WHY BAD TRIPS HAPPEN & How To Avoid Them

What is a recipe loosely for a bad trip?

Because I think over the years, you know, I, I've been talking about psychedelics on the show for a number of years now. I, you know, I, I think that they have amazing benefit. I've been quite open about, you know, doing ayahuasca and psilocybin has always been my medicine of choice. I really think that it's powerful, powerful tool in many ways. And I've also had people, you know, reach out and say, look, I've, I hear this conversation but like I just had a bad experience with it and I don't think I'll ever go back. And what with whatever drug it is, right, Acid or LSD or MDMA or psilocybin or ayahuasca. And so I'm curious about like what's the, if you, what do you want to avoid? Let's just put it that way. How do we set ourselves up for success?

The one thing I often talk about is to start low and go slow. That a lot of people when they first start to work with psychedelics may, you know, take five grams of mushrooms or go and drink a bunch of Ayahuasca or Smoke 5 Meo DMT, which is a very, you know, very, very, very, very potent psychedelic. And so usually what I tell folks is, you know, start with microdosing or start with something like MDMA or even ketamine because the likelihood of having a re traumatizing experience is much lower with a small dose or MDMA or even, you know, ketamine. So I think that's like the first perspective is this. You know, a lot of people who come into this are really looking for immediate impact. You know, maybe they've tried many other things, especially for certain mental health conditions and the none of those other things have worked. And so they're really looking for a miracle to some degree. And so I think to manage those expectations, to know that this is a path that may take three months, six months, a year, five years, 10 years, right, to continue to unfurl and integrate is one important part. The other part is I would say the basics around set and setting. So your mindset going into the experience, making sure you give adequate time to preparation, you know, meditate leading up to a high dose experience, learn how to anchor in the breath, maybe even do something like breath work before you go into a high dose psychedelic experience.

Have a coach or a guide or a therapist that is present with you when you're going through with this and then really pay attention to integration afterwards. Because even people who have, let's say, a challenging experience when they work with psychedelics, that may be material that had to come up. You know, that may be material that has to be processed. And it could be dark and hellish and it could be filled with paranoia and death and all these really nasty, difficult things.

And sometimes we need that shadow to really come up in order for us to grow and develop and evolve as a human. So I think knowing that there is professional support who can. Who can be present with you is a really helpful point. And because most of the bad trips that I hear about are people who are drinking alcohol and taking mushrooms. They're maybe at a rave or a festival or a party, and they just sort of inadvertently do it without giving it much thought or consideration. Or folks who, for example, they might think they're microdosing, but they're. They're not. They're taking like a gram of mushrooms and they're doing it like five times a week. And so they're just taking too much too often. That's another sort of common trope that I hear. So I feel like the educational component is very easy. Like a microdose is a hundred milligrams of psilocybin, right? For LSD, it's about 10 micrograms of LSD. It's not a gram of mushrooms. It's not a half tab of acid. That is not a microdose.

I was gonna say if you're doing. If you're doing a gram of mushrooms as a micro dose, like, good fucking luck at work, buddy. Like, that's gonna, that's gonna be. That's gonna be a little bit harder to function. And yeah, you're like, yeah, anyway, keep going.

Well, and, and because you're putting yourself in such a suggestible and vulnerable state that you're gonna be way more sensitive to all of the external stimuli that you're around. So it's like, find a setting, a home, an apartment that. Where you could just really relax. And again, have a friend or professional support to help guide you through this. And to start low and go slow. I would advise against someone's first psychedelic experience being three ayahuasca ceremonies in the jungle or smoking bufo 5 Meo DMT. I really, I emphasize this metaphor of the lotus flower. And the lotus flower is, you know, to plant a new seed of self. To plant a new flower, you first have to till the soil, which is the therapeutic work. We all, even if we don't have the big T trauma, like an adverse childhood Experience. We all have trauma from being human. And so how do we first till the soil, work with our shadow, know our shadow, understand our shadow. Microdosing is great for that. Ndma, ketamine is great for that. Once we have, you know, tilled the soil, the soil is healthy. Then we plant that new seed of self with psilocybin or lsd, and then we water that new seed of self. That's the integration, you know, with microdosing, with meditation, with breath work, with lifestyle changes, with relationship work. And then when we really want to fully blossom as that lotus flower, fully blossom into enlightenment. That's where things like ayahuasca and san Pedro and 5 Meo DMT can be very, very useful tools. But, you know, I worked with psychedelics for, I think, seven years before I ever tried ayahuasca. And I worked with psychedelics for 11 years before I ever tried 5 Meo DMT. So there is this thing to be said for be patient, be wise, don't be in a rush. And. And don't look at these tools necessarily as a panacea or a fix, all that. They're going to help facilitate an opening. But you still got to do the work. You still got to show up. You still got to commit to the change. It's not necessarily just rainbows and butterflies because he ate a few grams of mushrooms. You still got to put in the time and the effort to change your ways. Psychedelics make it easier, but they're not necessarily foolproof.

Yeah, I appreciate how grounded you are in the conversation because I think, you know, I've. I've seen people do what you're talking about, which is like, their first foray into psychedelics was going down to Peru or Costa Rica and doing five ceremonies back to back and then coming back, and they were just blasted right. Like they were having problems orienting who they were and how they fit into the world because, you know, they just went and had such a big experience, you know, and my buddy Traver Bohm, who has his own show, always talks about. He's a big Brazilian jiu jitsu guy.

Nice.

And so he always uses the analogy of, like, the white belt and the black belts, you know, and everything in between. And I like that notion of, like, working your way through psychedelics, you know, knowing that you're a white belt and actually finding your way through there. And I'm with you, man. Like, I think I. I did three or four years worth of psychedelic journeys with psilocybin before I went and did any ayahuasca and so I really appreciate the groundedness that you're, you, you bring to this conversation because I do think that's important. And I think sometimes I worry, you know, I have a two and a half year old son. Sometimes there's a part of me that is a little concerned because we all know what it's like to be youth and to rebel and to want to, you know, give the middle finger to the system or mom and dad or whatever. And with these substances, you know, much more commonplace and much more.

Accessible. I have concerns sometimes that, you know, they'll be misused and not so much with psychedelics. I think that'll happen here and there. But my main concern is actually with, with weed, with THC and how wildly fucking potent it's gotten. You know, I think it's really gotten out of control to a place where of course it can be a medicine, of course it can be helpful and generative. But I think, you know, if you're 15 years old and you smoke some of the weed that there is today, I mean that can create a psychotic break and that that maybe is not recoverable from. And, and so, you know, I think with all of these things there's a level of, not caution necessarily, but just level headedness that we need to bring to it. I, I really appreciate the work that you're doing and the way that you talk about these things because I think it's stewards like you that are going to usher this into our culture that in a level headed way where there's, they're taken seriously and with responsibility and you know, I think that didn't happen the first time we tried to inject this into our culture and we paid the price, right? We, you know, so many people got locked up and research grants got stalled and all that stuff and so we got set back decades in specifically being able to integrate these things into the therapeutic world. So do you have any thoughts on or sort of like concerns culturally, you know, with kids, you know, using these medicines and stuff like that?

I'm glad you brought up the jiu jitsu metaphor because the way I'll often talk about psychedelics is as a skill. So that's even the promise that we make to a lot of the coaches that enroll in our, our facilitator program. It's like we're going to help you up, level your skill in psychedelics. We're going to help you go from being a white belt to a purple belt to you know, maybe a brown belt to eventually, hopefully a Black belt, right? And that's going to take years. Like I'm, I, I've been working with psychedelics 14 years and I still feel like there's, you know, I haven't reached the ceiling by any stretch of the imagination. There's still more deconditioning, there's still more exploration, there's still more all of these things. And I think that concept of psychedelics as a skill.

Really emphasizes the importance of literacy when it comes to not only psychedelics, but altered states or states of ecstasy. And.

That we had a certain degree of literacy in ancient Greece. Right now it was pretty confined to a certain subsegment of the population, but there were clear structures set up to hold that container. And when the Eleusinian mysteries were eliminated, you know, 1700 years ago, we lost touch with that lineage and that wisdom. So we essentially now find ourselves at a stage where as a culture we are more or less completely illiterate as it relates to psychedelics and altered states. So what happened in the 60s was it was sort of like, you know, we, we put our training wheels on and I think the training wheels fell off a little bit. And so now what's happening in this third wave of psychedelics is we're start, okay, we, the training wheels are staying on, we're going to take them off pretty soon. We're going to learn how to ride the bike, you know, and ideally, it's not as if everyone has to become a black belt necessarily. There are some folks, just like in jiu jitsu who do it for fun, who do it as a hobby, who do it to stay fit, who do it for the community aspect. They don't necessarily want to become a master at it.

But we should enable everyone who wants to work with these substances to at least be able to get the basics down. You know, the other metaphor that I use, it's like you don't have to become a world class chef in order to make yourself a sandwich and cook yourself some eggs and you know, bake some chicken in the oven or grill some chicken or grill some steak. But ideally, you know how to prepare some food for yourself so you can, you can live and survive. And I think psychedelics are, are similar in that way. And it's, it takes time, right? Like we as a culture, we've been cut off from this for 50, 60, 70 generations, right? So it takes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 generations to get a feel for how we properly integrate this into culture at large. And so I think in the immediate term and to sort of get back to your specific question in the immediate term. I do think there needs to be a level of discernment that's practiced when it comes to how do we roll this out. Right. A lot of people have said we don't want psychedelics to become the new cannabis, right? Where it's found, where it's everywhere, where a lot of the risks are, are not necessarily talked about a lot. We want them to be pretty contained. We want them to maybe be difficult to get access to. We want them to have a lot of sort of warnings and cautions. And I think slowly what we're seeing is as people become more and more educated, they are approaching this with more reverence and responsibility. They're realizing, oh, if I have trauma, I should go to see a therapist or a clinician. I'm not just going to take a bunch of, bunch of mushrooms at home necessarily. So I think that process of developing the necessary structures and systems and then the more parents, quote unquote, the more parents that have these experiences with psychedelics. Right. You are now way better informed and capable of talking with your son about this and helping him to navigate the nuance. It's not, it's not the sort of like black or white of you either do this or you don't do this.

Celibacy approach of like just absent, just don't do drugs. Yeah.

It's like these are the considerations, these are the risks. And I think, I think the beautiful part about psychedelics is we have historical archeological evidence of their use as tools for this rite of passage, which I'm sure you've talked about at length on this podcast about that in indigenous societies, particularly, the men would go through rites of passage where they would become, or the boys would become men as a result of going through this. And psychedelics were one of the least dangerous ones in many ways because from a mind perspective, they facilitated this state of death without putting the actual physical body in harm's way. Like I hear about some of these rites of passage where they put bullet ants and gloves and you have to hold the, the gloves or you send them out into the wilderness for a week to fight a bear. You know, like, you don't need to go through that, that, that sort of physical torment with psychedelics. And so what more parents are considering is like, you know, if I have a 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 year old son, you know, how could I might, how, how might I facilitate a process of transformation for him in a really safe container? So we can go, oh, these aren't just drugs to be messed around with. These are substances that if used with a level of reverence and responsibility, could be dramatically beneficial. And I think that is the, the benefit of psychedelics over cannabis, that cannabis is much more like just another alcohol. It can be highly disassociated. People can get easily addicted to it. Psychedelics don't necessarily have that same, okay, I'm just going to use this everyday type of, type of vibe.

Yeah, I, I agree with that. I know a number of guys and clients that I've worked with over the years who they're like, I've never heard people talk about weed addiction, but I definitely feel like I'm addicted to weed. And it's like, yeah, dude, yeah, I.

Had that for five years and I've only this year got out of it because I did, I did a, an ayahuasca dieta in the jungle where I did five ceremonies in 10 days and cut everything out and didn't talk. And, and that's finally got me on the path where I can like get myself out of it. But it's, and I was never pleased about it. I wasn't like, I wasn't, I wasn't in denial. I'm like, I know I have an issue with this. I just can't get myself to get off of it. Like, it's that sticky in some ways. So it's, it's, it's worse than most people are willing to I think, admit at this point in time.

I would, I would agree with that. And I really forgot for people that are listening, want to know more about.

Marijuana, there's a really great episode that Huberman did actually where he breaks down. It's like a two hour deep dive into the research on cannabis. And man, was that eye opening. I was like, holy shit. Because it really gets in with your nervous system and bonds with the neuroreceptors specifically for your nervous system.

Sa.