Expanding conscious awareness is at the heart of all psychedelic experience.

It’s not possible to improve in any lasting way until you are aware of every element of yourself, including ‘shadow’ and repressed parts you’d prefer not to acknowledge.

Most of us intuitively know what we need to do to be better people. If that’s the case, why don’t we do it?

This isn’t a moral failure. It’s not because you’re a bad or weak person or have no willpower. It’s because you’re stuck repeating lifelong patterns. The brain has a structure called the Default Mode Network. This network is responsible for putting you on auto-pilot. It is essentially an energy saving mechanism, but the result can be deeply engrained habit and thought patterns – some harmful – that can be difficult to break out of.

But once you identify these patterns, you can begin to rewrite them one by one – with the help of psychedelic medicine. Psilocybin in particular works on the Default Mode Network by temporarily dissolving those ‘ruts’ and allowing us to step outside them, experiencing what it is like to be a different person (kind of). This is what is referred to a being in an ‘altered’ or ‘expanded’ state of consciousness. It is a very different feeling from being ‘intoxicated’ or ‘high’. It opens your brain up to fuller power.

Did you know your subconscious stores every single experience you ever have? It also translates these experiences into meaning, puts labels on them, and attaches emotions and beliefs to them. The subconscious mind is reactive and irrational.

Every moment of every day, your subconscious is shaping how you see the world. 

The more good things that happen, the more you think good thoughts, have positive interactions with others, maintain a clean home and body, surround yourself with uplifting healthy friends, and believe in abundance, the more you will see the world in that light. Those patterns in the brain referred to above may begin forming into helpful ‘ruts’.

However, the opposite is also true. If we spend time in negative, toxic environments, have chronic stress, or think harmful thoughts, those things instead become engrained in the Default Mode Network.

Anytime we are not fully conscious, we are slipping into our subconscious. This ‘autopilot’ is a function of our conditioning, which began in childhood.

Almost all of us live our day to day life in subconscious programming – some brain scan estimates have shown only 5% of the day is spent in a fully conscious state.

When we try to push ourselves out of autopilot because we aren’t happy with our conditioning and the choices that our autopilot are making for us, we face significant resistance from our body and mind.

As one example, this is why new diets are SO hard to stick to, and why we recommend putting as much of your eating schedule and food choices on autopilot as possible.

This resistance is called homeostatic impulse, and its sole existence is to create balance in the body.

Of course our brain is primed to expend as little energy as possible, and this is why it prefers to spend as much time as it can in autopilot – in the subconscious. Habits and routines feel comforting, but following those routines and habits keeps us stuck in them.

So when we prepare to truly change – grab the steering wheel and FORCE our car out of the rut, we have to be ready for it to take more energy. We should expect to feel exhausted for a little while. Physically fatigued, even. And we should have a recourse for this – some other area of life should ease up to make room. 

If you are stuck in a cycle of disempowerment, it is important to understand that this is a well honed evolutionary response, and no reason to feel personal shame. Shame is a misreading of the truth…that this is how your body (and especially your brain) have evolved over millions of years to work. It actually means you are functioning exactly as designed! (Doesn’t mean it isn’t frustrating, though.)

You’ll know your brain is trying to pull you back into familiar comfort if you hear messages like “you deserve a break/treat”, or “I’ll just do this later” or “I can catch up later” or even “I don’t really need to do this to be happy, do I?”

It’s also common to feel physical symptoms, such as irritability, anxiety, feeling “off”, or like something is wrong. This is all just your brain, encouraging you to quit making life so difficult for it.

You can increase your consciousness by changing your brain at a physical level. One way to do this is through increasing neuroplasticity. Researchers have found that the brain changes through life – structurally and physiologically. It can reorganize itself – and even grow new connections between neurons.

Ongoing practices of yoga and meditation are two common methods for increasing neuroplasticity in the brain. These practices – like any mindfulness activity – help you focus your attention on a present moment. Over time, this actually begins to restructure the brain. MRI scans have shown that consistent use of these practices can thicken the prefrontal lobes. Love-based meditation (closing your eyes and thinking about someone or something you love deeply and freely) strengthens the limbic system, which is our emotional center. Any kind of attention-based practice will build this ‘muscle’.

Psilocybin also works to increase neuroplasticity, but does so in a shorter timeframe. Each session of consciousness-altering psilocybin you complete will significantly encourage new neural pathways, and increase communication throughout various brain networks and regions.

So when you combine as a practice, psilocybin therapy with other consciousness-expanding activities, a symbiotic relationship forms. They can begin to disrupt existing or default thought patterns, and wake us up out of subconsciousness so that we live life more fully awake

Yes, it does take more energy. The brain will be working harder, but it will also be stronger. It is very common for our clients to come out of a macrodose psilocybin session feeling like completely exhausted at a physical level – like they just ran a marathon or worked out for four hours. Emotional and mental work takes a lot of physical energy, so this is to be expected. Nourishment (physical and emotional) is crucial after a big journey.

Once we start becoming more fully conscious, and spending more time in active consciousness vs autopilot, it is easier to see within ourselves those engrained patterns that have been holding us back. We separate our conscious from our subconscious a little more in order to evaluate it.

The subconscious operates in flow. It just goes around feeling, reacting, responding, doing. To be conscious is a meta-cognition type activity – it is to feel yourself feeling it. To observe it, like stepping out of your usual body or mind for a moment to just watch as an external entity. This is, incidentally, also an effective and safe way to begin processing prior trauma.

One of the best ways to learn how to listen is to spend time alone. To sit still, to hear your intuition and to witness your entire, pure Self. Alone energy is the purest form of energy that we have. You can use this time to process and debrief over past interactions with others. For example, if you go to a business lunch and then home afterward, use some time alone at home to sit still and process the lunch. What went on? How did you feel? Was there value in it? Did anyone make you feel inferior or upset? This is a valuable activity, rather than just moving from task to task. The latter can leave us with racing thoughts at the end of the day when we finally try to quiet our mind and sleep, leading to insomnia.

When we keep going with active consciousness practice, we will eventually witness the darkest parts of ourselves that we want to keep hidden.

But – it’s also freeing to separate ourselves from our thoughts. To realize that our thoughts are not us. That our thoughts do not define us – they may not even be true. They’re just…there.

You do need to be in a safe environment in order to begin tapping into your conscious self and raising your conscious awareness.

One key practice to build your active consciousness muscle (in addition to yoga, meditation, breathwork and psychedelic medicines) is to ‘wake yourself up’ several times during the day. Snap out of your subconscious autopilot and bring your focus back into your body and the present moment. Observe everything about what you are currently doing with all of your senses. Bring yourself into the present moment and space.

This is also an excellent practice for grounding yourself, which is a very helpful practice when going through active grief. It doesn’t matter if you are doing the most mundane thing, stop and focus on every little thing you can. How your house key feels sliding into your door lock. The sounds your door makes as it creaks open. How shampoo feels on your fingers. The warmth of the laundry out of the dryer. The sounds of birds or dogs or cars on your walk. The little insects on the sidewalk. This type of micro-attention is very focusing and grounding because it constricts your focus into smaller, manageable tasks, which gives us reprieve from the overwhelming emotions.

We’ll leave you with this concept: Creating change has to happen in the present moment. No change exists in the past or in the future. You either change right now in this current moment, or you don’t. Planning for change (such as to start a new diet or exercise routine) is not actually changing. Planning is often needed for long term success – but execution is the key to getting where you want to go. It’s a little like planning a vacation versus actually going on it.

How many aspects of your life have you chosen versus how many have you inherited? Perhaps use this as your next journaling prompt. If you aren’t a journaler, take yourself on a nice long walk or hike and reflect on this question along the way.

Here’s to becoming more Conscious human beings!