Puff, Pass & Ponder: Microdosing
I’ve been an entrepreneur for pretty much my entire life, while having a safety net for much of that time… but for the past 4 years, Puff, Pass & Paint and Cannabis Tours have been my main passion and career. When I tell people who don’t work in the cannabis industry what I do, their first reaction is something like “wow, that must be fun!”. Yes, it is, at times, incredibly fun… and then at many times it is not. The laws are constantly changing, sometimes daily. People in non-legal locations need their medication and struggle to get what they need, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. Sometimes people are unreliable. Sometimes the people you thought were reliable still let you down. Sometimes, in running your own business, things go wrong for no reason. Sometimes they go wrong because you, yourself, yes you, majorly screwed up. Sometimes the amount of stress is incredible. Sometimes the amount of stress is… unbearable.
While always doing a pretty good job of appearing easy-going on the outside, I would describe myself as hard-wired to be a little (extremely) high-strung. I think it’s something that runs in my family, a lineage of pacers and worriers and wonderers of “what if”. Last year, with the explosive ending of a long-term relationship, the passing of someone who was incredibly important to me, a move across the country, expansion of our company from 3 locations to 8, hiring of 30+ employees, acquisition of spaces, and tons of added events, my stress was at an absolute maximum. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t enjoying a second of my life, and I certainly wasn’t sending out good vibes. Every email I sent out was prefaced with “I’m so sorry for the delay, I’ve been SO crazy busy!”… and it was true. I was busy and I was going crazy. I looked and felt like total crap, so I realized I needed to do something to reinvent the way I dealt with stress. I was the founder and president of an extremely successful business that I didn’t want to give up, and I didn’t want to leave the industry, so something else, internally, needed to change.
About 3 months ago, I started a regimen of micro-dosing edibles and also regularly using mushrooms— I won’t dive into dosage and quantities because for every single person this can be SO different. I will say I was taking enough to alter my mood by relaxing me and to open up my perspective a little bit. This was enough to make me realize that something had to change about my mindset as well, so I started a regular regimen of 10 minutes of meditation every morning… keep in mind that this was an aggressive amount of meditation for someone who has commonly stated “oh I couldn’t possibly sit in silence, I have too many thoughts”. At first it was painful. Previously I had found meditation to cause me even more stress, because I would grow so angry at myself that I couldn’t simply sit in silence… and I found that the key to successfully calming my nerves was forgiving myself for not being good at it. When I did that, I started forgiving myself for other things, too, like the failure of my relationship, the times I let my business partners and my employees down, the times I forgot a friend or family member’s birthday, that time I was rude to Comcast customer service. I forgave myself for these things and others, and then promised myself I would strive to be better, and I have.
Micro-dosing edibles (with the addition of psychedelics) has been such a huge and transformative part of my journey into just being a better, kinder, wiser, and more capable person who isn’t so stressed she’s in both physical and mental anguish. I now try to make time to meditate for about an hour a day… and often it’s not sitting in silence, it’s going for a walk, or petting my dogs, or laying in the hammock in my backyard and just reminding myself that there is a reason I’m here and I have a mission in cannabis, but also that I can be successful in the present moment. When anybody asks me why I love cannabis and how I got started in what I’m doing, I talk about how I’ve seen my favorite plant do so many incredible things— sure, it’s amazing recreationally, but it also saves lives. I really do believe it saved mine.
To read more musings to make you ponder, click here.