This is not an article about meditating while stoned. It’s about leveraging the state of altered consciousness that cannabis can induce to meditate deeply and look inwards to learn more about yourself and help sort through issues that may be holding you back.
Most of the articles on this site assume recreational use. You can of course use any of the content here and apply it to the use of medical marijuana, but that’s not our primary vibe – we’re here to talk about the different ways you can imbibe cannabis to get high because it’s pleasurable. Using weed as a tool to look inward falls between these two stools – it’s not about addressing a specific medical issue, but it isn’t entirely recreational either!
Marijuana is often described as medicine and is frequently used in the treatment of certain physical or mental ailments – pain relief, anxiety, nausea, loss of appetite, and more. But there is another way to use weed for healing that is more akin to using psilocybin or ayahuasca to unlock your brain, knock it out of its habitual patterns and see things in a different way. All without actually hallucinating!
You don’t have to do anything differently in the way you smoke – roll a joint, use a vaporizer, whatever you’re used to. The difference is in your attitude and intent, not the mechanics. This is not about smoking more or stronger weed to induce a different type of experience, it’s about taking advantage of your usual stoned state rather than just experiencing it passively.
How To Buy Weed from a Dispensary: A User’s Guide
So, weed has just been legalized in your state. You’ve never really smoked, indeed never really been around it. You don’t even know anyone who has (to your knowledge). But you’re curious. It seems like something you might like to…
Is Cannabis Psychedelic?
The surprising answer to this for people who associate the psychedelic experience only with hallucinatory trips is yes. Marijuana, when smoked with intent, can stimulate extremely powerful feelings, perceptions, and experiences that can be quite as transformative as more traditional psychedelics like Psilocybin or LSD.
Advantages Over Other Psychedelics
Cannabis has a few advantages over other psychedelics. Here are the primary ones:
- It’s legal. Not everywhere and not for everybody, but the majority of Americans now live in a state where they can legally purchase marijuana. If you have lived your life in such a way that you do not have a hook up for illicit drug purchases (more power to you) you can probably still walk into a dispensary and walk out with a bag of weed.
- It’s voluntary. This is a more subtle point, but in my view more significant. Cannabis is unique amongst mind altering substances in that the experience you have is largely determined by your intent and where your focus lies. If you take LSD and you don’t like what it’s doing to you, you’re stuck for at least a few hours. The decision to experience intense psychedelic effects has been taken out of your hands. With weed if you don’t like what’s happening you can simply sit up, throw on some Rick and Morty and you are back to being just stoned. (You can’t choose not to be stoned, unfortunately).
How To Get Unhigh
A weed high is great, but as with other drugs too much THC can be bad (that’s what “too much” means!) It can make a person feel worse, not better, if too much cannabis is taken, whatever the consumption method.…
What to Expect
I personally have found two major and surprising benefits of using weed in this way. I wouldn’t expect everybody to have the same experience, of course, but I offer this as a guide to what you might expect.
Asking yourself a question and being surprised at the answer
When we’re stoned, our fears are lessened and the defensive structures that we put up around our thoughts to prevent us from feeling negative emotions are weakened or removed entirely. This enables us to reconsider events in our past that are painful, that we usually try not to think about, and ask ourselves honestly, “What was going on here? What need was not met at this moment that caused you pain?” We can conjure up our past selves and ask them, and be surprised at what they say – the thoughts we do not usually allow ourselves to think. This is a weird experience, and very powerful.
Finding out the real reason you feel the way you do
I’m sure we all, or many of us, have had the experience of having something unwanted occur or some setback in our plans and reacting with an anger or anxiety that is out of all proportion to the event. You know you shouldn’t have been thrown as much as you were, but you don’t know why.
I have found that if I focus on these emotions and attempt to feel them again when stoned, they melt away and the real emotion underneath comes to the fore. Anger usually becomes sadness. I can then focus on the sadness, and see where it leads. Often I find some old hurt or unresolved trauma at the root of my anger, and I can offer myself comfort.
Both of these experiences sound somewhat absurd in the cold light of day, but it is the suspension of exactly that kind of judgment while stoned that allows them to happen!
Breathing – Does Holding in Smoke Get You Higher?
When we talk about smoking marijuana, we generally talk about the different means of ingestion, different cannabis preparations, different strains, and different paraphernalia. But there is another, less discussed facet of the smoking experience – the inhaling. The breathing. Does…
How To Do It
If you expect to be encountering some strong negative emotions it is a good idea to have a trusted friend with you who can see if you become distressed and remind you that you are safe.
- Choose your weed. Generally speaking, Sativa strains give more of a head high with increased creativity while Indica strains are more of a body thing, bringing a feeling of deep relaxation. For meditation, you need the best of both worlds, so get a 50/50 hybrid strain, or just mix two strains together!
- Choose your music. You don’t want to be doing this in silence, but you also don’t want music you’re familiar with, or that has a hummable tune or any lyrics. You don’t want anything that your brain might start chasing. There is plenty of chill music out there that is specifically for meditating, and that’s what you want!
- Smoke up. While you’re smoking, think about your reason for doing this. This isn’t to get stoned and watch The Muppet Show (this time), this is to look inwards.
- Get comfortable. Take off your shoes and lie down. If you have an eye mask for sleeping, put it on. You want to be completely physically relaxed, with no distracting discomfort.
- Concentrate on your breath. Just as you would with normal meditation, focus on your breathing and get centered in your body and the present moment.
- Do the thing. Start focusing on the issue that brought you here. Let your brain go where it wants to go. Don’t force it, follow it.
- That’s it. After about an hour or whenever you feel done, take off your mask and sit up. You may have fallen asleep. It’s all good!
Conclusion
If you decide to try this, I hope you find it worthwhile. It’s not a substitute for therapy or medication when it comes to dealing with mental health issues, but it is a useful adjunct and beneficial in its own right!