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In This Article:
- How Zen meditation opened doors to spiritual growth and psychological insight
- The powerful, and sometimes frightening, role of psilocybin in deep healing
- Why psychoanalysis was the foundation that supported transformative breakthroughs
- What happens when spiritual and therapeutic paths converge
- The importance of guidance and safety when exploring plant medicine
Zen, Shrooms, and Shrinks: One Woman’s Journey
by Joan K. Peters, author of the book: Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis.
During the first years of my analysis, my parallel existence in psychoanalysis and ordinary life was mostly straight as train tracks. Psychoanalysis was about The Past, where the pain was. Ordinary life was about The Present, which was pretty good, despite my insomnia, nightmares, and compulsions.
Sometimes, though, those parallel lines intersected. When they did, sparks flew, particularly with Zen and psilocybin, which were part of my ordinary life. Like psychoanalysis, they took me to the remote interior of my being and pushed my limits.
Together, the three may have pushed me farther along the healing path than I could have gone with any one of them alone. In those overlapping moments, I had a front-row seat to the drama of my psyche, usually accompanied by a cathartic finale.
Of the three ventures, psychoanalysis has been the most transformative for me, but also the most laborious. Zen sometimes streamlined its complexity, as it did when my initial meditation retreat unleashed my unabashed loving feelings towards everyone. The intensity of psilocybin catalyzed the glacially-slow analytic process. In turn, psychoanalysis changed the way I practiced Zen and used the psychedelics.
Zen As A Spiritual Path
I came late to spirituality. I was too busy with daily life to take a step beyond it -- until my sixties, when the shock of aging made me want to spend some time exploring dimensions of my mind other than the familiar ones.
How to pursue spiritual life wasn’t obvious to me, however. My life-long wariness made me distrustful of groups, especially spiritual groups, and especially ones with charismatic male leaders, costumes, and buckets of money.
If I were going to find a spiritual path, it would have to be pretty down-to-earth. Buddhism seemed like a good option. The teachers I came across mostly seemed sensible. They didn’t ask you to chant on street corners, or give them all your worldly possessions.
Buddhism seemed like a spiritualism you brought into the life you had, rather than one you exchanged your life for. After visiting several Buddhist groups, I settled on a Zen teacher and her local sangha (meditation community).
Buddhism and Psychological Awareness
Before I took up Zen, I hadn’t known that Buddhism, which is said to begin with a study of the self, is based in psychological awareness. It examines emotions minutely. In one Buddhist text, I came across a list of eighty-nine ensnaring negative emotions, like jealousy or grasping. It cautions against building stories about those emotions, as in “I’m jealous because no one will ever love me.”
Being psychologically-oriented, the easy flow between Buddhist philosophy and psychology appealed to me. But once I started analysis, I was floored to learn how much Zen resembled relational psychology, which “clearly and emphatically situate[s] enlightenment in relationship” according to Asian scholar Peter Hershock.
After I read more about it, Buddhist philosophy started to sound a lot like attachment theory. And not just to me. Buddhist psychologist Mark Epstein describes meditation as holding the mind “just as Winnicott described a mother ‘holding’ an infant.”
That may be why Zen satisfied my psychological needs for a couple of years. It took me into the conversation about the mystery of being alive without ignoring my emotional murk. Nonetheless, l continued to feel places in me that seemed so twisted that Zen couldn’t untwist them.
Sometimes the painful emotions that meditation aroused didn’t dissipate. My body might become so agitated and my legs so restless that at times I simply could not sit still to meditate. What surprised me is that I’m apparently not alone.
Jack Kornfield, an immensely popular Buddhist psychologist and author, did an informal study in which he found that half of his retreatants were “unable to sustain mindfulness practice...because they encountered so much unresolved grief, fear, wounding and unfinished developmental business....”
Although the Koan practice I do offers specific tools to help meditators explore emotion, they may not work for people with too much inner turmoil, like me. I soon realized it would be asking a lot of any spiritual practice to heal complicated neuroses, which is why, after a couple of years of Zen practice, I decided on psychoanalysis.
I didn’t expect psychoanalysis to explore the unknowable, or address the primordial mystery. Zen did that well, especially as I faced aging, deterioration, and death.
Psychoanalysis and Zen
In her contemplative Christian tradition, Kristi, my psychoanalysist, also meditated, went on retreats, and had a personal teacher. I felt lucky to have found an analyst who understood the importance to me when, in the third year of my analysis, I asked my Zen teacher if I could become her personal student and take my vows under her guidance. Kristi also understood what a breakthrough that was for me.
Identifying enough with a group to officially join it, declare my allegiance to its precepts, and publicly announce my private beliefs might not have happened without psychoanalysis. I don’t think I would have put myself under the tutelage of a teacher. No one in my local sangha had done that.
I’d never had a mentor before, for anything. If I hadn’t been in analysis, I doubt I’d have risked a relationship that hierarchical and dependent.
Even my husband, Peter, who doesn’t seem to have a spiritual inkling, was so glad that I’d found something this meaningful, that he drove up to Northern California to pick me up from the retreat where I presented my vows. And, he listened attentively to my excited portrayal of the ceremony.
Pushing Back Boundaries
Zen was pushing back my boundaries, taking me into hitherto unknown layers of myself, and into greater intimacy with others. Like analysis.
Taking vows, you bare your soul to your teacher; in our local sangha, we bared our souls to one another in sharing what we experienced in our meditations.
I’d been much too guarded for that before. As our teacher says, “Intimacy is disarmament, a laying down of certainties, a dropping of my weapons, my anger, my separateness.” Everything that’s difficult for anxious me.
The Intersection of Zen with Psychoanalysis
For my Zen practice to deepen, I needed its intersection with psychoanalysis. When I got it, there was an enormous payoff.
In the winter of 2018, at another week-long Zen retreat when I was wobbly going in, the psychoanalytic assist got me through to a mini-enlightenment.
It was at the SFO airport that the ecstasy hit me. As I sat in my plastic seat to wait three hours for a late plane home and watched one person after another pass by, I was awed by the uniqueness and enormity of their individual lives; each like the subject of a documentary revealing an important truth.
This was a different angle on things than the one I experienced from analysis, even in those glowing moments when I felt a profound connection with Kristi, and through her to others in my life. At the airport I felt a connection with everyone.
That glimpse of what I thought might be enlightenment, like others I’ve had, lasted about a day. But each time I felt changed by it, if only by knowing that it was possible to feel so much a part of the world.
Blending Psilocybin Mushrooms and Analysis
The intersection with psilocybin and analysis was similar, in that I needed Kristi’s help in exploring the dark corner of my psyche.
Psilocybin had charmed me since my first trip in my twenties. I loved the thrilling high and the remarkable beauty the mushrooms unveiled. Although I took psilocybin largely as entertainment when I was younger, it gave a clarity about what I believed and why I believed it.
It allowed me to understand people better. I thought I could see the interplay of their public, social, personal and private emotional layers; I could even visualize them at different stages of their history.
Taking psilocybin with Peter made me aware of his deeply loving and innocent inner self hiding underneath his Mr. Spockian rationality. In that way, psilocybin guided the most important choices in my life, about who to be with and how to be with them. But in a party atmosphere it was hard to examine it.
Then a lifetime passed. By the time I was well into my second analysis, psychedelics had become plant medicine. Maybe hallucinogens were still mostly recreational for college kids, like my students told me, but psychologists and neuroscientists were now testing their effects on addiction, depression, and PTSD.
Michael Pollan’s 2018 book, How To Change Your Mind, documenting this psychedelic revival, was number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. Psychedelics were no longer about turning on and dropping out. This was dropping down into your deepest self for healing and understanding.
During my initial journeys, as we now called them, when I took fairly cautious doses, I felt the way I did at the end of meditation retreats. Words like “harmony” and “simultaneity” came up for me throughout. The pockets of fear weren’t disturbing. They were just there, like a little brother you’d had to bring along with you on a date.
Kristi thought that I was finding in psychedelics the integrated self she was helping me to know. Here was a psychedelic assist for psychoanalysis. So far so good. But after a few more lower-dose journeys where I communed with nature and myself, I decided I wanted something more.
With my plant-medicine “guide” -- who took all of this as seriously as Kristi did -- I set my intention to get to the bottom of my psyche. I wanted to go deeper than Zen or psychoanalysis had taken me so far.
Those paths were slow, and I was impatient. I wanted to know what was haunting me through my insomniac nights, and dropping me into galactic aloneness in meditation. When I told Kristi about my plan, she commended my “fierce desire to press towards wellness.” I’m not sure that’s exactly what happened, but by doubling my dose of the plant medicine, it may well have been.
Bad Trip or Breakthrough?
Without psychoanalysis, that psilocybin journey might just have been a bad trip; and maybe a lot worse than it was, had I not had the stability from five years with Kristi. The intersection of the two was crucial. On its own, I had always risked going down some very dark passageways with plant medicine. This time, analysis turned that night of horrors into insight.
As frightened as I’d been with Zen, psychedelics, and psychoanalysis separately, combined they provided a sense of wholeness. However, it was a fleeting one, until the last stage of analysis when that fleeting sense of wholeness would become my norm—the landing place in myself that I return to.
Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved.
Article Source/Book by this Author:
BOOK: Untangling
Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis
by Joan K. Peters.
With the drama of a novel, Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis tells the story of a turbulent and transformative psychoanalysis in this first ever in-depth patient's account. Joan K. Peters’s story lays bare the inner workings of this complex treatment, which takes place behind closed doors, is rarely spoken about, and is largely unknown outside of professional circles.
A polished, poetic, and often funny writer, Joan's willingness to expose her own demons brings psychoanalysis to life, from the intense strife to the fierce love that can develop between patient and analyst. Joan’s first analyst, Lane, helped Joan alleviate tormenting and recurring nightmares and to find herself by discovering her family’s secret past. Her second analyst, Kristi, guided her through the frightening depths of that past to a yearned-for freedom. Unique in its reach, Untangling reveals the mysteries that lurk beneath the surface of our psyches.
For more info and/or to order this hardcover book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Joan K. Peters is a Professor Emeritus of Literature and Writing at California State University at California. She is the author of her newly published book (February, 2025), Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, from Roman and Littlefield. Living in California with her husband Peter and their two dogs and six chickens, she continues to write about psychoanalysis.
Article Recap:
In this deeply personal narrative, Joan K. Peters explores the unique synergy between Zen meditation, psychoanalysis, and psilocybin. Each path, while transformative on its own, came alive in unexpected ways when combined, leading her toward a lasting sense of self-understanding and emotional healing. Her story invites readers to consider how healing can come from the most unlikely intersections.
#ZenAndPsychedelics #PsilocybinTherapy #SpiritualHealing #EmotionalWellness #JoanKPeters #PlantMedicine #Psychoanalysis #TraumaRecovery #Mindfulness #InnerSelfcom
