Writing High

In which we consider the blessings and challenges when one's muse is a plant spirit.

For artists and creatives using cannabis, I gather this is not a unique conundrum: when we are elevated on cannabis, we sometimes experience a sense of having profound ideas and insights, and then when we’re sober, they’re gone. Or, maybe we manage to write down or record our ideas, but they seem like vague scribblings the next day. How do the insights we receive when we’re using cannabis transfer in a meaningful way to our “sober” everyday lives? 

Some may ask:  Why does it matter?  Why do we need to do this?  If cannabis helps us feel better, unwind, feel more loving and have more fun, isn’t that enough? There has to be a reason that 17% of Americans use cannabis – although I’d venture it’s a much smaller subgroup of us who are exploring cannabis to support creativity and art-making. 

Maybe it’s my lifelong impulse to create – which has always included writing. Maybe it’s the confluence of personal life events: use of entheogens, midlife re-examination, and shifting of priorities. I love being creative and I want to create from my experiences. As breathwork and cannabis became more important to my self-care and growth, I was seeking for how to thread the needle between cannabreath and creativity.  I want to get high, have heart-opening and mind-expanding experiences – but I also want to be productive and see the real-world impact of my work.

About a year into my practice, I became more serious about journaling. I also started making notes of the date, the playlist I was using, some measure of how much cannabis I had imbibed, and stating my intention for the journey. (I’ve written this post on the impact of setting intentions.) I also started receiving what I will call “transmissions” – as if someone—or something—was sending me messages.  The voice was coming from within me, but it wasn’t that usual chattering voice that talks to me every waking moment of my life.

In early 2023, I received this transmission: 

January 12, 2023: One of the skills I need to be developing now is the ability to write about these journeys in a clear, descriptive, feeling way, to communicate the experience I’m having. This is a SKILL/DISCIPLINE [HE] can be working on. (It could be the only thing [HE] needs to worry about now.)  

To be able to bring back these experiences to the 3D level is the way that [HE] can process it.

Note the shift from first person to third person: the “HE”s were actually my own name, so I was speaking about myself. And the message was that HE/”I” could attend more intentionally to the writing that was coming out my cannabreath journeys.

I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with all my trip reports. I wasn’t about to subject anyone to the unedited whoo-whoo ramblings of my elevated self, but I continued to make journaling a structural part of my breathwork journeys.  A few months later, I received a bit more direction:

October 21, 2023: The point now of transposing the messages is sifting through what are private take-aways for my own healing, and what are things I can share with others or use to share with the world.    Also this impulse to record/journal will be a bit of a challenge to letting go, allowing, experiencing without narrating/over-writing the experience… something I’ll have to keep exploring)    

If I was actually going to publish, I would have to discern which are the personal messages for my own healing, and which might resonate with the larger world. 

As I started this project, I realized it’s calling on my ability to create a dialogue with earlier versions of myself across time, space, and states of being.  How does my elevated self from last year communicate and collaborate with my “sober” self— whose job it is to process these messages?  How do I transform “writing while high” into writing that makes sense and conveys its message across time?

For now, the sausage is being made by leafing through old journals, looking for coherent messages, identifying what might be useful or at least interesting for others. Looking for takeaways and messages. Looking for a narrative arc, a journey, that has been taking place over time. There’s a lot of personal healing work happening, particularly in the earlier entries, that almost make me cringe to share them.  Too vulnerable?  Too navel-gazy? Just TMI for others? 

One major difference in my Cannbreath Diaries, versus the thousands of other pages I’ve journaled throughout my life, has to do with the tone. Whereas the latter tend to be a steady drone of complaints, self-pity, and circling over the same issues year after year, my voice here in the Cannbreath Diaries is aspirational and uplifting. From this state, I write with a deep faith in humanity and our evolution, a belief that all is well. As I trace the steps of my own journey of healing and expansion, I have hope that this work can be helpful to others. 

I’m curious if others have used writing or other ways to record cannabis-inspired thinking, so please feel free to share your experiences with me here!