How to prepare for a psychedelic journey

welcome back to psychedelic therapy Frontiers the podcast devoted to exploring the frontiers of psychedelic medicine and what it takes to cultivate a healthy mind body and spirit I'm Dr Steve Thayer and today my co-host Dr Reed Robinson and I talk about how one might prepare for a psychedelic Journey we discussed the four domains of preparation the importance of intention setting share some stories from the trenches and of course much much more as this customary I want to thank all of you who have left us reviews in places like apple podcasts and Spotify that is the easiest and most concrete way you can support this show I want to thank everybody who's who have reached out to us via email and uh on social media folks we won't know how to make this show better if you don't tell us so feedback is much appreciated speaking of making the show better a couple episodes ago I promised that there were big changes coming to the show those changes are coming they're coming soon and we think they're going to improve the quality of the show and really deliver more value to you as a loyal listener so thank you for listening please enjoy today's episode on how to prepare for a psychedelic Journey Read's not uncommon for you or myself to get questions about how one might prepare for a psychedelic journey I feel like we get these questions on our Instagram uh I may or may not be mentioning Instagram so you go follow us on Instagram we get them via email certainly get them in clinic so we thought we've touched on a lot of these principles before in other episodes like we had a whole episode dedicated to intentions for example but we thought it might be nice to just sort of have a little condensed episode on preparing for a psychedelic Journey yeah we get asked by therapists how to prepare a client for psychedelic therapy whether they're doing a ketamine session with that therapist at an outside clinic or whether they're going off to the jungle for Ayahuasca and from clients like what do I do I signed up for this Retreat next month or next year right yeah and you know there's this this term in psychedelic therapy world called harm reduction where we have a lot of people who also will just ask us hey I got some mushrooms from a friend and I really want to have this psychedelic Journey what are some things I ought to know and as licensed Mental Health Providers medical providers we don't encourage the use of illicit substances but if I have a client or a friend who's going to do this I want to make sure I do whatever I can with knowledge that I have to reduce potential harm yeah and that is even though I much prefer looking at it in a positive light just personally like the harm reduction term I think has so much importance in the World At Large but when you're consciously picking or deciding to go on a journey like I think then it's really uh conscious preparation even though the goals are the same like part of your preparation is to minimize risk maximize outcomes get ready for the experience um but yeah I think there's overlap in those two School those two camps for sure yeah and I'll be transparent that that statement about harm reduction is a little cya like you know these a lot of these substances depending on where you live in the planet are illegal um I don't think they should be I'm a cognitive Liberty Advocate I think people should have the right to alter Consciousness if they choose um and I think uh like we often talk about on this podcast psychedelics have the potential to be very very transformative for people healing in one in some ways uh creativity boosting in other ways but like we'll talk about today um they can also be disruptive to people and not everyone should use them and your preparation matters with something like this so uh disclaimers abound but uh I think the content will be useful nonetheless yeah preparation matters it does it's it's probably along with integration of course one of the most overlooked or rushed parts of the experience even in today's world of psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy structure being you know more and more commonplace within like clinics and Retreats and things um people might view it as it's my prep session or two rather than long-term prep of getting to know oneself um the more intermediate term prep of taking on practices to help you navigate and get ready like mindfulness breathing like fine-tuning the body and the mind and then the nearer nearer term of like unearthing your intentions as the journey approaches right yeah well let's get into it I think I was just as you were talking I was remembering but a friend of mine from the Air Force psychiatrist buddy of mine from the Air Force he was in the office next to me at Barksdale we had a lot of good times together but suffered together too um he texted me out of the blue and said hey man I don't I know you're into this psychedelic stuff but I am getting so many of my patients asking me about microdosing asking me about going off their ssris or can they go to this psilocybin retreat in Jamaica or can I go do Ayahuasca in Costa Rica and still be on their ssris like what's going on point point me to a resource there are a lot of good resources out there but just to kind of highlight again the I think the need for good psychedelic education and you bring up another good point is preparing for a journey might involve tapering off medicines that could interfere or be unsafe along with the Psychedelic medicine for example and doing that over many months for example right now right okay so let's let's try to structure the conversation here around preparation um when I think of the domains of psychedelic preparation I think of at least four right there's physical prep we can talk about that involves psychological and a prep um spiritual prep and social prep there's I'm sure there are many more categories but that's just kind of the way I organize it in my mind um any additions or subtractions to that list do you think no I I like uh I like it so psychological prep um I think about you know your or we still I started physical let's start with physical so you mentioned um the medicines being something that you might need to consider like what medicines are you on psychotropics or otherwise that might may or may not interfere with the medicine or be contraindicated with what psychedelic you're you choose to use or you're going to use um but also just preparing your body like what what's yours what are your sleep habits like what are your um nutrition habits like what are your physical movement Habits Like are you seeing a body worker to help you with the knots and Kinks and energetic dams are you addicted to caffeine and might the shaman or medicine team ask you to stop that for a few days surrounding the ceremony and if so what what would that be like right I've seen many people go into their their Journeys with an unfortunate headache for that reason right yeah um yeah even though there are lots of nuances to that and ways to navigate it but but I think it's a good example of physical prep another one that comes to mind is uh I remember being in uh an ayahuasca ceremony once with um a bunch of tight male dudes who couldn't sit still because their hips were so tight and they'd never done yoga in their life and they had to squirm and it was highly distracting to them and it made me remember this idea that like the Buddha once he left the kingdom and started on this path a rumor has it Legend has it that he did a bunch of yoga in order to be able to sit still long enough to actually attain enlightened States and I think the same applies to ceremony like can you sit still long enough yeah I was thinking um for some of these psychedelic ceremonies uh your physical limitations could as you're stating could really limit the potential uh for the experience that you have because some of these psychedelic ceremonies are physically arduous like you hear about Ayahuasca in particular or we had that episode on ibogaine and for some people their psilocybin experiences involve trembling and tightness and changes of position and purging and um yeah they can be physically challenging so it makes sense to be physically prepared and being limber is one of those things but being in good cardiac health probably good too yeah practicing breathing you know just just learning to uh tune into the breath as an anchor during difficult times like sitting in meditation is a good practice doing breath work is its own Journey that we could talk about but yeah and we have talked about but um there are certain key practices like meditating mindfulness uh you know ability to be with your body in an experience like that yeah yeah that's that's popping my mind for physical prep is and there are overlaps between these four categories but um getting to know your body like inhabiting your body being entuned and embodied like we've talked about in other episodes as well but like getting getting really really acquainted with when I experience this thought or this feeling it manifests in this way in my body like where how are those things connected because you're going to experience your body in different ways typically on a psychedelic medicine and so it helps it helps to know what uh what your body's all about last month when I went out of the country for a ceremony we had some preparation from an elder in the blackfeet tribe who gave this really great metaphor that I'll never forget and has already proven very useful is the idea that um in your head it gets a little bit chaotic and he used the tree analogy it gets windy up there in the branches and the leaves uh remember to come back down to the trunk where it's more solid um and uh yeah just such a simple way to remember to get out of the head into the heart into the body into the embodied experience because that is your greatest resource for navigating the yeah like a wild psychedelic Journey it's just um think of all the resources we have by being embodied Beyond just the breath like yeah yeah it's so I love that metaphor did you hear words like grounding and anchoring I mean they all sort of uh create this image of coming down and being stable yeah climb back down one of my favorite guided meditations uh to use in preparation for a psychedelic experience involves imagining your feet as you sort of feel your feet and contacting the ground um sort of growing tendrils of energy Roots down and into the Earth all the way to the Earth's core just feeling connected to the Earth and then um out the top of your head other sort of energy and tendrils go into the cosmos and you're just this Nexus point between being grounded on the earth and connected to perspective out into the universe yeah I love that that grounding is so so crucial now because one of the biggest fears people have during a psychedelic experience is well losing one's mind losing oneself dying never returning back to home base to like normal waking reality and uh yeah being able to ground or have that ground control skill is is crucial for being able to actually surrender into the experience it's a good segue into the psychological category I think of preparation because one of the things that people um often struggle with is fear and resistance and anxiety when it comes especially if it's their first altered state experience yeah and fear often leads to resistance like when we're scared of something we don't want to we want it to be away from it or for it to go away from us and oftentimes in a psychedelic experience if what is presented to you or where you find yourself if you resist or if you try to control that's when it turns distressing or people have those quote unquote bad trips what you resist persists what's another saying there's got to be a a catchy one about what you persist turns into a scary monster or interface during a journey all right it reminds me of the Harry Potter thing I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan but there's some scene in in those movies uh where they're dealing with a um like a little creature that turns into whatever they fear and one of the ways they deal with that is they laugh at it like they they make but in order to do that they have to embrace it they have to allow its presence right yeah you need to get to know and befriend your fears you get to you've got to ideally during preparation do a lot of work on getting to know yourself including the resistances that will likely come up when faced with this difficult task of Letting Go like what do you hold on to in day-to-day life yeah I think that's one of the most useful forms of psychological preparation is getting to know your triggers um really following those triggers all the way down to you could call it trigger mapping right just sort of mapping all the triggers that you can all the way down to their roots there's an idea I like that's a question I'm still sitting with year after year is like I once read that Enlightenment is following one thing through all the way to the end and what you said about triggers makes me think of that like getting to know your trigger triggers her friends to follow right the obstacle is the path and following it to its origin if if you can connect it to the earliest time in your life when you felt that way or other contributing factors to why does you know someone honking the horn at me cause this reaction in my body or why did I have this hysterical reaction to someone's like innocent little comment yeah there's lots of um talk around self-awareness and what I think there are some assumptions about what self-awareness actually means that are probably wrong but what you just described sounds like if there is real self-awareness that's at least part of it that being able to follow what manifested in you what was triggered not your triggers but to follow what was triggered all the way back to its origin story or to where it began to its origin um man that is powerful self-awareness and there are people listening to this right now going like cool how I don't I don't get that like when something's triggered it's just I just feel crappy but you kind of gave us a hint when you said think of the earliest time in your life yeah when you felt something like this because it probably started when you were young yeah I've I've done this um practice with countless people before Journeys ketamine and other things it was in fact part of our protocol and that ketamine study we did um of like an emotion focused approach to cap where before the session we would do a process of self-exploration of thinking of a recent trigger tracing it back in a meditative guided way to the earliest time you felt that way and looking at your unmet needs at the time how it felt remembering the scene but then you're drawing this bridge like oh wow The Compassion that rushes in as you get some awareness of why you just reacted to this little trigger that might have otherwise otherwise be embarrassing or you might have some self-criticism around that you just drew this compassionate bridge and created a new narrative around uh like oh that's why and that's how awareness is half the battle now I can heal it yeah and I feel like if you can do what you just described and bring that into a psychedelic medicine Journey um you're probably going to increase the likelihood that healing happens like that kind of pre-work that kind of Preparatory work for a psychedelic experience is game changing yeah what triggers you what do you resist like what do you avoid and what are you afraid of like yeah I think one form of preparation in addition to what you're talking about is to practice being in um in the presence of your triggers yeah so I mean we've talked about it before or at least references referenced it before you you can just practice being in the presence of discomfort like you can do the cold plunge or the sauna or breath holds um you can go on a strenuous hike just surrendering yourself to discomfort is a great way to practice for what might show up in a psychedelic experience that could involve a lot of discomfort like practice what's it like to just oh I don't like being cold I'm going to sit here with my put my best mindfulness hat on and just notice being cold yeah it's interesting to look to reflect on how I viewed these triggers or uncomfortable situations a year ago several years ago and how I seek them out now like whether it's cold plunge or a practice like sananga those eye drops that burn your eyes for a minute or two like unpleasant to say the least yeah unpleasant before I did them I was like like well like why the heck would I do that but now I'm like when's the next chance I get to do sonanga and have my eyeballs feel like they're burning so I can practice surrender and I think the reason is because it's coming so handy in day-to-day life the ability to sit with the discomfort is done more to help me grow and navigate life than anything I can think of in this moment we talk a lot about that from this perspective from this Eastern perspective of equanimity and mindfulness but I'm also reminded of the science on grit and perseverance people like Angela Duckworth and um but that is one of the characteristics of resilience and grit is this phenomenon of being present to your discomfort without engaging in any kind of avoidance I brought a a bottle of sananga from four Visions Marketplace shout out non-sponsored great organization um purveyors of good hot base from the Amazon for example but I brought it in my fanny pack on a hike to uh it's now called kiv peak in Provo up Rock Canyon Park and then had uh Hannah sanaga Shaman me at the top of the mountain which was uh it was a fun practice it's kind of yeah just to uh yeah and then there are other reasons people do it for like you know that surrender practice uh helps you really be present like then you have this Clarity this presence this Clairvoyance if you will yeah yeah it's amazing what what becomes clear when you are very present and there's nothing like discomfort when you surrender to it to bring you into the immediate moment yeah so preparing for your journey and look for ways to sit with discomfort go to a meditation class even if you've never been especially if you've never been because they're going to make you sit or lay there for an hour and that may not be your practice but if you go to an Ayahuasca Retreat or you fly off to the Netherlands to psilocybin ceremony you're going to be there on a mat in a seat you know maybe moving around a little but for hours yeah and if you want to do something more simple just set a timer on your phone for five minutes yeah sit and stare at a wall and pay attention to create what I call craving self so anytime you you experience the the thought the sensation the urge to do anything other than stare at the wall like oh I wonder what's you know you mindlessly reach for your phone to check a social media app or something like that or I'm kind of hungry or want to move right now you just say in your mind or out loud if you want craving self craving self you just notice it and you'll discover like a lot of what you do day to day moment to moment is an automatic habit you know habitual responding to I don't want to feel something or I do want to feel something um I love that that's a great practice um another way of moving towards triggers that I'm just thinking is uh well go to all the family dinners you can have all the Deep chats with your significant other but I mean I say it playfully but really there's this idea that is quite true that we are mirrors for each other and we have these blind spots that we can't see until they're reflected back at us by someone close to us close to us meaning like you might get triggered at the grocery store and you could do some processing on that but there's nothing like the container of a loving relationship in your especially your closest ones in life to see those and work on them you know and it's uh it's a beautiful way to bring stuff up during these preparation phases yeah it dovetails nicely with the other category that I mentioned the social preparation yeah um again these all overlap like I said before but I I think part of preparation is is if you can if you're lucky enough to have these people in your life like who among the people who love you and that you love could you talk to about this could you talk to about going into ceremony or Journey or could you talk to about your experience because [ __ ] gets weird when you have when you're on a psychedelic and you don't want to cast those Pearls Before Swine um you want to be really Discerning about who you share these uh what can amount to be sacred experiences with and speaking your intention or working through it your potential intentions and what you're going through helps find it and make it real especially as you're approaching it uh you know there's something special about both writing it and speaking it out loud yeah and we're going to be we've been workshopping it like if you've been a therapist or a coach or a trusted loved one hey this is why I think I'm doing this uh what do you think you know not that you should Outsource it necessarily but Workshop it I love that question I do it almost just for fun too asking people like oh what would you prescribe to me as an intention just this like because it's hard to get honest answers of like what should I work on and you gotta also take it with a giant grain of salt but it is it is really valuable to try and see yourself through others eyes especially people who know you really well um in that safe container you gave me an intention once when we were doing our uh our experiential training for our ketamine study with Phil Wolfson I remember I was asking you like I don't know and I think you suggested uh show me who I am and it was just simple and it was exactly what I wanted but I didn't know I wanted it and I took that into my ketamine experience and it was my favorite camping experience that was that was a fun story to hear about after I still I still remember it I have my own picture of it even though it looked probably different in your in your dream state yeah it was a great great example of what you were just what you just said and when I've traveled for ayahuasca ceremony I've workshopped my intentions with people that I really trust whether it's a loved one somebody like you my wife um therapists it's helped tremendously I've done the majority of the work on my own because it is my intention but yeah that helps to get feedback so one other thought um there are lots of other thoughts on Preparation but one thing that comes to mind is this idea that when you sign on to a ceremony that's when the ceremony begins like what did what did Leo zeph say it was the secret chief he was famous for saying the trip has already begun and it's pretty neat to think about like once you commit to doing a journey like whether it's a your first or 10th ketamine therapy experience a month or six months away or Ayahuasca in the jungle next year or whatever it is um something coming up soon that's when like you can start to feel the Ripple effects like because understandably your soul your psyche is anticipating the fears start to come up uh like the the soil starts to get tilled along the way so I think it's a really neat concept yeah there's a there's a stoic tunnel stoic quote that's I'm going to butcher that I heard Ryan holiday talk about he's he's trying to Market his new book um but something like if you don't have uh a destination in mind then no wind is favorable this is a shipping metaphor I guess so when you've set your your course on this psychedelic Journey all of a sudden the wind that's blowing there anyway perhaps becomes favorable it's already propelling you toward this this Ceremony this journey and the potential insights there but that's certainly been my experience with a lot of my ketamine clients is we're going through the preparation process and we're talking about intentions and they're having their preparation sessions uh a lot shows up just in the preparation phase and frankly a lot of work gets done in the preparation phase if they take it seriously yeah and I love the ship metaphor as well because like I like to look at um well all of life's the ceremony right we're preparing as we go we're integrating as we go we have these little it's punctuated by these little mystical experiences and rituals and psychedelic experiences medicine or not like life could deal you some psychedelic blow that's that's an intense trip in itself so we better be preparing but also there's this this River of Our Lives that we don't have entire control of like you basically have as much control over your over how your psychedelic journey goes as you have control over how your life goes right like you can shape it you can gently steer it um you can get your sail up and and ride that but like you don't get to pick you don't get to pick at all no yeah I like that I like comparing it to life generally because when I think back on my life like sure there are certain decisions that I made but what influenced those decisions so much context I mean there's so many dominoes that were knocked down way before I was born that ultimately led to the opportunities that were presented me to make certain decisions so I try not to freak myself out too much about this um with life or with psychedelic experiences and we'll talk in a second about surrender but yeah yeah I think it's important to keep in mind but then our preparation becomes this this attitude or this stance of uh getting ready to be shown whatever is going to be shown and then getting ready to do with it what we will instead of getting completely blindsided or reacting in some you know huge resistance or fear um that stance of surrender that the practice begins long before your ceremony yeah yeah I mean the ceremony is the preparation to essentially but uh Leo zaf just a little tangent um as I think it's a fun story of of his life he was um the secret Chief there was that book I think in the 80s that came out called the secret Chief because he was the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA and even in that book he used a pseudonym I think it was Adam something and he even called MDMA because it brought you to this return to innocence I guess but he started out as an LSD therapist um kind of pioneering this psychedelic session approach eye shades music like holding space and then um it was the Shoguns who introduced him to MDMA and he was like boom mind blown and like they say he was responsible for introducing MDMA to 4 000 therapists wow um the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA but I heard this tribute by Terence McKenna on YouTube of uh Leo's F and it was the sweetest thing like I think Terence McKenna said something like you know I've never met anyone with such kindness wisdom humor like as Leo zeph like a gentle giant and Terence said he even said to uh Leo like wherever your canoe is going I want to be on it I want to be in it with you and then Leo said something like you are always welcome in my canoe yeah so I thought it was a fun a fun tribute to him a beautiful soul yeah I love these characters that are you know these people who are um I don't know what you would call them but I guess they're characters in the story of psychedelic medicine modern psychedelic medicine there's even a quote I pulled that Leo zeph shared with Terence twice in like the six months maybe leading up to his death and I don't know I haven't even fully read it yet but we could I could read it and we could just uh see what it holds let's experience it together yeah because it's by uh um Rayna Marie rilka if I'm saying the German name right of the Epic uh writer leave your opinions their own quiet okay I'm starting over leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything is gestation and then bringing forth to let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself in the dark in the inexpressible the unconscious beyond the reach of One's Own intelligence and a weight with deep humility in patience the birth hour of new clarity that alone is living the artist's life in understanding as in creating in that there is no measuring with time no year is of any value and 10 years are as nothing being an artist means not Reckoning and counting but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that altar that after them may come no summer it does come but it only comes to the patient who are there as though eternity lay before them so unconcernedly still and wide I learn it daily learn it with pain to which I am grateful patience is everything I like that what came up for me was the balance between being patient but not idle yeah right I think when we're preparing for a psychedelic experience we're patient we're not forcing we talked about surrender the importance of Letting Go and being curious we're not idle either we're doing all this other stuff that we're talking about we're working on ourselves we're working at self-development working at self um healing and self-awareness so patience yes but don't be idle I think everything is gestation and then bringing forth I just lost my voice um yeah this is it's an amazing quote about preparation like yeah my call progress must come from deep within and can't be pressed or hurried right yeah must come from deep within so you can't force it can't press it or hurry it um can't control it I think you know is there anything we want to say specifically about intention setting along those lines because people go in I mean we do psychedelic Journeys for reasons and I think it's important for you to be thoughtful about why you're doing it and there could be a lot of different reasons why a person would engage or submit themselves to a psychedelic Journey um and I think as I said people should be clear about that is it for healing is it for problem solving is it for deep spiritual exploration and growth yeah is it just as Duncan Trussell as we heard Duncan Trussell say at meet Delica over a year ago is it just pure Hedonism for enjoyment um yeah why are you doing it that might be someone's intention I think that's a really important question is why are you doing this what moved you to sign on to this and as a starting point to understanding your possible intentions and motives and there can be multiple and it's all good but um but then the intention without attachment is such an important concept like like we're saying your intention could be surrender show me whatever the hell is going to come up which is beautiful or it might be a question like like you were saying show me who I am yeah I've heard I heard intentions called once a loosely held hope and that makes them different from expectations right our expectations are this is what I this is what must happen or you know this if this doesn't happen I'm going to be really disappointed and you should be thoughtful about disappointment it's okay to feel disappointment um but I like the intention attitude better I think as a preparation tool than an expectation yeah it is something we would like to explore or unfold or understand better or heal or transform or whatever um but as uh as one of my ketamine clients put it the other day um I didn't get what I asked for but I got what I needed beautiful because he brought in his intention but then followed the instructions of this is what I want but show me what I need like yeah surrender let go go through yeah that's so key um the diff the difference between the expectation and intention in fact I like the I've always loved looking at through a yoga lens like in yoga class you might hear what's your intention for your class today um but if you go deep on it in like the Sanskrit terms like the intention sometimes the word sankalpa I think in Sanskrit is like a seed or could be translated like a vow birthed from the very core of your being and then if I look at it that way like you're going looking for what's alive in you like you're doing a deep inward dive finding out what intentions are coming from your heart not your expectations of your mind and then in this fertile ground of ceremony like preparing and especially during the experience in that therapeutic State of Consciousness you're you're really planting that seed and then the work the journey like creates this bridge to the everyday waking consciousness manifests it into day-to-day life which I think like helps that seed grow terminate gestate yeah that's that's a good sort of combination of all these principles we're talking about with um diving in paying attention to your triggers origin stories and patience uh but not idleness there's a quote by the poet mark nepo that I like um to listen is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear I love that then that willingness part is really really important uh along lines of that surrender piece like sometimes if you're not if you don't have that dial of willingness turned up to 11 then you're going to miss out on some really important lessons to lean to listeners to lean in softly softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear yeah that's uh that's a key part of the recipe yeah I like that one a lot yeah because I've seen a lot of people go into ceremonies saying like yeah I just have this question um but don't tell me anything about this part of my life um and sure there's a there's a Readiness but um and you can't tackle it all at once for sure but uh but yeah that's some interesting resistance to explore right there you know what makes me think of the one time I was in an ayahuasca ceremony and I really didn't want to puke all right oh yeah first time I had ever experienced Ayahuasca I vomited it felt like the universe went through my butt and out my mouth it was simultaneously I was like I channeled the entire energy of the universe through my body it was intense and I was it was great I mean I really did honestly like when I was done with my Purge it was clarifying um Gold Star Gold Star I got the gold star um but my subsequent Journeys I've just you know in sober space I was thinking about that experience like yeah it was good but I can't say that I want to do that again and I'm in Ayahuasca Consciousness and I'm feeling sort of bubble guts and I can it's coming up and and uh I'm fighting it I'm not listening I'm not listening softly I'm not I'm not willing to puke and as soon this is weird but you know we're talking about as soon as I finally said you know what fine I I will puke I will I will crap my pants I Surrender I Surrender went away then didn't need to puke anymore one of those fun little lessons grandmother Ayahuasca had for me what you resist persists you know I don't know if this story is relevant or a lesson of that kind at all but I was uh uh off at an ayahuasca ceremony helping with the retreat but got to sit with the medicine a couple times and um one night um I was called up it was working with this uh shapibo medicine team where they they do some hardcore chants at you at your soul at your psyche and they really get in there with you it's beautiful and I was called up and uh being chanted at and I forgot my bucket and I in my experience I hadn't thrown up most I was a ceremony so I wasn't too attached to the bucket but this chanting can really bring on intense nausea like I've seen it countless times of just chance boom an orchestra of throwing up um ensues but I was up there and the nausea is mounting and I have a a lot of resistance to throwing up and I have a good ability to squash it even though I don't like I'm not proud of that it comes in handy sometimes but um but I was sitting there and mustered up all the like vomiting self-interruption I could to stop it and I stopped it I even asked for help at some point I was like help but no one heard me and that was another lesson in itself of itself but the next day I'm sitting there at breakfast with the Sham and I was like that was intense when you were chanting at me I I uh hanging on for dear life I almost threw up everywhere and he's like read you're doing it wrong what do you think I was doing in there like I'm trying to help you clear some things out and you were like resisting it you're getting in the way yeah so yeah that's apropos what we're talking about um so we talked about intentions versus expectations physical prep some psychological prep um spirituals when we didn't talk about explicitly although a lot of things we just discussed would probably qualify yeah but I think you know depending on your relationship to Divine to source to the highest self to be unknown like pick it whatever it is I think it helps to contemplate your relationship to it before you go into a psychedelic experience we have measured in the lab that psychedelics tend to occasion mystical experiences that tend to be very very meaningful for people so you know buckle up you even if you are not a particularly spiritual religious person you're likely to have some kind of mystical experience yeah yeah I like that pays to prepare anything else read Around preparation a lot of good resources out there uh on psychedelic preparation we were just talking about strassman's book the Psychedelic handbook yeah yeah that was a great preparation chapter I think um but yeah just this idea that all Life's a ceremony and you know it could be we should all be preparing as we go and as these these special opportunities come up that's when a chance to really buckle down look at Ayahuasca as an example you have a month like the two to four weeks leading up to that to really um tune in to your body your mind your spirit by eliminating things and getting ready I think it's a special opportunity and then afterwards it's not right into the hamburgers it's like practice some of that on the tail end too that I think is part of the magic of that medicine in addition to the medicine itself but the ceremony around it I think we can take a page from that in all of our psychedelic experiences medicine and not through life well said thanks Reed thanks Steve all right if you like what you heard please subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you're using to listen or watch also if you're feeling generous today please leave us a glowing review on Apple podcasts Stitcher or wherever you like to listen thanks again the content of this podcast does not constitute medical advice or mental health treatment consult with a medical or mental health professional if you believe you are in need of mental health treatment

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Length: 44min 10sec (2650 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022