SIX
Finessing the Chatterbox Phase
The muse often tickles the mind and evokes flows of unexpected insights, memories, plans, and vision.
Feeling carefree, secure, and loved encourages us to extend gestures and words of simple goodness.
Trust in your free spirit to speak and you’ll tap the courage and passion to express what lies deep within.
And remember that listening for an equal amount of time is the essence of true love.
From recent studies and cannabis folklore, plus my own observations while working with couples, it seems clear that most people tend to shift right into “head-buzzing” conversations when they get high together. This free-flowing verbal buzz can be great fun. Inhibitions are lowered, and bright new ideas, insights, memories, and realizations may come tumbling out into the open.
Remember Danielle and Jim, the schoolteachers in chapter 1? After her first high experience with Jim, Danielle reported back to me that they’d soberly done the preintake meditation I’d taught them and then ceremoniously lit and smoked Jim’s water pipe. Then they sat there, concertedly watching for the first signs of being high.
And then we suddenly popped almost at the exact same time into quite an extraordinary feeling. At first I seemed to lose touch with my breathing and body completely, even though you suggested that I make that central. Instead I got lost gazing for who knows how long at the magic dance of the candle flickering on the coffee table. Then without thinking I raised my gaze and looked up right into Jim’s eyes for oh so long – and then suddenly both of us burst out laughing. He just looked so serious, you know, and I realized I was being so terribly serious myself – and at the same instant we both saw how funny we were, being so serious! We hadn’t laughed like that for ages, not since the kids were born. And we went right from laughing to talking – about how we really needed to loosen up like this, and have some plain good fun again in our relationship.
She and Jim talked nonstop with each other for about twenty minutes, she recalled. The next morning, they discussed their “high insights” and found them surprisingly valuable.
Critics of cannabis scoff at high insights, claiming that they’re never worth anything afterward, but this isn’t true at all.
Cannabis is often called an “insight drug” because it breaks us out of habitual patterns and liberates the associative function of the brain so that it can entertain unique ideas and visions.
As mentioned earlier, when we take marijuana with a partner, one of the main first effects is the “chatterbox phase,” where seemingly great ideas and realizations bubble up spontaneously, often as if under great exuberant pressure, and get vocalized. We never know when these flashes will emerge – all we can do is be open to them and let them flow out.
However, it’s also well observed that the nonstop pot buzz of our great ideas can at times go on and on and become a bit bothersome, self-centered, and a detriment to deeper relating. If we become overly caught up in our own seemingly brilliant flow of ideas, memories, plans, and realizations, we can end up ignoring our partner’s inner experience entirely. When we’re fixated on expressing the rush of great thoughts flowing out of us, we often lose any sense of heart contact with our patiently listening friend.
Stream-of-consciousness chatter can be stimulating, insightful, brilliant, and fun but also sometimes in need of reining in.
We’re going to talk often throughout this book about how to mindfully observe and perhaps modify such behavior, because learning to do so goes to the core of what constitutes a successful loving relationship, where we
- stay aware of our sense of feeling connected;
- regularly tune in to the other’s presence and experience;
- observe old conversational habits and inhibitions;
- focus attention on our whole body; and
- spend equal time talking and listening.
Before getting high, you’ll perhaps want to talk about this “staying tuned in” theme with your partner as you share your deeper intentions and needs, and also act on fulfilling them together. Even in long-term relationships, all couples need to perpetuate the process of observing and transcending limiting communication habits if they want to grow into new realms of sharing.
CONSCIOUS EQUILIBRIUM
One of the main complaints that people who are not high have about talking with people who are high is that “stoners just jabber on nonstop and don’t ever listen.” This chatterbox “problem” is very important to address and transcend if you want your high encounters to be mutually enjoyable and fruitful. However, I don’t mean in any way to put down the exhilarating chatter-buzz that so often hits right when you are getting high.
It’s all a matter of balance, mindful interaction, and knowing when enough is enough.
And this brings up a clearly related theme – that of being not only a good talker but also a good listener. Relationships work best when there’s mutual conscious awareness of sharing the stage: talking half the time, and listening half the time. Deciding together to pay attention to this back-and-forth “broadcast/receive” balance when you are high is one of the best intentions you can set as you develop in a successful cannabis-supported relationship.
One of the serious misconceptions of the marijuana high is that we lose all self-control for the duration of the experience. It’s usually assumed that we simply can’t control our chatterbox talking sprees. But as a long-term teacher of mindfulness meditation using cannabis, I can assure you that you do have the inherent power to assume control of your social behavior when you are high.
What’s key is realizing that you have the choice to stay self-aware as you talk. Staying mindful that you have this choice is what makes all the difference!
If the chatterbox dimension is an issue for you, I recommend trying this: Turn your serious talkaholic dilemma into a fun game to play when you are high. First, before lighting up or otherwise taking your cannabis, openly talk about this chatterbox theme. Discuss which of you tends to talk the most, and how you both feel about that. The discussion can in itself be a challenge because most people are defensive about even considering that they’re sometimes a conversation hog. But if you ignore this theme, chances are high that you’ll suffer from a bothersome imbalance in your conversations when you are high.
Let’s look at why one person often talks overmuch while the other person listens overmuch. Chronic passive listeners tend to come from families where they weren’t adequately listened to; instead they were dominated by a brother, sister, or parent and grew up resenting the fact that their voice was not valued. This “nobody listens to me” attitude and assumption can become ingrained and mostly unconscious, but it needs to be openly dealt with for the health of your relationship – and when you are high, it reveals itself, and thus opens up an opportunity for addressing it.
Solution: Beforehand, consciously agree that you’ll signal physically when you’ve listened enough and are feeling fatigued by taking in so much information and chatter from your partner. Then, when you are high together and the time comes that you’ve listened enough, just raise your hand with palm outward toward your partner, signaling that it’s time to end the one-way flow of words.
The talker can, of course, feel free to finish the thought and then should gracefully become silent. The listener then can have an opening to speak.
This agreement to purposefully honor the “I’ve had enough for now” hand signal will prove a great additive to your conversations – and that’s true whether you’re high or not. What you’re seeking to attain is an active state of verbal equilibrium, where there’s a healthy balance between listening and speaking.
It does take energy and attention to listen to someone talking about their inner experiences. You’re having to imagine and attempt to comprehend all the images and ideas the other person is expressing, and this is definitely mental work. For a while it’s fun and interesting and even enlightening to listen to your partner remembering or brainstorming while flying high. But at a certain point, especially when you’re stoned, you’ll feel your attention waning and your breathing getting tight – you feel trapped, but you don’t want to be rude by interrupting and demanding either silence or your own time to speak.
Here again, the ability to maintain breath awareness while high saves the day. If you’re feeling as if you can hardly breathe, this means that you’ve taken in too much talk for too long at one time. You need a break.
So just gently and with a smile raise your hand, palm outward, with a slight nod to express your honest need for silence, for breathing room, for an end to the chatterbox buzz. If you’ve communicated about using this raised hand routine beforehand and experimented with it a few times, you’ll both find it perfect for gracefully shifting. You’ll consciously establish a fair and healthy balance between talking and listening in your relationship.
The fine art of listening while high is something you’ll want to practice until you fully master it, and here are the guidelines that I’ve found most valuable to establish as a habit when listening. First, don’t think that you have to come up with a response when your partner is telling you something. Very often, they’re not wanting advice or an argument or any other response; they’re just expressing something that needs to come out.
Talk therapy is just that – the therapist remains quiet throughout and lets the speaker fully express an inner memory, feeling, or condition. The healing process isn’t generated by clever analysis of the therapist or friend; it’s generated internally and often quite spontaneously within the speaker. You as the listener have only one role: to quietly hold your attention on the speaker while they talk.
But it can be harder than it might seem to remain quiet and not interrupt or offer advice or analysis. To facilitate this art of listening, I suggest the following: while your friend is buzzing with inner thoughts and monologue conversation, your primary job is to stay aware of both your own breathing and your whole-body presence – at the same time!
This technique is called the “two-at-once silencer” because as soon as you split your attention between two quite separate sensations – the feeling of your breathing and the feeling of your body, such as your feet on the floor – all thoughts inside your head automatically stop. It’s the same trick I teach in my book Quiet Your Mind and the associated app program, and I call it mental judo because it is a method of using a natural effortless function of the mind to achieve an otherwise arduous goal.1
Try this for yourself right now. As you read these words, expand your awareness to include the sensations of the air flowing in and out of your nose . . . and at the same time, also be aware of your left foot . . . and for good measure, also be aware of your right hand . . . and as you come to the end of this sentence, see if you can continue to stay aware of your breathing, your foot, and your hand and, at the same time, think about anything at all. If you can, you’re way ahead of me. And if you can’t, that’s how you can stay quiet in your mind while your buzzing friend is talking up a storm.
You’ll find that if you practice this mental judo to quiet your mind while listening, you’ll end up not feeling drained. In fact, this little inner meditation on your physical presence will serve to recharge your energy.
THE “BOING!” MOMENT
In a related theme, many people get upset when they get high, start talking, and then lose the thread of their conversation. We call this the “marijuana gap,” and it’s a universal phenomenon. Cannabis will set you off enthusiastically talking about something – anything at all – but then you might pause a moment to catch your breath . . . and not be able to pick up the thread of the conversation. Your mind just goes blank. You might say, “Umm, what was I talking about just then?” Your partner might not remember either.
This sudden loss of short-term memory, as we mentioned earlier, is part of the trade-off you must deal with when you get high. You simply lose your train of thought; you come to the end of your flow and get caught in the marijuana gap. When this happens – when you seem to just drop off the edge of your conversational cliff – it’s usually wise not to fight it. It’s better to shrug it off rather than struggle to pick up the drift of the conversation.
You can agree beforehand with your partner that if you hit a marijuana gap, you’re free to indicate that you’re letting go of that conversational thread. Set up a code word that you say when this happens. We say “Boing!” to gracefully bounce out of the verbal flow, and then both of us can take a conversational breather and let it all gracefully go. As we do this, of course, another topic can pop into mind, and off we go again. Or following a “Boing!” we might take the quantum leap beyond talking and shift into perception mode, now focusing on our sensory experience.
This works equally well when an idea pops into your high mind that leads you into inner thoughts and memories that begin to bum you out. If you’re expressing this line of thought, and you realize you don’t really want to continue focusing in that negative direction, set up the code word “Boing!” and just let that thought or conversation go. We’re trained never to abruptly drop out of a conversation, but when we’re high, it’s very helpful to be free to let go of an unpleasant or negative buzz. Just agree that when this happens, you can simply say “Boing!” and end that thought riff.
This situation arises often when we’re high because the associative flow of the mind is being stimulated with a rush of memories, imaginations, ideas, and so forth. Sometimes we get led into ugly memories or disturbing imaginations, and we need to be free to drop off that thought wave at any time. If you talk about this beforehand with your partner, there’s no reason to feel embarrassed because you suddenly don’t want to talk further about a particular theme, or because you suddenly can’t remember what it was you were talking about a moment ago. Just say “Boing!” and you can both effortlessly move on. Perhaps you might enter into a bit of silence. Tune in to your breathing . . . and give the other person open space to begin talking about a new thought flow.
You’ll find that the “Boing” moment is contagious. Your friends will start doing it too, high or not, and in all conversations you’ll gain the freedom to break off from what you’re saying when you feel you want to, no questions asked.
Marijuana does alter how we converse, and one of the downsides of talking while high is that you might forget what you were just talking about. But hold in mind that losing the thread of the conversation is only important if you’re trying to “act normal” and sound logically coherent. When you’re high, yes, there’s always going to be a trade-off. You’re temporarily sacrificing some short-term memory and logical coherence in order to gain the freedom to abruptly follow new exciting associative threads. When you get high together, you’re quite obviously agreeing to let go of your habitual ways of thinking and talking in the hope of accessing a more mysterious, free-roaming, intuitive function of the mind. That’s the giant plus of being high together.
When you and your partner are sharing this early chatterbox phase of a shared high, you’re both experimenting. You’re inviting the marijuana muse to affect your brain in ways that may make you seem temporarily a bit incoherent or dumb – but at the same time, you’re entering into a portal of consciousness that can lead to you to explore some of the more intuitive realms of sharing.
Each time you get high with the same person, you have the opportunity to evolve into new ways of conversing together. You may want to talk about your shared experience after your marijuana high is over so that you can come to new understandings of what works best when the two of you are high together. Just always hold in mind that you are relating through mutual respect and compassion and seeking new ways of sharing your inner realms with your partner.
CANNABIS GIGGLES
As we saw with Danielle and Jim, along with the chatterbox buzz of words, during that first wild rush of the marijuana muse, very often something quite different and remarkably important can spring into being: the marijuana giggles!2 This is an involuntary wonderful whole-body release of tension giving rise to an instant sense of euphoric well-being and contentment that can last physiologically for up to an hour.
When you are high with a partner, even when you are right in the middle of a serious discussion, one of you can suddenly get emotionally tickled and start laughing outright. Usually this ignites shared giggling in the other person.
I recommend that when you are high, you let go of the social rule that it’s rude to giggle. Instead, be ready to simply surrender to this primal, spontaneous process of the human body. And remember, you’re not laughing at your partner, you’re laughing with them.
By “marijuana giggles,” we don’t mean just an occasional chuckle. We’re talking about getting carried away by an uncontrollable giggle fit that might leave you both delightfully rolling on the floor like little kids, convulsively overwhelmed by a mutual laughing fit.
Why does cannabis stimulate giggling? Marijuana boosts the levels of serotonin in your brain, which, in turn, elevates your mood. Shifting into a mildly euphoric state can spontaneously activate a giggling response even if there isn’t a particular reason for the giggle. It’s been shown that THC’s cannabinoids stimulate heightened activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, causing increased poetic and metaphoric activity, and this can lead to seemingly outlandish and paradoxical thought patterns, which, in turn, provoke a response of hilarity and giggles.
As a therapist, I’ve come to hold shared giggle fits in very high regard. They provide much-needed emotional release of buried tensions and are a built-in mechanism for breaking beyond inhibitions and overly serious attitudes.
Medical research shows that giggling temporarily lowers your blood pressure, reduces stress hormone levels, gives your abs and other muscles a great workout, improves cardiac health, boosts your T cells and immune system, triggers the release of endorphins to lower pain, and leaves you with a general sense that everything in your life at that moment is just fine.3 In other words, when you feel a giggle fit coming on, welcome it as your very best way to improve your health and mood.
THE GIGGLEGASM
Giggling is similar in many ways to sexual release, as we’ll explore in a later chapter. Giggling is an accepted social expression of the basic orgasm response. It’s sometimes called a gigglegasm in the same spirit in which a rush of meditative realization is called a buddhagasm. As in full orgasm, with a gigglegasm, all seven energy centers of the body (the chakras) fire off at once, resulting in a deep, satisfying discharge of accumulated tension. The sensation is usually a pure delight as you surrender control and let the muse tickle your innards.
Unless your childhood was terribly restricted, you probably indulged in many mutual giggle fits with your friends. But you may have been punished for such raucous loud outbursts, especially when you were in school.
The marijuana muse provides the blessing of bringing this primary healing discharge back into your life – and it’s one of the most rewarding experiences to share with a partner! Just remember that when you’re giggling, you’re not laughing at your partner in any way; you’re just surrendering to a much-needed outbreak of hilarity.
There are now therapy methods that openly provoke laughter as a means of emotional release. I studied under Chuck Kelley (the founder of Radix Therapy) in my own therapy training and learned, from the tradition of the great Wilhelm Reich, how to elicit a prolonged f low of laughter in my clients.4 This training ran parallel with what I’d already learned from getting high with my friends and indulging in a great many giggle fits. It definitely gets the job done, blowing ingrained inhibition fuses and releasing a lifetime of buried tension.
CAPTURING YOUR BRILLIANCE
Each new time you get high with your partner, you’ll flow into a unique expression of the liberating chatterbox phase as your inhibitions and contractions get put temporarily aside and you surrender to the insights that the muse of cannabis can spark. Trusting this muse, welcoming the buzz, and at the same time staying mindful of your experience – this is the challenge.
And what about all those great ideas that you’ll share with your partner during a high chat? Yes, you’ll forget most of them afterward because you’re not busy establishing long-term memory traces. You’ll be fully engrossed in hearing how you express new ideas that come springing out of a seemingly infinite womb of insights. So many people get upset about losing the brilliant ideas they had when they were high – but that’s quite easily remedied.
First, with a little practice you can learn to pause after expressing a great idea, consciously tell yourself you want to remember that idea, and then think it through again so that it becomes embedded in long-term memory. Practice this “high memory” process a few times and you’ll get good at it. A bit of discipline, even when you are high, can be of great value. If you make the effort, you can usually remember a great idea the day after your high time.
Also, I advise keeping your cell phone handy when you’re high. If you have a great idea that you want to remember, go ahead and express it out loud, using your phone to record it – got it! Later, you can review your ideas and separate the wheat from the chaff, as my granddad used to say – you can determine what’s worth saving versus what’s a throwaway.
My observation is that it’s usually best to capture the first few great ideas that come to you, recording them on your phone, and then to just go ahead with the experience and let the rest of your thought flows come and go on their own. Return your focus to your partner and your inner feelings, and don’t fixate on catching all of the many great ideas.
ALLOWING FOR THE NEGATIVE
It may seem a bit strange to welcome anything negative as part of the chatterbox dimension of getting high together, but it has its rightful place in your experience. Over the years I’ve found the following suggestions of great value for couples getting high together.
Especially if you haven’t had a chance to catch up with your partner over the course of the day, you might want to include in the chatterbox phase (if you naturally have one) a bit of free conversational time to share with each other the high points of your day. It’s an excellent opportunity to reflect on what you’ve done and to discover the day your partner has had – all through the marijuana window, which invites associative thinking and insights. When you share consciously in this way, with the listener giving full attention, you’ll find that hidden meaning and deeper significance tend to arise. Of course, you must both remember to honor each other by allowing each other to speak without interruption and listening attentively.
Most people do their best to stay positive with this type of exchange so that they do not pull the high experience down, but I recommend the opposite. Take a few moments to blow off any negative pressure inside you. Give yourself, and equally your partner, the freedom to express what’s been bothering you on any front. In other words, share the golden opportunity to complain!
When you give each other permission to share the negative, you clear the air between you, discharge buried feelings, and reveal all of you. Just be sure to allot limited time for complaining – and raise your hand when you’ve heard enough. Fall silent afterward, and just relax into whatever pops up next. Almost always it will be positive.
PAUSE AND REFLECT
While you were reading this section, were you able to stay aware of the air flowing in and out of your nose? Let’s expand this one more step to prepare for when you’re high with your partner:
While staying aware of your breathing experience . . . the air flowing in . . . the air flowing out . . . expand your awareness to include your whole-body presence . . . and tune in to the feelings in your heart.
Now begin to imagine that you’re with your partner, and you’re getting high together. As you imagine the effects of the cannabis hitting you, imagine that you continue to stay aware of your breathing and feelings as the marijuana magic occurs. . . .
And now imagine that instead of immediately starting to buzz with thoughts and conversation, you continue to stay calm, aware of your breathing and whole-body presence . . . and also aware of your partner doing the same. . . .
And now imagine entering into the buzz of a great conversation – with you talking some of the time, then your partner talking, using the hand gesture to shift back and forth . . . and perhaps imagine having some fun and giggling together as well. . . .