Culture
PT474 – The Origin of Psychedelics Today and the Growth of Vital
January 2, 2024
Featuring: Joe Moore & Kyle Buller
In this episode, we toast to the beginning of an exciting and hopefully groundbreaking 2024 by switching things up a bit. Christopher Koddermann, Co-Founder and Chair of Board of the International Therapeutic Psilocybin Rescheduling Initiative (ITPRI) will be conducting some interviews for PT, and in this episode, he does his first – with our Co-Founders, Joe Moore and Kyle Buller.
In this episode, we toast to the beginning of an exciting and hopefully groundbreaking 2024 by switching things up a bit. Christopher Koddermann, Co-Founder and Chair of Board of the International Therapeutic Psilocybin Rescheduling Initiative (ITPRI) will be conducting some interviews for PT, and in this episode, he does his first – with our Co-Founders, Joe Moore and Kyle Buller.
Kyle tells the story of his fateful New Years Eve snowboarding trip that resulted in a near death experience and a complete change in his life’s trajectory, and Joe discusses his more academic roots and how he and Kyle were united through their shared passion for the work of Stan Grof, holotropic breathwork, and transpersonal psychology. Psychedelics Today was created largely with no aims other than to promote transpersonal psychology and archive the best insights from their mentors, but has obviously turned into so much more, mostly from the simple goal of trying to spread the word through interesting conversations.
They talk about the growth of PT; how they got involved in education; the harms of the drug war; why decriminalization isn’t enough; where they see ‘the psychedelic renaissance’ going; what has surprised them the most in the last few years; and what we’re most proud of: Vital – how it came to be created, what’s involved, the benefits of the retreats, the self-discovery they’ve witnessed, and what they’ve learned through two successful cohorts.
The next edition of Vital begins on January 23, and we’ve extended applications until January 14, so if you’ve been curious if Vital is the answer you’ve been looking for, now is the time to act!
Notable Quotes
“This voice kind of came over me and said, ‘You’re going home. You’re going back to the stars where we all come from and this physical life’s going to cease to exist, but you’ll continue onward, and this is just a transition. And the more that you struggle with this transition, the harder it’s going to be. So the more that you can relax into it, the easier the transition will be.’ And I just really kind of relaxed into it, and there was a lot of beauty and bliss and love, and I just remember going, ‘I’m going home. I’m going home. This is what we all wait for.’ And the doctors are yelling at me to stay awake.” -Kyle
“We chatted and we were just like, ‘How do we get this transpersonal topic to be more discussed?’ Because to us, a huge portion of the human experience was getting washed away by super dry science, and we thought it was really important to bring the human elements back in. Human experience does matter.” -Joe
“A lot of our students are taking pause to say, ‘Oh, I need to do a lot more inner work and a lot more self-discovery before I just jump in and start doing facilitation work.’ And I love that as a result. It’s maybe not what they expected coming in, but self-discovery just unfolds and [they say], ‘Okay, I need to really figure out what’s going on a little bit more for me and how I want to show up in this really strange space that is psychedelics.’ And I really love that. That’s probably not the best sales pitch, but it’s true. We want people to really do self-discovery, regardless of how that shows up for them.” -Joe
Links
The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality, by Michael Talbot
Swimming in the Sacred: Wisdom from the Psychedelic Underground, by Rachel Harris
