“What is your original face before mother and father were born?”

—Zen Koan

February 2020: I sit upright on a mattress with a man holding a pipe to my mouth, while a woman leans against me back-to-back to support my fall. Soothing music floats in the background. This is my first time taking a psychedelic substance, and I chose the strongest known consciousness-altering compound, 5meo-DMT. No, I am not an extreme risk taker. Rather, a trusted friend recommended this particular guide to me and, out of curiosity and a desire for healing and transformation, I sought him out. In any case, it will all be over in about 30 minutes. I inhale the milky vapor until my visual field melts into fluid waves and the music stutters and warps. Then, in an instant, everything disappears. I am completely cut off from all sensory and bodily awareness.

At first, I remember that I was in a room inhaling from a pipe. Or was that a dream? I cannot say because I can no longer distinguish waking from dreaming. Then my ability to organize time into past, present and future dissolves. Not only the memory of being in a room inhaling from a pipe now, but everything I have ever known, including the memory of ever existing in the first place, rapidly recedes like a fleeting thought on the tip of my mind. Then even that fleeting thought passes beyond recollection.   

Does anything exist? I don’t know. I only sense that, in this timeless void, I can remain nothing at all or manifest as anyone or anything in any time and place, because there is nothing intrinsically “me” here. As if I am an actor-in-waiting, a blank slate upon which any identity or set of circumstances or relationships can be inscribed, and there I’d be—nothing lost, nothing gained.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to me (though related to me afterwards by my guides and perhaps hinted at by an underlying echo of terror and dread) as I wonder at this mystery of nonexistence, my body shakes and flails on the mattress and I cry and wail like a baby. When I do return to bodily awareness, I am in a completely different position than where I started. My limbs are oddly tangled. My face is soaked with tears.

September 2023: My wife Lisa and I are asleep in the loft of our new home. We just moved to the Pacific Northwest, a region of the country neither of us have lived before, and are still adjusting to the change. I dream that we are in something resembling a Matrix-like action thriller movie, atop a tall building overlooking a sprawling metropolis. We are each possessed by the urgency of our mission: to detonate a nuclear device to save something important, perhaps the whole world. I briefly consider that this device is so powerful that it will surely lay waste to the entire city, and more. But there is no time for second-guessing—we have to act! Lisa runs and dives through a low opening in a door, and I follow after her. Once inside, I find myself gripping two cables with shaking hands. Lisa calls out, “Connect the wires NOW!” And I do. I await impact, expecting catastrophe. A slight tingling sensation, like an electrical current, passes through my body. And that’s it. No explosion. No oblivion. Nothing in the room has visibly changed at all. I call out to Lisa but she does not answer. I turn around to where she had been, but she is no longer there. She is gone.

Immediately, I understand. We had detonated the device. We accomplished our mission. But now, as an unexpected consequence, we are trapped in different timelines, completely cut off from one another.

No sooner do I think this heart-shattering thought, however, than I find myself in a house I do not know, with a woman who is a stranger to me. She places a hand on my shoulder, and I realize: in this timeline, this is home, this woman is my wife. I’ve been dropped mid-story into a life that precedes me by decades. Stunned and sickened with grief, I wonder—who can possibly understand this unbearable, invisible loss, this annihilating rupture I just passed through? How can I possibly adapt?

Then I wake up, belly throbbing, heart still pounding to the rhythm of those terrible questions: Is this real? Have I been misplaced?

The body remembers. The body holds the question.

Despite these events taking place more than three years apart and over five and two years ago respectively, lately they’ve been interweaving in my mind’s eye as if to tell a story—or better, to ask a question.

On 5meo-DMT, the psychological structures we all take for granted, on which my experience of selfhood depends, utterly collapsed. No linear time, no narrative memory or self/other differentiation, no capacity to distinguish between waking and dreaming. I entered a state of radical indeterminacy or no-thing-ness.

Many people who report similar experiences of the dissolving of self on 5meo-DMT describe it as blissful, liberating. And granted, if I was more experienced, perhaps I could have ridden it out with greater ease and inner serenity. But the body does not lie. And my body’s movements and vocalizations told the real story.

Think about it. When you were a baby, you also lacked the capacity to organize time linearly, to differentiate between self and other, between waking and dreaming. Without object permanence, what was not immediately present to you simply did not exist. You floated in a state of radical indeterminacy, like a seed in soil, born physically but not yet inhabiting a psychological sense of selfhood. What carried you to term, so to speak, if you were fortunate, was the relative constancy of your mother and other caregivers. Their attuned responsiveness, mirroring, and reliable return provided the relational stability you needed, from which your sense of self gradually emerged.

For those of us who were relinquished and adopted as babies, however, before we developed a sense of self distinct from our mothers and biological lineage, a different storyline etched itself into the cells of our bodies. Instead of being held through our radical indeterminacy by the stability of our most intimate relationships, we endured a total rupture from all we knew. Before we could comprehend or consciously recall what happened, we lost everything and everyone—only to be handed to strangers who imposed a dissonant narrative and relational identity upon us. But the body remembers. Hence, when I entered a state of consciousness on 5meo-DMT resonant with what we all experienced as babies, all of the preverbal somatic alarms were tripped, as if to scream: “I know this place!!! This is where I disappear!!! This is where my whole world disappears, without anyone to witness or remember me!!!”

Significantly, as bewildering as this felt at the time, I immediately experienced surprising healing effects. For several weeks afterward, I could not touch alcohol. I lost my taste for it and even gave away the beer I had in the fridge. I could no longer drink my accustomed strong cup of morning coffee or even scroll through social media. For the most part, I spontaneously ate what my body needed and left the rest. In short, a whole host of compulsive coping behaviors simply dropped away with no effort or intention on my part. Yet, as profound (albeit temporary) as this apparent nervous system reorganization was, it did not resolve the basic underlying terror of the Nothing Place that 5meo-DMT uncovered so nakedly: Am I real? Or am I merely an interchangeable play-actor with no identity or agency of my own, dancing around a hollow core of nonexistence?

The dream, on the other hand, where I abruptly found myself torn from my life and relationships only to show up as someone else in an entirely different life, clearly bears the marks of post-traumatic stress, activated by a geographical move. Its connection to the wounding of relinquishment and adoption is unmistakable. In other words, I don’t need a chemically-enhanced deep dive into no-thing-ness to know the destabilizing doubt of the Nothing Place—it is already intimately present, woven through my relationships, my experience of selfhood and identity, even of reality itself as an underlying mistrust: will this too disappear in a world-ending event that no one else recognizes?

Prayer in the Nothing Place

The challenge for those of us drawn to contemplative spirituality, as I see it, is that contemplative practices such as silent meditation, Centering Prayer, or mindfulness (especially in its original Buddhist context)—any that involve quieting mind and body and letting go of thoughts—tend toward similar terrain as I encountered on 5meo-DMT: the softening of self/other differentiation and of identity as a separate self, and a sense of timeless immersion in the present moment. We are, therefore, more likely than most to activate preverbal traumatic material when we seriously engage these practices. How do we work with that? Can we access a similar sense of safety in approaching self-less or nondual states of consciousness that those raised in healthy settings as babies already have in their systems? Can we bring repair to the Nothing Place, where we internalized not safety but the falling out of existence before we even got to exist?

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a form of meditation inspired by the 13^th century Italian mystic, Clare of Assisi, who prayed by gazing upon an image of the risen Christ gazing back at her. This fascinates me because of how closely her way of praying resembles how babies and mothers share gaze. Clare not only gazed at Christ but received herself reflected back to her in Christ’s gaze, as babies do with their mothers. It’s a way of praying that invites the participation of preverbal and nonverbal parts of ourselves. And because it mirrors early bonding between mothers and babies, it’s also a way of praying that strikes close to the wound of the Nothing Place and the destruction of our earliest attachments.

In a letter to a spiritual companion, Clare suggests four movements to her way of prayer: gazing, considering, contemplating, and imitating. I modified these four movements to reflect adoptees’ need to access a sense of being seen and held in the Nothing Place as we let go into the silence and stillness of contemplation, and to carry that sense of holding into our daily lives.

I meditate with a traditional Christian icon, but any image that conveys a quality of being fully known and held can work— that of a divine figure, a sacred symbol, or even a landscape that evokes a sense of the sacred. It need not be explicitly religious. In fact, it need not be an external image at all but a general sense of being held in the gaze of the Divine, or of awareness itself—our own awakened nature bearing witness. Feel free to adapt these movements to suit your own beliefs, temperament, and preferences.

The Practice

Take a comfortable relaxed position. Light a candle in front of your image (if you have one), say a prayer, meditate, whatever helps you to enter sacred space. Set ordinary thoughts and concerns aside and pay particular attention to what’s happening in your body as you meditate on each theme. Allow these movements to unfold organically. They need not follow a strict linear sequence. Following the breath or repeating a mantra, short prayer phrase, or the suggested prompts can help you stay focused and grounded. If you start to feel overwhelmed, or if you feel unsafe and cannot meet that sense of unsafety with curiosity and compassion, step away and return to what helps you feel safe and grounded. Go slowly and gently, experiment, find what works for you. Don’t expect anything dramatic. Just receive what comes, without trying to make something happen. These movements can also be integrated with other forms of prayer or meditation. I find that it works well, for instance, with Lectio Divina, an ancient Christian practice of meditating on sacred texts. When Lectio Divina leads me into a sense of being held by the Divine, I can then turn toward these four movements:

MOVEMENT ONE: RECEIVE THE GAZE

“Before I had a name, you saw me.”

Notice any tensing or softening in your body as you begin to receive the gaze in this place of mystery, deeper than name or form. Notice any feelings of longing, fear, shame, anger, or perhaps numbness or dissociation. Let them come and go. What is it like to want? To receive?

MOVEMENT TWO: SINK INTO THE MIRROR

“You are the mirror that shows me I am real.”

Continue to soften and allow yourself to sink more deeply into the gaze that reflects your true self, held in an affirming embrace that is an ultimate “yes” to your existence. What arises in you? Stay with it even when what comes eludes your ability to put it into words.

MOVEMENT THREE: LET GO

“I open to the Nothing Place now.

I soften in body, heart, and mind.
I release all effort.
I unclench my selfhood.

Here in your gaze, Beloved, I can dissolve.
I can revisit the ruptures that once unmade me
and still be known,
still be remembered,
still be held.”

This is not regression but what is happening freshly now in relation to parts of you that carry the body memory of nonexistence. You may feel as if boundaries are softening or even evaporating, yet you still retain agency here. Continue to allow whatever feelings arise as you are able. If difficult emotions come, can they simply be welcomed and held in this field of compassionate witnessing?

MOVEMENT FOUR: SURFACE

(Open your eyes if they’re closed and look around you. Take in your surroundings with all your senses.)

“I marvel that I uniquely inhabit this intimate corner of the universe—
that I inhabit these senses, this body, this mind, these circumstances and relationships.

Sustain me, Beloved, I take refuge in you.
Remember me and hold me in your heart
through time and timelessness,
form and formlessness.”

Amen.

Savor any sense of holding that you accessed during the meditation. Give thanks as you re-enter the daily round.

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Closing thoughts: I find it helpful to have a mantra or short phrase on hand—ideally devotional in tone without stimulating a lot of thinking—not only to maintain focus and intention but also because, at certain points in the meditation, I feel moved to respond. This feels like completing a circuit somehow, analogous to the call-and-response dynamic between mother and baby: We are unfreezing our call-and-response-ability at a primal level. I tend to use a shortened version of the Jesus Prayer, the heartbeat of Eastern Orthodox spirituality: “Lord Jesus Mercy.”

For Buddhists and others for whom this meditation may imply an unhelpful dualism between self and other, I recommend checking out Buddhist psychotherapist Tara Brach on mindful prayer. This meditation can also provide a safe ambience for parts work such as Internal Family Systems.

To learn more about Clare of Assisi, I recommend Clare of Assisi: A Heart Full of Love by Ilia Delio, O.S.F. (Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 2007)