028 - Psychedelic Storytelling in Chicago

Program Notes

Year this lecture was recorded: 2017
Today’s podcast features a great storytelling night from the Blue-Dot tour. Hosted by the Chicago Psychedelic Club, you can hear why we loved our stop in the Windy City.
You can join the Chicago Psychedelic Club
Also: check out ‘The Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry’
For integration meetings in Chicago, there is the newly formed ‘Psychedelic Safety, Support, and Integration’ group.

To support our efforts, here in Salon2, at gathering stories, interviewing our elders and spreading the Good News, sign up to help at Patreon.com/NoNonsense

Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon

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2.0.

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And before I turn the microphone over to Lex Pelger today,

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I first want to let you know about another little project that I’ve begun.

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As you may know, iTunes limits the number of entries in our RSS feed to 300.

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But as of today, there are now close to 600 podcasts from here in the salon.

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Now, there are several ways to get them all,

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the best of which is to simply go to psychedelicsalon.com,

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click the podcast link, and, well, that’ll take you to a page

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that lists every one of the salon’s podcasts going all the way back to March of 2005.

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However, unless you are really into binge listening to podcasts,

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that’s, well, probably too many podcasts for you to sort through.

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So I’ve decided to do what a lot of our fellow salonners have been asking for all these many years.

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And that is for me to go back through all of these programs and point out the ones that I think are still worth listening to.

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Actually, just sorting through the 250 plus Terrence McKenna recordings

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is going to take you a lot of time. So over the next couple of years, I’m going to be sorting

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through them all myself and posting my favorites, along with my personal comments about how and why

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I selected a particular program. And I’m doing all this on the blockchain-based social media platform called Steemit,

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and that’s spelled S-T-E-E-M-I-T, as in short for Esteem.

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Esteemit.

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Well, one of the things that I like about this platform is that nobody needs to register,

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On top of that, since it is a blockchain site,

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there is no central server farm that is owned by a big corporation.

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Every post is uncensored and placed directly in the blockchain,

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where it will live for as long as the Steemit community exists.

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Basically, Steemit is a place where anyone who wants to can have their own blog, for free.

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And people who want to can become involved in several ways.

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The best way is to post things on your personal blog and or comment on other people’s posts.

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Each time you do one of those things, well, you earn Steem, which is a cryptocurrency.

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So if you’re interested in checking this out, just go to

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steamit.com slash at Lorenzo Haggerty, all one word, lowercase. And hey, please let me know if

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you’re already using Steemit so that I can follow you back. Now in a few days, I’ll be releasing a

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new Salon One podcast that’s titled A House Divided Against Itself. But for right now, I’m going to turn the

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mic over to Lex Pelger, who will introduce today’s storytelling session that was recorded in Chicago,

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Illinois. I’m really looking forward to listening to this with you today, as I still think of

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Chicago as my hometown. Granted, I grew up on the outskirts of Chicago in the small town of Elgin but whenever I’ve been asked where I grew up

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I always say Chicago

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that toddlin’ town Chicago

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This is a non-nonsense production

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If you like what you hear

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and want to help us make the Salon 2.0 bigger and better,

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As a two-person production,

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any help goes a long way.

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Join us at patreon.com slash non-nonsense.

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I’m Lex Pelger, and is a psychedelic salon 2.0

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it’s starting to feel like fall in this part of the world and it makes me nostalgic for windy

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lovely Chicago and our stop there on the blue dot storytelling tour it’s time to get back to

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sharing some of our story sessions from the road,

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and we’ll be sprinkling them in over the next few months. I’m excited to share these stories from Chicago because it was one of the biggest, best attended, and most fraternal stops on the

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entire trip. The Chicago Psychedelic Club has been regularly meeting for quite some time,

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and it shows in the vibe of their gatherings. I think you’ll find this set of stories quite intriguing and inspiring.

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And I especially like how the show ends with a story about holotropic breathwork.

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Because we must never forget, you don’t need drugs to get high.

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I also want to give a special shout-out to Matt Brown,

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who runs the Chicago Psychedelic Club,

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and to his friend Dr. Fernando S.B. Forsen,

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who is the chief editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry, a publication who is looking for submissions,

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if you have any. Also, many thanks to Dr. Paige Lassen, who went out and bought a portable PA

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system for us and for the evening, and then donated it to the tour, as well as for letting

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us stay at her place. And to Dr. David Ostrow,

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who is the delightful cleanup hitter in this story night

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and who is a longtime advocate for the rational use of drugs.

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Two final things to say about the show.

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One is that most of these storytelling nights

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are being broadcast on Facebook Live,

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and they can still be seen on the Symposia Facebook page,

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hence the number of people you’ll hear saying hello to their parents and their friends who might be watching online. And the other thing to note is

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that for all these storytelling nights, we play the stories in the order in which they occur.

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There’s something perfect about the flow of the evening, and I don’t want to try and mess with

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that by sliding things around. Every night feels like a symphony, and this series of events across the continent remains the best thing I’ve ever done.

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For anyone around Chicago interested in psychedelics, we have an announcement from our friends there Megan Kennedy and Jeff Bathge.

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They have started a monthly group called Psychedelic Safety, Support, and Integration.

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It’s an open meeting for people who want to come,

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connect, and process. They have a Facebook group you can join for more info.

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They offer open group integration, harm reduction, and education. I salute them for this excellent community-minded initiative. Before we begin this episode, I want to thank Daniel Potter

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and Abigail Bianchi for stepping up in a big way to support the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 on Patreon.

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Their help is much appreciated, and I have copies of my cannabinoid graphic novels headed their way.

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Daniel’s is going all the way to him in Australia.

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For now, sit back, relax, and imagine yourself in the back of a Chicago saloon surrounded by beautiful, friendly people

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listening with intense enthusiasm to each other’s stories of the other side.

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Hi, everyone. I’m Carly.

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And hi, everyone, to Facebook and Facebook land. If you’re watching,

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Mom, I’m sorry. Actually, I’m not sorry. I’m glad if you’re watching. But yeah, I want to talk about

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the first and really the only time I ever smoked DMT. So it was a little over six years ago and I had just experienced my first

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peyote ceremony. It was a really beautiful ceremony and in the morning just like the tears

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were flowing and just so grateful and just like oh oh my gosh, I never knew what gratitude was before,

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and put the earth in the water, and I was just in this really open space,

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and was kind of like, wow, questioning the way I was living my whole life.

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And we were in a house out in Queens, New York,

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and it was the morning,

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and it was a nice sunny day,

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and we were all hanging out in the backyard

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and just sitting in the grass.

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People were doing headstands,

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and there was a guy walking around

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with a little pipe

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and just kind of going up to people.

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And then the person would sit there

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and lay down,

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and I asked my friend who invited me

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to the ceremony,

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and I’m like, what are they doing? And she’s like, DMT. And I was like, oh, and I had no idea what

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it was or that it was even a psychedelic. And I didn’t ask too many questions, but I’m like, oh,

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are you going to do it? And she’s like, oh yeah, this is a great time to do it. We’re nice and

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open. Our hearts are open. You should try it. And I’m I’m like okay so the guy comes up to me and I like

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I really I never drank ayahuasca I had no idea what deemed he felt like or was and he comes up

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with the pipe and he’s like okay you know you’re gonna inhale and then you’re gonna hold it in as

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long as you can and exhale and you’re going to inhale again and I’m like okay

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so I did it the first time and I felt I don’t know what I felt but this a wave of something

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and then he goes to give me the second hit and I just go and I remember he looks into my eyes and

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he goes so I did it and um and I was just like I heard kind of this sound it’s like and I was in like another

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dimension and I like looked over at like a tree and the only way I can describe it is like a

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10-dimensional tree and I was like oh my gosh and looking around and everything is alive and ten dimensional. And I have this realization that’s like, oh my gosh.

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And it was like a certain realization.

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I’m like, I just got sucked up into like the next dimension.

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And there’s no way back.

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So I’m like in this next dimension.

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I look over at this guy next to me and he’s got like 12 eyes and like eight arms.

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And he’s like, hey, how you feeling? And I like 12 eyes and like eight arms and he’s like hey how you

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feeling and i like look down and i don’t have a body anymore and i’m just like a floating spirit

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and i look over and he’s just like and i’m like oh so we’re we’re here huh and he’s like yeah we’re

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here and i was like okay i’m in this the next dimension and at least I’m with some

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cool people I look around and we’re like you know just people with like 12 eyes

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are hanging out in this backyard and I was like okay so then I start coming

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like talking to myself like okay you’re here it’s alright like you’ll get used

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to it and then I’m like oh my gosh she’s gonna take care of my dog now I’m like

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thinking like my family and everybody else is still in the old dimension.

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And then I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m never going to see my family again.

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And then I’m going to start freaking out.

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And I’m like, oh my gosh.

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I’m like, no, it’s cool.

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And I look over and there’s the guy with 12 eyes.

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And I’m like, ah.

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And I was like, OK, you can do this.

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You’re here.

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And it felt like it was like, okay, you’re here for eternity too

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it’s not just like a next dimension where you’re going to die from

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but it’s like, no, you’re here forever

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and I was like, okay, so I spent a while

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just getting used to it

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and then I felt

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the ground again, I was like, oh wait

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am I going to come down from this? and then I would come back up a little bit and I was like, oh wait, am I going to come down from this? And then I would

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come back up a little bit, and I’m like, oh no, I’m here. And then I came down a little bit, and I’m like, okay.

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And I felt the ground, and I’m like, oh, I’m coming back to the earth. Like, I’m coming back. And I just got really

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excited, and I had like never been so grateful just to like be alive in this reality, and to have a body.

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And then I remember,

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and everybody in the backyard pretty much

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had their little turn,

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and then everybody had their experience,

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and then we were just laughing for an hour.

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And it felt, it was really good.

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And yeah, and that’s pretty much it and then I

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took a little trip to San Diego and I just like chill down the beach for a

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week and I don’t know and now I’m here

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I’m going to talk about something publicly that has previously never existed in a public discussion.

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And I wouldn’t be taking this leap

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if it wasn’t for the gravity

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of what I feel I’ve been carrying around for some years.

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And I’m only now starting to move beyond conversations

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with immediate connections and now branching out

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to you all in this room to tell a very short story

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of a very large happening.

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Essentially, some years ago,

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I was in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

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I took a tab of glycergic acid, I had all my AK, LSD, I said, call it what you will.

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And I sat down on a tree stump.

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This was about 1 p.m. that day.

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And to give you a little context as to how I got to this tree stump,

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I had more or less lit my old life on fire.

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I had quit a job after losing a relationship and losing a good friend to a drunk driver.

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It had pushed me to a place where I was basically ready for anything.

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And it seemed like, in my mind at the time,

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that perhaps LSD was so very foreign

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that maybe some answer lied there.

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I had met people influenced by it.

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And so I went, and I sat.

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And after about an hour of sitting,

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very subtle awarenesses started to creep in.

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It started first just with the simple noticing of the crevices of my hand,

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It started first just with the simple noticing of the crevices of my hand,

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seeing within those crevices the innumerable stories,

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innumerable repetitions of all of the various encounters I had had throughout my life.

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And somehow or another, that transitioned into a simple acceptance of my physical body, a caring towards my physical body that I hadn’t previously had. Part of what motivated me to get all the way far out west

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from Chicago and out there was a searching for something more, something to fill a hole,

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and I wasn’t sure what. But at that moment, by staring at my own hand,

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sitting and admiring a tree across the way,

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I transitioned from chasing a carrot that was out in front of me

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to simply existing within that carrot.

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And that carrot was life, was being there for my life.

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And it’s the simplest lesson perhaps I’ve ever learned

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and maybe the most immediately easy-to-forget lesson

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that I forget over and over.

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But that one moment is a place,

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a sort of mental constellation

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that I can journey to over and over,

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a place I can re-find when I need to.

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And for this, I feel compelled to speak positively

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of a substance that has been dragged through the mud for who knows

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how many different reasons and causes. And so I come

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simply as an advocate, as someone who is positively affected

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by an experience with LSD, who believes that there is

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some grounds for some research into understanding the ways in which

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these sorts of direct experiences with our senses

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can inform a certain sense of

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gratitude and use to

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potentially guide our day-to-day exchanges. I could talk at infinium

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about the other ways in which this experience has colored in so much of myself, but for me,

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being here today is about simply voicing support for something that is, yes, increasingly supported,

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for something that is, yes, increasingly supported,

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but something that has personally, quite honestly, saved my life.

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If not for that experience,

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if not for reconnecting with the experience of being alive, period,

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I wonder where I might have been.

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And for this reason,

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I feel a certain loyalty to LSD for what it has brought me

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and what it could potentially bring to others

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who are potentially at a place

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where an intervention can only come from within

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as it did with me.

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So thank you for listening

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and thank you for being here this evening.

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I was incredibly nervous before I started speaking.

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I’m probably about to cry

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because I’m like afraid of a million things at once.

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But that’s my story and I thank you all so much.

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So thank you.

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Over the last 30 years, I’ve delved into different ways to access a version of peeling back layers so that I can find a truth, I guess you will say.

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And really just trying to get to the root of things so that I can flourish.

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There are so many things that can cloud what we experience, and I like clearing and cleansing

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and seeing clearly. I guess starting my senior year in high school, I began with LSD and mushrooms.

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And at the time, it was just this adventure and this joy of discovering newness and seeing

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things from a new perspective. And then over time, when I realized that there was a lot going on underneath,

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I wanted to find a certain sense of authenticity that I couldn’t convince myself of.

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So over the years, it went from being recreational to being more this journey of exploration into a deeper version of self

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and maybe a new kind of truth that I would believe in more fully,

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if that makes sense.

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And it was actually these experiences with finding ways to open doors

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that ultimately took me to a place where I did something called a vipassana.

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And a vipassana is where you spend 10 days sitting in meditation for 10 hours.

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you spend 10 days sitting in meditation for 10 hours. And it was through something called pranayama. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, it’s breath work. Prana means your life

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force. It’s like your shakti or your chi. And so it’s the movement of breath. And so

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in this 10 hours of sitting, your work is to strip away the layers by emptying

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your mind and essentially you’re scanning your body from toe to head and down again.

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And that’s all you do for 10 hours a day. And you’re fasting. And there’s absolutely

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no interaction with other humans. You’re in a hall.

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Men are on one side, women are on another side.

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But even with sleeping, eating, there’s no eye contact.

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There’s no validation of the cues that we move through life with that are actually giving us information

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about how we’re maneuvering through space and that we’re really

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okay. So when you can’t have any eye contact and you can’t receive information about whether

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you suck or you’re awesome, it actually can tear you down. So you not only cannot make eye contact,

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but you have to avert eyes and you can’t even use body languaging that acknowledges that you exist in space with others.

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And it was beyond humbling.

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It was, it strips you down.

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And so I went through a series of emotions and experiences

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that took me deeper than any kind of psychedelic

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study I’ve ever done. Because we’re all these incredible machines. We are these self-healing

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mechanisms. And all the chemistry is within us. And all the knowledge is within us. And

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so how do you get there? How do you get to the truth? And so sitting in this meditation took me through despair and joy and bliss and eroticism and fury.

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And I grew up in a setting where it’s not okay to be angry, and it’s not okay to express anger. It’s not feminine

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to be confrontational. You discuss everything, and it’s not okay to have bad, ugly, dark feelings,

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and I went into the depths of my darkness and went to a place I didn’t even know existed and

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horrified me and terrified me, and I felt this rage and fury that overcame me and I thought I would

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never go back and and I think it was all the years of the psychedelic studies that I’d done

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recreationally and maybe even with a shaman and through different various various studies

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there was that comfort that familiarity like like, okay, this is temporary. This is just another dimension, and it’s time and space

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spectrum, and it will all come back. And if you don’t, it’s okay, because it’s all

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cool, and it’s going to be fine, and you’re just floating through the universe anyway.

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So ultimately, at the end of this 10-day sitting,

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it gave me the opportunity to recognize

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that we are these mult-dimensional beings and uh

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and i guess i initially walked out feeling rather unstudied but then later realized

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i was equipped with uh all the knowledge the vastness of who we all are is here,

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and it’s accessible at any time.

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And it just happened to be that this 10 days of meditation

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took me where I ultimately needed to be to feel safe and level.

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And so maybe it’s running, or maybe it’s a dance class,

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or maybe it’s going through birthing a baby.

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Whatever it is that gets you there.

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Ultimately, it was the 10-day meditation that got me so far to the deepest place

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in my mind and in all the layers of who I am so far.

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So that’s my story.

00:24:07 ►

It wasn’t necessarily a drug,

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except for the chemistry that I awakened within myself.

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That’s my story.

00:24:24 ►

I wanted to talk about an ayahuasca experience that I had about a little over two years ago now.

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I was very fortunate that after I finished my medical training, my fellowship,

00:24:36 ►

I was able to take a month vacation down to South America.

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As part of it, I went on a retreat.

00:24:42 ►

The retreat itself, there was two book-ended San Pedro ceremonies with four

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ayahuasca ceremonies in the middle. First ayahuasca ceremony, I came in, I had a lot

00:24:53 ►

of expectations. I thought I knew what was probably going to happen because I’d done

00:24:58 ►

a lot of reading. And I was prepared. I took the first shot. Didn’t taste nearly all that bad. And I sat

00:25:09 ►

there and I waited. Nothing. Took the second shot, sat there and waited and nothing. So

00:25:16 ►

my very first time taking ayahuasca, basically nothing happened. At the end I got up. I felt

00:25:21 ►

a little bit woozy, almost like I’d had a couple beers. And then I went to sleep.

00:25:25 ►

It was fine.

00:25:27 ►

A couple nights later, second experience.

00:25:29 ►

And I was told that this time by the Shaman, just take two drinks up front.

00:25:34 ►

But then take no more than two.

00:25:36 ►

Do not take more.

00:25:38 ►

I said, okay.

00:25:39 ►

So I took two.

00:25:40 ►

I sat there.

00:25:40 ►

And nothing was really happening.

00:25:41 ►

Nothing was happening.

00:25:42 ►

And then I felt like I had a hand on my face. And it was just giving a gentle pressure. Just saying like

00:25:50 ►

you needed to turn your head. So I started thinking, all right, that’s odd. You don’t

00:25:54 ►

normally feel like you have a hand on your face when there’s no one else there. So I

00:25:58 ►

started turning my head and then I just, I started just stretching a lot. And I got into

00:26:03 ►

some really deep stretches in the back of my neck, in my back.

00:26:07 ►

And I felt all this tension start to relax.

00:26:10 ►

And at some point during this, they were passing around, you know,

00:26:14 ►

another one of the little shot glasses, and I was asked to take another half a shot.

00:26:18 ►

I said, no, thank you.

00:26:19 ►

I was told not to do that.

00:26:21 ►

So I was stretching a little bit more.

00:26:23 ►

Shaman Singh is Icarus.

00:26:26 ►

And then he stopped again and he shouted something and I was told that he was asking if I wanted another drink.

00:26:32 ►

And at this point, I thought this is too weird. Sure, fine, whatever. So I took another half

00:26:36 ►

shot. And I was doing my stretching thing and then feeling kind of just a little bit

00:26:42 ►

odd. And then towards the end of each ceremony, there’s a blessing where everybody comes up

00:26:46 ►

and the shaman’s kind of singing a specific song.

00:26:49 ►

And he sings the same song for everybody.

00:26:51 ►

My turn came around.

00:26:52 ►

I went up there.

00:26:54 ►

And when I was up there, I felt him touch the top of my head.

00:26:57 ►

And it felt very similar to when there was a hand on my face.

00:26:59 ►

And I felt like, well, I should just go with this.

00:27:00 ►

So I was just trying to move and see where he was going to put my body.

00:27:00 ►

I should just go with this.

00:27:04 ►

So I was just trying to move and see where he was going to put my body.

00:27:08 ►

And then he started singing, but he was singing a different song than he sang for the others.

00:27:11 ►

And all that I really remember, there was a bunch of flashes

00:27:13 ►

of a number of different things.

00:27:15 ►

And one image that stuck with me,

00:27:18 ►

at first I thought it was just a big pile of vertebrae.

00:27:22 ►

I thought it was human vertebrae.

00:27:24 ►

But then there was something towards the top of it

00:27:26 ►

that didn’t really make sense.

00:27:27 ►

And I realized that the skeleton kind of had teeth and fangs.

00:27:33 ►

I realized that it was a stack of snakes.

00:27:36 ►

And I didn’t know what to make of this

00:27:38 ►

until probably about a week and a half ago

00:27:41 ►

at the Psychedelic Science Conference

00:27:43 ►

when Stan Grof was talking about

00:27:44 ►

the three different evils of humanity. And so then all of a sudden while he was talking,

00:27:53 ►

I kind of had this realization that really the snake is a representation of anger. And

00:27:58 ►

this was trying to tell me that I just have a lot of pent up anger built up inside of

00:28:02 ►

me. And then, you know, he finished a song.

00:28:06 ►

I went back.

00:28:07 ►

I was having a really hard time.

00:28:08 ►

I could hardly crawl.

00:28:10 ►

And then I started feeling really, really sick.

00:28:13 ►

And then I got a number of other flashes of things that I don’t remember.

00:28:16 ►

The only thing that I remember was there was some kind of a wavy picture

00:28:19 ►

that had like a, it looked like a head that was being scanned up and down.

00:28:24 ►

And then all I could

00:28:25 ►

see was fire. It was blue fire with my eyes closed or eyes open, just fire. And I got really hot.

00:28:33 ►

And it was only about maybe 30 degrees outside. So I, uh, so we were bundled up in blankets and,

00:28:37 ►

um, sweatshirts, et cetera. I had to pull all that off and I was just dripping sweat, dripping

00:28:41 ►

sweat, dripping sweat, and just, just moaning because I was on fire. It felt like I was on fire. Eventually that calmed down and I was just

00:28:49 ►

tired and I laid there and the ceremony ended. Went back to my room, had an excessive amount

00:28:57 ►

of diarrhea. That eventually did pass and I thought the whole thing was over but then um i was laying

00:29:07 ►

in my bed at this point it was probably about three in the morning i felt another rumbling in

00:29:11 ►

my stomach and i thought oh gosh i might have to run back to the bathroom again but no that’s not

00:29:15 ►

what happened i had like the entire experience started to come back again and um at first i was

00:29:21 ►

like oh this is interesting but then i started to get a little bit warm, and I started to get really scared.

00:29:28 ►

And I tried to knock on the wall to get the attention of my neighbor,

00:29:33 ►

but I realized the wall was kind of made of mud, and my hand just kind of thumped on it,

00:29:36 ►

so you couldn’t really hear anything.

00:29:39 ►

And I was just terrified that I was going to be on fire and I was going to die.

00:29:47 ►

was just terrified that I was I was gonna be on fire and I was gonna die um so I I everything that I I took every it took all the energy that I had to to get up out of bed and I was crawling to to

00:29:52 ►

get outside um and and I started just dripping sweat right before I hit the door and so I was

00:29:58 ►

outside and I and again it’s three in the morning everyone’s asleep I didn’t know what to do I I

00:30:03 ►

couldn’t I was trying to speak but then I couldn’t speak.

00:30:05 ►

So then I just started moaning and kind of yelling some sort of guttural sound

00:30:10 ►

and got the attention of some people to kind of come over.

00:30:15 ►

They helped me calm down.

00:30:16 ►

And then the retreat leaders sat with me in the room,

00:30:22 ►

and I kind of started processing.

00:30:24 ►

A lot of my, well, just thoughts

00:30:27 ►

that have been in my mind for a long time. So growing up, I was a very inquisitive person.

00:30:32 ►

I was always very interested in knowing why people do what they do. And I would ask my

00:30:38 ►

teachers lots of questions which really they didn’t like. Because whenever I’d ask them

00:30:43 ►

why, they would somehow think that that was sort of

00:30:46 ►

disrespectful or something like that so I talked about this for a while I processed it

00:30:52 ►

then the heartburn stuff so I have heartburn I have it’s called a hiatal hernia so like my

00:31:00 ►

esophageal sphincter does not close, it stays open all the time. And I had the absolute worst heartburn.

00:31:05 ►

I thought I was dying.

00:31:07 ►

And I laid there for probably about three hours just wanting to die.

00:31:11 ►

And it made me realize that’s probably how I will die.

00:31:14 ►

I think I’ll probably get cancer from my heartburn.

00:31:18 ►

I’m not kidding.

00:31:20 ►

And that was more or less the end of that experience.

00:31:24 ►

This is now into about 7 o’clock the next morning.

00:31:27 ►

I went back and I went to sleep.

00:31:28 ►

Everyone thought that I wasn’t going to continue on with the two other ceremonies I did.

00:31:32 ►

I think Ayahuasca was very kind to me during those other ceremonies.

00:31:35 ►

Nothing really all that profound happened.

00:31:38 ►

I did have some communication with another being slightly,

00:31:41 ►

but it was just kind of a joking thing.

00:31:44 ►

Actually, it sounded like a college sorority girl voice,

00:31:49 ►

and it was just like saying the stupidest stuff

00:31:52 ►

that didn’t make any sense,

00:31:54 ►

and I was just kind of like laughing at it.

00:31:57 ►

And then the very last ceremony,

00:31:59 ►

all that I remember was, you know,

00:32:02 ►

somebody else from the group said,

00:32:03 ►

you need to open your heart,

00:32:04 ►

and I started to try to open my heart, and then I saw the image of my wife’s face smiling down at me.

00:32:10 ►

And that’s the end of my ayahuasca story.

00:32:23 ►

Hello, everybody.

00:32:25 ►

Hello, Facebook. Hello, Facebook.

00:32:27 ►

I just wanted to tell the story

00:32:31 ►

of how I personally had experienced unity,

00:32:38 ►

collection with the people, with people, humanity.

00:32:42 ►

I was at an ayahuasca ceremony. This was like a year or two ago.

00:32:49 ►

And usually when you drink ayahuasca, it takes some time to kick in, half hour or something

00:32:55 ►

like that. So I’m sitting there and I noticed that like a lot of people were experiencing

00:33:00 ►

ayahuasca, but I wasn’t really feeling anything after a little

00:33:07 ►

while I noticed there was this light there was an altar in the middle of the

00:33:11 ►

room from the person who’s leading it there’s this light formed right above

00:33:16 ►

the altar and that was when it started to kind of come on and slowly it just opened up really big glowing structure and it was beautiful

00:33:32 ►

it was great after some time you know I’m kind of thinking like oh this is

00:33:36 ►

great like psychedelic imagery and all this so we take a break he says people

00:33:43 ►

can get up move around and then we’ll drink some more.

00:33:46 ►

So I go outside and some people were smoking cigarettes

00:33:49 ►

and this one guy is sitting there and he’s smoking

00:33:52 ►

and he’s like, yeah, it was a pretty good night.

00:33:55 ►

Did anybody else see that vortex open up over the altar?

00:34:00 ►

And I was like, what?

00:34:02 ►

Yes, I saw that.

00:34:04 ►

What?

00:34:05 ►

And I’d realized that and I started asking people about it,

00:34:09 ►

that when people get together in psychedelic states,

00:34:12 ►

they create this container.

00:34:15 ►

And in that container, we all start sharing all of our emotions

00:34:18 ►

and our thoughts and our experiences.

00:34:21 ►

And the more I’ve kind of meditated on that and tried to apply that lesson

00:34:27 ►

in my life, I’ve realized that a lot of things are like that. So in this room right now, for example,

00:34:34 ►

we’re all connected. In a way, we’re all kind of coming out of that psychedelic closet. I love that

00:34:40 ►

phrase. It’s great. So that’s my story. Thank you. Thank you.

00:34:59 ►

When Lex asked me to have a cleanup position on this round of Tories,

00:35:04 ►

I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was supposed to comment on other people or tell a defining moment of my life.

00:35:09 ►

So I’ve been sitting there thinking about the last 55 years of my life when I first started smoking pot as a freshman at the University of Chicago.

00:35:17 ►

And what were the defining moments?

00:35:26 ►

moments. And I guess they’ve always been an interplay between personal experience and the desire to capitalize on that, both for myself but for science. And so that’s kind

00:35:35 ►

of how my whole career has gone. Before I came to Chicago, I didn’t use any drugs. In

00:35:42 ►

fact, it was like a capital expense to be caught smoking in my high school.

00:35:47 ►

Cigarettes, that was.

00:35:49 ►

But I remember my first year in the dorms,

00:35:52 ►

my roommate and I both smoked cigar pipes, you know, cigarette pipes.

00:35:57 ►

And all of a sudden, all the other guys on that floor of the dorm

00:36:01 ►

started coming to us asking how to break in corncob pipes.

00:36:06 ►

And you know, we’re smoking these really nice pipes and tobacco from a store downtown that’s

00:36:13 ►

so famous. And so, you know, I started asking around and, you know, very, very paranoid.

00:36:19 ►

People finally said, oh, we’re smoking weed in here. And actually got taken someplace where I could buy my first nickel bag.

00:36:29 ►

And, you know, somebody had a big bale hidden in their closet,

00:36:34 ►

and they would go in there and shop off like a baggy foe.

00:36:37 ►

And it was $5.

00:36:39 ►

And, you know, between the seeds and the twigs, you could actually get high.

00:36:44 ►

You know, between the seeds and the twigs, you could actually get high.

00:36:54 ►

And then the next year, my roommates discovered that there were all these hemp farms still growing hemp in Indiana,

00:36:57 ►

you know, left over from World War II and stuff.

00:37:09 ►

We all know hemp has very little THC in it, but they would organize excursions and bring back duffel bags full of it, and then we would spend the night in the laundromat drying this stuff, and you could pretty much

00:37:12 ►

throw out all the plant and just take the

00:37:16 ►

particles, the resin that collected the bottom of the bag

00:37:20 ►

and it was kind of like Keith was.

00:37:28 ►

So, like Lex said earlier, usually a person’s favorite drug is the first one they use and I’ll never forget the first time I really

00:37:33 ►

got high with the right people and the right circumstances and we had the Mama Cass and Mama’s the Papas were playing on the LP.

00:37:48 ►

And next thing I know, Mama Cass is just singing to me.

00:37:52 ►

We’re having this two-way conversation.

00:37:54 ►

And, you know, looking back on it, it was very hallucinatory.

00:37:59 ►

And I don’t think I’ve had an experience with marijuana since then.

00:38:03 ►

And I don’t think I’ve had an experience with marijuana since then.

00:38:07 ►

But over the years, especially in undergraduate,

00:38:12 ►

our house was kind of like a place where people came through,

00:38:15 ►

you know, like Lex on their way across the country with all different drugs and things.

00:38:16 ►

So DMT was big and stuff like that.

00:38:22 ►

But it all came to a crashing halt when the feds,

00:38:28 ►

we found out that one of our best friends

00:38:30 ►

was an FBI agent attending the university.

00:38:33 ►

And I found out by reading in the New York Times

00:38:38 ►

that a picture of him testifying

00:38:41 ►

to the House Un-American Affairs Committee

00:38:43 ►

that the entire anti-war movement was a communist plot.

00:38:49 ►

And so I’ve always had a very ambiguous relationship

00:38:53 ►

with the government and truth and all that.

00:38:57 ►

And it’s certainly reaching a new nadir right now.

00:39:02 ►

But I haven’t been that proud that I haven’t spent my whole life sucking at the

00:39:08 ►

tit of NIH, which is support all my research. But whenever I would get to a point where

00:39:14 ►

I would think something was very relevant to the war on drugs and changing drug policy,

00:39:20 ►

I would be told by the head of the igniter or whatever

00:39:25 ►

that I shouldn’t go there.

00:39:26 ►

This was not a subject that they could discuss

00:39:29 ►

unless there was a representative from the White House there or whatever.

00:39:34 ►

So kind of underground.

00:39:36 ►

So when I retired in 2008, I decided,

00:39:39 ►

well, I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

00:39:41 ►

I don’t have to raise grant money anymore.

00:39:44 ►

So since then, I’ve’t have to raise grant money anymore. So since

00:39:45 ►

then, I’ve been working to change public policy, do education, and establish some sort of

00:39:53 ►

longitudinal observational research, which is what I did most of my career, but enrolling

00:39:59 ►

people or entering into medical cannabis programs throughout the country where

00:40:06 ►

there is a requirement that the material sold in the dispensaries be analyzed and

00:40:13 ►

records of the amount and then patients agree to be interviewed and their

00:40:18 ►

caregivers look at the subjective and objective complaints and in that way figure out kind of other strain specificities

00:40:28 ►

or even certain cannabinoid mixture specificities

00:40:32 ►

that really work for some symptoms and so forth.

00:40:35 ►

And I get a lot of resistance from my colleagues.

00:40:38 ►

They say, oh, why bother with that?

00:40:40 ►

The drug companies are going to do that.

00:40:42 ►

Or the federal government is going to legalize this stuff.

00:40:44 ►

And then the big pharma will come in and do it all.

00:40:48 ►

And they always say, don’t hold your breath, okay?

00:40:51 ►

It’s not going to happen.

00:40:53 ►

And even if they did, they’re not going to be interested in the boutique

00:40:58 ►

and specificity of this because it’s still not an accepted medical specialty.

00:41:03 ►

of this, because it’s still not an accepted medical specialty.

00:41:08 ►

And the real issue is until we’ve trained a whole other generation of doctors and psychiatrists and so forth

00:41:12 ►

about the positive aspects of psychedelic

00:41:16 ►

drugs, in particular cannabis, none of the green juice.

00:41:19 ►

I remember not so long ago speaking before a group of

00:41:24 ►

Northwestern medical students on this subject.

00:41:27 ►

And I even had my favorite patient there, Julie, who loves to just, she has MS,

00:41:33 ►

and she loves to just eat her brownies right in front of the audience while she’s speaking.

00:41:40 ►

Very effective lobbyist.

00:41:41 ►

very effective lobbyist.

00:41:48 ►

But after I finished talking about how so much of what’s on the websites of the various government agencies of contradictory and bullshit,

00:41:52 ►

a medical student stood up and said,

00:41:54 ►

how dare you accuse our government of saying lies?

00:42:00 ►

And it’s like, wow, you know?

00:42:03 ►

It’s another universe.

00:42:05 ►

So I’ll get off that.

00:42:06 ►

I’ll say one of the most important experiences to me was about 1967,

00:42:14 ►

a group of us were driving across country from Chicago to New York

00:42:17 ►

to participate in the big anti-war march,

00:42:20 ►

which if any of you have seen the movie Hair, you know all about that.

00:42:24 ►

And it was like a 15-hour drive during which several of us had psilocybin tablets with, you know,

00:42:31 ►

capsules with us. And so we knew not to eat anything at all during the day. However, we

00:42:37 ►

stopped for a break and I ate an orange. So about eight hours later, we get to New York

00:42:43 ►

and we take the little Sideman.

00:42:46 ►

I thought I was going to wreck that orange for at least an hour, but all of a sudden

00:42:50 ►

I noticed that I’m walking like six inches above the sidewalk in the village.

00:42:57 ►

And this trip lasted all night and ended up, we couldn’t even find the place in Brooklyn

00:43:03 ►

where we left our stuff and we were supposed to stay overnight. And we ended up some all night

00:43:08 ►

party where this woman looked into my eyes

00:43:12 ►

which I guess were wide as could be and started reading

00:43:16 ►

my past and my present and my future to the point that I really

00:43:20 ►

freaked out and I told my friends, we’ve got to get out of here. This is just too

00:43:24 ►

far much.

00:43:28 ►

If you read any book, I forget the author,

00:43:31 ►

but it’s something like Drug Set and Setting.

00:43:37 ►

It’s a classic.

00:43:38 ►

And it explains so much of what you’re talking about.

00:43:41 ►

The drug effect is only like a small part of what

00:43:45 ►

you experience, and your expectations and fears, et cetera, and especially the setting

00:43:52 ►

and who you’re with, really can determine whether you have no experience or a good experience

00:43:58 ►

or a bad experience. So I think it’s very important before you experiment with a new drug at least, that

00:44:06 ►

you do it with somebody who’s experienced and can guide you through that.

00:44:12 ►

Because they will know what the pitfalls are.

00:44:15 ►

I remember once being introduced to Special K, ketamine, not knowing what it was, thinking it was coke, and having

00:44:26 ►

a K hole

00:44:28 ►

on a dance floor in Miami

00:44:31 ►

with a bunch of Brazilians I didn’t even

00:44:32 ►

know.

00:44:34 ►

And

00:44:34 ►

it was the most horrifying thing,

00:44:38 ►

because you, I don’t know if you’ve ever used

00:44:40 ►

something like ketamine, or, yeah.

00:44:43 ►

It’s a totally dissociative thing,

00:44:44 ►

and your body

00:44:45 ►

and your mind are just separated

00:44:47 ►

by a whole lot and

00:44:49 ►

I got over it and I said I’m never going to do this

00:44:52 ►

drug again, I got back to Chicago and I

00:44:53 ►

told this story to a friend of mine and he said

00:44:55 ►

well you just didn’t do it with the right person

00:44:57 ►

and he arranged for

00:44:59 ►

him and I to take it and a third

00:45:01 ►

person to be kind of

00:45:03 ►

the driver of the experience in

00:45:07 ►

a wonderful setting where we felt safe. And he kept saying to me every time it seemed

00:45:12 ►

like my body was disappearing and my mind was just little blurbs above my head, having

00:45:18 ►

little thoughts, he said, you don’t have to worry. You know this is only going to last

00:45:21 ►

two hours and you’re going to be fine, okay going to be fine. And one has to really prepare for this.

00:45:30 ►

And then we get to the whole issue of safety and experimentation.

00:45:34 ►

Most of my research has been, unfortunately, because I’m a doctor,

00:45:37 ►

and my funding came from the AIDS epidemic,

00:45:41 ►

is on the negative aspects of drugs and how they contribute to behaviors that spread diseases.

00:45:50 ►

And we’re not just talking about AIDS, many diseases.

00:45:53 ►

And I think one of the most important discoveries that I made

00:45:57 ►

towards the end of that research was that, like,

00:45:59 ►

90% of all new HIV infections among gay men in the United States

00:46:04 ►

were associated with three classes of drug use.

00:46:08 ►

Stimulants, erectile dysfunction drugs, and volatile nitrates or poppers.

00:46:16 ►

And it’s such a close association that you can’t disentangle which comes first, the egg or the chicken.

00:46:23 ►

And it’s really amazing.

00:46:22 ►

which comes first, the egg or the chicken.

00:46:24 ►

And it’s really amazing.

00:46:30 ►

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the virus actually evolved to take advantage of the particular drug use

00:46:33 ►

that was used to make sex more exciting, long-lasting, and so forth.

00:46:41 ►

And that’s how it spread so fast.

00:46:44 ►

So, and one last thing.

00:46:47 ►

People talk about individual experiences,

00:46:50 ►

you know, and we have this put down

00:46:52 ►

in medical thing, we call that a case study.

00:46:56 ►

And I remember when I was doing research

00:46:59 ►

on lithium transport

00:47:02 ►

and found a woman who had rapid cycling

00:47:05 ►

manic depressive illness who was willing to be

00:47:09 ►

a subject where we sampled her blood

00:47:13 ►

as she cycled through highs and lows and everything. And I presented

00:47:17 ►

at an APA meeting the results where we could show that

00:47:20 ►

the chemical parameters

00:47:23 ►

the chemical parameters of her membrane transport

00:47:31 ►

varied with what her mood cycle was.

00:47:36 ►

And then I published it, and the head of research in the Journal of Biological Psychiatry,

00:47:43 ►

and the head of research at the American Psychiatric

00:47:45 ►

came up to me the next meeting. He said, you know, I read that paper, that case study of yours in the

00:47:51 ►

Journal of Biological Psychiatry. You know, you set back psychiatric research by 20 years by

00:47:57 ►

publishing that paper. So it’s wonderful to talk about our individual experiences,

00:48:05 ►

but unfortunately there’s a conflict,

00:48:08 ►

there’s a paradigm conflict

00:48:10 ►

between what we’re all experiencing and talking about here

00:48:13 ►

and how the so-called ideal scientific method is supposed to work.

00:48:18 ►

And it’s not that it’s a bad thing,

00:48:19 ►

I think we should be doing both,

00:48:21 ►

and we should be looking for how they interrelate with each other

00:48:24 ►

and how we can learn so much more that way.

00:48:26 ►

Thank you.

00:48:27 ►

All right.

00:48:38 ►

Psychedelics have just meant so much to me in my life that it’s hard to think of any one story. At this point, I’ve had

00:48:46 ►

enough experience that it has become sort of an overarching tapestry. But anytime I’m

00:48:54 ►

going to start telling my story with psychedelics, I have to begin with pain. And there are a

00:48:59 ►

couple people in this group who know me, so I’m going to try and keep this short, but I get headaches.

00:49:10 ►

And that was a story that I remember telling my wife when they first came back when I was 28 years old.

00:49:12 ►

I told her I get headaches.

00:49:14 ►

They’re migraine headaches.

00:49:15 ►

And I consider myself very lucky that she didn’t really believe me.

00:49:19 ►

She didn’t really believe me because she spent too much time with me having them, and that she remembers me sitting in a shower for two hours,

00:49:28 ►

rocking back and forth, crying, and just going,

00:49:31 ►

oh my God, oh my God, I hope it stops.

00:49:34 ►

She remembers sitting at too many dinners out with friends where I had a beer,

00:49:39 ►

and she could see me sitting across with tears streaming out of one of my eyes

00:49:42 ►

as I tried to pretend like I wasn’t in just unbearable pain.

00:49:47 ►

And at some point, she was the one who finally looked at me and said,

00:49:49 ►

these are not headaches.

00:49:51 ►

What are you doing?

00:49:52 ►

And she looked, and she looked into more research,

00:49:54 ►

and she found a different name for them.

00:49:56 ►

They’re called cluster headaches.

00:49:59 ►

But even that name isn’t incredibly descriptive.

00:50:03 ►

They don’t really give the effect of what they

00:50:05 ►

do, so there’s a third name for them, suicide headaches. These are a type of primary pain

00:50:13 ►

that are known to driving people to kill themselves, because they’re not actually headaches. They’re

00:50:19 ►

a nerve pain disorder, and they don’t really know what causes them or why,

00:50:25 ►

but a nerve in your face and the side of your head starts telling you that you’re in pain

00:50:29 ►

that cannot be treated by painkillers or unfortunately by crying or sitting in the shower

00:50:34 ►

and that people with the chronic form of this, they suffer.

00:50:39 ►

I’m very lucky in that I don’t have the chronic form of it

00:50:42 ►

and I’ve been bearing with them for years.

00:50:45 ►

But this research and this search for my wife

00:50:48 ►

led us to a website called ClusterBusters.org,

00:50:52 ►

a nonprofit organization that has done surveys and research

00:50:56 ►

because people with this particular condition

00:50:58 ►

have reported over time that a couple people noticed

00:51:02 ►

that if they take psychedelics, that their headaches,

00:51:04 ►

sometimes they stop, sometimes they go away, sometimes they go away for years. And so there

00:51:10 ►

I was, 28 years old, the type of person who really had never tried drugs. It took me until

00:51:16 ►

I was in my master’s degree in college to even consider marijuana because I got kind

00:51:20 ►

of talked down to by a student who knew more than me about it.

00:51:30 ►

And suddenly here I was with this condition that I needed relief from because I couldn’t get my life back.

00:51:32 ►

I couldn’t go out to dinner. I couldn’t have beers.

00:51:34 ►

I couldn’t play soccer. I couldn’t do any of the things that I loved.

00:51:38 ►

And so I tried psychedelics.

00:51:41 ►

And the short version of that is that I found great relief from them.

00:51:46 ►

But the truth is, there’s a lot of you here who know me and who know that story,

00:51:50 ►

so I’m not even going to dwell too long on that type of pain,

00:51:54 ►

because the part of the story that I don’t tell very often are the other types of pain in my life that I felt less than.

00:52:03 ►

I was so thrilled when I first tried mushrooms to find that my headaches did, they disappeared

00:52:09 ►

for a long time.

00:52:10 ►

And I was more thrilled to find that when they came back again a year and a half later,

00:52:14 ►

that LSD helped me to keep them away even though I couldn’t keep them away permanently.

00:52:19 ►

But what I didn’t expect to happen from these experiences, as I spent a year treating this disorder,

00:52:26 ►

was that other parts of me would begin to grow, and that parts of me that I had never experienced before would form.

00:52:35 ►

I didn’t expect that I would start drinking a lot less.

00:52:40 ►

I honestly didn’t really know I was a binge drinker, but I was.

00:52:43 ►

I honestly didn’t really know I was a binge drinker, but I was.

00:52:46 ►

I loved nothing more than waiting to get to the weekend and didn’t really consider the night to have started

00:52:49 ►

until I’d had my fourth or fifth drink.

00:52:52 ►

And I never talk about that going away

00:52:54 ►

because the truth is I was highly functional.

00:52:57 ►

I didn’t expect that not only would that happen,

00:53:01 ►

but that my marriage was going to get better,

00:53:05 ►

that I would become more patient and more kind.

00:53:08 ►

That I would listen more to my wife.

00:53:11 ►

That I would listen more to everyone around me.

00:53:15 ►

And that I would discover a deeper common, a deeper interest in everyone’s stories and the common humanity around me.

00:53:25 ►

a deeper interest in everyone’s stories and the common humanity around me.

00:53:31 ►

Probably most of all, I had never considered myself to be a religious or a spiritual person in any way, shape, or form. I was, I don’t know, maybe a rationalist, very logical,

00:53:39 ►

very educated, very much believing in school, and it’s an odd thing to be sitting where I am now at 31 years

00:53:47 ►

old just three years later finding for the first time that I have a deep-seated faith

00:53:54 ►

in something larger than what is going on and what I can immediately see in this life

00:54:00 ►

and I didn’t necessarily find a birth into any, I don’t consider myself to have found a

00:54:05 ►

birth into any specific religion, although Buddhist thought has probably influenced me heavily.

00:54:11 ►

But more than anything, after a couple of years of experimentation with these substances and

00:54:16 ►

looking deeply at myself and internally, I have found that I believe in happiness

00:54:23 ►

and that I had that awoken in me.

00:54:27 ►

I thought I believed in happiness before, but I did not.

00:54:30 ►

I believed in happy hour.

00:54:34 ►

I believed in chasing fleeting pleasures, and I looked for happiness in every place

00:54:38 ►

where it was possible to find it for a short time, but where it would inevitably vanish.

00:54:44 ►

And instead, through some strange combination of meditation, internal exploration, to find it for a short time but where it would inevitably vanish and instead

00:54:45 ►

through some strange combination of meditation internal exploration and this

00:54:51 ►

gift of psychedelics that they have been in my life I believe in finding lasting

00:54:56 ►

peace and beautiful joy that exists deep inside each and every one of us and that

00:55:02 ►

is a matter of going ahead and learning to access it, and that we can achieve

00:55:06 ►

it here, now, in this life.

00:55:08 ►

That it is available,

00:55:10 ►

and I hope

00:55:12 ►

to find it, and I hope every one of you do

00:55:14 ►

as well. Thank you.

00:55:28 ►

So, I became interested in psychedelics.

00:55:32 ►

Initially, I was interested for research purposes.

00:55:35 ►

I was thinking, oh my God, can we study this?

00:55:38 ►

Can we try to figure out if this is a good medicine?

00:55:41 ►

And also I was very interested in psychedelic music,

00:55:44 ►

in the 60s, in the rock music.

00:55:46 ►

I was like, I want to experience an other state of consciousness.

00:55:52 ►

For me, it was more like an experience in my life.

00:55:54 ►

I want to experience what is a hallucination,

00:55:57 ►

what is to feel in a different state of consciousness. So I first took LSD one time with my friend Matt

00:56:01 ►

and another guy that we knew from,

00:56:05 ►

he was a philosopher and we had like a bonfire

00:56:08 ►

and a group, we were doing like group therapy

00:56:13 ►

when we were in a forest in Indiana.

00:56:18 ►

We had an experience of sharing, of empathy,

00:56:20 ►

or of introspection, so we’re trying to do it

00:56:23 ►

with therapeutic reasons, but we didn’t know very much what we were doing.

00:56:27 ►

We were trying to share our experience,

00:56:29 ►

so I was trying to be insightful.

00:56:31 ►

Why do I like…

00:56:32 ►

I used to like older women.

00:56:35 ►

I was like, why do I like older women?

00:56:39 ►

I wanted to understand that a little bit more.

00:56:42 ►

We were having insightful experience about things.

00:56:45 ►

After that, I forgot about it for a while.

00:56:48 ►

And I went to New York.

00:56:50 ►

I’m from Spain.

00:56:52 ►

You know this, and I have an accent.

00:56:54 ►

So after that, I was in Chicago.

00:56:56 ►

And then from Chicago, I went to New York.

00:56:58 ►

And in New York, I was working with patients who had cancer.

00:57:03 ►

And I was seeing people dying all the time.

00:57:05 ►

And deeply in my heart, I knew that this comes from childhood experiences.

00:57:09 ►

So when I was a child, my mother passed away.

00:57:13 ►

And that was always in my head.

00:57:15 ►

What happens when you die?

00:57:17 ►

I’m a little spiritual, rationalistic.

00:57:21 ►

I don’t know where I am.

00:57:22 ►

But no religion really agreed with me.

00:57:26 ►

I didn’t know actually what happened after you died.

00:57:28 ►

So I was always like

00:57:29 ►

about this experience,

00:57:32 ►

what happens after you die?

00:57:33 ►

What does it mean to not exist?

00:57:36 ►

What does it mean to disappear?

00:57:37 ►

Do we encounter

00:57:39 ►

somebody? So this anxiety

00:57:41 ►

was always going on with me

00:57:42 ►

for many years.

00:57:45 ►

And I think that’s part of the reason I worked in a cancer hospital.

00:57:49 ►

I mean, also I wanted to help people, but from a psychoanalytic point of view,

00:57:53 ►

I really wanted to be there and see unconsciously if I could help other people go through that experience,

00:58:00 ►

maybe I could understand myself and I could kind of heal my own anxiety.

00:58:05 ►

maybe I could understand myself and I could kind of like heal my own anxiety. So after that I saw that in NYU they were doing research with psilocybin and I really

00:58:13 ►

thought, well, maybe we could do this in patients with cancer because I know they’re doing the

00:58:16 ►

research and so on.

00:58:18 ►

But I kind of like, you know, like I finished my fellowship there and then I came back to

00:58:22 ►

Chicago where I work now.

00:58:30 ►

And at that time, I met with Matt again, because we were co-fellows back in the day,

00:58:33 ►

and I met with him and reconnected.

00:58:36 ►

Well, we were connected even there, but we reconnected more here.

00:58:41 ►

And I had a friend who had the mushrooms.

00:58:43 ►

I said, well, let’s go again, and let’s try to do it right.

00:58:45 ►

So we got the Fallyman book,

00:58:47 ►

we started this psychedelic meetup,

00:58:49 ►

we got the John Lilly, so we read everything and I said, let’s do it now according to

00:58:52 ►

what they say, let’s do it again,

00:58:53 ►

but let’s do it right.

00:58:55 ►

Let’s just not do it randomly and so on.

00:58:57 ►

So we did the whole thing,

00:58:59 ►

we had an empty stomach,

00:59:02 ►

we took coffee,

00:59:04 ►

we put our music, our Jimi Hendrix and everything.

00:59:08 ►

We were in the forest again, in the cabin, in the booth.

00:59:11 ►

We were like really, we took a high dose.

00:59:16 ►

And then at that time I was like, you know, I was like, well, when I took the LSD,

00:59:19 ►

I was just feeling empathic and seeing weird things, but not so much.

00:59:23 ►

But with this, it was like, wow.

00:59:25 ►

So I found myself, and I wanted to do it just to re-experience,

00:59:30 ►

have a good psychedelic experience.

00:59:32 ►

So I guess I was a case report with myself.

00:59:35 ►

I wanted to understand something that I would potentially recommend

00:59:37 ►

to patients and other people in the future.

00:59:41 ►

So I remember my first experience was to feel very happy.

00:59:44 ►

I was feeling very happy. I was

00:59:46 ►

feeling, you know, like I was smiling. I remember I was smiling with my eyes closed, you know,

00:59:51 ►

with covering my eyes. And I was like, oh my God, I’m so happy. And then I saw a tunnel and I felt,

00:59:57 ►

do I want to go? Yes or no? So I felt I had the option to go in the tunnel or stay, you know? So

01:00:02 ►

I said, well, let’s go, you know, let’s go. But I don’t know what’s going to or stay you know so i said well let’s go you know let’s go but i don’t know what’s gonna happen you know so you get this feeling that if you go you may not be able to come back

01:00:09 ►

but you’re okay with it somehow you know so i i took the the right and i went in the tunnel

01:00:16 ►

and then i felt i think i was influenced by well first what i saw is i could empathize with other

01:00:23 ►

people that i thought i had hurt in my life.

01:00:26 ►

So at that time I had broken up with a girlfriend that I had in Spain for five years,

01:00:31 ►

five years long-distance relationship.

01:00:33 ►

By the way, I don’t recommend long-distance much.

01:00:35 ►

I don’t think long-distance is very good.

01:00:38 ►

So after five years we broke up and I felt her pain.

01:00:43 ►

For a while I was trying to justify myself, thinking, oh my God, it’s her fault, or it’s not my fault.

01:00:51 ►

But then I could feel her pain, so by feeling her pain, I almost could enter her consciousness.

01:00:57 ►

It was kind of weird, but I didn’t expect that.

01:00:59 ►

But I felt that I could be here, and I could see myself from her point of view, you know.

01:01:06 ►

So after that, I developed a kind of empathy about, you know, well, now I feel your pain, and I feel guilty about it.

01:01:13 ►

And it’s okay to feel guilty about it.

01:01:14 ►

Then I entered the mind of another co-worker that I had a problem with for a while, but I was not consciously aware that I had a problem.

01:01:23 ►

And I felt like I could enter his mind and understand his childhood and everything, you know. So I felt empathy

01:01:28 ►

for him, too. So after that, I said, okay, let’s move on to the next step. So I felt

01:01:33 ►

I was again in a tunnel, and I could take the ride or not. So I took the ride, and I

01:01:37 ►

was like, whoo, you know. And I was totally dissociated from my body. I was like, you

01:01:41 ►

know, my body was in a different stage or something. So I went to the new compartment or something. It was like in the movie Planta or something

01:01:48 ►

like that. Like you’re in a compartment and you’re like, wow, you know, I’m in a new compartment.

01:01:52 ►

And in this compartment, I felt that I was talking to the people who had schizophrenia.

01:01:57 ►

I was thinking, oh, you know, you guys, you knew it. You knew it and you didn’t tell me,

01:02:02 ►

you know. And, you know, I’m a physician, I’m a psychiatrist I was like, oh my god

01:02:06 ►

I prescribe antipsychotics, I mean now I don’t

01:02:08 ►

feel that way, but at that time I was feeling like

01:02:09 ►

why am I prescribing when these people are

01:02:12 ►

much better than me maybe

01:02:14 ►

or something like that, you know, that’s how I felt

01:02:15 ►

at that time, I wouldn’t feel, I think schizophrenia

01:02:18 ►

is a different thing, but that’s how

01:02:20 ►

I felt at that time, and then I took another

01:02:22 ►

ride to the third compartment, and in

01:02:24 ►

the third compartment I was really not expecting

01:02:25 ►

this, but

01:02:26 ►

this fear of dying, it really

01:02:29 ►

came out. I was like,

01:02:31 ►

oh my god, in the third compartment, I was

01:02:33 ►

like, oh my god, I’m dying.

01:02:35 ►

I’m dying, and I’m okay with it, but I was thinking,

01:02:38 ►

what about my family?

01:02:39 ►

What about my

01:02:40 ►

brothers? And then I felt,

01:02:43 ►

well, this is just a short time.

01:02:45 ►

We’re all going to be here at some point,

01:02:48 ►

and we all are going to be OK.

01:02:50 ►

It’s going to be OK.

01:02:51 ►

We’re happy here.

01:02:52 ►

We’re at peace.

01:02:54 ►

And we are going to be together.

01:02:55 ►

So I don’t even have to tell them.

01:02:57 ►

So it’s almost like I had an experience of conscious dying

01:03:01 ►

where I felt I was really dying at that time

01:03:04 ►

because I was really far away from,

01:03:06 ►

you know, like reality or something, and I felt that it was okay not to share that,

01:03:12 ►

that there was a consciousness after that, after I died, you know, so I felt it was okay,

01:03:16 ►

and I felt that it was, that dying was okay, and it was natural, and it was what we would expect,

01:03:22 ►

and I felt I was more okay with it. I was more okay with dying

01:03:25 ►

and I felt that dying was not that bad after all.

01:03:28 ►

So then after I came back

01:03:30 ►

from the whole trip, then we

01:03:32 ►

just went for a walk

01:03:33 ►

and we had reflections and I had

01:03:35 ►

we thought about it

01:03:37 ►

but that was I think the most intense moment

01:03:40 ►

for me psychologically because I’ve been living with this

01:03:42 ►

anxiety of dying and not knowing

01:03:44 ►

what happens after that and having this almost like fear of non-existing and lack of meaning and

01:03:53 ►

this kind of existential anxiety so I’ve been living with it with this for so long and at some

01:03:58 ►

point I felt you know it’s gonna happen it’s natural it’s okay it might be better or not you

01:04:03 ►

know and of course like

01:04:05 ►

everyone was saying you know a little bit a little bit more spiritual if anything you know like there

01:04:10 ►

might be something you know and let’s be open to that you know and in the meantime let’s enjoy our Hello, good evening.

01:04:28 ►

I’m Andrea.

01:04:30 ►

I had my first ayahuasca journey in September,

01:04:33 ►

and the first night was really beautiful.

01:04:36 ►

I definitely had reverence.

01:04:38 ►

I mean, I was like crying as I took my glass.

01:04:40 ►

I knew what was coming, and my ego was so scared.

01:04:44 ►

And when it came on, I had like a five-alarm fire in my glass. I knew what was coming and my ego was so scared. And when it came on, I had

01:04:46 ►

like a five alarm fire in my body. It was like, retreat, mayday, get out of here. Oh

01:04:53 ►

my God, I can’t. And then breathe. And the first night, you know, I remember one moment

01:05:00 ►

just being like, Buddha, is that you you and it was just you know really

01:05:06 ►

powerful experience in the cosmos and other other universes and then the next

01:05:12 ►

night I was just like I can’t do this again but it was like you came here to

01:05:16 ►

drink so drink and I was like I’m gonna drink and and it was really challenging. And I just became agitated with the music.

01:05:29 ►

And this is beautiful, celestial music and sacred space.

01:05:33 ►

And I just, you know, everything started to agitate me.

01:05:38 ►

And I couldn’t read anymore.

01:05:40 ►

And as the night progressed, I just, you you know wanted to control my life and I

01:05:48 ►

wanted to have any sense of control and the tea in the universe was like little

01:05:57 ►

girl you wanted to cut in line you know I love to cut in line and, like, get behind at concerts and sneak my way into stuff.

01:06:06 ►

And I always have.

01:06:08 ►

And the universe was like, not this time, little girl.

01:06:13 ►

Get back in line.

01:06:15 ►

And, like, we know why you want to do it.

01:06:17 ►

And you’re cute.

01:06:19 ►

But mm-mm.

01:06:21 ►

And, you know, so I was, like, learning self-love in the process, but then, like, the insanity.

01:06:27 ►

Like, literally, I felt the insanity of, like, trying to control life.

01:06:32 ►

And in the morning, I remember this little, like, dog was there.

01:06:37 ►

His name was, like, St. Pedro something.

01:06:41 ►

It was this beautiful dog from the heavens.

01:06:44 ►

And he woke me up up and I was like,

01:06:45 ►

and I just had this feeling of like a wild horse that had just gotten broken.

01:06:51 ►

And I got on my hands and knees and I just like thanked the Lord that the experience was over.

01:06:58 ►

And then I was like, you know, like, oh my God, thank you. And so then, so meanwhile, in the first night, you know,

01:07:06 ►

I had all these like symphonies to my love.

01:07:09 ►

His name is Lucas.

01:07:10 ►

I loved him so much, you know.

01:07:12 ►

I still, maybe I don’t anymore.

01:07:14 ►

I don’t know anything.

01:07:15 ►

But anyways, I had all these like symphonies in my head

01:07:18 ►

and I, you know, I had all these insights

01:07:20 ►

and then just my love for him and letters

01:07:23 ►

and just everything just came pouring out

01:07:25 ►

and um he he ended up ending the relationship because he felt he just you know wasn’t who he

01:07:35 ►

was meant to be in a partnership and stuff and I’m and and I like I’ve now lived that insanity

01:07:42 ►

of thinking I can control life.

01:07:46 ►

And, like, I haven’t accepted it.

01:07:51 ►

And what we accept we go beyond, and what we don’t we’re stuck with.

01:07:55 ►

And I’m, like, in a bad glass, you know. And I, like, when am I going to wake up?

01:07:59 ►

You know, when is this wild horse going to be broken?

01:08:03 ►

And I’ve almost been, like, mad at the tea.

01:08:06 ►

Like, maybe if I hadn’t drank the tea, I’d be fine with this dysfunction in my mind.

01:08:12 ►

You know, I’d be like, it’s heartbreak.

01:08:14 ►

You know, you’ll get over it, time, distract yourself.

01:08:19 ►

But I know it’s something deeper now.

01:08:22 ►

And, you know, blast you.

01:08:30 ►

And I’m grateful. I I really am I truly am um but it’s been hard and I think that the integration process even though I’ve drank the tea um since then

01:08:37 ►

it’s just still going on for me and I just want to thank you for the opportunity to share that and yeah maybe he’ll have a mushroom

01:08:48 ►

experience and get into my mind anyways I wouldn’t want anybody to get into my mind it’s dysfunctional

01:08:55 ►

but thank you for the tea thank you for this opportunity have a great rest of your evening.

01:09:12 ►

So it’s a little different.

01:09:17 ►

This story I owe to the meetup group and Matt, who was sharing one time

01:09:22 ►

about breath work

01:09:23 ►

and how that experience was for him and

01:09:28 ►

different than some of the psychedelic or other experience other experiences

01:09:34 ►

that thank you so um I so I I signed up and went to a holotropic breathwork. It was actually called neo-schematic breathwork.

01:09:45 ►

And so I went there, and I really wasn’t knowing what to expect.

01:09:52 ►

And I imagine it’s this way with most breathwork, but you have, we paired off,

01:09:59 ►

and one person’s a sitter for the other one while the other one’s doing the breath work, and then you would change.

01:10:05 ►

So I’m a sitter to begin with, and I came with a friend and business partner, Viviana,

01:10:15 ►

and so we paired off differently, and I’m sitting for someone,

01:10:20 ►

and while they’re all doing it and and I’m watching people, and I see Viviana, and she’s just breathing and nothing, just calm.

01:10:29 ►

And then I see a few other people, and the person I was sitting with

01:10:33 ►

was kind of starting to go through things.

01:10:35 ►

And I’m like, you know, I was like, you know, this is interesting.

01:10:40 ►

Like, they’re just breathing, and, you know, what’s going on?

01:10:46 ►

like they’re just breathing and you know what’s going on you know but I was I was you know kind of skeptical like how is breathing going to really like do

01:10:51 ►

anything and other than you know maybe a little hyperventilation and I wasn’t

01:10:58 ►

sure so then it was my turn we switched after a while and so it was my turn to

01:11:04 ►

start doing the breath work

01:11:06 ►

and again I’m not really

01:11:08 ►

I’m kind of skeptical I’m not really expecting

01:11:10 ►

anything I start breathing

01:11:12 ►

the music which was a

01:11:14 ►

big part of this starts

01:11:16 ►

going and within

01:11:18 ►

minutes like

01:11:20 ►

I would say like I was just

01:11:22 ►

01:11:23 ►

like blasted off to somewhere else and

01:11:27 ►

I my body started moving like first my legs and it was like just moving like I wasn’t doing it

01:11:37 ►

was just my my legs were moving I know it the music had an effect with it and then and then

01:11:44 ►

eventually like the rest of my body, it just couldn’t stop.

01:11:47 ►

And what it felt like was that there was something trapped inside of me,

01:11:51 ►

like this energy, like something that needed to get out.

01:11:55 ►

And I was just moving and moving faster and more,

01:11:59 ►

like something just had to get out.

01:12:01 ►

And the more I moved, the more it was like it was getting out

01:12:05 ►

and then all this and then at a certain point so this is going on for for quite a while and you

01:12:10 ►

know it started my feet and just kind of moved up and I remember my my head and my neck and like

01:12:15 ►

everything’s just moving and um that was pretty bizarre and I remember at one point being conscious of this and saying,

01:12:27 ►

God, I must look pretty crazy, but it was just happening.

01:12:31 ►

And then at a certain point, I start holding myself with my arms like this, tight.

01:12:40 ►

I just was holding myself.

01:12:42 ►

It was really like, and I’m still moving, but I was holding myself it was like really like and you know I’m still moving

01:12:46 ►

but I’m holding myself and all of a sudden

01:12:48 ►

I start crying

01:12:50 ►

and I get this

01:12:52 ►

picture of me as a little kid

01:12:54 ►

about 7 I think I was around

01:12:56 ►

7 years old and I’m in my

01:12:59 ►

room and I’m on my

01:13:01 ►

stomach like

01:13:02 ►

kicking crying

01:13:04 ►

kicking my legs and going to sleep.

01:13:09 ►

And I remembered as a child, like, I don’t know what, you know, I just, I know I felt sad.

01:13:17 ►

I felt scared.

01:13:18 ►

I felt lonely.

01:13:20 ►

And all this was coming up as I was doing it.

01:13:23 ►

Just like all of a sudden, like, I’m seeing me as this little kid and feeling these feelings again.

01:13:28 ►

And I’m like bawling, I’m like crying, like I didn’t, you know, I wanted to like, I remember my hands then going up to my face,

01:13:35 ►

because I didn’t really want anyone to see this in this room, but I was like, you know, I was experiencing what I,

01:13:48 ►

I was experiencing what I, and I think afterwards I thought about,

01:13:50 ►

like when I was a kid, I think I would cry myself to sleep,

01:13:52 ►

and it was kind of like this kicking and hyperventilation,

01:13:54 ►

kind of like what I was doing with the breath work.

01:14:00 ►

So there seemed to be some connection there between how I went to sleep as a kid during this period of time.

01:14:03 ►

So anyway, so that goes on. And then after

01:14:06 ►

a period of time, I don’t know if the music was changing at this time or my body was just

01:14:11 ►

like starting to like be tired from all of this. Like I know I was sweating and crying,

01:14:18 ►

so I was pretty wet at this point. But I just remember kind of relaxing and and I started like really

01:14:28 ►

getting relaxed and so I started breathing again because I wanted to you

01:14:33 ►

know see what was going on so I you know I kind of had slowed down my breath so I

01:14:36 ►

was breathing you could start breathing again faster and deeper and then um then

01:14:41 ►

all of a sudden like I see like I look like you know my eyes are closed

01:14:46 ►

and I have a thing over my but I look with my eyes closed and I see like a face like looking at me

01:14:54 ►

and um I don’t know who it was it was I believe a man’s face um kind of a funny I remember like

01:15:02 ►

I wasn’t scared or anything, but it was pretty bizarre.

01:15:05 ►

I was like, you know, who are you?

01:15:07 ►

Like, what are you doing here?

01:15:09 ►

And it was like, like they had a big wide nose.

01:15:12 ►

And I just remember thinking, you know, this is kind of interesting.

01:15:16 ►

And I don’t know where this came from.

01:15:19 ►

And then, and it was kind of like right in front of me.

01:15:22 ►

And I could kind of see through it.

01:15:24 ►

But I really couldn’t see, like, I was trying to really see, like, do I know this person?

01:15:29 ►

But then that went away.

01:15:31 ►

And then I believe after that came a tiger, like a Bengal tiger or something.

01:15:38 ►

Now I don’t think that’s much about tigers.

01:15:41 ►

I mean, if it was a wolf or some other animals, like I have some connection with, but

01:15:46 ►

a tiger, I don’t know where that came from, too.

01:15:48 ►

And it’s just looking right at me.

01:15:50 ►

And what was cool was I could see the eyes

01:15:52 ►

and the really green eyes.

01:15:56 ►

And

01:15:56 ►

afterwards,

01:15:58 ►

when we’re done, later on

01:16:00 ►

we go and we’re drawing

01:16:01 ►

our experience. We have a medallia

01:16:04 ►

and a circle. And I remember in the middle I drew these eyes

01:16:07 ►

because that was, like, so clear to me,

01:16:09 ►

these eyes, like, right in front of me.

01:16:11 ►

I’m like, okay, you know, again, not scary or anything.

01:16:15 ►

I’m just kind of fascinated by where is this coming from?

01:16:17 ►

I’m doing this breath work.

01:16:18 ►

Why am I seeing these things?

01:16:20 ►

You know, where are these hallucinations coming from?

01:16:22 ►

Like, it’s not something i think

01:16:25 ►

of so it’s coming from somewhere else and and then after that i saw a couple other um animals uh

01:16:32 ►

um that also kind of all looking right at me and um so i thought that was uh um so

01:16:39 ►

when it was over um you know to me, it was just really interesting.

01:16:46 ►

I did not expect it.

01:16:47 ►

I was skeptical.

01:16:50 ►

What I do know, I’ve done a lot of other different things to work on me

01:16:55 ►

and to learn and to evolve and everything. But I think like the understanding the breath work and body work, I think that’s

01:17:11 ►

something I haven’t done a lot of. And I think that after this experience, I really want

01:17:17 ►

to explore more of that. Because especially all this stuff that I felt inside of me, it

01:17:23 ►

kind of was like weird, like, okay, there’s something going on that I felt inside of me that kind of was like weird like okay there’s you know there’s

01:17:26 ►

something going on that I need to deal with it’s in my body or cells that I need to work through

01:17:30 ►

and um and the only other thing I’ll say is like I was with again I was with my a good friend and

01:17:34 ►

business partner and afterwards we hugged and like and I just remember crying like feeling like this

01:17:39 ►

love and like just so grateful for the friends that I have today and for her friendship.

01:17:46 ►

Because I remember thinking, you know, that little boy, seven years old,

01:17:51 ►

I remember that he could have used friends like I have now today.

01:17:55 ►

And at seven, I couldn’t do the things I do now and be who I am.

01:18:00 ►

So at seven, I was experiencing the world in that way.

01:18:03 ►

And today, it did bring afterwards like this great appreciation for, you know,

01:18:10 ►

what I’ve been able to work through and the people in my life today.

01:18:14 ►

And it was really a neat experience.

01:18:17 ►

And, you know, I’m grateful, you know, that I had that.

01:18:20 ►

I’m grateful for Matt for, you know, opening up and sharing about his experience that allowed me to

01:18:25 ►

then look towards that as well as

01:18:27 ►

things like sensory depth

01:18:29 ►

tanks and other things I’ve learned

01:18:32 ►

outside of the normal things I’ve

01:18:34 ►

done so thank you

01:18:35 ►

applause

01:18:36 ►

music

01:18:40 ►

music

01:18:41 ►

music

01:18:42 ►

thanks for listening to the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

01:18:47 ►

To help us out, you can leave a review or rating on your favorite podcast service

01:18:52 ►

or share an episode with a friend.

01:18:55 ►

It really does make a difference.

01:18:57 ►

And to follow along with everything else we’re working on,

01:19:00 ►

check out patreon.com slash non-nonsense.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

028 - Psychedelic Storytelling in Chicago

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Program Notes

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