Los Angeles-based musician and hashish farmer/hybridizer Willy Christie has spent the previous 5 years hybridizing his personal proprietary cultivars. His mindfulness and innate perception can’t be helped, as he was raised by his mom—a legally deaf music instructor—and his father—a legally blind tennis teacher. Mindfulness was not taught, it was emulated.
Christie mentioned he took a deep dive into psychedelics greater than 10 years in the past, going by what’s now known as “ego demise,” in an effort to find bliss and discover unity with God. He used them as a software to search out that means on this life and get beneath the human unconscious that may hinder our progress and growth.
As a toddler, he was recognized with Consideration Deficit Hyper Dysfunction (ADHD) and scientific melancholy, stating his melancholy was largely primarily based on poor choices and life conditions he put himself in.
Prescribed Adderall and antidepressants as a toddler, he realized he was self-medicating with hashish in school. He dropping out early, leaving hashish behind within the wake, then added psychedelics in an try and shake off the melancholy.
He was tripping commonly on both psilocybin mushrooms or acid a couple of times a month. This, he mentioned precipitated him to cease going out and socializing, along with his fantasy life taking on.
“I’d undergo a type of cosmic consciousness, then I’d sober up and need to go to work the following day,” he laughed. “I noticed these phases I used to be going by on the psychedelics have been already there in my thoughts. I didn’t need to maintain tripping or going by it to maneuver ahead. It was the distinction between utilizing the expertise to open a door or really strolling and dealing by it.”
With the distinction between attempting and doing firmly understood, Christie felt he didn’t need to proceed utilizing psychedelics. He used the experiences he already had as a software to get to the following life degree, protecting hashish use as a part of his wellness and musical course of.
“I hadn’t but written music, performed an instrument, and even thought-about myself a musician,” he mentioned. “Psychedelics put the items collectively for me. Pointed me in the fitting path … I really feel psychedelics are as an vital a software to psychology as a telescope is to astronomy.”
“My methodology in making music turned medicating with hashish, jamming, and recording.”
– Willy Christie
Respiratory the Third Eye Open
Meditation has lengthy been a approach for people to transcend their very own unconscious—to go away behind the luggage of emotion we retailer within the thoughts that may trigger us to stagnate as creating human beings.
Via Holotropic breathwork, Christie mentioned he was and is ready to transcend a lot in the identical approach he did on the psychedelics.
Holotropic respiration workouts have been developed within the Seventies by Dr. Stanislav Grof and his spouse, Christina, initially utilizing lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). When the psychoactive formulation was made unlawful, the couple developed the respiration approach to permit their topics the identical kind of launch and realizations outdoors of themselves.
“The purpose is just not the place the work takes you,” he continued, “however what you do with the expertise afterwards. Utilizing psychedelics as a remedy reveals you the work you want to do, the place you want to be in your life – particularly if a change is required.”
It’s commonplace for somebody to make use of psychedelics to assist them get to a different place of emotional wellness. Fungi, LSD, MDMA, and ayahuasca are all used to assist dig into the unconscious for understanding, to heal trauma, and to assist in dependancy restoration, providing a reset as a place to begin.
“The experiences whereas on these substances open up your third eye, permitting you to see what’s vital, main you on a path to therapeutic,” he added. “However you continue to need to do the work. My use of acid really taught me to medicate smarter, helped me to really feel peace lengthy after the expertise had ended.”
Christie mentioned he additionally realized that the psychedelics have been extra about feeling, and that after your mind stops ruminating, that’s the purpose the place you might be really current—to “be right here now,” because the late, nice non secular instructor, Ram Dass, as soon as suggested. And meditation, he mentioned, provides him that very same portal of peace.
“That’s the message I convey by music—moments of peace,” he continued. “You probably have a sense of peace, of being current, it’s simpler to have religion that all the pieces goes to be all proper, and you might be on the fitting path.”
Music, he mentioned, is a placeholder for different messages, melodically talking on to the unconscious. A signpost letting you already know you aren’t alone, united by a typical thread of phrases and melody.
“Speak about some radical shit camouflaged in music,” he laughed. “Music has a common message and might communicate to many. This can be a dream we live in, however we’re all in the identical dream. Music places you instantly within the current. Eckhart Tolle’s The Energy of Now was life altering for me in dwelling within the second.”
“Life is now. There was by no means a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”
– Eckhart Tolle, The Energy of Now (New World Library)
The Message in Music
Christie just lately launched a psychedelic rock album, Kukuni, created in a self-imposed six-month isolation, “unintentionally” sacrificing your complete summer season of 2019.
Afterwards, he swore he’d by no means lose one other summer season, after which America’s necessary COVID-19 lockdown hit, forcing a second isolation interval and the completion of the album—fueled by consuming copious quantities of weed.
“I’m one of many members of the “do medicine and make music for individuals who do medicine and hearken to music,” he laughed. “I went by kilos of weed through the six months time it took to write down the album. The affect of the plant is plain. One music on the album, ‘Zorrillo’, is a reference to weed. It’s the Spanish phrase for ‘skunk’.”
His moniker Kukuni makes this album self-titled. It’s a play on the phrase cocooning—likened to his self-imposed, then pandemic-mandated lockdown.
“I used to be listening to NPR and misheard the phrase ‘cocooning.’ I used to be anticipating to listen to some new international idea, as I’d simply turn out to be hip to the Japanese idea of Forest Bathing,” he mentioned. “In case you are pressured, you exit into the forest and breathe within the pine air. The phrase cocooning gave the impression of Kukuni to me, so I went with it.”
The connection to the forest and hashish is robust, as terpenes are additionally present in pine bushes (pinene). It’s one in the identical.
“Identical to if you smoke a cultivar with the pinene terpene, if you go into the forest and breathe in that terp, you might be immediately relaxed and alert. It’s the identical impact,” he concluded.
Christie was just lately signed by Liquid Tradition, a world neighborhood of artists and creators with a mission to protect and additional the psychedelic expertise—based by Nutritious and “Renaissance lady, publicist extraordinaire,” Zoe Wilder.
Christie’s album had him working with producer Tony Buchen (Smashing Pumpkins, Sam Gendel, John Carroll Kirby) and drummer Robby Sinclair (Linda Perry, Chet Faker).
The album cowl is trippy in itself, shot by Los Angeles-based photographer, Emily Eizen. The duvet encompasses a nod to the plant, with Christie holding hashish flowers he grew in a vase. Within the different hand he holds a mirror, as an indication of his fixed looking and self-reflection.
Fueling the Muse
Hailing from Kansas Metropolis, Kansas, Christie proved what everyone knows: even in conservative, unlawful states, folks develop hashish. The plant prevails.
“I’ve been rising now for 12 years, however was dwelling with the fixed concern of a knock on the door and going to jail for the necessary five-year sentence once I was nonetheless in Kansas,” he mentioned. “So, I moved to Los Angeles in 2016, staying with pals in West Hollywood. Once I arrived and exited the freeway there was a gasoline station on the nook and I bear in mind pondering how excessive the gasoline costs have been and pondering to myself, I’ll by no means be capable of make it right here.”
After putting an ad on Craigslist to place a band collectively, he met a woman—buying each a bandmate and a girlfriend—making the excessive costs of California a little bit extra bearable. A job with a hashish firm didn’t damage.
“I labored for a corporation referred to as the Venice Cookie Firm,” he mentioned. “They’re referred to as VCC immediately and nonetheless make a beverage, Hashish Quencher.
His cultivar, Rainbow Street, was impressed by Mario Kart’s last course on Mario Kart 64.
“On the course, you might be actually driving on a rainbow with stars as guardrails,” he defined. “You’re driving round in house on a psychedelic rainbow. What’s higher than that?”
Kukuni is full of symbols, myths, and fables—the language of the unconscious.
“I wish to take folks into the darkish forest of the human spirit and shine a lightweight on the trail much less taken,” he surmised. “It’s what hashish does for me, and it’s within the spirit of the music I make.”
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