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“I describe myself as a philosophical minimalist. That is, I believe in as little as possible… Jettison all the baggage, all the new age claptrap, all the bullshit, all the spiritual bypassing. And just believe in as little as possible. But you get those things right, they are entirely sufficient. I’m putting my money on the redeeming power of love—in all its forms” Hello friends, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to jettison the baggage and the bypassing so we can fully show up to our life and calling. Today I’m sharing a powerful conversation on that subject, written by my wife, Trina Woods, MSW in conversation with Dr. Bruce Tobin. If you feel like you’re moving through a transition, and are ready to move beyond the baggage that keeps you exhausted, we’re partnering to share a virtual workshop on September 9th called The Architecture of Initiation; From Bracing to Becoming. Now please enjoy the article. Luck was on my side in the form of unfavourable weather keeping Dr. Bruce Tobin from kiteboarding on the rainy summer day he welcomed me into his home for an interview. I reached out a couple of days prior to ask if I could interview him about psychedelics and his thoughts on the role they play in the initiation of death and dying. There is a poignancy in asking a man of advancing years to talk about death, but throughout the interview it was Bruce’s vitality and youthfulness that struck the resounding note. He offered me a cup of peppermint and licorice tea as I settled onto the couch in his office, looking out the big window to his view of Brentwood Bay and beyond. He sat across from me with one knee bent, foot on the chair, sipping his tea in the loose-limbed repose of a man in his 20s, and I wondered if his cup held a secret elixir. I asked him if there were many other 78-year-olds out on the lake. He laughed, saying he and his wife are easily the oldest ones by a considerable number of years. He claimed they no longer go out in rougher weather, but I remained impressed. I was similarly impressed when I met Bruce in 2021—he was the teacher and I was a student in the first in-person training hosted by Therapsil, the organization he founded to advocate for the legal use of medical psilocybin. The training in psilocybin-assisted therapy for “end-of-life care” was aimed at developing a pool of qualified practitioners to work with patients receiving exemptions from Health Canada. The exemptions allowed these patients to legally take magic mushrooms to treat end-of-life distress. In the month before our training, Bruce flew to Saskatoon to work with Thomas Hartle, the first person to receive such an exemption. It was the middle of COVID, and he received approvals to work with seven cases, all consecutively. “It was like, I was dealing with these seven people, all dying, and it’s in this context where death is up in all of our faces,” he said. Soon after, Bruce received his own cancer diagnosis. Though it has since been successfully resolved, of the time he says, “it was like all the clients, plus COVID, plus my diagnosis. And after a while, I felt just completely besotted with death and dying.” As one might in his position, he decided to take a trip of his own. “I took about a six-gram mushroom trip, and just went right down to the bottom … Decrepitude, rotting flesh, graves. Just everything.” It turned out to be what he called “a great blessing.” At this point, he had taught a number of training seminars, and he said, “It was a confirmation of everything that I was sort of preaching from the pulpit.” His eyes welled up, and with sincerity he said the experience left him “ready to die.” I wondered if his readiness for death was the elixir in his cup. But before probing further I asked him to share some of his background as context for his work and his willingness to take such a large dose of psilocybin. He dove right in, beginning with his birth in 1948. “I was kind of coming of age through the ’60s,” he said. He first came across LSD in a magazine: “I can remember where I was when I read that article and saw those artist pictures depicting a psychedelic experience.” His first thought was, “I’ve got to check this out.” He took his inaugural trip as a 16-year-old alone in his bedroom; it was followed by a dozen or so more. While he describes these first experiences as mystical and positive, he also says, “the gems seemed to slip through my fingers within days or weeks.” It left him with a sense of ambivalence, unsure if it was doing him any good. Despite his uncertainty about the long-term benefits of psychedelics, he remained a seeker and eventually earned a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Psychology. His inroad to psychedelic therapy, though, initially came from concern for his mother’s depression rather than professional interest. After several years of unsuccessful treatment, Bruce asked her doctor to refer her to the Hollywood Hospital, a clinic in New Westminster that was still providing LSD therapy. “I was absolutely shocked when her shrink just made the referral without any push-back at all.” The treatment helped resolve his mom’s lifelong smoking habit and was a drop in the bucket towards his eventual work in the field. But he remained ambivalent about the long-term effectiveness of psychedelic therapy until many years later, when he came across the work of the renowned psychiatrist Stan Grof. He read the book LSD Psychotherapy on a family vacation and said, “it was a revelation to me.” He began right away to practice Holotropic Breathwork, and after reading Grof’s other books, he thought, “Here’s how to do it. Here’s how to make it stick.” By directing oneself inside, instead of just enjoying the way it made the day more beautiful, he began to heal his own depression. “I got deeply into all the emotional stuff that I’d been hauling around for, you know, 20 years, through this childhood.” Going inwards left him saying, “Let’s not just fart around with this surface stuff… Let’s get down to the deep stuff.” There is a depth of experience underlying Bruce’s lighthearted countenance. He says the emotional “cracking open” he experienced in altered states shifted him from a life in his head to one in his heart. “It was not necessarily all through grand insights, but through somatic experiences where I moved through the tremors and contractions,” he said. It wasn’t until Bruce turned 60 and retired from his psychotherapy practice that he overtly stepped into the field of psychedelic medicine. A chance encounter with a new friend who asked him for help after doing her own research into psychedelic therapy, “rekindled a thing inside of me.” Bruce has been an advocate for legal psychedelics for 18 years now, but he doesn’t believe psychedelic medicine or breathwork are panaceas. In fact, he has seen and heard of many people who take large doses and don’t benefit. “It’s about our decision to let go,” he says. This brought me back to the questions I wanted to ask Bruce about death–the ultimate letting go. I wanted to know if Bruce thought of the psychedelic experience as an initiation into death and the dying process. I explained my own view that initiations are often, as soul-centred psychotherapist Francis Wellers says, “contained encounters with death.” They serve to sever you from your former world and identity, providing an opportunity to cross a threshold to your larger self. Bruce agreed, saying, “the cumulative takeaway for me with psychedelics…is the experience is essentially about death.” He says psychedelics recreate the cycle of life-death-rebirth present in every spiritual tradition worldwide. He saw it in his early religious training, and he saw it in the longhouse tradition over the 30 years he worked with First Nations. Of his own experiences, he says, “the old self dying” led to a sense of “infinite possibilities.” And in characteristic fashion, he went deeper into the spiritual, saying, “in the experience of letting go there’s that place of unity, where there’s no need to hang on to anything because it’s all one.” Bruce pointed to the clinical research studies—dating back to Pahnke’s work with terminal cancer patients in the ’60s and continuing in recent times with the work of notable researchers such as Roland Griffiths and Bill Richards—looking at the connection between these “unitive” or what are referred to as “mystical-type experiences” and the relief of end-of-life distress. While he sees the potential for individual and collective healing in such experiences, he isn’t making a case for transcendence as the answer. He is pragmatic; Pointing to the transitory nature of altered states and the need for integration, he says, “when we come back, we have to find our feet and get grounded and be able to push back against all the pressures and shit that’s coming our way.” He says his dying patients tended to focus on cleaning up their “unfinished business.” I kept thinking of the refrain “die before you die,” attributed to C.S. Lewis, though likely of Sufi origin. But as I reflect on what psychedelics revealed to these clients facing their death, it’s the importance of living fully before you die that strikes me. Psychedelic experiences as an initiation into death and dying may provide an opportunity to both face ourselves and to transcend ourselves—to live fully so that we can let go fully. Bruce said it eloquently: “This is the promise of psychedelics: if one can dance with whoever and whatever shows up and keep dancing with it, yes, it will transform.” I was left with a sense that the elixir in Bruce’s cup isn’t just freedom from the fear of death, it’s gratitude. He described an opening of his heart to life, and a desire to give back, gained from his own transformative experiences. He says, “There’s this kind of cutting edge in the present of life, but everything behind that has died. And all of that death has made it possible to live in the present. I do feel gratitude at this point. And, I’m willing to die when the time comes so that they great chain of life can continue. I’d like to pass life on to those coming up.” Weller, too, wrote of traditional initiation as an “act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater circle of life.” Bruce’s psychedelic experiences, and those of the people he has helped to die, provided an initiation into dying in this way of taking one’s place in the cycle, in the continuation of life. As Bruce finished, we were both a little teary-eyed. I sat for a while appreciating the fact of him, living and breathing before me. His presence, alongside a deep conversation and a warm cup of herbal tea on a rain-soaked day, made me feel more fully alive. For more articles to help you live a more integrated life, join us on Substack. Healing SharesEach week I share vetted resources from trusted experts to assist your healing journey.
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