Dee Dussault - Ganja Yoga: A Practical Guide to Conscious Relaxation, Soothing Pain Relief, and Enlightened Self-Discovery

Dedicated to my husband,

my third love after yoga and weed.

CONTENTS

BHAVA NA SANA HRIDAYAM.

May this cannabis be a blessing to my heart.

T he first few times I consumed cannabis were so unremarkable that I cant recall them, but my third experience was a doozy. I was fifteen, in high school, adventurous, and ready for my long-promised adulthood. I can still see it: My boyfriend standing in the kitchen, his stringy black hair hanging down in his face, intently heating butter knives to red-hot on the stovetop. When they were ready, he dropped a huge plop of hash onto each of the knives, and then showed me how to sip the thick smoke through a funnel wed fashioned from a half-gallon pop bottle.

Inhale. It doesnt feel that rebellious, really. After all, Mom smokes weed. Hold. Ouch, this burns. Exhale. Immediately the room is spinning, I cant breathe, and my heartbeat is pounding in my head. I flail about, a fish out of water, knocking over the coffee table. The room closes in around me. Im tripping balls. Panic attack.

As a kid, I believed everything. D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) taught me about the evils of marijuana. I knew my mom did drugs in the back room; I could smell the skunky smoke and requisite Lysol each time and see the butts in the ashtrays after parties.

My aunt and grandmother did not do drugs, and I could tell they thought my mom should not either; their hints and indirect negative remarks were not lost on me. For my part, I was just worried about her, because I didnt want her brain to be fried like the eggs in the frying pan on TV.

One day in the sixth grade the police came to my school and showed us dirty bongs made of pop bottles, warning us about criminals who might offer them to us. I secretly died of embarrassment, certain mine was the only mother who had such paraphernalia at home. At a slumber party a year later, my friends found a baggie in my moms bedroom. I vehemently denied it was dope, even though they all knew it was. My plausible deniability was shattered after that, and I couldnt pretend Mom wasnt a druggie, a criminal, an outlaw. In protest, I refused to wash her dirty ashtrays.

Its no wonder, then, with visions of vicious criminals and brain cells cooking at a high temperature, that I struggled with anxiety when I did smoke. In addition to the anxiety, every time I got high after that, the intense sensation of panic would come back, a symptom of PTSD. Id project negative meaning onto everything anyone said, or, weirder, Id have the overwhelming sense that I could hear peoples thoughts or know that they were reading mine. And it was always negative. I spent many nights at teenage parties bawling my eyes out, trying to just be normal and get high like everyone else.

After a while, I gave up trying, assuming I must have an allergy to weed. I viewed cannabis the way I did booze: a drug that is fine for my mom and friendsand even my friends who were now puffing with Mom!but not for me.

The irony is not lost on me that I had such a negative experience with the plant early on, and now I am one of the leaders in the cannabis wellness movement. Much of my life consists of talking about how cannabis enhances my mind-body connection when I do yoga. When I think about how intense and awful that experience with weed was in my teens in light of my career, its like talking about two different drugs.

Twelve years later when I bravely tried cannabis again, I actively strove to overcome the paranoia and dissociative states. If I microdosed, I could mitigate most of the anxiety, and getting stoned was fun. By then I had practiced a lot of yoga while sober, giving me the tools to deal with hard stuff that came up. I was older, more psychologically mature, more knowledgeable about the plant, and, not to be overlooked, not overdosing with a bunch of sweaty teenage boys.

My relationship with yoga was far less traumatic. Slow, mindful yoga had helped me through a bout of depression in my teens, had given solace to my feelings of isolation and loneliness at college, and had soothed my nerves as I went through breakups in my twenties. I even brought it with me when I taught English in South Korea for two years. Its my longest-lasting friendship.

So when I developed a healthy relationship with weedfinallythe first thing I noticed is that it made yoga, like sex and music, far better.

I could quiet my mind in ways I had never before been able to do, despite my many years on the mat. Pot lifted a veil of mental fog that I didnt even know existed. Its a little like the years Id spent thinking my digestion issues were normal, until a friend (correctly) suggested maybe I was lactose intolerant. When I cut out dairy, my bloating disappeared and my definition of normal totally changed.

With the addition of ganja, my definition of yoga would never be the same. I could get to bliss and clarity in my meditations far faster and deeper than when sober. The mental chatter slowed down, and I could more easily connect with the profound space and silence inside.

Plus, I could finally feel the esoteric aspects of yoga that Id been reading about for years, things like chakras, which in yoga are seven vortexes of energy that run along the spine and have a coordinating color and psychological association. Being a smarty-pants, Ive always valued the rational mind and didnt believe in anything that couldnt be proven by science. Meditating on my heart, throat, or third eye when doing yoga sober rarely felt any different from focusing on the palm of my hand, lip, or any other nonchakra part. After I enhanced yoga with cannabis, however, the subtle yet not-so-subtle pulse of aliveness in these energy centers could not be denied, despite my rational academic minds disbelief in them.

Not only did I feel chakras when I did stoned yoga, I found myself experiencing orgasmic bliss from them! Spirals of cascading pleasure and delight with no beginning and no end. Yum!

Needless to say, these fruitful experiments propelled me to start blending cannabis and yoga practice regularly. This was before major news outlets were publishing front-page stories about the medical benefits of weed. It was also before I knew yogis in India had been elevating the practice for millennia. I just know it worked for me, which is surprising because I was twenty-seven and had been doing yoga since I was fifteen. As I said, I was a late bloomer.

Despite still having to grapple with paranoia at times, I found that pot brought unmistakable insight to my life and yoga practice. I learned to work with my cannabis-fueled anxiety, realizing that the plant had been magnifying some of the thoughts and feelings I had not been allowing myself to express, negative emotional stuff that had been bottled up for years, even decades.

Weed-fueled yoga made the high feel psychologically and spiritually therapeutic, like the way peyote and ayahuasca might work. Journeys into some of the darker parts of the self can sometimes be painful, but with my twelve-year yoga practice now enhanced with cannabis, I could tap into and heal things I hadnt before been able to access. While doing yoga.

I also loved how pot helped me tune into my body and connect to the stretching muscles. It wasnt all shamanic voyaging into darkness. In fact, it was mostly just awesome stoner trippin and feeling groovy.

A year later, I went from fighting paranoia most of the time I got high to less than half the time. Im a lot of things, and tenacious is one of them.

As I mastered dose and setting and brought light to my unconscious fears so they had less power, I soon started toking more often, one to three times a week. It was still very tentative. I did so only in situations where I could feel safe, be warm enough, have water handy, and be around people I was fully comfortable with. My pasties (mouth dryness), my munchies, my sense of time shifting, all the stoner stereotypes were superstrong for me then, and I was very protective of my high, especially knowing how awful it was when it slid into a bad trip.