they are not instructions on how you should act, but they can imbue your everyday battles with a grander sense of purpose and meaning, as if your struggles (which don’t suddenly end!) are more accessible, more understandable, and even more appreciated.

If you find yourself experiencing such a personal transformation (like I did), from the outside you may look the same, and you might even act the same, but by fuck you won’t feel the same.

Altered States / Spirituality

As I watch, without judgement, the people rushing into the bottle shop on a Friday evening, or stressfully waiting at the chemist for their pain pills (just as I used to) I am reminded how we constantly alter out state to escape ourselves because we feel trapped in our lives and the challenging burdens they contain.

So many conversations I have with my friends and peers are around how wasted they got on the weekend, how they know they are drinking too much, but how they struggle to change their habits.

Fortunately, you can alter your state in a different way, more knowingly, in order to face those challenges consciously, helping you see them from a different perspective. The difference (between coping with booze and coping with mushrooms) can seem subtle, or non-existent to some, but there is a big difference. These altered or flow states can offer your own mind a different perspective that you cannot ordinarily get from inside your own head. It’s like taking a walk in another person’s shoes, only not a specific person’s, more like humanity’s shoes – because you are, in a way, all of humanity, one in a series of interconnected Matryoshkas.

You can, in some way, see the green leaves through another's eyes! (the trick is, they are still your eyes, just ‘altered’). You can look into the dark jungle and see the flashing lights of the UV bugs and the heat radiation of the hiding rodents! You can see it 'all' (especially when high on mushrooms), before returning back to your more limited, identity-based point of view, fresh with the different perspective that you are only experiencing a wafer-thin slice of reality, your unique umvelt.

Jamie Wheal outlines in his book Recapture the Rapture a bunch of modalities that encompass what he calls 'hedonic engineering' - using altered states of consciousness to heal, find purpose, elicit embodiment and belonging. He explores breathing techniques, music, sex and sacrament/drug taking. (So, all the good stuff). Some of these techniques can 'give both proof and permission to reconnect our bodies and brains. From breathing, to moving, to meditating, to biofeedback, there are increasingly varied ways for us to discharge trauma and heighten integration, and none of them requires lying down on a couch to talk about it." (85) P120.

In his NYT’s best-selling book The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku finds some evidence that early Christian’s drank wine and elixirs drugged with ergot (the fungus that was eventually used to synthesise LSD by Albert Hoffman in the 1940s). So, even the Christians where on mushrooms, literally communing with 'God' by getting high. Now that is a religion I could get on board with! (Then the Catholics had to take all the fun out of it and swap the drugs out for mere symbols, wafers and wine. As Brain says, "The Catholics where the first ones to start the war on drugs".) (86)

Remembering the hymn 'I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see' that they forced me to sing over and over again at school (sorry, the collage) takes on new meaning in the context of my own personal transformation, one that I could tentatively label as a ‘spiritual awakening’.

All of these altered states and ‘waking up’ experiences and deep self-revelations tilted me towards a sense of non-religious spirituality that I never thought a hard-nosed rationalist with a scientific and materialistic world view could experience. If an atheistic heathen such as I desired to explain spirituality, it would have to be done without referring to religion, reference to God, dogmatic beliefs or doctrine, or even ritual. Perhaps it could be described as so:

A feeling, however fleeting (it isn't permanent, no feelings are). Of temporary transcendence of pain and attachment to things, attachments to beliefs and even attachment to oneself, one’s body and one’s ego. A sensation of seeing 'more than usual' in one's mind eye - of seeing the 'whole' of everything and its connectedness. Of how, for example, there is no oscillating throat to send without an oscillating ear to receive and without a medium of air for oscillations to oscillate through. That any separation we feel between these things exists only in our minds, and once freed of these separations, the hyper connectedness of all things, of the whole, emerges.
It's a feeling of preciousness, of improbability, of the miraculous nature of all the things that we normally see as ordinary through our personal veneer. It is a penetrating sensation of awe.
It’s the feeling that nothing is ordinary.

That we breathe, that our aliveness, our ‘pnuema’ (Greek for the ‘breath of life’ – and as in pneumonia) is our ‘spirit’ (as in respiration), our spirituality.

This brings us back to the body, because these feelings of awe require the body (the soul needs a body), even as these states can take us beyond the body. In my case at least, to experience these states, however fleeting, require a less than warmongering relationship with it. Maybe the word God isn't a noun, but a verb, something we do or something we feel, again, requiring the body which C S Lewis referred to as “those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent.”

Was Master Yoda right when he said “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter” (gesturing to Luke’s physical form)?

It's only in my 40s that I've learnt to understand and manage some of the chemical systems that exist inside my own body, now that I can get close enough to it to understand it. We have a cannabinoid system that I spent years abusing and modulating by smoking weed! We have a dopaminergic system that I pickled with alcohol for 2 decades, spiking and crashing my endorphins on an endless loop! We have a built-in opioid system that loved it when I needed surgery and was handed buckets of legal narcotics! There has to be a built-in caffeine modulation system in there somewhere, but I haven’t managed to master that one yet….

A deeper understanding of these bodily systems affords me a greater ability to manage myself over that 4^th dimension that the word chronic evokes (time). To be future orientated and not always capitulating to the desperate, often pain filled needs of this very moment, is to ask:

What are the ‘easier’ things I could choose to avoid today that would make tomorrow harder? What are the ‘harder’ things I can face today that could make tomorrow easier?

It's not a perfect heuristic, but as a method of illuminating the patterns of compulsion that I get stuck in, it can help.

What is an awakening – and what am I awakening to? Myself? Or a deeper understanding of what life is? What was the force preventing me from doing this earlier? And how did it change to allow greater self-reflection?

In his 2023 book Awe, Dacher Keltner asks if psychedelic experiences of awe truly change people or if the ‘ironic prediction’ that ‘psychedelic experiences make us more like who we are rather than changing us in any enduring ways. Mystical transformation is an illusion. Out of the decay of these extraordinary experiences we simply distil who we really are’. (Ch 9, Awe, Penguin Books)

This is the dichotomy of self-awareness. All we ever have is this moment to feel anything, and anything else is a memory of a feeling, or an anticipation of a feeling. In this moment, I can look back into the past and find greater meaning and see my coping patterns more clearly. Then I can look to the future and attempt to avoid pain and weave a richer tapestry of actions that deliver me greater understanding of what my life is.

I spent a lot of my life running away from this moment, from this ‘now’ feeling, because it felt rotten, the altered state of consciousness that illness creates/created in me. I was running from my future which I knew would be filled with pain and hurt, back into the past, caught on mechanisms to cope and escape. I was Marty McFly, travelling in time, stuck in the past and trying to get 'back to the future' of accepting my current predicament so I could accept how I felt and begin to understand it.

At the very least, psychedelics released me from the paralysis of not being able to easily express how I felt, that Alexithymia. I still have all the feelings, good and bad and everything in-between - they swirl around inside like a hurricane waiting to erupt. Psychedelics don’t ‘solve’ any of that, and I probably wouldn’t want them to. Yet having a greater awareness of my internal sensations, emotions and feelings allows me to identify and describe them much more healthily.

Parenting One Last Time

We want everything good for our children - a deep, valuable, and meaningful life, not one that is always happy and pain free (this is not possible), but one that navigates those inevitable fluctuating states with as much grace as possible - but we are charged with the challenge of first delivering that to ourselves. If we cannot, we run the risk of seeming duplicitous to our own children, because we are telling them one thing whilst experiencing another.

What is the 'purpose' of my children (if such a ridiculous question could be asked, as it regularly is by me but perhaps no one else), of this 'human perpetuation' that feels so overwhelmingly miraculous when our children are born, then gets so hard and so normal when as parents we are charged with shepherding them for so many years? Yet still feels as miraculous if we’re able to slow down, gaze into the stellar nursery that is their eyes and contemplate the wonder of who and what they are?

For me, the purpose is better-ness (another word I have made up), generationally. The purpose is to increase understanding, connection and meaning over the impossible to grasp lengths of time that constitute our human lives and the patterns of life of our forebears and our offspring. The purpose is to be released from the shackles of our own minds to see, feel and live the awe and wonder of being alive, if only for brief periods before the worries and the hurt and the burdens wash them away in the next moment. The purpose is to teach our kids the knowledge that the awe will return, should they find the strength to shoulder their burdens with as much grace and grit and they can.

We are tasked with shepherding them from one moment to the next, one feeling to the next, one day to the next, one year. Every moment that we as parents are alive and having any experience, so are our children. This is at first terrifying, especially when you have more than one child – the number of consciousnesses to manage outnumbers you, remembering you still have the most difficult one to navigate – your own! Raising children is like a long separation of nervous systems. This untangling must be done delicately, with an understanding that whatever exists in us as the parents, exists in them too.

My awakening didn't just reveal to me my own patterns, it revealed those that had been passed to me from previous generations, and those that I was unwittingly passing on.

Is it possible to break patterns of thinking, coping, and addictions that in some ways feel generational? I really hope so.

When you don't feel inside yourself any sense of belonging, peace or acceptance, you automatically look to get these things from outside, from other people. This is a recipe for disaster, because those people that you want, need, to hold you up in ways you can't do yourself, they are busy, tied up in knots trying to keep themselves upright.

To understand that this human blaming that we do, this impulse to judgement, this obsession with criticism represents something missing inside, not something wrong outside. The ‘culture’ I felt tyrannised by for the many decades of my immaturity was in fact my projecting of my own self judgements onto the external world, and the only way I could release these judgements and see and feel the immensity of my own privilege was to heal the parts of my internal world that were disconnected, allowing real gratitude to fall on me.

The best way I have found to do this is to transmute my feelings (the sensations of being a person) into words (or music, art, movement, discussion) to try to understand them. Find the words to describe the feelings! Fight our Alexithymia!

As parents our job is to guide our children through each moment, allowing what is to be, not to control it, dominate it or suppress it (even if, especially if, it is hard), whilst guiding with some learned wisdom that everything inside is allowed and ok and will pass. Then, oh god, the realisation that we need to shepherd ourselves through each moment, regulating our own nervous systems. A momentous challenge for people with bodies who fester in discomfort and dabble in ridicule.

That challenge, of shepherding ourselves with love through each moment so we can pass on how to do that to the next generation that will survive us, seems about the most honourable thing we can do.

Co-dependency

As I was writing this manuscript, I had a series of conversations with my wife Cate about our marriage and about how we wanted to live our lives – individually and together – something that we would often ‘find’ ourselves doing, perched in the kitchen late at night when the kids were finally asleep, or scrunched on the couch drinking coffee as they jumped on the trampoline out the front (like most parents, we have to ‘sneak’ our existential chats in-between the never ending task of loving and parenting our kids).

We had recently healed our crippling co-dependency, waking up to all the ways in which we had previously put unfair expectations on one another to ‘solve’ the way each one felt, painting the stress of our unseen and misunderstood subconscious fears all over the canvas of our relationship. Once we were able to more fully ‘see’ ourselves, we could more fully ‘see’ the other - as a beautifully complex, amazing, flawed, precious human whom we loved dearly, who was forging their own path. These chats are often inspired by Cate’s favourite poem, Mary Oliver’s The Journey, and Mary’s articulation of the determination to do ‘the only thing you could do’ which is to ‘save the only life that you could save’ – ie, your own.

I asked Cate if she harboured any resentment towards me because of my health struggles. My health journey often takes me in certain directions, not ones that I want to go in – that is, one of low energy, prolonged contraction into sickness, often early nights, and a reduced ability to be intimate and supportive of her. I wish to live a vital life, to enjoy my body, to be energetic and have gusto and passion. These are some of the things ongoing illness can take away, and I am excruciatingly aware of the impact that has on my family, particularly Cate and my two boys.

Cate said to me that she used to hold resentment towards me about these things, and to others in her life about many things, but that she felt resentment no longer, because “the truth is that I am finally starting to fall in love with myself. After a lifetime of negative self-talk and general dislike, for so long wanting to avoid myself and those feelings of brokenness and deficiency, all I wanted was to lose myself, morph into ‘us’ and evaporate my challenging, lonely parts. Yet it doesn’t work. Co-dependency and expecting another to solve these feelings for me creates pressure, resentment. Coming to love myself and accepting all the broken bits, I’m finding all this other beauty in me that was covered in fear for so long.”

As if on cue, like a word nerd, she even quoted more Mary Oliver, asking herself ‘What is it your plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”. (89)

For her, the answer to that is expansive, and some of those parts perhaps won’t fit inside our marriage. That doesn’t mean we are destined to become polyamorous swingers reaching for car keys in fruit bowls, it’s just a recognition that I cannot fully provide for her the answers to her deepest longings, her most outlandish dreams and her greatest desires any more than she can fully for me – we are individually walking this life, choosing love and connection as we go, separately healed, together.

How can one person ‘solve’ life for another? We can love, we can support, we can listen, we can be present for everything this person is, all their hurt and pain and joy and their most expansive dreams, and we can even do much of this alongside this person we love – but we cannot do it for them. That’s the expectation co-dependency evokes. Besides, the greatest thing we ever did was bring our 2 little people into the world and love and nurture them together with as much consciousness as possible. None of the newly found ‘expansiveness’ inside our relationship - that freedom to live how the individual requires whilst being held in the container of the loving, resentment-free connection - was possible without first ‘falling in love with yourself’.

In both our cases, this required much relief from the obsessiveness of our own minds.

And on I read
Until the day was gone
And I sat in regret
Of all the things I've done
For all that I've blessed
And all that I've wronged
In dreams until my death
I will wander on
From the song Like a Stone (2002)
by Audioslav and sung by Chris Cornell

Self Honesty and Shedding

Shedding skin is a process of transformation, just like any transformation is like shedding a previous version of yourself. We are constantly transforming on our long journey from birth to death, transmuting into better and worse versions of ourselves in incomprehensible cycles, expanding and contracting, thrust along the arrow of time by concealed forces, veiled patterns, obscured from us by the manic thought machine in our head.

Yet we shed constantly, just like we ‘cling’ (the opposite of shedding).

Scar tissue carries forth, clinging, reminding, thwarting natural metamorphosis and reifying stagnation. It remains. The transforming and healing of a wounded person must be done whilst carrying forth these enduring reminders, incorporating them into their personhood. Scars can’t be left behind any more than the earth-shattering grief of losing a loved one can ever be fully healed – we carry these experiences with us forever. If you can get close enough to them, scars, like grief, contain under their hurt and their seeming radioactivity, wisdom to be shepherded forth as we reach for the future.

Carl Jung was spot on, “Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”

My greying beard thanks you, Carl.

I spent the first 3.5 decades of my life intuiting that there was more to life, that something was being held back from me, that I was missing out yet stymied by my suppression of that innate knowledge. And there is, and it was, and I was.

Yet expressing what that is becomes effectively impossible – abstract words can never fully convey the sensation of freedom from the tyranny of my own mind, of the childlike awe I can access at the fact that this world exists, and the wonder that I am alive in it and having the particular human experience that is my life. Even as the price of admission is a wonky and reactive body, and suffering and pain in its many guises. The poet in the maternity ward has few words that can fully grasp the wonder and awe of a life, any life, and its immense beauty and complexity.

In my case, the ‘poet’ in the maternity ward ended up being the torn jeans and eyeliner wearing singers fronting my favourite 90s and 2000s rock bands. Their words suffused with as much meaning as you can find anywhere – suffering, alienation, addiction, rebellion, regret, shame, existential questioning, sex and music, life and death – it’s all right there.

Viktor Frankl calls this desire to express our deepest purpose a search for ‘super meaning’. “What is demanded of man is not….to endure the meaningless of life, but rather to bare his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms." (90) Our struggle to find cold, rational words for the 'meaning' of life that is all around us is real – there is too much meaning to explain, it’s everywhere, we must live it, feel it, sing it, dance it.

It amazes me and terrifies me that my own children are vanishing before my very eyes, my desire to capture them always going unfulfilled. As I mark their ever-increasing heights in black pen on the sliding door of my 8-year old’s room, this morphing and changing is a reminder of how little time we get, and that they can only be seen and felt and loved in this moment, because we only have this moment to see and feel such magic.

The expressing (the opposite of suppressing, something I was so good at) of that magic, that essence, that awe, ends up becoming the purpose of life, the very meaning of life that I was always seeking. This is what James Hetfield meant when he sang ‘nothing else matters’ - to take the dangerous risk of expressing your feelings, to fight back against our alexithymia, that inability to express how we feel, that is a risk worth taking. “Forever trusting who we are.” (1) To attempt something that can never be fully accomplished, that is, to express in words, or song, or art, or dialogue, or movement, or actions of honouring towards ourselves or in service to others – as some sort of fucking expression - something that can only be felt: that this life is an incredible gift.

All of its tragedy and the things we can learn from challenge, all of its hilarity, all of its beauty and wonder and complexity, all of its pain, all of it’s suffering, all of our shedding skin, all of it.

Everything.

Thanks for reading episode 10 / 10

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Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_

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Links and References

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London : Arrow Books, 1929.

Whyte, David. Consolations. Edinburgh : Canongate Books Ltg, 2019.

Cog. My Enemy. The New Normal. s.l. : Difrnt Music, 2005.

Wheal, Jamie. Recapture the Rapture. New York : HarperCollins, 2021.

Muraresku, Brian. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. New York : St Martins Press, 2020.

Kershner, Irvin. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. [writ.] George Lucas. [perf.] Frank Oz. 20th Centunry Studios, 1980.