Inspired by the Netflix documentary “How to Change Your Mind” and the article “The trip treatment” by The New Yorker Magazine I created this conceptual illustration.

This would be the idea from which part:

We all know that it is not easy to change our mind and access our subconscious. Finding the key (the way) to access our mind and free ourselves from the mask and ego that sometimes cages us and does not allow us to move forward.

In the documentary and article they talk about psychedelics as one of the ways to gain access. Medically administered and supervised, of course. With great advances in people with traumas and diseases such as cancer.

They explain how you feel a release from fear and go on a journey where you feel connected to everything around you. I feel a lot of love. And also, through this experience, create new brain connections that sprout like a flower in your garden.

I’m sure there are other ways to get around this. What is clear to me is that our brain is flexible and can change. But obviously it requires daily and constant work, which costs and although it is not easy, when you notice the progress, it can be very rewarding.

SYMBOLS

• Flowers: Clematis: for people who live in the future and do not enjoy the present. Who live in the present with a lack of interest. It helps to be happy in the present moment and to pay more attention to things. Gentian: Improves mood and self-doubt vanishes. Red roses: symbolize the blossoming of love and passion.
• Psychedelic background: made with the floating ink technique. Create the psychedelic sensation of the fusion of shapes and colours that change in your mind.
• Rye key and cage: conceptually symbolizes what is used to open the mind (our cage). The key has an ornamental rye shape, because the documentary talks about LSD that is obtained from a fungus that grows on rye grain.
• Puzzle face and bird: these symbols speak of the ego and its liberation. The mask or character that we create for ourselves, that lives locked up inside us and how difficult it is to destroy it, but in the illustration it is destroyed and flies off as a release, which finally allows new connections to sprout in the brain.
• Hairless Face: represents the people with cancer named in the documentary and the article, who have tasted the experience of the “trip” and have felt that freedom and tranquility that is intended to be conveyed in this illustration.