🍄 Load and Capacity

On Monday I sat in a physio's office with a sore shoulder, and he said two words I've continued to think about, and how they relate to growth and healing as well as physical recovery. The two words:

Load and capacity.

Pain shows up when the load you put on something is more than it can currently take. That's the whole idea.

However, the answer isn't to stop using it.

The leaflet he sent the next morning with information for my recovery put it plainly. "Some pain whilst exercising is normal and expected." It should be tolerable, and it should settle again shortly after.

Not only that, but protecting it, resting it for too long, "can reduce the capacity" of the very thing you're trying to heal.

You don't build capacity by avoiding load. You build it by adding load, gradually, and recovering in between.

I thought about that, and it stopped being about my shoulder.

Because this is how we grow too.

A big psychedelic experience is a lot of load. Things come up that we've carried for years. Grief, anger, old stories, sometimes all at once. And afterwards, people sometimes go one of two ways.

Some rest too much. There's a sense that the work happened on the journey, so now they can relax.

But integration isn't always easy. It might mean a difficult conversation. It might mean getting out of your comfort zone. Skip that, and like my shoulder, the capacity quietly shrinks.

Others come back so inspired they try to take on the world. Change every habit overnight. Overhaul their whole life at once.

It makes sense. They've seen what's possible. But it's too much load, too soon. It gets overwhelming, it often doesn't stick, and things flare up rather than settle.

Integration lives in between. Enough challenge to keep growing. Enough recovery for it to settle. One hard conversation to start, not five. One change, given time to take hold. Coming back to a practice, gently, once the glow has worn off.

There's an old phrase for the other half of this. Use it or lose it.

True of shoulders. True of the parts of us that opened up for a moment and then closed again because it all felt like too much.

One more line from the leaflet has stayed with me. "You may not see any improvement in the first six weeks." The capacity is still building. You just can't feel it yet.

A lot of integration is like that!

Some discomfort means something is wrong.

Some is just what growing feels like.

The difference is whether it settles.

A reflection for you today:

👉 Where are you protecting yourself from load you could actually carry? Where have you taken on more than you can recover from? What would the right amount look like this week?

What did this bring up for you? I hope you'll reply and tell me about it.

📚 Microdose of Wisdom

"Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire."
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

🎵Psychedelic Supplements

Numinous heart psilocybin/MDMA playlist. Ends with “Arcoíris”; extra tracks at the end to add to session as needed with lengthy tanpura drone for integration/journaling.