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 trainer—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 dying,” in an effort to find bliss and discover unity with God. He used them as a device 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 medical despair, stating his despair was largely primarily based on poor selections 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 despair.
He was tripping usually on both psilocybin mushrooms or acid a few times a month. This, he mentioned brought about him to cease going out and socializing, along with his fantasy life taking on.
“I’d undergo a sort of cosmic consciousness, then I’d sober up and should go to work the following day,” he laughed. “I spotted these phases I used to be going by on the psychedelics had been already there in my thoughts. I didn’t should preserve 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 should proceed utilizing psychedelics. He used the experiences he already had as a device to get to the following life stage, preserving 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 best path … I really feel psychedelics are as an essential a device to psychology as a telescope is to astronomy.”
“My methodology in making music turned medicating with hashish, jamming, and recording.”
– Willy Christie
Respiration the Third Eye Open
Meditation has lengthy been a manner for people to transcend their very own unconscious—to depart behind the bags of emotion we retailer within the thoughts that may trigger us to stagnate as growing human beings.
By means of Holotropic breathwork, Christie mentioned he was and is ready to transcend a lot in the identical manner he did on the psychedelics.
Holotropic respiration workout routines had been developed within the Nineteen 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 method to permit their topics the identical sort of launch and realizations outdoors of themselves.
“The purpose shouldn’t be the place the work takes you,” he continued, “however what you do with the expertise afterwards. Utilizing psychedelics as a therapy reveals you the work you should do, the place you should be in your life – particularly if a change is required.”
It’s common 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 help in habit 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 essential, main you on a path to therapeutic,” he added. “However you continue to should 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 had been extra about feeling, and that after your mind stops ruminating, that’s the purpose the place you’re really current—to “be right here now,” because the late, nice non secular trainer, 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. “In case you have a sense of peace, of being current, it’s simpler to have religion that the whole lot goes to be all proper, and you’re on the best path.”
Music, he mentioned, is a placeholder for different messages, melodically talking on to the unconscious. A signpost letting you recognize you aren’t alone, united by a typical thread of phrases and melody.
“Discuss some radical shit camouflaged in music,” he laughed. “Music has a common message and might converse to many. This can be a dream we live in, however we’re all in the identical dream. Music places you immediately within the current. Eckhart Tolle’s The Energy of Now was life altering for me in residing 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 lately launched a psychedelic rock album, Kukuni, created in a self-imposed six-month isolation, “by accident” sacrificing the whole summer time of 2019.
Afterwards, he swore he’d by no means lose one other summer time, after which America’s obligatory 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 tune 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 grow to be hip to the Japanese idea of Forest Bathing,” he mentioned. “If you’re harassed, you exit into the forest and breathe within the pine air. The phrase cocooning appeared like 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.
“Similar to while you smoke a cultivar with the pinene terpene, while you go into the forest and breathe in that terp, you’re immediately relaxed and alert. It’s the identical impact,” he concluded.
Christie was lately signed by Liquid Culture, 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 quilt includes 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 residing with the fixed concern of a knock on the door and going to jail for the obligatory five-year sentence after I was nonetheless in Kansas,” he mentioned. “So, I moved to Los Angeles in 2016, staying with associates in West Hollywood. After I arrived and exited the freeway there was a fuel station on the nook and I keep in mind pondering how excessive the fuel costs had been and pondering to myself, I’ll by no means be capable of make it right here.”
After inserting an ad on Craigslist to place a band collectively, he met a lady—buying each a bandmate and a girlfriend—making the excessive costs of California a bit extra bearable. A job with a hashish firm didn’t harm.
“I labored for an organization referred to as the Venice Cookie Company,” he mentioned. “They’re referred to as VCC as we speak and nonetheless make a beverage, Hashish Quencher.
His cultivar, Rainbow Street, was impressed by Mario Kart’s closing course on Mario Kart 64.
“On the course, you’re 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 light-weight 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.”