Steve Lee
We have an inner life. How we relate to it 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 that change 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 their 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 affect those around us. And we can learn to better endure the emotional pain of life and minimize the harm we might do to ourselves and others.
I am writing this book for those who are interested in their inner life and how it 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, told the entire cadet 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 thereafter, married, and moved into Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in Santa Rosa, California. This included daily meditation from 5:30am for an hour and a half, another hour and a half in the evening, and silent meditation retreats once a month. My wife and I lived there for nine years 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 at any depth. Problems would arise out of nowhere. 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 I did not know what that might look like.
So, I began studying psychology and earned a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. After practicing as a psychotherapist for a while, I began teaching. I was an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco, Santa Rosa campus, for over ten years, teaching in the graduate program in Counseling Psychology. I also taught Mind-Body Medicine and Couples Communication at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Santa Rosa for about ten years.
During my early 20s, while I was still attending the Air Force Academy, I began taking psychedelic plants and medicines, including cannabis, because I wanted to understand why these substances had become so important in our culture to so many people. As I continued to explore this curiosity throughout my life, these plants have offered me a greater sense of wakefulness to inner and outer activity.
Externally, psychedelics helped me see a much bigger picture of what was changing in our country during 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 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 to integrate what was discovered during plant journeys into all relationships.
This book explains how to integrate psychological and spiritual work and how psychedelic plant medicines can support that process.
Meditation, Psychotherapy, and Psychedelic medicine, used intentionally, showed me a voice from within and taught me 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.
