Tripping into your Identity - Part 6

Chapter 8: Vulnerability and Authenticity

Since I’ve mentioned it a few times at this point, I think it’s time we covered another essential step towards achieving happiness.

Vulnerability and Authenticity

We’ve covered authenticity and vulnerability to some extent already, but what exactly do they mean, and why are they so important?

Authenticity can be complicated, and I tend to use it interchangeably with “identity”, as it is essentially the honest, vulnerable expression of the entirety of who and what we are. There’s the authenticity we have, the authenticity we want, and that which appears to us as authentic, but is not necessarily so. I believe that achieving healthy authenticity requires the following steps, which I’ll refer to as, “The Journey of Authenticity”.

1. Seek to discover the authenticity we have, and understand that certain elements of it cannot change, or can only be adjusted slightly, over time. As we come to better understand and develop our authenticity/identity, the things we have the power to change will become clearer.

2. Learn to differentiate between what is authentic, and what appears to be authentic. Sometimes, what appears to be authentic may just be a temporary desire or misunderstanding of ourselves which, at the very least, can be used to help reveal a less evident part of our actual authenticity. The simplest and most useful formula I’ve come across for achieving real, healthy authenticity is the following:

   Adherence to values + Not giving a fuck = authenticity

   This is obviously oversimplified, and cannot perfectly produce authenticity each and every time, but I promise you’ll be surprised by how often it can help lead you in the right direction.

3. Using what we have learned following the first two steps, carefully encourage the undesirable elements of the authenticity we have towards developing the authenticity we want. Remain mindful of that which we cannot change, as well as that which appears to be authentic, but may not be. Again, the things which are not actually part of our authenticity may teach us something less evident about our true authenticity.

Let’s expand on this with some examples.

Have you ever wondered why the Harry Potter series is so popular? Probably not, because there are so many great reasons to choose from. Regardless, I believe that one of the primary reasons Harry Potter speaks to so many people is because it is the story of developing, achieving, and embracing agency and healthy authenticity, even at the expense of death. The “Journey of Authenticity” comes heavily into play.

Harry spends the early years of his life helpless and unable to truly live as, or even discover his agency and authentic self, but is increasingly aware there is something special and unique about himself that yearns to be discovered and embraced. Suddenly, he is thrust into a world in which everything he experiences is a clue to and expression of his agency and authenticity, and the reader gets to watch it happen from start to finish. As far as I’m concerned, Harry Potter is essentially agency and authenticity porn.

Once thrust into the world of magic, Harry gets endless opportunities to explore and express his agency and authenticity in ways which bring him endless joy, fulfillment, wonder, adventure, etc. It’s like an authenticity playground, and the more authentic he can be, the more he comes to love himself, the people around him, and the world he knows he belongs to. The more he pursues his authenticity, the more agency he experiences, and the less helpless he feels. There is a reason that this experience appeals to so many people, regardless of age, gender, race, etc. All of us yearn to find ourselves in a position in which we can freely develop and express our agency, vulnerability, and authenticity, and be constantly and profoundly rewarded for it.

However, Harry’s development of his agency and healthy authenticity is not without struggles. Among other things, he is often an overly zealous risk-taker with a disregard for authority, and occasionally experiences severe consequences as a result. Throughout the course of the books, he must learn to direct the growth of his authenticity towards where he would like it to go, while simultaneously understanding that he must continue to embrace the parts he cannot, and should not change (acceptance). He must hold onto that which serves him and his loved ones in alignment with his values, and develop or change the ones that do not. His agency and authenticity have limits, and he develops them more powerfully by learning to recognize and accept these limits.

Additionally, Harry is a child whose expressions of authenticity are not always clear to him or those around him in the moments they occur. Through persistence, self-awareness, negotiations with others, and a commitment to improving, he comes to distinguish that which is truly authentic, and that which appears so, but is not necessarily as simply authentic as it seems.  There are many examples of this throughout the story, but one of the most reoccurring is Harry’s proclivity toward assuming that many of the things he has in common with Voldemort are indications that he is destined for similar evil. As the story unfolds, he continuously comes to understand that these similarities do not necessarily indicate what he and others initially feared regarding his identity, and that they manifest in ways entirely unique to him, and in accordance with his true and profoundly “non-evil” identity and values.

Being authentic requires vulnerability, and being vulnerable requires letting go of the unhelpful fear and control we are constantly exerting in our lives. Vulnerability is essentially just a commitment to freely and openly expressing that which we would normally feel a need to control people’s perceptions of; it is allowing your true self to take center stage, despite, but not in total indifference to the risks we perceive that action of carrying.

Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability is exceptionally thorough, and I believe most people could benefit greatly by reading her book, “The Power of Vulnerability”. I’m a huge fan of hers, and I highly recommend all of her books on shame, vulnerability, and authenticity. However, since I’m including this section in this book, I feel it would be appropriate to provide you with what I consider to be some of the best takeaways, as well as some of my own criticisms and interpretations of her work, as I believe there are at least a few important things she gets wrong or, at the very least, has left incomplete.

1.  Vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness

Demonstrations of vulnerability are often courageous acts of strength, despite how they are perceived in many cultures as weakness. Many of us are taught to suppress our feelings in an effort to display strength, but this often has the exact opposite effect, even if it might not immediately seem that way. Just as people can easily pick up on the attractiveness and contagion of authenticity, they can just as easily spot a person who is performing in an attempt to control perceptions. Vulnerability requires incredible strength and courage, as we are willingly opening our deepest selves up to people who may attempt to criticize and shame us for doing so.

2.  Pursue excellence (your personal best) and avoid perfection

Perfection is a fear-based attempt to control our experiences and their outcomes; it is the enemy of progress, and it cannot be achieved. We often engage in perfectionism in a futile attempt to remove any possibility of negative feedback or consequence. Unfortunately, the effort of achieving perfection is ultimately far more damaging than what any person could inflict on us for not achieving it. How much effort does it take to achieve the impossible? What kind of toll does it take on us to constantly pursue that impossibility for the sake of others, and in direct opposition to ourselves?

3.  Self-awareness over selective awareness

Self-awareness is an incredibly difficult, but absolutely necessary skill to develop. It’s a never-ending process, as our awareness of ourselves will not automatically track with all of our growth and experiences. It requires constant effort and commitment to truth. Self-awareness requires self-honesty, self-responsibility, and open exploration of elements of ourselves that may be deeply uncomfortable to explore and accept. Selective awareness, on the other hand, is easy on the surface, but takes a large toll on our ability to achieve vulnerability and authenticity. Selective awareness is simply the practice of picking and choosing that which we wish to be aware of, and ignoring or suppressing the rest. Remember, reality will always check us eventually. When practicing self-awareness, try to avoid self-criticism and, instead, focus on accepting what you find with compassion and understanding (observe without judgement), as well as a commitment to move forward and improve. We are all flawed, and we achieve nothing but suffering and unwillingness to continue searching for and improving on them when we find our own flaws and beat ourselves up for owning them.

4.  Embracing and leaning into Fear

Fear is scary… Obviously. What many people don’t realize is that both opening yourself up to, as well as overcoming fear, are skills. The more often we lean away from and avoid fear, the better we become at allowing it to control our lives, even if we don’t realize it. If we want to achieve vulnerability and authenticity, then we need to practice confronting our fears, including many of the fears we have convinced ourselves are totally reasonable to have. Eventually, we will get good at it, and build tremendous resilience to it. Conquering our fears is an incredibly rewarding experience, and is undoubtedly one of the most important steps on our journey toward learning how to live as our best selves. Try briefly mentally placing yourself in a situation that would typically cause you fear. Now try to imagine experiencing that same thing without any fear at all, as a sort of superhuman version of yourself, almost as if you aren’t even capable of experiencing fear. For many, it can be hard to even imagine but, if you can, you will get a taste of what it feels like to live a vulnerable and authentic life of agency.

Another word of caution: Beware of people who encourage the expression of your vulnerability in an attempt to take advantage of you. Especially in recent years, the number of people who frequently engage in manipulation of this kind is both staggering and unprecedented. I would argue this is primarily a result of the increasing popularity of authenticity and vulnerability, coupled with the total misunderstanding of what they mean, as well as a drastic increase in internet and social media use, and the narcissism and mental illness they so reliably foster.

I can’t tell you exactly how to spot and avoid these people without fail, but I can tell you that one of the most common signs of encountering one is that they often claim to be able to guide you into your identity in some way. Outside of a parent/child relationship, this interaction is simply never appropriate. Once you have reached adulthood, it will be your job to guide yourself into your identity, not to have someone else take the reigns, or even control the GPS from the passenger seat for you. Remember that some parts of your identity must necessarily be negotiations, but this is not at all the same as allowing someone else to make the call for you.

What are some of the misconceptions regarding vulnerability and authenticity?

We cannot hope to freely express whatever it might be that feels like vulnerability, in any given moment, solely because it makes us feel vulnerable to express it. Like authenticity, vulnerability is not simply a willingness to express every conceivable thing we have reservations about expressing. Vulnerability is the expression of that which we may have fear in expressing, but that our thinking and feeling selves both agree needs to be expressed. Since vulnerability and authenticity are skills that require practice and development, it can take some time to align what we think and feel in regards to the expression of that which makes us feel vulnerable.

It will often be the case that we find ourselves wishing to express something that makes us feel vulnerable, but that we simply are not ready to express. Again, this is because we have not sufficiently developed our skills of vulnerability and authenticity; our relationship with ourselves. Developing these skills is not as simple as blurting out our vulnerabilities to anyone and everyone, at any time. As with every other skill we will be developing during our journeys, we must identify the challenges we are ready to take on. We need to start small, but not so small that we move nowhere when we succeed.

With that in mind, let’s move onto some additional information and misunderstandings regarding authenticity.

Authenticity has become a sort of synonym for happiness in recent years. Again, I would argue this is largely thanks to people’s interpretations of the work of Brene Brown. While I agree with many of the conclusions she draws in her work on both vulnerability and authenticity, I believe that something very important is missing and, as a result, has created a sort of grossly simplified “cult of authenticity” in some circles, especially among those who conflate authenticity with doing whatever they desire.

As I mentioned earlier, authenticity has absolutely nothing to do with pursuing every single thing we believe we want and deserve for ourselves, at any given moment. That feeling you get before you do something you want to do, but pause for a moment to wonder if it’s the right thing to do, is also part of your authentic self in some way. Ignoring it will further separate you from yourself (and make you better at doing so), increase your helplessness, and decrease your agency. It will not bring you closer to your authenticity. This doesn’t mean the thing which stopped us is fully representative of our authentic selves either - it is simply another piece of our full identities that we need to consider. Remember, the alignment and relationship of our thinking and feeling selves must be developed if we are to know with any certainty that an action we take is a complete and wise expression of our authentic selves, and that is exactly what this book is intended to help us learn to do well and, in most cases, do quickly and intuitively.

Authenticity requires acknowledging and understanding the nature of the skepticism we feel in regards to what we desire, but not granting it ultimate power, all of the time. We observe it and consider it fairly, not allow it to control us and instill us with fear. If your moral foundation, personal values, and ability to communicate between your thinking and feeling self are in shambles, then fully unleashing what you perceive as authenticity may feel good in the moment, but the chaos and helplessness it inevitably creates will undoubtedly catch up with you, as well as with the people in your life. This is not the authenticity we seek - it is simply a momentarily desirable and alluring approximation of what we will be capable of one day, with work. It’s the best you could manage while existing in a state that cannot reliably foster or express well-developed and healthy authenticity.

Imagine that practicing authenticity is the same as driving a car to a destination, but the car you own (your underdeveloped identity) has almost no gas, worn out tires, a busted windshield, and shakes violently when driven above 15mph. Yeah, you can still drive the car, but should you take it on a 12-hour road trip, or an off-road excursion? Probably not. Instead, maybe you should drive it slowly around a parking lot and pay attention to what is wrong with it. Then, over time, repair and improve it until its ready to be used in a more complete and useful way.

The point I’m trying to make is that practicing authenticity is important, but it is not as simple as taking your busted up car for a full-on road trip right from the start, especially when you don’t understand it, what’s wrong with it, or where improvements should and can be made. Think of the parking lot as your entry into living authentically, and the road trip as what you can do with a solid understanding and development of your authentic self, as well as where you’d like it to go in the future.

There will never be a shortage of things we think and feel that may present to us as authentic, and our only hope of learning to separate the inauthentic from the authentic, as well as to make improvements to the authentic parts of ourselves we wish to change, is to develop our relationship with ourselves and practice what we both think and feel to be true, in alignment with our values. If our thinking and feeling selves are not on board, then we have no chance at succeeding. The longer we practice this, the easier it becomes to honestly look inward and see ourselves for who we truly are.

I’m a codependent, plain and simple. This also means that part of my authentic self is codependent, which is often a serious problem for me, as well as for the people in my life. I can still love my fully authentic self without accepting that nothing about it should ever change, or that I should just do whatever I feel like doing because I believe it to be authentic. If I were to simply embrace the absolute authenticity of myself at all times, then I would have no reason to work on the codependence that makes certain things about my life so difficult. Authenticity is crucial, but it’s also potentially disastrous if we commit to fully accepting and embracing every seemingly-authentic attribute of ourselves, without questioning whether or not something is as plainly authentic as it may initially appear, or consideration for growth of the genuinely authentic behaviors we wish to change.

Young children tend to frequently engage in fully authentic behaviors, but that does not mean that we automatically praise all of these behaviors solely because they are authentic. Part of the process of moving from childhood to adulthood is correcting the behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and/or others, however authentic they might actually be. Ideally, we want to preserve the parts of our authenticity that serve us and the people we care about, and adjust the parts that do not. Authenticity is not necessarily set in stone – much of it changes constantly as we grow and experience life.

The automatic and incredulous acceptance and retention of all that we consider to be authentic will, without exception, trap us in a state of perpetual childhood, helplessness, eventual narcissism, and disastrous behavior. To engage in this practice would be to essentially revere and encourage, beyond reproach, every single thing that can be accounted for in the human experience, both exceptionally beautiful, and wickedly evil. If it weren’t obvious, there are innumerable, yet perfectly natural human instincts and desires that are antithetical to living a happy and fulfilling life, especially in communion with others. We must be aware of what is desirable and acceptable behavior, and what isn’t; of what will improve our lives, and what will make them worse.

People who struggle to honestly and effectively communicate with themselves, as well as listening to and understanding the language their feeling selves speak, are not good at knowing when they are doing damage to themselves or others, at understanding who their authentic selves are, or how to express them in healthy ways. Authenticity is a skill which must be developed, and we cannot hope to simply dive into it and emerge with a perfect expression of it right from the get go. We must learn to communicate with and understand ourselves before we can hope to experience the benefits of authenticity, and we must always attempt to express our authenticity in ways that adhere to our values.

Trying thinking of the often-evasive nature of authenticity this way:

Say all of your closest friends love a particular movie and are eager for you to both watch and love it as much as they do. What happens when you watch it? More than likely, your fear of not belonging, or your desire to share in their love influences the way you feel about it to the point where you are able to convince some part of yourself that you love it as much as they do. Meanwhile, another part of yourself might be thinking, “I really don’t feel the same way about it as they do.” As time goes by, the part of you that feels differently than your friends grows and, eventually (when the fear and risk of acknowledging, accepting, and expressing your full feelings sufficiently diminishes), you are finally able to admit that you never really loved it in the first place.

Part of developing healthy authenticity is the ability to recognize, accept, and communicate that feeling from the very beginning. It’s the part of you that arises whether you wanted it to or not; the part that cannot internally exist in total subservience to the influence of others, or to your own fear. As we develop our relationship with ourselves, we will learn to identify and embrace these feelings early on, instead of waiting until we perceive little or no risk in doing so.

Once again, authenticity is not simply pursuing whatever we want, whenever we want. I promise that if you learn to immediately accept whatever you feel as truth and an expression of healthy authenticity, then you will become a slave to your feelings and desires, and fail to engage and develop the part of your brain that separates you from a purely instinctual animal: your thinking self. Remember, we need a balance of both, and we need to work on developing a good relationship with ourselves to achieve it. Patiently coming to understand, develop, and accept our identities will grant us agency. Attempting shortcuts will corrupt our identities, delay development of them, and burden us with helplessness.

A quick note before moving on: While I am absolutely certain that it is impossible to fully know our identities while in a chronic state of depression and anxiety, that does not mean that it is impossible to get any reliable input from our thinking and feeling selves regarding an action we wish to take. If it were, then we would stand no chance at practicing and developing healthy authenticity, as well as moving closer to self-actualization. Instead, what I wish to emphasize is that we do not make the mistake of believing our expressions of our vulnerabilities and desires, while existing in deep states of suffering, to be perfectly and undoubtedly representative of our authenticity. We are more than capable of making intelligent, meaningful, and informed decisions on how to proceed while in a state of suffering. This is simply far more difficult to achieve, and that is why we practice it and commit to moving forward at a pace we are ready for, and avoid shortcuts along the way.

Perfect authenticity is not required to make these informed decisions, only honest and patient observation and consultation with our thinking and feeling selves, and a desire to measurably improve in some way. As we improve, the process of consulting with our thinking and feeling selves becomes easier, more effective, and more reliable, and we move closer to knowing our true and healthy authenticity when we see it; eventually reaching a point where both knowing and expressing our true identities becomes natural and intuitive to us.

The Necessity of Authenticity

So why exactly is achieving healthy authenticity so important? Are you sick of reading about authenticity yet? Don’t worry, we’re almost done.

Do you enjoy people who aren’t afraid to confidently be themselves, even if maybe there are some things you don’t like about them? Guess what, other people feel the same about you. They want to be around authentic people, as it’s much more important to them than being around fake people who have more fake things in common with them, and whom they cannot truly trust.

Authenticity is attractive because we all carry a natural yearning for it, as well as a natural aversion to deception. When someone is good at being themselves, we think, “Damn, that’s impressive. I wish I could express myself so confidently and effortlessly.” It’s far from effortless, but it is absolutely attainable for everyone. Why do we experience such emotional resonance when we watch a talented musician perform a piece that conveys a vulnerable expression of what they are feeling? Simple, their vulnerability, agency, and authenticity are on full display, and it’s mesmerizing, inspiring, and admirable to watch.

What about people who have no clear identities, constantly shifting identities, or identities that fail to resonate with us as authentic? Despite the fact that we are not perfectly capable of identifying authenticity when we see it, we are, not-so-surprisingly, very adept at noticing inauthenticity. Interestingly, this doesn’t just apply to our fellow human beings. We can also recognize, and tend to feel aversion to inauthenticity in whatever form it takes, whether it be characters in a movie, or even inanimate objects and the systems of civilization itself.

Broadly speaking, we fail to relate to and emotionally invest in characters with inconsistent and constantly-shifting identities, we avoid purchasing and using products with ambiguous functionality and identity, and we have a profound distrust for the systems of civilization whose function and purpose are not at all apparent to us – whose “identities” are indeterminable. Essentially, anything we come across which carries an element of deception, ambiguity, and instability tends to trigger a sense of caution and distrust within us and, most of the time, rightfully so.

We are averse to excessive ambiguity, fluidity, and inauthenticity because they so often prevent us from making sense of reality and discovering truth. Without a way to achieve these things, our ability to emotionally invest in and relate to these elements of reality carries an undeniable risk which we intuitively tend to avoid. This isn’t to say that ambiguity, fluidity, and inauthenticity are always undesirable, just that we are often averse to them for very good reason. The human brain, thanks to millions of years of evolution alongside reality, has an instinctual reverence, respect, and yearning for truth, whether we are acutely aware of it or not.

Authenticity and stability of identity are desirable in most areas of life because they present just as they are, they hide little or nothing, and they make sense of reality. They allow us to feel confident in our decisions to emotionally invest ourselves, and they stand the best chance at producing desirable outcomes. Inauthenticity and instability of identity, on the other hand, tend to only attract those who share an affinity for them, and who feel a sense of value and virtue in embracing them. If there is one thing I am certain of, it is that the embracing of inauthenticity and instability of identity cannot lead you to happiness and fulfillment, as they are antithetical to our coexistence with, and ability to flourish in reality, especially in relation with others.

I can’t teach you how to be authentic or vulnerable, I can only aid in helping you to identify and understand them for yourself when you experience them. Developing the skills of vulnerability and healthy authenticity are wholly unique to each person, and the process of improving these skills never ends. If you want to achieve vulnerability and authenticity for yourself, then the best way to do it is to repeatedly put yourself in tolerable (though not effortless) positions in which you are likely to feel what it is like to experience them. Once you have experienced them enough times, you will become familiar with them, and begin to understand what your space looks like on the way to achieving them more often, and more easily.

You will identify the challenges of vulnerability and authenticity you are ready to take on (like driving the busted car around the parking lot instead of taking it for a road trip) and, so long as you continue to practice, you will eventually become skilled at developing and expressing them. Remember, we are trying to design our own methods for achieving these things, not trying to force other people’s methods to work for us.

Chapter 9: Powerful Values and Effective Habits

Learn the virtue of selfishness. You are no good to anyone else if you aren’t good to yourself first, except to be taken advantage of.

Despite what many would tell you, selfishness is not inherently good or bad, it’s simply a word that describes a constant and unavoidable mental process happening in all of us, all of the time. We are all engaging in selfishness, every second of every day. It is only when the expression of our values is interpreted as immoral, in regard to the effect it has on others, that the word “selfish” is used to describe what we are doing, and incorrectly or, at least incompletely so. If our selfish acts benefit others, then we will rarely, if ever, be described as selfish, even if selfishness is exactly what we were engaging in (spoiler: it always is).

Selflessness, on the other hand, is always a bad thing. Unfortunately, as a result of a total misunderstanding of the necessity of the self for good, the word has mistakenly come to be synonymous with good. Selflessness is always bad because it requires a complete denial of the self, which includes everything good we have to offer to ourselves and others, as well as our agency, vulnerability, and authenticity. I would argue that true selflessness is not only impossible, but that seeking to achieve it will inevitably lead to suffering for all involved.

In reality, selfishness is required to care for, consider, and provide benefit to others, and it is the absolute best way to achieve what would traditionally, but incorrectly, be considered a “selfless” goal. We cannot produce truly meaningful, sustainable, and net-positive benefit for others without some kind of investment of personal, “selfish” interest.

What if I asked you to volunteer to work at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse but, for many potentially valid reasons, you had little or no ability to truly invest yourself into the work? Would you do a good job? Would you truly care? Would the people you are working to help benefit from your indifference and lack of commitment, or would those things bleed into every single thing you do, draining the other volunteers, as well as the people who need help, and diminishing your ability to fully contribute what you have to offer?

To many people, your inability to sufficiently care about the job would be perceived as selfish, but that would be a total misunderstanding of what selfishness is. It’s not selfishness that is resulting in your inability to care and perform well, it’s that your values and/or experiences don’t comfortably align with the work, they aren’t being effectively appealed to, or both.

For those who hold values which are only capable of serving themselves, they would be considered selfish, and the application of the language would deservingly line up with what the word has come to mean for most people, generally speaking. However, selfishness is not to blame here, not at all. The blame lies in the values and/or the lack of appeal to them.

The expression of one’s selfishness, in this example, is simply revealing those values, not creating them in the first place. It’s not that the word “selfish” fails to describe these values at all, it’s that it is missing some very important components that must be considered. To put it simply, the word “selfish” does not contain values itself, it reveals them in the person who engaged in an expression of selfishness which was visible to others.

Those who hold values that are capable of serving both themselves and others would also incorrectly be considered selfish so long as those values are not being effectively appealed to, utilized, and considered. This would be a terrible misuse of the language, as well as a missed opportunity in understanding how to manifest and utilize what those people may have to offer the world.

What if, before asking you to volunteer, I made an appeal to your unique selfishness – to your particular values and experiences which could be useful in this endeavor? What if I framed the work in such a way that inspired you to not only desire helping, but to truly invest your full, unique self into the work? What if I assigned you to a position within the volunteer program that stood the best chance at benefiting from and appealing to what you have to offer?

Even the most altruistic actions require selfishness if they are to be as impactful as possible. The problem lies in the interpretation of what the word, “selfish” has mistakenly come to mean for most people. Selfishness is not a descriptor of what you are capable of giving to others in the ways people have been conditioned into believing, it is simply the word that describes your personal process of investing what you are uniquely capable of offering.

Unfortunately, some people’s values prohibit them from being useful to others in the ways we have come to respect and value as a society. If we want to effectively give to others, then we must selfishly develop something worth giving. The tricky part lies in recognizing and appealing to the values in an individual so that they are capable of contributing to the best of their ability.

When you do not love yourself first and foremost, you open yourself wide up to be taken advantage of, and you are far less likely to be of use to the people you wish to help, except to be taken advantage of. You will find that you will become infinitely more useful to both yourself and others once you have accomplished this first, and that the acts you may have once perceived as “selfless”, are in fact profoundly selfish, and for very good reason – it’s more useful to both yourself and others!

Daily Self Care. Exercise, Journal, Mindfulness, Gratitude, personal hygiene and living space cleanliness, being kind and compassionate to yourself/treating yourself like a friend you love.

Okay, so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the importance of some of the goals we will need to aim for, why they’re important, and how to achieve them, but how do these things manifest for us on a day-to-day basis? What does pursuing these goals actually look like in practice?

The things we do each day are, whether we realize it or not, representative of who we currently are, as well as who we are likely to become. Is your workspace messy? If so, then the message of “I’m a messy person”, or something similar, will be sent to and reinforced within your identity, even if you aren’t typically a messy person. Let it happen often and for long enough, and it will manifest as truth within your identity, and begin to spread into other areas of your life.

This holds true for everything we choose to do, which is exactly why it is so important to create positive habits and routines that we engage in on a daily basis. Our minds and bodies produce our habits, but our habits also influence our minds and bodies. These things reinforce each other, and so if one or more things fall out of line for too long, the whole system can eventually fall out of balance.

Since each of our daily routines will be unique to us, it would be pointless for me to try to tell you exactly what you need to do every day. Instead, I suggest that, as you walk down your path and discover what works for you, you write those things down, and figure out your own way of practicing them regularly, in a way that is sustainable and manageable for you. This is the essence of Informed Personalization.

One again, this is what the process looks like:

1. Set a self-improvement goal

2. Whether on your own, or with the help of someone knowledgeable in achieving the goal you’re aiming for, determine which steps you’re going to try taking to get there (the plan)

3. Start where you can NOW, and personalize the process to make it as easy, enjoyable, and sustainable as possible FOR YOU (your space between steps)

4. Self-educate (inform) yourself as you move forward and make progress

5. Use what you’re learning to make adjustments where they are needed, whether to the space between your steps, or the steps themselves. Keep what works, set aside what doesn’t (maybe try it again later)

For me, using Informed Personalization resulted in the following approach:

I wrote down the things I was 100% certain I should do every single day, followed by the things I was certain I should do at least somewhat regularly and, finally, the things that I want to try doing more often, but aren’t necessarily certain I need to – basically, the “let’s maybe try this” section.

Things I need to do every day:

1. Exercise

2. Adhere to my nutrition plan

3. Challenge myself in some way

4. Clean myself and the spaces I spend the most time in

5. Practice some form of mindfulness

6. Practice gratitude

7. Practice and develop vulnerability, authenticity, and self-love

8. Lean into fear, confront it, and attempt to overcome it

Things I should do at least somewhat regularly:

1. Journal

2. Spend time outside

3. Socialize with friends and family, as well as pursue and foster meaningful connections

4. Engage in hobbies that are fun and make me feel good about myself (a form of agency development)

Things I want to try doing more often, but aren’t certain I need to:

I’m not going to include anything on this list here, as it changes constantly, and is reflective of my unique self. The point of this part of the list is to give myself ideas to try as I grow and change as a person. It serves as my list of things that may, one day, be included on one of the other lists.

Some of you may look at these lists and think, “Wow, that’s a lot of things I need to do all the time to be happy. How will I have time for anything else?”. To that, I have two things to say:

First, these are things we know that we should do, not things that, if we fail to do, we beat ourselves up for. The goal is to eventually create a routine that reliably supports our ability to do these things, not to demand of ourselves that we do them immediately, perfectly, every day, without fail.

Second, many of these things can be accomplished at the same time and/or while we are doing other things. For instance, I could choose to go for a walk outside and, while I’m fulfilling my goals for exercise and spending time outside, also practice mindfulness, gratitude, self-love, challenging myself, leaning into fear, etc. None of these things require a constant and significant time investment, and most of them are so closely related that they can be done simultaneously.

Remember, your routine will manifest in a way which is entirely unique to you, even if many of the things on your list are identical to mine or other’s. Identify the steps you will need to take, then, as you move towards them, write down the ways you are best able to reach them. It’s worth noting that, for some people, creating a list of things you should avoid can also be extremely helpful, especially if you find yourself compulsively drawn to them.

If you find yourself requiring some extra assistance in developing healthy habits, and ridding yourself of unhealthy ones, then I cannot recommend enough that you read the book, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. The book contains simple and powerful steps you can take to make a lot of the advice in this book easier to implement into your life!

Don’t think, just DO. Get out of your head.

We’ve covered this a bit, but it’s one of those things that’s worth reiterating. For those of us that are constantly in our heads, engaging in negative creativity and attempting to exert control over everything, it is our default mode of operation to immediately present ourselves with reasons not to do something the moment we consider doing it. I was so good at doing this that I am confident I could have achieved a gold medal in it if it were an Olympic sport.

What would happen if you just pretended you were possessed and had no say in the matter? After all, you’ve likely already consulted both your thinking and feeling selves on whether or not you should do it, and you arrived at the conclusion that you should, in fact, do it. So, what’s holding you back? You are!

If it wasn’t obvious by now, I am not trying to make the argument that you should always immediately do whatever it is you think and feel you should do without any second thoughts. Instead, I’m suggesting you learn to trust yourself more, and to understand that, at some point, whatever it is you’re about to engage in does not require additional consideration; it simply requires doing. Sometimes, the only way to actually go about doing it is to force ourselves out of our heads and into our bodies. Don’t worry, our bodies are very good at alerting us when we absolutely need to get back into our heads and, as you get better at achieving a balance between the two, you will learn how to trust where your energy and focus should go.

Learning to challenge yourself in manageable ways, and practice self-love and gratitude when you succeed, even if you, or others, don’t fully believe the success is worth celebrating.

This is another thing we’ve covered a bit already, but I think it could be useful to both summarize and highlight the most important aspects of it.

All of us need to be challenged. Unfortunately, most of us design our challenges around what other people have accomplished, as it is common practice to look at what someone else has and desire it for ourselves, then assume that the only way to get it is to do exactly what they did. Not only that, but many of us become accustomed to achieving a sense of worth as a result of accomplishing more than, or at least the same thing as someone else.

As I stated in a previous chapter, I’m a big fan of success modeling, as it can be a great way to provide us with new ideas and inspire us to achieve certain things for ourselves. The problem is that no two people are the same, and so their path to these goals will never manifest in the exact same ways, even if the steps they took to get there are identical. We need to learn to stop caring so much about the ways other people challenge themselves, and care more about how we can and should challenge ourselves.

Equally, if not more importantly, we absolutely must learn to celebrate ourselves when we overcome our challenges, and to be compassionate and understanding with ourselves when we inevitably fail. This is the essence of self-love, and it can be very useful to imagine ourselves as our closest and dearest friend, as it is much easier for some people to be kind to their friends than it is for them to be kind to themselves. We are, in fact, our own best friends in a sense, and we need to both remind ourselves of that and treat ourselves accordingly.

Expose yourself to things you fear.

What are you afraid of doing? For many people, even identifying things that fall under this category can be incredibly difficult, as many of us outright refuse to accept that we are terrified of a great many things. Admitting to fear can be shameful, and the desire to avoid shame is a common trait in all people, not just depressed people. Again, this is why truth and self-honesty are so incredibly important to self-improvement. If we can’t admit to what we’re afraid of, feel the shame of it, overcome that shame, and build resilience to it, then we will have no idea what fears we actually need to address and overcome.

Like with everything, we should start as small as we need to, as starting with something too large is likely to put us off from trying again in the future. Do not make the mistake of imagining that, just because it’s something small, it should be easy and that, if you fail, you’re a horrible and useless person who can’t even do something easy. It’s not supposed to be easy - it’s just supposed to be doable. Whether you succeed or fail, be kind to yourself and understand that, eventually, you will get better at it, and the challenges that once seemed impossible will move closer and closer to “doable”.

Lastly, do not let other people decide what challenges you are capable of. Only you are capable of knowing what you are ready for.

Make good habits your addiction.

Are you a fan of addiction? Me too! I’ve been addicted to so many things in my life that I think it would be reasonable to say that I’m addicted to addiction. But what if, hear me out… what if we became addicted to good habits? What if we found a way of exercising that we enjoyed so much we couldn’t imagine our lives without it? What if we discovered a method of meditation that felt so good we actually prefer it to drugs, alcohol, or any other thing that we used to feel we required in order to live with any semblance of pleasure or without excruciating pain?

Are you one of those people whom something like this could never happen to? Well, congratulations! You are the only human being who has ever lived to fall into this category! Please immediately stop reading this book and go dedicate your body to science, as you are officially the most unique person who has ever lived.

Seriously though, there is no such person and, short of some crazy mutation that effectively qualifies one as something other than what we understand to be human, there never will be. There are things you can gain overwhelming pleasure from as you make progress down your path that you would have never imagined you could. Once our bodies and minds increasingly open themselves up to pleasure, and move further from fear and isolation, we come to learn things about ourselves that we simply could not understand before. We weren’t ready to hear or understand them, and so they weren’t functioning the way they were meant to.

Before we finally get to the chapters on psychedelics, I want to tell you a quick story about what happened to me when I quite literally shot out of my decades-long depression, following psychedelic therapy.

In the years leading up to the moment of my emerging from the cocoon of trauma, depression, and anxiety, I became increasingly frustrated at the thousands of hours I had invested into feeling better, as well as the countless things I tried to achieve happiness, but ultimately failed. I constantly had this reoccurring thought of, “What the hell, was all of this work wasted? Did I really travel down the wrong path so many times and learn all this crap that won’t ever end up helping me? Did I really even do any work at all, or was I lying to myself the whole time?”. I could not have been more wrong, but it wasn’t until I actually escaped my depression that I was capable of understanding why.

When it happened, I explained it to my therapist in the following way:

“It was like I spent all these years tinkering with and learning how to perfectly control this giant soundboard of myself that contained hundreds of buttons and sliders, but I forgot that I actually needed to turn the damn thing on. As soon as I turned it on, most of the buttons and sliders were set exactly as I needed them to be and so, ultimately, none of my previous efforts were wasted in the slightest – they were actually necessary, I just addressed them in an order that prevented me from seeing it.”

It turned out that I had learned about and practiced countless valuable self-help skills, but I couldn’t actually fully utilize most of them until the master switch was turned on. For me, that master switch was a combination of learning self-love, reducing my primary sources of helplessness, and correcting behaviors that were destroying my ability to effectively produce and use dopamine and testosterone. For others, it may look completely different.

The point of this story is that any effort in a positive direction; any effort at all, will ultimately serve you in living your best life, even if you can’t see how just yet. Not only that, but once you unlock certain things within yourself, you will experience the rewards of those efforts, and it’s going to make you feel like a superhuman version of yourself.

Chapter 10: Beneficial Psychedelics and how to use them

Isn’t this book supposed to be about psychedelics? Yes, we’ve finally reached that chapter, but before we jump into advice on how to use them, I want to briefly cover the psychedelics that I have experience with, as well as the differences between them.

I must mention that all of these drugs are extremely powerful, and can be dangerous and habit-forming if not treated with respect, and used in the appropriate setting. While I will be the first to admit they can hold recreational value if used properly, this book is not intended to serve that purpose. For most, it would be unwise to use any of them recreationally without a thorough understanding of how they work, what they feel like, and what risks they carry, especially if you are currently, or have previously suffered from depression and addiction. We aren’t taking any of these drugs to avoid our pain – the exact opposite; we’re taking them to help us identify, face, and overcome it.

Differences and benefits of each Psychedelic

MDMA Introduction

I want to start with MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) because, despite the fact it wasn’t my first experience with psychedelics, it was my first experience with using them for a therapeutic purpose, and holy shit did it change my life forever.

What is MDMA and how does it work?

MDMA, sometimes referred to as Ecstasy or Molly, is very unique in the world of psychedelics for more reasons than are necessary to go over here, so let’s just cover the ones that can help us understand it and get the most use out of it if we choose to go that route.

MDMA is a synthetic drug that produces stimulating, euphoric, and hallucinogenic effects. It’s exact mode of action on the brain is not perfectly understood, but it is believed to primarily achieve its effects by drastically increasing the release and/or blocking the reuptake of the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. The effects of MDMA are typically felt about 45 minutes after ingestion, and will “peak” for most people between the 1 and 2 hour mark, typically lasting 3-6 hours in total.

What does the MDMA experience feel like?

While the experience can differ a bit from person to person, it will typically result in distortions in time and perception, a profound increase in enjoyment of sensory experiences, powerful expressions of empathy and emotion, and what feels like, but is not necessarily, a “true” sense of self.

The experience of MDMA is like being wrapped up in your favorite blanket, then taken back to your fondest and most comfortable childhood location, being injected with a truth serum that doubles as a mental painkiller, followed by waves of euphoria, inner peace, and connection with humanity and the world. Essentially, we are placing our feeling selves in their safest location, then providing them with every conceivable tool they need to feel the way they want to feel, and to feel great about it without any fear or reservation. Let’s just say there’s a reason why people refer to it as magic.

Essentially, MDMA produces a temporary contract between the thinking and feeling self to agree to sit down with each other, love each other, talk it out for a few hours, and feel great while doing it, no matter how at odds or disconnected they were with each other before taking it. MDMA excels at removing the shame and emotional pain we experience when exploring our helplessness – it allows us to see and treat ourselves as the human beings we are, without any of the emotional influences which have come to make that process excessively difficult and painful.

What are the best therapeutic uses of MDMA, and how does it differ from other psychedelics in this regard?

Because taking MDMA is almost always accompanied by feelings of safety, agency, and euphoria, it is particularly useful for those who have experienced intense trauma and anxiety. Typically, accessing some of these feelings would be so terrifying to our feeling selves that they try to protect us by preventing us from experiencing them in any way. Not so on MDMA. Not only are most people open to accessing them, but many people report feeling downright excited to finally access parts of themselves that have felt out of their reach and control for so long.

Because it’s also a stimulant, it typically grants a powerful feeling of mental acuity for most users, making it easier to access memories, thoughts, feelings, etc. It can make you feel sharp and focused, putting us in an optimal state of mind for therapeutic work.

MDMA is also unique in the psychedelic sphere in that it can give us a sort of “sneak peek” at what our lives could look like without the burdens of severe helplessness, trauma, depression, and anxiety. It can restore the hope that many people have lost, as they’ve forgotten what it feels like to be happy and to not hate and/or fear themselves and others. For these people, MDMA can help to create the vision of a life worth fighting for – it can remind them of what it feels like to have agency over the most difficult parts of their lives and identities.

Hope is a very interesting feeling that I believe is overlooked or, at the very least, misunderstood in much of the psychiatric community. Hope is simply accepting that it is possible for things to improve, but not knowing for certain they will. We cannot know for certain, but that’s exactly the point! Since we cannot know for certain that things will always suck for us, then that means there must always exist a possibility that they can get better. MDMA is good at strengthening our hope, and I believe hope is necessary for those deep in the pits of depression.

And last, but certainly not least, taking MDMA can be a lot of fun. This isn’t necessarily something one might feel inclined to focus on while burdened with trauma, depression, and anxiety, especially since the stigma surrounding psychedelics and drug use can dissuade us from giving ourselves permission to enjoy them, but I am a strong believer that one of the key parts to succeeding with psychedelic therapy is to learn how to have fun while doing it.

Healing is supposed to feel good, and I believe there are few, if any better ways to approaching it than to make it fun for yourself. How else are we supposed to sustain what is, in many ways, difficult and often frightening therapeutic work?

I can tell you from personal experience that, with time and effort, many of the effects of MDMA can be experienced every single day, without any drugs at all.

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Ketamine Introduction

Ketamine is the psychedelic I have the most experience with, as well as the drug I attribute much of my success to. My work and experiences with it also happen to serve as the primary inspiration for this book! It is truly bizarre in the best of ways, and particularly useful for navigating through trauma, depression, and anxiety, as (unlike MDMA) it can be taken frequently in a therapeutic setting with little or no known lasting side effects.

What is Ketamine and how does it work?

Ketamine, sometimes referred to as Special K, or just, “K”, is a synthetic, dissociative, and hallucinogenic drug that was created in the 1960’s as an anesthetic and sedative. As with MDMA, its exact mode of action is not fully understood, but there is strong evidence to suggest that it works on many different areas of the brain, including on opioid receptors, the glutamate system (glutamate is used in the process of allowing neurons to communicate), and even the neuronal pathways in our brains.

The effects of ketamine are extremely dose-dependent, and can vary between different people, but therapeutic doses of ketamine will typically enhance the production of glutamate, which is believed to aid in building new connections or synapses between neurons. When a person has experienced depression for an extended period of time, they will often damage or change many of these connections. With regular and proper use of ketamine in a therapeutic setting, these connections can be repaired, and new ones can be created.

Of course, as with all psychedelics, the physiological mechanisms are simply one component of the therapeutic potential. Many of these drugs offer significant therapeutic benefit not solely because of their effects on brain chemistry, but because of what they help us to mentally and physically accomplish during and after the experience.

What does the Ketamine experience feel like?

Unlike with MDMA, the ketamine experience can be wildly different for each person, or even on each use, though there are typically some shared attributes to it. The experience is also extremely dose-dependent, which can cause certain experiences to feel almost entirely different from others. I believe the primary reason the ketamine experience can differ so much from person to person is because it amplifies many of the unique qualities and experiences of both our thinking and feeling selves.

Ketamine is a powerful dissociative that causes people to feel detached from certain parts of themselves (typically physical parts), as well as the environment. It is powerfully hallucinogenic and sedative at higher doses, and will produce both feelings and visuals that are difficult, if not impossible to describe. As is the case with most psychedelics, the shift in both feelings and visuals appears to be heavily guided by your current state of mind, as well as the setting you are in.

My experiences with ketamine were all accompanied by a decrease of overactivity in my nervous system, almost as if I were a car whose engine was always being rev’d, but was now idling comfortably, instead. My feeling self would calm down its automated processes, providing me with an opportunity to explore things about myself that were previously shrouded by excessive noise and energy.

My existence also seemed to frequently align with my breathing in some way – causing whatever space I was perceiving to slowly collapse as I exhaled, and for new space to be birthed into existence while inhaling, though this never occurred for the entire duration of any of my trips, and was typically only experienced on higher doses. It also reliably felt as if the line of communication between my thinking and feeling self became so thoroughly cleared of obstacles that it became somewhat confusing to observe their attempts to communicate and understand one another, as well as the reality I was experiencing.

The sensory experience is also extremely difficult to describe and, once again, seems to be influenced by a person’s unique attributes. I heard things in music that I never noticed before and, even more importantly, the stories being told and emotions conveyed by the music resonated with me so powerfully that it was as if I was suddenly a master at understanding what that music was communicating, whether I had heard the song hundreds of times prior to the experience, or never before.

Light seemed to have a mind of its own, often appearing brighter with my eyes closed instead of open, with colors shifting in correspondence with the music, my state of mind, and almost anything else I could imagine. I would sometimes stare at what I knew to be a static painting on a wall, only to have it play out like I was channel surfing through windows of reality. It moved and changed to such extreme degrees that I would sometimes almost convince myself that it was, in fact, a TV.

Each experience was filled with a sense of wonder, yet firmly grounded in what felt like some kind of absolute truth. I may not have understood what I was seeing or feeling, but something about it gave me the profound sense that it was perfectly true in some sense and, therefore, meaningful and important to pay attention to. During the experiences in which a therapist was present in the room with me, I would often say things like, “the ketamine doesn’t want me to finish that thought or feeling, it wants me to follow another one”. I believe this is because of the trust I came to invest in the truth of the experience. I knew that, if something about the experience was calling to me, I should let go of the control I would typically exert over it in a sober state of mind, and follow it instead, even if it was uncomfortable.

At higher doses, it is all but impossible to physically move around, as the sedative properties of the drug are too powerful to overcome. It was during some of these high-dose sessions that I experienced some of the most bizarre and difficult-to-describe experiences of my entire psychedelic journey. Since I cannot perfectly describe them, I thought it might be helpful to share a journal entry I wrote immediately following one of the experiences.

“It started with a welcome and rapid cessation of the ever-present tension in my nervous system. I remember becoming confused and feeling unprepared. Were we starting already? Was Lauren (my therapist) even in the room? Shouldn’t there be more preparation and build up given that I might never be the same again when it’s over? I didn’t know, and my ability to care or comprehend was fading rapidly.

When it fully hits, I release a breath I had no idea I was even holding in, one that felt as if I was exhaling from my entire being. I realize I can’t recall a time in my life where I was able to observe myself losing so much control.

The folding of reality begins, and I feel as if I’m existing outside of, or in different relation to time. I think this is at least partially due to the fact that the visual and sensory aspects of the ketamine experience seem to accurately predict the future of the music currently filling the small room, even if I’ve never heard it before and it doesn’t follow any familiar or predictable time signature or tempo. The elements of the environment and qualities of the music seem so inextricably and intimately bound to the same fundamental constructs of reality, that it’s all too easy for me to see where the music is going before it arrives. It’s so mind-blowing every time it happens that I can’t help but be in awe, and accept how little I ultimately understand about the complexities of the human mind, of perception, consciousness, etc.

It’s not just a visual component though. The environment seems to carry with it this property of expansion or contraction and, paradoxically, occasionally both. This representation feels unfathomably bizarre when experienced in this way, and yet there exists something so immutably perfect and natural about it. It greets my intuition with a profound and almost ancient sense of familiarity, as if the expansion and contraction are natural and ever-present elements of existence that simply go largely, but not entirely unnoticed in everyday life.

It’s as if I am witnessing the muscles and bones of reality in motion – revealing a secret that is all but incomprehensible in that it seems to so firmly exist outside the capability of the tools I’ve grown accustomed to perceiving my reality with over the course of my life. I feel as though I’ve moved from a casual relationship with reality to an intimate one, and now I have the privilege and challenge of listening to every single one of reality’s thoughts on how horrible everyone she works with is. “Space time can be such a dick sometimes, he’s so stubborn and confusing”.

Then there’s the overwhelming amount of data. I mean, was it absolutely necessary for me to watch an extradimensional “How it’s made” regarding what happens to every fiber of existence in the exact moment I begin considering how firm an imminent handshake should be? I never would have guessed so, but Ketamine Bae seems to think it’s important in this moment, and she’s got a great track record so far.

After what has likely been mere seconds, the first room beings to collapse and fold in on itself to an infinitely small point – a singularity. There is a sense of impending obliteration, but I don’t fight it, partially because I can’t, and partially because it feels as natural as breathing. There is no fear, and I wonder if this is what death feels like – pure acceptance. It’s not so bad, and the first thing that comes to mind as I accept that I may in fact just be dead is, “I can live with this”.

As always, something about the ketamine effect seems to have accurately predicted the future, as represented in the crescendo, or “completion” of the room, in perfect harmony with a song I’m hearing for the first time. I have been treated to what feels like the most masterfully choreographed sensory presentation of my life, one that could not have been choreographed if I am to adhere to the truths I have come to understand about reality up until this moment. I don’t actually believe it can be described, as I simply cannot make sense of the forms the data have been presented to me as. Colors that aren’t colors, shapes that aren’t shapes, events that occur both simultaneously and separately, inexplicable relations to the real world outside my inner experience, etc. What does the concept of tactile feedback on a keyboard look like? What color is it? What sequence of events need to occur in the universe for it to function properly and exist as we perceive it? Am I high?

I’ve come to learn that this place is not meant to be understood in the ways I’ve grown accustomed to relying on in order to feel comfortable and familiar with my reality. I have a profound sense that I am a guest here, and that I may only linger and observe for a limited time, almost as if I’ve cashed in my golden ticket, signed the NDA, and agreed to keep my hands and arms inside the cart at all times.

The collapse of the first room is finally complete, and it seems to “rebirth” me via what feels like a natural and necessary expansion of the collapsed reality I just left behind. Am I living through my own “big bang” on repeat? This rebirth always seems to be accompanied by a renewed sense of time and existence, and is physically represented by me in the form of inhaling a deep breath. It’s as if I’m choosing to breathe life, trust, and meaning back into myself following the collapse; that reality and I have agreed we need each other to accomplish it, and that I have affirmed my desire to awaken again and conquer the next challenge.

I instinctively know that I can trust my breath to carry me forward. I don’t think my eyes are open, but there is additional light in the next version of this space. My brain wants to construct something recognizable out of what I’m seeing, but the moments are fleeting. Each moment that passes as utterly unrecognizable increases the intensity of the pareidolia as my brain yearns to establish any semblance of familiarity. I know I am attempting some form of control over an experience that cannot be directed by my analytical mind, so I once again trust in my breath to carry me forward.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of this experience is that, throughout its entirety, I am 100% certain that no raw lies or untruth can be found here. Whatever is revealed cannot be false, only improperly perceived and scrutinized by my rationalizing mind. It’s quite easy for my brain to play tricks on me in everyday life, and for them to occasionally go entirely unnoticed. Ketamine seems to establish a lossless connection to the source – one that must show the unadulterated activity of my mind and its effect on some part of my life. Given the impossible strangeness of the experience, I don’t always know what to look for, but I know that whatever I’m experiencing is my brain revealing to me some part of the true nature of itself. It’s telling me to pay attention, that what I am observing is important to the process of healing, even if I don’t have the slightest clue why, in the moment.”

What are the best therapeutic uses of Ketamine, and how does it differ from other psychedelics in this regard?

I like to think of ketamine as a tool that serves to present reality in a sort of visual matrix; a multidimensional framework for both our perceived and actual realities. Taking ketamine is akin to throwing a bucket of colorful ink onto the matrix and watching it reveal the otherwise transparent and difficult-to-perceive structure beneath. In this example, ketamine is the ink that elucidates the reality being perceived. It’s like a splash test, the ink sticks and reveals something I can make sense of and work with.

Imagine looking at a perfectly white wall which represents your experiences and reality. The wall has grooves, indentations, scars, etc., some intentional, some consequential. The point is, from a typical perspective, the “flaws” aren’t even noticeable. Ketamine throws light and color onto the “wall”, allowing you the chance to study, observe, communicate with, and improve your relationship with it. Ketamine helps you see what that wall (yourself) really looks like. It shows you what is working and what isn’t. It’s honest with you. It can point you in a direction you didn’t know existed, helping you to understand and accept yourself, and allowing your mind and body to develop and utilize their own healing systems.

Ketamine cuts out a lot of the bullshit, makes you see things that matter – teaches you something about yourself you might not have known, or shines a light on the importance of something once thought to be trivial or meaningless. If your brain is consistently pointing to something while under the influence of ketamine, or any psychedelic, chances are you should pay attention. What’s revealed is not always plainly evident, but it is always important and worth investigating.

With this in mind, I would say the primary therapeutic benefit of ketamine is that it provides us with incredibly valuable clarity and insight into the truths of ourselves. While it cannot prevent us from lying to ourselves, it will allow us to see those lies in such a way that makes them impossible to ignore forever. Similarly, ketamine cannot directly tell us what truth is, but it will present it to us to such a powerful degree, and in so many interesting ways that, once again, we cannot ignore it forever. It may take time and practice to learn how to understand what we are experiencing during a ketamine trip, but the information is always there.

I believe ketamine is also profoundly useful in that it can be used frequently with few, if any lasting side effects. For me, this was a game-changer, as it allowed me to get “good” at using ketamine for therapeutic purposes. While this may not be necessary for everyone, I believe people are more likely to gain value from something they can effectively practice with on a regular basis.

The frequency with which ketamine can be used is also valuable in that a therapeutic ketamine session is a commitment which requires us to devote time and energy to our own healing; to improving ourselves, which is something many people rarely take the time to do, can feel bad about, or even unfamiliar with. This may not seem all that important upon immediate consideration, but there is tremendous value in setting aside a chunk of time, on a regular basis, for the sole purpose of improving your life. Your body and mind will thank you, even if they don’t know how to right away, and you will come to understand how important this kind of dedicated self-care is to a mind and body in need of healing.

Lastly, as with MDMA, taking ketamine can be a very fun experience, and we need to learn to both embrace and utilize this fact! I’ll cover the “fun” aspect of psychedelic therapy in a later section but, for now, just keep in mind that it is absolutely important that we try to enjoy ourselves during a therapeutic psychedelic experience whenever possible.

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Psilocybin and LSD Introduction

I’ve chosen to combine Psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms) and LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) because they share many similarities and, in my experience, produce very similar experiences. Having said that, there are absolutely differences between the two, and I will do my best to cover the more notable ones. In higher doses, both psilocybin and LSD are extremely powerful hallucinogens, and will produce drastic changes in consciousness and sensory experience.

What are Psilocybin and LSD, and how do they work?

Psilocybin has been around forever, as it is a natural chemical found in a variety of wild mushrooms. Psilocybin is what is known as a “pro-drug” in that it is converted by the body into a chemical called psilocin, which is the psychoactive chemical responsible for producing the trip.

LSD, on the other hand, is a synthetic compound derived from a fungus called ergot, which is a type of mold that grows on rye and other grains. It was first synthesized in 1938 by a Swiss scientist by the name of Albert Hofmann.

Both psilocybin and LSD appear to have similar modes of action, as they both affect certain parts of the brain, including the claustrum, serotonin receptors, and the glutamate system. As with all other psychedelics, the exact mode of action is not known, but these areas are believed to play integral roles in the experience of both drugs.

Whether taking psilocybin or LSD, the user will experience a sense of ego death, drastic changes in sensory experience, a feeling of oneness with nature and the world, powerful hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness.

What do the Psilocybin and LSD experiences feel like?

As with ketamine, appropriate doses of both psilocybin and LSD will produce a feeling of ego death which, in turn, is likely to feel like a flooding of information from reality, much of it feeling more real or “true” than what the user would typically experience in everyday life. Again, this is because our defenses and perception filters are drastically altered or even outright removed while under the influence. Unlike ketamine, however, there appears to be little or no suppression or calming of our feeling selves to accompany the change in data perception, at least, not for everyone.

Unlike many other psychedelics, I would argue that the experiences of both LSD and psilocybin are almost entirely dependent on the person who takes them, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately describe the experience.

Having said that, there are definitely some common shared attributes to the experiences. The first is that the feeling self can become overwhelmingly loud during the experience, as it becomes very difficult to ignore it in the ways many of us have become accustomed to doing in sober states of mind. For many, this can produce a bad trip, as we are no longer able to exercise the kind of control we would like to over ourselves. This is why, particularly with LSD and psilocybin, set and setting are incredibly important.

For those who are good at listening to and influencing their feeling selves, they are very unlikely to experience a bad trip, as the feeling self appears to be the primary director of the experience, whether we want it to or not. For many people, the simple act of reminding ourselves that the experience is temporary, and will not last forever, is enough to calm our feeling selves down, and make it easier to engage in productive communication with it.

The second common feeling of the experiences is sensory alterations and hallucinations. The alterations and hallucinations are overwhelmingly pleasant and life-changing for some, and exceptionally difficult and uncomfortable for others. Again, this depends largely on the set, setting, and individual. If your feeling self has been screaming at you to acknowledge it and make a change, then both psilocybin and LSD are likely to drastically increase the volume of this “screaming”, though definitely not guaranteed to, for many different reasons. Although this experience can be intense, or even frightening, it is typically a sign that your body is in dire need of attention and change, and you would do well to calmly listen to it and show it compassion and kindness to the best of your ability.

Lastly, both drugs can produce profound effects of feeling one with nature and the world. I attribute this feeling to the way in which we interpret the data while under the influence. For me, the data feels so raw and unfiltered that it produces a sense of solidarity with all living things – almost as if we are momentarily sharing a universal commonality with whatever it is that all life engages in at all times.

Psilocybin is typically associated with more of a “whole-body” experience, while the LSD experience is more often associated with cerebral alterations, which has resulted in many people asserting the importance of set and setting with LSD in particular. The effects of LSD typically last longer – about 6-10 hours, whereas the effects of psilocybin are rarely felt in any meaningful sense after the 6-hour mark. Personally, I find the experiences to be overwhelmingly similar, though I tend to have more positive ones with LSD. Remember, we’re all different, so my own experiences with these drugs may have absolutely no relevance for you, or for others.

What are the best therapeutic uses of Psilocybin and LSD, and how do they differ from other psychedelics in this regard?

Both drugs are likely to show us things about ourselves that our bodies consider to be extremely important to the betterment of our being, whatever they may be. The experience can point us to things we’re doing that are working, things that aren’t, things that might, and everything in between. It can help us to confirm what we love, what we hate, what we wish we could change, what we would like to improve, etc. It’s important to keep in mind that, during these experiences, we are getting a glimpse of the path we want ourselves to head down, even if makes absolutely no sense to us as we’re experiencing it. Remember, there is no living person who better knows the exact ways in which we need to heal than ourselves. We are self-healing creatures both physically and mentally, and we are ultimately the only ones who can get in our own way.

I believe that the primary benefits of both psilocybin and LSD are almost identical to ketamine in every way except for one very important difference: ketamine tends to calm our feeling selves down, while LSD and psilocybin often do not. There are advantages and disadvantages to this difference, depending on the person.

For those who are in deeply uncomfortable states of trauma, depression, and anxiety, the experiences of both LSD and psilocybin can be frightening and very difficult to contend with, especially with high doses and/or inexperienced users. For some, this increase in volume of the feeling self, coupled with the raw interpretation of information, can be exactly what they need to help themselves figure out the best path forward. For others, it may be too overwhelming to gain benefit from, at least, in higher doses.

With ketamine, we can experience many of the same things we would experience on psilocybin or LSD, but with the added benefit of reducing the volume and intensity of whatever our feeling selves are trying to convey to us. Again, this could be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on the dose, the person, their state of mind, set, and setting.

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Honorable Mention: DMT

Unfortunately, I have yet to experience the effects of DMT, and I simply don’t know quite as much about it as the other psychedelics I cover in this book. Regardless, it purportedly produces the most powerful psychedelic experience a person can have, and there are several studies, as well as endless anecdotal reports attributing its therapeutic use to life-changing improvements in wellbeing. DMT is so powerful that many people consider it to be something like an interdimensional space time drug, which should imply that one who takes it would do well to give it a great deal of respect, and not jump into taking it lightly. Perhaps it can teach us something important about ourselves and, if I ever decide to try it, I will likely write about it.

What can we do to gain the most therapeutic value from each of these psychedelics?

In this section, I will go over the things I found most useful for myself, as well as the things others have reported to find most useful for them. All of the things I cover here will apply to all psychedelic experiences, unless otherwise specified.

Before we begin, I want to cover a few things that I believe are important to both keep in mind and aim for prior to and during any psychedelic experience.

Set and Setting

Set and setting are the gold standard in psychedelic preparation, and for good reason. Both your mindset (set), as well as your setting (physical and emotional environment) will almost always factor into your trips in a major way. In almost every case, the goal is to produce the most positive experience possible, with the lowest chance for experiencing a “bad trip”. It should be noted that a bad trip does not necessarily mean a bad outcome and, in fact, the vast majority of people who use psychedelics in a therapeutic setting report positive outcomes down the road, whether their trip was good or bad in the moment. Sometimes we need to experience the bad in order to move closer to the good!

Having said that, there are many ways to increase the chances of a good trip, and reduce the chances of a bad one, some of which will depend entirely on the individual but, in general, I recommend doing whatever you need to do to get your mind to a place of peace, comfort, familiarity, agency, and purpose, before tripping. This could include things like meditation, positive mantras, breathing and/or physical exercise, focusing on things that make you feel good, etc.

Once the trip begins, our state of mind will be pulled towards either negativity or positivity, often changing directions throughout the trip, and so, by firmly setting it in the most positive place possible before tripping, we are effectively giving it more positive space to work with. That way, if we do slip towards negativity during the trip, we are less likely to fall past the bad trip event horizon. Of course, this “event horizon” doesn’t actually exist, as our minds will, almost without fail, find their ways back during the trip. However, it can be difficult to understand this fact during the actual trip, and so we stand the greatest chance at succeeding by firmly setting our minds in a place of positivity.

The effects of setting will also differ drastically from person to person. The goal is to place yourself in a space which is most likely to help maintain the positive mindset you set for yourself prior to tripping. For some, this may be outdoors in the wilderness and, for others, it may be in something like a ”grown-up fort” they’ve constructed just for this purpose. There is no right or wrong answer, what matters is that the environment is supportive of your mindset and intention, which brings us to the next preparation.

Intention setting

I’ll tell you right now, if you enter into any psychedelic experience without any therapeutic intention, then you are drastically less likely to experience any therapeutic benefit, especially if you are an inexperienced user. This is especially true for MDMA, as MDMA causes so many things to feel so pleasurable that it is very easy to get lost in the experience and stray far away from anything that could be considered therapeutically beneficial. In some cases, this can lead to dangerous results. Worse, MDMA is not safe to take frequently, and so it could be considered a tremendous waste to have the experience without proper preparation.

So, how do we set an intention? Simple, we start with acknowledging what we want from the experience, even if we don’t fully believe we can achieve it, then we make an internal commitment to do our best to remind ourselves of, and focus on the intention as the trip proceeds. The point is not to anticipate or control what might happen, it’s to provide ourselves with a focus with which we can use to narrow the window of the experience and, therefore, increase our ability to acknowledge and understand what we ultimately experience.

Without an intention, the likelihood of “floating” through the data of the experience without any sense of direction is drastically increased. This doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from it, it just makes it more difficult to perceive, collect, feel, and think on the experience as it relates to our therapeutic journey. Ultimately, we will experience whatever our bodies and minds desire for us but, with some direction and focus prior to tripping, we give ourselves a better chance at shining a light on the things that align with our intention. Not only that, but setting an intention also makes it easier for us to recognize the data we receive, which aligns with our intention, during the trip. We may not have control over the data in ways we are used to, but our intentions can allow us to recognize which data is worth giving extra attention to, both during and after the trip.

So, remember, we cannot perfectly control the trip, and we shouldn’t try to but, we can prepare ourselves to increase the likelihood of gaining therapeutic value. Personally, one of my best trips took place after I purposefully went into it without an intention, but this was after dozens of previous trips with a variety of psychedelics, and was undoubtedly the result of learning to understand the process, as well as trust in the experience on an advanced level. For most, it will take a lot of practice to get here and, even then, I wouldn’t recommend avoiding the intention setting process. I did it because my body was undoubtedly telling me to in that particular instance, and I trusted it.

Emotional resonance preparation

Emotional resonance preparation is the practice of preparing yourself with one or more things that, while tripping, are likely to produce an emotional experience that you believe you can benefit from, depending on what you are trying to accomplish in a particular trip. There are practically an infinite number of ways to do this and they will, of course, vary depending on the person. For me, music was my go-to source of reliably producing a specific kind of emotional resonance, but it also took me several trips to learn how to achieve it for myself.

As far as I can tell, this kind of preparation works similarly to what is known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT is a process by which you learn to react and respond to challenging situations in a beneficial way, as opposed to the negative ways you may be accustomed to responding by default. Essentially, you are working to change the negative emotional associations you have developed towards certain things into less negative, neutral, and/or positive emotional associations, instead.

Here's an example:

Say my typical response to eating vegetables is profoundly negative. With proper emotional resonance preparation, I can reliably produce a powerfully positive emotional experience during a trip that, over time, I can learn to associate with eating vegetables. It’s very simple, but not necessarily easy, as we will need to both learn how to reliably produce these emotional experiences during our trips, as well as recognize and integrate them when they occur. In my case, I would also typically need to further integrate them following the experience, whether in my journal, in therapy, during meditations, while engaging in whatever it is I was trying to change my emotional associations with, etc.

If you want to learn how to do this effectively, then I suggest you do so by entering into each one of your trips with some of your own ideas on how to produce the desired emotional experience, then observe where you fail and where you succeed. Essentially, you’re just testing to see what sticks and what doesn’t. Without attempting to exert control, take note of the particular qualities of each emotional experience, where/when they occur, and what seemed to cause them. With each new experience, reintroduce the ones that seem to work, set aside the ones that don’t, and try new ones you believe might. Like with all of the skills in this book, we’re using Informed Personalization to help us find our paths of least resistance toward improvement.

Over time, you will naturally develop your own set of emotional resonance tools which you can, at least somewhat reliably, use during your experiences to help alter the ways in which you emotionally respond to certain things. I’ve used my own tools for dealing with things like fear of death, fear of failure, and anchoring positive feelings and achievements in regards to a variety of things.

One of my favorite examples is a time in which I achieved a certain fitness goal I had been working towards for almost twenty years, but was having just a little trouble congratulating and feeling gratitude and pride towards myself for achieving. Instead, I found myself burdened with thoughts of, “well, it took you long enough!”, or, “big deal, lots of other people have done this too.” So, for my next psychedelic therapy session, I prepared a couple songs to play for myself once I was “peaking” in the trip. One of the songs was on my workout playlist, and never failed to inspire me to push harder and challenge myself, and the other song was one that, during previous trips, I noticed would reliably produce powerful feelings of positivity that spoke to personal accomplishments in particular.

I set my intention, entered the trip, let the songs play, and did my best to truly feel the resulting emotions, and to associate them with what I had accomplished for myself. It worked, really, really well. In the months following, I began embracing and even capitalizing on my achievement in ways I would have never though possible for myself, and I was met with a profound sense of power, agency, and accomplishment, as well as continued success toward my goals.

A note of warning: do not force emotional resonance. Even if we become very good at it, there will be times in which it simply does not happen as we would like it to. Purposefully utilizing emotional resonance during trips is likely to require varying amounts of experience and practice, and I cannot recommend it for absolute beginners. Remember, attempting to exert excessive control over our trips will almost always go poorly, so please try to refrain from doing so. Sometimes, it’s better to simply let go, observe, and listen.

Fun

This may just be one of the most overlooked and/or misunderstood aspects of the therapeutic psychedelic experience. Drugs are bad, mkay… or are they? Whether we believe that to be true or not, the fact of the matter is that we are all-too-aware that there are many people who feel this way, and that acknowledgement can absolutely have an impact on how we both feel about and approach the experience, especially once we are under the influence of the drugs. There is a stigma in the atmosphere and, at the very least, this tends to burden us with a sense of needing to forbid ourselves from having fun during our experiences.

We tell ourselves, “This is serious and potentially dangerous business. My happiness depends on this, and there’s no room for fun. After all, we’re not at a rave, we’re in therapy!”. Don’t get me wrong, these drugs demand care, caution, and respect, but that hardly implies we should avoid enjoying how they make us feel.

I would argue that the element of fun is absolutely required for having the best chance of success in psychedelic therapy and, if you can’t manage it, you are significantly less likely to succeed with it in the long-term.

Here’s an incomplete list of reasons why I believe having fun is a critical component to healing with the help of psychedelics:

1. Associating the healing experience with fun not only makes it feel good, but it makes us excited and motivated to continue doing it. Some psychedelic therapy sessions are incredibly difficult for a variety of reasons. If we can learn to have fun as often as reasonably possible during them, then it paints the entire process in a light that makes it more sustainable and effective for us. In ANY self-improvement endeavor, sustainability is essential.

2. Despite the fact that psychedelic therapy is work, it is a kind of work that demands room for “play”, in that we will be regularly accessing parts of ourselves that, in many ways, appeal to our inner child and, as a result, require that we speak to it in emotional languages it understands and enjoys.

3. Associating our experiences with fun provides us with many of the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, and other useful therapeutic practices. It’s a kind of emotional resonance that will prove incredibly useful to us as we learn to change the ways we react to certain situations and, especially, challenges.

4. Allowing ourselves to have fun during our experiences is, in essence, practice towards gaining confidence and trust in ourselves to heal; developing our agency. Remember, psychedelics help to reveal our paths towards healing, as well as grant trust in them, and so associating the process with positive feelings like fun, will assist us greatly in trusting and enjoying the process.

5. Allowing ourselves to have fun during the experience is also practice in learning to trust ourselves over others, as the very existence of the stigma surrounding some of these drugs often influences us to question ourselves and what we’re doing. If we can give ourselves permission to have fun in the face of the stigma, then we are learning to trust what we know to be helpful for us, instead of what other people may be telling us is helpful for us.

6. Some of us have forgotten how to have truly authentic fun, especially if we’ve spent a great deal of time submerged in suffering. Surviving in helplessness tends to make having fun require effort, or even feel like a chore. Psychedelic sessions are a great opportunity to redevelop the skill of having fun effortlessly, as well as open ourselves up to the vulnerability and agency needed to both accomplish and feel that we deserve it.

So, how do we actually have fun with psychedelics? I’m sorry to say that, once again, I can’t tell you exactly how, as it will look different for everyone. However, I believe there are a few things you can try to give you the best chance at finding your own way of enjoying your trips.

The first step is to try to identify any element of the experience that you enjoy, even if, and perhaps especially the ones that you wonder if you should be allowed to enjoy. For me, my first one was the feeling I got the moment the ketamine entered my bloodstream, and I could almost feel it cooling my veins, and tempering my raging and overactive nervous system. At first, I felt bad for enjoying it, as it so closely resembled the feelings I would experience when engaging in some kind of addiction that would have typically served to help me ignore and avoid my pain. Over time though, I came to understand and accept that this was not at all the same thing; this was something I was doing to learn to love myself, not move further away from it, and so I should embrace and enjoy the positive feelings that came with it.

Next, what are some of the things you already enjoy doing, but that psychedelics seem to increase your enjoyment of? I like to be creative, and so I would do things like look at a painting on the wall, and make an effort to identify something cool or interesting in what I was seeing. I wouldn’t force it, or spend too much time waiting for something to happen, I would just allow myself to enjoy observing and considering what it was I was seeing in a way that was fun for me.

The next step is to make an effort to bring some of these things into your sessions. I enjoyed taking time to include certain songs in my playlist that I thought might sound extra cool, or that spoke to me in ways I was interested to see manifest into something greater during the trip. Essentially, I was just allowing my authentic self to learn to feel good and have fun, and to feel deserving of doing so.

Again, I wouldn’t recommend exerting excessive control over the experience by attempting to force these things, nor would I recommend allowing them to dominate the duration of the experience, especially not as a beginner. The point is to help associate the experience with positivity, not to try forcibly painting the whole thing in one color that we mistakenly think will serve all our purposes. There is always room for fun, but we cannot always expect it to dominate the majority of our experiences.

If you’re having trouble coming up with things, then I suggest asking yourself the following questions: What gives you a powerful sense of agency? What is your “concert moment”? What are some of the ambitions and/or fantasies you have that make you feel truly powerful, even if they might feel delusional? What are some of the things that cause you to feel loved and valued by yourself and others? What’s the feeling you get when you sing in the shower and imagine you’re on stage? What about that fantasy gives you the feeling of power and agency? What makes you excited to be creative? What makes you feel useful and important? What gives you confidence and meaning? What makes you feel good about yourself, if even a little? What gives you a sense of purpose?

In asking these questions, we are appealing to and developing our own agency, self-love, and authenticity. The goal is to learn how to embrace and enjoy these things, and associating our psychedelic experiences with fun is a great tool for achieving this.

One last note on this topic. If you fail to achieve this, don’t make the mistake of believing that there is something wrong with you, or that you just can’t do it. You aren’t failing because there’s something wrong with you, you’re failing because failure is a part of developing any skill, and learning how to enjoy your trips is absolutely a skill. Remember, it can be difficult to figure out how to cross a hurdle before we move close to it and trip over it repeatedly. Keep trying and I promise that, eventually, you will find something to enjoy during your trips, and you will become good at it over time.

Mindfulness

Did you know that the purpose of mindfulness is to learn how to better exist in our bodies, in the present, and not necessarily solely in our minds? Granted, learning how to practice mindfulness will absolutely improve your ability to use your mind, but it does so by achieving a better balance between mind and body, and changing the way we observe and experience distress. I like to think of it as the strengthening of the connection between mind and body.

Mindfulness is simply the practice of being present in yourself, in the moment, instead of allowing your mind to exist in the past or future. Here’s something you might not know: many depressed and anxious people are exceptionally creative, overdeveloped, and skilled thinkers. They often come to rely on their creative abilities to think their way out of helplessness and discomfort; to achieve a sense of agency by exerting “intellectual control” over their experiences. Unfortunately, these people also tend to lag behind when it comes to utilizing their feeling selves, as their ability to feel is underdeveloped. This doesn’t mean they don’t feel strongly – often the opposite, they tend to feel things to an excessive degree. What it means is that they are not “skilled” feelers. They are not good at feeling through themselves with positive and desirable outcomes. Mindfulness requires getting in touch with what you’re feeling, and developing the skill of feeling. The more we embrace and feel our feelings, the better we get at it. Yes, you can actually get good at feeling!

Our bodies speak a language that can be extremely difficult to understand, and so we often have no idea what they’re saying to us. Practicing mindfulness is like downloading the Rosetta Stone language of your body. The purpose is to learn how to listen to and communicate with it, but do not make the mistake of believing that this means we must obey it or accept what it is telling us as absolute truth. We are listening, observing, and communicating, not obeying.

Our intuitions are part of the language of our bodies, and when we repeatedly treat them poorly, our bodies receive an injury. Keep injuring it, and it will eventually cause serious damage, and a total fracturing of your relationship with yourself. Again, this does not mean that we must obey what our bodies are saying to us! Investing absolute trust in your feelings will eventually enslave you to them, just as investing absolute trust in your thinking self will enslave you to it. We are seeking balance and input from the entirety of ourselves, not dominance.

With that in mind, some people (myself included), will need to occasionally flirt with the extreme opposite end of the spectrum in order to understand what it feels like to do that which we have been avoiding; to develop the skill that has gone unused for a long time. In my case, I trapped myself by imagining that my thinking self would directly translate to my feeling self; that they were already in reasonably good communication with each other. So, every time I thought I understood, or could accept, or be open to something, I didn’t realize that my feeling self was often not at all on the same page. I had allowed my thinking self to convince me we were on the same page but, in reality, we weren’t.

So, how do we practice and utilize mindfulness in the context of psychedelic therapy?

I believe that mindfulness is required before, during, and after a psychedelic trip. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as mindfulness is required constantly in life, but I believe it is particularly important to remember to engage in it immediately before, during, and after our experiences, as someone who isn’t accustomed to engaging in mindfulness all the time cannot be expected to engage in it by default surrounding the psychedelic experience. It will require some extra attention and reminders.

Remember the process of overcoming stage fright while peeing? That’s almost exactly what my most commonly used mindfulness technique looks and feels like. I focus on what I’m physically feeling, observe it, and lean into it until it overcomes me. It’s really just a basic form of meditation, and there are countless ways to practice it. Just remember that it is a skill and, for depressed and anxious people in particular, it’s a skill that they are likely to be very bad at the first few times they try it. Hell, I think it took me about 6 months of consistent effort to become half way decent at it. My thinking self was a severely overdeveloped control freak, which made it more difficult for my feeling self to catch up.

This doesn’t mean that we need to practice it for hours on end, every single day. At my best, I think I practiced meditation for about 5-10 minutes per day, and so I’m hardly an example of someone who went full throttle. A big part of the reason I didn’t practice more was because, for a very long time, I couldn’t see the benefit. I understood there must be a benefit, as I’ve never heard of a person who didn’t gain some kind of value from consistent meditation over time, but I couldn’t get it to resonate with me in a convincing way until I had been doing it for a long time in conjunction with psychedelic therapy.

It’s also important to remember that, every time you spend long periods of time engaging and overly-relying on your thinking self, you are diminishing some of the benefit of mindfulness, and potentially even reversing your progress. Luckily, these moments can effectively be interrupted with brief meditation and breathing exercises, among other things, and can ensure that you not only don’t lose progress, but that you continue to gain it.

As I mentioned, it wasn’t until I began meditating in conjunction with psychedelic therapy that it began to truly resonate with me. Interestingly, my pre-session meditations were no different than any of the other times I meditated. I simply sat back and let my therapist guide me through a basic, 5-10 minute body recognition and feeling meditation. I listened to my breathing, felt the different parts of my body against the couch, and kindly directed my attention back to my body whenever I found myself wandering back into my head. It’s by no means easy, but I eventually got very good at it, and it served to put me in an optimal state of mind before, during, and after each one of my sessions. Not only that, but it carried over into practically every other area of my life, including peeing in public…

As with almost everything else in this book, the kind of mindfulness that works best for you will be unique to you. I suggest trying a variety of things, beginning with routines that you feel capable of getting through, as well as ones that sound the least bit enjoyable. Sometimes we won’t know what we can get through or what feels good until we try it, and the first step is always the hardest one. Try taking the step, even if it’s just for 30 seconds, then congratulate yourself for moving forward, even if it was just a tiny bit. Moving is always better than remaining stuck, as any number is infinitely greater than zero.

What about mindfulness during our trips? What can that look like?

Since most psychedelics open up communication between the thinking and feeling selves, they can effectively allow us to “cheat” our way through what may have otherwise required years of therapy and/or mindfulness practice to get good at. They provide us with such valuable and untarnished information, that we can quickly learn to trust in and utilize it for our benefit.

During your trips, try to be aware of the feelings you find most difficult and, instead of attempting to quiet them or override them with something else, simply be aware of, and observe them without judgement or thought. We need to listen to and understand what we are feeling before we try to change it in any way. Notice and observe how they feel; where they reside in your body, but don’t bother making any judgements on them just yet. Stay out of your head, just feel it, try to listen and understand, then move on. You can make a decision later if one needs to be made. For now, just feel.

Identify the things that open you up to anxiety. Pick one that has developed recently and/or is low in intensity, and pay it deliberate attention. We can learn a lot about ourselves just by paying attention, especially while on psychedelics.

It’s important to always challenge ourselves, but to do so in a way we can reasonably expect to manage and overcome. Always start small if you need to, and avoid criticizing yourself for the fact that you started small. Similarly, avoid criticizing yourself for failing. It’s gonna happen, and we need to get used to it, congratulate ourselves for trying, then try again, perhaps with a smaller step if need be. Sometimes we will even need to take several steps back from where we have progressed to, and address something much further back. This can feel painful and defeating, but it’s a necessary part of the process, and despite what we may convince ourselves, we are never truly “starting over”. Our efforts are not wasted, even if they occasionally appear to be.

Lastly, don’t forget to journal or record these experiences in some way. It is so difficult, if not impossible to track all of these experiences purely in our heads. It doesn’t matter how good our memories are, or how profound an experience was. Eventually, we will forget extremely important things about those experiences, and require a refresher of some kind.

Music.

I believe that the catalogue of the music we have chosen to listen to throughout our lives amounts to the ongoing creation of our own personal emotional biographies. In other words, the music that punctuates moments in our lives represents the emotional language we used to write the emotional biography of our lives, and we have the ability to read (feel) through it whenever we want to simply by listening to the music.

Music is an emotional experience, and the emotional language it conveys to us is perfectly unique to each of us. Whatever you have felt in the moments that make up your life, there will always be music that speaks to and even clarifies those moments in ways that language alone cannot fulfill.

Music is one of the most powerful tools we can use to make progress during our psychedelic experiences. Music is essential because it reliably provides the necessary emotional stimuli needed to produce emotional resonance and catharsis – it expresses something that resonates deeply and uniquely to us, even in high dose psychedelic states. Our perception of music is always perfectly unique to us, which means that it can help reveal the space between our steps; it can show us how we really feel about something, and it can do so quickly, powerfully, and reliably, especially on psychedelics!

Being musical gives a person a special kind of skill with emotion, and a way to collect, experience, foster, and express it. You don’t need to be a musician to benefit from music in this way, you just have to have an emotional connection to it.

So, what are some of the things we can do to effectively use music during our trips?

Once again, the only way to figure out how to use a tool effectively during our trips is to give it a try, pay attention, write down what happens, and repeat the process. Luckily, when it comes to music, we don’t have to start from scratch. We are often already aware of the effects that certain songs have on us, which is exactly why we choose to listen to them in the first place. The tricky part lies in figuring out which music will best serve the intentions you set for each trip.

In my experience with taking psychedelics in a therapeutic setting, it was conveyed to me that music without lyrics was the recommended protocol, and I have to say that I really couldn’t disagree more with that recommendation, at least, for more experienced users. That’s not to say it was given without reason - far from it. I believe the purpose of the recommendation was to cover the bases of psychedelic therapy in a way that can effectively apply to the largest number of people, as well as remove the distraction that lyrics can cause during a psychedelic experience.

When we hear a voice, or something familiar, we tend to direct some of our focus towards it. When we hear a familiar voice singing a song we know, we increase those odds substantially. If we listen to music without lyrics while tripping, then we decrease our chances of distracting ourselves from what we’re experiencing. Despite the fact that I agree with all of this, I also believe that, once a person gains some experience with psychedelics, identifies their path, and begins traveling down it, “distraction” that serves our intent and purpose will likely achieve better results than what background music is capable of. Of course, this is unlikely to be true for everyone, but I would still strongly recommend giving different kinds of music a try.

Psychedelics serve to get us in touch with and help us understand our emotional selves. I would argue that this is the primary reason they are so incredibly useful in a therapeutic setting. Once we have some psychedelic experience under our belts, we gain confidence and trust in our ability to both navigate and understand what the experiences are helping us to understand, and so we require our own unique tools to move through our space between steps.

Say you want to learn how to become a good artist. Well, when you first start out, you are going to get the generic gear and tools you need to cover the fundamentals (music without lyrics). Once you start getting good, and discovering your own unique style of approaching the craft, you are going to require gear that facilitates your unique qualities (your “voice”). Perhaps you prefer a particular sketching pencil, working with references, focusing on abstract art, or using acrylic over oil paint. These specific differences are representative of who you are and how you best achieve success, and bringing your own music (typically, music with lyrics) into a psychedelic experience is no different; you’re searching for your “voice”.

Bringing background music into a psychedelic session is equivalent to playing it safe, but a strict adherence to safety is absolutely antithetical to growth. It’s true that we don’t want to purposefully put ourselves in a position in which we are absolutely convinced our lives are in significant danger, but risk is a necessary component of the challenges we must introduce to ourselves in order to learn how to overcome fear, as well as build resilience to troubling situations, emotions, and trauma.

Life is not about safety, and if we are constantly attempting to eliminate things that cause us to feel unsafe or helpless, then we are effectively priming ourselves to experience trauma, fear, and discomfort; we are eliminating opportunities to develop our agency. The world can never be a perfectly safe place in the ways we would like it to be, and we will never run out of ways in which to perceive danger. Instead, we must learn to strengthen ourselves and develop our agency, so that when we inevitably encounter something dangerous or challenging, we stand a better chance at conquering it and strengthening ourselves further.

Seeking safety = dodging all the potholes forever (making more and more over time)

Seeking agency = making solid ground out of the potholes

By improving our ability to conquer our fears and challenges, we eliminate the dangers of life far better than we would by attempting to avoid or forcibly remove them. The ultimate goal is to increase our agency, competency, and resilience, not to eliminate all of the things that may test them, which is outright impossible.

Say you’re lost in the woods. Would you rather have a companion who can confidently and competently fight off any threats when they inevitably come, or one who can perfectly point all of them out to you and give you advice on how to avoid them, but crumples into a useless, quivering heap when you, again, inevitably come into contact with them? An attempt at total avoidance of danger confines us to a cage of ever-increasing helplessness, while developing the skills of overcoming it sets us free. Ideally, we all need some of both, as there are some dangers in life which reality either prevents us from overcoming, or demands more of us than we should willingly give.

Despite this fact, it is typically much better to excel at dealing with challenges than it is to excel at avoiding them, as avoiding them forever is impossible, and will drastically decrease our ability to deal with even the smallest of challenges when we find ourselves faced with them. We do not want to train ourselves to only feel comfortable in our safe spaces, and to be afraid of what’s around every corner. Instead, we must train ourselves to have the agency, confidence, and competence to overcome the things we find standing in our way, and the things yet to come.

As we gain experience using psychedelics in a therapeutic setting, music will help us learn to be our own badasses, we just have to figure out how it can best serve us. For my own trips, I would simply select a few songs which I was confident could help produce the emotions that I wanted to feel in order to meet my intention for a particular trip.

I can recall one trip in particular in which I wanted to focus on, try to understand, and make progress with my fear of failure. Since the intention was heavily focused on fear, I decided to include a few songs that I knew could not only help me observe and feel my fear during a trip, but to also overcome it, and feel powerful in doing so. I wanted to confront the fear first, then essentially queue the soundtrack to the scene in my own movie in which I could observe myself being the action hero who doesn’t bother to look at the explosion as I walk away. I wanted to feel powerful and competent in the face of fear, instead of timid, helpless, and weak.

Here’s what that looked like for me.

Step 1 – Confront, observe, feel, and step towards the fear: Song – Fear Inoculum by Tool

Step 2 – Gain confidence and determination in overcoming it: Song – Face to the Floor by Chevelle

Step 3 – Walk away from the explosion without looking: Song - My Name is Human by Highly Suspect

Not only did it work, but I left the experience feeling like a superhuman version of myself. It wasn’t that I conquered all of my fears in one trip, but the steps I took were so significant that it left a permanent impression on me, and inspired me to continue moving forward in the face of fear. I had given myself all the proof I needed that I could overcome my fears, and I essentially did it by staring in my own movie and scoring it with a soundtrack that would emotionally resonate with me. That was my space; that was my path toward achieving agency where only helplessness had existed.

Once again, I cannot tell you what to include in your space; what songs to bring, what to focus on, or even how to use them. All I can tell you is that they can be unimaginably effective, and that all it requires is coming to understand what emotionally speaks to you, and what is being communicated. If you need a little more help, then I believe the following tips may be of use to you.

Ask yourself, what are the notes of your feelings? What did your day, or a particular feeling or experience sound like? What key was it in? I bet there’s a song for it! Slap on a playlist and pay attention to the feelings that each song conjures. While listening, make note of any song that evokes any powerful emotion, even if it’s not necessarily the one you were looking for. More than likely, you will eventually find a use for that song. In this process, we are simply collecting tools which may be of use to us during one or more of our trips, not necessarily searching for a hyper-specific tool/song.

Just like psychedelics, music can teach us about ourselves. Find things like agency, gratitude, joy, power, drive, confidence, love, etc. The vast majority of songs I purposefully used as tools of emotional resonance during my trips were songs that, until I listened to them while tripping, I didn’t fully understand the emotional power of. I had some good ideas but, in most cases, I didn’t experience the full truth of how they made me feel until I listened to them while under the influence.

Lastly, while under the influence of a psychedelic, try singing the words or sounds in your voice (even if it’s only in your head), with your meaning, and understand this belongs to you, and can only be for you. You are expressing it the way you need it to be expressed, and that is the entire purpose. Do not allow yourself to lose your value for this based on how someone else may interpret or experience it. Your voice is your identity attempting to express itself in a particular way. Allow yourself to find and embrace it without hesitation, embarrassment, or shame.

This expression of “voice” took on many forms for me during my experiences. Sometimes I would find myself saying things like, “if you can tap to this drum solo, then you will both feel and overcome the emotion being conveyed”. It never failed to work. Not because I was playing some game and trying to achieve a perfect score in order to feel better, but because I convinced myself that what I was doing had meaning; that it was authentically me, and that I could express it confidently and succeed. The music was helping me to guide myself through the process of solidifying that intent with powerful emotional resonance, and I was having fun doing it.

Music, perhaps more than anything, is a powerful and reliable means of producing emotional resonance for ourselves during a psychedelic experience.

A word of caution: If you achieve a calming sense of familiarity when listening to sad, upsetting, angry, or any other kind of negative, helplessness-inducing emotional music, then there is a very good chance you are trading the calm of familiarity for a decrease to your mental health. While I can’t say this kind of music has no place for anyone in a psychedelic setting, there is a very good chance it will reinforce your relationship with those negative feelings, instead of teach you to move beyond them, and identify more with positivity. Considering this very real possibility (I have witnessed it before), I recommend avoiding bringing that kind of music into the experience, if possible.

Now that we’ve covered what I consider to be the most useful tools for making progress in our psychedelic therapy sessions, what about the things we can use to help us before and after our trips? Well, I’ve got a chapter just for that!