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Meet the Marijuana Muse

Through setting a clear intent to honor and explore the cannabis muse, you can venture beyond the obvious and awaken unlimited possibilities that nourish your relationship.

Imagine two people setting aside an hour or two to be alone together, get high, and just . . . see what happens. Perhaps they chat a bit beforehand about their anticipations and intentions, about their needs and desires, sharing what they might want to experience. Or maybe they just light up or ingest their preferred cannabis product and jump right in.

In either case, these two people are entering into an agreement, even if unspoken, to spend time together under the influence of a consciousness-altering herb. And no one can predict what’s going to happen when they get high. It’s always new – that’s one of the remarkable features of cannabis. You and your partner are opening up to the unexpected, to newness, to emerging opportunities, and who knows, maybe to an encounter with aspects of yourselves that you habitually keep well hidden.

Getting high together is always an adventure, and also somewhat of a risk for both of you. Grass reduces social inhibitions; it makes you more honest and therefore more vulnerable.

When you share marijuana with another person, one of the fundamental assumptions is that you are both willing to take a risk – to become more exposed and open as you venture into unknown realms together. This is an intimate act in and of itself. When you decide to light up or ingest together and focus on each other’s presence rather than drift off into solitary zones, you’re expressing your willingness to really see your partner, and also to be more fully seen. This is part of the built-in revelatory rush of getting high together.

During my years as a counselor in Hawaii, I worked with a couple named Jim and Danielle. At that point in my career, with steady income from writing self-help books and teaching meditation courses, I’d put aside my formal psychotherapy shingle. Instead, I was working with clients more as a spiritual counselor, shifting from helping emotionally disturbed people find balance to helping relatively normal people expand their inner experience and relationship potential.

Both Danielle and her husband were teachers at the local high school. She came to me first as a meditation student and then as a private client. After a few sessions, she told me she was thinking of leaving Jim because they were no longer finding any real joy in their relationship. Jim had no interest in seeking help from marriage counseling, so she was learning meditation to help her tolerate her current, rather lonely situation.

Jim had smoked pot back in college but had stopped when he got his first teaching job. Danielle had never tried it, but she said that Jim was now getting high most evenings alone in his study. I suggested that she join him and see if the muse of marijuana might open up their relating. She was a bit apprehensive, having been indoctrinated as a child to believe that marijuana was bad and dangerous. However, I gave her my positive perspective on cannabis, and she became more interested, especially when I explained how the marijuana high sometimes runs parallel to and awakens meditative insights.

Danielle told me later that when Jim heard of her interest in getting high with him, he was both surprised and pleased – and he agreed to show up at my office to further discuss this possibility. When I had them both there, I explained how the cannabis high could be approached in a mindful manner with another person. As it turns out, Jim already knew a bit about mindfulness meditation. He’d always seen using marijuana as a solitary retreat into blissful oblivion, not a shared experience – but he was open.

As I explained to them, relating at any level is all about focusing attention outward in the direction of your partner. Learning to finesse this power of compassionate attention is important in any couples experience.

I watched Jim and Danielle eye each other and then look away – but then they looked at each other again and smiled slightly. “So you really want to get high with me?” I remember him asking her. “Well, maybe,” she replied tentatively. “If you want to.” This made Jim frown. “You’ve always rejected that part of me,” he told her. “I know,” she said right back. “But like I told you, John thinks maybe getting high together might wake us up to each other again.”

Jim looked at me with a question in his eye. “You’re the meditation expert,” he said, “and you’re encouraging people to get stoned?” I shook my head. “No,” I said. “There’s a difference between getting stoned and getting high. We get stoned to zone out and disappear from the world. As I use the word, we get high to tune in to the world and explore new realms of relating. I’m recommending the latter.”

Jim and Danielle decided to experiment and see how using cannabis might affect their relationship. Jim wanted to just go home and jump into the experience, but I suggested that they first learn some simple steps to help aim their exploration in rewarding directions. Here are the basics of what I told them.

CONJURING THE MUSE

Whenever two people set aside time to enjoy the muse of marijuana, they’re participating in a ritual – they’re doing something together that has meaning for them. The act of partaking in the holy herb represents a shared willingness to discover whatever the muse is ready to bring forward at that moment. But even though the experience is always new, the cannabis muse is also highly responsive to the moods and intentions of the couple and to their immediate environment.

Humphry Osmond taught that “set and setting” (mind-set and environment) were crucial to the outcome of a cannabis experience.¹ I explained to Jim and Danielle that this set-and-setting preparation was key to conjuring the marijuana muse because our mood and mind-set as well as our surroundings powerfully influence the type of adventure that cannabis will elicit.

Psychologically, marijuana definitely makes you more suggestible. This means that you’ll tend to get pulled strongly into whatever external situation presents itself to you – so it’s important to be mindful of the setting you choose for getting high together.

This doesn’t mean you have to micromanage your environment; you simply need to be wise about avoiding situations that will be disturbing or challenging to deal with when you’re high. Also, you might choose what music you’d like to listen to together, and whether you want to be in your living room, backyard, bedroom, kitchen, or maybe even the park.

Likewise, you’ll want to pause before getting high and note how you’re both feeling, mood-wise. You might take a few preliminary quiet moments together to shift into a more relaxed, balanced, positive mindset so that habitual mental fixations don’t stir up unwanted worries and distractions. Toward this mood-balancing end, I taught Jim a basic here-and-now mindfulness process that Danielle was already familiar with (which you’ll learn later, and which is found on the High Together app discussed at the end of this book). I suggested that when they were at home, ready to partake together, they set aside five to ten minutes to discuss what they’d like to focus on when they are high, and then to move through the short mindfulness meditation just before lighting up. The fact that they both readily agreed to do this was a good sign for their future together – I could see there was still a spark of attraction and hope between them.

Why is this pause or refocusing step important? Because if you’re not in touch with your own inner presence and emotional condition, you can’t be present for your partner to relate with.

How you choose to approach the marijuana muse is, of course, up to you and your partner, determined by your current situation and intentions. Step by step, you’ll naturally discover your own unique path to ingesting grass together. Certainly, sometimes it’s fun to just light up and jump in with zero preparation. But openly talking about your expectations, spending a few quiet moments together to move through a centering process, and then consciously partaking of the herb with clear intent – this approach can add considerably to the experience that emerges.

IN THE BEGINNING

The preliminary process of setting intentions and talking about expectations can be quite informal. Just set aside a few minutes to talk about the general kind of experience you want to move into together. Be sure to let this discussion be free-roaming so that any ideas, insights, memories, and fantasies have the opportunity to emerge.

Danielle and Jim told me later that when they did this, they unexpectedly started talking about things they’d never shared with each other before. They found themselves opening up and exploring shared interests that they’d previously overlooked. Now that they were getting ready to go on an exploration, they found new realms in which to relate.

After talking about expectations, it can be helpful for you and your partner to take a few minutes to focus on being present together – to become grounded, centered, and connected. As you each consciously relax and focus inward, you can observe and accept your current mood and energy level. And as you do this, you can also purposefully expand your bubble of awareness to include your partner in your awareness. Then you’re all set to flow together into whatever the muse offers.

As Jim and Danielle told me, after they were done talking, they closed their eyes for a few breaths and listened together to one of my short guided audio programs, which led them inward, step by step, to observe their own current mind-set and emotional condition. Unexpected feelings began to emerge as they let the psychic dust settle, let go of past and future thoughts, and got ready internally to flow into a shared high experience.

This sort of preparation can be seen as an act of respect toward the cannabis muse. Marijuana is definitely a psychoactive drug, especially these days, with strong new strains of cannabis available in many different forms, and respect for the power of the cannabis muse is clearly called for. Just hold in mind that those moments right before you partake are when you determine much of what’s going to happen.

Sharing this preparatory moment, before the marijuana high, will provide both of you with a baseline from which to observe and guide your inner experience as the natural chemicals begin to take effect.

Then . . . you smoke, vape, eye-drop, or ingest the herb and commit yourself to being high for at least the next hour or two. You will at some point suddenly feel the transformative influence of THC – and this is always a bit of a jolt to the nervous system – as an altered state of consciousness takes hold of your awareness. By approaching the experience mindfully, as Jim and Danielle did, you won’t be caught off guard when the muse of marijuana lifts your awareness up and away into high gear.

THE LEAP OF FAITH

When I talk about the effects of cannabis on human experience, it seems to be almost impossible to avoid using what are commonly called “spiritual” terms. I’m a fairly pragmatic psychologist who no longer identifies with any religious organization or theological belief system. However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize, respect, and encourage experiences that exist beyond the material limits of scientific understanding.

I did some of my earliest research at Princeton, where Albert Einstein had been a professor for the last decade of his life, and his shaggy ghost seemed to still wander the paths late at night. Einstein once said, “I’m not a religious person, but I am definitely a spiritual person.” That pithy quote certainly applies to my experiences with cannabis, which does often awaken deep spiritual experience. In that spirit, I’ll be including the more mystic elements of getting high in this discussion – but not within any particular religious framework.

What’s key in this regard is realizing that you have the power to aim your mind’s focus of attention wherever you want. If you choose to explore meditative, mystic, or religious realms while high, and intently focus in those directions, you’ll effortlessly encourage such experiences. As you explore each of the seven dimensions of the cannabis experience that I listed earlier, you will probably discover many opportunities to open up and venture into the more mystic realms of human experience.

That’s certainly part of the allure of cannabis – it empowers us to shift into expanded states of mind where we feel more in harmony with the infinity of nature, and with our own deeper nature as well.

Often you’ll find that you can’t quite verbalize or even think logically about many of the experiences that come to you. Nevertheless, you’ll be impacted by them deeply, at both an emotional and an inspirational level. Whatever your personal religious or spiritual inclination, you’ll probably find that you can integrate your cannabisenhanced mystic experiences into your personal belief system. You’ll also perhaps discover that your religious beliefs begin to evolve and expand fairly rapidly as a result of using pot mindfully with your loved one.

For several thousand years, as the 1894 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report documented quite rigorously, cannabis has been accepted and often encouraged in Hindu life as a meditative sacrament.² You can still buy cannabis beverages on street corners today in New Delhi. Likewise, many religious sects throughout the world have used psychedelic sacraments to enhance spiritual experience; see my earlier book Mindfully High for further discussion of this. But other religions, such as Christianity and Islam, have always been hostile to the use of herbal sacraments to induce mystic experience. I originally trained to be a Presbyterian minister and ran head-on into this prohibition. In the years since, I’ve worked with many Christian believers who wanted to explore how cannabis might bring them closer to communing with their Creator but, to do so, had to ignore the remonstrations of their minister or hide their use of the herb. Even today, the established Christian churches in America remain hostile to the use of herbal sacraments to stimulate a closer encounter with God.³

If the prohibitions of Christianity are an issue for you, let’s clear the air right away: It’s common knowledge that Jesus made alcohol an integral part of his communion ritual, and alcohol does definitely alter consciousness. Why did my childhood church use grape juice rather than what Jesus prescribed? Perhaps partly to help the alcoholics who come to church for communion, but I suspect the answer is also because when people get high, they temporarily shift beyond any ego-based theological dictums, assumptions, and belief systems and let go of everything they’ve been taught and programmed to believe – which for a church is dangerous ground indeed.

HIGH SPIRIT

Marijuana definitely serves as a quantum shifter of your usual mind-set, taking you beyond the grip of restrictive one-liner beliefs and ingrained assumptions. As we’ll see in more depth later, psychologically, cannabis helps you shift your trust beyond ingrained religious concepts and tight ego control. It encourages you to look directly inward and explore realms of deep spiritual realization beyond the confines of a particular theology.

When high, you choose to listen to your own inner voice of wisdom and truth and to trust in your natural ability to open directly to and embrace the universal human virtues of compassion, honesty, trust, faith, joy, and service.

When you have a mystic experience while relating intimately with your partner, you can share from the depths of your heart and soul. Beyond all the great sexual and psychological insights and encounters that might come to the two of you, there exist deeper realms of intimacy where the muse of marijuana reveals truly remarkable insights and realizations. And these experiences definitely help develop new bonds of togetherness.

I suppose I’m limiting the readership of this book and program by openly talking about spiritual dimensions here at the beginning. However, in the spirit of full transparency, I want to let you know my personal perspective on the value of cannabis at the deeper levels of relating. When you approach the experience of getting high together mindfully, you’ll discover that the mundane and the mystic, the physical and the ephemeral, the logical and the transcendent elements of human experience often merge into a greater whole. A higher vision and a most fulfilling shared experience are always waiting. When dealing with something as vast as the human mind, and introducing a chemical that can transform that mind in unpredictable directions, it’s important to honor the marijuana muse and approach your experience reverently, in the very best sense of that word.

This is the great joy of cannabis, as well as its great value – it opens us up to new experience, and that’s how we grow. And when we share these high experiences, we grow together!