** This post is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. All medicine should be used in a way that is in line with applicable local laws. It is recommended to have an experienced guide present when using psychedelic medicine. **
As I mentioned in the previous newsletter, I was intrigued by the profound positive outcomes, including the alleviation of anxious and depressive symptoms, experienced by people who had taken psychedelics – changes that were linked to the experience of spiritual and mystical states during the trip.
I wanted to try for myself. For purely logistical reasons, the trip I ended up taking was with LSD rather than mushrooms containing psilocybin, but the literature suggested that the effects should be similar. To prepare, I read the Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25 (1), written in 1959 for therapists administering LSD-assisted psychotherapy. It is still considered one of the most comprehensive guides on psychedelic therapy. The handbook, which I found to be an invaluable resource, describes that while under LSD, the patient can ask themselves self-reflective questions and immediately experience insight into the answers because LSD removes the need to rationalize behavior and allows the perception and acceptance of underlying behavioral motives.
Even though what initially drew me to the experience was the possibility of having a spiritual or mystical experience that could potentially shift my life perspective, after reading the handbook, I became curious about and eager to receive therapeutic insights about myself. Who wouldn’t want to know what their main problems are? I created my own self-reflection questions for the experience.
I don’t want this to be a gratuitous description of the time I took LSD. Many better writers than I have given marvelously detailed descriptions of these exceptional experiences, especially the perceptual changes. I leave the poetry to those writers. The story I want to tell is how my personal experience far, far outlived my own expectations in terms of personal value, as well as how it opened my awareness to the range of possible human perceptual and emotional experiences
However, just to orient you to the story, I will give a very brief overview of the stages of the experience, which lasted a total of 12 hours. A friend babysat me.
0 - 50 mins: While in an art store, the LSD took hold and it was suddenly extremely difficult to focus and to move. I grabbed my friend’s arm and said, “We have to get back, quickly.” Then, we proceeded to walk home at a snail’s pace (she tells me).
1 – 4 hours: An extreme heaviness descended on my entire body. I fought nausea, the world got wavy, and I tried to hide from my friend the fact that I was internally freaking out. She later told me I seemed completely normal. We painted for hours, if you consider glacially dragging a paintbrush across a canvas painting.
4 hours 30 mins: “Oh my god, we live in Wanda Vision.”
5 – 6 hours: I felt the entire range of human emotion within a span of 3 minutes, while watching people taking out the trash, cleaning up after their dogs, and the trees swaying in the wind. I felt deeply connected to the entirety of humanity and cried tears of overwhelming love for everyone, everything, all of it. Maybe love really is all you need?
6 hours: Electricity was sparkling up and down my spine, and through my limbs. The energy was so intense that I had to get up and dance to release it. I began to ballet dance. No, I am not trained in ballet dancing.
6 hours 30 mins: With eyes closed, the doors of imagination were flung open and wild, colorful panoramas folded and toppled into, onto, and through each other, leaving neon-streaked emotions in their wake. Oceanic love permeated my being. A unicorn slid down a rainbow into a bunch of purple grapes that burst upon impact with an outpouring of blood. Cartoon figures flew through my awareness, and the rapidly changing scenes left me in the dust. My consciousness pulsed with unseen life, creation, possibility! Where had this been all my life! This is creation. I felt I saw the source of inspiration. I was dazzled, mesmerized, sold.
About four hours into the trip, I turned to the notebook containing my prepared self-reflection questions, eager to see whether I could get some straightforward answers from my elusive psyche.
I mentally asked myself, “What’s my biggest problem right now?”
Answer: “You forgot to be weird.”
The answer came immediately after I asked the question. I didn’t think it. It arrived. The underlying message was crystal clear: you project who you think you’re supposed to be, and forgot who you truly are; your true self has been a casualty. Then, a montage of examples from my life flashed across my mind to really drive home the point and show me exactly how I had betrayed myself – e.g. desiring things I didn’t actually want, striving for accomplishments to impress other people, suffocating my self-expression that wasn’t deemed “productive,” and more.
Explaining the experience does not come one iota close to doing it justice. The insight wasn’t solely logical, rational, or even cognitive – I felt it and came to know it in every cell of my being – in mind, body, and spirit. Even though I had put some self-work in, I was nowhere near coming to this personal insight that descended upon me within 30 seconds during an LSD trip.
Apparently, psychedelics are known for this type of insight, emotional release and breakthrough, which is similar to catharsis from psychoanalysis (2,3) and is distinct from the spiritual/mystical component of the experience (4). Before psychedelics were banned in the 1970s, many behavioral health practitioners successfully used these substances to breakthrough emotional and memory blocks in patients (5–7), and research continues to highlight the importance of insights and breakthroughs in supporting enduring the positive outcomes of psychedelic therapy (8–15).
So, while I didn’t get what I would consider a mystical or spiritual experience that knocked my socks off (from this trip…), I did come to personally and intimately understand the power of psychedelics as a therapeutic. Here are some additional valuable teachings I believe psychedelic trips can bring, based on my experience:
Resilience. Many psychedelic trips are hours long, so you’re dealing with an altered state of consciousness and reality for quite a long time. While this is the reason that many people avoid psychedelics, I argue that this is a reason to embrace them. The psychedelic state forces you to face a reality that is uncomfortable to you because it is unfamiliar, but finding ways to breathe through it calmly, while understanding that this too shall pass, ultimately builds resilience. You can resist and suffer, or you can let go of control and simply observe. It is a beautiful and useful metaphor for life. I would argue it takes the same kind of courage to undergo a psychedelic trip as it does for any kind of extreme human performance. (This may, of course, not be relevant when someone is having a horrendous trip.)
Immediate, profound, and emotional personal insight and breakthrough. The kind of insight it can take years of psychotherapy to obtain can rapidly emerge from one therapeutically-oriented psychedelic session. The LSD handbook describes it as “an emotional insight involving an intensity of conviction which implies acceptance, i.e., emotional insight plus acceptance”(1). One of the greatest challenges in behavior change, self-growth, and healing is getting at the underlying (and usually hard-to-access) subconscious beliefs and traumas. Psychedelics can help rip through to the root of personal issues and accelerate the desired personal change. I’m aware I’m a sample size of one, but I can attest to this and am still astounded.
The experience of deep feeling and knowing. As described above, some of the insights that one can obtain during a psychedelic trip can have a feeling of deep knowing, rather than a cognitive knowing. This experience is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced it. Not only is the wisdom obtained in this deep experiential way important for the person’s growth, but the person can become aware of the wider range of human feeling and knowing. It’s like suddenly being able to see colors you weren’t able to see before. I would argue that this is extremely valuable to the human experience.
1. Blewett D, Chwelos N. Handbook for the therapeutic use of LSD-25: Individual and Group Procedures, https://maps.org/research-archive/ritesofpassage/lsdhandbook.pdf (1959, accessed 29 March 2021).
2. Jackson SW. Catharsis and Abreaction in the History of Psychological Healing. Psychiatr Clin North Am 1994; 17: 471–491.
3. Breuer J, Freud S. Studies on Hysteria. London: Hogarth Press, 1895.
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5. Grof S. LSD psychotherapy. 3rd ed. Sarasota: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 1975.
6. Martin AJ. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) treatment of chronic psychoneurotic patients under day-hospital conditions. Int J Soc Psychiatry 1957; 3: 188–195.
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9. Carbonaro TM, Johnson MW, Griffiths RR. Subjective features of the psilocybin experience that may account for its self-administration by humans: a double-blind comparison of psilocybin and dextromethorphan. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 2020; 237: 2293–2304.
10. Johnson MW, Garcia-Romeu A, Cosimano MP, et al. Pilot study of the 5-HT2AR agonist psilocybin in the treatment of tobacco addiction. J Psychopharmacol 2014; 28: 983–992.
11. Garcia-Romeu A, Davis AK, Erowid F, et al. Cessation and reduction in alcohol consumption and misuse after psychedelic use. J Psychopharmacol 2019; 33: 1088–1101.
12. Garcia-Romeu A, Davis AK, Erowid E, et al. Persisting Reductions in Cannabis, Opioid, and Stimulant Misuse After Naturalistic Psychedelic Use: An Online Survey. Front Psychiatry 2020; 10: 955.
13. Roseman L, Nutt DJ, Carhart-Harris RL. Quality of acute psychedelic experience predicts therapeutic efficacy of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Front Pharmacol 2018; 8: 974.
14. Davis AK, Barrett FS, May DG, et al. Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry 2021; 78: 481–489.
15. Davis AK, Barrett FS, Griffiths RR. Psychological flexibility mediates the relations between acute psychedelic effects and subjective decreases in depression and anxiety. J Context Behav Sci 2020; 15: 39–45.