Psychedelic Medicine, Therapy and Science #3

Continuing this thread.
An interview with a psychedelic therapist with a lot of experience who also wrote a book. Podcast.


Episode Breakdown

• the nuances of where trauma comes from
• how psychedelic therapy heals trauma
• developmental/attachment traumas are more insidious
• regression and re-parenting during psychedelic experiences
• the importance of having a sitter to do the deep healing work
• psychedelics may or may not completely heal people from trauma
• expansion; contraction
• the importance of doing the shadow work outside of the psychedelic experiences as well
• why and when to provide different psychedelics in therapy
  • MDMA therapy
    • contraindications to MDMA
    • dangers of constipation before MDMA?
  • LSD Therapy
  • Psilocybin Therapy
  • Cannabis as a psychedelic and an agent of therapy
  • combining MDMA and Psilocybin
  • combining MDMA and LSD
  • combining LSD and Psilocybin
• what does the therapy look like before and after the journey
• a list of who should NOT work with psychedelic therapy and why
• a case for the value of pharmaceutical antidepressants
• the complexities (and prevalence) of trauma from satanic ritual abuse
• encounters with demonic forces during psychedelic therapy
• the most important piece of advice for being a psychedelic sitter

@Tuan Jie , Thanks for the link. Don't know if you pursue mindfulness, but this article explores how mindfulness augments the effectiveness of psychedelics. I meditate daily and find that it helps me to be aware of when my mind is taking me some place that will kill my mood. Mindfulness brings me back to appreciating what is going on in the present, obliterating the highway to hell of troubling thoughts.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-...silocybin.html

Hi @Erroll !
After my first experiences with ayahuasca, I started a daily meditation practice as a means to continue, strengthen and deepen the direction I found myself catapulted into. Like so many others, I echo that psychedelics and meditation/mindfulness are perfect companions. I can relate to the findings in the article. Cool study, thanks for sharing. I have the feeling you'd appreciate the deconstructing yourself podcast as well.

Paul Stamets was on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was a blast, just like the first time. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say about psilocybine (in the US and Canada). If you want to skip the part about how he plans to address colony collapse disorder, it starts about here.

A historic event happened just a couple of months ago; the announcement of the opening of the World's Largest Psychedelic Research Center, in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins Medicine will house the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Among other things, researchers there will be investigating the effectiveness of psychedelics as a new therapy for opioid addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (formerly known as chronic Lyme disease), anorexia nervosa, and alcohol use in people with major depression. The researchers hope to create precision medicine treatments tailored to individual patient needs.

We're entering a new phase in psychedelic research. It's quite poetic this is happening in the country where Nixon threw away the baby with the bath water, after which the entire globe followed. So many lives could potentially be un****ed by these substances, it isn't even funny. This is extremely good news!

A phenomenal podcast about depression, the inner critic, addiction, psychedelics, legislation, meditation and emotional resilience. I don't think that in the hundreds of hours of listening to podcasts and audio books on the subject of psychedelics, I have heard a better description of what a psychedelic experience is like and why it's therapeutic potential is so high as from Tim Ferris. It's a real treat to hear this conversation between him and Peter Attia.

From Attia's website:
In this episode, Tim talks both experientially and from his own deep dive into the literature of psychedelics and mental health. Tim is shifting his focus from investing in startups to funding experiments that he hopes will establish more reliable knowledge and therapeutic options for those suffering from anxiety, depression, and addiction.
If this topic even remotely interests you, I can’t recommend Tim’s podcast with Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, enough. (You should definitely read Pollan’s book as well.) Even if you’ve never had any exposure to psychedelics or their potential applications, I think you’ll find this subject matter really interesting, and I was very grateful for Tim to be so open and honest about his experiences.

Tim also shared his short list of acquired wisdom he returns to most reliably, which might be worth the price of admission alone.
We discuss:

Tim’s history of depression and his TED Talk on his close call with suicide;
The type of thinking that triggers Tim’s downward spirals;
Tim’s transformative experience with ayahuasca;
How Tim’s experience and research has led him to focus on furthering the science of psychedelics and mental health;
What some of the meditation modalities, and meditation apps, are out there, why can meditation be so hard to do, but also worthwhile to stick with;
Why Tim made a big commitment (more than $1 million) to funding scientific research, and to psilocybin and MDMA research, in particular;
From all the habits and tools that Tim has learned, the five things that he returns to most reliably; and
More.