[JOE]: This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, episode number 444.
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Well welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. We are about to enter into a series that I assume is going to be a bit controversial. I’m going to start with a disclaimer. So many of the substances discussed in this future series are considered or are illegal in the United States. People have died from using some of them. I am not a doctor, nor did I do well in, well actually I never took chemistry. And this podcast is not an endorsement of any illegal drug. Do your own research, be safe in whatever choices you make. All right. So, what are we talking about here with that kind of disclaimer at the front end? Well, we are talking about Psychedelics and you know, this all started when I read Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your mind and got me thinking about mental health and how there haven’t been many breakthroughs in mental health really in a long time in regards to kind of psychiatric treatment.
That book opened me up to just kind of learning more about it and as I learned more, I realized how much of a stigma there is around any sort of drug use and how classifying Psychedelics in the same category as cannabis, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, meth you know, it doesn’t really look at the nuance of it. And so, I wanted to dive in and explore what really is kind of happening with some of these drugs. And so today we’re going to be talking a little bit about Ayahuasca and hearing from an expert named M about Ayahuasca, Ayahuasca ceremonies. Then in the next episode, which actually plays right after this is going to be an introduction to Psilocybin, then we’re going to be talking more about Ayahuasca and then we’re going to be talking about some MDMA assisted psychotherapy in a couple of different series after that, interviews after that. So, a five-part series about Psychedelics for this psychedelic series. Really excited about it, but we’d love to hear what you think, you know, however you want to message me, whether it’s email, whether it’s on social media, please let me know. So, an intro to psychedelics, this is part one in the psychedelic series with our guide M.
Well today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have M. M is not her real name, but in an effort to protect her and her identity, we are just using that initial. And M is somebody that does a number of different modalities in regards to medicine work and we’re going to dive into that today as part of this psychedelic series. M welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[M]: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to speak with you all today.
[JOE]: I know, and I think it’s so important for therapists to understand kind of where the world is going and even, you know, where it’s been for a really long time and how kind of the worlds of therapy and medicine work and all of this kind of have come together for people to experience different benefits. So, you’re trained as a licensed therapist. We’re not going to disclose where you’re from or anything that could get you in trouble, but we, I’m so interested to just dig into kind of this work. Let’s maybe start with how did you get into, why don’t we actually start with definitions because some people might be brand new to this kind of work and maybe let’s just go through some of the basic definitions so everyone’s on the same page.
[M]: Great.
[JOE]: So where should we start? Which definitions do you think are really important for us to start with?
[M]: Well, the vocabulary is actually such a vital part of this conversation, so I’m glad you brought that up. You know, we in the work that I am in, we often refer to work with Psychedelics or other molecules that can alter your consciousness as medicine work. This idea being that it is, there is something deeply healing about it and perhaps something mysterious but still something healing. It is not being intoxicated, we call it being altered or a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Then I recently read something from Stan Grof that I really appreciated where he said, you don’t even want to call it non-ordinary because it’s privileging some forms of consciousness over others. So, let’s even just call it holotropic, which means a whole way of being conscious of things or more holistic way. So, if I refer to medicine work, that’s certainly what I’m referring to is those experiences of other non-ordinary ways of being in the world. Even from, you know, recreational use, and I think that that also is implicit in the term medicine. You know, that we are doing something here that has an intention and a hope behind it.
[JOE]: Yeah, I heard an interesting discussion on Psychedelics today on their podcast where they were kind of talking about how using the term recreational use versus medicine works sometimes creates this kind of stigma around recreational use. And so, they started saying, I think adult use was what they were saying around that. Or so today we’re going to focus mostly on medicine work, kind of this intentional set and setting. Why don’t we go there? Set and setting. People may have heard that. What does that mean?
[M]: Oh boy. Set and setting.
[JOE]: You do a whole podcast on set and setting.
[M]: I’ve heard that people that I work with either in group or individual settings say that, “Well, I had no idea how much all of this stuff matters until I went through my experience. So, set and setting is this idea that everything you bring with you, your set is your mindset, and that’s your past historical experiences, the culture you live in, the kind of day you’re having. Everything that you carry internally with you is your personal set in some ways and that deeply influences what a psychedelic journey can be like and the stunning is the environment that you’re in. Then I think in these experiences, what is inside and what is outside becomes a lot more [inaudible 00:06:51]. I’m not sure that that’s even the best distinction, but the setting is where you are, what time of day it is, what’s the room like, who else is there, what time of year it is, where in the globe are you? And it’s all the kind of stuff that I think in the age of the internet and the age of online work that we think we can kind of bypass or doesn’t matter. And yet in psychedelic work it deeply, deeply matters. So that’s set and setting. What’s happening with you and where you are in the world.
[JOE]: Well, let’s also kind of go through just some of the medicines so that people have an idea of them and maybe kind of how they’re typically used and then maybe we can talk about your individual work. So, the kind of medicines, and we can just go within kind of your scope of practice, which medicines do you typically use? And maybe we can talk a little bit about each of them and then I want to do a deep dive a little more into especially kind of psilocybin and Ayahuasca work. But what are the primary medicines you tend to use in your work?
[M]: So, my kind of home-based, the one that I feel most comfortable in and then I tend to have learned the most from and pulled the most from is Ayahuasca. It is a brew most frequently, a kind of a fixed tee or a thin tee depending on where you are working with it. From what part of the Amazon? It’s two plants that come from the Amazon jungle that when cooked together for a long time potentiate one another in this way so as to cause this deeply altered experience. And there are many, many ways of using and relating to Ayahuasca in the world. There are many tribal traditions down in the Amazon, there are many [inaudible 00:08:26] traditions and there now seems to be a gringo tradition as well. But it’s just those two plants and they sort of act as a communicator and navigator and translator for other plants as well. Down in the Amazon, they certainly use a wide variety of plants for all kinds of healing work, not just Ayahuasca. Some of them have psychoactive components, but a lot of them don’t.
[JOE]: And you’ve done some of your own work around that in addition to being a facilitator?
[M]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do not yet consider myself a facilitator for Ayahuasca. I’m working towards that. It’s the thing that can be, you can get yourself into a pickle with that one. Let’s just put it that way. It’s a very strong experience and it takes a while [crosstalk]
[JOE]: In what ways? I mean, we don’t have to go super deep into it, but how do you [crosstalk]
[M]: Let’s see. Well you can, there’s always a way of getting physically in a pickle where you’re mixing something you shouldn’t or don’t know how to take care of your body or prep your body ahead of time. But it is really easy I think in all of this work to get into, to get yourself into a pickle. We are so open and so sensitive and so vulnerable when we are in psychedelic states and a lot of ideas or experiences can kind of pop into your head and land there and latch there and you can begin to believe that your idea about it is true and then you begin behaving and acting as if that idea were true and it may not be the whole story. A lot of what makes for good psychedelic work whether facilitating or participating is discernment. And I think Ayahuasca, in particular tends to be such a strong experience in some ways and it has so many mysterious components that I think the people who’ve worked with it for a long time begin to understand, but even they will say it’s mysterious. Because it is so strong and it is such a mystery. I think it’s a particularly easy one to get caught up in these ideas about it, about what we think is right or true or needs to happen.
[JOE]: Yeah. It seems like as I’ve done interviews with this series and just on my own kind of exploration of these thoughts and just reading that the idea that the medicine is almost a third presence in the room. I wouldn’t even say a person, but an entity that’s guiding the experience and that really the person in the room is more there for safety and some facilitation, but that it’s almost like the Ayahuasca becomes a guide or the psilocybin becomes a guide. Is that accurate that I’ve picked up on that or is that, how would you describe it?
[M]: I think that’s a great way to put it that it is a third presence. It certainly has that feeling of being some other consciousness in the world that is not ours. And that seems to be aware of a lot of things that we are not aware of is that in our small human way of knowing the world and so, you may have a different relationship with it than I do, you know, just like you might have a different relationship with a person we have in common. You might have a totally different relationship with Ayahuasca and I think there’s this sort of myth out there that it is somehow all benevolent and all-knowing and is only there to do as good. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Certainly, in the Amazon there’s a long history of what’s known as blue harrier or witchcraft out there. So, it’s a lot in how you use it. It’s just not a universally beneficence or beneficial sort of presence —
[JOE]: Yeah, and I want to go into kind of what some of those ceremonies look like, but talk a little about kind of psilocybin and that kind of work, what that looks like and how it’s different than Ayahuasca work.
[M]: Yeah, there are some similarities and a lot of differences. Certainly, a stronger dose of psilocybin, it becomes a lot more Ayahuasca like.
[JOE]: When you say stronger, what kind of level for people that understand that world?
[M]: Yeah, sure. My rule of thumb and everybody’s a little bit different, is that generally sort of a low or a light experience with psilocybin is anything under a gram. Maybe anything from a gram to about two grams is probably a middle of the road experience where you’ll be altered, but not in a way that’s sort of shocking to your system in some way. And usually anything, depending on how big you are and how experienced you are, you’re, you know, anything upwards of four or five grams is going to be pretty strong. And certainly, people go upwards from there. And your mileage may vary. Everybody is different, every experience is different, everything you bring to it is different and some people can find themselves for themselves that one gram is a really strong experience and other people can take five and feel very little. So, yeah.
[JOE]: And I know that we’ve, I’ve been interviewing some people that were involved with MAPS with the MDMA protocol. Is it advised, because I’ve heard that having MDMA as part of especially a first experience can kind of make things more positive? Maybe speak a little bit to that pairing of MDMA with the psilocybin.
[M]: Oh yeah. I think that’s a lovely combination to sort of intro and especially for working with people who maybe have a nervous system that gets triggered very easily or they get, they get jolted to being anxious or worried. MDMA, well not, it’s not considered by many people to be a co-classic psychedelic, although I’m not sure I know what that means. I think it can be very visionary and imaginal if you’re using it in the right set and setting. But what it does do is create this incredible safety net around you so that everything is just okay. It all feels really good, it all feels okay. Even the dark places and scary places that you might not normally go to and your normal way of being in the world just feels all right. It’s a great trick.
I feel like MDMA has that, I often call it a one trick pony, but it’s a really good trick. The theory is, I think that it may shut off some blood flow to the amygdala at least in the body and, so you just can’t get as riled up or as scared. So in that, in combination, I think with the psilocybin, which has this sort of more transpersonal, maybe more alien or more other feel to it where we might normally kind of freeze up and get really scared in the presence of meeting something or meeting this aspect of ourselves that’s so different, I think MDMA can create that feeling of, “Oh, it’s really okay to do this and it’s okay to meet either this being or this presence or this piece of myself in that way.”
[JOE]: Wow, those are great summaries. So, let’s go back to, are there other plant medicines that you use in the way that you work or is it primarily either Ayahuasca or the psilocybin?
[M]: Yeah, for psychoactive plants, those are certainly my two main go-to’s, but because of the way, you know, I’ve learned and I’ve been taught, I will use other things, other plants but that have less psychoactive components. But those are the three ones that I tend to go to for alteration effects.
[JOE]: Okay. Well, let’s dive into what a typical Ayahuasca ceremony looks like, maybe how do people prep for it? You know, our listeners are huge into the psychology and especially if people have been through trauma or they’re dealing with their own history maybe we can kind of dive into that as well. So, when someone’s maybe prepping for an Ayahuasca experience, what does that mindset prep look like for most people?
[M]: Everyone’s going to be, you know, as I said before, everyone is going to be a little bit different and how your facilitator manages that is going to be different for everyone. But I do think there’s a good period of time ahead of time where you, it is wise to prepare yourself physically, emotionally and spiritually to do this experience. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. And a teacher of mine, a mentor of mine certainly says it’s like preparing the garden in the spring. You want to put, you know, soil amendments in and compost and loosen everything up so that when you put the seeds of a new experience in there, they actually have a chance to take root. And that can look like any number of things. Often there’s a lot of dietary preparations, cutting certain things out of your diet, which certainly in Ayahuasca, some of them can be actually physically dangerous so you want to cut them out of your diet.
Others, it’s more like this idea of giving things up and that there’s a merit in that, in stepping away from your normal way of being. So, it often involves giving up red meat or processed sugars or processed food or other intoxicants like alcohol or cannabis. You know, I think for me what has always helped me with emotional and spiritual preparation is at least creating a little bit of space in my day to slow down and just be, and just notice things, connecting with the outside world. I think one of the interesting things about most psychologists and most way we understand at least this idea of single person psychology is that meaning comes from inside of you, that you are the meaning maker. And I think in the psychedelic world humans are not the only meaning makers.
That meaning comes from any places outside of us. And so when we kind of make ourselves more receptive and open to noticing what else might be speaking or, and what it might have to say and what language it’s coming to us in, which is often images, felt senses of things, the more you sort of open to that, the more you will I think, connect with the experience when you finally do it. In some ways the preparation and what you do with it afterwards is as important, if not more important than the experience itself, I think, especially in Ayahuasca world. And that’s certainly, I think also part of the Western tradition of this for, if you go down to the Amazon, you know, their preparations may look very, very different. It’s a different culture, it’s a different way of working with it. But I think that’s pretty standard practice for preparation up here. And again, I always preface with, there are many, many tribes and many, many ways of doing this and we’re sort of finding our own way with it up here in the Western world.
[JOE]: Yeah. It reminds me a lot of, you know, many of the spiritual traditions of doing a pilgrimage, whether it’s, you know, the hike in Spain, or traveling to Mecca, a lot of the kind of Buddhist paths to where it’s taking you out of your every day to say like, I’m, I’ve heard many people say I’m not just a human doing, I’m a human being. And that idea that there’s something greater than ourselves, however we name that, that it could just be that connection to more humanity, but that we tend to get this tunnel vision in our everyday life. Even just when I think about how me and Christina cook, you know, we tend to make tacos once every couple of weeks. We tend to make, like, even just like the things that we make for food tend to kind of rotate and not expand that much.
So, the idea of some sort of kind of pilgrimage of disrupting your diet, of disrupting how you think, disrupting kind of where you are going into an experience and saying, you know, there’s something beyond the way I’ve done things. It seems like whether or not you choose to do Ayahuasca that that pattern in human history is pronounced. That’s happened over and over in a variety of forms and you know, each tribe, whether that’s tribes in the Amazon or tribes within Christianity or each subsection has its own way of doing that but the purpose seems to be the same of disrupting what’s been inside of you and your patterns.
[M]: Yeah, yeah. There’s always, I love the way you put that, that it is always a pilgrimage and we often refer to this work as a journey. You know, so what are you taking to bring with you on the way? What is companioning you you know? What tools and skills and memories are our bringing with you? And that can often be a really imaginative thing to do. And I think classically the way a lot of us in the West have understood it is at some point there is a crossing of the threshold right at the beginning of the journey. And then there is this sort of transformative process in which sort of chaos and confusion and things really shift may happen. And then there’s the return where you sort of go back in some way to the place that you were yet changed. And naming and acknowledging that change is a really important part of that too. And I think it’s the same thing with these journeys. There’s a preparation part, you know, within you, and then there’s the crossing of the threshold where you get into this crazy chaotic transformation. What did I do? Why am I doing this? I’m never doing this again. And then you come back shifted in some way.
[JOE]: It sounds like a physical manifestation of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey completely. So, if I were going into an Ayahuasca ceremony, what would I experience? What would I see, smell, hear? Like take us through what that would look like, because you know, many of our listeners may be curious, they may just want to be knowledgeable, they may be interested in Ayahuasca journey. Take us through what that would look like.
[M]: Well I’ll speak from the tradition that I know, which is a Mestizo Peruvian tradition. Typically, it’s done in groups. This is not done as solo work. So, you’re in a group of anywhere from six to maybe upwards of 20 people. It’s often done at night. It can be done during the day, although it’s a very different experience at night. When you take this medicine, which is bitter and bad tasting and there’s a lot more about that, —
[JOE]: It seems like a good metaphor for you know, things that are going to transform you.
[M]: Exactly. This is not going to be fun. When you take it, your senses get very, very open and sensitized. So, it’s almost like you can feel someone walking 20 feet from you and you’ll become very sensitive to smells and sounds. Your hearing becomes very, very acute and your vision changes. It becomes very, very, very acute. And I think that’s part of the experience though. I think that’s part of why it’s done in the dark and why it’s often held in silence; it’s to allow those senses to open up. And that’s where our information comes in, right? Our information doesn’t come from the thoughts in our head. It comes from our senses. So, creating a space for those pieces of us just to be very, very wide open is helpful. So, you generally, everyone drinks the medicine at about the same time, anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to sometimes an hour or sometimes two, the effects start to come on, there’s really no way to describe what the effects are. I think there’s a lot of myths out there and a lot of sort of dramatization of what the experience is that, you know, “Oh, you’re going to throw up for hours and it’s the most terrifying time of your life.” And that’s not always true. I think that’s a lot of our drama about it.
[JOE]: Yeah. I remember I saw Chelsea Handler did this show called Chelsea Does. And my, I had never heard of Ayahuasca before that. And so, my first experience watching it is her like puking and crapping her brains out. Like that looks like the worst sickness ever. Why would someone do that? But then as I talk to people who have done it, they say there’s such a cleansing and purging feeling if that happens to you, of just like something that’s been sitting inside of you, like physically getting rid of your baggage.
[M]: Yes. And there’s lots of ways to purge. You know, it’s not just a vomiting. You can shake, you can cry, you can sweat, can go to the bathroom. There’s lots of ways for your body to sort of process what is happening and to purchase this stuff out. And it does feel really good. It’s not like that kind of sickness when you have eaten, like food poisoning or the flu and it just feels awful. It feels so good to let this stuff go. You immediately feel lighter and clearer and better. I will say the ceremonies are often conducted entirely with sound, which is another reason to do them in the dark. So, there are, in many of these traditions, there is sort of a Pantheon of songs called Icarus that are sung. They’re very repetitive, they’re very simple and they sort of seem to act as a thread that carries you along this journey.
So, I find that even when you feel very topsy turvy and chaotic and you’re not sure when you look out onto the world what is up and what is down music somehow feels very re-orienting. So, it can often carry you into these really deep places that you wouldn’t have traveled to on your own. So, they often say in these traditions that the songs are beings in and of themselves. So, you can’t just sing them like a performance. You have to invite that song in and see if it wants to be song and then if it will allow you to sing it. It’s a lot about, I find about permission.
[JOE]: I’ve been thinking a lot about music where, you know, it’s one of, it’s probably the oldest example or one of the oldest examples of cooperation, and so I’m wondering if kind of deep in our evolutionary brain and when we hear music you know, it’s, you have to cooperate and be on time with each other if it’s multiple people, but even if it’s one person, it just feels like there’s something in it that says this is the first thing that humans did where we cooperated. That’s just how I’ve been thinking about music lately.
[M]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what makes music and what is end even more above and beyond that, some of the real experts in this work are aware of how just sounds are affecting people and affecting the room and what’s happening. Some of it we call music and some of it is just sounds. Sometimes the most beautiful thing down in the jungle when you’re working with Ayahuasca is just the sounds of the jungle themselves and realizing that you are just the part of the jungle that is walking around on two legs.
[JOE]: Right. You’ve talked about kind of, offline, you and I have talked about how, you know, when you’ve gone to Peru, it’s often you’ll do a ceremony and then have a day of kind of meditation and often a very restrictive kind of potato-based diet and then maybe do another ceremony. Take us through that schedule a little bit.
[M]: So, there’s a process down in the Amazon of learning to work with these medicines and it’s called the dieta, the diet. And it is a period of isolation and stillness and simplification and it can be anywhere from a week to months, many, many months. It’s a traditional way for people to get to know and build relationships with these plants that they’re using. And you’re not speaking to anyone, you’re not processing with anyone, you’re not discussing what’s going on with anyone. You’re not eating a lot. Oftentimes, there is no salt so your diet is very, very, very simple and all of that helps to sensitize you to the world around you. And then you’re drinking a key of whatever these medicinal plants are and noticing the effects on your consciousness and on your body and on the world around you.
And I think at its best, a process of building a relationship with a plant, which is maybe a strange thing to say in our Western psychological world. Like why, how could you have a relationship with a plant or the spirit of a plant or the being of a plant. But yet, it’s well understood and known in these worlds that that’s what you’re doing. Yeah, and so, it’s, typically the ones I’ve been on there’s five Ayahuasca ceremonies every other day and on the days off you’re just kind of resting and you might be working with some other jungle plant that doesn’t have psychoactive effects. And then at the end, you kind of come back together and end the diet. And then there’s the process afterward of maintaining that relationship. So, you know, for the next two weeks you might have to continue to restrict your diet or be really quiet or something. So, it’s a big commitment and it’s not for everyone. I think, you know, it’s really about getting to know yourself, but also for people who really want to get to know this work, it’s a great thing to start to do.
[JOE]: Yeah, I could see how after going on something like that coming home and my wife being like, “All right, help with the kids.” And it’s like, “No, I need to be quiet for two more weeks.” That would be a tough sell. So maybe talk, I mean, as someone that’s trained in mental health, you know, talk a little bit about some of the effects. Now I know it’s not going to be like, it has cured this and it’s done this, but just how does that openness through, Ayahuasca in particular, help people work on things going on inside of their brain or inside of their soul or however we want to conceptualize that?
[M]: I think like many psychedelic experiences, what it does is, gosh, and MDMA is particularly good at this I think, but the psychedelic experiences create a space for dialogue. What they do is they shut down, you know, what’s commonly known now as that default mode network. You know, the assumptions we walk around with in the world that make us know how to cross the street and know how to pay our taxes. And all of a sudden all of that stuff doesn’t matter in a different framework seems to come up and it opens all our senses, some new information is coming in, and I think in that state of openness, a lot can happen. And I think gosh, I’m trying to settle my thoughts about this. We in the West have a really different take on Ayahuasca, I think than they do in the Amazon. There it’s very much for physical healing and for relational healing, and those two things are, our emotional healing is not seen as anything separate from that. So here, we kind of look at it and there’s certainly a lot of the research has been about like smoking cessation or how do I work with death anxiety and it’s good at those things. You know, I think it just opens us up and shakes everything up in a way that when, well, hell doesn’t just retraumatize us and scare us and make us run away, but I think in other more indigenous traditions, it’s a whole different perspective on relational healing. I don’t feel like I’m verbalizing it very well. So, I don’t know how well to put it.
[JOE]: Well I think it’s one of those things that you can’t necessarily verbalize. I would guess that if you could, then it kind of defeats the purpose of it.
[M]: And it’s the frustrating thing for psychology, and for people who are steeped in this psychological paradigm that you cannot put everything about this into words and sometimes the words defeat the purpose.
[JOE]: Well, even in talking to the MAPS people in the episode, I think is going to play after this one, we are talking about how intuitive some of the MDMA work is with the two therapists, but then how they’re trying to standardize it to say, “Yes, here’s the treatment protocol. Just the challenge of doing that. So, I do want to, we’re going to actually, so that we have two episodes where we can go deeper in, in the next episode is when we’re going to talk all about kind of Psilocybin work, want to make sure that we have time to dig into that and not have an episode that goes way too long. So M is going to be back, I think we’re just going to do them two days in a row. So, we’re going to do the second half of this episode tomorrow. We might even release some on the same day just so that you know, you guys don’t have to wait. So, M, we will be back in just, you and I in just a minute here and for the rest of you stay tuned for part two.
Well, thanks so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. We are going to dive right into the next episode, but do want to say thank you to Therapy Notes for being a sponsor. With promo code [JOE], you get two months for free. Also, if you are a Next Level Practice member in our membership community, you get six months for free. Just let us know after you sign up and we will connect you with the right people. They don’t have a promo code for it for you because it’s just too darn valuable. All right, so this next episode actually is going to be released right after this. You can binge listen through.
Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.