Grief and psilocybin — losing my mother, then finding her again

My mother died in April. By October I was still not sleeping. The grief had a quality of stuck-ness to it — not the waves of acute grief but a kind of frozen middle distance that nothing could reach. My therapist, who works with psychedelic integration, suggested we consider a session. I agreed, not knowing what I hoped for.

Preparation took three weeks. We identified specific images, memories, things I wanted to say to her that I hadn't said. I wrote a letter. I made a playlist that included music she loved and music I associate with her.

I don't know how to describe what happened in the session without sounding like I'm claiming something I can't verify. At around the two-hour mark, I had an extended experience of my mother's presence — not a hallucination exactly, but a quality of felt presence so clear it was indistinguishable from her being in the room. We had a conversation. I told her things. She said — or something inside me said, in her voice — things I needed to hear.

I know this can be explained entirely in terms of the brain's capacity to generate these experiences. I'm not claiming anything supernatural. What I'm saying is that the experience had the quality of genuine contact, and that it changed something that had been unchangeable for six months.

The grief didn't disappear. But it became flowing again instead of frozen. I could access it, which meant I could also step out of it. The following weeks I cried more than I had in the months prior. My therapist said that was the grief processing rather than accumulating.

I sleep now.