Psilocybin’s Curious Effects
By Justin Levy
I love exploring the way psychedelics interact with our culture, and I’m always on the lookout for little cultural snippets that open the door to bigger questions.
I live in Portland and am part of the largely therapist-dominated and psychology-based psychedelic community here. This means I get plenty of little snippets to explore just how far apart my Spirit-centered worldview is from the predominant one. One of those reminders showed up recently in a community discussion when a provider shared a challenging experience with a client.
The facilitator posted about what she referred to as a peculiar “side effect” that occurred during a psilocybin session with a client. The person began to experience involuntary, full-body movements like twitching and shaking that persisted through the entire session. It wasn’t painful, but it definitely freaked some people out, including the client, because it was not under voluntary control.
Comments poured in from other facilitators with various interpretations: some framed it through a medical lens (maybe serotonin syndrome?), others through a nervous system lens (trauma release, muscle memory resetting, somatic unwinding, etc.).
But here’s the thing: that so-called side effect is the very phenomenon at the heart of the Spirit-centric model.
The Spiritual Origins of Sacred Movement
I’ve spent three decades investigating it ever since it started happening to me and cracked me open into a profound and deeply unsettling world. Back then, there weren’t Reddit threads or Discord servers to compare notes on this stuff. I was flying blind until I found my first real roadmap in the teachings of Swami Muktananda and the Kashmir Shaivism tradition. There, the experience had a name: kundalini. And not just a name but an entire body of ancient teachings that was incredibly foreign to my modern mind.
Later on my path led me to capoeira, where I got to explore spirit (axé) through singing capoeira songs and playing its rhythms on the berimbau and pandeiro. But nowhere was the axé stronger than when playing the game in the roda. When everyone was singing with their heart, and the rhythms were on point, the game took on a life of its own, and I felt like I was connected to a force bigger than just me.
Axé is connected to the Afro-Brazilian spiritual tradition of Candomblé. In that lineage, the kind of shaking I’d experienced could indicate a divine possession, where an orixá (deity) descends and enters the body. This was a different cultural explanation than Kashmir Shaivism gave, but it was the same phenomenon and the same understanding that Spirit is at the heart of it.
Traditional healers in South Africa, trembling shamans of Siberia, even the Shakers of early America all share this ecstatic, involuntary movement that connects them to Spirit. Sometimes it’s framed as the Holy Spirit, sometimes the Goddess, sometimes the ancestors or even natural forces like a river or mountain.
Whatever the name, the core experience is consistent: a surge of something powerful and uncontrollable entering the body.
It’s Not Just Psilocybin
Early on, I thought my experiences were just a quirk of the substances I was using, so I experimented with non-drug methods. Sure enough, things like breathwork and dancing on their own would also unlock it. Psilocybin just turned up the volume.
Oregon has legalized psilocybin and trained a generation of facilitators. On one level, that’s great that people now have access to it. But they are learning from a therapeutic, trauma-resolution lens. We’ve flung open a massive portal to the Spirit world and handed the keys to people who haven’t been trained to explore the spirit world.
Why Ritual and Reverence Still Matter
Beyond just emotional healing, psychedelics provide direct contact with the sacred, primal, and vibrational forces of creation itself. Many of my traditional lineage teachers cautioned against invoking this energy with substances. They emphasized that the power involved can be overwhelming if not approached with proper preparation, ritual, and community holding.
Western culture often dismisses ancient rituals as superstitions, preferring sterile clinical safety protocols. “Set and setting” and “naming your intention” are good, but nowhere near enough.
Someone in that online thread said this kind of shaking “needs more research.” And sure, if you’re looking for Western-style studies, that’s true. But let’s not pretend this is uncharted territory. There is a vast body of knowledge already, even though much has disappeared. What remains may not be written in English and it’s certainly not peer-reviewed. It lives in oral traditions and initiatory practices passed down through generations.
When the Shaking Doesn’t Stop
Another person chimed in to say that the shaking stopped after the session ended, which reassured everyone. But that is the problem—we’re terrified of what we can’t control. And if you listen to the old traditions, the shaking isn’t meant to be under your control.
It’s meant to break us open, to teach us that all our grasping at control in a chaotic world is the problem itself, and we need to learn over and over again how to surrender. This process demands reverence, not analysis.
Back in the day, temples and communities existed to support someone through that kind of encounter. There was time, space, and structure to integrate what came through. Nowadays, we’ve got 60-minute Zoom integration calls.
Control Culture vs. Sacred Experience
We live in a culture obsessed with control of our bodies, minds, and emotional states. So when something like sacred shaking shows up that bypasses all that, we freak out. And in that freak-out, we try to find a way to control it, to analyze it. And when the shaking stops, we can file the experience away for more research.
But what happens when the shaking doesn’t stop when the psilocybin session ends? What happens if the Goddess comes in and demands to be honored and worshipped?
At that point, no amount of scientific data will help you, and no peer-reviewed study will give you the answer.
Whether you're fresh from a journey or deep in the work with Psilocybin and psychedelics - let’s meet in that in-between space where transformation really happens. Schedule a session here.
About the Author
Justin Levy has spent the majority of his life exploring the intersections of spiritual traditions and Plant Medicine, with a particular focus on kundalini. He started his own spiritual healing and integration practice (called Kundalini Mediumship) in 2009, based on decades of personal work with Ayahuasca and other plants, the spiritual tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and the martial art of capoeira. His practice incorporates bodywork, movement and dance, and rhythm and song, with a particular emphasis on shadow work and integration. Justin has been teaching this medicine since 2011 and leading ceremonial work since 2020. His focus is on helping each person connect to and embody their own unique gifts and medicine within the context of tradition.
