Steve Lee
We have an inner life. How we relate to this inner life makes all the difference in the world. Dreams, feelings, thoughts, memories, fantasies and insights are the voice and activity of the inner life. It is alive with experiences changing moment to moment. Sometimes it appears to us in ways that seem very foreign or weird, gratifying or ecstatic, and painfully overwhelming.
We did not choose our mind or body with all it’s thoughts, feelings and instinctual hungers. We were born into a particular situation in life that we had no control over. However, we have a way to make the most of this arrangement.
We have an opportunity to learn inner love and understanding which effects those around us. And we can learn how to better endure the emotional pain of life and minimize the harm we might do to ourself and others.
I am writing this book to those who are interested in their inner life and how that inner life is expressed with others.
When I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy in 1970, “I had a moment”. General Olds one of our commanding officers, said to the entire cadet student body, “You know men, Vietnam isn’t much of a war but at least it’s a war.” As a twenty year old I woke up to where I was and what I was participating in.
I quit shortly there after, married and moved into Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in Santa Rosa, California. This included daily meditation 5:30am for an hour and a half and another hour and half in the evening with silent meditation retreats once a month. My wife and I lived there for nine years along with our two boys. We continued to practice meditation in various Buddhist traditions until today, fifty years later.
After about 15 years of Buddhist meditation I began to realize the limits of spiritual practice and meditation. Meditation helped me stay calm and present but I did not know how to be a husband or partner to my wife, to any depth. Problems would occur out of no where. My unconscious was being activated but I did not know how to think about it or talk about it with my wife. The same was true with my sons. I felt there was a much better way to parent but did not know what that might look like. So, I began studying psychology, getting a Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy.
After practicing as a psychotherapist for awhile I began teaching. I was an Adjunct Professor at University of San Francisco, Santa Rosa campus for over ten years, teaching in the graduate program for Counseling Psychology. I was also teaching Mind-Body Medicine and Couples Communication at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Santa Rosa for about ten years.
During my early 20’s, while I was still attending the Air Force Academy, I began taking psychedelic plants and medicines including cannabis because I wanted to find out why these substances had become so important in our culture, to so many people.
Externally, psychedelics helped me to see a much bigger picture of what was changing in our country during the time of the Vietnam War. As a culture we were stuck in an age old problem: How to evolve as human beings? The symptoms included political corruption, violence toward the environment, and violence toward women and people of color. An ancient work in progress evolving slowly.
Internally, psychedelic substances helped me to realize I had an inner life. I realized I had a “self” that wanted to live a meaningful life. But how? The plants helped me move toward meditation, in depth psychotherapy, and learning how to integrate what was discovered during plant journeys into all relationships.
This book is about how to bring psychological and spiritual work together and how psychedelic plant medicines can help that process unfold.
Meditation, Psychotherapy, and Psychedelic medicine, used intentionally, showed me a voice from within. And how to listen to that voice which comes in the form of feelings, dreams, sensations, memories, intuitions and all the myriad activities we experience through this mind and body.
