I found my hand drifting to my solar plexus. It was something I often do, as if to rub a sore spot or to ward off contact there. And then, lying on the mattress, I recalled a black-and-white photograph that my younger brother, John, recently dredged up. It was of me at age 3 or 4 on the front lawn of our first home in Houston. I was lying flat on my back on the grass. Eli, 4 or 5, was lying directly on top of me. Apparently, he wasn\u2019t trying to hurt me; after all, our mother was standing nearby, taking the photograph. But the look on my face in the photograph was not one of happiness. I looked trapped. Suffocated.<\/p>\n
And from there, my memories leaped ahead a decade or so. This time, I was on my back, and Eli was sitting on my stomach with his knees pinning my arms to the ground. With his index fingers, he was stabbing away at my solar plexus. This really happened. It happened several times, to me and to John. And it also happened to Eli, being tormented by the neighborhood kids, and in the way of the bullied he had become a bully himself. John, who today is a psychologist, had moved on from all that. But I had not. I could still feel Eli\u2019s weight on me. I was still, in work and in life, trying to understand why bullies did what they did, the endless transmission of pain from one human receptor to the next. And amid that psychological inquest, I\u2019d fixated on what the world had done to Eli so as to forget what he had done to me.<\/p>\n
\u201cRobert?\u201d came Kay\u2019s searching voice. \u201cAre you still on your journey?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said. I lifted my mask and sat up.<\/p>\n
I had been there for 20 minutes. \u201cCompletely still,\u201d Zach said. \u201cCompletely relaxed.\u201d I found that hard to fathom. Kay offered me a second dosage. I agreed, and then, with the pipe back to my lips, I changed my mind, thinking: What if I forget any of this? I don\u2019t want to risk it. Time was now speeding up for me. Tomorrow I\u2019d be home, and I wanted to find out what I would be taking with me.<\/p>\n
\u2018That glimpse I had of myself\u2019<\/p>\n
So what did it all mean? What did the ibogaine do, apart from slapping my psyche about like a leaf in a blizzard? I\u2019ve been asking myself these questions, especially when I\u2019m irritable or despondent. And what I\u2019d say is that those questions are not so much an accusation as an invitation to explore \u2014 to connect and to grow while not losing sight of that glimpse I had of myself, once upon a time in a basement south of Tijuana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I found my hand drifting to my solar plexus. It was something I often do, as if to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[62818,62819,62817,169,33568,9,24,55,54,56,62815,1950,175,62816,1979],"class_list":["post-150065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-audio-neutral-immersive","tag-audio-neutral-informative","tag-audio-positive-escape","tag-brain","tag-mental-health-and-disorders","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-post-traumatic-stress-disorder","tag-psychedelic-and-hallucinogenic-drugs","tag-therapy-and-rehabilitation","tag-traumatic-brain-injury","tag-veterans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}