It becomes more apparent every day how much isolation and focusing so much on the individual is hurting us. Can psychedelics – and specifically, group therapy – be the answer to our crisis of individualism?
In this episode, Kyle interviews Geoff Bathje, Ph.D.: licensed psychologist, researcher, former Full Professor, and co-founder of Sana Healing Collective, a Chicago-based non-profit focusing on ketamine-assisted therapy and psychedelic integration.
He talks about what he feels is one of the largest factors in our mental health crisis: the individualistic and neoliberal lens Western culture has placed on mental health and how it neglects the massive systemic and relational factors that are affecting us all. He digs into how we got so alienated and how psychedelics and non-ordinary states of consciousness can not only help us think critically and solve problems, but also move us out of this individualistic framework of healing and more into a collective one. How do we use psychedelics to fix our relationships and find our community?
He discusses:
The challenge of knowing when to work for relationships and when to just end them, especially in the afterglow of a big experience
Group ketamine experience vs. individual, how groups can help facilitators find patterns, and how ketamine works with somatic therapy
His paper, “Psychedelic integration: An analysis of the concept and its practice” and his visual model of integration showing the different domains of our personal experience
What he thinks will happen next in drug development: Will therapy be left out after Lykos’ failure with MDMA?
The importance of moving beyond aggressive criticism and moving into world building
There is a delicate balance between risk and efficacy with any psychedelic intervention, but especially with ibogaine. Just how safe is ibogaine therapy?
In this episode, Joe interviews Thomas Feegel: co-founder of Beond Ibogaine, an ibogaine treatment and research facility in Cancún, Mexico.
When Feegel first heard of ibogaine 16 years ago, he found that people were having great success, but nobody could recommend where to go for treatment. So he worked to create what was needed: a combination of a hospital, mental health treatment facility, retreat center, and resort, with the proper infrastructure in place, employees with ICU experience, exhaustive HIPAA-compliant admission criteria, regular data collection, and a major focus on safety.
Addressing the recent Rolling Stone article about the tragic death of a patient at Beond in 2022 (interestingly, 2 days after his initial dose), he discusses what he feels was inaccurate, largely related to what could be perceived as a suggestion that there wasn’t enough screening or that corners were cut. With no official reason given for the patient’s death, it brings into question just how safe one can be, especially with people whose bodies and hearts have been through so much. How much hidden harm is created by the stress of PTSD and addiction?
He discusses:
The complexity of journalism and drawing conclusions from limited information
The limitations of conventional addiction treatments and the sad numbers around how many people stick with rehab
The importance of collecting as much data as possible about each patient, at regular intervals, prior to, during, and after the experience
The need for a regulating group to create standards around admission and administration procedures for ibogaine
Faced with health challenges that traditional treatments often fail to remedy, veterans are increasingly turning to psychedelics for help. Their stories of trauma and healing help humanize their experiences, reduce stigma, and foster essential conversations that broaden acceptance and understanding of how psychedelics can support them.
While over 7,000 U.S. service members have died in combat since 9/11, more than 30,000 veterans and active-duty soldiers have taken their own lives during the same period. Some estimates suggest this number could be significantly higher, reaching upwards of 150,000. This staggering statistic highlights a mental health crisis, one in which veterans face PTSD, depression, chronic pain, insomnia, and other challenges at alarming rates. Many veterans feel abandoned by traditional therapies that often provide only temporary relief.
With increased advocacy and a surge in scientific support, psychedelic-assisted treatments have emerged as a promising pathway for veterans seeking more comprehensive recovery from trauma.
Heroic Hearts Project: Promoting Psychedelic Literacy and Support for Veterans
After leaving combat, former Army Ranger Jesse Gould struggled with severe PTSD. He left his career as an investment banker, sold his belongings, and journeyed around the world in an attempt to find a new way forward.
After an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, Gould says he – finally – found relief from his PTSD symptoms. Invigorated by his experience and the relief he found in plant medicine, Gould founded Heroic Hearts Project, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting veterans and their families in overcoming the impacts of PTSD and military trauma.
“I was at my lowest point, feeling disconnected and hopeless,” Gould told Psychedelics Today. “As my own pain began to lift, I knew I couldn’t keep this journey to myself.”
“When veterans have these big psychedelic experiences during a retreat, no matter what, they will have lasting changes,” Gould explains. “They gain new perspectives on how they view themselves and the world.”
Bridging the Psychedelic Knowledge Gap for Veterans
Ensuring veterans have not only have access to a community, but that they’re armed with a strong foundation of psychedelic therapy, integration, and risk reduction is crucial to ensuring their relief is durable, says author and educator Matt Zemon MSc.
A new book, The Veteran’s Guide to Psychedelics, written by Zemon in collaboration with Heroic Hearts and clinically reviewed by Ken Weingardt, PhD, was recently published to help bridge this critical knowledge gap. Gould and Zemon kicked off the project after Gould noticed the lack of comprehensive publications tailored for veterans exploring psychedelics.
The clinically reviewed book was designed to equip veterans with knowledge of safe, responsible, and therapeutic psychedelic use, offering insights into a new frontier of mental health care that emphasizes key principles veterans need to understand when exploring psychedelic options responsibly.
Understanding the Challenges and Potential of Psychedelics for Veterans
“For years, like most clinicians, I relied on conventional treatments… but despite our best efforts, the standard approaches often fell short,” he explains.
This realization led him to explore psychedelic-assisted treatments, which he views as potentially transformative for veteran mental health care.
With nearly 40 years in military medicine, including combat experience and public health expertise, Koffman has seen firsthand the limitations of traditional approaches. He believes that psychedelics – particularly those promoting neuroplasticity – can address trauma in ways conventional methods cannot. According to him, these therapies may “not just heal hidden wounds, but by mending the accompanying soul wounds, and save countless families.”
Koffman emphasizes the importance of health literacy for veterans: “It’s about knowing what questions to ask, recognizing the risks, and understanding the potential benefits.”
For him, informed preparation and responsible use are essential for veterans to move from crisis to genuine transformation and long-term wellness.
The Power of Openly Sharing Veteran Stories
According to Zemon, openly sharing stories is a powerful force for fostering understanding and encouraging other vets to explore new avenues of healing. Many veterans who have turned to psychedelics describe their experiences as life-changing, inspiring fellow veterans to consider new possibilities for their own recovery.
Tom Satterly, Delta Force veteran and co-founder of All Secure Foundation, says psychedelics allowed him to confront trauma in ways conventional therapies could not.
“These treatments have allowed me to break through pain that no other method could touch,” Satterly said.
Steve Keefer, a veteran of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, says his perspective evolved through sacred ceremonies supported by community. “I viewed life as a series of battles, but this attitude strained relationships and led to negativity. Through healing ceremonies, I’ve found fulfillment, peace, and healthier relationships. I’m more in service to others now than I ever was in uniform.”
Navigating Psychedelic Risks: Safety and Responsibility for Veterans
“Veterans need a clear understanding of the risks, as well as a strong foundation in preparation, set, setting, and integration – each essential for veterans who choose this path to navigate it successfully,” Zemon said.
Zemon advocates for a proactive approach, encouraging veterans to balance both potential benefits and risks in considering psychedelic-assisted healing.
“While psychedelics offer new possibilities for healing, they must be approached with caution and preparation,” Koffman adds.
The conversation around psychedelics in veteran mental health is evolving, and at its core is an urgent need for psychedelic literacy and supportive resources. Bridging this knowledge gap with science, safety, and empathy equips veterans with the guidance they need. By understanding the critical elements of psychedelic therapy and the organizations that facilitate access, veterans can embark on a healing journey that addresses trauma holistically and cultivates renewed hope.
Psychedelic shadow work is central to the transformative potential of entheogens, helping us confront and integrate hidden parts of our psyche.
Psychedelic experiences, in and of themselves, do not create lasting change by chance or passively – they require active participation. Entheogens can open the doors to the unconscious and invite us to make meaning from its contents. Shadow work supports this soul-manifesting process by helping us embrace our hidden parts so that we may become fully actualized.
What is the Shadow?
Psychotherapist Carl G. Jung coined the term “shadow” to describe the instincts, drives, and emotions we consciously and unknowingly repress but whose malignant impacts we feel.
The shadow contains our darkest secrets, covert desires, and obscured emotions. It holds our greatest fears and our fullest potential; it is the source of intuition, wisdom, and individuation. And yet, most of us reject it because we fear the truth – that we are both good and evil, loving and hateful, angry and calm, devastated and joyful, masculine and feminine.
“The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore, wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness,” said Jung in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
This process is necessary, according to the late psychedelic-assisted therapy pioneer Ann Shulgin. After all, we can’t enact our darkest fantasies of rear-ending every insufferable driver who cuts us off. We need executive control via the ego to quell such drives.
However, the issue arises when we overcorrect and deny our shadow’s existence.
When we hide from unflattering elements of ourselves, like aggression, guilt, power-hunger, and greed, we paradoxically give these traits more control over our lives. Unseen shadows show up unexpectedly, like when we lash out over minor frustrations, sabotage our career because of unacknowledged fears of success, or spout passive-aggressive remarks instead of confronting conflict directly. Unprocessed shame or guilt can manifest as perfectionism, and buried feelings of inadequacy may elicit a compulsive need to control.
“A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps,” wrote Jung.
But just as we suppress unfavorable qualities, we also bury our brightest traits.
What is the Golden Shadow?
The “golden shadow” refers to these constructive qualities, such as confidence, creativity, compassion, leadership, and joy. We see these characteristics in others but sometimes fail to recognize them within ourselves because we feel unworthy, afraid of failure, or unfamiliar with how to embody them.
Kyle Buller, M.S., Psychedelics Today co-founder and psychedelic integration therapist, notes that many of us come from environments where positivity is unwelcomed.
“People may find it hard to experience joy because they associate it with guilt or shame, or they might feel that the therapeutic focus should be about the ‘darker emotions’ when it comes to shadow work. They may want to shut the good feelings down. This can be a great opportunity to work with the golden shadow,” said Buller.
Whether golden or dark, the shadow must emerge from hiding so we can reclaim our autonomy. But we must do the work to coax it out.
“We develop our ability to be aware and embody what we are conscious of,” Cohen told Psychedelics Today.
Psychedelics are one of the best ways to do this work because they “activate and amplify the psyche and our emotional, somatic and spiritual dimensions.” Dreams, hypnosis, and life transitions are also excellent catalysts.
Dreams Jung believed dreams offer a direct path to the unconscious through their symbols. He suggested that themes like falling could represent a fear of failure, being chased might signify an unresolved conflict, and dark figures could convey unaddressed desires. He advocated that processing and analyzing such symbols illuminates the shadow.
Hypnosis According to Ann Shulgin, Ericksonian hypnosis is another powerful shadow work method. This approach leads patients into a trance, where they descend a stairway deep into their inner world. When they reach the basement, they confront the shadow, which they see as a fierce animal. The hypnotist instructs them not to fear the beast but to enter its form and experience the world through its eyes. This merging allows them to harness the shadow as an ally rather than an enemy.
Transitions Major life transitions, such as losing a loved one or experiencing a midlife crisis, can also ignite shadow work, whether we choose it or not. Such events break down our defenses and ego structures, leaving us vulnerable to repressed emotions, drives, and conflicts that demand our attention in order to grow.
Psychedelics Psychedelic experiences are perhaps the most reliable path into the depths of our souls because they fundamentally change the way we think, feel, see, and perceive our inner and outer worlds. Entheogens teleport us directly beyond the ego’s veil into the unknown
“Psychedelics offer a unique opportunity to face our repressed parts head-on. They allow access in ways that regular psychotherapy may not,” said Buller.
How Can Shadow Work Arise During Psychedelic Journeys?
Psychedelics help us access the shadow by disrupting the way our neural networks communicate and perceive stimuli. This process reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which governs our sense of self and ego.
When the DMN quiets, boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness blur. The resulting experience excavates stifled thoughts, memories, emotions, and visions while allowing us to interact with them from an open and receptive state.
Shadow work can happen naturally during these journeys. We might even transcend the unconscious labels of “good” vs. ” bad” while stepping outside our sticky parts to merge with something greater than ourselves. Such interconnected insights are transformative, but they are not necessarily the norm.
Psychedelics often reveal harrowing traumas and wounded parts that we may be unskilled to face. This confrontation can spark intense anger, grief, or shame. Our ego will resist the discomfort to protect us, but its efforts will paradoxically exacerbate it. We may become overwhelmed, overly identified with the pain, or completely detached from reality.
These very real risks are a crucial reason navigating the shadow with psychedelics often requires support, especially when we’re inexperienced with these substances.
The Importance of Support in Psychedelic Shadow Work
Psychedelic-assisted therapy, preparation and integration coaching, and group processing provide critical foundations to face and embrace unconscious aspects of the self.
Skilled practitioners know how to hold space for every part of us to emerge. If we’re experiencing unresolved rage, therapists or facilitators can help us feel and release it.
“Anger is a major emotion that people often struggle to express. We [as practitioners] might ask, ‘What would it look like to express this anger?’ It could mean yelling, shaking, or verbalizing. Clients may even direct anger toward the therapist in place of the person they’re really angry at,” said Buller, who added that projections are O.K. within the confines of the practitioner’s comfort and safety boundaries.
Psychedelic facilitators also invite us to stick with the feelings we may want to oppose.
“When clients experience discomfort, we might ask, ‘Can you find pleasure in this sensation?’ Sometimes, the edge of discomfort is where the real work begins,” said Buller.
Buller explains that from a holotropic breathwork perspective, amplifying emotional expression is the key to expunging it from our system.
However, the edge is sometimes too dangerous to approach, and effective practitioners know when to pull back the reins.
“We don’t push shadow work agendas on clients. If you go too quickly, the parts might rebel. Instead, we take a slow approach and partner with the client so they can eventually go deeper,” said Buller.
This alliance allows practitioners to determine when digging into the shadow’s contents is appropriate and when it could inflict harm.
Integrating Psychedelic Shadow Work
After confronting the shadow, we must begin the process of integration, where we interpret and act on our findings. Some of the most effective integration methods involve working with a therapist, coach, or support group.
“Ideally, we want to start with a safe process of slowly digesting our psychedelic insights. We can then form a relationship of curiosity, inquiry, and then change,” said Cohen.
The change piece can be the most challenging because it mandates that we rewire our lives to match the authentic selves we’ve been hiding for so long. We may need to quit a job, end a marriage, or restructure relationships with friends, family, and substances. Such radical shifts often require reliable help and compassionate accountability.
Therapists trained in psychedelic integration, especially those using frameworks like Jungian analysis or Internal Family Systems (IFS), are well-suited for effective shadow work because they provide a structured approach to processing unconscious material.
Jungian therapists can help interpret the symbolic messages of psychedelic visions, such as the tiger, whose archetype might signify repressed feminine essence, aggression, or independent spirit.
Analysts can also help us make sense of bodily sensations, postures, memories, and emotions.
“We then want to understand the shadow material within the larger context. How was it formed, what’s its use, and more. This will allow us to start weaving together a narrative, opening us to intergenerational and environmental influences and having more compassion with ourselves,” said Cohen.
In the context of IFS, therapists can help us integrate the shadow using parts language. They may guide us in understanding that the tiger is a protector part, fiercely defending our vulnerable exiled parts, such as our traumatized inner child from suffering. Such terminology prevents us from overidentifying with the stifled rage and allows for a more harmonious and balanced sense of self.
The Bottom Line
Psychedelic shadow work is transformative, especially in the context of powerful journeys and integration. It provides a framework for understanding the visions, sensations, and thoughts that arise during altered states of consciousness and invites us to engage further. In turn, psychedelics calm our ego and amplify our psyche so we may embrace our inner outcasts as missing puzzle pieces to the fullest expression of our humanity.
Are you interested in learning more about what the shadow can reveal? Join us forIlluminating the Hidden Self: Navigating the Jungian Shadow with Psychedelics. In this 8-week live-taught course, participants will learn how to work with the Shadow in a conscious and embodied way, how to harness the psychic potential of the Golden Shadow, and more. Seats are limited.
Does combining the knowledge from Indigenous traditions with more research-backed Western frameworks land us in the sweet spot where science meets spirit?
Stover discusses the inspiration for the book: the ancestral voices she started hearing after she had children, being featured on Heacock’s podcast and becoming fascinated with people’s healing stories, and her move to Mexico, where she learned the beauty of a less complicated and more connected life. She learned that the village you surround yourself with is really the medicine, and that existing in the mysteries of life can be much more beneficial than trying to solve everything. Combining her Western training with more Indigenous perspectives, she wondered: Where do science and spirit meet? And how can they dance together?
They discuss:
Stover’s early days of offering medicine journeys in Mexico, and how much leaning on elders from all backgrounds matters
The importance of discernment in non-ordinary states: Is spiritual bypassing just the absence of discernment?
How finding a village can be just connecting to the earth: How much of our trauma is from a “nature deficit disorder”?
The power of transference and the relationship between therapists/facilitators and clients
The idea that modern psychology has fallen short because we’ve sterilized love out of the room, and the challenge of bringing love back as part of a safe container
and more!
The book, which is laid out somewhat like a workbook (and which Heacock wrote the foreward to) comes out on November 4 and is available for pre-order now.
Breathwork can be a powerful tool for addressing trauma and supporting growth, but the community formed around it seems to prove where the true magic lies: the healing power of connection.
In this episode, Kyle interviews Mustapha Khan: Emmy Award-winning director with over 100 film and television credits, who has worked with clients such as Coca-Cola and Honda, and celebrities ranging from Maya Angelou to Snoop Dogg.
Khan is finalizing a film about Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson and their ongoing work at Dreamshadow – the people and community responsible for Joe and Kyle meeting and the creation of Psychedelics Today. He talks about meeting the Gibsons, being welcomed into their community (instead of his proposed “fly on the wall” role), how centered and happy he felt after his first breathwork session, and what he has learned through the process: that breathwork can be an incredibly healing modality, but the magic he has found has been more in the community surrounding it, and the responsibility (and honor) of being a sitter for someone else.
He discusses:
The first time his breathwork went psychedelic, and speaking with his recently deceased Mother
How he got into filmmaking and why he wants to tell stories about people like the Gibsons
The beauty of breathwork not having a dogma or doctrine attached to it
The power in holding space for someone else, even if it’s just being present
The importance of taking action that aligns with psychedelic ethos: What can you do to contribute to your community?
and more!
Khan is planning to release the documentary, “Life and Breath,” in October. In addition to a screening at Dreamshadow, PT will likely do a virtual one as well, so stay tuned for updates!
Lykos’ psychedelic-assisted therapy model was meant to reinvent mental healthcare as we know it. Its PTSD protocol, which included preparation support, three guided MDMA therapy sessions, and integration counseling, took a bold step toward merging pharmacology with psychotherapy. But the FDA’s decision to reject it may force the psychedelic industry to pivot from resource-intensive and holistic to streamlined and pharma-friendly.
How We Got Here: Understanding the FDA’s Rejection
On Aug. 9, Lykos announced that the U.S. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected its new drug application (NDA) for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. The company’s press release was so matter-of-fact and measured that I had to read it twice to grasp the meaning.
Eventually, my eyes refocused on two sentences: “The FDA communicated that it had completed its review of the NDA and determined that it could not be approved based on data submitted to date. The FDA has requested that Lykos conduct an additional Phase 3 trial to further study the safety and efficacy of midomafetamine (MDMA).”
I’ve investigated the infamous MDMA hearing in prior articles, so I’ll spare the exhaustive details here. But to briefly recap, PDAC members who lacked psychedelic expertise said that Lykos’ statistically significant clinical data was unreliable. It determined the trials contained inherent design flaws and feared that alleged misconduct, although unsubstantiated, could have skewed the data. Nine of eleven panelists said the NDA was not ready for approval.
PDAC’s vote confused many advocates, who noted that Lykos followed the FDA’s draft psychedelic therapy FDA approval guidance. Others pointed out that MAPS and the FDA co-created the trial design through a Special Protocol Assessment in 2017.
In the FDA’s words, “We have completed our review and, based on the information submitted, agree that the design and planned analysis of your study adequately address the objectives necessary to support a regulatory submission.”
Dr. Scott Shannon, Principal Investigator in MAPS Phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, added that the FDA thoroughly investigated MAPS’s research sites during the trials to ensure proper data acquisition.
However, the advisory committee ignored these facts. Instead, they lamented over Lykos’ drug plus psychotherapy protocol, consistently questioning its validity and whether emotional support was even necessary alongside MDMA to alleviate PTSD. Worse, despite blatant contrary evidence, they asserted that MAPS’ FDA-aligned MDMA therapy protocol could do patients more harm than good.
Facing the Fallout: Lykos’ Next Steps
Lykos must now conduct a third Phase 3 clinical trial to overcome issues it thought were ironed out. The new trial will take at least two years and cost millions of dollars the team may not have.
In preparation, Lykos laid off 75% of its workforce, discontinued funding MDMA therapy research in Europe, and radically shifted its leadership team.
Rick Doblin, PhD, founder of Lykos’ non-profit parent company MAPS, resigned from the board shortly after the MDMA therapy FDA rejection.Doblin, a beloved psychedelic trailblazer and somewhat controversial figure, said his activist nature interfered with Lykos’ regulatory path. He will now pursue MAPS’ broader research, education, and policy reform goals.
Upon Doblin’s departure, Lykos hired a seasoned pharmaceutical executive, Dr. David Hough, to oversee the NDA’s next steps. In a recent press release, Lykos Chairman Jeff George said, “Dr. Hough is a consummate industry professional and exactly the right person to lead the crucial work of engaging with the FDA for our resubmission.”
Hough’s resume includes bringing Spravato (esketamine nasal spray) to market at Johnson & Johnson, where he led compound development and the medical, scientific, and regulatory processes.
Spravato is a ketamine-analog medication with dissociative psychedelic properties prescribed for major depressive disorder. The FDA approved Spravato’s NDA in 2019 with a protocol requiring patients first to prove that traditional antidepressants failed before becoming eligible for coverage.
Glaringly, Spravato’s application did not include therapeutic intervention, begging the question, could Hough have similar plans for MDMA?
A New Path for Psychedelic Therapy?
The future of psychedelic-assisted therapyremains uncertain. Doblin, among others, believes that Lykos will eventually bring MDMA therapy to the masses, but following the FDA rejection, he has grave concerns about the direction the industry might take.
On a recent Modern Enlightenment podcast by Ceremonia, he expressed fears that the FDA’s decision could have a chilling effect on future psychedelic NDAs, setting a hands-off precedent he deems immoral.
Doblin told Ceremonia, “We (MAPS) had suggestions that it might be interesting to do a study just giving people MDMA without any support, but Michael Mithoefer, our lead psychiatrist, myself, and others thought it would be unethical to do that.”
“…stuff comes up [on MDMA], and if you’re not capable of processing it, you can end up worse off,” he added.
Doblin also articulated why he believes MDMA alone is insufficient to extinguish PTSD.
He explained that 40% of Lykos’ clinical trial participants had previously tried MDMA recreationally before joining the study. If the drug alone were all they needed, these patients would’ve been cured of PTSD. But they weren’t. Many had suffered for years without relief. And it was the combination of MDMA plus psychotherapy that finally helped them achieve remission.
Doblin explained, “It’s not about the drug. It’s about how you process. And it also is not just about the drug experience. It’s about integration. It’s also about preparation. All of that is what contributes to the outcomes.”
In other words, the idea that a psychedelic experience alone can cure mental health issues ignores the complexities of trauma and the human psyche.
Nevertheless, the FDA skepticism about MDMA therapy means psychedelic NDAs may start to look like Spravato’s, or they may follow the “psychological support” approach that pharmaceutical companies Compass Pathways (Compass) and Mind Medicine (MindMed) are promoting.
“Profit-oriented companies like Compass are minimizing any psychotherapeutic angle. They just want [psychedelic medicine] to fit into the psycho-pharm model that people understand,” said Shannon.
He added, “I have to tell you that 95% of the people that I know in the psychedelic realm don’t believe in that {approach},” he added.
According to Shannon, “psychological support” means licensed therapists are on-site during drug administration. But instead of providing counseling intervention, they serve in more passive roles, stepping in only to prevent psychological harm when necessary.
“[This approach comes from] people stuck in the old ways. People who want something comfortable and not challenging. This is what fading, failing paradigms do. They try to prevent new ideas from coming in,” said Shannon.
Will Lykos Carry MDMA Therapy to the FDA Finish Line?
Lykos has vowed to bring this novel psychedelic medicine to the current regulatory framework. However, industry insiders think its new Phase 3 trial will introduce different study design elements that could render the original protocol unrecognizable.
At the very least, Lykos may need to shift from integrative, holistic therapies, like Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, and Holotropic Breathwork, to accepted “evidence-based approaches” like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that fit neatly into the traditional medical structure. CBT can be effective for PTSD, but today’s mental health crisis proves it is remarkably substandard.
Amid the tug-of-war between innovation and convention, I fear psychedelic-assisted therapy, as we now know it, may be headed toward extinction. But I won’t mourn its passing. Instead, I’ll see this phase as a metamorphosis—where the old form dissolves, making way for a model that adapts to today’s framework while (hopefully) preserving the transformative essence of psychedelic healing.
Somatic therapy and psychedelics are proving to be mutually beneficial as the psychedelic revival evolves. Somatic therapy can unlock deeper levels of healing and trauma release inaccessible by psychedelics alone. And at the same time, somatic therapy can set the table for someone who is not quite ready for a psychedelic journey.
Whether they’re new to the psychedelic field or not, most people have a basic understanding of what psychedelics are and what they do. However, many people are unfamiliar with somatic therapy. Thus, even fewer understand the intersection between somatic therapy and psychedelics. Before exploring the interplay further, let’s address the obvious question first.
What is Somatic Therapy?
According to Harvard Health somatic therapy is “… a treatment focusing on the body and how emotions appear within the body. Somatic therapies posit that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions, and traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become ‘trapped’ inside.”
Somatic therapy, or just simply ‘somatics,’ is a topic that covers significant breadth and depth. Somatics is not one thing, but many different training programs teach it, and unique practitioners practice it with distinct approaches.
Two notable therapists, Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk, specialize in trauma and psychedelics under the somatic umbrella.
“It is the result of the multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, Indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics,” Levine says.
Dutch psychiatrist, researcher and author Bessel van der Kolk has made significant contributions to the somatic therapy field as well. His book The Body Keeps the Score describes how a group of therapists and scientists struggled to integrate recent advances in brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments that “can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past.” Van der Kolk’s work has brought much-needed attention to how trauma gets trapped or “stuck” in the body, and is often referenced in the psychedelic field.
Besides somatic experiencing, a variety of methods exist to address trapped trauma in the body. Some of them include body awareness, pendulation, titration and resourcing among others. So who might benefit from somatics?
Who Benefits From Somatic Therapy?
People suffering from anxiety, complicated grief, depression, PTSD, self-esteem problems and other challenges can find healing benefits from somatic therapy.
Often these unsettling feelings manifest in the body in crippling ways. These unwelcome feelings, anxiety and stress may lead to lack of concentration, sleep complications, muscle tension, stiffness, etc. Over a long period of time, these physical maladies put tremendous wear and tear on the body, and can lead to the manifestation of chronic pain and illness.
As van der Kolk says, “the body doesn’t lie.” These debilitating physical conditions are symptomatic of the underlying stuck or blocked psychic energy. So anyone with entrenched experiences, feelings or traumas causing corporal pain can benefit from somatic therapy. Somatic therapy works to disempower these emotions. But how do these unwanted emotions become unwelcome guests in the body?
How Animals Have an Advantage Over Humans
Levine made one of the biggest advancements in somatics by studying animals. By observing animals, Levine came to the conclusion that animals have an ability to discard or brush off psychic distress. Think of a dog shaking off water. Animals seem to have an innate ability to neutralize trauma after escaping a predator. Not possessing this ability would compromise their survival instincts and threaten an existential crisis. However, humans don’t appear to have the same set of skills.
Somatic therapy focuses on the nervous system as its foundation. The human nervous system does not respond like the nervous system of animals.
“Animals complete the whole threat cycle. They go through the whole thing. They discharge that energy,” Kara Tremain, ACC explains.
Bonnijane Monson, DPT concurs, and explains further. “You’re looking for saber-toothed tigers around you. You have to be aware of all the saber-toothed tigers in the area, because the saber-toothed tigers can potentially harm you. But if you’re looking for external saber-toothed tigers, you don’t care if you’re hungry. You don’t care if you’re sleepy. You don’t care about the signals happening in your body that are trying to tell you what you need because your biggest concern at that moment is safety. So we lose interoception which is the internal knowing and sensing of what we need and want. So what we teach in somatics is to increase interoception.”
In a way, somatic therapy teaches us to regain our animal instincts and reclaim our bodies again. We have to teach our bodies that we are no longer in threat. However, if a person is stuck in deep trauma, in a flight, fight, or freeze response for example, they may not benefit from other therapy types.
Where Somatic Therapy and Psychedelics Intersect
For some people with deep, embodied trauma, somatic therapy may be the skeleton key that unlocks it.
For example, a person may not be getting results from traditional psychotherapy. In a case like this, the body transforms into a psychic sentinel and does not allow passage to the origin of the pain.
“You can talk about it all day long, but your body is still going through the experience,” Monson says.
The nervous system is the ideal starting point for somatics, Tremain says.
“… You really can’t do the bigger, deeper work if you’re stuck in a trauma pattern.”
In this case psychedelics may not be the ideal solution – yet.
Undergoing somatic therapy may be a necessary pre-game step, leading up to a psychedelic experience. The need for somatic therapy shows up in psychedelic settings in slightly different ways.
Somatic Therapy as a Psychedelic Precursor
Because most people are unfamiliar with somatic therapy, chances are a therapist will recommend it to them for the first time. Perhaps a traditional psychotherapist has encountered a blockage in someone that talk therapy can’t resolve. In this case, a psychedelically informed therapist might also deduce that the timing for a psychedelic journey is not right either.
“Unless there is a real orientation to the body, you can spend the whole psychedelic session in your mind, just processing things from a mind perspective. An orientation with the body changes things,” Tremain says.
Sometimes severe trauma can reduce the benefits of psychedelic medicine, despite the medicine’s potency. In this case, somatic therapy prior to a psychedelic session may help someone prepare for a journey. Tremain emphasizes that her goal is to get people to do somatic work before they engage in a psychedelic session.
Somatic Therapy in Underground Psychedelic Settings
Many people attending underground psychedelic retreats and ceremonies may not know about somatic therapy. However, people with severe, nervous system-based traumas may still seek them out, and may not be aware that their body is keeping the score. Thus underground retreat leaders, practitioners, and guides, need to prepare for these scenarios and seek expert-level training to help support those who may come to the circle with unresolved somatic trauma.
Monson points out the risk stating, “With different memories or experiences are going to come sensations from the body. And if somebody is not prepared to experience the intensity of what is happening in their body, it can feel really scary and a lot of fighting and struggle can happen as a result of what’s showing up in a psychedelic experience.” Some may interpret this as a “bad trip” when in reality a tough experience may be an indication that a person needs somatic therapy. It boils down to a matter of comfort.
“If somebody feels more comfortable being present and can stay there a longer period of time, the amount of struggle is less and the integration afterward is much easier because they already know how to process that through a somatic approach,” Monson explains.
How Somatic Therapy and Psychedelics Complement Each Other
Somatic therapy and psychedelics can be like a training ground to the playing field of the psyche. As an individual undertakes a journey of deep, personal work, layers of the psyche peel back. This reveals more profound levels of psychic projects underneath. However, sometimes a person’s body isn’t quite ready for the psychedelic playing field.
“Somatics prepares someone to stay in their body and work through, or be with, whatever shows up,” Munson says.
Whether it’s emotional or physical pain, or different memories and experiences, somatics prepares a person to take on these challenging moments. The glamorization of psychedelics can mislead people to believe that challenging experiences are throwaways. In fact, these difficult experiences may provide the richest rewards.
A quick dip into a psychedelic-adjacent field reveals “the bad” often seeds and nourishes personal development. German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the idea of “post-traumatic growth.” He was way ahead of his time in 1888. He also aided the progress of psychology with his idea. Through the lens of post-traumatic growth, somatic therapy opens, sets and tends the psychedelic playing field.
“A big part of this work is learning to be with uncomfortable sensations and to be with discomfort. It’s about learning to be with discomfort so you can process it. The more you can be with it, the easier it is to process. The more you’re not over-responsive to something, the more settled your body is, you can actually see things and process things that come up in a psychedelic space,” Tremain explains.
In this way, somatic therapy gives a person the tools to graduate to the psychedelic big leagues, and artfully manage challenging experiences.
Somatics and Psychedelics: Unlocking the Treasure Within
The psychospiritual healing process often plays out like a locked treasure chest containing more locked treasure chests. Everyone has unique treasure chests, sizes, shapes, and locks requiring distinct keys to open. Somatic therapy provides another key to opening the next chest. Anyone with psychedelic experience knows how journeys can elicit profound visceral reactions. Without a body-centered approach to psychedelic journeys, a person may short-circuit their healing process and shortchange their full healing potential.
Jungian psychology takes a fascinating look at the relationship between the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds. How is this framework brought more to the forefront through psychedelics and an understanding of our many parts?
They talk about the experiences that helped them first understand the concept of multiple different parts making up their being, and dive into what it is about psychedelics that allows us to discover and work with these different parts: how the protector parts of our psyche work overtime to keep parts away from us, and how psychedelics can dissolve them, leading to a better understanding of ourselves. How much of our persona is based on who we feel we’re supposed to be? What shadow parts are stopping us from being our true selves? And what amazing parts of ourselves have yet to be discovered?
They discuss:
The idea of self as a unified entity: Does this concept make sense anymore?
Risks in understanding how different parts work together, from justifying behaviors to inflating defensive structures
The need to move away from solution-based to more process-focused frameworks, and the power in treating healing and growth as an ongoing process
The rejection of the shadow and the archetypal (and impossible) wish to extinguish all suffering
The large discrepancy between what people think being a psychedelic facilitator is vs. the reality
and more!
If you really want to dig into Jungian ideas, Jungian psychology is one of the new specialization tracks featured in the next cohort of Vital, beginning September 16. If you want to know more, send us an email or attend one of the next Vital Q+As.
Psychedelics in palliative care has become an exciting new framework for people looking to ease anxiety and embrace spirituality, but the concept is not as simple as just providing a substance.
In this episode, Joe interviews Livi Joy: Director of Health and Safety, Existential Palliative Ministry Lead Facilitator, and more at Sacred Garden Community (SGC).
As she screens applicants for SGC (and Beckley Retreats), she talks a lot about the process and the safety measures that are absolutely necessary when using psychedelics in palliative care – especially under the framework of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Does the patient have at least one strong support person? Do they need to start or increase therapy? Does their home need to be rearranged due to possible fall risks? How will certain medications muffle their experience? Are they truly physically healthy enough to be able to handle a powerful journey? And also, is the sacrament always necessary?
She discusses:
How preparation questions for a journey are often in line with preparation for death
Why it’s important to provide these experiences for people far from the dying process itself
What Sacred Garden’s core tenant of faith that everyone can have a direct experience of the divine in this lifetime means to her
Atheism and the complications that arise when discussing spirituality and consciousness: Who’s really in charge?
How psychedelics can help with understanding and preparing for death, but our culture is too death-phobic too embrace it
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna interviews Monica Nieto: Vital graduate, psychedelic facilitator and integration coach, and founder of Holistic TherapeutiX, a retreat center offering cannabis and breathwork retreats; and Jordana Ma: past Vital instructor and psychological counselor who runs retreats in Peru following the Asháninkan tradition of traditional Amazonian medicine.
They discuss their similar paths to psychedelics and healing, the power of plant dietas and fully immersing yourself into nature, and learning to hear your true teacher: the inner healer. They highlight how we’ve lost the connection to the ecological consciousness within our bodies, and how the plants – perhaps in a self-serving way – have become allies, trying to teach us to heal the web we’re a part of and reconnect to nature and ourselves.
They discuss:
The importance of combining traditional perspectives and Western psychotherapy into a spiritual practice
The similarities between yoga and traditional Amazonian medicine
Singing as a somatic (and breathwork) practice
How things are meant to work in synergy, and the problem with science trying to extract compounds rather than respecting the power of the whole plant
Their role models who have inspired them and informed their work
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Sara Reed: Vital instructor, lecturer, and lead psychedelic research therapist at Imperial College London; and Alex H. Robinson: Vital student, integration coach and psilocybin facilitator for Heroic Hearts Project, and distinguished Army SOF combat Veteran with a decade of active duty service.
Reed has worked with MAPS to make clinical trial populations more diverse and is creating culturally sensitive Clinical Research Forms for future research trials, and Robinson spearheaded her unit’s Cultural Support Team program and contributed to policy changes to help place women into traditionally male-centric Special Operations roles. Representing marginalized groups themselves, they’re both passionate about making psychedelic therapy more inclusive and representative of the general population, and getting more practitioners up to speed to be able to deliver culturally competent care.
They discuss:
The importance of having difficult conversations and calling out bad behavior
The fallacy of zero-sum thinking: Doing something special for a smaller community doesn’t take away from the main goal; it adds to it
The benefit of being able to self-reflect and personalize content when most psychedelic education consists of one-sided lectures
The challenge of getting people who don’t feel represented to enroll in clinical trials, and how personal stories go a long way
Although the late psychologist and mystic Carl Jung died in the 1960s, his ‘inner self’ legacy is enjoying an organic revival, synchronizing with the resurgence of psychedelics.
Jung’s work provides a reliable road map for a psychedelic trip through the unconscious, and contemporary psychedelic explorers are hungry to learn more about his profound teachings.
Why Jung Appeals to a Broad Psychedelic Audience
Jung’s enduring transpersonal principles can help us interpret and understand complex non-ordinary experiences, whether they’re brought on by psychedelic compounds or other endogenous methods.
Thus, his insights resonate with a broad audience: licensed therapists, reiki practitioners, guides, yogis, integration coaches, breath workers, and others.
“We’re in need of tools that help us to articulate what’s going on at that level of depth,” says Jungian analyst-in-training and clinical psychology doctoral student MacKenzie Amara. “…we don’t have [many tools] to articulate what’s happening when we get into the messy place of extreme emotional catharsis and symbolic representation through the form of visions and communication with ancestors who have been long dead.”
Understanding Archetypes on Jung’s Terms
In order to comprehend Jung’s psychospiritual philosophies, it’s crucial to first understand some basic Jungian concepts and terms. Jung believed that the psyche (mind, body, soul) is composed of three parts: the ego (or personal conscious), the personal unconscious (unique, containing suppressed memories), and the collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious is a domain of primordial images and symbols that evoke meaning and connection across races, cultures, and nationalities. According to Jung, these symbols contain ‘ancestral memory’, which is inherited. Our ancestral roots and dreams provide insights into the collective unconscious, which shapes our perceptions, knowledge, and experiences.
Within this realm, four main archetypes reflect our beliefs, values, motivations, and morals. The four main Jungian archetypes are:
The Self: The Self emerges when the ego integrates with both the conscious and unconscious aspects of our minds. It represents the culmination of an individual’s spiritual journey, known as individuation. Through individuation, each person realizes their unique, cosmic identity.
The Persona: The Persona refers to the various social masks we wear. We present different aspects of ourselves depending on the social context, such as at work, with family, or with friends. The development of the persona is influenced by upbringing, culture, and environment.
The Shadow: The Shadow contains the parts of our personality that we repress, discard, and hide. These can include traits we are unaware of or do not appreciate. While prejudices and biases originate from the shadow, it is not entirely negative; it also holds potential strengths and hidden talents.
The Anima or the Animus: These archetypes represent the ideal feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) aspects within us. The animus embodies masculinity in a woman’s psyche, while the anima embodies femininity in a man’s psyche. Society often discourages the expression of these opposite-gender traits. Integrating the anima or animus is a crucial step in the process of individuation.
Due to intense engagement with archetypes during psychedelic experiences, individuals risk having their personal worldviews disassembled in the process.
“Jungian theory lends itself to people that have had spiritual, transgressive, or transpersonal experiences more than those that are kind of stuck in a rational materialistic worldview,” Amara explains.
These transpersonal experiences make the Self the focal point of the journey of individuation.
Carl Jung’s Inner Self Explained
The Self is central to Jung’s worldview, merging consciousness and unconsciousness to represent the whole psyche. We are born with a sense of unity, but as we grow and focus on the outer world—school, work, relationships—we form an ego and lose this unity, neglecting our inner world.
Jung identified two life stages: the outer world and the inner world. As adults, we often experience tension between our conscious and unconscious minds, leading to a midlife crisis. This signals the need to nurture our inner life.
Life’s challenges can bring a “dark night of the soul,” where societal values fail us. This prompts a quest to reconnect with our soul, though many avoid this confrontation. Embracing our suffering can lead to psychic growth, uniting our conscious and unconscious realms.
Through this process, known as individuation, we integrate the ignored parts of our unconscious, regaining wholeness and inner harmony.
Carl Jung’s Process of Individuation
As we turn inward, we encounter individuation, a central theme in Jung’s work. Individuation integrates our unconscious with the conscious, restoring the wholeness of the Self. This process, akin to self-actualization, involves breaking free from societal and cultural norms to become a unique individual. Successful individuation provides deep-rooted stability, like an ancient oak tree, supporting us through life’s storms.
Individuation heals the split between the conscious and unconscious, allowing our true Self to emerge. This journey creates turbulence as we realize our conventional world and unconscious world often conflict. The conventional world shapes our beliefs and behaviors, creating a structured reality. In contrast, the unconscious is chaotic and tumultuous, divided into the personal and collective unconscious. The personal unconscious contains everything outside our conscious awareness.
From birth, we operate largely on autopilot, influenced by external conditioning. This conditioning shapes our ego and self-perception, leading to a split and psychic imbalance. Psychedelics can help repair this split, aligning our conscious and unconscious minds.
Jung, Psychedelics, and “Ego Death”
Carl Jung coined an often used term in psychedelic vernacular: ego death. Ego death refers to a compromised sense of self, and it’s a state that’s coveted by many psychonauts. While some consider it an end goal of psychedelic work, it’s really the first step towards a return to wholeness. So, why is this idea prevalent in the psychedelic community?
“Psychedelics are what we call psycho-pumps for individuation. Meaning psychedelics are connectors to personal and collective unconscious; what gives you more of the unconscious material to then work with,” Dr. Ido Cohen explains.
This idea results in the common sentiment that psychedelics are “ten years of therapy in one day.”
While Cohen doesn’t think it’s necessarily accurate, he believes people are trying to say, “Wow, psychedelics can really open up the barrier to the personal and collective unconscious which then a flood of information comes in.”
This shedding of a one-sided self-identity holds true in above ground and underground psychedelic settings, as people jump-start their individuation. Insights can follow that may lead a person to explore what has been relegated to the basement of their psyche, or the “shadow.” When we learn to dance with the shadow, we empathize and relate with all of mankind on a profound level, Cohen says.
Learning to Dance with the Shadow
As a midlife crisis arises, or we enter a dark night of the soul, and the process of individuation begins and we come face to face with our shadow. This daunting task is referred to as doing “shadow work,” (another Jungian term gaining popularity in licensed and underground settings alike).
At first glance, we may see our shadow and assume it is evil or an enemy. But our shadow is part of us, and can’t be abandoned or avoided. As we familiarize ourselves with the shadow, we learn that it is not to be feared, as it is only dark or hostile when it is ignored or misunderstood. Thus, it’s critical to understand what the shadow really is.
What is the Shadow?
The shadow encompasses all the psychic elements we reject and hope to discard by casting them into the depths. It includes the traits we’ve ignored, disowned, or removed from ourselves, forming our personality in the process. The shadow is the unknown dark side of our personality, representing everything we desire not to be.
The shadow includes negative and primitive human emotions and impulses: selfishness, rage, greed, pride, and lust. Anything we reject in ourselves as evil, intolerable, or less than ideal forms the shadow. It’s a repository of both negative and positive qualities we no longer claim. Within this mix, we find the shadow’s hidden treasures.
Cohen notes, “There is also the golden shadow, which includes beautiful aspects we repressed due to our upbringing or environment.”
This could mean rediscovering playfulness or sexuality. Or it could reveal latent talents, like a lawyer discovering a talent for writing or an athlete becoming a chef. It often emerges in psychedelic settings, inspiring life changes like new careers, divorces, or relocations. However, it’s crucial to provide quality integration and a solid container to help individuals make sound decisions and avoid regret.
The shadow compensates for what we lack. For instance, if a person is aggressive, the shadow reflects empathy and tenderness. If they’re shy, it reflects confidence and assertiveness. Honoring and accepting the shadow is an intense spiritual exercise, revealing our potential and the ideal self we strive to become.
Carl Jung’s Psychedelic Guidance is Here to Stay
For the Western mind, unaccustomed to Indigenous worldviews that embrace plant spirits and entities, Jung’s concept of the inner self offers all psychedelic practitioners an invaluable tool to navigate the mind-manifesting unknown. Think of Carl Jung as a trustworthy psychic sherpa: he guides us through the peaks and valleys of the timeless and boundless realms of human consciousness (and unconsciousness), helping us reconnect with our soul.
Do you feel called to learn more about Jung’s teachings? Consider joining us for our fourth cohort of Vital, where students can specialize in Depth and Jungian Perspectives. Applications are open now with limited seats available.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Casey Paleos, MD: Vital instructor, researcher, psychiatrist with a private practice offering ketamine infusion therapy and KAP, and co-founder of Nautilus Sanctuary, a non-profit psychedelic research, education, and advocacy organization.
Paleos talks about how stress creates trauma, and how the symptoms Western medicine tries to silence are actually signals – a quality assurance mechanism sending an alert that something is wrong, and that when symptoms are labeled as ‘treatment-resistant,’ is it actually a case of one’s own inner healing intelligence outsmarting a medication to make sure that that message is delivered?
He discusses:
MAPS’ recent advisory board ruling, past ethical violations, and how training should be done
How consent in a therapeutic relationship is an ongoing process of checking in
How psychedelic-assisted therapy (and maybe all therapy) is simply removing obstacles so one’s own inner healing intelligence can do its job
The importance of a culture (and training) that celebrates all therapeutic modalities as complementary: There’s a lot of uniqueness in this world, so we should embrace that
Asking for help is an inherently vulnerable thing. But when it comes to becoming a better psychedelic facilitator or guide, it’s crucial. Enter: psychedelic mentorship.
When people seek help from a psychedelic professional, experience matters. One may be dealing with addiction, depression, or trauma. Or perhaps something a bit lighter: a reset, a shift of perspective. Whatever the reason, individuals place their trust not only in the substance, but in the practitioners who help guide the way.
The vulnerability and trust between individuals and their psychedelic support providers highlight the critical importance of experience. This is why professional relationships, such as mentorships, are essential. A skilled mentor can equip facilitators with the expertise to handle the most challenging circumstances, distinguishing them from those who cannot provide the same level of support.
How Mentorship Can Help Psychedelic Professionals
The resurgence of interest in psychedelic medicine has ushered in a new era of therapeutic possibilities, yet despite the exciting prospects of increased access and expanded treatment options, considerations like ethics and client safety must remain paramount. Mentorship can provide the responsible guidance needed to navigate these crucial therapeutic aspects, ensuring that the rapid expansion of psychedelic therapy does not compromise the quality of care.
Psychedelic mentorship offers numerous benefits, both for the mentees and the broader professional psychedelic community. It provides future practitioners, therapists, guides, and integration specialists with critical knowledge, guidance, and support, helping them build confidence and competence in their practice. Experienced mentors share insights gleaned from years of helping others, including best practices, ethical considerations, and the subtleties of client care that are not always covered in formal training programs.
Moreover, mentorship fosters a culture of continuous learning and professional development. It encourages mentees to stay updated on the latest research and developments in psychedelics, promoting an evidence-based approach to supporting clients. This dynamic exchange of knowledge helps advance the field, ensuring that therapeutic practices evolve and stay connected with new scientific discoveries and industry norms.
What Can Future Psychedelic Professionals Learn From Mentorship?
Through mentorship, novice professionals and healers gain hands-on experience under the guidance of seasoned practitioners. This practical exposure is invaluable, as it allows mentees to apply theoretical knowledge in real-world settings, honing their skills in client interaction, session management, and therapeutic intervention.
Mentors also provide future psychedelic professionals with feedback and constructive criticism, helping them identify areas for improvement and develop their therapeutic style. This personalized guidance ensures that new psychedelic practitioners are well-equipped to handle the varied challenges that will inevitably arise during their practice.
For insight on mentorship in the psychedelic medicine space, we spoke with Kylea Taylor, therapist and creator of Inner Ethics program. As an ethics instructor for the Vital Professional Certificate Training in Integrative Psychedelic Studies, she observes first-hand how valuable mentorship is for psychedelic professionals who are training to build their careers and work with clients.
“I think the most important training is experiential. Supervised experience of having many extra-ordinary states of consciousness oneself and sitting for others who are in extra-ordinary states of consciousness,” Taylor said.
“Along with those experiences, it is very important to be in experiential study communities with other peers who share their experiences while you listen and who listen to yours. It is important then to have trainers and trained facilitators who can answer your questions and make comments about what happened in a group session. They can answer the questions of your peers, from which you learn as well.”
The Unique Situation of Psychedelic Therapy
Psychedelic therapy and support occupies a unique and complex niche within the broader field of mental health treatment. There’s a delicate mix of hands-on client care, navigating the legal status of psychedelics, and the specific ethical and professional considerations intrinsic to this type of therapy.
The Vulnerability of Clients
Clients engaging in psychedelic therapy or support often enter highly vulnerable states. The substances used, such as MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD, can induce intense emotional and psychological experiences. These experiences can unearth deep-seated traumas, evoke powerful emotions, and alter perceptions of reality. This heightened vulnerability requires practitioners to be exceptionally skilled in managing emotional crises and providing a safe, supportive environment.
Mentorship plays a critical role in preparing therapists to handle these situations with the utmost sensitivity and care, ensuring that clients feel secure and supported throughout their journey. Mentors can share their experience, help keep mentees focused, and guide them through helping clients navigate challenging experiences.
In her training sessions with burgeoning psychedelic facilitators, Taylor places an emphasis on the importance of ethical considerations and the utmost care for clients.
“[Facilitators have] an up-power position that has a greater power differential than the one between a therapist and a client in talk therapy. The psychedelic medicine amplifies vulnerability, suggestibility, and sensitivity. It softens the client’s defenses. This makes it incumbent on the practitioner, what I call the person who is in the ‘Responsible Party’ role, to have a regular source of oversight for their work—a peer consultation group, a supervisor, or a mentor—where we can be vulnerable ourselves and talk and learn from our challenges to provide impeccable care to clients.”
The Legal Status of Psychedelics
The legal status of psychedelics adds another layer of complexity to psychedelic facilitation. While there is a growing movement towards the decriminalization of psychedelics, they remain illegal in many parts of the world. Even in jurisdictions where psychedelic therapy is permitted under specific conditions, like clinical trials or compassionate use programs, legal restrictions and regulatory requirements can be stringent. Mentors help practitioners navigate this complex legal landscape, ensuring they remain compliant with all relevant laws and regulations. This guidance is essential for protecting both the facilitator and the client, as legal missteps can have severe consequences.
Ethical Considerations & Ensuring Safe Spaces for Clients
The unique and sometimes intense realities of psychedelic therapy demand adherence to rigorous ethical standards. The altered states of consciousness induced by psychedelics can blur boundaries and heighten emotional and psychological sensitivity. Practitioners must be adept at maintaining professional boundaries, managing therapeutic dynamics like transference, and ensuring informed consent. Mentors can help trainees understand and uphold these ethical standards, offering guidance from their lived professional experiences, helping future practitioners prepare for the unique challenges that could arise in psychedelic sessions.
“Practitioners can, without realizing it sometimes, come to believe that the healing and transformation of their clients is their own doing,” says Taylor. “They can misuse a client’s transference and be in denial about their own countertransference. They can exploit a client’s vulnerability or suggestibility sexually, emotionally, financially, medically, or spiritually and rationalize their reasons for doing so. They can ignore their own semi-conscious and unconscious motivations. If they have no peer consultation group or mentor, they may have no one to remind them about their client’s best interests.”
Traditional vs. Peer-to-Peer and Community Mentorship
Mentorship in psychedelics can take various forms, each with its unique benefits. Traditional mentorship involves a one-on-one relationship between an experienced mentor and a less experienced mentee. This approach allows for deep, personalized guidance and the development of a strong, supportive relationship.
In contrast, peer-to-peer and community mentorship involve more collaborative and collective forms of support. Peer-to-peer mentorship connects individuals at similar stages in their careers, enabling them to share experiences, challenges, and solutions on an equal footing. Community mentorship, on the other hand, involves larger networks of practitioners who provide mutual support, share resources, and collectively advance the field.
These forms of mentorship can complement traditional mentorship, providing a well-rounded support system for professionals at all stages of their careers. Taylor sees benefits in a well-rounded approach.
“I think having both forms of oversight is ideal. Traditional mentorship is usually one-on-one or in small groups. One can benefit from a mentor’s greater expertise. A one-on-one supervisory session can usually provide more security of confidentiality about a client situation,” Taylor said. “Peer consultation groups can provide more points of view, a breadth of resources and greater reach in networking. Our InnerEthics Peer Consultation Group is structured to protect vulnerability as practitioners rotate in roles to help each other do self-inquiry and relational reflection. Together they do mutual consciousness development to help them do their consequential work. Members of these groups also benefit from two things that are hard to come by in modern culture: a feeling of belonging and greater self-compassion.”
Considering the unique dynamics of psychedelic therapy, and how the future rollout will be full of new participants and novel therapeutic models, mentorship is quickly becoming a cornerstone of professional development. This supportive mode of training will help equip professionals with the knowledge, skills, and ethical grounding necessary to ensure they’re well-prepared to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new era of mental health.
Are you working toward becoming a psychedelic professional, and looking for mentors to guide you? Consider Vital, where students gain access to one-on-one mentorship opportunities with experienced facilitators working in the field. Applications are open now with limited seats available.
In this episode, Kyle interviews Peter A. Levine, Ph.D.: developer of Somatic Experiencing®, educator, and author of several best-selling books on trauma.
His most recent book, An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey, is exactly that: a change from more scholarly writing into an extremely vulnerable telling of his early childhood trauma and how he has healed over the years. He talks about how his unconscious convinced him to write the book, how trauma can move into the body, and how he needed a student to identify how his trauma was affecting him. He believes that we all have wounding, but it’s how we carry these wounds and tell our truth that matters.
He discusses:
The need to allow space for both Indigenous traditions and evidence-based Western frameworks
The power of having even just one distinct moment of feeling cared for and loved
How Colin Turnbull saw healing differently after living with an African tribe for three years
Why he suggests 15-20 sober experiences with non-ordinary states for each drug experience
Why not having a community or empathetic other makes us more vulnerable to trauma
Microdosing. By now the practice has fully emerged from the underground and into the mainstream. No longer the domain of self-healing psychonauts and efficiency-chasing CEOs, the benefits of microdosing can be found in major magazines and clinical trials with Ivy-league universities.
The concept is relatively simple: taking very small, sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics (generally one-tenth to one-twentieth of a recreational or therapeutic dose). This practice has been reported to provide some of the benefits of psychedelic substances without strong sensory effects and, sometimes, help with the difficult work involved in full psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions.
As we move towards possible approval of psychedelic medicines by the FDA, and with decriminalization measures making progress in jurisdictions across the globe, how will microdosing fit into this future of psychedelic-assisted therapy? What benefits does it provide to therapists, practitioners, and the clients they serve?
Microdosing as a Tool For Practitioners and Clients
Despite an overwhelming number of positive personal stories and self-reported research, the hard science is still out as to the level of tangible benefits patients might gain from microdosing psychedelics. However, this combination of enthusiastic anecdotal reports and (slowly) mounting clinical research makes microdosing an intriguing tool for people looking to better their mental health and the practitioners who help them do it.
We spoke with Kayse Gehret, microdosing expert and founder of Microdosing for Healing, for her perspective on how microdosing can improve therapeutic results for both patients and practitioners.
Microdosing is the ideal way to introduce most individuals to psychedelic practice and therapy.
“Its relative subtlety is an advantage as it provides people a gentler introductory experience and begins to allow some challenging or unfamiliar emotions to surface incrementally versus all at once,” Gehret said. “My colleagues and I are seeing an increasing number of clients coming to us after returning from a high dose ceremonial retreat feeling destabilized. While psychedelics can bring us big truths, we must also recognize that much of the public is not appropriately prepared, resourced, or ready to receive these truths in a single weekend.”
Psychedelics primarily work by modulating the brain’s serotonin system, which plays a key role in mood regulation, cognition, and perception. They can also enhance neural plasticity and connectivity. These types of effects create states of mind that are fertile ground for mental health therapies. Openness, creativity, dissolution of the ego, the breaking of bad habits of mind — all are typical benefits of psychedelic therapy that may also be accessible through microdosing regimens.
According to Gehret, microdosing has a lighter touch, and is less of a jarring and intimidating experience. This allows patients to take part in psychedelic therapies with a gentler, more accessible introduction.
“By starting with microdosing, individuals can begin to heal and discover threads and shadow material leading up to and in preparation for their high dose journey,” Gehret explained. “In our microdosing community, I’ve witnessed repeatedly that when people begin with microdosing and work to deepen their relationship with the medicine over time, when they ultimately journey they tend to have much less fear, resistance and ‘challenging trip’ experience.”
“Professionally, I also believe microdosing is wonderfully supportive of the therapeutic bond between the client and their facilitator. By beginning with a microdosing protocol, a psychedelic guide can establish, deepen, and develop their bond with a client well in advance of the journey, which I believe can lead to much better outcomes and experiences for both client and guide.”
Therapeutic Benefits of Microdosing Psychedelics
While the efficacy of psychedelic medicine is becoming increasingly known to mental health professionals, it’s useful to look at some of the potential benefits of microdosing protocols and how practitioners may be able to incorporate them into their practices.
Depression and Anxiety: One of the most promising areas for microdosing psychedelics is in the treatment of depression and anxiety. Anecdotal reports and preliminary studies suggest that microdosing can lead to improvements in mood, reduced anxiety, and increased emotional resilience. For clients who have not responded well to traditional talk therapy or antidepressants, microdosing may offer an alternative or adjunctive treatment option. For recent clinical results, see the Phase 2 results from MindBio Therapeutics’ microdosing trial using LSD for depression.
Enhanced Creativity and Problem-Solving: Microdosing has been reported to enhance creativity, focus, and problem-solving abilities. These cognitive benefits can be particularly useful in therapeutic settings, where patients are often encouraged to engage in introspective and creative processes as part of their treatment. Enhanced cognitive flexibility may also help patients break out of rigid thought patterns that contribute to unhealthy states of mind.
Increased Mindfulness and Presence: Personal reports and self-reported research has shown increased mindfulness and a greater sense of presence in their daily lives. This heightened awareness can enhance the effectiveness of therapeutic practices such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and other mindfulness-based interventions.
Gehret has been guiding therapies and teaching Vital’s microdosing courses for several years, sharing her first-hand experience with burgeoning student practitioners. In addition to the therapeutic possibilities, microdosing protocols can help solve issues around access, as traditional psychedelic-assisted therapy can be a costly and lengthy endeavor, she says.
“Microdosing is a subtle and gentle way to explore a therapeutic relationship with psychedelics and test how your body, mind, and spirit respond. It’s also far more accessible and affordable than clinical psychedelic therapy treatments, which can run into multiple thousands of dollars for a single experience, is not covered by most insurers, and will leave out most of the under-insured population,” she told Psychedelics Today. “On the other hand, cultivating your own medicines and becoming part of a microdosing community will cost far less, plus provide you with the ongoing benefits of community, education and support.”
As psychedelic therapy continues to enter the mainstream, it seems that microdosing will become an important introductory tool for those looking for help but are perhaps not yet fully comfortable with the idea of psychedelics. From a logistical perspective, the shorter session time and lack of hallucinatory journey means that microdosing can provide a tool for practitioners that offers some of the benefits of psychedelic therapies but with fewer demands on resources (time and costs), which can create a more accessible experience for clients.
Microdosing group work and peer-to-peer models are also advantageous over traditional one-to-one therapy, as more people can be served, while eliminating the potential for practitioner burnout
“These models also empower people to step into their own healing, self-trust, and intuition, and support each other in the process. In our microdosing community, we have people who have been attending our gatherings since our inception – and many of them have gone on to become microdosing coaches, guides and community builders. They serve as models, mentors and inspiration for the participants just starting out.”
This psychedelic resurgence is in an exciting moment, one that offers the possibility to create new modes and models for mental health treatments. Yet as with any new frontier, it’s crucial to build solid foundations based on education and responsibility. Ensuring that tomorrow’s practitioners are receiving the proper training is vital to the health of the growing landscape. Mentors like Gehret are lending their expertise to help build these paradigms.
In the future, Gehret envisions practitioners offering a range of microdosing support: integration circles, one to one support, group programs, and weaving the practice into their existing healing modalities like bodywork, psychotherapy, end-of-life care, human design, hypnotherapy, and more.
“This new way of incorporating and blending complementary modalities is incredibly effective and also a breath of fresh air from the silos and gate-keeping we see within medical models of care where you need to get a referral for everything and the system is rigged for profit over the best interest of the patient,” she said. “It really is an exciting time to be in the healing professions and microdosing is an ideal practice and bridge for people to begin to think differently about their health and healing.”
Interested in learning more about how to become a professional specializing in microdosing? Enrollment for the September cohort of Vital is open, with limited seats available.
Following the multi-decade regulatory pursuit, legal MDMA-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT) seemed imminent to many people. In February 2024, the FDA accepted Lykos Therapeutics’ New Drug Application (NDA), and all markers indicated a likely approval.
However, on June 4, the Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee (PDAC) shattered optimism when nearly all members advised the FDA to reject Lykos’ application.
In a 9-2 and 10-1 vote, the committee asserted its belief that MDMA therapy, as it stands, is neither effective nor safe for Americans with PTSD.
So, what is MDMA’s FDA approval status following the hearing?
The outlook seems grim, given that the FDA aligns with the advisory panel 88% of the time. Still, Lykos (formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation) remains hopeful.
“We believe there is a path forward and are focused on collaborating with the FDA as they continue to review our NDA over the months,” said Lykos in an email interview.
A final decision on MDMA for PTSD is expected on or around August 11th.
The Backstory
Starry-eyed psychedelic proponents didn’t see the dissent coming. The FDA had just granted Lykos’ NDA priority review, and everything seemed to be going smoothly.
However, the contention became clear on March 26, when the Institute of Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) published draft evidence on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. In the report, ICER acknowledged MDMA’s potential to help people heal from trauma. However, it raised significant concerns about weaving this novel treatment into traditional medicine.
The TLDR of the report’s criticism was that Lykos’ clinical evidence did not sufficiently support MDMA therapy for PTSD. The report cited alleged data validity issues, potential biases from therapists and participants, and a reported incident of sexual misconduct. It also highlighted MDMA’s cardiovascular risks, unexamined adverse events, and lack of long-term data proving the therapy’s enduring effects.
A month later, five people submitted a citizen petition to the FDA commissioner requesting the organization convene an advisory committee meeting on MDMA-AT to discuss the application’s “shortcomings and risks.” The letter also called for an extended public comment period prioritizing concerned speakers, and a live webcast.
The letter’s primary claim against the NDA was that MAPS/Lykos allegedly “manipulated clinical trial data to hide adverse events from regulatory agencies, motivated in part by a belief that these agencies would not understand that these adverse events are a necessary part of their MDMA-AT.”
The FDA responded to the petition by granting the advisory committee meeting with an extended comment period. However, it denied the request to prioritize input from concerned stakeholders.
The Meeting
June 4th’s meeting was a nine-hour saga, inviting FDA members, public participants, Lykos representatives, and eleven PDAC panelists to debate the risks and benefits of MDMA-assisted therapy.
PDAC boasted various roles in the psychopharmacologic field, including consumer representatives, pharmacists, patient representatives, scholars, and physicians. It did not include experts from the field of psychedelic research. Nevertheless, by 5:30 p.m., the board confidently dismissed MDMA-AT’s ability to do more good than harm for PTSD.
Lykos told Psychedelics Today that they didn’t see the rejection coming.
“Going into the meeting, we knew this was a unique assignment for the panel to review a drug-plus therapy combination. We did, however, believe that the fact that studies showed MDMA-assisted therapy offers statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in PTSD symptoms and functional impairment compared to placebo across two phase 3 trials with evidence of durability over time would compel the panel to support approval.”
86.5% of patients in the MMDA-AT group clinically benefited from the treatment compared to 69% in the placebo group.
71.2% of the MDMA cohort no longer held a PTSD diagnosis, compared to 47.6% in the placebo group.
46.2% of MDMA patients achieved remission compared to 21.4% in the placebo cohort.
Despite the clinically impressive results, PDAC emphasized significant doubts about the data’s validity and MDMA-AT’s overall safety.
Functional Unblinding and Expectation Bias
Functional unblinding occurs when participants or researchers accurately predict the treatment they receive or administer. Expectation bias occurs when someone anticipates a particular result. Prior experience, previously held beliefs, and functional unblinding can cause such biases, potentially impacting patient experiences and reporting.
Dr. Paul Holtzheimer from the National Center for PTSD said, “Expectation bias can work in two ways. It can exaggerate the effect of the active treatment and blunt the effect of the placebo treatment.”
It’s true that 40% of the trial participants used MDMA in the past and may have assumed the drug worked based on prior positive experiences.
However, as Lykos points out in a recent statement, “The data indicates that prior illicit MDMA use had no impact on the results, as there was no meaningful difference in primary outcome measure or adverse events reported between the subgroup of Phase 3 participants who reported prior illicit MDMA use and the subgroup of participants who did not.”
Functional unblinding impacts, however, are far more debatable.
Renowned psychedelic drug researcher Matthew Johnson, PhD, explained Lykos’ unblinding problem in a recent X post.
Johnson said, “For those [in the study] thinking they got MDMA, the therapeutic effect was nearly identical between MDMA and placebo [groups]. Yikes.”
In other words, people who guessed they were on MDMA achieved similar therapeutic responses, whether or not they really took the drug.
Still, Johnson points out in The Illusion of Consensus podcast that functional unblinding is not a new issue for psychedelics, nor is it unique.
“There are a whole host of drugs that have been [FDA] approved. All of the sleep drugs… all of the anti-anxiety benzodiazepines, all the ADHD drugs… all of the opioid pain relievers. The practice of psychiatry is filled with psychoactive drugs that have very clear signatures… I want to know to what degree in FDA advisory panels this [functional unblinding issue] has come up… Because cutting through the blind is an issue for all these [compounds]… I don’t think psychedelics should be held to a higher standard than the normal process.”
Misconduct and Data Integrity
Potential misconduct during the MAPS / Lykos trials added to PDAC’s concerns about the integrity of the results.
Allegations included reports that principal investigators:
Discouraged patients with negative experiences, like suicidality, from participating in follow-up studies.
Influenced patients to report favorable outcomes.
Inconsistently recorded adverse events.
Purposely recruited patients who would respond well to MDMA therapy for PTSD.
PDAC also lamented the trials’ insufficient data on patients with severe trauma as well as an overall lack of diversity, citing low Black and Asian representation.
Dr. Melissa Barone, a psychologist from the Maryland Healthcare System, said, “There are so many problems with the data that each one alone might [be okay]… But when you pile them up on top of each other… I think there are still a lot of questions about how effective the treatment is and how durable it is.”
At least some of the mistrust centered on the perception that Lykos and MAPS founder Rick Doblin, PhD, are determined to push MDMA approval at any cost.
Lykos says, “Like all research sponsors, Lykos and its clinical sites are subject to regular FDA inspections. We have full confidence that the FDA will continue to assess the integrity of Lykos’ research through its inspection process.”
Durability of Effect
Lykos’ clinical trials show that MDMA-assisted therapy exhibited durable therapeutic effects for at least six months. However, PDAC questioned the claim for several reasons.
One was that patients utilized other integrative treatments in between MDMA therapy and the follow-up analysis, including:
Psychodynamic therapy
Eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR)
Other cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Group psychotherapy
Prolonged exposure
Cognitive processing therapy
Holotropic breathwork
Interpersonal therapy
The committee expressed that these therapies introduced “confounding factors,” which made it challenging to isolate MDMA-AT’s specific impact.
Meeting chair, Dr. Rajesh Narendran, added more skepticism. He said, “I’m not convinced that this drug is effective in the short term… PTSD is a disorder where symptoms can fluctuate quite a bit. We all know that. And I feel like there should have been more repeated assessments over time to gauge where these people are heading.”
Psychological Intervention
Lykos’ unique psychotherapeutic approach was another confounding factor impacting the data, according to PDAC.
The FDA does not regulate psychotherapy, so this sticking point was beyond the meeting’s scope. However, several participants expressed distrust over what they perceived as an unstandardized and unproven modality.
It employs standard protocols like Exposure Therapy, Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), EMDR, and psychodynamic therapy. It also invites less conventional techniques, like Internal Family systems (IFS), Voice Dialogue, Hakomi, virtual reality, and Buddhist psychology.
Dr. Holtzheimer said, “I think the challenge here is that the psychotherapy in this case is not evidence-based yet.”
Dr. Barone added, “MDMA is not administered without the psychotherapy. And the psychotherapy is really vague. It is not well-determined. It seems like it was not standardized. And that makes it really hard to determine how effective it is…”
PDAC argued that the lack of standardization raises questions about the trials’ reproducibility and reliability. They also questioned the necessity of the therapy itself, wondering whether MDMA alone could elicit similar benefits.
Dr. Amanda Holley, a pharmacologist who previously worked at the FDA, explained this challenge in a recent Psychedelics Today Podcast.
“[The FDA] is having a hard time disentangling the contribution of therapy vs just MDMA. With this trial, they would’ve liked to see a factorial design that [tested] the therapy with the drug, an arm with the drug alone, and an arm with therapy alone. That would’ve given them a more holistic view of the data.”
Safety Concerns
Another data gap involved cardiovascular health risks, which panelists said were not fully assessed throughout the studies. They raised concerns that MDMA could cause heart attacks and strokes.
In The Illusion of Consensus podcast, Dr. Johnson explained that this argument was somewhat “absurd” due to MDMA’s known effects. Sure, it raises blood pressure and heart rate. But it’s a reasonable risk-benefit ratio. Johnson compared MDMA’s cardiovascular impact to Adderall, which doctors give to children every day.
“Even with a minor abnormality at the end of a session, it doesn’t mean it will lead to a clinical event like a stroke, which is extremely rare,” said Dr. Johnson.
The FDA said it should have required Lykos to take EKGs and blood samples after MDMA sessions. However, the agency admittedly approved Lykos’ study design without these measures.
The FDA’s admission did not shift the panelists’ perspective.
Sexual misconduct was another significant concern sparked by an incident in 2015.
A harrowing public comment on the matter came from Speaker 26, Sarah Grosh, who spoke as a proxy for Phase 2 participant Meaghan Buisson. In Buisson’s words, Grosh described the abuse that took place. Buisson’s descriptions of the assaults she suffered in session were recorded and are now publicly available.
Buisson also reported becoming suicidal during the trial and said that Lykos did not document this adverse event. She claimed MDMA therapy left her overwhelmingly vulnerable and led to further exploitation by her therapist, who she said trafficked her while still in the trial.
Grosh asserted that Lykos’ leadership did nothing to intervene after she filed the ethics complaint in 2018 and that they continue to deny any ethical violations.
Lykos responded in its statement, saying, “This was a terrible and harmful instance of malpractice that caused profound suffering to a participant. Lykos reported this violation to Health Canada, the FDA, and the relevant Institutional Review Board and banned the therapist pair associated with this case from all future work. Since then, we carefully developed and implemented new policies and practices aimed to prevent, detect, investigate, encourage reporting of, and thoroughly respond to potential instances of misconduct or unethical behavior.”
Prospects of FDA Approval
Amid the shadow of alleged misconduct, data misalignment, and safety concerns, PDAC voted an overwhelming no to MDMA treatment for PTSD. The FDA is not required to follow PDAC’s guidance. However, the overwhelming pushback casts serious doubt over whether 2024 will be Lykos’ year.
“It doesn’t look good at all. I imagine at some point MDMA will be approved for PTSD, but I wouldn’t put bets on it to be approved in August,” said Dr. Johnson.
Many people have read the statistic that the FDA aligns with advisory committees 88% of the time. However, a lesser-known fact is that in cases when the committee did not recommend approval, the FDA only agreed 67% of the time. This disparity leaves the door open for hope.
Another hopeful sign, according to Dr. Holley, is that the FDA prioritizes public health when making NDA decisions. The fact that current PTSD therapies are highly deficient and no new drugs have been approved in decades represents a significant healthcare failure.
Lykos maintains that MDMA-assisted therapy can meet the nation’s critical mental health needs, and it has not given up on approval.
“While we understand that the FDA considers advisory committee recommendations, most of the conversation at the meeting centered on known issues that have already been discussed and investigated. In addition, the panel was focused on the regulation of therapy outside the FDA’s purview.”
Lykos added that the organization is discussing a potential post-approval REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy) program with the FDA. REMS would seek to ensure patient safety and regulatory compliance through measures to monitor and manage risks.
“If FDA-approved, prescription MDMA-assisted therapy will be launched with careful consideration of its potential benefits and risks, following established medical guidelines, protocols, and quality standards,” said Lykos.
What’s Next if the FDA Approves MDMA-Assisted Therapy?
If the FDA approves Lykos’ application in August, the decision will spark a timeline that requires several bureaucratic steps before patients can access MDMA treatment for PTSD.
First, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) must reschedule MDMA from Schedule I within three months of approval.
After the federal rescheduling, states must also reschedule the drug. Most have processes for automatic alignment, while others have state-specific scheduling procedures.
“Our plan is to make MDMA-assisted therapy available, if approved, in 2025,” said Lykos, who clarified that they would initially roll out the program to a limited number of sites.
What’s Next if Lykos’ Application Fails?
Lykos declined to speculate on what they might do if the new drug application for MDMA-AT fails.
However, in similar circumstances, trial sponsors must thoroughly rectify the issues through additional studies, further data collection, or modifications to the drug’s formulation, labeling, or manufacturing process. Once finished, sponsors must resubmit a package with all the information proving the issuers were resolved. The FDA then re-evaluates the application to determine if it meets the safety and regulatory requirements.
The process can delay FDA approval by a median of 435 days, requiring companies to spend significantly more time and money to get to the finish line.
The Bottom Line
PDAC does not think the current data proves MDMA therapy is effective for PTSD, nor does it believe the potential harms outweigh the risks. Lykos asserts that the clinical trial results speak for themselves and that treatment could significantly improve countless lives. Now, 13 million Americans with PTSD await MDMA’s FDA approval status in August.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Kaitlin Roberson: Vital graduate and co-founder and CEO of Cacti Therapeutics, a psychedelic biotech company developing novel therapies for chronic pain; and Dr. Michele Cox, DO: current Vital student, veteran, physician, and co-founder of LifeBloom, a brand new company focusing on bringing community and connection into women’s healthcare.
They talk about their work: Roberson’s research on trauma and chronic pain, and why she feels that working in the pharma industry is a calling; and Cox’s framework as an osteopath, the value she’s found in touch and connection, and how she explains to clients what to expect when undergoing ketamine treatment.
They discuss:
Why psychedelics are such useful interventions
The body’s ability to tell us what’s wrong, as long we’re listening
The destabilization that can occur after a big experience: If you don’t have a good support system, is it really the right time?
Self-care and our tendency to never feel like we’re good enough
How there is energy in everything and we should all recognize that more
And, as Vital students, they talk about what they hoped to get out of Vital and how it delivered more than expected. If you’re just discovering Vital, be sure to check out the website and fill out an application. Secure your spot and take advantage of the Early Bird discount!
Disclaimer: The content of this article does not constitute medical advice. At the time of this writing, psychedelics remain largely illegal in the United States. We urge parents to consult with doctors and legal experts before considering psychedelic therapy for their children.
*All names and identifying features have been changed to protect the privacy of the youths featured in this article.
Mark* was 16 when he dreamt of ending his life. Jessica* was just 15 when she tried. Ketamine therapy saved them both, their clinicians say.
Mia* faced an eating disorder at 16. Her mom’s decision to book her a psilocybin retreat in Mexico led Mia to eat normally again that year.
19-year-old Justin* lived with phobias, anxieties, and bouts of depression. An underground mushroom journey and integration coaching enabled him to feel acceptance and autonomy for the first time.
Mia, Justin, Mark, and Jessica’s teen brains hadn’t fully formed when they ingested these psychedelics. And long-term research on adolescent entheogen use is limited. Yet, parents like Mark’s and Jessica’s are pursuing psychedelic healing for their depressed teens.
Sometimes, parents seek psychedelics as a ‘hail Mary pass’ after traditional antidepressants fail. Other times, psychedelics are the preferred first line of defense. Desperate to ease their children’s suffering, parents are pursuing solutions that break this taboo known to Western culture.
Here, we explore the parent-led phenomena of psychedelic therapy for teens, spanning ketamine clinics, psychedelic retreat centers, and underground circles.
Traditional Youth Psychedelic Use Around the World
Every psychedelic experience is different. Many are uncomfortable. However, the perception that only adults can effectively harness their healing power is steeped in narrow modern framing. The view does not hold up against centuries of use among Indigenous cultures that give young children plant medicine for spiritual and cultural initiation purposes.
The Fang tribe in Gabon, for instance, administers ibogaine to children between the ages of eight and ten. Brazil’s Santo Daime Church members give ayahuasca microdoses to babies, and the Huichol of Mexico give peyote to children starting at age six. The Huichol also use plant medicines prenatally and while breastfeeding to prevent miscarriage, support fetal growth, and enhance breast milk.
Family-based psychedelic rituals remain a common practice in Mexico, according to Andrew Tansil, co-owner of Mexican psilocybin retreat center Sayulita Wellness.
He recalls the time when Sayulita was a local center serving only Mexican nationals.
“People would bring their children as young as five or six, and they would do bufo, the Sonoran toad medicine, and have whole family experiences.”
Sayulita does not serve young children today. However, the center regularly accepts accompanied minors from all over the world starting at 16.
Why Parents Are Seeking Psychedelic Therapy for Teens
Parent-led inquiries on psychedelics have steadily increased over the past few years at Sayulita, with about one teen traveling there monthly. Sometimes, the center welcomes whole households, including parents and children, who ingest the medicine together. Other times, teens engage in private psychedelic sessions with Sayulita’s registered nurse practitioners. One parent must go with minors to these retreats.
Most teens who visit Sayulita have mental health concerns like depression or anxiety. However, eating disorders are the most common problem among young girls like Mia. Fortunately, many emerge from the psilocybin experience transformed.
“Mia was a superstar. She left the retreat eating all kinds of food and continued the trend back at home. Mia really moved forward and did so fearlessly. She got out of her way, and that was the whole intention of the experience,” Tansil said.
Eating disorders are not so common among Certified Psychedelic Coach Ehren Cruz’s young adult clients. However, many suffer from persistent unexplained anxieties, like Justin. Others face existential emergencies. All seek Cruz’s coaching services to prepare for and integrate psychedelic experiences into lasting change.
“The demographic of people reaching out is getting younger. Eighteen to 24-year-olds want to launch into the world with more purpose than the provisional life their parents built. They want alignment but don’t know how to achieve it, and the disconnect is causing a real crisis.”
Cruz finds that parents of these young adults see psychedelics as an bright pathway through the harrowing transition period.
“Parents have often gone through mental health struggles themselves. They have been in talk therapy and on SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and have navigated the world from that muted sensory capacity. Now, they’re raising collegiate-age children with similar issues and want to handle healing differently.”
Cruz states that many parents seek psychedelics over SSRIs for teens to avoid clinical diagnoses. However, other parents find their way to psychedelics when all else has failed.
And if new research is any indication of the efficacy of psychedelics for teens, parents may no longer have to rely on anecdotes and their instincts to help them decide whether the compounds are the right choice for their child’s treatment.
The study aimed to investigate the long-term psychological effects and side effects associated with psychedelic use among adolescents between 16 and 24. Results indicted that not only did the teens have a greater sense of well-being after psychedelic use, they were less prone to depression, suicidal ideation, and delusional thinking.
How Ketamine Therapy is Helping Teens
D.C.-area ketamine clinic Avesta Ketamine and Wellness receives many calls from parents seeking psychedelic therapy for treatment-resistant teens. The center treats about one adolescent per quarter, like 15-year-old Jessica, who are severely depressed or nearing the brink of suicide.
Avesta co-founder Dr. Ladan Eshkevari welcomes this population because she believes ketamine saves young lives. She recognizes the potential risks but doesn’t see them as unique to young patients.
“Ketamine is a generally safe medication, but can be habit-forming in all patients,” said Eshkevari, adding, “the compound is rapid-acting with minimal side effects when done in a controlled setting, with providers trained to use it appropriately. Research shows ketamine induces synaptogenesis-growth of new synapses, impacting neuroplasticity.”
In other words, ketamine is well-tolerated at any age while helping form new connections between brain cells and reversing damage caused by stress and depression. This process typically improves mood and quickly reverses suicidal thoughts.
Fortunately for Jessica and Mark, many ketamine clinics accept teen patients. Some centers treat children as young as six.
Mark’s mom, Dana, recalls her son’s history of depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and panic attacks starting at 14. At 16, he began expressing suicidal intentions.
At 18, Mark had a severe dystonic reaction to his antipsychotic medication, Abilify, involving intense involuntary muscle spasms. He refused to continue the medication afterward, so Dana searched tirelessly for alternatives.
“I second-guessed myself and worried that Mark would somehow get addicted… but in the end, it was his decision,” said Dana.
After Mark’s physician and psychiatrist agreed, Dana brought her son to Priority You ketamine clinic in Clearwater, Florida.
“By the sixth infusion, Mark felt different and no longer had suicidal ideation. He felt hopeful and creative for the first time in years,” said Dana.
The ‘Rubber Band Effect,’ Close Monitoring, and Expert Support
Mark worked with a therapist for two months after the protocol, developing healthy life skills like nutritious eating, exercising, and engaging with nature. However, four months later, he had a setback after his best friend committed suicide.
Mark went back to the clinic for an infusion. However, instead of feeling better, the ketamine experience confronted him with deeply repressed guilt.
“He had a breakdown,” said Dana.
Like Mark, Justin faced mental health deterioration after his psychedelic experience. However, Justin’s distress appeared just weeks later, and for different reasons.
“We call it the ‘rubber band effect,’” said Cruz.
The rubber band effect refers to the period after the peak experience when the mood-boosting psychedelic glow wears off. Initially, the person feels empowered and capable of transformative change. However, weeks or months later, old fears, egoic patterns, and anxieties can resurface with a vengeance.
“As the mind returns to its normal state, it can perceive the psychedelic insights as threats and tries to reassert itself,” said Ehren.
Justin’s rubber band smacked him into a full-on spiritual emergency. He experienced suicidal thoughts, couldn’t sleep, and started taking stabilizing medications.
“In [recent] conversations with Justin, he said he wouldn’t trade the psychedelic experience. He found the true grace and the essential self he was looking for. But he’s still coming through it two or three months later. The situation was incredibly disruptive,” said Cruz.
Justin and Mark’s psychedelic therapy challenges are common amongst people of all ages. However, young people are particularly vulnerable because they lack engrained self-regulation skills. The shaky emotional defenses teens have mean they need attentive, professional support before, during, and long after breakthrough psychedelic sessions to process fears, contend with disruptive insights, and avoid re-traumatization.
“It’s a big responsibility, and you must ensure young people have a support structure, a network, and other channels to hold it down,” said Cruz.
Ehkevari agrees.
“At Avesta, we ensure adolescents have a lot of support from parents, therapists, psychiatrists, and pediatricians.”
“… differences in acute subjective effects, specifically the less positive role of ego-dissolution experiences for long-term changes in adolescents, as well as a higher prevalence of HPPD-related symptoms suggest that special considerations might be required when assessing psychedelic treatment design and risks,” the report cautions.
Therapeutic intervention helped Mark a great deal after his friend’s suicide. Talk therapy and two additional ketamine infusions allowed him to process and heal the repressed emotions that the first session revealed. Mark started college a month later and is pursuing a degree in game design.
He visits the clinic for booster ketamine doses every six months.
“I don’t think Mark would still be here now if it weren’t for ketamine,” said Dana. “Mark still experiences anxiety. However, he does not have to take medication for it because he’s learned to cope.”
Coping with life’s ups and downs while staying present for the ride is precisely the promise that psychedelics offer. Parents like Dana value that pledge and are helping their teens feel their way through pain rather than medicating their young minds and managing symptoms.
“Current medications have a 70% failure rate and come with a whole host of side effects, with a long uptake time. I think patients and their families are starting to think about treatments that may get to the brain’s ability to heal versus medications that are mainly for symptom management,” said Eshkeavari.
According to Tansil, starting these alternative treatments earlier in life could be crucial.
“Younger people have less conditioning. And so they have a higher chance of having positive, transformational psychedelic experiences. The young person’s mind is also more open. So, healing happens much quicker and more fluidly.”
“The number one comment I hear from people over 60 who come to Sayulita is, ‘I wish I would’ve done this so much earlier in life.”
In this episode – the first in the 2024 series of Vital Psychedelic Conversations – David interviews Pierre Bouchard, LPC: Vital instructor and lead trainer for the Congregation for Sacred Practices; and Kara Tremain, ACC: recent Vital graduate-turned-instructor, somatic practitioner, and growth and development coach.
In this series, we pair up a Vital instructor with a current or previous student as a way of showcasing different (and aligned) perspectives on what they feel is most vital for the psychedelic space to be discussing, while also highlighting their experiences with Vital, our 12-month training program. The next cohort begins September 17 and we’re accepting applications now!
As they are both are passionate about somatic work, they discuss:
The power of somatics in showing people how much our bodies and nervous systems matter, and how our thoughts are often not the main driver
How ketamine or MDMA can help with somatic work
How somatic sound can be, through music for journeys, sound bowls, or tuning forks: Can just the right frequency create magic?
How somatic work is not solely about resolving trauma, but also about learning to conduct energy and use one’s body as a tuning apparatus
During a crowded mid-pandemic Zoom seminar on microdosing for addiction treatment, a few attendees raised caution over the dangerously simplistic ways in which addiction was being presented. Within moments, a frenzy of animosity resounded.
“Why are you bringing your negativity here?” one participant asked.
“The presenters are doing great—why not recognize that?” another chimed in.
“If you don’t like microdosing, you can git out!” yet another declared.
I would have been surprised if I hadn’t witnessed other psychedelic conversations where “negativity” was not welcome and legitimate criticism was deemed “bad vibes.” What did surprise me was the group’s validation – even the facilitator joined in and scolded the critics. Then again, since such critiques threatened his microdosing livelihood, I suppose his attitude made sense.
I noticed a similar – albeit more concerning trend – arise in February 2021, when a video surfaced of former 5-MeO-DMT facilitator Dr. Martin Ball boastfully recounting the time he vomited on the face of a client incapacitated by the powerful toad venom. For each objection to Ball’s blatantly unethical behavior, a defense kicked back, spitefully ridiculing the judgmental “snowflakes” and their “low vibrations.”
I’m all for a fair trial. But some actions are not OK, and vomiting on the face of an incapacitated person in your care is one of them. Evidently, many psychonauts disagree.
What is this trend I’m pointing to, this negativity about negativity, this shaming of voices raising valid concerns? This is a trend I’m calling “psychedelic bypassing.”
Psychedelic Bypassing: The many ways the mind can excuse abuse, ignore the darker sides of ourselves, categorize the vast scale of emotions into little boxes of “good” and “bad,” and cast aside anything deemed “lesser than” — all in the pursuit of a more enlightened life.
A Primer on Spiritual Bypassing
To understand psychedelic bypassing, it’s important to first understand spiritual bypassing.
In 1984, meditation teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing.” As laid out in Robert Augustus Masters’ book Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, spiritual bypassing is “the use of spiritual practice and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”
In other words, it is disguising patterns of avoidance with New Age lingo that liberates us from confronting difficult and painful realities. In short, Masters describes spiritual bypassing as “avoidance in holy drag” — a strategy “not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing such avoidance.”
But What Does This Have to Do With Psychedelics?
Don’t psychedelics force us to confront difficult and painful realities, no matter how fervently we resist? A lot of the time, yes. But not all the time.
Amidst abundant scientific research demonstrating that psychedelics catalyze profound healing for an ever-expanding cast of conditions, many advocates appear to have forgotten that psychedelics can also inflict harm. Despite suggestions from mainstream narratives, taking psychedelics is not a guaranteed route to healing. Just as psychedelics can heal our wounds, they can also amplify our capacity to avoid those wounds — and, in the case of the face-vomiting Ball, even inflict them on others.
Plunder the depths of Erowid and you’ll find no shortage of reports of psychedelics catalyzing psychotic breaks. Read through Chacruna‘s website, and you’ll find abundant articles on sexism and racism in psychedelic spaces, sometimes at high levels of influential organizations. Dig deeper, and you’ll find stories of people being physically, psychologically, and sexually abused in “safe” psychedelic environments.
Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, meaning they can amplify our darkness as well as our light. Just as psychedelics can open space for curious inquiry and new perspectives, they also provide fertile ground for embedding distorted beliefs and behaviors more deeply. If psychedelics solely induced awakening, why would the CIA spend decades researching their potential to control people in myriad ways?
Intention and context make all the difference. When self-delusion is the operating principle, psychedelics can amplify the delusion. And we mustn’t underestimate the mind’s capacity to delude itself. In the words of Carl Jung, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”
And still a perspective spreads that psychedelics can only transform our world for the better, and anyone who raises concerns about their potential harms is a “threat to the movement.” Victims and their allies are silenced by a chorus of proselytizers who justify themselves, saying, “We’re so close to FDA approval! It’s not worth putting all this progress in jeopardy!”
No one wants another Nixon slamming down the great gavel on substances that can clearly help countless people. But when avoidant patterns proliferate unchecked, they become a culture, and when a culture avoids serious issues and vilifies those who speak about them, that culture deepens traumatic neural pathways that damage ourselves, our loved ones, and our world.
No matter how enraptured in the Godhead its constituents become, a culture that evades its most pervasive issues will never be a culture of widespread healing.
Why Do People Engage in Psychedelic Bypassing?
Sometimes, it’s as simple as refusing to hear what we don’t want to hear. For instance, early in 2021, preliminary research from Imperial College London showed that the life-enhancing benefits of microdosing, as reported on countless podcasts and blogs, may be attributable to the placebo effect.
The response of the microdosing community?
A chorus of people instantly ripped on the study, refusing to consider the possibility that the results had validity, because… well, the results didn’t jive with their beliefs (or their business interests).
Such instances of bypassing are easy to recognize. Other times, bypassing is more complex, stemming from sources beyond the reach of awareness.
Psychological vs. Spiritual Bypassing
Robert Augustus Masters argues that bypassing flourishes when the spiritual is separate from and given more significance than the psychological. Countless spiritual practices emphasize “letting go” of pain, securing stability in a palace of positivity whose iron gates seal out all dementors. “Don’t mind the dementors that breach the castle in your nightmares!” the spiritual teacher preaches. “Just focus on the light, and your pain will dissolve away.”
The thing is, that pain often stems from psychological wounds, and spiritual practice that denies it won’t make it disappear. While meditation can be healing, it can also enhance patterns of disassociation and withdrawal that bar people from experiencing intimacy and love.
Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield speaks to this phenomenon in his book, A Path With Heart. After a decade of vigorous Buddhist training, Kornfield felt he had resolved his issues. However, when he returned to the States and entered a romantic relationship, he found he was “still emotionally immature, acting out the same painful patterns of blame and fear, acceptance and rejection that I had before my Buddhist training.”
Kornfield’s monastic isolation kept him distant from his deepest wounds, which were relational in nature. “I’ve seen how many other students misunderstand spiritual practice, how many have hoped to use it to escape from their lives” and “avoid the pains and difficulties of human existence” writes Kornfield.
Whether we meditate for decades or blast ourselves into cosmic unity with every psychedelic under the sun, we still may be avoiding the most pertinent issues stunting our psychological development.
The Traps of Transcendence and Oneness
Transcendence is a psychedelic buzzword, often regarded as a healing path of “overcoming” wounds and becoming more whole. It can also justify bypassing, for many transcenders cast negative judgment on that which must be transcended — often their psychological and emotional pain.
“When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable,” Masters writes. Healthy transcendence embraces that which is transcended, while “unhealthy transcendence avoids it, making a spiritual virtue out of rising above whatever is deemed ‘lower’ or ‘darker’ elements of our nature.”
In the framework of influential transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber, development is not about transcending, but transcending and including what came before.
Transcendence is similar to another psychedelic buzzword, “oneness.” In the face of conflict and difference, many psychedelic advocates like to remind others that “we are all one.” While this is true at some metaphysical level, it invalidates the reality of difference and the struggles many face because of those differences, such as people who hold marginalized identities and experience overt oppression every day.
What kind of “oneness” casts out all who don’t bliss out on the same medicine? Nothing more than the oneness of a bubble that resists what threatens to pop it.
The Happy Place Where Egos Die
Masters writes that we are vulnerable to spiritual bypassing when we practice to reach a better place — where suffering is abolished, where love and light reign in the resuscitated Garden of Eden.
When that’s the ideal, we villainize and shame the parts of ourselves we believe block us from that idealized perfection. We may even deny their existence, because according to our high/low, positive/negative ethic, these parts indicate we are far from reaching Happy Fun Land. If we’ve been presenting ourselves as a spiritually-evolved being, then no one can know about these parts of us. So we shove them down with a Buddha smile, forcing ourselves to connect to compassion and eliminate the enemy of our “lower” nature.
This trend is especially evident in the psychedelic concept of “ego death.” Psychedelic folks often villainize the “ego,” which is typically comprised of these “lower” aspects of our nature. When ego death is the aim, anything resembling ego becomes an obstacle. When ego is not recognized as an essential part of our inner world, that essential part of our inner world becomes the villain, creating a war within ourselves.
I imagine this is partly due to psychedelic healing being framed in the same way that yoga, meditation, and numerous “alternative” healing methods are marketed: Do this, and your life will improve dramatically. This idea is even more intoxicating with psychedelics because a) they work faster, and b) a boatload of science backs up their efficacy. But when we fall prey to this “magic pill” mentality, we follow a falsely advertised claim that psychedelics will transport us to Big Rock Candy Mountain, where our egoic problems evaporate.
This thin narrative brings too little focus to the fact that psychedelic healing isn’t sustainable without significant changes in lifestyle and thought patterns. Feeling awesome and gaining perspective on your suffering is rarely sufficient. It is the beginning of a new path, and without commitment to new ways of being, benefits tend to vanish as quickly as they appeared.
Psychedelic folks often speak of “integration” as some finite place, like, “I integrated deep realizations about my anxiety on MDMA, so now it’s gone!” Healing isn’t always linear, nor is it about arrival. It can be cyclical, and when we cling to states of bliss, we bypass whatever threatens those states’ supremacy. Integration isn’t a final arrival, but an ongoing process of active engagement. As Jung wrote, “There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.”
Recognizing Dualistic Thinking
Bypassing can also be a symptom of dualistic thinking getting carried into the nondual realms psychedelics can open, where reality does not abide by rational structures. Rather than categorical frameworks like “good/bad” and “self/other” ruling the day, the ground of truth becomes paradox, beyond the reach of reason’s limits. As rationality fights to make sense of such an experience, it often subjects the paradoxical to the categorical, applying dualistic labels like “good” and “bad,” and “me” and “not me” to the experience.
Picture this: say I have a mystical experience on five grams of mushrooms, and I realize that at my core, I am love embodied. I’m so immersed in the experience that I am certain my demons have been forever cleansed. Three days later, I get cut off on the highway, and a familiar anger takes hold as I curse that reckless SOB. I pause, thinking, “This anger can’t be me, because I now know I am pure love, and I can’t be love and simultaneously feel such hostility.” So I reject my anger, creating a schism in my psyche that spawns a dualistic battle that will rage indefinitely, no matter how vehemently I deny it.
If, on the other hand, I recognize that I can be love embodied and feel intense anger at the same time, I give myself more space. In that space, I can feel anger without identifying it or fearing it is me at the core.
Passivity and Aversion to Anger
In numerous spiritual communities, anger is the quintessential “low vibe” emotion. Countless frameworks teach to restrict its expression, if not eliminate it completely. Only then can you abide in whatever nirvanic illusion is the goal.
The problem is, anger is an essential human emotion, and a powerful one. Powerful emotions don’t just go away when we deny them. They get stronger, and even if we stop ourselves from expressing them externally, we end up expressing them toward ourselves.
“There isn’t any such thing as a negative emotion,” Masters writes. “There are negative things we do with our emotions, but our emotions themselves are neither negative nor positive. They simply are.”
When we judge anger, we are often judging harmful expressions of anger, such as hostility and violence. The emotion and the behavior are distinct, and becoming more intimate with the emotion and its sources will open healthier, more conscious avenues of expression.
When we judge our anger as “bad energy,” we judge it as such in others. When a community validates that judgment as virtuous, that community shuns an essential emotion that has a lot to teach us about boundaries, needs, and deep wounds.
In hearing about practitioners abusing clients, it makes sense to be angry. If we shun our anger, we disregard the wisdom of this response and may even justify the practitioner’s behavior, saying, “They’re doing their best. Who am I to judge if that’s right or wrong?” In that response, both our anger and someone’s harmful behavior are bypassed under a distorted ethic of “acceptance” and “forgiveness.” This encourages a passivity akin to numbness, a glorified distancing from a dark reality and the looming prospect of confrontation. It’s more comfortable to just “let it go.”
Maybe this trend is reducible to a reluctance to cast judgment. Moral relativism — the notion that each person’s moral code is justified unto itself — is a seductive ethos, but it promotes a passivity that allows harm to flourish unchecked. Anger about harmful behaviors is not “bad energy”; it is a valid, important response to issues that could implode this whole psychedelic renaissance if they remain unchecked. Transformation can only come by calling problematic issues to conscious light, and anger can sometimes show us where those issues lay.
What is Guru Syndrome?
The psychedelic space is home to many self-appointed “guru” facilitators, many of whom are far less skilled at facilitation than they are at bypassing. How else could a self-described “healer” inflict sexual abuse on participants — an ongoing problem in psychedelic spaces — and free themselves of responsibility?
According to Masters, this form of bypassing spawns from “delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.” Quite likely, these facilitators have had profound psychedelic experiences, and they mistakenly “confuse the attainment of such states with being at an advanced stage of spiritual practice.”
Here’s where psychedelics create a particularly tricky form of bypassing. Unlike meditation, which can take years to induce a peak experience, psychedelics can rocket anyone into sudden confrontation with the mystical. The confrontation can be so earth-shattering that the individual emerges completely certain they have been reborn, where yesterday’s troubles that occupied their “previous self” have forever melted away. That may be true for a while, but what about when yesterday’s troubles return? Since this experience birthed them anew, those troubles can no longer be them, right? This person fails to recognize this new “egoless” persona is actually the structure of a new ego that bears more similarities to the previous one than they care to admit. And how could it not, with root issues continuing to fester unresolved?
The danger then emerges as justification of harmful behavior. “Even clearly abusive behavior on the part of a spiritual teacher may be excused as an opportunity for students to grow in their practice,” Masters writes. It’s gaslighting to the extreme, fueled by an ego-boasting infallibility under the claim it is egoless and insusceptible to “lower” impulses.
It may be tempting to pass this trend off to a handful of underground practitioners, but recent revelations again show that above-ground clinicians are susceptible as well. Researcher Matthew Johnson describes this trend as “the inclination to believe that the nature of the experiences people have on psychedelics are so sacred or important that the normal rules do not apply, whether they be the rules governing clinical boundaries, the practice of clinical psychology or medicine, sound philosophy of science, or ethics.”
“Psychedelics might magnify the subtle abuses of differential power that can be at play in the routine practice of clinical psychology or medicine,” Johnson continues. “The scientist or clinician might, perhaps without explicit awareness, fall into the trap of playing guru or priest, imparting personal philosophies without a solid empirical basis.”
While psychedelics can amplify the healing of therapy, they can also amplify the transference — a client’s unconscious feelings toward the therapist. If practitioners are adept at bypassing, they are vulnerable to excess countertransference — the therapist’s feelings in response to the client’s transference. That countertransference can manifest in harmful ways, and the practitioner can justify their harmful behaviors as “part of the client’s healing” — exactly how Martin Ball justified vomiting on his client’s face.
Responsibility in Facilitating Journeys in Non-Ordinary States
What level of psychedelic bypassing has to occur for people who have allegedly perpetrated significant abuses in psychedelic spaces to rise the ranks and become some of the most influential spokespeople of the entire psychedelic ecosystem?
Part of me wants to give those who stay silent during abuse scandals the benefit of the doubt, to bury my responses beneath a higher kind of “understanding” and “forgiveness.”
Maybe everyone deserves a second chance, but giving people a shot at redemption cannot be the same as enabling them to perpetuate harms without consequence. Taking an honest look at our capacity to bypass, with or without psychedelics, strikes me as a good place to start.
In this episode, Kyle interviews Alex Belser, Ph.D. and Bill Brennan, Ph.D.: psychologists, psychedelic researchers, authors, and co-creators of the EMBARK model, a framework for psychedelic therapy.
When Belser and Brennan worked together at Cybin, they canvassed the field of psychedelic research and saw very little reporting (if any) of the manuals researchers were using. So, they created the EMBARK model as a “big tent” framework – a way to understand what patients were going through from the perspective of six different clinical domains, where the clinician can go deeper into whichever domain is needed based on their specific skill set. The EMBARK model has been used in two randomized controlled trials to date, and its corresponding book, EMBARK Psychedelic Therapy for Depression: A New Approach for the Whole Person (which they co-authored), was released in April through Oxford University Press.
They discuss:
The six domains and four ethical care cornerstones that make up EMBARK, as well as the many proposed change mechanisms that come into play
Concerns over facilitators stepping aside and letting the medicine do the work: How much of a factor is someone’s presence in the room?
How much smaller, “little t” traumas can affect people – trauma doesn’t always come from a single hallmark event
The need for facilitators to be trained well (and trauma-informed), as it’s nearly impossible to tell when an adverse outcome is coming
In this episode, Joe interviews Sean Lawlor: writer and therapist specializing in ketamine-assisted therapy at Reflective Healing in Fort Collins, CO.
His first book, Psychedelic Revival: Toward a New Paradigm of Healing, will be released on June 4. Written as somewhat of a primer for psychedelics and psychedelic therapy, he talks about how he decided to write the book, how Michael Pollan was an influence, and the importance of making psychedelic literature not boring: Research and statistics are important, but how does one relate to data points when trying to understand something so rich and weird?
He discusses:
Studying philosophy, from Nietzsche and Freud to Jung and William James
When a clinical frame or license is important (but can you always trust a license?)
How context and interwoven culture matter when differentiating between plant medicines and man-made psychedelics
Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key and research into ancient Greeks using psychedelics: Why do we place so much importance on proving this?
The importance of community, rituals, shared meanings, mythology, and rites of passage
He digs into depth psychology and why it’s a beneficial framework for navigating non-ordinary experiences – a practice he believes will be the next focus in psychedelic education and understanding, alongside more analysis into the archetypes and myths that reside within (and all around) us. In an age of hyper-individualism and isolation, the stories and archetypal energies we share (which can be brought more to the forefront with psychedelics) can be incredibly healing and connecting.
He discusses:
The challenges of reintegrating to reality after the classic Hero’s Journey, and how some people don’t want to
The time he ate 7 grams of strong mushrooms and nothing happened, confirming to him the omnipresence of trickster energies
Jung’s theory on individuation, and how true individuation actually creates deeper engagement with the world
How myths offer windows into deeper realms, and a breakdown of his Mythopoetic Integration Method
How psychedelics show us our souls, and how so much of the chaos in the world can be related to a denial of the soul
The body seems to mend itself from illness and injuries without conscious effort. Yet when the mind wanders down a deep self-loathing abyss, it can get stuck there for years. Amidst serotonin-boosting drugs and clinical psychotherapy, millions still suffer from persistent depression. But within this reality, a more profound truth might be at play.
According to psychedelic therapists, researchers, and explorers, the mind doesn’t have to accept unyielding despair: all humans, they say, may have an ‘inner healer’ who can guide them to balance.
This article explores the concept of inner healing in psychedelic therapy, examining the theory, the debate, and the latest study testing its merits, led by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris.
What is the Inner Healer?
According to leading psychedelic theories, the inner healer is “the innate capacity or wisdom of the self to guide its own healing process.”
The inner healer is the deep knowing that emerges from the subconscious to help people resolve emotional and psychological challenges. It empowers them to navigate back to their intrinsic wholeness.
The notion posits that just as the body naturally mends wounds, the mind can instinctively recover from depression, PTSD, anxiety, and all other imbalances when freed from habitual fears that command ordinary consciousness.
In the context of psychedelics, MDMA, psilocybin, and DMT facilitate access to this profound wisdom. And through therapeutic support, psychedelic explorers can safely self-direct their own transformation.
Psychedelic therapy sessions offer a safe haven for people to work through trauma and conditioning. The experience can create a unique bond between the therapist and client, akin to a healthy parent-child relationship, where the client feels open to exploring challenging topics.
Along the way, clients may reconnect with and soothe exiled parts of themselves, like the wounded inner child who unconsciously drives their habitual patterns. By soothing these traumatized parts, clients might experience greater ease, compassion, integrity, and flexibility in their daily lives.
Modern Emergence of the Inner Healer in Psychedelic Therapy
Psychotherapist Dr. Michael Mithoefer was integral in spreading the inner healer theory throughout the psychedelic movement.
In a pivotal 2013 Bulletin published by The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics Studies (MAPS), Mithoefer reflected on the mysterious nature of the mind and challenges in understanding how psychotherapy – be it MDMA-assisted or traditional approaches – really works. Rather than struggling for comprehension, he embraced the tension.
“We [as psychotherapists] strive to do rigorous science without losing sight of the remarkable richness of the process as we observe and participate in it,” Mithoefer said.
Inspired by psychologist Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal theories, Mithoefer asserted that psychotherapy wields effects across emotional, cognitive, physical, energetic, and spiritual levels. And that psychedelics’ pharmacological mechanisms play a role in the process. But he emphasized that the client’s inner healing pathway in relationship to the therapist and the medicine was the key to guiding transformation.
Mithoefer quoted psychedelic therapy patients in the article whose experience embodied the inner healer theory:
“I keep getting the message from the medicine, ‘trust me.’ When I try to think, it doesn’t work out, but when I just let the waves of fear and anxiety come up, it feels like the medicine is going in and getting them, bringing them up, and then they dissipate.”
“Maybe one of the things the drug does is let your mind relax and get out of the way because the mind is so protective about the injury,” he said.
Co-authored by Dr. Mithoefer and MAPS Founder Rick Doblin P.h.D., the manual emphasizes prioritizing the patient’s wisdom over the therapist’s expertise. It provides instructions for practitioners to take a non-directive approach to psychedelic therapy. It invites clinicians to listen empathetically and encourages the patient to trust their own capacity to heal from trauma and inner child wounds. In underpinning the approach, the manual emphasizes respecting each patient’s ability to process painful memories on their own terms.
MAPS’ MDMA protocol is now with the FDA for a new drug application review. If approved, the inner healing pathway may be seminal to the first nationally regulated psychedelic therapy program.
Following MAPS’ lead, psychedelic therapy researchers, universities, training programs, educators, and practitioners have broadly adopted the inner-directed therapeutic approach. Even ketamine clinics have embraced the practice despite the dissociative compounds’ distinction from classic psychedelics.
Trusting the client’s inner guidance during psychedelic therapy is so ubiquitous the method appears in Colorado’s draft rules for psilocybin facilitators. Under the state’s Natural Medicine Act, practitioners must prepare clients for psychedelic sessions by advising them to trust their inner guidance, inner genius, the self, wise mind, soul, or spirit.
Unlike Colorado, Oregon doesn’t require psilocybin facilitators to employ inner healer models. However, the state’s service centers promote the approach, including Satya Therapeutics and Omnia Group.
The Industry Debate
Despite widespread consensus, not every psychedelic proponent ascribes to the inner healer theory. A recent article challenged the notion that people possess this inherent capacity.
The critique raised several concerns about the inner healer’s scientific validity, coherence, and mystical undertones. It argued that attributing healing to unexplainable subconscious forces may oversimplify complex psychological processes, leading to pseudoscientific woo-woo practices. It also cautioned against inappropriately introducing spiritual-based therapies into tax-funded programs. Finally, the article pointed to the contradictory nature of a “self-led” process that requires significant intervention from therapists and hallucinogens.
Proponents of the theory, however, emphasize that therapists merely facilitate access to deep healing. But that they are not the source of the healing, per se. These practitioners believe that psychedelics serve as the prime catalysts for unlocking humans’ innate wisdom and that their role is to help people address unresolved wounds in a safe and supportive setting.
At the same time, proponents acknowledge that their perspective is steeped primarily in observation rather than empiricism.
The Inner Healer Study
Famed psychedelic researcher Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris does not see the inner healer as mystical or supernatural. He believes in its credibility, publishing a placebo-controlled study, “Psychedelics and the ‘inner healer’: Myth or mechanism? to “deconstruct, test, and potentially validate” the concept.
The research randomly assigned 59 participants diagnosed with moderate-to-severe depression to two groups: one receiving high-dose psilocybin therapy and the other a placebo alongside the antidepressant, escitalopram. Both groups receive psychological support.
Psilocybin therapy group: Participants received two high doses (25 mg) of psilocybin three weeks apart. They also received a daily placebo after the first dosing session.
Escitalopram therapy group: Participants received two placebo doses (1 mg) of psilocybin three weeks apart. They also received daily escitalopram for six weeks. The dosage was 10 mg for the first three weeks and 20 mg for the last three.
After the sessions, participants completed an assessment called the “inner healer item,” where they rated the degree to which they strongly agreed or disagreed with the following statement:
“I felt like my body/mind/brain was healing itself, automatically/naturally/by itself.”
The Results
In the end, the high-dose psilocybin group was far more likely to report inner healer experiences compared to the escitalopram group. Additionally, higher inner healer scores within the psilocybin group marked greater declines in depression symptoms two weeks after the protocol. Additionally, patients who reported higher inner healer scores experienced more significant mental health outcomes, regardless of the self-reported intensity of the psychedelic effects.
Critics argue that the results might be skewed because the study focused solely on patient perspectives during medicine session days. It did not ask the escitalopram group about their inner healing experiences throughout the therapeutic protocol.
Additionally, according to the research team, the study did not empirically prove whether the inner healer feeling is an intrinsic, quantifiable neural mechanism or an event caused by subtle therapeutic guidance.
Still, the outcomes suggest that the inner healer construct, defined as “the belief that psychedelic compounds, plants or concoctions have an intrinsically regenerative action on the mind and brain…” is a substantive phenomenon worth investigating further using detailed scales and qualitative methods.
Enduring mental health may rely on this integrative approach.
In this episode, David interviews Sami Awad: Palestinian peace and nonviolent activist and founder of Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem; and Leor Roseman, Ph.D.: Israeli neuroscientist, researcher, and senior lecturer at the University of Exeter.
They talk about Roseman’s 2021 paper, “Relational Processes in Ayahuasca Groups of Palestinians and Israelis,” which looked at what happened when people with fiercely different opinions moved beyond fear, anger, and othering, and sat together in a safe container and drank ayahuasca with the purpose of healing collective trauma. When the focus of the participants moved toward understanding each other, Roseman and Awad saw a unity that gave them a lot of hope, leading to the creation of their nonprofit, RIPPLES, which is focused on using psychedelics for peacebuilding – first in the Middle East, and hopefully soon, everywhere. As Awad says, “If it can happen here, it can happen almost anywhere.”
They discuss:
The efficacy of psychedelics as a tool for nonviolent activism, building peace, and recognizing – and healing – collective trauma
The balance between the idealistic and the practical, or ‘the irony of harmony’ – if you focus too much on the connectivity of psychedelics, do you actually exclude voices?
The concept of “my liberation depends on your healing and your liberation depends on mine”
The challenge in doing something with the hope and enthusiasm that comes after a powerful experience: How do you make sure that wave of hope continues rippling through choppy waters?
In this episode, Joe interviews two members of the Heroic Hearts Project team: Director of Donor Development and founder of The Hope Project, Allison Wilson; and Director of Research and founder of Hystelica, Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley.
They discuss how The Hope Project – a nonprofit that supports spouses of veterans, Gold Star Wives, and female veterans with scholarships to psychedelic healing retreats, integration, community, etc. – merged with Heroic Hearts Project, and why this is such a necessary part of the veteran healing story: How does a family hold space for a vet returning to a suddenly alien civilian life (especially after a psychedelic journey)? How does a spouse deal with their own trauma from constant worry and isolation? Wilson and Blest-Hopley are learning that, for many spouses, having their own experience (and with other spouses) has been incredibly beneficial.
They talk about:
The concept of secondary PTSD (often referred to as ‘compassion fatigue’) and the many ways it can manifest
How Heroic Hearts is working with Imperial College London to use veteran retreats as real-world observational research
The importance of involving family in the healing process, and how positive outcomes can trickle down to children
The need for more research into how PTSD and the effects of psychedelics are different in women based on their unique physiology (as most studies have focused on men)
In this episode, Joe interviews Shahar Amit: psytrance musician who has created what may be the world’s first modular album for psychedelic exploration under his project, Held By Sound.
He talks about his background in the rave and festival scene, the moment he realized he wanted to make music, and the realization that he could create soundscapes specifically for journeys into non-ordinary states. And he digs into the ‘choose your own adventure’ framework of the free album: how he actually recorded 3 different albums and figured out how to transition into different moods based on which direction the listener wants to go – from more still to more expansive, to darker or more bittersweet. He has also created music for DMT trials in the UK, and talks a lot about the potential in extended-state DMT experiences.
He also discusses:
How he came up with the flow of the album related to phases of the trip
How much of a catalyst and safe container music can be, with or without a complimentary substance
How psychedelics in a fun, festival experience with lots of laughter can be extremely beneficial – you don’t need to do them the ‘correct’ way
Graham Hancock, Donald Hoffman, and the concept of consciousness as the building block of all reality
Psytrance, classical music, traditional Bwiti music, Lady Gaga, and what music he feels is best for exploration
Much like the psychedelic experience itself, the idea of ‘spaceholding’ or ‘holding space’ can strike some as a nebulous concept.
The term is largely synonymous with psychedelic facilitation or ceremony leading. When executed poorly, or not considered at all, the consequences can be severe for the recipient.
Why Holding Space Matters
When the psychedelic kicks in – whether it be psilocybin, ayahuasca, or 5-MeO-DMT – the individual may arrive at a fork in the road where the ego is invited to dissolve. How they navigate this juncture is key to the quality of the experience and managing their passage towards bliss is one of the key areas where a space holder can earn their salt.
With a safe container created for exploration and tools at hand, including mantras, breathing techniques, and attentive coaching, the journeyer is empowered to surrender gracefully through the depths of consciousness (and, possibly, dimensions). In that moment of ego death – should it occur during the trip – the body can experience long overdue relief from near perpetual fight or flight through a state of rest and digestion which promotes healing.
But in a chaotic setting, left unaided without guidance, travelers may find themselves engulfed in waves of fear and discomfort, veering into distress and confusion and finding elusive the state of simply being, without worries.
The Crucial Role of the Space Holder
The best space holders are beacons of guidance and support in the ethereal, mind-manifesting kaleidoscopic landscapes of a psychedelic journey. Their influence can determine the trip’s trajectory, and the best space holders remain discrete until they are called upon, possessing an intuitive sense of when greater direct presence is necessary.
In the uncharted territory of the psychedelic ’20s, as every man and his dog decides to serve toad venom and ayahuasca, the psychedelic community is increasingly emphasizing the need for well-trained facilitators. Initiatives and training programs like Navigating Psychedelics: For Clinicians and Wellness Practitioners aim to help equip those holding space with the skills to compassionately and adeptly facilitate psychedelic experiences for individuals and groups.
“Psychedelic therapy can bring about intense psychological, emotional, and physical experiences,” writes Michelle Anne Hobart, a spiritual emergence coach. It is thus crucial for space holders to be well-versed in trauma-informed practices to mitigate any issues that may arise, remaining calm, supportive and empathetic for their clients.
Creating Internal Space Through Set and Setting
In a sense, the phrase ‘space holder’ is metaphoric and refers to the creation of an internal sanctuary for the journeyer, through the adept management of their immediate external reality. Common pitfalls of flawed space holders can include a propensity for touch that may lead to intrusive physical contact, or encouraging excessively high doses. These missteps can all take the participant deeper into the experience than they are comfortable with, and risk energetic transference between the space holder and the participant.
Space holders must exhibit sensitivity and awareness, not only in setting the space optimally with appropriate music, smells, and vibes, but also in witnessing, guiding, and comforting individuals throughout their journey.
Otherwise, ceremonies intended to bring about transmutation and recalibration can become potentially dangerous and risk re-wounding participants who turned up to heal. “The ones who are in the role of holding vigil must be as attuned as the survivors of trauma and spiritual emergency themselves have had to be,” adds Hobart.
Maintaining Personal Integrity
The participant has effectively given the space holder permission to witness them in a highly suggestible, hyperplastic and defenseless state. “You’re really putting yourself in someone else’s hands in a very, very vulnerable way, even if you’re an experienced psychonaut,” says Dr. Ido Cohen, a psychedelic facilitator and the founder of the Integration Circle.
The space holder may wish to remain as invisible as possible until they are called upon. It can be tricky to know when greater presence is required, and when to simply allow the profound journey of self-discovery and transformation to happen.
An often-overlooked element of space holding is the ability to be completely present with a participant in their process without judgment or having a desire to give advice, according to Victoria Wueschner, president of F.I.V.E. (5-MeO-DMT Information & Vital Education). Deep in the throes of a visionary psychedelic journey, emotions and words shared may inadvertently relate to the space holder, but it is imperative they do not take it personally and instead remain in a state of compassionate detachment.
“When facilitators step into the role of being a space holder, they commit to giving their full attention and presence to the participant by actively listening with compassion, free of personal ego or motive,” says Wueschner.
‘Let the Unfolding Experience Be the Guide’
If somebody feels unsafe, rushed, or judged, it is more likely that negative thoughts and unresolved memories can arise in an overwhelming fashion. The space holder ideally lifts the weight from the participant’s shoulders, and when the path is clear, a protective bubble is created to block distractions and allow greater space for them to dive deep into their psyches and transform their inner worlds. The space holder is their unobtrusive cheerleader.
The key principles of the Zendo Project, which provides harm reduction education and psychedelic peer support services, are trusting, letting go, being open, breathing and surrendering. The organization advises space holders to be calm, meditative presences of acceptance, care, and compassion.
“Promote feelings of trust and security,” they say on their website. “Let the person’s unfolding experience be the guide. Don’t try to get ahead of the process. Explore distressing issues as they emerge, but simply being with the person can provide support.”
Space Holding Begins Before the Space Opens (and Continues After It Closes)
Another aspect of space holding that can be neglected is the process of screening individuals to ascertain whether a particular psychedelic experience is suited for their needs, and then helping people prepare. If a space holder does not, at a minimum, offer to conduct a call before the journey day and provide some preparation exercises – such as intention-setting, journalling or meditation – then that should ring alarm bells.
Space holding doesn’t end when the effect of the psychedelic wears off. A key component of the healing process is the integration – a period which can consist of check-in calls, talk therapy, and the provision of a personalized schedule of activities such as spending time in nature and avoiding certain foods.
But, ultimately, everything is rooted in a trusting bond between the space holder and the patient or client, says Dr. David Rabin, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who co-founded Apollo Neuroscience.
“Holding space always begins with a safe setting, rooted in trust, that helps to create the fertile ground for the seed of healing to grow. Without the trust and safety of the therapeutic alliance, the healing process can be completely shut down.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Juan Pablo Cappello: co-founder and former CEO of Nue Life Health, whose assets were subsequently acquired by Beckley Waves.
Cappello digs into his recent article which has been making waves across the psychedelic community: “Profit Over Patients? A Critical Look at At-Home Ketamine Therapy.” He created Nue Life with the goal of helping a million people address the root cause of their anxiety, and while the company was successful, he began to see a problematic trend: that using ketamine while providing services of a mental health company is very expensive and resource-consuming, and as companies saw a large percentage of clients requiring maintenance doses, the most profitable business model became essentially slinging ketamine to patients without providing any real integration or aftercare. Are these companies promising healing but really only guaranteeing recurring revenue?
He talks about:
How this emerging model makes it harder for ethical practitioners to be able to provide their services
The tools they built at Nue Life for long-term benefit, and why these should be the main focus – not repeated ketamine
Matthew Perry’s death and how the media was quick to place the blame on ketamine
The need for companies and communities to come to gather and create ethical industry standards for the at-home ketamine model
How cannabis was almost decriminalized under the Carter administration
and more!
Notable Quotes
“There’s all sorts of ethical companies and practitioners who are doing the good work every day on the front lines, and we have to recognize that. We also have to be honest that it’s harder and harder for those ethical practitioners to make a living because of what unethical practitioners are doing every day in the trenches, which is slinging ketamine.”
“Do I think that it’s probably a good trade to take ketamine six times a year as opposed to taking an antidepressant every day? Yeah, that’s probably a good trade. But there’s a better trade. which is: Let’s address the root cause of your depression, anxiety, or trauma once and for all. Let’s do the hard work. Let’s use ketamine as a beautiful tool to help you reset and reboot, and let’s get you well. And let’s support you in your wellness journey going forward, rather than putting you on the cycle of feeling better, feeling worse, feeling better, feeling worse.”
“I absolutely believe the pharmaceutical companies are way too close to the regulators, absolutely. But what do we expect when getting a drug approved by the FDA is a billion dollar proposition? I mean, look at what MAPS has gone through. They’re still raising money, notwithstanding the amazing clinical results that they’ve had with MDMA. …[They’re] continuing to raise money for clinical trials of a drug that wasn’t made illegal until 1982. So it’s not as if, in terms of the safety profile of MDMA, we don’t have oodles and oodles of real life data prior to 1982. Nothing’s a better sign of how broken the system is than what MAPS has gone through.”
She discusses her personal metamorphosis and name change inspired by a powerful ayahuasca experience, and how that moved her into a life more inspired by authenticity and self-love. She gives the details of her retreats, explains her PRISM sessions, and talks in depth about the magic of resiliency: How can we not just return to baseline, but experience post-traumatic growth?
She talks about:
The power of tuning into creativity in times of depression
The efficacy of narrative therapy and writing in general
The universal themes of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ and how much agency matters
The importance of embracing nonfiction, and her upcoming book series, The Dreamweaver’s Legacy
The potential of microdosing psilocybin for menopause
“On the fourth cup, I saw these visions and I heard a voice. And you know how it is. Yes, ayahuasca is a hallucinogen, but this voice was so powerful. And it basically was giving me an opportunity to make a shift. And the first time I heard it, I said no. The next night, I was in the same turmoil again, [and] by the time I got to my fourth cup, the voice came back and I said yes. And as soon as I said yes to this horrible question for me, I had to grab my bucket and I started to purge. And with that purge, I could see from me as a baby to that point, it was as if I was purging that timeline. What I realized is who I had become (because I grew up with so much trauma), I felt stuck. I felt like I couldn’t get out of the loop, even with this powerful medicine. And what she gave me was the opportunity to purge that. And by the third time I’m heaving over the bucket, I knew: I’m being reborn.”
“As a physician, I just recognize that without self-love – without true, unconditional self-acceptance, it’s really hard to be healthy.”
“I think everyone could benefit from just imagining: What would life be like if I had more magic, and I wasn’t so blocked and limited by my usual way of being or seeing things?”
“Many of us have wounding based on our family, or attachment wounds, so we need to heal and we need to recover in community. A lot of the people who do find success with 12-steps: they find that we recover together. I think there’s a certain magic that happens. A lot of my colleagues in this space say the group is the medicine. Yes, we take these magical molecules, but the group brings its own sort of medicine.”
In this episode, Johanna interviews Laura Reeves: Glastonbury-based facilitator and medicine woman trained in craniosacral therapy, somatic experiencing, breathwork, and more, who holds retreats at sacred sites in the U.K. and Peruvian Amazon.
She tells of her journey from serendipitously booking a trip to Ecuador just as she first heard about ayahuasca, to the early ayahuasca experiences that showed her our true interconnectedness, to a heroic dose of psilocybin and a trip to the hospital, to being accepted into training with an Indigenous shaman in the Amazon. With a lifelong love of nature, paganism, and ancient traditions, she stresses the importance of connecting to the natural rhythms of the Earth and harnessing its energy.
She talks about:
Self-initiated shamans and the dangers that can come from bad actors operating out of integrity and respect for the lineage
Ayahuasca as a purgative and the power of energetic clearings
Her experience with shamans using Icaros to channel the sounds of plants
Shadow work and its role in personal growth and healing
The energy of Glastonbury, feeling deep connections to sacred places, and how ley lines inspire places of pilgrimage
and more!
Notable Quotes
“I just walked off on my own, and I remember just standing there. And I started hearing the entire symphony of the rainforest and it was like no sound was a mistake. It was like I could see and feel the interconnectedness of every single sound and every feeling of every sound, and I just was there in this orchestra of nature. I guess that was [my first]] experience of this interconnectedness, the energy that kind of weaves between everything.”
“It’s great that these plants are awakening to awaken us now. But what’s unfortunate is a lot of people are then using it as an opportunity to make money, to be the shaman at the front of the ceremony, and they’re not prepared to do the work to actually be in integrity with these sacred lineages.”
“The way in which this other tradition works with the medicine is to drink ayahuasca without the DMT active substance (you still have visions, but it’s different), and then you drink warm water, and you’re literally just purging for about two hours. …And the way that I felt after this: It was like the medicine went down into the deepest parts of my body, into my cells, and just pulled out any toxins, any negative thoughts even, anything at all. And I felt completely clear and energized. My nervous system felt really reset at this point. …I was like: How can we create experiences just with the body where we can feel this depth of liberation and openness?”
So, you’ve had a psychedelic experience. And somewhere within the sensory avalanche, the perplexing interior narrative, and avoiding looking at your own face in the bathroom mirror, you (gasp!) may have actually learned something. But what comes next? How can you ensure to take the insights you gathered and apply them to your life? Enter psychedelic integration.
What is Psychedelic Integration?
The word ‘integration’ comes from the Latin word ‘integrare,’ which means to make whole or begin again. It also has French roots, from the word ‘intégration,’ which speaks to ‘bringing together parts of a whole.’
While the psychedelic community has yet to uniformly align on a single definition for integration, we can begin to understand it by acknowledging that psychedelics can help disrupt and loosen our rigid personality structures and long-held beliefs. Integration is about finding a middle ground, fixing the tears in our narratives, and becoming whole again.
Sounds simple, right? Simple, yes. Easy, maybe not. Psychedelic integration is both passive and active. It takes time, willingness, and effort to work through and re-live a psychedelic experience within the natural mind. It can involve taking a thorough inventory of the mind, body, and spirit, and challenging oneself to dig deep, get uncomfortable, and sometimes, make big changes.
But don’t panic. Integration is an extremely personal process and doesn’t look the same for everyone. Before getting started, get grounded, give yourself permission to take your time, and treat yourself with love, compassion, and patience.
Document Everything
Someone I used to work with is fond of saying “it doesn’t exist if it isn’t written down.” And while, for our purposes, he uses it in terms of project management, the same is true for psychedelic integration.
As soon as you’ve had a little breathing room from the most intense part of the trip – either before the psychedelic substance has worn off, or a few days after – begin journaling. Writing or recording the parts of the experience that stood out to you is a great place to start while the memory is fresh in your mind.
Whether in a blank notebook, or an intentionally designed psychedelic Integration Workbook, capturing those fleeting thoughts and feelings is often considered a foundational step in psychedelic integration. If a blank page feels a little daunting, check out our comprehensive guide to integrating psychedelic experiences, including meditation prompts, structured journaling exercises, and goal planning.
Find Someone to Listen
After a profound psychedelic experience, it’s often helpful to share your story with someone. Whether a therapist experienced in psychedelic integration, a trusted friend, or a member of a psychedelic community, finding a non-judgmental person to hold space for you is important.
The act of verbalizing your experience can help in processing and understanding it on a deeper level. Your experience may have included some anxiety, depression, and discomfort. It’s crucial to find a person who is open-minded (and did we mention, non-judgmental?), allowing you the space to explore your thoughts and feelings without steering them in any particular direction.
If your resources are limited, or there just isn’t anyone in your circle who fits the bill, consider contacting Fireside Project, a free helpline for peer support before, during, and after a psychedelic experience.
“(The volunteers) come to the experiences having had their own experiences, and desiring to hold space for others as they navigate their experiences and navigate their processing afterwards. They’re not doing therapy. They’re not diagnosing. They’re really with the person (the caller, the texter) as somebody who gets it,” Fireside Project founder Hanifa Washington told Psychedelics Today.
Depending on the intensity of your experience and the state of your well-being in the aftermath, finding a trained professional or a doctor may be necessary – especially if you’re in distress.
Do Your Homework
Psychedelic integration also involves educating yourself about the psychedelic experience. Dive into books, scientific research, and personal accounts that discuss psychedelics and their effects on the mind and body. Understanding the psychological, neurological, and spiritual aspects of psychedelics can provide a richer context to your experience.
To really dig into your integration, consider taking an online course. Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self-Care and Integration was designed so you can learn at your own pace, with lessons on how to get the most out of your experience and integrate psychedelic experiences into your daily life.
These days, there is more psychedelic information available to curious people than ever before. While there can be a lot to wade through, it’s best to find a format that’s easy and compelling to digest. This knowledge can help in recognizing common themes and lessons that emerge in psychedelic experiences. Knowledge is power, and there’s a lot of it out there for you to discover.
Take Care of Yourself
Physical health plays a significant role in psychological and spiritual well-being, especially after a psychedelic experience. And if you’ve just had one, your body might have gone through the ringer.
Ensure you’re taking care of your body through proper nutrition, adequate sleep, and regular exercise. Activities you enjoy, like yoga, art, meditation, and nature walks can also be beneficial, helping to ground your experiences in the physical world. Remember, a healthy body is crucial for a healthy mind. Though you may often hear about mental and physical health discussed separately, they are one in the same.
Find the Others
Outside of a therapist or coach, connecting with others who have had similar experiences can be incredibly beneficial for psychedelic integration. Look for community groups, workshops, or online forums where people discuss their psychedelic experiences and integration processes. Sharing with and learning from others can provide different perspectives and insights, and also remind you that you are not alone in this journey.
And even if, for example, you’ve taken psilocybin, don’t discount the experiences of those who have used other substances, from 5-MeO-DMT to ketamine (and all substances in between). While the substances and effects on the body and mind may differ, many of the feelings that can arise and the outcomes can be eerily similar. Finding commonality with many others who use psychedelics for healing and betterment can offer support, understanding, and camaraderie as you navigate your own integration journey.
Don’t Overthink It
The morning after my first ayahuasca experience, I woke up to a text from a friend that read:
Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
I didn’t fully embrace the sentiment of this quote, originally written by Austrian author Rainer Maria Rilke, until much later. My friend was gently urging me to avoid trying to decode the ayahuasca experience too quickly. I didn’t take this advice, and by the time I landed back in Canada, I decided the medicine was, without question, urging me to live with more gratitude. Maybe so, but maybe that wasn’t quite everything I could have learned, or even the most profound. Because I stopped asking questions, I closed the door to new insights.
“How beautiful that we have this access to deep knowledge of the universe through us, but we have to be quiet. We have to be quiet to hear the whispers of the heart. And when you become quiet, the whispers of the heart become louder and they start filling you in. Then you have to start believing it,” Dr. Michael Sapiro told Psychedelics Today.
Sometimes, psychedelic experiences can be colossal, endless, and enlightening.
And sometimes, they can also be underwhelming, unremarkable, and even boring. Resist the urge to define the ‘why’ too quickly after the substance has worn off. Take a beat, unpack it, and let it marinate in your mind for a bit before concluding its significance – there may be more (or less) there than you think.
One Step at a Time
Choosing to take psychedelics can be transformative, opening doors to new perspectives and deeper understanding of oneself. But remember, the true journey begins with integration — weaving these profound experiences into the tapestry of your daily life.
As you navigate this path, cherish the insights, embrace the challenges, and remember that psychedelic integration is meant to be a journey, not a destination.
In this episode, Joe interviews Alyssa Gursky, LPC: artist, research associate and study therapist at the Social Neuroscience and Psychotherapy (SNaP) lab, and founder of Psychedelic Art Therapy LLC, which pioneers ketamine-assisted art therapy.
She talks about her first mushroom experience and how her art and creative process instantly felt different – how the judgment and concern about where the art was going disappeared and was replaced by a freedom; a return to a more childlike way of being, where all that mattered was the fun of the creative process, and expressing her inner world in art. They realized how much the creative process related to true embodiment and the ability to be fully present, and how healing it can be to simply be with other people and create art.
She talks about:
The power of being seen in a group, and how the bravery of one person can completely shift the group dynamic
The need for mentorship in the psychedelic space
The comfort and freedom found in affinity groups
The inspiring lives of Genesis P-Orridge and avant-garde filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Rick Rubin’s ability to treat creativity as a spiritual act
and how attending a live wrestling event aligns with non-ordinary states.
Gursky is launching a virtual education and support group this March for anyone who wants to integrate art into client work or their own process. Visit her instagram for details.
Notable Quotes
“I used pastels pretty much the entirety of that whole first experience, and I was just so stunned at how much more freedom [I felt]. Like, there were concepts that I was learning, that your creative process is a reflection of your mind. And I felt like there was an observer really present, to where I remember drawing and there wasn’t this judgment of: ‘Well, what is this going to become?’ and ‘What am I doing with this?’ and ‘Should I have used that color?’ – this deep, neurotic, judgemental inner voice. But instead, it was just sensation.”
“When we’re not taking the time to process through what is in our bodies, we start to lose the ability to be present.”
“Psychedelics really help with this: helping people break through the veil of: just trust your impulses – that that artistic sublimation, the process of taking whatever is happening inside and allowing art to be a vehicle to have it on the outside: that is nervous system regulation. That is psychic healing, just to be like, ‘I kind of want to do that,’ and just trusting that. It seems like such a small act, but it’s such a big deal.”
“Art is helping us create the map of our psyche, and psychedelics are giving us wider access to that landscape. It feels like a match made in Heaven for me.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Matthew ‘Whiz’ Buckley: former decorated US Navy F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot and now, founder and CEO of No Fallen Heroes Foundation, a non-profit focused on healing veterans and first responders with psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Buckley met Joe in D.C. while they were both campaigning for psychedelic therapy to any lawmaker they could speak with. He talks about how the government is spending a fortune on the military, but not paying the total cost, since so much of that is externalized onto the soldiers themselves. He points out how many of them care more about making money than saving lives, and how we need “We the people” moments to wake them up or remove them from office.
He discusses:
His time in the Navy and his transition back to civilian life, coming to terms with trauma and realizing how much was physical (including tinnitus)
His life-changing experiences under ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT with the Mission Within
How we should be teaching veterans about various mental health options (including psychedelic-assisted therapy) as part of their transition process
The signing of the National Defense Authorization Act and the disappointing amount of money reserved for psychedelic research: Was it all just lip service?
The complications that arise when trying to get benefits from the VA while also trying to move on: When honesty about mental health isn’t incentivized, when do you tell the truth?
His experience operating legally in Colorado and how he plans to stay on top of Governor Desantis to bring psychedelics to Florida
and more!
Notable Quotes
“The military does an incredibly good job of turning us into human beings that are capable of doing some pretty horrific things to another fellow human being. And then when they’re done with us, they do a pretty shitty job of transitioning us back to being a human. They pay lip service to it, but there’s no return in it: ‘Hey man, you’re getting out. You’re not our problem anymore. We’ve got to focus on the next generation of killers.’”
“If we can get our first responders healed along with our military, I think this world would be a better place. …These medicines have the potential to turn warriors into peacemakers. And maybe that’s also why they’re illegal; they need little uniform killing machines that don’t do critical thinking.”
“Veterans: it’s interesting because it’s a tough community. We don’t listen to advertising or bullshit or anything; it needs to come from another vet for anything to have credibility. So you know, a Marcus Luttrell or a me or a JT looking a bro or a sister in the eye and going: ‘Hey man, this is what happened to me.’ Even in the back of their mind, if they’re like, ‘What the? That’s insane,’ there’s still a lot more of: ‘I trust this person. They would not steer me wrong.’”
In this episode, Joe interviews Steve Rio: psychedelic guide, performance and transformation coach, musician, and co-founder of Enfold, a retreat center in BC, Canada.
While Enfold caters each experience to each client, they largely work with 5-MeO-DMT (which is unregulated in Canada); partly because of its power, and partly because Rio realized how much was missing in terms of safety and process when using the substance. They are trying to fill in the gaps, working with the University Health Network Centre for Mental Health to analyze measurements of mindfulness, DAS tests, the Brief Inventory of Thriving survey, and language used when describing experiences to collect as much qualitative data as possible. He discusses their screening process, why they work with synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, why they encourage everyone to go to a group session, and how 5-MeO seems to bypass psychological processes and largely be related to somatic release.
He talks about:
The power of 5-MeO and being humble and honest with yourself: Are you stable enough to handle the dysregulation?
5-MeO bad actors and ‘Drive-by 5’ people who show up, do the drug, and leave
The plight of Sonoran Dessert toads and the need for more data around their declining populations
How 5-MeO seems to connect people with a higher power, and the need for the experiencer to find their own context for it
The importance of creating a clean and open container for spirituality and meeting the client where they are
and more!
Notable Quotes
“I think inserting any type of dogma is not really helpful in taking people through a psychedelic experience. I think there are some core basic principles around love, around compassion, around forgiveness, that I think everyone can agree with, but I think beyond that, it’s important for everybody to be able to contextualize their experience in the framing that feels right to them. …We try and create the clearest and simplest container for spirituality that allows for the depth of spirituality, but doesn’t necessarily try and say spirituality is one thing or another, because frankly, that’s a very personal choice.”
“These toads have quickly become close to extinct. And the whole region is in turmoil because of people coming to harvest toads. There’s cartel activities. I think there’s human safety risks, I think there’s animal safety risks. And once you work with synthetic, you realize that there’s so little difference between Bufo Alvarius and synthetic that it makes no sense to be working on healing, transformation, and consciousness expansion at the expense of this beautiful animal.”
“The more people can open up in a group setting, I think that’s an incredibly healing practice – to be able to be vulnerable, to be able to be heard, to hear other people’s stories and realize you’re not alone. To hear yourself in others is really powerful. I think, ultimately, the deepest healing does happen in community.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Ayize Jama-Everett: author, educator, filmmaker, and therapist with a long history of work in substance use and mental health services.
When Jama-Everett was last on the show, “A Table of Our Own” – a film focusing on healing, psychedelics, and bonds within the Black community – was still in its infancy. It’s now complete, and he and others behind the film are touring with it, with showings coming up in Detroit, LA, and Boston. A free follow-up discussion hosted by CIIS’ Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research is happening Feb. 15, and, from February 15-16 only, the film is available to rent online.
He gives his full origin story: growing up around substance use, how he got into therapy and healing people through journeys, how “A Table of Our Own” came about, and how it was influenced by mushrooms. Then he discusses a lot more, with a much-needed critical eye:
His experiences with some notorious bad actors in the facilitation space
Decriminalization and how we celebrate small wins while ignoring steps back
Drug exceptionalism, the Drug War, and the demonization of crack
Power dynamics and the dangerous concept of letting go
Why the Black community is so skeptical of psychedelics
And he talks about why it’s so important to meet people where they are – that what works for one person or one community won’t necessarily work for another, and the above-ground, corporatized, overly medicalized model will never work for everyone.
Notable Quotes
“I’m about to crawl back underground after this, I think. …This above ground shit is, by and large, for the birds. …There’s so many people now doing psychedelics and stuff, right? I would assume, given the promises, that there’d be more ethical people out there. There’d be more people with less ego. There’d be more women in charge, there’d be more queer people in charge, there’d be more people of color in charge. But it just seems like the same white corporate dudes. It’s like they’re talking about an app. …I want to just be of service to the people that need it and not deal with the rest of this bullshit.”
“The whole decrim thing in general: I feel like when decrim isn’t married with all substance use, then I don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.”
“When we talk about access, we’re talking about insurance. Dude, I barely have insurance. Insurance reimbursement? You want a revolution and you start with insurance reimbursement? What? How does that make any [sense]? Was Martin Luther King marching across that bridge in Selma, being like, ‘We are going to have insurance reimbursement for [everyone]?’ No. That is not where you meet people. That is the last fucking thing. That is the blip at the end. People are dying. People are killing themselves. …People who are seriously struggling don’t give a fuck about insurance.”
“You’re sitting here, taking all of this stuff and you’re putting it in the context of pathology: Something has to be wrong in order for you to take this, so that it can be corrected. Actually, maybe things are alright, and this is the way of joining.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews Emma Knighton: Somatic trauma therapist, Vital instructor, and psychedelic integration therapist focusing on consciousness exploration, complex PTSD from childhood abuse, and queer identity development.
This episode is a bit of a masterclass on consent and boundaries within the client/practitioner relationship. She discusses power dynamics: how conflicts arise due to the breaking of established boundaries; safety, and embracing the idea of creating a container that is ‘safe enough’ to go into places that feel unsafe; and the importance of maintaining agreed-upon boundaries no matter how much the client may want to break them. They discuss ways to fulfill the need for touch when touch was not agreed upon, and the concept of practicing touch interactions before the experience – that playing out possible scenarios will create a somatic map so bodies remember what it feels like to be near each other while one body is deep in an experience.
And she talks about much more: What she’s learned from the kink and sex work community and their similarities with the psychedelic world; ways to handle consent in group settings; the clash between giving people agency but needing to step in and protect them; restorative justice models and how they could be used in a much-needed psychedelic practitioner accountability system; the need for practitioners to continue doing their own work; and how part of true consent is being honest about one’s own limitations or conflicts as a practitioner.
Notable Quotes
“We live in a compliance culture, not in a consent culture. So most of us have not actually learned what it feels like to be really attuned to consent in our bodies.”
“I don’t say, ‘This space is safe,’ I say, ‘We’re going to make this space safe enough’ – safe enough to do the thing, whatever the thing is. Safe enough to consent to the risk that is present. I don’t actually think that ‘safe, period’ exists for anybody anywhere. So it’s more about: What does ‘safe enough’ mean for each person? And that’s facilitators and clients, because facilitators: We have our own boundaries. And if we’re not attending to our boundaries and if we step over one of our boundaries in service of somebody else, that container is now out of consent, because we’ve crossed a boundary that we have. So we have to think about: What is safe enough for me to be in this setting and then, what does safe enough look like for the person or people I’m working with? And how do we create that?”
“I think part of the consent process and part of being an ethical and accountable practitioner is being really honest around: What do I know, what do I not know, and what do I not know that I don’t know?”
In this episode, Joe interviews Christine Calvert: Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator.
She talks about how addiction led her to breathwork, how breathwork has helped her over the years, how breathwork can be a compliment to other self-work, and how becoming comfortable with breathwork first could be a very important stepping stone towards better understanding the psychedelic experience. She talks about how years of breathwork helped her navigate complicated states of consciousness, and the incredible benefit of learning to trust our body’s capacity to heal itself.
She discusses using bodywork in sessions and the importance of having the experiencer be the one who requests it; how much a facilitator’s past relationship with touch affects how they use touch; the risk in meditation vs. the safety of breathwork; the concept of learning self-awareness; how profound it is to be witnessed in breathwork’s dyad model; and why researching and creating guidelines for this kind of work seems impossible.
Notable Quotes
“One of the things I love so much about breathwork vs. psychedelics is that it is endogenous medicine; this is coming from within me. And as somebody who had experienced the world in [a way that] felt like I really was surrounded in a culture and a society that was incredibly disempowering – to have a model that turns you back inside yourself over and over again is a true gift and an act of radical self-empowerment.”
“Obviously in counseling we get witnessed, but there is something really profound about the witnessing in the dyad setup model of holotropic breathwork where [we’re] being witnessed by somebody, and their job is only to do that: to literally sit [and] accompany me as I go internal. And then there’s just an immense amount of support. So for these parts that really didn’t have support and are holding a lot of the trauma of omission (the things we needed that we didn’t get); it’s incredibly powerful and poignant to have this kind of relational field surrounding us through that while that material is moving through us.”
“I feel like if we could do a stepping stone program, breathwork would be the first one, because I think if we can’t access and understand what and who we are with our own endogenous medicine; as explorers and facilitators or practitioners, I think we’re missing something.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Christine Caldwell: graduate of the first cohort of Vital and Founder of End of Life Psychedelic Care (EOLPC); and Mary Telliano: end-of-life coach, psychedelic facilitator, and Founder of The Anam Cara Academy, which trains people in the art of end-of-life coaching.
Whether we’re comfortable with it or not, we’re all going to die. And research shows that psychedelic experiences can help tremendously with the anxiety and depression that surround that inevitable transition between realms. Caldwell and Telliano discuss the role of a death doula; how they found their way into end-of-life care; why the West’s relationship with death changed during the Civil War; the role of families in the process; the legality of providing end-of-life psychedelics and the complications that arise when people are unable to leave their homes; and how different substances can be used based on each person’s abilities and comfort level.
They talk about why the mystical experience of psychedelics can be so helpful during this process (and how the placebo effect can be a very real factor); tell a few stories of amazing things they’ve witnessed while doing this work; and drive the point home of how important it is for us to reintegrate death as a natural part of life – to have rites of passage around death, to learn from death, and, much like we need to remember our inner healing capacity, realize that we all have the capacity to play the role of a death doula for someone else.
Notable Quotes
“We are on the forefront of people calling back in sacredness, calling back in those pieces that we’ve forgotten. I was about to say ‘missing’ and I’m really trying to reframe that linguistic and say ‘forgotten’ because it’s never gone away; we’re just really remembering this piece and this emphasis on how important it is to honor the transitions as a community, as a whole. And what it does for me on a personal level as a death doula, how it’s changed me by witnessing so many people dying, is that I’ve witnessed my death over and over and over and over again through these people. And I’ve gotten to kind of really sit and be comfortable in a space that I think a lot of people shy away from. And being in the room with somebody who is in transition is one of the biggest gifts you can get because you carry that with you now. And so, the work of a doula is also in service to ourselves.” -Mary
“It’s the mystical experience. I just firmly believe that, because we’re working with people who have an openness, a receptivity to looking at spirituality in terms of coming to terms with their death and dying, and looking into whether or not there is a greater consciousness, which of course we know there is. And psychedelics are the portal to that greater consciousness.” -Christine
“The technology of psychedelics helps us transcend beyond our body. And if we can make meaning outside of ourselves, things become a little bit more [navigable] because now, we have enough inside of us to remember that there’s something that happens outside of us, and these two worlds start to communicate and inform each other.” -Mary
In this episode, Kyle interviews Kayse Gehret, the Founder of Microdosing for Healing, an international virtual community and coaching program supporting microdosing practice.
She tells the story of embracing microdosing and her grand mal seizure disorder going away, and how the inability to touch people during the pandemic led to the creation of Microdosing for Healing. She breaks down the details of the program, challenges she’s seen, and the importance of using every effective modality possible to align with each person’s individual experience. The next 6-Week Immersion Group course begins January 26.
She talks about how accessing the body is usually the best entry point to healing; how effective journaling and other personal development practices are to recognize change (especially with how subtle microdosing can be); the efficacy of group process; how physicians are beginning to see the power in community and connection; concerns over the “jump in the deep end” attitude of many people leading to destabilizing experiences; how regular check-ins are important to keep people connected to their original intention; and the idea that people are striving for an unattainable state of perfection – that our goal should be a constant state of improvement and aligning ourselves to who we are meant to be – and microdosing until we don’t need to microdose anymore.
Notable Quotes
“I grew up with a grand mal seizure disorder, so I had always, growing up, shied away from anything that would destabilize my brain more than it already was doing on its own. So doing high dose or experimenting with drugs was never appealing to me and kind of a bit scary to me. But when I was introduced to the concept of microdosing, there was something that just was like ding! And the idea that I could do something that felt more like a natural supplementation, a spiritual vitamin if you will, over time, as kind of an expansiveness [tool] and a healing modality – not anticipating at all it would have the effect that it it did end up happening for me – but that sounded more appealing than high dose work at the time. So I started microdosing and among other things, my seizure disorder disappeared completely, immediately upon practicing.”
“Somatics and body work is fundamental, I think, to our healing, especially where we are in society right now. I think accessing the body is, for many people, the best first access point to their own healing.”
“I really feel like the majority of the public, especially now that it’s mainstream, most people (and again, this is just my opinion) are not resourced and resilient and in a place where going straight to a high dose experience is going to best serve them. And what we have witnessed loud and clear over the last three years is when people take the time to lay the foundation and really apprentice themselves to their practice – incorporate breathwork, body work, other healing modalities first – and they lay a foundation of trust with themselves and the medicine; then they move into higher dose work with a guide and facilitator, it is a completely different experience.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Mike Finoia: standup comedian, Producer for the hit show, “Impractical Jokers,” and co-host of the Comes a Time Podcast with Dead & Company bassist, Oteil Burbridge. His new Special, “Don’t Let Me Down,” is out now.
He talks about his early days of recreational drug use at jam band shows; a powerful psilocybin experience; passing out before his first ketamine experience and how his commitment has made subsequent experiences much smoother; and how his continued work has allowed him to focus on what’s truly important. He’s seen positive results from talking about his ketamine-assisted psychotherapy experiences on stage, and he’s working on new material that will be much more focused on not just psychedelics, but the therapy, self-work, and growth he’s gone through in his journey.
He also discusses the influence of other comedians; the bioavailability in different ketamine methods; how psychedelics are like a performance-enhancing drug; the importance of having a working, attainable idea of success and not getting caught up in other people’s lives; the benefit of asking people in the audience to raise their hands if they’ve done psychedelics; and the importance of recognizing that psychedelics are absolutely not for everyone – at least if they’re not ready.
Notable Quotes
“It’s interesting because I’m trying to work out the material and figure out what’s funny, but also, some of the stuff I’m saying that’s from my gut is getting laughter and applause, and also, people are coming up afterwards and they’re like, ‘That’s really awesome that you’re talking about this.’ …I have to pay attention to that.”
“A comic, just like anything else really – you know, a podcaster, an entrepreneur, a businessman, whatever – you’re 10 different things. You’re the Director of social media, you’re the Director of advertising and marketing and promotions. You have your art and you have the thing you like to do, but then there’s a hundred other gigs that come with it, and you have to kind of stay on top of all those things. And that can get extremely overwhelming. And if you already have that imposter voice or that critic that’s beating the hell out of you all the time, it’s more ammo or more fuel for their fire. So to me, psychedelics have been– It’s almost like a vacation. It’s like a way to shut that crap off and get to what really matters.”
“When you have the anxieties and the depressions and the imposter syndrome, things like that; sometimes the most psychedelic part of a psychedelic experience is the absence of the bullshit, where it’s just: you get down to being a living being and you’re out of your own way. And that, to me, is the most valuable part.”
In this episode, Joe and Kyle are honored to welcome back Stanislav and Brigitte Grof: Stan being the person who kickstarted their interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness, breathwork, and this podcast; and Brigitte: his other half, co-creator of Grof® Legacy Training, and support system (and often, voice) since his stroke a few years back.
They discuss the recently released Stanislav Grof, LSD Pioneer: From Pharmacology to Archetypes, which Brigitte assembled in honor of Stan’s 90th birthday. It celebrates his life’s work in pioneering research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and transpersonal psychology, and features an extended interview with Stan; testimonials from a number of legends in the psychedelic and psychological fields like Jack Kornfield, Rupert Sheldrake, Richard Tarnas, and Fritjof Capra; and a large photo album of rarely seen pictures, including Stan doing his first experiments with LSD.
And they talk about so much more: The evolution of LSD psychotherapy as Stan realized people’s experiences were coming from the psyche rather than any pharmacology; why he started practicing and teaching breathwork; Stan’s love of treasure hunts; how the perinatal matrices were born and how each corresponds to astrology and religious archetypes; why experience in breathwork can be so beneficial to better psychedelic experiences and facilitation; why integration is equally as important as the experience; and an argument to take archetypal astrology more seriously – that there is often a synchronicity that can’t be denied between these archetypes, events, and experiences.
Notable Quotes
“I was surprised that people were having very, very different experiences. And then when [they] had these substances repeatedly; then again, it was completely different. …So I realized that this had nothing to do with chemistry, this had nothing to do with pharmacology, and that it’s basically about the psyche.” -Stan
“I have to say I’m extremely grateful for the map that he found and he gave to all of us, especially in The Way of the Psychonaut, his life’s work, encyclopedia. All the knowledge is there. And when I go to these places myself and I get into the pits, I can, in the back of my head, remember, ‘Oh, this is what Stan was writing about, so it should be okay. I’m going to get out of this.’ So I think everybody who is doing these journeys should know about Stan’s findings. It’s just so mega helpful.” -Brigitte
“When you hear what people say later or you see the creativity and the power of energy that gets released, then the liberation, it’s so amazing, and so healing and very exciting. And the people sometimes say, ‘How do you live with all that screaming?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s music in my ears, because so much of the suffering is silent. So when these things come out and they get expressed, they’re leaving the system and people get liberated. So once you understand that, then you’re good.’” -Brigitte
“When we do breathwork, then you add to it breathing, and actually, the intelligence; it brings its own thought. And then of course, bringing in LSD, psychedelics: it’s even further. But the idea is to always work with the psyche. You don’t need any specific tricks.” -Stan
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna interviews Angie Leek, LMFT/LPC-S, SEP: Vital instructor, Founder of the Holos Foundation for Transpersonal Healing, and psychotherapist offering KAP through her private practice, Holos Counseling; and Justin LaPree: Vital graduate, decorated Marine, former firefighter, and Founder and President of Heroic Path to Light; a retreat center in Austin, Texas offering psychedelic-assisted therapy and community to veterans, first responders, and Gold/White Star families.
LaPree shares his personal journey of struggling to reintegrate into life after war and the daily traumas he lived as a firefighter leading to an eventual suicide attempt, and the healing he found when he rediscovered the community and purpose he had been longing for. And Leek tells her story of her spiritual emergency and the nonlinear path she found for coming to terms with her repressed trauma, further illustrating a common theme we see in this space of the wounded healer, and the challenge of taking care of yourself first in order to be able to heal others.
They discuss the importance of specialized communities for trauma healing; the need for a support system and the power of sharing experiences with others; how they both work with their clients, the idea of viewing preparation as “pre-integration”; why families and friends also need to be prepared; and how, if you feel like something needs to change or you’re in need of a community, maybe it all begins with you.
They also talk about how much they loved Vital and the impact it’s had on their life paths. The deadline for applications for the 2024 cohort of Vital is tomorrow, December 20, at midnight, so if you’re ready to take the leap, head to vitalpsychedelictraining.com to apply now!
Notable Quotes
“Coming together with small groups of people – …that’s really getting back to the roots. It’s getting back to the basics of civilizations. There’s just so much to be said there about coming together to support each other.” -Justin
“So many people that started doing psychedelics that I was working with either ended up divorced or having big breakups with friendships. It’s like when somebody in the system [changes], the system craves homeostasis. It’s like, ‘No, we don’t want to [change]. We liked how it was before; we don’t like this change.’ And so, either the relationship goes through this transformation that may be rocky, or it breaks. And so that’s a good thing to know going in. It’s actually sort of informed consent. It’s good to know your life might blow up after this in ways that you can’t even imagine.” -Angie
“I really want the entire community to be there for the shared experience of healing. I’s just as healing, if not more healing, for me to be able to facilitate these containers and be there with the individuals. That’s why [I], as the Founder and President, [am] at every retreat, because this is the medicine that I need without even taking the medicine. This is my medicine of community.” -Justin
Though psychedelics have been used for thousands of years, modern technology is beginning to teach us more – much more – about their effects on our minds and bodies. We caught up with Apollo Neuro co-founder and neuroscientist and board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. David Rabin, to learn more about how people are using wearables to gather new insights about their trips.
Alexa: For anyone who isn’t already aware, can you give us a high-level overview of what wearable tech is for, who might want to use it, and why?
David: I think of wearable technology as a powerful tool in our health toolkits to help combat the stresses of modern life, just like mindful practices like meditation, breathwork, and exercise. The wearable technology that we’ve developed at Apollo is safe for children and adults alike, so it’s really for anyone who feels they could use a tool to help them feel more safe, in control, and calm and experience better sleep, less stress, and a brighter mood. When we feel more secure, we’re able to fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer, focus more effectively, socialize more freely, and sustain energy throughout your daily tasks
Alexa: Can you explain the synergy between technology and psychedelic treatments in achieving better mental health outcomes?
David: Psychedelic-assisted therapy can be scary or intense for people, especially during their first time. Wearables can serve as a somatic anchor for both the patient and the therapist so they can stay in tune with their bodies. It helps the therapist to remain impartial on any difficulties or challenges that the patient may be experiencing, and it helps the patient to have a smoother journey.
To date, we have never had access to modern tools to help us solve these challenges that exist within and around the psychedelic experience. Today, the Apollo wearable is the only patented technology to reduce uncomfortable experiences associated with medicine-assisted therapy. So far the results from Apollo plus psychedelic-assisted therapy in the real world have been tremendous, including reducing anxiety in advance of medicine administration for easier drop in, reduction in ‘bad’ or uncomfortable trips, and improved ease of integration afterward. Apollo represents the very first example of how wearable technology can empower us to make healing with psychedelic and non-psychedelic techniques easier and more accessible for all.
Alexa: Can you share some examples of scientific research or studies that support the effectiveness of wearable tech and its combination with psychedelic therapies?
David: Currently, the Apollo Neuroscience Clinical Research Team is running an IRB-approved clinical trial with the support of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit sponsoring the most advanced clinical trials of a psychedelic-assisted therapy. The purpose of this study is to understand how the Apollo wearable touch therapy impacts long-term outcomes and improves integration following MDMA-assisted therapy in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Two large clinical trials evaluating the Apollo wearable in PTSD patients are currently underway and recruiting participants. The first is taking place at the Rocky Mountain VA in Denver, CO and the second, a nationwide trial, is evaluating the Apollo wearable to sustain remission from PTSD following MDMA-assisted therapy, described above. Anyone who has participated in a MAPS trial of MDMA-assisted therapy is eligible to join the MDMA-Apollo study and receive an Apollo wearable for the study.
We’ve seen tremendous results with the Apollo wearable in thousands of traumatized individuals and those who have participated in psychedelic-assisted therapy thus far. Some of the most promising responses were in people receiving ketamine-assisted therapy, particularly those new to psychedelic medicines or who have a lot of anxiety in anticipation of new experiences. We care about the outcomes, and anything we can do to help people stay in remission or feel better for longer periods of time is a big win for our field. We are very much looking forward to seeing how the Apollo wearable will contribute to the integration period following MDMA-assisted therapy.
Alexa: Have there been any clinical trials or user feedback demonstrating the positive impact on mental health?
David: The Apollo Neuro technology has been studied in over 1,700 research subjects in seven complete and 14 ongoing real-world and university clinical trials demonstrating very promising improvements in everything from sleep, pain, and fatigue to mood, anxiety, and focus. Ongoing studies of the Apollo technology include studies of PTSD, ADHD, and TBI, metastatic breast cancer pain, and severe autoimmune disorders.
Alexa: There are tons of wearable devices out there these days, could you share an overview about Apollo and how it’s different?? What specific features or technologies does Apollo employ to support mental health?
David: The Apollo wearable is different from other wearables as most wearables are trackers. They tell you what is going on with your health but leave it up to you to make decisions to improve it. The Apollo, on the other hand, actively improves your health through soothing vibrations that shift you out of “fight or flight” and into “rest and digest,” or a parasympathetic state. You can actively choose how you want to feel on the Apollo Neuro app on your phone – Focus, Social, or Unwind, for example – and the wearable plays vibrations that help to shift you into that state, much like the way certain songs pump you up or chill you out.
Alexa: What mental health benefits can users expect from your wearable technology on its own, and how does your wearable tech complement or enhance the effects of psychedelic therapies?
David: On average, users experience 40% less stress and feelings of anxiety, an 11% increase in heart rate variability (HRV), up to 25% more focus and concentration, and up to 19% more time in deep sleep. In an ongoing real-world sleep study, users get up to 30 more minutes of sleep a night. Less stress and feelings of anxiety is especially helpful in a psychedelic-assisted therapy setting, as well as an increase in HRV, as that is the biggest indicator of how well your body responds to stress.
Alexa: What does the future of this type of therapy look like? Do you collaborate with mental health professionals, therapists, or healthcare providers to integrate your technology into treatment plans?
David: The future of Apollo being used in this type of therapy is that it will be used by clinicians and patients in the office or treatment facility where medicine is administered, beginning in the waiting room or before arrival, to improve short term experiences. It will then be used, as it is today, by patients/clients after their experiences at home to improve clients engagement in treatment and enhance their outcomes from integration practices, which are the most important piece of treatment and often ignored.
Alexa: If a healthcare provider is interested in incorporating wearable tech into their practices, what is the process for going about that?
David: We work with hundreds of healthcare practitioners ranging from holistic health clinicians, centers for ADHD and autism, psychedelic assisted therapy clinics, trauma therapy practitioners, Chiropractors and more. Our goal is always to work hand in hand with them to tailor a program that meets the needs for their clinic and their patients. To learn more about partnership options with Apollo, Practitioners and Clinicians can reach our partnership team directly by filling out this form on our website.
Alexa: How do you see the intersection of technology and mental health evolving in the coming years? Are there plans for further advancements or updates to your technology to enhance its mental health benefits?
David: The future of mental health involves the convergence of technology, psychedelic techniques, and our current practices. As Apollo learns from people over time, it will personalize vibes for each individual user based on their needs at any given time today. This is already happening with Smartvibes for sleep, which is the first wearable technology AI collaboration to give us 30-60 minutes more sleep each night that is concentrated in deep and REM sleep, just by understanding our sleep signature and acting on it predictively to prevent unwanted middle-of-the-night wakeups. This will only get better over time!
Interested in trying the Apollo Neuro, or gifting it to a friend or loved one? Purchase through this link and save $50.
In this episode, Kyle interviews Bessel van der Kolk, MD: pioneer clinician, researcher, and educator on traumatic stress; Founder of the Trauma Research Foundation; Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School; Principal Investigator of the Boston site of MAPS’ MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study; and author of the #1 New York Times Science best seller, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma.
As of this recording, van der Kolk was publishing his last paper and closing down his laboratory, so he looks back on his past: being part of the group who put together the first PTSD diagnosis in the 80s; the early days of psychedelic research and how he discouraged Rick Doblin and Michael Mithoefer from pursuing MDMA research; how the DSM has no scientific validity and was never meant for the diagnosing it’s being used for; how science wasn’t seeing the whole picture and pushing us mindlessly from medication to medication; and how trauma research has evolved over the years as society learned more about how the mind actually works.
He discusses the struggle to validate “softer” sciences; the impracticality and price of the MAPS protocol and the need for more group and sitter/experiencer frameworks; the efficacy of psychodrama and how that plays out in group sessions; his interest in using the Rorschach test more; how rolfing helped him; the problem with diagnosis and people becoming their illnesses; bodywork, somatic literacy, and how disconnected most people are from their bodies; and how, in all the healing frameworks he’s explored, he has never seen anything work as profoundly as psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Notable Quotes
“I have quite a few friends who are sort of major scientists. And I asked my friends, ‘So, did you take acid also in college?’ All my friends said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And I say, ‘So, how do you think it affected you?’ And my friends generally say, ‘Well, I think it really accounts from my having become a good scientist, because I got to appreciate that the reality that I hold inside of myself is just a small fragment of the overall reality that is.’”
“It was really very gratifying for me to be part of a psychedelic team the past 10 years or so, where we got to see the astounding transformations that people go through on psychedelics – more than anything else that I’ve seen in my career, and I’ve studied many different methods. I’ve studied other things that also turned out to be quite helpful like EMDR and Internal Family Systems therapy and theater and yoga, but the transformations on psychedelics were really astonishing and made me really hopeful that we may enter a much more complex era of thinking about mental functioning.”
“It’s delicate, but we keep running away from it. But the reality is that if you really feel upset, getting a hug from somebody who loves you makes all the difference in the world, of course. That’s still our primary way in which we feel calm. And touch by other people may also scare the shit out of you and send you into a tailspin. So doing that right is very delicate and fraught with danger, but that doesn’t mean we can just keep running away from it.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Dana Lerman, MD: a decade-long infectious disease consultant who has since been trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy, ecotherapy, and Internal Family Systems, and is the Co-Founder of Skylight Psychedelics, where she prescribes IM ketamine and trains therapists who work with it.
Lerman tells her story: how working with kids with cancer made her want to learn medicine, what it was like working as an infectious disease expert during COVID, and how fascinating it has been to start with modern medicine and then fully embrace the traditional frameworks of ayahuasca ceremonies. She has realized that part of her role is to bring that intention, ceremony, and inner healing intelligence to modern medicine – that that will greatly benefit patients as well as clinicians who naturally want to be healers but are burnt out by the bureaucracy and distractions of the faulty container they find themselves in. Skylight Psychedelics is working on opening a clinical research division, researching psychedelics for Long COVID, and bringing in-person psychedelic peer support services to emergency rooms.
She also discusses intergenerational trauma and how psychedelics have affected her parenting; the impossibility of informed consent in psychedelics and why there should be disclaimers as well as instructions; accessibility, the need for insurance to cover psychedelic-assisted therapy, and why the price of these expensive treatments actually makes sense; why we should be sharing stories of mistakes and things going wrong during ceremonies; and why one of the biggest things we can do to further the cause is to educate our children and parents about psychedelics.
Notable Quotes
“What’s come to me recently in ayahuasca ceremony is that part of my role in this space is really to bring intention and to bring ceremony and the inner healing intelligence and that concept to the modern medicine space. I mean, there’s so many places for improvement in modern medicine, like even: We have a few minutes for a timeout so you can check to make sure that’s the right patient [and] it’s the right limb you’re going to amputate, but we don’t have a moment to talk about who this person is and the intention of this surgery and what we want for this person. We just have this disconnect, and this disconnect; obviously, it’s not just in medicine. It’s in everywhere. It’s our food. It’s our community. All systems.”
“I have three small children. A lot of why I went to ayahuasca was because I knew [beside wanting] to heal myself of all the stuff that I’ve been carrying around, I wanted to shift my parenting and to be a better parent, and I felt that if I carried my anxiety, my control, all the stuff: It just keeps getting passed down because the kids are just learning from us. But if you can address that, if you can address where does that come from, what is the work that has to be done around it, and do that work, your kids see it. My daughter: When I came home from ayahuasca (she was probably seven); she looked to me and she said, ‘Why didn’t you go there sooner?’”
“Anytime people are using these medicines, I think: There’s a huge disclaimer that should be coming with these medicines, like: ‘Your life will be changed forever. You will never look at anything the same way again, and there’s a possibility that you enter into a space where you are experiencing the vastness of the universe, and that may be very overwhelming for you when the journey is over. You need someone to talk about it with.’ The whole concept of integration is so important.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David speaks with two current Vital students: Certified Depth Hypnosis Practitioner and Founder and Executive Director of Zoo Labs, Vinitha Watson, CHT; and artist and outdoorsman with decades of experience in bodywork, structural integration, and Vipassana meditation: Judson Frost.
They talk about their personal paths: Watson’s work educating musicians about the music business and their value with Zoo Labs and Frost’s work as an artist; as well as how their experience as parents has grounded them, and how they found Vital. They discuss the importance of integration, having a process, and recognizing how long that can take; being adequately prepared and learning mindfulness skills ahead of a journey; and bringing courage to the space (and as the space-holder, encouragement). They talk about how they hold space, and how one needs to view integration from a spiritually-open perspective to enable people to find their own meanings behind what they experienced.
They discuss how Watson uses a combination of hypnotherapy, transpersonal psychology, and buddhism to create a slowed down mystical experience; how hypnotherapy can benefit a psychedelic experience; bodywork and how we can’t view the mind and body separately; and more. And since they’re nearing the end of their Vital experience, they discuss what they’ve gotten out of it, and reflect on something they didn’t expect: a collective feeling of regenerative healing inside their Vital community.
Notable Quotes
“There is a lot of harm that can be done when there’s no space for integration. As much as we may feel that it’s alleviating our pain, there has to be space in between to really look at the material, to look at the symbols of our psyches, and to really be able to get this intimate understanding of the symbols of our psyches and what they’re telling us. And so, I think it’s such a special place to go into integration after a psychedelic journey, and to really have a process and someone holding that space for you.” -Vinitha
“The first thing I bring to a space (and I encourage other people to bring to the space) is courage, and that bravery and that ability to kind of face the unknown, and face our fears and still move forward into them. I feel [that] to encourage someone is really important; like support and encourage them to take a step towards something they feel uncomfortable with. …We don’t usually have that support to really face that and to learn from it.” -Judson
“Thinking about culture and how a lot of it is in this disembodied state, and what the result is is disease, is pain, is sorrow. I think that’s why psychedelics and altered states are just so important, because it just gives you a state to come back to yourself, and a doorway in.” -Vinitha
In this episode, Kyle interviews Ted Riskin, LCSW: psychotherapist running group KAP sessions and certified in Core Energetics, Internal Family Systems, and Holotropic Breathwork, which he has taught in various forms for 26 years.
He discusses group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy: how he runs sessions, why being welcomed and loved in a group seems to be a bigger factor than the psychedelic, how he came to combine IFS with ketamine or breathwork, and why exploring the parts work of IFS seems to work so well with non-ordinary states of consciousness. And he talks about two complications we often don’t think about with Group KAP: the challenge of getting our different parts to all truly consent to an experience (and how do you get them to?), and how very safe spaces can inspire oversharing, and sadly, subsequent shame.
He discusses knowing when to use a non-directive approach vs. intervening; how people often learn more about themselves as a sitter; using core energetics before experiences to move energy we’re often afraid to work with; the importance of embracing anger (when necessary); memory reconsolidation and bringing exiles from the past into the present; the concept of double bookkeeping; and finding the magic in realizing that sometimes, just being there (“being a useless person” as he says) is all that’s needed.
Notable Quotes
“I think people underestimate the power of breathwork. These days, a lot more, people are coming to do breathwork for the first time and they have done psychedelics. In the past, that was more the minority, now it’s probably the majority. And I’ll tell them, ‘The difference is, you’re used to riding a motorcycle, and now this is a bicycle. You’ve got to pedal this one.’ And yet they’re shocked sometimes how deep just the breathing takes them.”
“We’re realizing that there’s so many things happening that it’s impossible to tease it apart. We don’t know how much the ketamine increases self-leadership, we don’t know if it’s the IFS work that people are doing, but I suspect it’s a combination – that the ketamine seems to really lubricate the IFS work and invites protectors to relax so that people can do deeper, and the rearrangement of the techniques of IFS happens much more deeply.”
“We also think the group experience is as powerful as anything else that’s happening, especially when people are anxious or depressed. Often, they have assumptions about how they will be welcomed by other people, and to be in a loving group where people are vulnerable and find out, ‘I can say anything. I can talk about my shame and fears and people are just with me and accepting’: I sometimes wonder if that’s doing more than the medicine, even.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Erika Dyck: Vital instructor, historian, professor, author, and editor of the new book, Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics; and Jono Remington-Hobbs: graduate of the first cohort of Vital, coach, facilitator, and now, Co-Founder of Kaizn, an experiential wellness company with a strong focus on community, creating a feeling of safety, and modern rites of passage.
They talk a lot about rites of passage and how they create liminal spaces to reflect on the deeper questions we need to ponder but our culture doesn’t allow time for. They talk about how categorization took us away from tradition; how so much of what we get out of these experiences isn’t related to psychedelics at all; why we struggle with connection in the digital age; the power of community as medicine and recognizing a kinship in others; and why we need to integrate our heads and hearts and live more heart-led lives.
They also dive into why cultures have always sought out non-ordinary states of consciousness; how our current state of needing to make sense of a chaotic world is similar to the mindstate of the 60s; psychedelics’ success in palliative care; coaching and why it should be attached to therapy; the creation of the word “psychedelic”; flow states and discovering the intrinsic calling we all have; and the Vital question that starts the podcast out: Are psychedelics the future, or will psychedelics just bring about a different way to think about the future?
“I keep sort of wrestling with this question about whether the future of psychedelics is really about psychedelics or whether psychedelics are a tool for unlocking a different kind of future. …And to me, that’s really an exciting possibility for what this psychedelic renaissance holds: that it’s an opportunity to really take stock of what we want to revive about the past, whether it is psychedelic or not. It might be something more sacred, it might be a kind of humanity or a kind of way of thinking, that focusing on psychedelics allows us to think differently about how we want to organize those thoughts, those actions. And I think it’s a really exciting opportunity to invest in this kind of renaissance moment, to really blend these historical impulses with an opportunity to think about a different future.” -Erika
“The role of community with psychedelics: I think that we can occasionally get a little bit lost that it’s the psychedelics, the medicine. And the more I’m seeing is that the medicine is community and psychedelics are the implementation tool of that medicine.” -Jono
“Tolerance is a word that comes to mind as you were talking. I think that one of my hopes is that (and it doesn’t have to be everybody taking psychedelics) it can be just tolerance towards difference. I think psychedelics can help us to come into a place where we can appreciate that diversity is a strength, that difference is a strength, that sameness isn’t necessarily the strength or the goal that we should be striving towards.” -Erika
“[Psychedelics] are an offsetting of an eternal balance between these two hemispheres. And we’ve gone so far one way with this worldview where we are also gamified by what we do. The amount of information that I know because an algorithm wants me to know; it terrifies me when I actually think about it, but on the other side, the amount of wisdom …that’s available from us, from these experiences that we’re having that help guide us back to this other way of being gives me radical hope – radical, radical hope that things haven’t gone too far. It’s just the pendulum has swung very far one way, and I think psychedelics are some of the momentum to take us back the other way and back to ourselves, each other, and Mother Nature.” -Jono
Bogdan* is a 43-year-old asylee who lives in New York City. He has a Master’s degree from the University of Sussex. He used to live in student accommodation on the King’s Road near my old house in Brighton on the south coast of the UK, but he is currently homeless and living in what he calls a “ghetto.”
A series of highly traumatic ayahuascatrips with a famous ‘shaman’ led Bogdan to become seriously ill. It wasn’t helped by later trips with LSD and san pedro, either. Blighted by a debilitating mixture of chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and brain fog, he says he “feel[s] like a 100-year-old Alzheimer’s patient.” Bogdan suggests that successive traumas have left his central nervous system “fried.” He has no medical insurance, and so cannot pursue the Somatic Experiencing therapy people have encouraged him to try.
Bogdan did five sessions with ICEERS’ free integration service, but he doesn’t think “just talking with someone on Zoom will help” him. A cash handout from the local Eastern European community was helpful, yet it only lasted so long. One wonders how much processing his ‘stored trauma’ would alleviate living in a homeless shelter.
Or take Kristen*, a 39-year-old who participated in a Canadian clinical trial for psilocybin. In between each dose of psilocybin, Kristen developed debilitating spikes in anxiety that eventually manifested as a visual complaint, which in turn flowered into full-blown HPPD after two ‘therapeutic’ trips once the trial ended. What was driving Kristen spikes in anxiety? It wasn’t only the likely dysregulating effects of psilocybin’s serotonin dump. It was also significant financial stress. That didn’t just go away.
For those with severe HPPD, the visual presentation is so intense as to impair one’s ability to work. Reliance on scant welfare and disability benefits is not unheard of; I remember a phone call with one long standing HPPDer who was on the continual brink of homelessness for the destabilizing and disabling effects of his condition.
Possibly as many as 60% of homeless people have schizophrenia, and over half may have serious mental health problems. If we take seriously how dangerous psychedelics can be, these will be the outcomes. There will be many more people like Bogdan, Kristen, or those whose lives are destroyed by HPPD, increased anxiety, depression, or brain fog brought on from a challenging experience with no support, or simply the financial and life stress that continue on after even the greatest experience. Suicide is a tragic and occasional fact one cannot escape in HPPD communities – something that has been openly acknowledged by the late, great Roland Griffiths.
So what is the answer? As is hopefully becoming clear, ‘harm reduction’ is not just a matter of appropriate drug testing or set and setting and integration. It is a matter of having enough money to muffle a mental health crisis’ worst outcomes – to pay for help, stay housed, and stay healthy amid the stress and chaos that can follow a trip. Simply put, if we want to help those most affected by the challenges of psychedelic exploration, there may be a case for direct monetary transfers: giving people money to safeguard their material container.
A Cost of Living Crisis
There is a curious gap, a kind of Uncanny Valley, between our dreams of healing the ‘Mental Health Crisis’ with psychedelic mystical trips, while an arguably more primary Cost of Living Crisis is tearing apart people’s wallets. The association between anxiety, depression, addiction, and poverty is well known, and requires no elucidation. Even those who are not on the streets or actively facing homelessness in the future need money.
Have you looked at how expensive therapy is lately? $75-$150 a session is not viable for someone on a low income, so what could be a necessity becomes necessarily optional. It’s the same for gym memberships, exercise equipment, or good food and nutritional check-ups: all vital ingredients for good mental health and recovering from a psychedelic shockwave. The costs of therapy especially can add up while one shops around to find a suitable practitioner, or at least one who isn’t a weirdo – a genuine concern in psychedelic circles.
After an extremely destabilising LSD experience in September 2021 – whose sequelae included a deep depression, cannabis dependency, and suicidal ideation – I first tried a ‘psychedelic integration’ specialist based in Brighton. He wasn’t good. A couple of friends and I were wondering whether to do mescaline together, and I thought that might be a terrible idea. My ‘therapist’ urged me to wonder whether the second thoughts were perhaps the internalized voice of the “free market.” I burned through about £600 with this guy. I then burned through another £350 on another, thankfully more helpful therapist who gave me a discounted rate. It still amounted to £50 a session, or $60 USD.
Most people cannot afford to do this. And if they cannot afford to seek help while suicidal, they may die. We ought to consider the history lessons of psychiatric research. The ‘Decade of the Brain’ set in motion by President Bush in 1989 envisioned a future of revolutionary psychiatric treatments furnished by data from brain imaging and genetic research. This has not happened. Psychiatric outcomes have deteriorated. SSRI medications are of uncertain value relative to placebo and involve a staggering list of side-effects. Neurobiological markers have so far proved too wide and confounded to guide treatments – not least when our brains must exist in a world that’s crumbling.
“[W]hile we studied the risk factors for suicide, the death rate had climbed 33 percent. While we identified the neuroanatomy of addiction, overdose deaths had increased threefold,” Dr. Thomas Insel, the former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, reflected in his 2021 book, Healing. “While we mapped the genes for schizophrenia, people with this disease were still chronically unemployed and dying twenty years early.”
In many ways, we already know what works: people need social support, housing, good therapeutic rapport, and food on the table. What will spell the difference for many people is the possession of resources that will enable them to reach for such low hanging fruit.
What Would a Harm Reduction Fund Look Like?
It is already well-known that the psychedelic movement is overwhelmingly middle- and upper-middle class and white, and has a particular representation among the aristocracy. The psychedelic movement is mainstreaming, though, and more people of color and low income are joining ranks of users. This means more people are at unnecessary risk, for lack of social and economic resources, of the worst outcomes of psychedelic drugs.
The psychedelic movement needs to own this risk, because the public sector and existing infrastructure probably won’t. As discussed above, welfare support is measly and the most vulnerable will be without medical insurance – if such packages would even cover the debilitations of drugs illegal in many parts of the United States. The Zendo Project, DanceSafe, and Fireside Project are laudable, but their applications for those struggling after their trips are limited.
It is often accepted that some proportion – usually dismissed as a merely ‘rare’ occurrence – of people will be greatly damaged by psychedelic drugs, and end up homeless, dead, or struggling with severe mental illness. What if we stopped accepting these as inevitable?
If we are really interested in harm reduction, one option may be a fund for those harmed by the effects of psychedelic drugs.
Suppose there was a fund of $500,000 – similar to the resources required in a study – which was focused on those facing suicide, homelessness, or mental health crisis after a trip. The details can be discussed and fleshed out by anyone who wants to take my proposal seriously, but it would simply provide bursaries, cash transfers, and much needed subsidies to people struggling in the wake of psychedelic journeys to seek help. Perhaps the effects of the help they seek can be recorded to collect data. Perhaps it could fund legal action against therapists and ‘Shamans’ that leave their clients in tatters, much as Bogdan is facing now. Such projects would likely mean saving or seriously changing dozens of lives. I welcome feedback on my loose suggestion.
Of course, there would be a risk of people ‘gaming’ the system, but I imagine its wastage would be comparable to a study, which has large opportunity costs in terms of the direct help such a fund could provide. Search costs would be invested to ensure the person is who they say they are: interviews, conversations with family members and friends, possible documentation. Different priorities would be made. Do we invest 80% of our budget for search costs on that 20% at the greatest risk of peril? Or ought we to prioritize creating free support in other ways, like expanding free therapies along the lines of ICEERS?Alternatively, as I suggest in a new article for Ecstatic Integration, immediate support could occur through peer support groups organized through Reddit, whose potential is, in many ways, untapped.
Certain challenges would no doubt arise through using private money, as well as exporting what should likely be a government task, such as through a Universal Basic Income – there’s a risk that some measure (number of people helped vs. number of dollars invested) would become a core indicator rather than real value provided. There’s likewise a risk that the kinds of interventions and support deemed worth subsidizing will fit with donors’ own biases, or that the pool of therapists deemed acceptable will be narrow and normative.
I would not be surprised if the data were relatively unsurprising. Income support and housing for those most debilitated would be a clear game changer. Free CBT, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, membership to a local gym that has a sauna and a pool, or full blood work to scan people’s nutritional deficiencies and inform a better diet would all likely help. These are relatively inexpensive interventions, but the marginal gains are probably enormous, and could be, at the very least, comparable to the hundreds of thousands raised to fund studies – which will not necessarily translate into interventions and treatments, nor with any particular immediacy.
The Psychedelic Movement and Owning the Risk
One may wonder if a post-psychedelic fund is arbitrary. All mental health problems, including but not limited to psychedelics, vary with poverty and access to resources. Why have a post-psychedelic fund and not one concerned with mental health in general? How can we ever separate the two? I suppose similar questions can be raised about the psychedelic sector on the positive end as well. Why the interest in psychedelics, when similar experiences can be engendered by other means like meditation – including with similar risks? To focus on post-psychedelic risk is likewise only repeating the same distinction already explicit in psychedelic risk management: that psychedelic trips can meaningfully create adverse outcomes even while connected to broader life concerns.
Even if this proposal doesn’t make sense to you, something needs to be done to address post-psychedelic harm. I believe we know more than enough to do something right away – and something specifically targeted towards those worst affected, for whom every dollar of subsidy and support reaps massive gains in social benefit – and saves lives.
These are new ideas, but let’s start the dialogue.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of sources profiled in this writing.
In this episode, David interviews psychiatrist, main researcher behind the first US Phase II trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, and Senior Medical Director at MAPS Public Benefit Corporation: Dr. Michael Mithoefer; and Research Group Lead at the University of Zurich, and Principal Clinical Biomarker Lead at Boehringer Ingelheim, Katrin Preller, Ph.D.
Mithoefer, Preller (and David) are speakers at Psychedelic Medicine – Israel, which will now take place July 28 – 31, 2024, in Tel Aviv. They discuss the conference and their current research: Preller’s neuroimaging and work with psilocybin for alcohol use disorder, and Mithoefer (likely) being extremely close to seeing the FDA approve MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. He talks about how the therapeutic protocols for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy were created, what it’s like to be so close to legalization, and how the next challenges will be accessibility and not minimizing therapy in favor of faster turnover.
They discuss neuroplasticity and whether or not it actually translates into something in humans; the concept of performing brain scans before a psychedelic experience to look for trauma biomarkers (and how this could actually result in savings over time); the excitement of seeing clinical work and neuroscience progressing in parallel; why integration frameworks need to be individualized; and the importance of embracing different therapeutic approaches.
Notable Quotes
“We need to find ways to make it increase the cost effectiveness or the efficiency without losing the human connection and the inclusion of robust therapy in the process. So it’s a big challenge. But in the research, we’ve done everything we could think of to increase the chances of safety and success and efficacy. So we couldn’t individualize. So I think part of it will be figuring out: some people may need even more support than they had in the research, but some people may be able to do it in a more streamlined way, and also groups and things like that. So I think we need to be really creative about how to do it and also resist the pressures of minimizing the therapy and the human connection in favor of speed.” -Michael
“We’ve already shown in healthy participants that basically the way your brain is working without any substances on board is associated with the way your brain reacts to a psychedelic. And we’ve seen that across different brain metrics. That doesn’t tell us anything about clinical efficacy quite yet, but it tells us that there is something in your usual daily waking state that may have to do with how you react to a psychedelic. Now, the next step would then, of course be: well, can we close the gap on how you react to the psychedelic, whether that has something to do with whether or not you actually get better after psychedelic or MDMA-assisted therapy? So there are many gaps for sure at this point, but I think that doing this research, we may eventually be able to close these gaps and eventually maybe have an idea of who may benefit, who may not benefit, [or] whether MDMA is the correct or the most beneficial treatment versus psilocybin.” -Katrin
“One of the dangers I see if these drugs are approved is thinking you need more drug, you need higher doses, you need it more often or whatever, instead of: You need more integration.” -Michael
In this episode, Joe interviews Louie Schwartzberg: renowned filmmaker known for the award-winning documentary, “Fantastic Fungi”; and now, director of the new film, “Gratitude Revealed.”
He talks about his path to photography and filmmaking and how psychedelics were a huge inspiration – how his techniques of slowing down, speeding up, and zooming in were ways to capture the invisible aspects of reality – that which is “too slow, too fast, too small, and too vast for the human eye,” but is always there. He discusses the premiere of “Fantastic Fungi” and the waves it spread through the psychedelic space; The Louie Channel, his new streaming channel that will feature all his work in 4k and the work of other curated artists and friends; and the clinical trial he’s involved in to see if participants have better results in the treatment of their alcohol use disorder by watching his imagery set to music on an 80-inch screen while on psilocybin – research that hopefully leads to the concept of being able to prescribe images and music to people based on specific criteria.
He discusses his new film, “Gratitude Revealed,” which explores the power of gratitude: making it a daily practice (and especially a post-psychedelic integration practice), how resilience is one of the best benefits from practicing gratitude, and how easy it is to stop a rumination spiral by simply finding something to be grateful for. He also talks about the blessing of being a photographer and always thinking of beauty; how psychedelics make people more environmentally conscious; tripping with parents; how a shared love of nature could be the bridge between opposing sides; and how the best way to deal with the climate crisis is to start in your own yard.
Notable Quotes
“We’re talking about psychedelics on your podcast, but the truth is, I think the imagery I want to create for your community, this community, is exactly the same as I would do for a four-year-old or a five-year-old. How beautiful is that? It’s about wonder and awe. It’s about being open-minded.” “The politicians, they understand how to press that fear button. They go right to the cultural differences and press the abortion button or the gun thing or whatever it might be, and all the lies and all that. I don’t want to even spend another second talking about that, other than [to say] we have to be conscious that pressing the fear button is easy to do because that’s survival, and you get an immediate reaction. The films I’m trying to make and what we’re discussing here is making people laugh, making people cry, making people fall in love. That takes a little more talent than pointing a gun at you. …Beauty and love and gratitude is the emotional energy we can employ to overcome fear.”
“It’s a great tool. It’s not like we have to practice meditation, become a Yogi for like ten years or 20 years of practice. It’s something you can do immediately. It’s not like a meditation thing that you have to become an expert in. It’s like, how easy is it just to ask yourself in the moment: what can I be grateful for? Pretty easy.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews General Stephen Xenakis, MD: an adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist who retired from the U.S. Army in 1998 at the rank of Brigadier General and began a career starting up medical technology companies and clinical practice to support human rights and new methodologies of healthcare.
In June, he became the new Executive Director of the American Psychedelic Practitioners Association (APPA), whose mission is to bring practitioners together as a community; develop the best training programs and practices; shift to a more patient-centered, integrated model of care; eventually accredit practitioners to practice with legal substances; and overall, help to make these new modalities more mainstream.
He discusses their path to success, which began with their publishing of the first professional practice guidelines for psychedelic-assisted therapy practitioners, and will continue on with ethical guidelines and clinical practice guidelines in the future. And he talks about the idea of a safety net for people who have adverse effects from psychedelic journeys; what clinicians need to know about psychedelics; concerns over accessibility; and the importance of identifying the correct treatments for the correct patients, as each person’s path to healing will likely be drastically different.
Notable Quotes
“We live in a world of disease-centered treatments, and we want to shift to a patient-centered model. We want to know that we’re not just treating your symptoms, we’re not just treating the problems that you have; that what you’re getting out of this is, in fact, helping you live the life that you want to live. What do those outcomes look like? How do we know [what] they are? How do we collaborate with you? It’s a partnership, it’s a rapport. It’s an alliance between you and me so that you’re getting what you feel is most important and we’re doing our job in providing it. That’s a big shift in medicine.”
She shares her journey with psychedelics and how they enabled her to leave a toxic job and pursue her passion for advocacy with vitality, and how important it is to focus your energy where it’s best used. She talks about where we find ourselves in the psychedelic space based on Psychedelic Science 2023, as well as her recent TV appearances and the responsibility of preaching to the non-choir. And she discusses the idea of perfectionism in today’s age; the need for psychedelic people to be involved in non-psychedelic conferences; the complications behind requiring physicians to experience psychedelics; the concept of it being malpractice for a physician to not mention psychedelic options; and the Psychedelic Medicine Association’s upcoming virtual conference: Sana Symposium 2023, which happens October 26-27.
Morski talks a lot about the importance of educating healthcare professionals about psychedelics, debunking myths, and the need for standards in training therapists and primary care providers. She highlights how there is still no nationally-recognized certification for even ketamine providers, so how can people make informed decisions on who to trust? The Psychedelic Medicine Association is taking steps to improve this paradigm, offering a new course called “Managing Medical Risk in Patients Seeking Psilocybin Therapy,” which will work to help clinicians make risk assessments for patients seeking psilocybin therapy – something that is not really being done today.
Notable Quotes
“It was just so clear that this little microdose was showing me basically what my soul was doing all the time: like, your soul is just constantly crying about this terrible toxic job that you feel you can’t leave, etc. And wow, that turned things around for me, where I was like, ‘I need to get out.’ …I was giving all these talks to doctors about if your mental health is suffering, quit that doctor job, while the whole time, my mental health was suffering and I was still in that same job. I was not taking my own advice. And this was kind of like a little psychedelic gift saying like, ‘Hey, take your own advice, do whatever you need to do, get out.’”
“Right now, the big question is: is it malpractice for me to mention psychedelics to my patients? And I envision a future where it’s malpractice not to, where you are keeping that information. Like, imagine somebody comes to you as a psychiatrist and you’re depressed and they don’t mention antidepressants? …With these PTSD findings, Phase III proving what they have: imagine in ten years, somebody goes to their psychiatrist with severe PTSD, nothing else has worked, and that psychiatrist still doesn’t recommend MDMA (assuming that it is FDA approved), that’s going to have to be malpractice. That’s the future that I envision.”
In this episode, Alexa interviews Chase Hudson: Founder of HempLucid, a premium CBD wellness brand.
Hudson discusses his journey from being a firefighter to becoming involved in the cannabis and hemp industry, the origins of HempLucid, the restrictions they faced, and their current genetics and flagship water soluble tincture. He talks about the benefits of CBD and cannabis used in conjunction with psychedelic therapy – especially ketamine-assisted therapy, which he gives to his employees as a benefit. And he talks about Lamar Odom and the documentary he executive produced, “Lamar Odom Reborn,” which chronicles how Odom came back from rock bottom through high dose CBD, iboga, and ketamine therapy.
He also discusses the idea of cannabis as a gateway drug to healing; the need for insurance to cover psychedelic therapy; the changing landscape of Utah from religious ideology to psychedelics; ketamine as the bridge between old and new models of healthcare, and more. And they talk about their own journeys a lot, with Hudson telling the story of his powerful and life-changing ibogaine treatment, and Alexa sharing stories from her tragic car accident and recovery, as well as the ketamine sessions she recently began. The conversation ultimately becomes one about the need for education and conversation to help us all climb out from decades of drug war propaganda.
Notable Quotes
“We do a lot with kids with seizures. I also do a lot of work with children with autism, and we’ve seen great results over the years. We’ve been in business seven years, so we’ve been fortunate to just see the impact and the change that happens within people personally, but then also within their family. And it’s been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”
“There’s this whole frontier that is going to open up here. I mean, it’s opening now, but it’s going to be accelerated as this old guard starts to collapse. We’re living in a time where Babylon is really falling. These pillars of what reality has been structured on are failing because it’s been built on a bed of lies. Our government, our financial system, our healthcare system, our media: these structures of the matrix, essentially, are failing. And as it fails, there has to be something to kind of transition people into the new world, and that new world is everything that we’ve discussed and are doing. And it’s exciting to see, but as Terence McKenna says: we’re in the birth canal for sure, and there’s going to be blood, it’s going to be hard. But we’ll make it out, and humanity will turn into something beautiful on the other side of this.”
In this episode, David interviews East Forest: Portland, OR-based producer, podcaster, ceremony guide, and musician, specializing in ambient, electronic, contemporary classical, and indie pop music largely to guide listeners through deep journeys.
Forest discusses his live performances and influences; how his music pairs with journeys and specific psychedelics; the difference in the connection and vibe from a live performance vs. a recording; the difference between single-artist music created specifically for sessions vs. Spotify playlists; the inhumanity of generative music; his Journey Space online music and journey platform; and the challenges of making money in a time when music is more prevalent than ever, but also more in-the-background and diluted.
He talks a lot about sound itself: the role of rhythm and sound in communication and personal transformation; how richer overtones and increased layers of sound increase effects; research into very low pulsating tones, and how more synthesized sound and the growth of AI has created a yearning for more authentic, imperfect sounds.
His newest album was just released August 18: “Music For The Deck of The Titanic,” an homage to the musicians who spent their last few hours playing songs for passengers amidst the chaos and tragedy – an album Forest sees as an offering to the chaotic moment we’re all in.
Notable Quotes
“I’m trying to make music that is intended to come directly into the foreground and pass the foreground into the place where you merge with the music, and the music becomes the sonic architecture by which you are having an experience inside, and perhaps become it, synesthetically. So I want to go way beyond it being in the background. I actually want it to be even more than a guide. It’s almost like you synthesize with it as one: like who’s guiding who? There can be a magic to those experiences that’s far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in anything else in life, and that’s really the North Star that I want to be in service to. I don’t think, even, that that’s something that I can concoct or conceive totally. It’s more opening myself up to some kind of magic that’s way beyond anything I could decide.”
“What I love about humans’ creativity is the fact that we can be creative and we can celebrate that by making things like art. When I’m surprised by art is the best feeling. And so giving people support to create: as of now, we can’t beat that. You’re just asking yourself: how far can we go in this celebration and in this experience? I have never experienced a generative experience that’s even anywhere close to where we can go with one person sharing their humanity in a way that’s beautiful. If it’s innovative, even better.”
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Join us in the Netherlands for the Kiyumí Psilocybin Retreat & Vital Training: September 6-11, 2023. Click here to learn more and apply!East Forest performing
In this episode, Kyle interviews Lisa Wessing: Clinical Psychologist and facilitator specializing in harm reduction at Kiyumí retreats in The Netherlands.
Wessing shares her personal journey and the shift from being uninspired with studying psychology to being a part of space-holding in Mexico and finding her true path. She dives into the world of Kiyumí retreats, discussing their holistic healing approach using psilocybin, somatic movement, dance expression, and other methods supporting their four pillars of embodiment, nature, mindfulness, and art. She discusses their more long-term program with Dr. Gabor Maté integrating his Compassionate Inquiry framework; their Equity Program, which offers partial or full funding for people who may not have the financial resources or who come from marginalized communities (e.g. BIPOC & Queer); and the importance of integration as a continuous process and checking in with people much later to build their “Kiyumíty.”
Much of this discussion covers the challenges of somatic psychology and facilitation in group containers: how most people are somatically illiterate and the challenging journey of becoming more somatic; what to do about someone laughing or singing in a group context; what moving into one’s body really means; and different ways of using art to integrate an experience.
As part of our Vital program, we are running a psilocybin retreat with Kiyumí from September 6-11, and we have some available spots left! If you like what you hear, you’ll be in The Netherlands in September, and want to have an amazing experience with us, click here for more info!
Notable Quotes
“Something really important is expression: self-expression and expression in community. So seeing and being seen is something also that we value. And that seeing and being seen can create awkwardness and strangeness, and it’s something that we really like to also go into, because once we break through that awkwardness, there’s so much potential of creativity amongst people.” “It’s the fostering of allowing discomfort that is just generally important in this kind of work and in self-work itself. …We live in context in which it’s all about escaping the discomfort. We want to have a really comfortable home and a great job, and our vacation has to be as comfortable as possible. And also in medicine, it’s better to take just a pill that will do the job for me. Psychedelic work is often really uncomfortable, and so the group process reflects that discomfort. So I guess one of the main missions and one of the main challenges is to present that: like, yes, you will be uncomfortable. And let’s work with that.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews The Susan Hill Ward Endowed Professor of Psychedelics and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins, and renowned researcher of nearly 20 years: Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D.
Recorded in-person at MAPS’ Psychedelic Science after running an 8-hour workshop on psychedelic therapy for addiction treatment, Johnson was still happy to sit down with PT to explore a wide range of topics: the under-researched concept of integration; how to best take advantage of optimal neuroplastic windows; why psycholytic therapy used to be more common; how our current protocols and research models are largely arbitrary; and his hopes for new, experimental, and flexible models of psychedelic therapy.
He also discusses his ongoing smoking cessation studies; the Oregon model (are we doing therapy or not?); misrepresentation in psychedelic therapy and knowing your lane; and the role of music in psychedelics: why shouldn’t people pick the music they know will give them goosebumps?
Notable Quotes
“How in the world could there be these beneficial effects that we can see in someone’s behavior (their substance use, their depression) 6 months, a year later from one, two, or three medication experiences that were time-limited? …People are changing the way they’re operating. And the more you start to do that, and that starts to become the new normal, so it’s not just ending at the psychedelic session or even in the explicit integration sessions where you talk about your psychedelic therapy or your psychedelic session; but then, if you put into practice – like actually changing the way you’re operating in the world and that becomes the new normal – I think that’s what’s happening to explain why we’re seeing these beneficial effects six months, a year later. It’s just kind of the causal nature of the therapeutic mechanisms unfolding over time in a kind of a living, organic way, because people are interfacing with reality in a different way, that can, if they’re doing it right, it can have a feed-forward effect, like, ‘Oh, this actually works. I feel better. I’m doing better in life when I do things more this way than the way I used to do them.’”
“The nice thing that’s probably going to happen once we get out of this phase, at least with, like, psilocybin and MDMA where it’s only in clinical approved research now, if they’re approved by the FDA for straight up treatment, FDA is not going to control what music you use or how you integrate and all these other things. And so there’s going to be this wave of naturalistic experimentation which is going to be really cool. And then hopefully people are safe, but hopefully there’s an integration of the communication of the art of the practice of medicine and psychology. It’s like just through that communication – like what tends to work, what tends not to work, people sharing ideas – I’m looking forward to that.”
She shares her journey of how she became involved in the psychedelic space through her mother, and her personal experience as a patient in a clinical trial on psilocybin for the treatment of anorexia – a much more common and deadly affliction than most people realize. She discusses her involvement with the various psychedelic gatherings surrounding Davos and the World Economic Forum, as well as the work she’s doing with Tabula Rasa and some of their clients seeking to expand insurance coverage to psychedelic-assisted therapy.
She discusses the Synthesis Institute’s recent struggles that shook up the psychedelic space, what they’re doing to save the company, how Retreat Guru has helped them, and the implications for the wider psychedelic movement. And she talks about much more: the legality and vetting process for training in Oregon and Colorado; truffles in the Netherlands vs. classic psilocybin; the idea of alcohol as poison and ‘Cali sober,’ and how can we all be more collaborative and not sling mud at each other?
Notable Quotes
“The limitations are really when you’ve been in therapy, you’ve seen a nutritionist for five, ten years; you have all the tools there, you know what you’re supposed to do (this can be applied to things like depression or anxiety or any other mental issue), but those neural pathways that have been connecting and forming with those negative thought patterns for decades: for people, they’re not going to undo themselves. It takes more motivation than I have ever had to break my cycles, and I really felt stuck. I don’t think I was going to ever get better than I was at the time without something like psychedelics.”
“It could set the temperature for a lot of other psychedelic organizations and movements to say, ‘This isn’t working and let me show you why. If this goes up in flames, then what else is possible?’ And the space is already greatly under-funded and financiers look at this and they’re like, ‘I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole. This is too early, or this is too risky, or X, Y, and Z.’ So that was really the scary part of the first few weeks of what this meant for the movement at large: if we can’t pull it off, then who can?”
“This whole thing has been like a great big psychedelic trip: use our learning towards being a facilitator, towards facilitating ourselves through this chaos. There has to be chaos within to give birth to a dancing star, I think is what Nietzsche said. We’ll be that dancing star.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews the Reverend Dr. Brian Rajcok, Lead Pastor at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Avon, Connecticut, who recently completed his Ph.D. in pastoral counseling.
Rajcok dives into the intersection of spirituality, religion, mysticism, and how psychedelics bring these topics together, discussing a transformative peyote ceremony and the awe-inspiring moments of surrender, connection, and divine presence that left a lasting impact on him and deepened his connection to God. And he talks about his recently completed dissertation that was inspired by it all: “The Lived Experience of Professional Mental Health Clinicians With Spiritually Significant Psychedelic Experiences,” which he created to gauge the relationship between religious spiritual commitment, tolerance, and multicultural counselor competency. He shares stories from the study and reflections on how these experiences have changed the way involved clinicians work.
And he discusses much more in the realm of psychedelics and religion: why he pursued pastoral counseling and how psychedelics come into play; the balance between tradition and reason and spiritual commitment and tolerance; the legal and regulatory considerations of religious psychedelic use; the concept of a faith quadrilateral; the need for psychedelic experiences in counseling training programs; the big question of ‘when is it religion and when is it mental health care?’; and how the future of psychedelic spirituality could be humanity’s biggest evolution.
Notable Quotes
“There were moments in the night where I felt like I was looking at the fire, having a feeling of being in Hell. And then there was this shift of when I said, ‘Okay, if I’m in Hell, accept that.’ And then I accepted that, and then there was this total emotional shift to like, ‘Wow, now I’m in Heaven!’ It was just this beautiful experience of accepting the worst, and then once that work was done, it shifted into this beautiful experience. That was a very profound moment for me.”
“People who are more religiously committed tend to have a reputation for being less tolerant, and people who are the most tolerant tend to have a reputation of being the least committed. But I think that what we see from people who have (whether it’s psychedelic experiences or naturally occurring) mystical experiences, there’s a level of religious spiritual commitment and tolerance at the same time that increases. So that was one thing that I wanted to explore.”
“That was another really profound one: people who experienced different spirit guides; experiences of the divine; encounters with deceased relatives was another one; there was someone who was not a Christian who had an experience with Jesus. So there’s a lot of these profound encounters. …And they’re so healing that it’s obvious that there’s something good going on here. It’s not just your imagination running wild, there’s a real [connection] to the spirit realm or to whatever other dimensions of reality, and it’s such a mystery, but it’s clear that there’s something real going on.”
In this episode, David interviews Dr. Rosalind Watts: famed clinical psychologist, former clinical lead on Imperial College London’s first Psilocybin for Depression trial, and Founder of ACER Integration.
She discusses the awakening she had after having a child; her work at Imperial College and realizing the importance of staying in touch with patients; the challenges of balancing her work with being a mother; her ACER integration model and the interconnectedness of trees in a forest; how the Watts Connectedness Scale works (and David fills it out); and how much the outside-the-hype surrounding pieces matter – the therapy, the therapeutic relationship, the lessons learned, and the work done to integrate it all.
And she talks about another moment of awakening, at last year’s Psych Summit conference, where capitalism’s obsession with profit-over-care frameworks and “magic bullet” and “brain reset” narratives was on full display, which fully enforced what she hopes for in the future: a world where we embrace non-clinical, ceremonial, and nature-based practices; with healing centers (psychedelic and non); supportive communities; infrastructure around conflict resolution and restorative justice; and a shift towards collectivism and collaboration – and how that all starts by finding our psychedelic elders.
Notable Quotes
“I’m a tourist. I’m listening, I’m learning, but I know that I don’t have deep roots and that there are people that do. So it ties into that thing about finding the elders: as we find our elders for conflict resolution and for therapy and for healing and for psychedelic healing, I also hope we find the elders who are deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions, from Indigenous traditions all over the world, and that they can teach us and teach me, if they will, those stories and those ways, and that then, my daughter: if she can learn through her life, she can grow up with it in a way that I didn’t – so she can have deep roots in that tradition.”
“When we’re on the riverbank and we’ve had our cup of tea and we’ve warmed by the fire, we can look upstream and think: all the people that are coming down the river, what might they need? And then we can kind of run and chuck them the blankets or a chocolate biscuit or the things that they might need, or just shout to them and say, ‘Hey, you’re doing great. It’s crazy out there, there’s a riverbank soon. You can come and sit and join us.’ So it’s like, it’s also about thinking of what’s next for us, but also thinking of all the people that are coming and how we can support each other on the rapids as well.”
In this episode, David interviews Dr. Roberta Murphy: training medical psychotherapist and member of the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research.
This is a rare impromptu podcast, recorded about a half hour after David heard Murphy speaking on a panel at UK’s Breaking Convention conference. He asked her if she wanted to be on the podcast sometime, and before they knew it, they were recording. Fastest turnaround ever?
She discusses her past research and what she’s doing at Imperial College; her work on a psilocybin for depression trial; her hopes for psychedelics treating people with Parkinson’s; and her recent co-written paper on the ARC Framework (Access, Reciprocity and Conduct), where she will be focusing strongly on the Conduct aspect through her work at Imperial.
And she talks about her other paper exploring the impact of one of the more important aspects of therapy: the therapeutic alliance on the psychedelic experience. How does the treatment dynamic between the therapist and the client impact the outcome (and course) of the therapy, and what determines whether it’s neutral, negative, positive, or very positive?
Notable Quotes
“It makes sense in a way that you might need to kind of work through those mistrust feelings before you get into a deeper layer, and then in the next session they were able to (I think because they felt a bit safer with us) let go and have a bit more of a typical psychedelic experience where they visualized things and saw things. …I think that that can often then be mistaken as resistance or like nothing’s happening. But there’s always something happening, it’s just sometimes it’s a little bit more nuanced or a little bit harder to pick up and work with. But there’s always something happening. You just might have to zoom in a bit to see it.”
“There’s a difference between a challenging experience that occurs, is processed, and worked through vs. a challenging experience where people kind of never really work with it, it doesn’t get processed, and they get quite stuck in it. …I do think that if you have a good container of a therapeutic relationship, it can help you to work through and process, and I think if you don’t have that, it’s more likely that you’ll end up with something a bit stuck, because I think in order to process, you often need to go in and go deep. And if you don’t feel safe to do that, you’re just going to kind of float on the edge, in a way, and never quite get through.”
In this edition of Psychedelics Weekly, Joe and Kyle dedicate the entire episode to one of their biggest passions: breathwork and the power of breath in reaching non-ordinary states of consciousness.
What many listeners may not know is that Psychedelics Today was created because of the lack of attention being paid to breathwork, transpersonal psychology, and the work of Stanislav Grof, so this episode serves as a deep dive into all the facets of our fascinating ability to reach psychedelic states simply by breathing in specific ways.
They discuss the history of breathwork; the various methods (box breathing, alternate nostril breathing, rebirthing breathwork, the Wim Hof method, Holotropic and Transpersonal breathwork, etc.); early and most powerful experiences; why Joe recommends becoming familiar with breathwork before a first psychedelic experience; how a breathwork practice can help enhance psychedelic experiences; and one of the most amazing things about breathwork: that it can give people a sense of agency they may never have felt before – that they can produce these experiences and insights with nothing but their own bodies.
If you’ve been curious about breathwork, this episode is a great starting point to learn more. And if you’re in the Northeast and are ready to attend a breathwork retreat and experience four Transpersonal breathwork sessions (two as a breather, two as a sitter), there are spots available in our upcoming Vital retreat on July 28 in Pennsylvania. Click here for more details.
June 20 in Denver: “Better Together: Stacking Mushrooms and Plants” – A communal conversation around mushrooms, a fungi feast and unique culinary experience, and afterparty featuring music from BOSA. Click here to buy tickets.
In this episode, David interviews Alex Belser, Ph.D.: clinical scientist; author; licensed psychologist; Co-Investigator for a psilocybin and OCD study at Yale University; and co-creator of the EMBARK approach, a new model of psychedelic-assisted therapy that focuses on six clinical domains that typically arise during psychedelic experiences.
He is also one of the editors of Queering Psychedelics: From Oppression to Liberation in Psychedelic Medicine, the new anthology from Chacruna featuring 38 essays from queer authors and allies looking at the heteronormative aspects of psychedelic culture and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, self-acceptance, psychedelics and pleasure, and ways the queer community can become allies with other groups. As they serendipitously recorded this episode on June 1, it only made sense to celebrate Pride Month by releasing it now, as well as launching a giveaway, where you can win one of five copies of Queering Psychedelics.
Belser talks about the concurrent emergence of the psychedelic and queer communities; the need to research the effects of transphobia and homophobia in psychedelic work (as well as the internalized phobias often realized during an experience); why it’s more important than ever to talk about the psychedelic space’s dark past with conversion therapy; why the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire needs to be updated; the idea of queer people being boundary walkers; recreating the Good Friday Experiment, the immense importance of long-form interviews and other forms of qualitative research, the power of love and community, and the question: how does anyone not want to change after a powerful psychedelic experience?
Notable Quotes
“When we talk about MK-Ultra and we talk about the abuses of boundary transgressions and sexual transgressions, we also need to be talking about how psychedelics have been used to harm people through conversion therapy and how they have repeatedly been used in this way. If we don’t look to our past and what’s happening currently, then I don’t think we’re ever going to have a truly integral reckoning with how we carry these medicines in ethical ways.”
“I spoke with an Orthodox Priest who said, ‘Before, I used to give sermons to my congregation and I would talk about God’s justice: the justice of the lord.’ And now, after taking psychedelics (he had a really powerful experience), he says, ‘All I want to talk about is God’s love.’”
“[The EMBARK model is] open architecture. It’s multidimensional, but it allows for the therapist to bring in their existing skill sets, and it allows for a patient-centered approach to what might actually emerge or arise, because I don’t think there’s one path for psychedelic healing. What we see are multiple trajectories, and we needed to build a comprehensive theoretical framework for psychotherapy that allows for different expressions of that for different people.”
“I don’t think psychedelics are a panacea or cure-all, but I think that they help us experiment with different ways of being together, and it doesn’t have to be one way. That’s what I’ve learned; it really does not have to be one way, and it does not have to be the old way.”
In this episode of Psychedelics Weekly, Joe and Kyle are once again able to take advantage of Kyle’s temporary Colorado residency and record together in Joe’s office.
While last week focused on the numerous challenges facing a rapidly growing industry of psychedelic therapists, facilitators, and guides, the topic of therapy itself is put under the microscope this week, as they dissect a New York Times article titled, “Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That.” They discuss whether or not therapy is right for everyone, the efficacy of different types of therapy, the role of the therapeutic alliance in treatment outcomes, and how (if it’s even possible) to measure all of these factors.
They also discuss:
-a study showing that ketamine was more effective than ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) for patients with treatment-resistant depression;
-the potential benefits of the LSD analog, Br-LSD, in treating people with major depressive disorders, cluster headaches, and more;
-Ireland’s Health Service Executive launching the Safer Nightlife program, which will partner with music festivals this summer to establish on-site drug testing;
-the U.S. slowly beginning to legalize fentanyl test strips, which, for some reason, are illegal in many parts of the country;
and much more!
See you next week, and if you’re in the NYC area, make sure to check out “Tales of Transformation,” an in-person event Thursday, June 8 at the Athenæum, moderated by David, and featuring Ifetayo Harvey, Juliana Mulligan, and Raad Seraj.
In this episode, Joe interviews the Co-Founders of Enosis Therapeutics: researcher and scientist, Agnieszka Sekula; and psychiatrist, clinical advisor to the Australian Psychedelic Society, and leading Australian advocate for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, Dr. Prash P.
Enosis Therapeutics is a medtech startup that began with the question: how can we use VR – with or without psychedelics – to improve mental health outcomes? They feel that the biggest problem with powerful psychedelic experiences is that, once you’re back in reality, it’s oddly difficult to remember the insights and new ideas that were so clear during the experience, and even harder to make connections that lead to concrete change. They believe that the immersive nature of VR and the novelty of unique VR environments creates a sense of presence that can’t be recreated otherwise – a liminal, in-between state that’s just different enough to allow the patient to feel like they’re back in that non-ordinary state, and therefore more able to anchor their experience and begin to find connections and more clearly understand newfound insights.
This all happens by the user essentially creating nonlinear, abstract, multi-sensory VR paintings while describing what they remembered; allowing them to revisit these worlds later, bring in therapists (or anyone else) to work inside these environments, and hear their own voice describing what happened, thereby creating a mental map that can be worked with in completely unique ways.
They talk about the conflict between new technologies and traditionalists; the problems with moving away from psychoanalysis and not treating psychotherapy as a process; how VR could improve the efficacy of therapy (and improve therapists’ lives); how it could replace models of repeated dosage; how VR could generate analytics to actually quantify success in mental health treatment; and how (whether psychedelics are used or not) culture needs to bring the psychedelic way of thinking to mental health.
Notable Quotes
“Imagine that you build out that network, that you make it physically visible and tangible, and you can actually have someone that comes into that space and visits that network. So you can share your mental model with anyone that you want: it can be a therapist, it can be a guide, it can be a shaman, it can be a well-being specialist, it can be your partner, it can be your parent, it can be your child. It can be anyone that you wish had a better understanding of you, but they don’t. It’s hard to understand ourselves, [much less] understand each other based on those linear narratives. But if we actually see how people connect things [and] how they see those links, I feel like we have a much better chance to actually connect to each other and have a better understanding of consciousness.” -Agnieszka
“So much of the focus in psychedelic therapy has been on the dosing session, whereas a lot of us would like to think that it really should be on the psychotherapy, and the psychedelic is purely that stimulus that ignites the insights which you then take through psychotherapy. If that stimulus can be the stimulus which ignites a process of psychotherapy, and therefore the power of psychotherapy to produce change, and in that way, brings psychotherapy further to the forefront of mental health treatment (in a way, it’s completely disappeared and been replaced by biological methods), then I think we have won – just by that.” -Prash
“We can induce a similar psycho-emotional state with the use of VR during the integration sessions to help patients remember, at their psychological and at an emotional level, what the experience has been like. …A lot of studies (especially earlier studies) would report that within the first two weeks after the psychedelic experience [is] the most potent time for integration because patients are still in that emotional state that was evoked with psychedelics. So maintaining that for longer by repeat application of VR might give us more access to those emotions, and might enable patients to process things a little bit more deeply.” -Agnieszka
In this episode of Psychedelics Weekly, Kyle and David meet up to talk news, but end up mostly having a discussion about the numerous challenges facing the rapidly growing industry of psychedelic therapists, guides, and facilitators.
That discussion comes from the article, “Psychedelic workers of the world, unite!”, which breaks down the shortcomings and risks of an industry many are flocking to without realizing what they’ll likely have to deal with: unprecedented legal and financial risks, burnout, misalignment with management, transference and countertransference, and what happens when one finds themselves in the middle of a genuine emergency? While these issues could be found in any industry, a big reason why they seem so prevalent and dangerous in the psychedelic world is our lack of elders and passed-down experience – and the faster this all grows, the more we need that guidance.
And for news, they talk about Ohio State making history as the first U.S. University to receive a license to grow psilocybin mushrooms; a new study showing that LSD enhanced learning, exploratory thinking, and sensitivity to feedback; and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funding $1.5 million to research the efficacy of psychedelics for substance use disorder – which spurs a conversation about research, funding, and the idea that maybe we’re spending too much time and money on neuroscience.
In this episode of Psychedelics Weekly, Joe and Kyle are both on the road, so David and Alexa take the helm.
They cover news stories about:
-a man in Colorado facing a Class 3 drug felony for giving people psilocybin mushrooms in exchange for monetary donations – pointing out the bold (or stupid?) stances some are taking to highlight the absurdity of legislation that allows possession and donation as long as no money changes hands;
-a study showing what many of us have felt ourselves: that the day after psilocybin-assisted therapy, depressed patients had a stronger brain response to music and saw improvements in the ability to find pleasure in previously empty activities;
-a trip report from a psychedelically-naive 50-year old, showing the power and beauty of MDMA-assisted therapy;
-the New Hampshire state Senate continuing to be behind the times and voting down House Bill 639, which would have created a legal recreational cannabis framework for the state;
-a video where people on the street in Oregon were asked how much they thought psilocybin therapy would cost, showing a drastic misalignment between public perception and reality;
and a local TV news feature touring Rose City Laboratories, the first licensed psilocybin testing lab in Oregon.
And in conversation, they talk about some of the lesser-discussed (and often dismissed) tools like CBD, THC patches, and very low-dose edibles; the problem with drug dealers and harm reduction; the power of music in guiding a psychedelic experience (and in living a pleasurable life); and the importance of dosing and listening to your body to know what’s right for you.
In this episode, Joe interviews Erica Rex: award-winning journalist, past guest and writer, and participant in one of the first ever clinical trials using psilocybin to treat cancer-related depression; and Mona Sobhani, Ph.D.: cognitive neuroscientist and the author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe.
As Rex discovered the power of psychedelics through a clinical trial, she discusses a huge problem she discovered: that researchers are not preparing participants enough for the ontological shock they may go through in trying to match unexplainable happenings to a rigid framework (or match the normal to a framework that has suddenly shifted) – that while patients have support at the clinic, it all disappears when they return to normal life. She believes that all too often, researchers are doing only what is necessary to be able to continue to receive funding, push drugs through the FDA, and prescribe a pill.
And as psychedelics changed Sobhani from very constrained scientific thinking to being very open to new ideas about consciousness and spirituality, she learned that many scientists had similar stories, and that coming out of the psychedelic closet is sometimes the best thing to do to normalize these ways of healing.
They discuss the challenges of newcomers trying to explain their experience without having the necessary language; how we still don’t truly understand mental illness; how the DSM just clusters symptoms to fit ‘disorders’ into a box; how society has started pathologizing anything we find unpleasant (which of course, is a part of being human); Gary Fisher’s research on using LSD and psilocybin for schizophrenic children, why science needs to combine consciousness research and psychedelics research, and more.
Notable Quotes
“I think most people (neuroscientists, a lot of psychologists): we don’t like labels. We don’t like the DSM (especially neuroscientists). It doesn’t make any sense; all you’re doing is clustering symptoms and calling it a disorder. It’s useful, but it’s not explanatory. …Everyone’s so focused on ‘What are the brain mechanisms?’ but we do need to pull out and [ask]: ‘What are the societal mechanisms? How is our society not supporting [us]? Why do we see such an increase in some of these disorders? It’s a really big question.” -Mona
“There was a big move to get grief made into a pathology that was defined in the DSM so it could be treated with a pill. Grief. This was during COVID. So now grief is a pathology and you can be diagnosed with ‘grieving disorder’ and treated for it. …Anything that does not serve the machine is now considered a disease and disorder and has to be fixed, which is unfortunate because it takes us away from every piece of authentic experience that we could ever possibly have. And that is dehumanizing, profoundly.” -Erica
“Our whole society’s not built around humanity, even though we talk a lot about humanity. But there’s no humane principles in business or in society. Nothing is built around what the human needs, and that’s why, even in psychiatry, you see [that] grief or these normal human needs are pathologized. …We’re just cutting off parts of ourselves and not catering to being a human because we hate being human so much, apparently. We hate the things that are inconvenient about it, that it’s like we just have to cut it off and block it off and go forward. But you can’t do that; then you have all these coping mechanisms that emerge and then all these disorders, because you’re not functioning in an environment that supports you being what you are.” -Mona
In this episode, David interviews two of the founding members of Fireside Project: activist, healing justice practitioner, musician, and Chief Ambassador, Hanifa Nayo Washington; and lawyer, aspiring researcher, and Executive Director, Joshua White, Esq.
Fireside Project was created after White volunteered for a help line for years and realized a few things: that follow-up calls made a big difference; that the state of mental health in the U.S. was a disaster (he was talking to some of the same people for years); and that while psychedelics were becoming popular, they would likely only be accessible to the wealthy. Alongside Washington, they realized the most effective thing they could do would be creating a free help line where people could call for peer support during a psychedelic experience, and receive support in integrating that experience afterward. They’ve focused on finding volunteers who may be marginalized or who have been persecuted from the war on drugs, but most importantly, have real experience and true compassion (rather than letters after their name proving their credentials). They are on track to receive 10,000 calls over their first two years.
They discuss Fireside’s Burning Man origin story; the serendipity they’ve seen in the organization’s beginnings and so many calls; where the name came from; how they prepare volunteers; what true equity looks like; and how, while it’s a common challenge for therapists and facilitators to hold back and not try to fix a problem, that may be even more important here.
Fireside Project takes calls every day from 11am – 11pm PST, and while there is an app you can download, they recommend saving their number in your phone for when you need it (62-FIRESIDE). And to destroy the notion of being afraid to ask for help, they encourage everyone to share their stories on social media: the times that you’ve used Fireside Project or the times you had a challenging experience and wish you had known about them. Many newcomers have no idea this support exists, and it could truly be life-changing for them.
Notable Quotes
“What’s revolutionary about what we’re doing in this idea of democratizing care is that these are volunteers, and they come as peers. They come to the experiences having had their own experiences, and desiring to hold space for others as they navigate their experiences and navigate their processing afterwards. …They’re not doing therapy. They’re not diagnosing. They’re really with the person (the caller, the texter) as somebody who gets it.” -Hanifa
“I think some of the most powerful moments on the line come when we say absolutely nothing at all, when we just allow the silence to become almost palpable, to really feel that ember. I think silence has led to so many of the most beautiful moments that I’ve been lucky enough to see on the line.” -Josh
“By being able to create a safe and non-judgmental space for people by phone, then yes, that absolutely can reduce the risks of their psychedelic experiences. And I think there’s kind of a yin and yang here, which is that when a person is in a space of non-judgment, and when they do feel deeply seen and heard and listened to, then that not only reduces the risks, but it also allows someone to really turn towards their psychedelic experience and to unwrap the gift that’s before them.” -Josh
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In this episode, David interviews Sunny Strasburg, LMFT: Clinical Director at TRIPP PsyAssist; psychedelic trainer, consultant, therapist, and writer, specializing in EMDR and Internal Family Systems, and offering ketamine-assisted therapy as well as ketamine therapy retreats (often co-led by Dr. Richard Schwartz).
She talks about her family history with magic, and how the act of calling energy in and out pairs with psychedelic work; how the human experience is made up of contrasts; why we need to embrace the recreational part of psychedelics; how art can be used more in therapy; and how post-experience group integration is the act of creating mythology, recreating the small-community-sitting-by-the-fire archetype – that community we so desperately need. And she discusses ketamine: different ways she uses it; how it pairs perfectly with Internal Family Systems; and how it’s autobiographical medicine, making us an observer and allowing us to separate ourselves from our story.
While passionate about the mystical, magic, and reconnecting to nature, she is also very involved with virtual reality, and she discusses how VR and meditation apps are easing people into non-ordinary states and familiarizing people with breathwork. With the help of pioneering psychedelic DJ, David Starfire, she created PsyAssist, an app with music playlists and voice integration for people to enhance ketamine experiences that don’t otherwise include therapy or integration work. PsyAssist was acquired by VR company, TRIPP, and they’re running a study on people using VR before a psychedelic experience to see if data proves that VR really does reduce the anxiety so many of us feel before taking that big journey. But she reminds us: as we become more connected to technology, VR, and AI, being connected to other human beings will become more and more important.
Notable Quotes
“I call ketamine the open source code of psychedelics because it doesn’t have a very strong signature or agenda in and of itself. Psychedelics like ayahuasca and psilocybin definitely have a presence. DMT has a presence of beings that live in that space, and it seems like you go to this place that’s informed by the beings that run that space. Ketamine is more open-ended. It feels like it takes autobiographical content and feeds it back to you in interesting ways. …It has this interesting signature of pulling us out of the experience and into ‘observer mind,’ and it also has a signature of traveling. That combination is super interesting for therapy.”
“I do not see VR as a replacement for therapists at all. In fact, I think the more we get into technology and AI, the more in-person experiences with another human being are going to become increasingly valuable to us. We have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to be prosocial animals that connect with other beings like us, and that’s not going away anytime soon. …I actually think that as AI and technology takes a lot of jobs, I think there are certain sectors of human connection that are going to become more important than ever.”
“I love [how] in holotropic breathwork, they have the mandalas with art materials and they encourage you to create a drawing or painting of what you experienced before you speak to anyone as part of that experience. And I really like that, because as soon as you start giving words to ineffable experience, it collapses it down to something that’s simplified beyond what it was. But you can keep it in that open-ended space when you make art …or you make music or dance around what you experienced. It holds that openness and that sublime energy of the ineffable.”
Thank You Life is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization on a mission to revolutionize mental healthcare and help the world heal by eliminating the financial barriers to psychedelic therapy. Click the link to donate!
In this episode, Joe interviews the Co-Founder and CEO of Beckley Retreats, Neil Markey.
Markey describes Beckley Retreats as comprehensive well-being programs, and talks about the importance of holistic wellness – that, while the retreats are centered around two group psilocybin experiences, the true benefits come from complementary factors: the four weeks of online prep and community building before the retreat, the six days in Jamaica surrounding the experiences, the six weeks of integration work after, and the depth of connections people find in the new community they may not have realized they needed so badly. He breaks down the details of the retreats and what they look for in facilitators, and tells a few success stories that really highlight how trauma, opposing ideas, and an infatuation with material objects and amassing wealth can all get in the way of real relationships and meaning.
Beckley Retreats is currently working on two new projects: an observational study with Heroic Hearts and Imperial College London on using psilocybin for-traumatic brain injury, and a study with Bennet Zelner and the University of Maryland to bring executives through a retreat to see how it affects leadership and decision-making: can they prove that these types of experiences lead to more heart-centered leaders?
We are currently running a giveaway where you can win a one-on-one meditation class with Neil and a custom Beckley Retreats tote, as well as many other prizes. Click here to enter!
Notable Quotes
“The problem, a lot of times with Western medicine, is if you can’t understand the mechanics of it, then we kind of discard it, or if you can’t isolate a single variable, then we discard it. It’s like: well, some things work in tandem. If you actually peel the physics back, it looks like everything’s connected to everything, so we’ve got to think about more comprehensive approaches. I think that you can learn a lot from looking at traditional practices and some of the Indigenous wisdom that’s out there; that there’s a method to how this work has been done for quite some time and we shouldn’t disregard it.”
“If we can help people in a clinic model, let’s do that. But [with a] clinic, again: when you take someone, you give them a mystical experience, and then they go right back home or right back to work and right back into life, are you creating enough space for there to be optimal change? I think we need to keep studying it and asking those questions.”
“[Amanda Feilding] never saw a rule that she didn’t want to break. She’s [this] lifelong badass that has just gone against the grain for her entire career. But it was never about money for her, it was all because she thought she could help people. It’s so inspiring. We need more of those stories; less stories about people that made a billion dollars or whatever and more material things, and [more of] these stories about folks that are just out there trying to help others. It fires me up.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Vital instructor, Dr. Devon Christie: Senior Lead of Psychedelic Programs at Numinus, MAPS-certified MDMA therapist, and now four-time guest; and Vital student, Emefa Boamah: coach, facilitator, and trauma-informed intuitive guide specializing in embodiment.
We’ve all heard the trope, “It’s all in your mind,” but it’s also in your heart, soul, community, support system, and body – the focus of this episode. Christie and Boamah dive deep into the various aspects of the relationship between non-ordinary states and our bodies: ways to embody our bodies more; how the body is a fundamental source of truth; the benefit of checking in with one’s body after an experience (to validate or disprove what may have come up); the importance of movement and rest; the different bodies we inhabit (physical, emotional, energetic, mental, and spiritual); and ways to accept (and eventually love) our bodies in a society that’s always working to make us hate them – is self-love the ultimate act of defiance?
They also discuss the post-experience plasticity in everything, and the challenge of preparing an experiencer for something we can’t know; how facilitators and practitioners need to track their own subconscious feelings and reactions; the concept of embodied inquiry; the necessity of remaining curious and humble; and the idea of using integrative practices to find ways to become the person you want to be – the person you may have seen glimpses of in non-ordinary states.
And as this year’s edition comes to an end, Boamah reflects on her experiences with Vital, particularly the communal aspects of the retreat and how healing it was to literally be lifted up by her companions. If you’re curious about whether Vital is right for you, please come to an upcoming Q+A. Applications close March 26!
“Something happens with plant medicines (psychedelics (for me, with mushrooms)) that just takes you out of it and you see the inherent worth of who you are as a human, as a person. And integrating that process after coming out, I think, does a lot to help with self-love – not to say that cannot be attained without psychedelics, but it’s a different quality to it when you’re able to see yourself outside of yourself and see that you’re just valuable as you are.” -Emefa
“Not only are we fighting against us as human beings (like, whatever is happening internally), there’s also the societal expectations of how we ought to be. …There’s all these things where society is bent on making sure that we don’t feel comfortable in our bodies, so for me, from that lens, self-love is an act of reclamation. It’s like a defiant political act to reclaim who we are as people and spend that inherent worth without buying into what we’re being told to do, unapologetically – like, own it: ‘This is who we are and this is where we come from and we get to take space.’” -Emefa
“Those strongly reinforced habits: they restrict what we can attend to. They restrict our perception. So when they’re loosened under a psychedelic, we’ve got all these dimensions of experience that we can suddenly experience. That’s where, I think, not only in preparation, but in how we meet and attend to the emergent experience of people in psychedelic experiences, as practitioners, we need to be fluent ourselves in our own dimensions of experience of our being, so that we can meet and be curious and inquire and help that person to come to know themselves in all of that dimensionality, and then for their meaning to percolate up from that place.” -Devon
“The wisdom of ceremony, community ceremony, dance, music: that brings connection, that brings rhythm. And one nervous system by itself in the face of trauma is very vulnerable, many nervous systems together in the face of trauma: there’s resiliency. …Thankfully, in many ways, psychedelics help us to perceive this, and then in each person, perceive: ‘What’s the truth for me in this?’ and then we can try to live that.” -Devon
In this episode, David interviews Kevin Cannella, LPC: MAPS-trained psychedelic psychotherapist and Co-Founder and Executive Director of Thank You Life, a nonprofit organization working to provide access to psychedelic therapy by eliminating its financial barriers.
Co-Founded by Dr. Dan Engle, Thank You Life is very new and still in the process of officially launching, having just obtained 501(c)(3) status in December and recently gaining its first corporate sponsor in Dr. Bronner’s. The nonprofit came from the realization of just how expensive psychedelic-assisted therapy can be, and Cannella wondering: what if there was a fund practitioners could plug into when a patient couldn’t pay? While access for the patient is obvious, this model benefits the practitioner as well, which is something not often discussed in the psychedelic space – we focus a lot on how much these services will cost the patient, but rarely on the practitioner deserving to be paid fairly for their time and expertise.
Cannella tells his story of immersion into a world of ayahuasca, yoga, and vipassana meditation; volunteering at the Temple of the Way of Light, living in Hawaii, then Brazil, and finally, landing at Naropa University, where his passions were finally validated. He discusses looking for signs and learning to trust intuition, ways to increase accessibility outside of a 501(c)(3) model, how it feels to be paid well for your work, and why he only wants to work with practitioners who offer therapy alongside their chosen substance.
Head to their website to donate to the Thank You Life fund, and follow them on socials for details on upcoming launch/fundraising events in April and May, including a public event at the also-new California Center for Psychedelic Therapy. For larger donations or partnership inquiries, email kevin@thankyoulife.org.
Notable Quotes
“If the client couldn’t pay, the financial burden was falling on the therapist or the clinic, although a lot of what was in my field was just therapists in private practice. Therapists can take some sliding scale people, maybe they even do some pro bono, but they still need to make a living and they can’t just be giving away their hours and their time. So this sort of Utopian thought was like: wouldn’t it be great if there was just a fund that we could all plug into, and then that fund could take the financial burden, and we could just be saying yes to the people that we want to be saying yes to?”
“What it feels like in my body when I would do a session for $70 compared to $150: it’s different. It’s different to get paid well. It’s a different energetic experience to get paid well. And I have so much more to give when I’m getting paid well, because I’m not burdened by feeling undervalued and feeling like I’m in this uphill battle with making a good financial living for myself and my family.”
“I think it can be one big shift in the whole way our culture looks at mental health if it becomes a standard that employers offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for trauma healing. I mean, what a shift that that would bring, just on its own. …How different would it be if not only could you share with your boss that you got a ketamine treatment, but that the company was actually paying for it and saying, ‘Yes, go get your healing.’?”
In this episode, David interviews Victor Alfonso Cabral, LSW: Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Fluence Training and Licensed Social Worker and practicing psychotherapist in Pennsylvania.
Cabral is currently involved with the film, “We are the Medicine,” which aims to explore the reemergence of plant medicines from the perspective of people of color from all backgrounds and walks of life, with the added factor of a strong hip hop influence. Filmmakers Eric Blackerby and Esteban Serrano want the film to normalize the concept of psychedelics and healing for people of color, but also the notion of men being truly authentic with each other and building each other up with love and support – something that challenges society’s expectations on how men (and more specifically, Black and Brown men) should be in relationships with one another. Head to pictureacolorfulworld.com to donate and sign up for the mailing list for more info on future fundraisers and screenings.
He begins the episode by reading a powerful poem he read at Horizons NYC, then tells his story: his childhood and his mother’s sacrifices; how trauma caught up to him in college and led to the low point of his life; his subsequent 120-pound weight loss journey and embracing of therapy, how his first psychedelic experience resulted in an awakening of possibility; how he became a social worker and why he felt instantly aligned with the work; how he ended up working for PA Governor Tom Wolf; and how he came to be interviewed by Sway Calloway (who is also an Executive Producer of the film). His story and all of the organizations and efforts he’s been involved with prove that being authentic, following your heart, and building relationships with the right people can lead to growth and positive change in whatever path you choose in this space.
Notable Quotes
“Social work felt like I finally had language to describe the way in which I’d been living and being most of my life, and it felt validating to have this whole profession dedicated to the way in which I felt I was showing up in the world already.” “After that experience, I felt like there [were] possibilities for me to be whatever I wanted to be, and that I wasn’t everything that had been prescribed to me through intergenerational trauma or systemic oppression or a capitalist society. And I was able to peel those things back one by one and see: okay, what’s under this? And what’s under this? And then when I got to the core of that, the message to me was: love is what matters. So that really made me feel like I do have everything that I need. I have my wife, I have my daughter, I have a family, I have good friends, I have my health. And I have ability to manifest, to do, to plan, to live. I’d been doing a lot up until that point to get my life on track, but that opened up the doors in a way that I didn’t think was possible for me, where I felt a kind of freedom that I’ve never felt before in my life.”
“When we talk about collective healing and about empowering our communities and about joy and freedom and liberation, I think it’s important for us, as men of color – for me and for the people that I love and the people around me – to be liberated, to just love each other and to be together, and to be able to be their authentic selves together without all of these other masks that we’re taught to wear. So I hope that if there’s anything that comes out of the film, [it’s] a message of what we can co-create when we can be our authentic selves with each other and hold each other up and love each other.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews Carla Kieffer: psychedelic educator, Certified Psychedelic Facilitator, Community Liaison at Maya Health, and Founder of Kairos Integration, a company offering psychedelic training, preparation, facilitation, integration, and microdosing support.
This episode was recorded in-person, in between the first and second psilocybin retreats at Atman Retreat in Jamaica, where Kyle, Johanna, and a large group of Vital students just worked with Carla last month. Many participants that attend retreats are new to psychedelics, and often don’t know each other, so it was powerful to have a group of classmates follow the breathwork model of having sitters and journeyers take turns (which is the same model she uses for her Psychedelic Guide Training and Certificate Program), and demonstrates how much one can learn when taking the role of the sitter and how the journey becomes the teacher. They talk about how big the therapy part of psychedelic-assisted therapy is, in how rare it is to have someone attending to your every need for hours on end, and wonder: How can we take that aspect of holding space for each other and apply it to everyday life?
She discusses the importance of data collection and how her Internal Family Systems training has helped her balance her love for the mystical with her more science and data-based mind; the importance in facilitators meeting some sort of baseline harm reduction and safety training (and the need to establish an agreed-upon set of standards); the need for increased accessibility; how important it is to further educate about and normalize conversations about psychedelics; and how integration isn’t just a box you check off as part of the experience, but a continuous process and part of our lives, where checking in on ourselves should be a regular practice.
Notable Quotes
“If we could hold space for each other to have our own experiences, I think there might be a lot of learning on both sides.”
“The medicine is one part, but it’s also that experience of being held in a container – being heard, being witnessed. I think we also have to acknowledge that about this type of work. Even if it is individual therapy, if it’s psilocybin or MDMA-assisted [therapy]: when do you have somebody just there for you for six hours, giving so much attention to every little need? Does that have a healing quality to it?” -Kyle
“How can you do that in your life: show up for people in support and name what you need and really feel held by each other? I have visions of communities and spaces as we move forward with psychedelics and psychedelic awareness, where people can actually actively listen and avoid the need to interject, and any competitive talking goes away. …I think that, in turn, will reverb into the rest of the world.”
“In the end, you are the medicine. Whether you’re working with psilocybin or LSD or breathwork, these are just ways to access your true self, your higher self (whatever resonates for you), and really, as you move through life, as you have these journeys, whatever they may be, just continuing to integrate that into your life, integrate that into your higher self.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna takes the helm for the first time, hosting a conversation with Jungian analyst-in-training, writer, researcher, 5Rhythms® teacher, and Vital student: Mackenzie Amara; and clinical psychologist, long time PT collaborator, and Vital instructor: Dr. Ido Cohen.
As this episode features three huge fans of Jung (Johanna wrote her Master’s dissertation on The Red Book and teaches a course through PT), they focus less on education and the future of psychedelic therapy, and instead get pretty deep; shining a light on an integral part of psychedelia (and life) we often avoid: the shadow. What is the shadow and what is true shadow work? What did Jung give us, and why is Jungian psychology so relevant for integrating psychedelic experiences?
They discuss the notion of the unconscious as a place you can develop a relationship with and access by very different means; the idea of the healer as the container; the problematic binary of good vs. evil; the flawed concept of ego death; the differences between authentic and neurotic suffering and personal and collective consciousness; the archetype of the wounded healer and why facilitators should both be wounded and in the process of healing; and how wonderful it is that society is beginning to embrace the weird and what makes us unique.
There are no shortcuts in life and there is no “cure” for the parts of the human condition we aren’t comfortable with, but in the capitalist, efficiency-above-all-else West, we aren’t raised to sit with the unpleasant, and instead learn to seek a quick fix, which has created an environment where we’ve lost the ability to feel in the ways that we need to. Can you be with someone else’s pain if you’re running from your own? Can you have real compassion if you’ve never suffered? Can you be complete without knowing your shadow?
Notable Quotes
“Yes, we’re all suffering and suffering is scary and shadow is scary and it can overwhelm us and it takes time. And there is this thing where we can build a relationship with it. It’s all about the relationship.” -Ido
“Nature is a perfect representation of how the unconscious is. It’s unfinished. It’s in process. It’s not perfect. It’s human consciousness, and [it’s] our egoic, persona-driven striving that have us believe that we can be perfect, AKA not human, AKA have no shadow. So the shadow is this part of the unconscious; it’s the frills, it’s the weirdness, it’s the awkward pauses, it’s the burps and the disgusting stuff and the repulsion, and also the quirks, the idiosyncrasies. In Swiss German, they talk about a square that’s missing a corner – it’s the missing corner. You need to have a piece missing so that life can live there.” -Mackenzie
“There is no ego death. You can have ego disidentification, you can release the center of your consciousness from your ego, but you will never kill your ego, and you shouldn’t want to kill your ego. If you’re going to kill your ego, who’s going to be home to integrate? Where are you going to take all these beautiful experiences? Who’s going to synthesize them and alchemize them for you? …That is a way in which we’re banishing the feminine, which is process, which is yes, being in my body and suffering, because there is also so much beauty in suffering, because if you can’t be in your body to suffer, you’re not going to be in your body and experience love. They work together.” -Ido
“Psychedelics are the opportunity to get outside of oneself far enough that then I can come back and say: ‘Do I consciously want to choose to continue to be the way that I’ve seen that I am, or do I want to use my power, my influence over myself to make different choices?’” -Mackenzie
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, we do something a little different: instead of interviewing a teacher and student to hear their different perspectives, Kyle (Vital’s main creator/developer) has a conversation with Johanna Hilla (our Coordinator of Education and Training), with the two basically interviewing each other.
Johanna is originally from Finland but now lives in the UK, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Exeter. She has worked with us before, but became a full-time part of PT right around the time we launched Vital, so we thought it’d be interesting to hear a talk between two of the main figureheads behind this year’s cohort as it comes to an end.
They discuss the beginnings of Vital and how the pandemic actually helped; how it’s been for Johanna to experience powerful group work for the first time; and what it’s been like to see virtual connections turn into real friendships as groups came together at retreats (this was recorded at Altman Retreat in Jamaica). And they analyze Vital and look to the future: What worked? What didn’t? What were the biggest takeaways from this year? How can we add more somatic work (and maybe even have a retreat centered around getting into flow state and hiking or snowboarding)? How can we incorporate state-specific models as more states legalize? And most importantly: Can we become a new gold standard in the training/education world? We hope so!
“The whole curriculum, the way in which it’s structured with the five elements, the way in which it emphasizes experiential learning and process-oriented thinking and incorporates all of these transpersonal elements but also has a really sufficient amount of clinical backing: I just thought that it was really brilliantly structured (which I think you did most of that work) and I thought that this is exactly what we need right now.” -Johanna
“The emotional density and the charge that happens in a room when people are either doing some kind of plant medicine ceremoniously or doing breathwork: I think it’s always really something tangible, and it’s a great privilege to witness people going into these deep psychological processes. But obviously, it also takes something from you. You really have to be very present, there for many hours, and you go through the experience with the people as a witness. Even though you don’t know what they’re going through, you’re still going through it with them in a way.” -Johanna
“I think breathwork really honors the idea that we all come from a certain baseline and that people have different levels of intensity that they’d like, and different comfort zones. And I think that’s also fine. Not everybody is going to go for the five grams in silent darkness, and I don’t think everybody has to either. If there’s people who are feeling a bit more anxious about going into new experiences, I think breathwork is a really great gateway into the psychedelic world. And then maybe some people will really fall in love with the method and actually want to continue with it. I think it offers something for everyone.” -Johanna
In this episode, David once again interviews a teacher and student from Vital, speaking with Grof-certified Holotropic Breathwork® practitioner, author, and developer of InnerEthics®: Kylea Taylor: M.S., LMFT; and therapist and Lead Consultant of psychological therapists at NEU: Shabina Hale.
This Vital Psychedelic Conversation is largely centered around ethics: how practitioners and facilitators define ethics; how InnerEthics® is involved; power dynamics; accountability; how the energy in a session is transferable and can bring up shadow elements for both parties; the need to be honest about one’s own scope of competence; the need for facilitators to have more experience both as a sitter and experiencer; and the very simple but most vital aspect of facilitation: considering how any decision made will affect the person on the psychedelic.
They also discuss having a code of ethics inspired by Indigenous culture and decades of underground use; how the psychedelic experience is affected by the ways it’s treated by its surrounding culture; how the practitioner becomes a protector; defining what is normal in a psychedelic experience (can you?); informed consent and the importance of explaining how roles will change throughout the process; and what the world would be like if everyone followed the same set of ethics.
Have you seen our commercial for Vital yet? We’re pretty thrilled with how it came out.
Notable Quotes
“We’re doing psychedelics in a different culture and a different community. I come from an Asian community that is often more tight knit and more tribal in its way of being, and mental health is seen differently within that community, care for elders is seen differently in that community. And so immediately, you’ve got these different rules and different structures that happen. And psychedelics obviously have come from some of those communities, but we don’t have the same communities anymore. We’re in the West. People will take them [and] they don’t go back to communities. They’re on their own. And that’s really isolating. …How do you keep people safe in some form of community when they go back into a society which is much more individualistic?” -Shabina
“I think it helps to just consider it all normal and not abnormal, because it’s only abnormal in the context of our society and our culture. What happened to Indigenous people in their psychedelic experiences was held; whatever it was was held by the culture, so it was not abnormal. It was normal in the extraordinary state of consciousness, and they assumed that it was healing and worked with it.” -Kylea
“You can see things that may not make sense on the outside, but to that person, on the inside, they really do make sense. And they make sense of it in a way that is far more profound than you could ever interpret or analyze or try and take apart.” -Shabina
“I think if people really find out what is theirs to do and do it, that is so satisfying that all these other things that cause problems for other people disappear.” -Kylea
In this episode, Joe interviews Portland, OR-based licensed marriage and family therapist, ketamine-assisted therapist at Rainfall Medicine, lead educator at InnerTrek, and speaker at our upcoming Convergence conference: Gina Gratza, MS, LMFT.
She talks about how she decided she wanted to become a therapist and when she knew psychedelics were the next step; meeting Rick Doblin at Burning Man; the efficacy of MDMA being used in conjunction with traditional therapy; how the self-compassion of MDMA gives her tremendous hope for its use in treating eating disorders; how non-ordinary states of consciousness teach us the wiseness (and uniqueness) of our inner healer; and her healthy concerns for how Oregon handles psilocybin legality: InnerTrek will be graduating some of the first licensed facilitators in Oregon and they should be certified by summer, but with OHA-approved service centers and manufacturers still up in the air, what happens next?
She and Joe also discuss how non-ordinary states of consciousness teach us the wiseness (and uniqueness) of our inner healers; the need for therapists to continuously do their own work; the idea of a psilocybin-licensed facility doubling as a music venue; David Nutt’s drug harm scale; Kylea Taylor; “The Trialogues”; archetypes of Burning Man; and how in psilocybin-assisted therapy, we can only do so much before the spirit of the mushroom ultimately takes over.
Notable Quotes
“There’s a strength in the empathic attunement that’s happening in the heart space that’s coming forward, so it’s not just talk therapy. There’s a connection happening. And we are creatures of love and belonging and connection, and when we feel that with another human being [and it’s] authentic – that is a very powerful force. We don’t have to compare it, but it’s just as powerful as medicine.”
“I hope to never be a master of any domain. I know that the juiciness of this life and this existence is continuing to stay open to learning and growing and evolving, and for me, that’s coming back to humility: I’ll never know everything, especially when it comes to the realm of altered states of consciousness. We’re trying to understand life in this state of consciousness, let alone bringing in altered states and the many different dimensions at which things can come through to you, and the uniqueness of everyone’s experience.”
“This is what we humans are able to do: Here are the measures, here are the ways in which we’re training. And then there’s the spirit of the mushroom. There’s what we are going to bring and then there is going to be what the mushroom brings: …the mycelium network, the earth, the nature; like a total other force that is beyond our ability to really know or read what will move through that.”
In this episode, David interviews two people from different sides of Vital: clinical psychologist, adjunct professor, Co-Founder of the Psychedelics R2R nonprofit, and Vital instructor, Dr. Dominique Morisano, CPsych (the teacher); and writer, psychedelic-assisted medicine facilitator, integration coach, and Women On Psychedelics Co-Founder, Jessika Lagarde (the student).
With the 2023-24 edition of Vital set to begin in April and applications closing at the end of March, we thought it would be interesting to relaunch Vital Psychedelic Conversations, but with the spin of speaking to both instructors and students to hear their different perspectives on retreats, facilitation, psychedelic education, the quickly advancing psychedelic space, and of course, Vital itself.
Morisano and Lagarde mostly discuss experience: how it’s gained, how it changes perspectives and methodologies, how one decides they’ve experienced enough to be able to know the terrain enough to help others, the importance of knowing when a patient needs a facilitator/therapist who has had the same life experience, and knowing when one’s own skills and limitations means a patient would be better off seeing someone else. And they discuss safety, the importance of being trauma-informed (and what does that mean, really?), and the puzzling cases when facilitators haven’t had their own psychedelic experience but feel the need to use psychedelics to help others.
And of course, they talk about Vital: the joy in joining together in community with people they’ve only known virtually; how interesting these retreats are compared to others due to the level of the participants’ experience; how partnering up and taking turns as the sitter and experiencer shows how little of a difference there is between student and teacher; and how many people have reported the most impactful part of the retreats was not their own experience, but being there for someone else.
Notable Quotes
“Do you know the terrain? Let’s say you’ve taken ketamine once, and you’re doing six sessions of ketamine with a client. Do you really know what they’re going to be experiencing, and can you have had the full range of experience? …How do we define this? I can tell you: You have a hundred psychedelic experiences; most likely you’re going to have a different experience each time, and a different connection to inner/outer terrain or different realms or different ways of thinking and being. So when is enough enough? When did you learn your lesson? When did you gain the experience necessary to navigate someone [else’s experience]?” -Dominique “You learn a lot about yourself as well, I find at the end of a day. Every journey is also a journey for the facilitator, and we are constantly mirrors to each other, so it’s very interesting work to do in that sense as well, because your own inner work is continuously being done.” -Jessika “It’s never the same. Two sessions are never the same, and even how you show up on that day for that session, or set and setting; all of that influences [the experience], so we have to constantly be placing ourselves between being a student [and being] a teacher sometimes, but never put ourselves in the spot that we think, ‘Okay, now I know everything. Yeah, I’m done.’” -Jessika
“How do you develop wisdom? The way to develop wisdom is through experience, and often, pain.” -Dominique
In this episode, Kyle interviews researcher, speaker, writer, competitive freediver, and one of the world’s leading experts on 5-MeO-DMT: Dr. Malin Vedøy Uthaug.
As a society, we mostly live in our minds, emotionally constipated while surprisingly disconnected from our bodies, with basic human needs that are all too often not met. Uthaug and Kyle talk about what manifests when those needs aren’t fulfilled, the strength of one’s inner mind state to change perspective, and how powerful true catharsis and embracing grief can be. And they talk about somatics: why we don’t focus on the body more, and how we could embody experiences with non-ordinary states of consciousness to better connect to our inner world.
She discusses the impact (or non-impact) of following a strict dieta before a big experience; preparing for an experience with physical exercise (even right before the ceremony); freediving; the challenge of therapists/facilitators sitting with someone through strong catharsis; the popcorn theory; the guilt people feel from experiencing love and bliss; and the paralysis-by-analysis problem of not making the connection between insight and action.
Notable Quotes
“What I’ve seen throughout all these years working in the field is that there is at least very commonly this notion that the psychedelic is going to heal them; they don’t have to do any other work – just popping that tab of psilocybin or smoking that pipe of 5-MeO is going to result in change. And that expectation is a bit dangerous, I think. They might not get the help that they are seeking because they’re placing that help externally to them. …Healing is actually hard work. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s the tiny little steps of change accumulated that creates a bigger change. It’s changing your tiny, tiny habits until it changes your life.” “You can realize a bunch of things, but if you’re not doing anything, nothing is actually going to change. It might feel like it changes because you have felt it in your brain or you’ve seen it or have this insight, but that needs to be translated actively into your life.” “I think putting the body back into the equation is the way forward, however that might look.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews C.J. Spotswood, PMHNP-BC: author and board-certified psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner currently enrolled in CIIS’ Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research certificate program.
He talks about his introduction to psychedelics and his first patient immediately asking him about microdosing; why he changed his mind on microdosing and why he wrote his book; microdosing studies he’s most excited about; the terms: treatment-resistant depression, risk reduction, and flight nurses; Irving Kirsch’s work uncovering the bad science of research studies; the need for physicians to know enough about psychedelics to be able to meet their patients where they are; the importance of group work; and how, while they’re already so well-versed in caring for patients, using nurses to their full licensure could be the answer to the quickly growing psychedelics and scalability problem.
Notable Quotes
“When you look at the early research into the 50s in the 60s; they were doing microdosing research, they just didn’t have a title for it. They thought they were using placebo levels but they were actually looking for threshold levels; things like that. Really, it was what by today’s standards [would be an] amount that we would consider as a microdose.”
“I don’t like the term [treatment-resistant depression] when we use that because if you’re using [it] when you’re looking at the standard medications like SSRIs [or] SNRIs, they’re basically all the same. …So when you say that someone’s ‘treatment-resistant’ for three medications, four medications that are all basically working the same pathways and in the same amount; is that truly treatment-resistant, or are we just trying the same thing with just different medications, whereas doing microdosing is a different pathway [and] is a different approach?”
“My first patient I ever saw as a new clinician, like, literally my first patient: I come in and I’m starting to talk to them for the first interview and I got to the point and I’m asking them: ‘Where are we going, what do you need?’ and they said to me, ‘Do you know anything about microdosing?’ …I said to them, I go, ‘Yeah, I know a little bit.’ …So I asked her what she knew, and she knew quite a bit. And she goes, ‘What do you know?’ and I kind of just said to her: ‘I don’t really know how to put this, [but I] wrote a book on it and it’s going to be coming out next year.’ …It reinforced my feeling [that] I’m doing the right thing: this career suicide I’ve thought of, going into working with psychedelics and being open and talking about it, hearing my first patients talking about it – it’s got to be serendipity.”
In this week’s episode, Kyle is back on the podcast, joining Joe to discuss three recent articles; two of which pose a lot of questions.
They first look at Colorado’s Proposition 122, which, now that it has passed, enters into the long and arduous process of being figured out – all while existing in the complicated paradigm of state vs. federal legality. One of the biggest concerns revolves around data collection and privacy: Is the collected data truly anonymous? Since psychedelics will still be federally illegal, how can we trust that the DEA isn’t going to abuse their power?
Next, they discuss Attorney General Merrick Garland making moves to end the sentencing disparity between offenses involving powder cocaine and crack cocaine: while essentially the same substance, being caught with 28 grams of crack cocaine currently carries the same sentencing as having 500 grams of powder!
And lastly, they touch on a very interesting article from Lucid News about the value of psychedelic therapy, which gives some staggering data points showing why the black market will always exist: MDMA-assisted therapy sessions likely costing $11,500 (with the MDMA itself costing between $480 and $9,600), Esketamine treatments costing as much as $32,400 a year, and more – all with results that don’t seem to be as long-lasting as many believed they would be. This one deserves more analysis, but Joe and Kyle had limited time for recording this week, so stay tuned for more. For now, enjoy this episode, and Happy Holidays from the Psychedelics Today team!
As the psychedelic movement expands, with surmounting research serving to change the tide of public opinion, more people are seeking out psychedelics as modalities for healing and self-exploration. Whether in the context of psychedelic-assisted therapy, plant medicine ceremonies, or recreational use, the modern Western psychedelic discourse has long been interwoven with the concept of “set and setting.”
But in contemporary psychedelic culture, the term is no longer sufficient as a harm reduction mantra. How can it be updated to better serve today’s journeyers?
A Brief History of Set and Setting
“Set and setting” refer to many factors which extend beyond the psychoactive effects of a given substance, playing a vital role in shaping psychedelic experiences. Typically, “set” refers to the mindset of a psychedelic explorer and “setting” refers to the context in which a substance is taken.
However, there has been little development of which variables fall under the umbrella of set and setting since its conception in the 1960s. There are significant factors that shape a psychedelic experience – both acutely and in the long term – which aren’t fully captured by set and setting alone.
The concept of set and setting has become something of a harm reduction mantra interwoven with the emergent field of psychedelic-assisted therapy and psychedelic research at large, used to describe the ways in which factors that extend beyond the substance itself can impact and shape its effects. Accordingly, it’s been an impactful linguistic tool that therapists, researchers and explorers have looked to for guidance on curating a container for an experience with medicine.
“Set” commonly refers to an individual’s mindset, including both immediate and long-range states of mind. A person’s immediate set is related to their state of mind before a psychedelic session, including everything from intentions, fears, hopes, and expectations about the session. However, their long-range set might include enduring personality traits, personal history and formative life experiences, social identities, and mental health history.
“Setting” commonly refers to the container of the experience, which includes the physical and social environment within which a substance is ingested, factoring into account when and where it will take place. Thus, setting may include aspects such as music, whether it takes place outdoors or indoors, the decor/props in the session room, as well as the relationships between others present.
The concept of set and setting does not exist independently of culture, with the sociocultural context of set including, but not limited to, race, economic status, strength of relationships with others, and the individual’s access to and relationship with nature.
Timothy Leary, 1960s counterculture icon and ex-Harvard lecturer in clinical psychology, is generally given credit for popularizing the concept of set and setting through his emphasis on the importance of both in shaping psychedelic experiences.
In the cult classic, The Psychedelic Experience, Leary together with his colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert reflected, “Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key – it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.”
To a large extent, the notion of set and setting within Western culture has been shaped and inspired by the ways in which Indigenous cultures around the world ingest psychoactive plant medicines in contexts bound by ritual, ceremonial objects, music, relationship with the land, and cosmological interpretive frameworks.
Compared with Indigenous cultures, Western culture has a bias against the use of psychoactive substances, and despite evidence that the peoples of Europe once used psychoactive plants ritualistically, such traditions have been long forgotten. Cultural frameworks determine the lens through which psychedelic experience is interpreted, and the lack of a cultural context, beyond that of prohibition, within which to make sense of psychedelics in the global North has produced a need for the ongoing formulation of set and setting.
More recently, Ido Hartogsohn, assistant professor at the program for Science, Technology & Society at Bar-llan University, has been conducting research on set and setting, exploring the ways in which psychedelic experiences are shaped by society and culture. In 2017, Hartogsohn published a paper outlining the history of set and setting, pointing out that although the term is often credited to Leary, its roots extend further back.
He explains how members of the Club des Hashischins, translated as “Club of the Hashish Eaters,” a Parisian group dedicated to exploring psychoactive-induced experiences in the 1840s, gave emphasis to what he calls factors beyond the substance itself. When Timothy Leary began his research with psilocybin in 1960, he exchanged letters with English author Aldous Huxley, who shared an excerpt written by one of the club’s members, Théophile Gautier, in which Gautier explores the necessity of preparation and going into a hashish experience with a “tranquil frame of mind and body.”
In addition, Hartogsohn suggests that having a better understanding of set and setting could serve as a form of harm reduction as well as benefit enhancement, highlighting that “the discourse on set and setting had remained largely underdeveloped over the years.”
An Expanded Vision: Set, Setting, and Support
Considering the growing mainstream emergence of psychedelics, set and setting alone is no longer sufficient as a harm reduction mantra, nor is it sufficient as a guidepost for the benefit maximization of psychedelic therapy and research. We argue that as a matter of public health, this mantra must evolve into “set, setting and support.”
No doubt that the proliferation of positive results from clinical studies being conducted on psychedelics, alongside countless mainstream articles detailing their healing benefits with promising headlines like “The Psychedelic Revolution Is Coming. Psychiatry May Never Be the Same,” are driving increasing numbers of people experimenting with psychedelic substances.
Despite the undeniable healing benefits of psychedelics, media discourse around them is sometimes dressed in sensationalist language, serving to construct psychedelics as miracle cures for all mental health problems. This premise is misleading and does not highlight the innumerable challenges that present themselves around the psychedelic experience.
One evident challenge that may emerge, is that of the psychedelic experience itself. Even when set and setting are controlled, there is no guarantee that challenging content and situations will not present themselves.
“Sometimes active journeyers can find themselves in unsound decision-making states. Having the support of a peer, trip sitter, or facilitator, during an experience can help the explorer navigate their inner state and make adjustments to the setting for maximum comfort and safety,” says Hanifa Nayo Washington, co-founder and Chief of Strategy at Fireside Project, a psychedelic peer support line that provides free, live phone support to individuals actively tripping or looking to process past experiences.
As psychedelic researcher and transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof says, psychedelics can be “non-specific amplifiers of mental or psychic processes.” That is, they have the ability to amplify content which is latent in the psyche, bringing up thoughts, emotions, and sense impressions that we were previously unconscious of.
Another challenge that may emerge after the experience relates to the fact that healing is often a messy, non-linear process in which things sometimes get worse before they get better. Anecdotally, there appears a common point of contention around individuals’ expectations going into an experience versus the actual outcome. No doubt, having forms of support already integrated into the process can make such moments of difficulty easier.
This self-guided class investigates the history, science, and best practices for safe and effective microdosing; hosted by Adam Bramlage, founder of Flow State Micro, Dr. James Fadiman, the “father of modern microdosing,” and a dozen expert guest faculty. Enroll today!
Beyond this, the aftermath of a psychedelic experience can also be destabilizing, as the non-ordinary states of consciousness they elicit serve to catapult us beyond the bounds of our everyday perceptions. In part, it is this very disruption in our normative flow of consciousness that enables psychedelics to be so healing, however, it can also be a simultaneously scary process as we find the foundations of our worldviews and belief systems turned on their heads.
“Psychedelic experiences can invite tremendous dysregulation in the body, mind, and spirit system,” Washington says. “Enlisting post-journey support in the immediate days, weeks, and months that follow a psychedelic experience can significantly ease the process of self-regulating to a ‘new normal’.”
What Can You Do To Seek Support?
Seeking avenues of support is a way to enhance psychedelic preparation, journeys, and integration, with support taking many different forms. One type of support, which may seem more self-evident, is that of socially-based, community support at the interpersonal level.
Despite the fact that psychedelics can elicit feelings of connection and oneness, some who use psychedelics may find themselves feeling alienated and misunderstood. For years, prohibitionist, zero-tolerance policies served to demonize psychedelic substances and those who used them, resulting in a lingering stigma and sense of shame associated with their use. This is especially true for individuals from communities of color who have long faced the impact of the discriminatory enforcement of drug laws, with the war on drugs producing profoundly unequal outcomes across racial groups.
Additionally, spiritual and mystical-type experiences have long been ridiculed and pathologized in Western culture, as they often include elements that are not culturally accepted as objectively real, sometimes resulting in those who have profound transpersonal experiences being dismissed or labeled as “crazy.”
Following a deep spiritual or transpersonal experience in which an individual disconnects from their ego, once they begin folding back into themselves there are layers of their identity or their lives that they may leave behind. This letting go of behaviors and parts of the psyche that are no longer of service can be conceived of as a type of “psychedelic shedding.” Omar Thomas, Founder of Jamaica’s Diaspora Psychedelic Society, CEO of Jamaican Organics and Psychedelics Today Advisory Board member, first formulated the notion of “shedding” in the context of psychedelic integration.
This might relate to one’s job, relationship, identification with a certain religion, sexual identity, or even their gender. When one goes through this shedding process without adequate support, there’s the risk that rather than finding relief from their mental and psychospiritual afflictions, they deepen, due to the many associated implications and consequences of the shedding process.
For example, what happens when someone realizes that the reason for their stress is rooted in their work, but they can’t quit because they won’t be able to support their family otherwise? Or what happens when someone sheds a cis-gendered identity but they’re in a marriage that would fall apart, opening a flurry of difficult, albeit potentially necessary effects?
This shedding process isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it certainly can be without having adequate support present to facilitate and ease the process. Like a butterfly going through its metamorphosis, it needs to be held in a safe container while fragile to emerge on the other side as its fullest and most beautiful expression.
Even today, as psychedelics become increasingly accepted in the mainstream, there is still a residue of stigma that remains. Thus, it is important, when looking for someone to support your journey, to find a non-judgemental, trustworthy person to share the experiences with. For some, this person may materialize in the form of a therapist, counselor, coach, or shamanic guide, while for others it may be a trusted friend or family member.
If support in an individual’s immediate circle is scarce, finding community support could come from connection online or in person with a psychedelic community, many of which offer courses and integration circles. One benefit of finding community online is around connecting with people from a particular social identity group that may not be accessible otherwise. For example, there are now integration circles that cater to individuals who identify as BIPOC, neurodivergent, or queer.
“In preparation for a psychedelic journey, support can look like gathering with a trusted friend, psychedelic facilitator, or support circle, to explore intentions, apprehensions, impressions, and beyond,” Washington says. “This support can increase awareness of one’s inner weather or set. With greater awareness comes the possibility for increased understanding of one’s own needs and knowing.”
Other forms of support include tools and techniques that a psychedelic voyager can draw upon as resources for grounding before, during, and after psychedelic experiences.
No matter the quality of the experience, beyond an intention to reduce the risk of harm, certain practices can be adopted as a way of supporting oneself through moments of discomfort or difficulty, to add a deepened sense of meaning and lasting benefit to the experience. For example, a 2019 study that observed the effects of psychedelics on long-term meditators suggested that the effects of a mindfulness practice may help patients sustain treatment outcomes in the long-term.
One might consider adopting a type of embodiment practice, engaging different aspects of the body in creating deeper self-awareness, balance, and connection. Whether it be a practice rooted somatics or mindfulness, or a more dynamic movement-based practice like yoga or dance, finding ways to become embodied helps to cultivate a deeper relationship with oneself and inner support to fortify your whole being.
Exploring the value of somatic practice, Lauren Taus, therapist practicing Ketamine-assisted Psychotherapy and Founder of Inbodied Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Integration Training shares, “Every emotion has a somatic counterpart, a felt sense in the body, which means that developing a daily practice of being in your body and listening to somatic wisdom is essential for healing.”
Support can also manifest by tending to your connection with nature. It can be easy to feel isolated after the depth and intensity of a psychedelic experience, however, the earth and the manifold beings that permeate it can serve as a source of community, providing consistent support through the embodied, knowing you were never alone to begin with.
In our vernacular, we tend to say that we are using psychedelics, but it’s certainly possible that psychedelics are actually using us. When one considers the predictable shift in values developed out of their use, expanding them to the global scale, we can see that not only are psychedelics healing us at the individual level, but are collectively helping to change the course of humanity’s place on earth by allowing us to care more about ourselves, one another, and the earth itself.
As this continues, there will be a never-ending need to increase layers of support for the broader community. Where might you be able to add that missing piece in your community, in your work, or in your personal life? What does it mean for you to evolve beyond set and setting?
In this week’s episode, Joe and David team up again to discuss what news interested them the most this week: the DA dropping a felony drug charge against a mushroom rabbi in Denver due to the passing of Proposition 122; Numinus Submitting a Clinical Trial Application to Health Canada that would give in-training practitioners the ability to experience psychedelics with their psilocybe-containing EnfiniTea; and a University of Exeter-led trial moving forward with the next step in a study using ketamine for alcohol use disorder (with 2/3 of the money coming from the National Institute for Health and Care Research).
They also review a paper that analyzed the economics of psychedelic-assisted therapies and how insurers come into play; as well as The Journal of the American Medical Association stating that, based on current trajectories compared to cannabis legalization, they believe the majority of states will legalize psychedelics by 2037. So nice to see these continued steps in the right direction!
And if you missed it, we just announced that applications are open for the next edition of Vital. There are incentives to paying in-full by certain dates, so if you missed out on last year’s edition or have been curious, attend one of our upcoming Q+As!
In this episode, David interviews Sherry Rais: Executive Director of the Boston Psychedelic Research Group, Grants Manager for CIIS, and CEO/Co-Founder of Enthea.
Enthea is a benefit plan administrator that provides health plan benefit riders and single case agreement services for psychedelic healthcare with a provider network including certified and credentialed Ketamine-Assisted Therapy (KAT) and Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy (PAT) practitioners. In other words, if a company wants to offer psychedelic-assisted therapy as a benefit for their employees, Enthea makes this possible (and affordable). Their first client was the very psychedelically-minded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, and they’ve just announced the signings of three new clients that you may not expect to provide KAP to their employees: Daybreaker, Tushy, and Guinn Partners. Their goal is to have 100,000 covered lives in 40 cities by the end of 2023, and, alongside the guidance of MAPS, hopefully roll out MDMA-assisted therapy in Q2 of 2024.
Rais talks about Enthea’s process, costs, and goals; her Ismaili religion; her nomadic, marathon-running life; her experience sleeping on the streets of Toronto at 16 and her need to help the less-fortunate; how her most powerful psychedelic experience was watching someone else transform; and why companies are suddenly interested in these emerging therapies.
Notable Quotes
“For me, the most powerful psychedelic experience I had was actually in a situation where I was sitting with someone else and saw this person transform in front of me. That was two years ago and that person; I still see the effects of that experience on that person’s life and how much he’s changed from this one experience, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed.”
“I think you and I know that these medicines work, and we also know that they cost way more than $500, and immediately, that tells me there’s an equity crisis in the ecosystem; that we’ve finally found medicines that may be able to help millions of people that are suffering from a variety of issues, and there’s this huge barrier and its cost. So the goal of Enthea is to solve that problem by making these medicines affordable.”
“The fact that you have a plan that doesn’t cover mental health is very telling of the landscape and the culture in America today and why you’ve made the case for me on why Enthea is needed. Because if this doesn’t happen, when will people get access? They’ll continue waiting and waiting and waiting that their primary insurance provider covers this.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews psychologist, psychotherapist, author, and certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator: Marc Aixalà.
Aixalà is part of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service (ICEERS), offering integration psychotherapy sessions, developing theoretical models of intervention, and training and supervising therapists. He is also the writer of the recently released, Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness, of which you can win a copy by entering our giveaway here!
Aixalà wrote the book after receiving more and more emails from people asking for guidance on how they were supposed to process a recent experience, and he realized that so much was unknown around the concept of integration: What exactly does it entail? Has the psychedelic space created a narrative that you need integration when maybe you don’t? When is the work considered integration and when is it psychotherapy?
He talks about some of the metaphors he uses to explain integration; the seven scenarios he typically sees in people seeking integration (and how to respond to each); philosophical constructivism and the importance of working with someone within their preferred cosmology; how the psychedelic hype has created a marketplace full of competition (and why that could be bad); and why he thinks being trained in Holotropic Breathwork is perhaps more important than being trained in facilitating a psychedelic experience.
Notable Quotes
“One of the things that psychedelics show us (or for me, the main thing) is that somehow, healing is inside of us and growth is inside of us, and they teach us accountability, they teach responsibility, and they teach us that we are the expert of ourselves – that our journey does not depend on an external person. So in my way of practicing integration, I also want to honor that, and do integration when it’s needed, but not create an additional need for people that don’t have it.”
“I think that that’s the richness and the beauty of psychedelics and the psychedelic experience, is that it cannot be understood from just one prism. No, it’s a trans-disciplinary approach that will give us a more subtle understanding of different dimensions included. I don’t think that there’s one way that is better than the other of using psychedelics, [just] as I don’t think that there’s one Shamanic tradition that is better than another Shamanic tradition. Things are there for a reason and we find what resonates more with us.”
“I believe that breathwork can be more effective than psychedelics to deal with certain emotions; things like anger, rage. The body and the somatic part of a traumatic event; that has worked very well with breathwork in my opinion – better than with other substances because it provides some sort of mental clarity that is not distorted by the archetypal aspects of psychedelics.”
An NYU psilocybin depression study participant discovers an unforeseen application for psychedelics: the treatment of chronic pain. Part 1 of the series: Psychedelics and Chronic Pain.
Everything Worked, but Nothing Lasted
In the fall of 2020, I was living a pretty successful and happy life – on paper. I had co-founded a very popular, leading-edge CrossFit gym in NYC; one of the first in the world. I held multiple advanced certifications in applied neurophysiology through Z-Health, helping clients with challenging pain and performance issues. As an early adopter of kettlebell training, I became a nationally top-reviewed instructor and trained Team 6 Navy SEALs, astronauts, pro athletes, wounded veterans, and members of the FBI, NYPD, NYFD, and ROTC. I was featured in Men’s Fitness, the NY Times Sunday Routine, and USA Today. I had 30 years in the pain & performance field, training and teaching at a high level, and was becoming widely known for helping people with difficult mobility problems or chronic pain, using unique methods from the leading edge of neurological rehabilitation. On top of all of that, I was 17 years sober.
However, not all that glitters is gold. A now ex-business partner was committing a Ponzi scheme to the tune of millions, and his case followed him like a shadow, turning my life’s passion into an emotionally and financially toxic nightmare that economically devastated my family. My best friend, Kirk MacLeod, who I had completely rehabbed from chemo & cancer surgery, died six months after being declared in remission. My first son had developed undiagnosed GERD and couldn’t sleep more than an hour and half at a time, which meant my wife and I slept even less.
Unsurprisingly, my episodic depression returned after more than a decade and a half, and I was now increasingly treatment-resistant; unresponsive to psychiatric drugs that had previously worked. All my pain neuromodulation interventions that worked on my clients no longer worked for me, and I had developed chronic pain myself.
I share all my background here to demonstrate that I was not under-resourced in either knowledge, networks, or diversity of approaches, practice, or experiences. I poured over all my certification materials looking for anything I had missed, but had fallen into an increasingly deeper recovery hole; everything worked, but nothing lasted. I was hitting a new bottom in my life, deeply sinking into the midst of an increasingly treatment-resistant depression episode that had likely been ongoing for five years.
But then I became aware of ongoing studies on psilocybin for depression happening locally in NYC. I had experienced a few high-dose psychedelic sessions nearly a quarter century ago and had been an avid Terence McKenna fan (even speaking with him directly after a lecture in Seattle), but I had never taken psychedelics therapeutically, and my recreational interest had effectively vanished once I became sober from alcohol. Intrigued, I connected with the local clinical research coordinator, Leila Ghazhal, at the NYU for the clinical trial of Psilocybin for Major Depressive Disorder study (sponsored by the Usona Institute), and took all the online and over-the-phone assessments, passing them easily. The primary investigator (PI) on my study was Dr. Stephen Ross, who had been leading psychedelic research at NYU for more than a decade. Amazingly, I made it into the trial within a month and a half, learning that I’d actually beat out 8500 other applicants for just 100 spots nationwide.
Trying Not to Hope
When I first entered the trial, I was in a state of denial about how severe my depression was, but once I took the MADRS assessment, there was no avoiding that I had moderate to severe depression with suicidal ideation.
I remember a specific moment very well during this process, when I was finally cleared to enter the study and the study coordinator was speaking with me about the results of my assessment and my upcoming participation. I asked what would happen if I didn’t receive psilocybin during my session, and he reassured me that they would not just drop me off in the middle of the ocean to dog paddle – that there were other interventions and studies available and they would be sure to find me something, but there was a good chance I would receive psilocybin and hopefully get some good results. At this point, my mask cracked a little bit and some protective cynicism came out, and I quipped with a bit of a shrug: “Well, we’ll see.” I hadn’t meant it to be dismissive or sarcastic but it came out that way, and the conversational atmosphere rapidly shifted. He looked right at me and suddenly he wasn’t the primary investigator anymore, lost in the myriad details and logistics of a very involved study. Now he was the deeply experienced clinician and therapist, and, having heard something within the tone of my voice, dropped all the way in and asked softly: “What’s going on behind that, Court?” Suddenly, all the masking dropped and there was no more place to hide because I was so, so tired at this point, and had been waiting for this moment. In and out of therapy for years, dozens if not 100 self-help books, so many modalities, so many somatic systems, and here I was with a chance for something new to help me. When I realized why there was cynicism behind my statement, my voice cracked, I started crying, and I answered him: “Trying not to hope.”
The one glimmer of hope I did have was reading a 2018 paper by lead author Calvin Ly describing psychedelics’ neuroplastic activity in the prefrontal cortex. As someone who had studied the neurology of pain for years, this was revelatory. Many pain conditions are, in fact, nociplastic or noxious conditions arising out of the central nervous system (CNS); there’s no more injury or damage if there ever was, but your CNS is still continuing to put out a maladaptive alarm signal that is perceived as pain. So learning that psilocybin was creating actual structural change within my cortex – not “just” psychological change – was completely astonishing.
Applications close on March 26 for this year’s edition of Vital.
My dosing date was on March 5, 2020, and I remember looking down at the capsule sitting in the cup, saying to it: “I really hope that’s you.” I was terrified inwardly that I would receive the placebo, that I wouldn’t respond to the psilocybin, or that it would only work just a little bit, only for its effects to slowly fade. But within half an hour, there was no denying that I had received psilocybin, and I earnestly pursued all the procedures everyone on my care team at NYU had worked with me on for weeks in preparation for this day.
I was genuinely shocked at the sheer volume of psychological material from my childhood and early adulthood that came up. I had profound transpersonal experiences and healing, revisiting instances that were pivotal in my childhood. I had an encounter with the first woman I had ever loved, who had committed suicide three years after we had broken up. Her death had caused a profound grief in me that drove my drinking for a decade after. I thought I had released the majority of my grief around her once I got sober, but clearly, there was so much more to heal that had been deeply suppressed as I tried to move forward with my life.
Reset, Renewed, and Reborn
The biggest shock of all, though, was waiting for me at the end of the day when one of my facilitators casually pitched a seemingly routine question while closely watching me out of the corner of his eye: “So, how do you feel?” Without thinking, I reflexively replied, “Good,” but then, just as reflexively, scanned more deeply inward, and in a sudden rush, realized my depression was completely gone – not just better, but vanquished, exclaiming: “Good! That fast? Are you fucking kidding me, that fast? Is it gone already?”
It felt as if a huge mass had been surgically removed from me or as if an entire continent within my interior was now suddenly revealed. No matter how many times you read the word “remission” and the percentages behind it in scientific studies, very little will prepare you for the shocking reality of it. The contrast between before and after was profound. All of the iterative rumination was gone, and it took no effort for that to happen. And it only seemed to strengthen as the days passed. Miraculously, all suicidal thoughts ceased on that day and never returned.
Shockingly, only ten days after my dosing session, NYC went into a complete pandemic lockdown, my entire industry closed, and my two young boys were now at home with me 24/7, tele-learning. I cannot imagine what 2020 would have been like for me if I had received the placebo. It’s almost unimaginable.
For more on this topic, make sure to check out episode 369, where Court and Joe interview Timothy Furnish, MD & Joel Castellanos, MD of UC San Diego’s Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative (PHRI).
But here is where the story takes an even more profound and impactful turn. During the session, my leg started intensely tremoring/spasming. I had been evaluated for musculoskeletal pain and dysfunction that I had acquired through a host of injuries over the years of my performance career, and in fact, had just been in the doctor’s office a few months earlier trying to determine if I had arthritis or something worse. But right there in the session room, I started having a neurological revision, with my muscles and nerves in my right inner thigh firing in an effort to recalibrate the sensory and motor inputs and outputs in that part of my kinetic chain. It was almost like a self-generated TENS unit (Transdermal Electromagnetic Nerve Stimulation, used to generate muscle contractions and neuromodulate pain signals with micro-electric pulses) getting my leg back online by creating intense motor activity in the muscles of my thigh.
I’ve since spoken with spinal injury survivor Jim Harris and read a case series from UC San Diego’s Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative (PHRI) published in PAIN Journal where the exact same thing occurred to them under the effect of psilocybin with the same positive results, but at the time, the facilitators were concerned enough to ask the primary investigator to come and evaluate me during the session. I had to explain to him, somewhat hilariously as I was going into my peak, that, in fact, the tremors felt intensely good. I’m grateful that he let them continue because it has made all the difference.
While I partially understood what had happened, I was understandably beyond eager to learn more, and to see where else this realization could take me: Why did this work so well? Has our understanding of chronic pain been wrong? And if psychedelics are the answer, what does treating chronic pain with psychedelics actually look like?
This is part 1 of a 2-part piece and part of a larger series on chronic pain and psychedelics. In part 2, I will dive into the research around remapping and mirror box therapy, and why my psychedelic experience seemed to be so effective.
Future articles will focus on:What is pain and what causes chronic pain, old assumptions vs. new science, the suspected mechanisms of action behind the interaction between psychedelics and pain, and best practices and safety concerns for working with psychedelics to alleviate chronic pain.
In this episode, David interviews Dr. Ben Medrano: Co-Medical Director with Nue Life, board-certified psychiatrist specializing in integrative psychiatry, and former Senior Vice President and US Medical Director of Field Trip Health.
He discusses his path to Nue Life; from growing up around mental illness, to the rave scene, to Buddhism, to his years working for the underserved in an East Harlem Assertive Community Treatment, and his biggest takeaway from that time: that the healthcare system he knew was not truly helping people. He talks about stigmatization (of some modalities like electro-shock treatment, of psychedelics, and of ketamine – which seems to be stigmatized even within the psychedelic space); his concerns that the at-home ketamine model is at risk as we make our way out of the pandemic; and how at-home ketamine can drastically reduce the cost of treatment.
Medrano tells a great story of a patient who saw incredible improvements through ketamine, and discusses some Nue Life highlights: their just-released 664 participant-study in Frontiers Psychiatry showing the safety of at-home ketamine (and that at-home is just as effective as other routes of administration); Nue Care, their model for aftercare using digital phenotyping, goals, and a scoring system (which he believes could be the new model for integrative psychiatry); and their Nue Network, which could be a solution for better education on ketamine and for granting access for patients through prescribers who typically don’t understand much about its efficacy.
Notable Quotes
“All the different interests, personalities, visions, [and] goals that are in this sort of circus of psychedelic commercialism is very necessary to understand. And for me, I think the biggest takeaway is that there is one thing that binds everybody who’s involved, and that is hope, really. I think there’s a lot of hope in this sphere.”
“The hazards of a benzodiazepine are well known, and to some extent, one might even argue that with some of these DEA-regulated substances that we do ship at home; that if we’re going to say that we need to subject ketamine to a higher standard, then we need to do it for the rest of these DEA-regulated substances, because they have very hazardous risk profiles. …I can’t help but think that there’s a little bit of …stigma [around] what it is that we’re doing.” [On an at-home ketamine patient’s success]: “He is able to get out of the house every day and enjoy the sunshine, and the way he views his trauma is at a level that I think all of us would aspire to: really, as something that has sort of made him into the man that he is today, with something really unique and powerful to offer as a human to others – rather than as a wound.”
In this Veteran’s Day episode, Joe checks in with two members of the Heroic Hearts Project: Founder and President, Jesse Gould, and Chief of Operations, Zach Riggle.
Heroic Hearts’ mission is to create a healing community that helps veterans suffering from military trauma recover and thrive through helping them gain access to psychedelic treatments, professional coaching, and ongoing peer support – and we’re always happy to have them on the podcast to remind listeners about the extremely important work they do.
Among other projects, they are currently running several studies: psilocybin for gold star wives (spouses of fallen soldiers), ayahuasca for combat veterans, and ibogaine for special operations veterans through the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School’s Center for Psychedelic Research & Therapy; a study with the University of Georgia on personality change through psychedelics; a gut microbiome study with University of Colorado Boulder; and a psilocybin for head trauma study through Imperial College London. And today, they released the short film, “It’s Time – A Documentary of Veterans and Pro Athletes Seeking Healing Through Psychedelics.”
Gould and Riggle discuss the growth in interest and acceptance in psychedelics they’ve seen over the last few years; the importance of people telling their stories; relative trauma and how people too often wait to seek help; how trauma isn’t always due to a single event; Colorado’s Proposition 122 (which passed!); the need to have standard measurements in psychedelic studies; and how people who go through trauma together can heal together.
Notable Quotes
“At what point do we ask for help? I think, just as a society, we feel like things have to be in full-on crisis before we need to seek some sort of assistance. And we want to put [it] out there that that doesn’t have to be the case – that if you’re able to look at your life and realize that there may be some areas where things could improve and you might need some help in improving them, then don’t be afraid to reach out, because we’re not going to turn you away.” -Zach
“In the standard medical world, the physicians [or] the psychologists are looking at that qualifying incident and trying to heal that, trying to address that. And there’s some things that are pretty effective …but they’re working largely on that single incident, and ignoring all the other things that may have happened over time. And that’s where psychedelics can be so beneficial, is that they address that whole issue with a full system reset.” -Zach
“You take a population that largely (due to their illness) has been isolating, pushing everyone away, and just sitting back and looking at how amazing everyone else’s life is while theirs continues to deteriorate. Well, we plug them back into a community, bring them in, and help them to heal together. That’s a powerful thing to realize: that communities that were traumatized together; they heal better together.” -Zach
In this episode, Kyle interviews Dr. Steven Radowitz: Medical Director at Nushama, a wellness center in New York City primarily offering IV ketamine, with a strong focus on letting the experiencer explore their journey undisturbed.
Recorded in-person at Nushama’s flagship location just over a year after opening, Radowitz talks about his past and why he became interested in ketamine, the look and feel of Nushama, their process, and why they favor IV ketamine. He highlights his biggest takeaways from the year: the surprise in just how effective ketamine has been; the role of integration and what aftercare truly looks like; and the importance of learning to hold space and be a compassionate listener – that the doctor isn’t the healer and the psychedelic isn’t the magic bullet cure; instead, they are just tools that allow the patients to heal themselves.
He discusses how he sees psychedelics as a dimmer switch for the ego; how disorders are tools to deal with trauma; why he is reframing trauma as a learning experience; why he thinks ketamine will survive once psilocybin and MDMA are legal; why group work is so effective and powerful (and likely the new model for psychedelic therapy); and the importance of staying humble through all of this – humble to the power of the medicine and humble to the amazing capacity for people to heal and grow, simply by being allowed to explore their journey and be heard.
Notable Quotes
“I’m not a healer, and I often tell people [that] during their preparation, when I do my medical intake. I talk to them about that. I say, ‘I’m not here [to heal you], I’m here just giving you a tool. You’re the healer. All this stuff does is [that it] just takes away what’s blocking you from realizing that. It’s like a dimmer switch on the ego [and] on the mind.” “I’m trying to move away from the word ‘trauma.’ It’s a difficult life event that’s there to teach us. It’s there for something. And with every one of those events; there’s a little jewel within it, but you have to go in there and go through it. And it’s just a cloud, just a myst, almost, that’s preventing you. Just push [through it] and hold space. As long as people are in a safe place to go there and journey there, then they’ll realize that it’s just an event. It’s just an experience, and you move on. That wisdom is: a memory without the emotion.”
“I think any type of journey work, any type of psychedelic work, I almost think you have to be called to it in a way. You shouldn’t be coerced, ever, into this. …I find that the ones that are really ready to do the work are finding us on our own.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews Dr. Jennifer Montjoy: Tucson, Arizona-based psychiatric nurse practitioner with a private practice specializing in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and Medical & Research Director at TRIPP (Transpersonal Research Institute of Psychotherapeutic Psychedelics); a 501(c)(3) organization that provides psychedelic training and research opportunities largely for female and BIPOC scientists.
A Vital student introduced Kyle to Montjoy’s research on ketamine and PTSD and presented with her at the recent ICPR conference in Amsterdam, where this was recorded in-person (as Kyle and Johanna were there, representing Psychedelics Today). Montjoy talks about her protocol, the self-transcendent scale she’s using with clients pre- and post- induction, how ketamine can help people get over past trauma through shifts in emotional memory, and what she sees most in successful cases: a gradual shift toward self-agency.
She discusses how integral titration is to her process; how ACE (adverse childhood experience) scores work; how dissociation can help with childhood trauma; how clients often naturally fall into using Internal Family Systems to describe their process; and how physicians and therapists shouldn’t be afraid of the concept of ceremony and opening sessions with intention – and, as she likes to say, giving one’s mind coordinates on where it can end up.
Notable Quotes
“I do think it’s helpful to have a skillset and general understanding of that so you know what’s happening in real time, but for the most part, I subscribe to the philosophy that we all have an inner healer. We all have that inner wisdom, but most of us don’t have access to it because we have these managing protectors from our trauma.”
“Often [for the] opening, I’ll ask the higher self to step into the light, to take the reins and let all those parts know that the goal here is not to annihilate or bypass them. That’s the language I consistently use in opening, because as the facilitator, we want to align with those parts too. We’re not the enemy.”
“Don’t be afraid to incorporate ‘ceremony.’ …I think that makes a lot of physicians maybe uncomfortable; that idea. [But] opening and closing [the ceremony] can be very helpful tools, [and] making sure we’re asking about intention before each session. I call that the coordinates, because we want to give the unconscious mind the coordinates.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Christopher Dawson & Andrew Galloway: Co-Founders and CEO and COO, respectively, of Dimensions; a Canadian-based company creating retreats that blend traditional plant ceremonies with neuroscience and a luxurious, five-star environment.
Dawson realized what so many people were starting to learn about psychedelics after attending a 2015 conference in Peru that mixed neuroscientists with traditional healers, but for Galloway, it was direct experience, as he gives credit to plant medicines for helping him to heal from a 6-year addiction to crack cocaine. They each tell their story and how it led to the beginnings of Dimensions, where they worked for a year with a “Dreamlab” team of MDs, psychiatrists, practitioners from different fields, and even a design agency to create different programs for different substances – all with a focus on true set and setting and integrating perfectly with nature. They’re in the middle of a soft launch right now, offering cannabis in a ceremonial, group setting context to friends and families at their Algonquin Highlands location; perfecting everything before opening up to the general public. And once the law catches up with them, they hope to offer psilocybin and other psychedelic-assisted therapy across several new retreat locations.
They talk about Health Canada and the country’s trajectory towards legal psychedelics; critiques of traditional addiction treatment and the efficacy of 12-step programs; the tension between the psychedelic space and traditional healing space; investing in biotech; the polyvagal theory; how animals deal with trauma (and how we don’t); and the concept of integration: If you’re just taking a pill and not doing the work, are you missing the point entirely?
Notable Quotes
“We’re biased (we’re in the retreat business), but I don’t think that psilocybin, as an example, should be reduced to a pill that you take with your juice in the morning and you no longer take your SSRI because this is your new pill. For us, it’s the psychedelic-assisted therapy that actually maximizes the potential of the psychedelic experience, and that’s the mechanisms through which fundamental, behavioral change can take place. I think the idea that a pill can replace all of that means that you’re kind of missing the point about the whole experience.” -Chris “I don’t want to slam traditional treatment because it actually did work for me to some degree. …I had a crack-cocaine addiction for six-seven years and ended up in rehab for six months and came back and participated in 12-step programs and remained abstinent. That part worked. The difference for me when I got involved with plant medicine was something else: I got healed. Instead of just abstaining and not using to cope or to manage with whatever I was dealing with, I actually healed through plant medicine.” -Andrew “Is it a pill or is it the therapeutic process? If you don’t engage in integration, then you’re just taking a pill.” -Chris
“We talked about stigma earlier; it’s changing, and [for] the general public, the stigma around the war on drugs is changing too. I think people have finally figured out that it doesn’t work. No war works. We only declare war on things that we can make money from.” -Andrew
Christopher Dawson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dimensions, a growing collection of retreat destinations combining neuroscientific research with plant ceremony in immersive natural environments. Prior to co-founding Dimensions, Christopher was the founder and CEO of Edgewood Health Network, where he oversaw the largest private network of residential/outpatient treatment providers in Canada and led the merger and acquisition of Canada’s top three treatment centers to create that network.
About Andrew Galloway
Andrew Galloway is the Co-Founder and COO of Dimensions, a new paradigm for healing, combining ancient ceremonial plant medicines with modern science in safe, legal, and nurturing natural environments. He leads the organization’s clinical teams and operations for Dimensions Retreats, a new collection of immersive, transformational healing retreats combining neuroscientific research with plant ceremony and luxurious hospitality. Prior to co-founding Dimensions, he was a National Director of Edgewood Health Network; leading 10 outpatient centers. Andrew was the former VP at GreeneStone Muskoka, an international certified alcohol and drug counsellor, and has 14 years of experience working directly for the NHL/NHLPA substance abuse program.
Shannon feels that the majority of people who are interested in (and could benefit from) psychedelics would prefer that their experience be as close to a conventional medical setting as possible. And especially with the risks of rogue practitioners, licensing boards want to see predictability, uniformity, regulation, and (perhaps most importantly) that we as a psychedelic culture are placing importance on being accountable and self-governing. He wants to establish a certification process that’s standard enough that which medicine the patient is using will become secondary.
He discusses what the certification process will likely look like; why uniformity is so important; the challenges of respecting and integrating Indigenous traditions into a medical model that’s drastically different; what people should look for in psychedelic education; and the importance of breaking from a siloed and hierarchical model into one that’s cross-disciplinary, where professionals of all types can work together for the betterment of the patient.
Notable Quotes
“The premise of the certification board is that we’re trying to certify a process …of medication-assisted, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy that looks at integration [and] prep, that looks at set and setting, that looks at the sacred container of this relationship; and that we build that, and that is the core of it, and the medications become a little bit secondary. We can bring ketamine in, we can bring DMT in, we can bring psilocybin [in], [and] we can bring MDMA in; because these medications, frankly, they’re not really chemically-related or that similar, but what’s similar is the process that patients go through with them.” “There’s always the question of: ‘How do I get training?’ …The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative just did a survey of the field of education and found that there are now over 50 providers of psychedelic education, and four years ago, there might have been a handful. But someone coming [up]: What do they do? ‘How much do I need to study?’ These things are expensive. It’s confusing. So we want to create a clear, professional path [where] someone says: ‘I’m going to step into this and do this as a career. Here’s what I need to do? Good. I can do that.’”
Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honor’s thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s. Following medical school, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a Psychiatry residency at a Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico. Scott has published four books on holistic and integrative mental health including the first textbook for this field in 2001. He founded Wholeness Center in 2010 with a group of aligned professionals to create innovation in collaborative mental health care.
Scott is a past President of the American Holistic Medical Association and a past President of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine. He serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He has also published numerous articles about his research on cannabidiol (CBD) in mental health. Scott founded the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI) to train professionals in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and deliver clinically relevant studies. Scott co-founded the Board of Psychedelic Medicine and Therapies in 2021 and currently serves as the CEO for this non-profit public benefit corporation. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues and a paradigm shifting perspective about transformative care.
In this episode, Joe interviews Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and certified sex therapist, Courtney Watson. In just two years’ time, Watson grew from “Psychedelics are white people drugs” to opening a ketamine clinic to serve the marginalized communities she comes from. She shares the work she is doing through Access To Doorways; her Oakland-based non-profit whose mission is to bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to queer, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, Black, Indigenous, people of color, and two spirit communities.
This discussion is all over the map, from the platform of African traditional religion through the prospect of trauma healing for white supremacists, across BIPOC erasure in psychedelic research studies, and down into the realms of connecting to the spirit of entheogens from our pasts. Watson waxes on Black resilience; Hoodoo; how ALL plants are entheogenic; how conceptualization and talk in the psychedelic space often falls short of real action; ancestral veneration and ways to connect with one’s ancestral past; andthe concept of “spirit-devoid” synthesized compounds actually being the evolution of those plants’ spirits. She breaks down thoughtful considerations for queer and trans people in the psychedelic space, pointing out that while our society places too much emphasis on gender and sex, the acknowledgement of gender diversity and tearing down of the myths of hetero- and cisnormativity is hugely important. She believes that true access to these medicines can lead to true healing, which leads to love, justice, and actual equality. You can support Access to Doorways by making a donation here.
Notable Quotes
“Our people will talk to us. They will guide us. They will direct us. Especially for folks that don’t have ancestral practices in their day to day and haven’t had for generations; ancestors are starving for attention. They’re like, ‘Thank God you see us!’ Give them some light, give them some love, give them some attention, and they will open roads for you in all sorts of ways that you never knew were possible.“
“I think we also place way too much emphasis on gender and sex in this culture in this way that ends up stigmatizing the fact that there is gender diversity. …Holding all of this knowledge that heteronormativity is a thing and cisnormativity is a thing, and that these are not the default when we’re working with trans folks and folks that do not identify as heterosexual – that is really important.” “Healing could actually help shift what’s happening. It can help turn things in the ways that they need to be turned; in the ways towards love, towards justice, towards actual equality. It’s only when we are healed that we can actually do that; 1) because we have enough energy to be able to do that, but also because we have enough vision and foresight to be able to do that. The clarity of what it means to actually love only comes when we are healed.“
“There’s a lot of conversations, there’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of conceptualizations, there’s a lot of dreams. But there’s not a lot of action. …So many people get stuck in the conceptualizing piece of it and the philosophizing piece of it that action gets missed. Access to Doorways is action. With $7000, we have given 4 subsidies. I know people that have raised ten times more than us and have not done that much. It is completely about doing what we say that we’re doing. It is completely about action towards healing.”
Courtney Watson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AASECT Certified Sex therapist. She is the owner of Doorway Therapeutic Services, a group therapy practice in Oakland, CA focused on addressing the mental health needs of Black, Indigenous & People of Color, Queer folks, Trans, Gender Non-conforming, Non binary and Two Spirit individuals. Courtney has followed the direction of her ancestors to incorporate psychedelic-assisted therapy into her offerings for folks with multiple marginalized identities and stresses the importance of BIPOC and Queer providers offering these services. Courtney has received training from the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at CIIS, MAPS, and Polaris Insight Center to provide psychedelic-assisted therapy with a variety of medicines. She is deeply interested in the impact of psychedelic medicines on folks with marginalized identities as well as how they can assist with the decolonization process for folks of the global majority. She believes this field is not yet ready to address the unique needs of Communities of Color and is prepared and enthusiastic about bridging the gap. She is currently blazing the trail as one of the only clinics of predominantly QTBIPOC providers offering ketamine -assisted therapy in 2021. She has founded a non-profit, Access to Doorways, to raise funds to subsidize the cost of ketamine/psychedelic-assisted therapy for QTBIPOC clients (now accepting donations!!!). When not in the office seeing clients or in meetings for the businesses she leads, she’s watching Nickelodeon with her kids, kinda working on her dissertation and more than likely taking a nap!
In this episode, David interviews one of the biggest names in psychedelics and someone we haven’t had on the show until now; Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Rick Doblin, Ph.D.
MAPS has recently been at the center of media scrutiny, notably through the New York magazine‘s “Cover Story” podcast series, which chronicled instances of alleged sexual abuse within the MAPS clinical MDMA trials. Since reporting on this issue has largely called into question the design of MAPS’ clinical trials, data reporting, quality control, and claims around the efficacy of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD, we wanted to provide an opportunity for Doblin to respond to these very real concerns – and he does just that.
He discusses how MAPS reacted, what could have been done better, what it has all meant for the non-profit, and how it feels to now be considered the enemy by many in a space MAPS helped build. He addresses the concerns of sessions ending too soon (highlighting how that may suggest a desire for additional therapy) and asks anyone who has participated in a MAPS trial to complete a long-term follow-up survey so the organization can improve their process and ensure their data is as accurate and robust as possible.
He also discusses what the post-approval psychedelic landscape could look like; their goals for facilitator training and how they align with requirements in Oregon; their desire for a patient registry or “global trauma index”; and the importance of collecting and analyzing real-world evidence. And he talks about MAPS and their globalization goals: how exploring psychedelic therapy specifically in countries with little to no tradition of psychotherapy can lead to new therapeutic models. Rather than exploring areas where there is guaranteed revenue, they are seeking areas that are high in trauma instead – to bring these medicines where they are most needed.
Notable Quotes
“I think you can have solutions that go too far. The podcast people put out a solution, saying that there should be no touch in therapy. …They’ve also said that [our] studies should be shut down and that we need experts to think about this for years. I think that kind of thinking is out of balance with the amount of suffering that seems to actually be alleviated.”
“The more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal.”
“We’re really wanting to bring this to the police, [and] we’ve done a lot of work with veterans. The breakthrough that we’re still looking forward to one day would be to treat the first active duty soldier. So far, it’s only been veterans, but if we can treat active duty soldiers, I think that would be [great]. The closer you can treat people to the trauma, probably the better.”
“Even though we’re focused on MDMA and there’s all these other things for MDMA, really, what we’re doing is opening the door to psychedelic medicine. So what we want, ideally, is therapists to be cross-trained with MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, whatever. And then the psychedelic clinics of the future will not be: ‘Here’s a ketamine clinic, here’s [an] MDMA clinic, here’s a psilocybin clinic.’ It will be psychedelic clinics, and the therapists will be cross-trained and they’ll customize a treatment program for each individual patient with any number of different kinds of psychedelics at different times in a sequence.”
Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. He also conducted a 34-year follow-up study to Timothy Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment. Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof and was among the first to be certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife, with three children who have all left the nest.
In this episode, David interviews Clinical Psychologist and Founder of the Psychedelic Society of Vermont, Dr. Rick Barnett, PsyD.
Barnett discusses the importance of building community in psychedelic spaces; psychedelic experiences as preventative medicine, and the differences between (and value within) the sanitized medical model and more ritualistic experiences. He talks about his own personal journey with addiction and recovery and looks at the interrelation between trauma, addiction, trust, and how psychedelics operate as disruptors – with a sense of meaning and purpose.
He discusses many of the current clinical trials happening around psychedelics and addiction; Alcoholics Anonymous and LSD; Vermont’s developing decriminalization bill (Measure H.644); the psychiatric workforce shortage and the potential solution of more prescribing psychologists; and, considering Oregon’s budding psilocybin therapy model, points out that one doesn’t need to be a licensed clinical practitioner with specific schooling to be a good psychedelic facilitator. Could we instead build models that are based largely on competency?
The Psychedelic Society of Vermont is putting on the Psychedelic Science & Spirituality Summit on the summer solstice (June 20-21) in Stowe, VT, with the goal of holding space for both the scientific and spiritual side of psychedelia. The conference is specifically for healthcare professionals, but all others are welcome to virtually attend or come to the summer solstice celebration after the conference. For more info, head to vermontpsychedelic.org.
Notable Quotes
“I had several profound experiences with LSD when I was a kid, and when I crashed and burned on alcohol and wound up in a 12-step rehab (the Hazelden Foundation), I quickly recognized that my experiences with LSD made me extremely receptive to the message that was being put forth to me in a 12-step-oriented rehab program. Concepts like surrender and a connection to spirituality, a connection to open-mindedness, willingness, being honest with oneself, taking one’s inventory – these kinds of concepts that are so common in 12-step programs – they resonated so strongly with me because of my experiences with LSD.”
“We have the ability to instill a sense of trust with our patients, and they can begin to trust themselves, and to trust the therapist, and to review some of these old hurts and really get into it over the course of therapy in a way that’s very healing. So it can happen with therapy, and I don’t think one is necessarily a substitute for the other. I think [psychedelics and therapy] work very well together. Psychedelics are yet another tool, just like therapy is a tool, just like AA is a tool, just like Suboxone and Methadone are tools. They’re all tools, and it’s really important to respect and honor that each one brings something positive, potentially, for an individual.”
“An AA program, a harm reduction program, a therapy program, a psychedelic program, [a] meditation retreat: All these things provide a nudge, and potentially a very transformative nudge in the direction of like, ‘Okay, and then what?’ What are you doing in your daily life? …That ‘assisted’ part is not just assisted by a therapist. It’s not just assisted by a drug. It’s not just assisted by a shaman or an integration coach. It’s assisted by everything.”
Dr. Rick Barnett, Psy.D., is the Co-Founder of the Psychedelic Society of Vermont, the Legislative Chair and Past-President of the Vermont Psychological Association, the founder of the non-profit organization, CARTER, Inc., and is a clinical psychologist and addiction specialist in private practice in Stowe, VT. Dr. Barnett has worked as a Clinical Psychologist in nursing homes, hospitals, and outpatient programs, and has trained hundreds of health professionals through workshops on addiction and mental health issues over the past 20 years. He is in long-term recovery of alcohol and substance abuse and is an active advocate for addiction treatment and recovery resources. Dr. Barnett holds a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia University, a Doctorate and Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychopharmacology. He is a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor and holds certificate in Problematic Sexual Behavior (PSB-S) and Gambling Disorder.
