05. Yes, I've Done Psychedelics: From Psychonaut to Researcher

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to a chat with Uma, with me, your host, Uma R. Chatterjee. On this podcast, I bring together all of my roles as a neuroscientist, researcher, board certified mental health peer specialist, mental health advocate, community builder, and a survivor with lived experience to bring you honest and unfiltered conversations exploring our true human experiences in their fullest form. Every week, I'm bringing you conversations bridging the gap on all things neuroscience, psychology, mental health, lived experience, advocacy, psychedelics, and more. This is a space for raw unfiltered truth to truly explore ourselves for who we are and how we are. I cannot wait to connect with you, answer all of your questions and co-create this with you. Welcome to a chat with Uma. Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another episode of a chat with Uma. I cannot believe I'm saying this, but it has already been a month of the show. I mean, honestly, a little bit longer because it's been four episodes plus the trailer and they've each come out once a week, consecutively the last several weeks. So at some point in a month, and to me, that is just wild because this has been something in my heart for so long, like so many years, and now it's happening. And it's been a month of co-creating this space with you all, and just receiving your love and support and feedback and creating from what y'all have asked of me, and just creating this space of openness and honesty and curiosity and just love and compassion. And it's been beyond all expectations and beyond my mildest dreams. So thank you so much for one month of the show and for supporting me and just blowing me away with how y'all have received the show and everything that's happened since. And so many exciting things have happened with this month of the show. I mean, it has opened so many opportunities to really grow the show and create this space together and make a difference in the way that I just so hope to with y'all. And I'm just so excited. I mean, something that's super, super unexpected and exciting is that now the show is bringing on some really aligned and supportive partnerships because of the way y'all have supported the show from the beginning and the way it's been received and that is just such a dream. So that will be starting in the next few episodes. Everything's just getting ironed out and it'll really support me and being able to continue making this show and putting my all into it and being able to bring on just some incredible people that I might not have had access to as quickly to talk to and just really ultimately making these conversations the most supportive and expansive as possible. So I'm so excited for the partnerships that are coming on. I'm so excited for everything to come and it's all because of y'all. So thank you so much for supporting the show. And to continue supporting the show, it would just mean the world to me. If y'all could leave a rating and review or wherever you listen to your podcasts, if you listen to multiple places, even better, and just sharing the show, the most supportive way you can help the show other than rating and reviewing is by sharing it, sharing the clips from the show that are on social media or just sharing the episodes directly to anyone who would resonate with these conversations because that's how we co-create this community and grow this space of honesty and this new way of being together. So it would mean the world if this resonates with you to bring this to other people, just make this community even more full. And I have so many things up my sleeve for this community. Just all of these possibilities been unlocked together with the beginning of the show and ways of really reinforcing community and the community not just being and listening to the show, but actually talking to each other, that's something that's in the works that's coming. I'm just alluding to so many different things right now. I know I'm being kind of vague and I'll just stop there because I'm getting too excited and I will share as soon as I can. But there are so many things that are coming beyond what you already know about the show and I'm just so excited. So thank you all so much for making this be a dream come true and allowing me to really just put more into this and make this sustainable and supportive for as many people as possible. And with that, before we get into the episode, I also wanted to share a really exciting update because there are so many things coming up. There are so many exciting sessions and panels and workshops and conferences and events that I have been invited to speak at relating to all things. My advocacy and research and journey and like everything we talk about here, which is just such an honor to me. And I'm so excited to be able to share all of this with y'all so that you can attend whatever resonates and I can see your faces and just we can support these events and be there together. So something really exciting coming up next Saturday on February 25th of 2023 is the Town Hall on Disability Justice and Higher Education at the annual National Conference for the National Association for Graduate and Professional Students. And this panel is being presented by the Graduate Student Action Network and amazing organization really dedicated to bringing awareness and action to a variety of populations and topics related to equity and inclusion in grad school. It's so, so special to me because I'm going to be presenting on grad school and mental illness, talking about navigating OCD, PTSD, depression, and more in grad school. And this topic is so important to me because it has been such a huge point of contention and pivotal in my way of even accessing grad school a little while getting through it, it is something I've learned so much about from being in grad school and so many of the objective barriers and things to consider when navigating disabilities, especially mental illness in grad school. So I've learned so much and it's such an honor to be asked to just share about my experiences honestly and raise awareness for these causes and these experiences and then create a safe space through a breakout session for anybody who has similar experiences or has questions about navigating grad school and just really creating communities. So if you are a graduate student or a prospective graduate student, if you're a student of any kind, if you're a faculty member or just anyone involved in academia and you are interested in understanding how to support yourself or other students with disabilities, especially with mental illness and grad school, come to this event. It is free. It's from 10, 30 to 12 Pacific Standard Time on February 25th. The link to sign up will be in the show notes. It's also on my website and it's gonna be an amazing event. There are so many panelists speaking on so many different disabilities, many of which I also have and I in particular will be speaking on mental illness. So if you want to attend mine, that's amazing. If you want to be supported in other disabilities that you might experience, there's so many other options as well. And I would just love to see you and there's power numbers. That's the most beautiful thing of this event. It's open and it's accessible. And there's gonna be so many educators and students there who are not aware of the disabilities. We're gonna be talking about they're here in willing to learn. So power and numbers of people showing up and showing out and talking about their experiences will make all the difference in creating awareness. So I really hope to see you there. And it is sponsored by Caltech and their division of biology and biological engineering, specifically their diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. So thank you so much to Caltech for sponsoring this event and supporting all of us and being able to share our experiences. So I hope to see you there. All right, so today's episode, perhaps the most self-explanatory title that could ever possibly exist for a podcast episode. I probably may be not, but it's titled, yes, I've done psychedelics from Psychonaut to researcher. And my goodness, this is a really scary episode to record, which is strange for me because I am an open book and generally have no issue talking publicly about anything. And yeah, I've never really I hid my story or actively not owned that I've done psychedelics ever since I've done them. But there are reasons that I'm scared of putting this out so publicly on a podcast. And those very reasons are why I'm doing it anyway because I do not resonate. My values do not resonate with the reasons that I'm scared. And I mean, why would I, the most open, unfiltered, uncensored person have any fear about talking about anything? Well, objectively, I'm in an interesting position where I am a graduate student, I am a researcher. I research psychedelics. I have an active project going on right now where I am, you know, publishing and working on actual research, like peer-reviewed evidence-based research. And it, there is a stigma about being open about one's personal use. Maybe less so in clinical settings, which I do have experiences with. But in terms of autonomous choice of being able to choose how one experiences the world and what they put into their bodies and experience, there is still undue stigma and I don't resonate with it. I understand it exists and I am choosing and continue to choose to live and defeat the stigma by being open. And also putting a face and name to the identity of someone who has chosen to experience psychedelics completely, consensually and with all the education and choice that I have, it's not mutually exclusive to be someone who engages in science as a neuroscientist researcher or whatever, and being a human being with reasons to experience psychedelics. And I feel like most people listening to this, I'm just preaching to the choir, there isn't any question of it. But I really just wanted to put some language to any apprehension that y'all might sense or just the nature of this episode and me going for it. And I know that y'all want to hear this because another reason that I've chosen to do this episode now, so early in the podcast is because this is probably the most asked question I've gotten, at least in the last several weeks. I mean, I put up a question box on Instagram about the podcast and what y'all wanted to hear. And in one question box over 24 hours, I think I got 30-ish questions about psychedelics and have I done them, my opinions, because I, to this point, really mostly talked about my research. And I'm, I totally understand why people want to know and I'm here to talk about it. So that's why I'm doing this so early because let me just answer all of y'all's questions. And I mean the title already answers a lot of it, which is "Have you done psychedelics?" Yes I have. And now we will get into how on earth I started experiencing them and the context around it and what I have learned, my personal experiences, what I would do differently where I'm at now, how I choose to use them, what they have to do with my research and why I'm interested professionally. And I just think that it's so important to share my experiences and for us to share our experiences now more than ever because number one for me at least, most of the time when I've asked about psychedelics in whatever capacity that people ask me, I'm wearing the hat of a researcher and it's in a research setting or on a platform where I'm being asked as a researcher and I'm asked about my personal opinions and experiences and in that sense, in those settings, they are mutually exclusive and it's not ethical or appropriate for me to be sharing my personal experiences with psychedelics and usage when I'm speaking purely from a research perspective. It just isn't and I know that you could understand why. That being said, I'm asked about those experiences because I am not just one person with one identity. I am also an advocate. I'm very open about my lived experiences obviously with mental health and mental illness and physical illness and all of the experiences I've had, of course on the podcast, but far beyond the podcast, like in my advocacy in general, navigating life as a human, I hold a lot of roles. I'm also a mental health peer specialist and a huge part of my role there is to be open and honest with my experiences to support other people alongside them in a professional capacity. So while it is mutually exclusive in research settings and presenting, my research and being asked about psychedelics from a research perspective, it is not mutually exclusive for me as a person overall outside of those settings and of course, lines can get blurred, but on this podcast, I am all of those things. I'm not just a researcher. And so with that, it's so important for me to be able to answer those questions because those are my values. I am an organizer. I am the director of media for the intercollegiate psychedelics network, sitting on the board of directors for an organization dedicated to the advancement of psychedelics, you know, might be a little telling about my interest beyond just research and being that passionate to dedicate my time to that. So that makes it a little bit obvious, right? And then just my values as a human being, I believe in being honest and open and there is such a lack of awareness and education about personal use of psychedelics and consciousness, answering, exploration, substances, whatever you want to call them, medicines, whatever resonates. And my values, and these are my values again, I am representing myself and myself only. People have the right to experience psychedelics and to explore their consciousness on their own terms. As long as of course, they're the ones choosing it and it's with informed consent and they're the ones actively engaging in it, I believe in autonomy and I believe in shutting down the stigma around people choosing that for themselves. And so the way to be able to have a conversation about this and to be open and honest about the things that people are already doing because many people are already doing it and have been doing it, whether it's indigenous cultures that have had these in their traditions and their sacred belief systems and their ways of administering medicine for eons for centuries or even in modern day living where people are accessing these substances, medicines, whatever they resonate with again and they are experiencing these. Like it's so common yet it's not talked about and that doesn't make any sense to me because we only learn from each other when we want accept reality for what it is rather than censoring it for what some ideal tells us it should be but to by being honest and by talking about our experiences and that's again not to say that anybody's telling anybody what to do, that's in the disclaimer for me, like not a thing I'm doing at all. But if people are consensually asking questions to me and want to receive the answers, this is the space for me. I feel to be able to answer them and be open about what I've experienced, what I'm comfortable sharing which is pretty much everything and then letting people make their own choices and letting that inform them however they see fit and that is their responsibility not mine. So that's why I am so incredibly passionate about sharing this and not only that but the way we as humans engage at the world is by learning and identifying with people who hold our identities and hold commonalities with us and I know for a fact that in all of my research and my seeking of information on psychedelics and usage to be as safe and informed as possible. I was not seeing people who look like me at all holding Asian or South Asian heritages, ethnicities. I'm not saying they don't do it and I'm saying I'm not saying that nothing exists out there but by and large I'm not seeing people who look like me or come from where I come from, doing it or talking about it and that is definitely consideration for people because we identify with people who have our identities, not only that but people who have young adult cancer like me, people who have the conditions, the mental illnesses, the disabilities, the chronic illnesses, the life experiences that I have. I feel like I need to have a responsibility to give a voice to the people who have experienced one or many of those things and in the context of those experiences and the awareness that I had at the time, talk about my experiences so that people can do with that. what they will. That's all I really care to do. Just empower people with experiences I've had and understandings that I've had for them to make their own choices. So I am so grateful for this space to take on and own all of my roles and be able to talk through the nuance and the context and the confluence of all of them in a way that is safe and supportive and honoring of all of my identities because this is my and our space and this is the place I get to be fully myself and share all of me. So thank you for witnessing me and hearing that and holding everything I'm about to share and everything I've shared thus far and I'll end my tangent here after this but this also speaks to the very point of why I created this space for myself and for all of us because in the world that we live in and in the roles that I have it does not oftentimes feel like I can share all the parts of myself and how they coalesce and come together in the ways that matter like my lived experience in forming my research and my advocacy and my initiatives and my organizing being something that's held against me in terms of research settings and just so many examples of that. It doesn't feel conducive to being able to do that at this point. I do it as much as I possibly can to a fault but I just can't for ethical reasons as well and so this is a place for me to bring everything together and the reason that I think it's so important to bring everything together is because I believe that our existence is greater than the sum of its parts and I've seen the proof of that in my own life from the research project that has taken my career 10 steps further than anything else has being informed directly by my own lived experience with the mental illnesses that I was exploring the comorbidity of which we'll be talking about in episode soon. But conversations we can have without barriers without implicit rules of what's acceptable to bring up, what's not acceptable to bring out filters and just unnecessary gatekeeping of certain parts of one's identity. I'm here to change that. I'm here to create a space where all of that can come together not just for me but for the people that come on the show so that the magic of exploration and understanding can really come through in the multifaceted ways that we look at life and how those perspectives inform our thoughts and ideas and the way we show up in the world and how we do things in the world. And that's just what gives me life and what inspires me to keep going and to if nothing else just create a space to make that difference. So that's why we were here and thank you for being here with me doing this in this new way. And this is as good of a time as any to make a very strong and clear disclaimer that everything I'm sharing today and always are from personal experiences. They are anecdotes and they are for anecdotal and educational purposes only. There is absolutely no recommendation or medical advice in terms of any sort of substance use or psychedelic use of any sort. Of course this episode does not constitute a relationship between us as me being a mental health peer specialist for you. This is purely just me speaking on my experiences and any educational lessons or reflections that it dispense are just for consideration and are not any sort of medical advice. Also I am not representing the views of any organization I'm affiliated with. These are purely and completely my views, my opinions, my experiences and my perspectives. So with that let's get into my experience and my journey with psychedelics thus far. So as always I will say that this episode and the way I'm going to talk about it as I've done with all episodes thus far will be chronological. It'll be telling a story and it'll be giving both my perspectives in the moment and my decision making and the context relevant to those decisions as well as hindsight from now looking back at what I didn't have a framework for understanding then but now I can contextualize and see. And so I'll do my best to orient you to what I'm talking about my in the moment experiences and thoughts versus me reflecting back and I hope that in telling the story I answer the vast majority of all the questions that are answered and if I don't get to them I will answer them at the end. So the story really begins in 2019 when I was 23 but I guess I should mention just like tiny little blips before that which was mainly that when I was 21 I thought I was trying some psilocybin mushrooms just like because I wanted to try them not very strongly but I figured why not like very ignorantly almost just I had heard some things and I was like maybe I'll try a little bit but whatever I had tried did not have potency and virtually nothing happened so that's like a blip on the radar but where it really begins is in 2019 the summer of 2019 and the context around that in short was I had been diagnosed with cancer in the several months leading up to that and had gone through treatment and was continuing to go through treatment and complications from treatment and being just at one of the rock bottoms of my life and losing my voice and having to leave music forever and just being completely lost and confused and at a very very low point with my mental health not really having the proper diagnoses or treatment and for all of that context if you don't have it I would really encourage you to listen to the episodes prior to this so my full story and then the three parts of mental health journey because they really fill in the gaps of the context around the extreme nature of this time in my life but if you've listened to that then you know that I was just really lost and confused and didn't know what to do with myself I didn't even know if I wanted to live which is kind of hard when you're going through cancer treatment and you're trying really hard to live and I had no sense of purpose I had no career I had let go of the one part of my identity that had given me any sort of self-esteem which was music and singing because I couldn't sing anymore because of the side effects of my cancer surgery and I really didn't have a job other than the side jobs I was doing from home while I was sick to try to make ends meet and I just had no purpose I also just was in a really abusive therapy situation that I didn't understand at the time I was out of the cult but didn't really have any awareness or processing of the cult and what I had been through and I was just to very if you can imagine it just like a very very traumatized sick person and at a very very low point and it was suggested to me by a good number of people actually that psychedelics might offer some form of support or insight and it actually was because of the part of my life of cancer because at the time psychedelic science was starting to come to the surface of the media and being talked about because of their really exciting results in different trials and one of them was in cancer patients so I had learned about the fact that people with cancer were taking psychedelics in various forms in different trials and experiencing some level of liberation and acceptance of their circumstances and insight and I guess something important about that is a lot of them were terminal or were very old and age so it wasn't really a one-to-one comparison of me versus people in the trials because I was 23 and I wasn't really sure like what my prognosis was I ended up finding out after that it was far worse than we all thought it was I was just kind of in libo and confused but nonetheless I identified with the absolute dreading confusion of facing her mortality especially at such a young age which arguably was an extenduating circumstance compared to those who were older so I figured if it helped them maybe it would really help me and I just honestly didn't know a whole lot about it so someone really really trusted in my life who was very knowledgeable about psychedelics and their use and their history just really educated me on the psychedelic reticence and the initial rise of psychedelic research and the unfair suppression of it and just really gave me context about the history and ultimately just educated me on what I needed to know in terms of battling the stigma because let's be honest, the stigma that has been created around psychedelics and psychedelic use is really unfortunate but pervasive so I really needed to unlearn a lot of things and you know that was really important what was also important though was starting to wrap my head around what experiences could possibly be like for other people and not that experiences are entirely replicable I wasn't going into it with that intention or that delusion but it's just helpful to get a really good sense of what might happen in certain people just to see how they respond and the you know what's sometimes in the realm of normalcy just so if I did have a analogous experience I could contextualize it and label it and just know that I wasn't alone which is not a guarantee again but it's helpful so I just started looking into what it was like in so many different ways and I guess I'll say that around the summer of 2019 when this was all going on the first psychedelic that I knew I was going to start experiencing was DMT, dimethyl-tripped mean. I can't tell you exactly why it was DMT the only thing I can really say is that I felt most called to it and it felt synchronistic and like it was the right thing for me to start with because of accessibility and trust and just feeling drawn to it so I knew I was going to start with DMT so a lot of my you know just looking into different people's experiences and watching videos and repairing myself and understanding as much as I could about the compound itself and what we had any idea of what was going on in our systems in the brain which is not a whole lot but we did know like that's where I started looking into things and I really just jumped into it and I wouldn't say that I was ignorant and that I feel like I did my due diligence and was given due diligence in the way I educated myself and received education about DMT and experiencing it but nonetheless there is a level of ignorance when you have no idea what it's like until you actually do it and so that kind of sets me up for starting to experience DMT. So let's go back to maybe at this point it's August September is of 2019 it's been like a month or two of really considering it and doing research and if I'm being completely honest I really can't tell you that I was actually hopeful in that space or time of my life in the summer of 2019 because I was at such a low point in my life and the word that really comes to mind was just hopeless and defeated and fully burnt out in every sense of the word and just beaten down by life is how I felt and I also didn't have a conception of things being better because things hadn't been better it had just culminated into the almost inevitable worst way of life going that it almost felt like confirmatory of how I saw life going at the time because at that point in my life and in all the years prior I never really even thought about the future because I didn't really see myself living for very long whether it be life taking me out or me not being able to hold on any longer so at that point it was so dark and I was not hopeful yet I was open and willing and so beaten down in my resolve or my conception of reality and holding on to norms which I hardly held on to anyway but I thought at that point it was just all out the window that I was willing to try anything that I had nothing to lose that's really the mentality was like I had nothing to lose so why not so I did I started doing DMT in the context around how much I did DMT in that period of time and what that looked like was at the time the tool I had access to taking DMT with was not ideal it was just like a regular vape which is not ideal there's usually specialized tools to take in DMT but because I didn't have that I was using regular vape and making do and it did work but there are a few problems with it which was one I was not I was out of vapor so is vapor word I think I think so a vape ER I wasn't a vapor so I wasn't super like familiar with the concept of vaping and like having hold it in and it was super super super rough on my lungs and ingestion and in terms of taking DMT it's often like I guess vaping anything or smoking anything like you take it in and then you hold it and then you let it out and there's some implicit need to take in a good amount and hold it for a good amount of time and then let it out and I wasn't really good at either of those things so a good number of the first many times that I tried DMT was me just trying to act with me myself to it and sometimes something would happen and sometimes not much would happen I would say none of the times like nothing happened but it's a combination of I had never done psychedelics before I was like so uncomfortable with not uncomfortable and like unsafe way but just like I was not familiar that's the better word I wasn't very familiar with going into like quote unquote another realm or just like altering my state of consciousness so it was also getting used to that and the thing with DMT for context is that it's very very very very powerful it's also very short acting and short lasting so on average anywhere from like 7 to 15 minutes is the trip which if you've heard of other psychedelic trips you know anywhere from like 4 hours to 8 or 12 hours so this is nothing like that this is if there is an analogy the analogy I've generally heard is you blast off from this version of consciousness reality to somewhere else and I'm not saying somewhere else in like a ethereal like spiritual way I just mean like some other level of existence and consciousness really and then you come back and so each time I would I was able to try this like multiple times and at night taking breaks in between because it was so short acting and you relatively maybe you come back and there are perhaps like revelations or integration you can do but it's not like your consciousness is like completely altered after at least in my experience and the experiences that I studied of other people like you're basically like mostly functional and of course as high passes you become completely functional so I was able to do the multiple times a day and so I would say I'm trying to remember exactly but I'm pretty sure it was like in the August ish all the way to like the first few weeks of October there would be days in the week where I would take it 3, 4 maybe 5 times in a night on days or nights that it needs sense it wouldn't be like multiple days in a row it'd be spread out to like just half time and process and continue but I mostly will sum up all of the experiences up till the last one and I would say at that point I probably did it around 50 times that's a huge number and I know it sounds like a huge number but again the context is like it wasn't like a full blown quote unquote breakthrough like oh my gosh I went and had the biggest revelation like 50 times it was really one time that I ever had that at the very end of that period of time and we'll get into what that was like but I basically was just like getting familiar with it and doing it and experiencing the experience of Blastoff which is that you ingest it you inhale it and you smoke it and then after you get enough puffs it's a very clear experience for me at least of the visuals and it literally feels like blasting off like there's like a zoom upwards to I don't know into my brain into another realm and again I'm not speaking about this literally I'm speaking and just perception and a lot of times I would experience that zoom up and I would be in a fractal world of seeing all of the different dimensions and shapes and colors and the fractalness and it's just there's no way to explain it and that's so annoying anyone who's listened to anything about psychedelics it's like people always say like oh you can't explain it and that would really annoy the shit out of me but honestly there's not really a whole lot of a way to explain it maybe go to Alex Gray's art and that's a version of it but nothing really does the actual perception of all of the visuals justice so I experienced that good amount of times I actually never experienced the typical like or common thing people experience of mechanical elves which I found really interesting because it's oftentimes in this space people talking about their experiences especially when they're more so dissociating it from science and going more into like spiritual beliefs about it there's this conception of like people are all accessing the same place and that's why so many people have the mechanical elves and see it yet from a scientist perspective and just like my very almost skeptical or just trying to rationalize and understand things as much as one can with the idea of neuroscience which is now clearly a neuroscientist it's interesting that I didn't experience mechanical elves when being told and having that bias that preconceived notion that I would because one to think maybe my experience would confirm that because I had that conception that framework in my mind and yet I didn't which was very interesting but I did see just the inexplicable the most beautiful fractals and things like that in terms of entities or energies or perceptions of those there were and none of them were super notable really until the very last one that I did the one breakthrough but really big breakthrough transformative one that I had but up till then I guess like the 49ish that I did before not really notable it was just there and then there was just a lot of variance in general like what I would experience a lot of times almost all the time there was music by a band named Spongle which is a for my understanding at least like a very psychedelic if not specifically DMT oriented band and their music just makes sense when you're doing DMT it would be on a lot and it would guide a lot of my trips and when I say guide I mean that like it felt like a dissolving of my physical body you're having really any autonomy over the experience it being guided and shaped by the music and so like the visuals and the feelings being incomplete concert with the music and the ebbs and flows and the general just way the music went so that was very cool and interesting and I love Spongle and highly recommend if anyone is doing DMT but all of that happened and then I was doing the same kind of practice that I did with the M.T. in general which was taking a night and then doing it like three or four times maybe five depending on like the quality of my trips and I should say that the reason I was continuing to go is because I did not feel a resolve or end to it which with my especially like OCD uncertain brain which I didn't have a concept of the uncertainty and stuff at the time but with that one could argue that maybe I just felt like I wasn't sure what it would be over what that feeling would be like exactly and I didn't have certainty around that feeling so maybe I kept going but I don't think that's the case I think I'm sure like I did have that concern because uncertainty played me then it is kind of what's to find a lot of my life like discomfort with uncertainty but in the context of having like a resolve closure experience given that I did have that at the very end of that cycle of doing DMT I wouldn't say that that's why I was continuing I was continuing because I genuinely didn't feel like there was a resolve so there was a night and I think I have the exact date of it actually because of a note that I wrote down that is really pivotal important with my experience let me find that note okay I found the note and it's called bots and it's from October 17th of 2019 and it's been untouched and unedited since then so that was the date that I had this experience it's really cool to have an actual date for for once and probably the only time I'm talking through this story but that day I had done I would guess like three to four times before and then I went in for my final I didn't know if it would be my final but I went in for this trip and it was completely different than anything I had experienced it started off pretty normal in that like it was quote-unquote successful meaning I'd taken in enough and I got like a full like going up into the realm of consciousness and experiencing all the fractals and all the everything and then after all the quote-unquote normalcy where I would normally come down from the DMT it took me through this visceral experience and again I have to say especially for people who haven't done psychedelics that the way I'm telling this story is a perception of what it felt like this is not like me saying this was objective reality in fact I largely argue that it's not objective reality and it's kind of my life's mission to understand in part like the correlations of neural processes to these more phenomenological conscious experiences but nonetheless this is just what I experience as a human taking it not what actually quote-unquote happened but what I experienced was I blasted off I would experience all the normal fractal stuff and then there was this experience where this quote-unquote energy of this feminine energy came up and was very strong and felt very very scary and felt very dark and felt like a threat which was really scary being in that situation and like on the one hand knowing that this was a trip and not like it would be over but on the other hand being so immersive that it feels believable and everything in me wanted to run away but I couldn't because I was in the trip so I was faced with this energy and it kind of felt like everything beautiful and all the fractals and everything had like melted away it was just me and this energy and it felt like I was laying there well I was laying there in the bed that's I guess for context for anyone who doesn't know this like taking it and then laying down at least how I did it in the bed and then tripping the entire time like laying down very very comfortable very like dark and cozy setting and safe setting just a little some twinkle lights around because I preferred that and it gave me some like tetherback to reality but anyway so I'm laying down in my mind as well and I'm kind of helpless in my mind and there's this energy and it's just like coming towards me I don't remember it having a face or anything it was just this energy so I don't know how to explain it and it was really dark and then it started coming closer and closer towards me and I started getting more and more of a sense that it was going to kill me and again it's not like I believed like I was gonna die physically nor am I even thinking that way it's like just completely in the trip feeling like this energy was going to do something very very bad or like it was out to get me and it was gonna take me out and it was just like my biggest enemy and then also I was helpless and couldn't do anything about it and the best way I can describe what happened was that that energy just came and came and came closer to me and then it just like smothered me is the best way I it's that's not the right word because I mean how do you get smothered in your head but the closest analogy I can think of is getting smothered by its energy and it just like fully did what I was afraid it was gonna do like it just quote unquote, "killed me" or something. And then, after that, it was just peaceful. It was a peace that I had never experienced before. And I wish I had better words for it. Again, I wish I could just like, transmit the experience to you. But with the words I have, it was amongst all of the just endless amounts of fear and dread and despair and hurt and all of it. It was just peace. And I guess it was just sitting in that peace and then like, naturally, that was the end of the experience. And when I say experience, I mean like the trip trip, like I'm up in with that. And it ended. It dissipated as it did. My eyes were closed. I was in that peace. I realized it was over. It was becoming over. And I slowly but surely came back into full humanness. But with that peace and with that experience. And I didn't have a conception in words yet of the experience, right? Because like when you're experiencing something, you're not like narrating the experience in your head, generally speaking, you're just experiencing it. But for me, like after coming out of that, naturally, what one's brain does is start to try to make sense of what the fuck that was. And at least like put it in some form of context or words, of course, like narrating it to the person around me and then like to myself. And what transpired after that was, I don't know exactly how long, but I think it was around like anywhere from like half an hour to an hour of just having these thoughts. And it didn't feel like my thoughts, I guess. And of course, it's mine, but it didn't feel like it was coming from like my way of thinking or my general language or like my experiences thus far. It just were thoughts that were just like in my head and felt like they needed to be written down, like they just had to be written down. And it was pretty late at night, but I just had to write them and type them. And so that note that I had referenced that I could go back to and know the date of this whole thing was that note. And I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And it seems to, I guess, like a lot of sense of that experience for me. And in some what that experience felt like to me in the context and knowledge that I had done was it felt like it was showing me that my worst fears could come true. And I would still be okay. But I would ever standard, I had a okay, like I would be able to withstand it. And then there's death. And once there's death, there's no more just from like again, my vantage point perspective, like there's no more. And until then by definition, if I'm not dead, then I'm withstanding everything. And I'm making it through for better or for worse. And nothing can take me out until death does. And when it does, it does. And it just is. I don't know if that makes any sense to anybody else, but that is the recollection of that whole feeling. And I don't know why I feel called to like read the note. And you know what? I'm going to because I'm going to talk about kind of what happened from that note and make sense of that note in terms of conceptualizing what it did for me. So I'll say about this note. I'm sharing this. It's really, really vulnerable, but I'm doing it. And what I want you to know is that all of this is not like a belief system or thoughts that I 100% resonate with now or even then. They were just what came to my mind that had to be written down. And none of this is considered to me or the intent of sharing to you as any form of quote unquote truth. It's just what came in my head. And basically what that DMT experience caused in my head. So, okay, I'm going to read a verbatim thoughts. What a what a creative title. Okay, thoughts. Our subconscious remembers everything. When we can't recall correctly or doubt our choice, it's from the fear of messing up or making a mistake or being imperfect. Bypassing that gives us the answer that we have in ourselves. Nothing is able to crush us. Nothing is big enough to hurt us until we die and can't experience anything more. Nothing matters. Nothing is big enough to keep us from doing what we want. Nothing is important enough to say it safe for. Life is so easy for us. Everything is so taken care of and accessible. Trust in the universe. You are always provided for. Nothing is big enough to live in fear of. There is no reason to know. We are not trying. The world is open and bright and beautiful and waiting for us to be free. Live our true selves. Live all our potential out. We are so worth it. Everything is virtually and consequential. Who gives a fuck? It is way too short to not live in love and authenticity at all times. Worry is useless. It doesn't serve our purpose at all. We are surviving until we die. We can't control death. It's certain. Why live like we can avoid it or push it away or control it by living in fear? Control is an illusion. Life is too short to live in lack. Lack of survival mode. We are not surviving. We are thriving. We have been given the greatest gift where survival is at its easiest. Use that gift to thrive. Let go of limits. Let go of habits that don't serve you because you live out of fear and lack. Life is abundant. Take advantage of the gift of life and honor it. It will honor you back. Nothing is big enough to hurt us. But by running away from them, avoiding them, blaming them, fearing them, we give them the power to hurt us and control us. We have the power and we give it away. Having the power is scary because it entails infinite responsibility and possibility, which is so antithetical to our wiring in our brain. That it's easier to place it to someone or something else. It minimizes the situation and the impact of facing the power. But the power is so empowering if we face it and embrace it with open arms. The power gives us the ability to create anything we choose in the face of fear. It is up to us and only us. We control ourselves in our power. Harness it and use it for your best, highest self and the highest where you can do. It is completely worth it. It is powerful. We look at the responsibility of doing something bigger than ourselves with our lives, thriving and not surviving as a burden because we're so scared to do the work and face the unknown. Seeing it as a burden and trying to revert back to survival mode consciously or unconsciously is trying to keep us comfortable and safe. But we don't live in a world where we need to be safe or saved from things like we are wired to believe. It's all in the head, programming from our old times. But the reality is that we live in a new world and we have the power to adapt to it and thrive, leaving the lack and fear mentality behind. There is a way to do both. Had the best of both worlds, balanced in an optimal way. But finding that balance requires trying, doing, experimenting, tinkering, finding and actively seeking that balance. Trying to expect to find it in your head without even trying is absurd and just an excuse to avoid doing the work and feeling any discomfort or pain from trying and failing. But what is failing? Nothing but a negative connotation to doing things and learning lessons because back in the day, there was a finite amount of time, energy and resources to put towards doing something correctly. The stakes were so much higher and survival was literally at risk. So failure is embedded in us as such a monumentally flawed thing as a survival mechanism. But we don't live in that world anymore. Survival is so easy. Failure is not that big of a deal. Until you die, nothing is finite and unable to be recovered. So why live in that fear of failure? The stakes aren't real. I feel serene and incredible. So calm and so hopeful and optimistic and excited all at the same time. I know anything is possible. I am taking care of. Everything is infinite until I die and I can't control death. It's inevitable. So I'm going to put all my energy into living. Unlimitedly and relentlessly until the time comes. Nothing is big enough to bring me down or hold me back. I am free. I am safe. I am unlimited. I am brave. I am open. I am love. I am light. I am wide open. I am fluid. I am adaptive. Anything that comes my way, I will adapt and accommodate and pivot and continue on my merry way effortlessly. Everything happens for me. Nothing is good or bad. It just is. I don't attach meaning to what comes my way. I let it shift me closer towards my purpose here. Let it guide me towards my North Star. I have no limits whatsoever. I am only limited by what limits I place on myself. They may come from fear or logic or something else, but just remember that they come to protect us. But in most cases, what we are being protected from is so primal and not relevant to today's reality. Break free from the limitations that you just assume without question and find out if the why really serves you. Life is unlimited in possibilities if you listen to your guides without much question. Resistance is unnecessary. I am warranted, outdated, protective instincts. That's the end of that whole thing. And wow, reading it again out loud just brings up so much for me. What I'll say is that it's really hard to read that out loud in its entirety and not change anything or omit anything because there are certain things in there that I do not resonate with as a person now. And I can see that those words were executing a line of thought that I only had the language for at the time with the explanation I was doing. And so a clear example of that is saying that everything happens for me. That was a belief system from things I was embedding myself in to try to cope with my reality. And it was prescribed as a way to look at life or rather a truth which I don't subscribe to. But at the time it was meant to be something empowering and I can see the value in it and I'm not trying to cut down anybody who does resonate with that statement. But for me in the way I navigate life now and how I exist, it doesn't support me at all to think that everything happens for me because that forces me to find some sort of rhyme or reason or good and that could work for some people but for me it doesn't. And so that's an example of something in there that it makes sense in like being that person in 2019 coming out of such despair and having this profound experience in less than what 10 minutes. But yeah I don't fully resonate with all that. That being said though, the genesis, the idea of everything in there, it's so fascinating to me that that all came out of my brain interacting with for lack of a better term a substance for like 10 minutes because it's sort of a pathway if you look at it that way or a foreshadowing of all the work I had to do in treatment and understanding and like really embodying all of that in the future. And like what I want to emphasize is at that point in my life, nothing in that note was like something that I lived by or believed or was like working on or even thought like consciously was a massive problem. I mean of course I knew I lived in fear but I wasn't like just working through those lines of thought that then like came to fruition like they just came and looking back it just seems like whatever happened in that situation was my brain interacting with a substance that was allowing me to create and when I say me I mean my brain. Whenever you want to call it create some sense of understanding of where I was and make sense of my experiences and provide me with some sort of insight that existed with the connections in my mind that I wasn't able to fully like embody your access. But it just was so far out of like the scope of how I was living and how I was thinking and to that was so profound to me and I'm just so fascinated as a neurobiologist and as a human and a scientist of like understanding how the fuck any of that happened or how that happens in general for people because it's such a common thing for people who experience psychedelics to have these profound things not all the time but often it's like a characteristic of people's supporters like a deletrips all say but anyway I guess what I'm trying to say is that was so out there and profound and I remember for like maybe a week from there I felt like I could make radical changes in the way that I acted with different fears like at the time I had been consumed with this when I say obsession I mean in OCD like a fear this very very very very fearful experience with money and in like the week after because of my financial situation like I was able to just like tolerate that and face it rather than just ignore it and live in a very horrible state of being that was an example I can remember and it helped me navigate life for about a week and then in terms of like having super profound in the moment effects it honestly just like dissipated like I could read that and I couldn't even connect to that feeling and the way that I did for the week after like remember exactly that feeling and coming out of it and viscerally re-experienced that faded and I'd love to say that everything I wrote in there all that profound insight into my experiences for the most part like totally changed my life actively and I can't say that and I would attribute a lot to that and this is where I feel like talking about these experiences is so important because there's so much context around it like at the time I was only in treatment with a therapist who was treating me for PTSD calling my OCD unreal which if you haven't heard about that please listen to the previous episodes that this makes sense because I can't go into all the context there but basically at the time I was not inactive or proper treatment for OCD I had no concept of exposure response prevention tolerating uncertainty any of that I had no full understanding of how my fear response worked other than it just was told to me that all my fear came from experience as I had the past which is not true it's not only that so at the time I had no scaffolding of these profound insights to integrate into my life and utilize as like some sort of motivator or pathway or understanding or framework for how I navigate my choices because there was nothing to support me and that's because of a lack of integration in general because the system isn't set up for that to exist at this time hopefully it will soon but it wasn't and even if I did even if I could have sort of done that with my therapist the therapist I was with was abusive on ethical irresponsible and could not contextualize it in the way my mind and system works so without that support I didn't have a way of powerfully integrating it into my life the way that maybe I could now or that other people could in the way that supports them that being said though seeing all of those things written down does show me that I generally had an upward trajectory from there it could have been a lot easier it could have been less painful perhaps or less long and less excruciating but nonetheless I did have an upward spiral and I have to imagine that a lot of it in terms of like my life pivot from there and towards the end of the year deciding I'm going back to school for the first time in four years and by school I mean UTT where head basically failed out and then like trying my classes again and face basically like a theme of facing a good amount of fears the fears I was aware of at least and gritting my teeth through them and suffering very strongly through them but nonetheless starting to face fears and them being possibilities in a way that they just were not before doing that passively they definitely as far as I know we're related to that experience and for that I'm so grateful and I would only wish that people who have these experiences are as supported as they can be and are an evidence-based treatment if that's what they need it's coming from a state of illness or pathology or even if they're not just in a place of being supported and seen by someone who is qualified and good at doing so for a lack of a better term who's resource to do so that's a better word so I guess that sums up DMT chapter and then as you know from generally the context of my life like started an upward spiral in 2020 starting school again a lot of things were going on it wasn't all great and pretty and a lot of horrible things are happening with my cancer, but nonetheless I was persisting and that was great. And then came the point where I decided to start trying psilocybin mushrooms. That was around February March, it's of 2020, so right around the pandemic. Because I felt like I needed a lot more help. And at the same time I felt complete with EMT. That's the thing I should have said or I should add. That there was a sense of completion, maybe not forever, but with the cycle of exploration with DMT. Like it just felt like I was done and I got what I was going to get. And I was done until I felt super cold through it again. So months had passed and then I felt called to continue this new incredible version of exploration and support perhaps, but not with the EMT. So psilocybin mushrooms is what I decided to start exploring next. And so I started by taking, I think like a two gram dose, which for context is not small. Like it's definitely a dose, like to have a full trip, but it's not a big dose or macrodose or anything like that. But I had it and it was in the context of being safe in my own home, supported, but being a, you know, in my own experience going through it as the only person going through it. And it was really interesting because what I had learned and what I had been told was it could be anywhere from like four to eight hours of a trip. And you know, there's a lot of visual experiences and whatnot. And generally speaking, most of the experiences I had heard of were very positive in the moment and just very exciting, ethereal, connected to self and the world and just like, nice. Like there was great experiences in the trip and after. And so that's what I was hoping for and I didn't really think to expect anything to different. But what quickly happened for me was I just started experiencing a whole lot of just existential fear and panic and having just a lot of intrusive thoughts and being stuck and looping on them. And I didn't really have the words for intrusive thoughts at the time because still I had not been in proper treatment to even label anything as such, but that's what they were. And I just started thinking about my biggest fears and some fears more than others in particular. Money was like a huge fixation for me at the time. So that and dying and being a bad person were kind of what mostly came up. And the whole trip basically was me just like sitting there in an altered state, being so afraid and just not being able to break out of this loop of just like really, really loud scary thoughts that were almost just screaming at me. And I mean, there's no better way to say it. It really sucked. And also it only lasted for like three to four, like by four hours, I think I was completely back with the world just fully sober, which was interesting because that didn't generally happen for people based on the experiences I had heard of and the research I had done. So figured maybe it was just like a first-timers luck or whatnot, but it really sucked. And I figured that maybe I just did something wrong. I didn't set up my environment for success. I was just, you know, flawed and I just did it wrong, whatever that means. So I figured I'd try again and try to change things up and do things better. And so I set myself up with what I perceived to me more exciting, invigorating, peaceful environment with like pretty colors and music and stimuli, a place to color. Maybe because I had seen a lot of people enjoy doing that as an outlet. I was supported by the person sitting me during my trip to like just being a good headspace, as good as a headspace as I was capable of being at the time at least. And I also chose like a sunny day because the first day it was more of a cloudy dark day and I figured maybe that changed things because I'm very, very sensitive to the weather and to the rain or cloudiness and just like tends to wreck my mood unless I actively work to shift out of that. So I figured maybe make things easier and make sure it's a nice sunny bright day. And I did, I think like three grams maybe four, something like that. And basically the same thing, but maybe even worse, it just really sucked again and the same thoughts came up, the same things looped. I was just like laying there shaking, feeling like it'd be easier to not exist anymore and it just sucked. And I wasn't crying in either of those trips. I just was like in my brain and nothing could distract me. And I remember the only difference with the second one was that I had told you I just set up like a whole coloring situation and I tried to do that and would it be game was this paper and I think I still have it somewhere. Maybe I'll try to find it and kind of picture out somehow. But like it was this paper and I took a bunch of markers and I just started like stream of consciousness like drawing on it and it was just like all these circles of just, it looks like demonic chaos like I don't know how else to describe it. It was just like it was just representative of my brain and it felt a little cathartic and that normally I was so controlled in the way I did everything. So like normally in my tendencies which now I can like most pathology like things that have to be perfect or like I was that kid that I would try to draw something and I would throw my paper away if I make one mistake and I have like maybe even like 500 pieces of paper as a kid like thrown away from trying to draw one stupid thing. And that's why my parents would bring home like messed up printer papers I could do it on the other side anyway. So it seems like that was reversed in this trip and I was just like drawing nothing in a nonsensical way and it seemed like I was allowing myself to not be perfect which maybe I'm just creating some sort of reason and I glean some sort of like positive thing that I tried to make out of it but it was still pretty disturbing and liberating and disturbing. So that's really the only difference and it sucked. And so I figured that maybe I just don't know how to do it right there's something wrong with me and I proceeded to try to figure it out by doing as much anecdotal research as I could and throughout the next several months in my education because I'd gone back to school like trying to contextualize with what little resources I had to try to reach like read research on my own and start understanding neuroscience because I was psychology major at the time and like figure out what I could be doing wrong how I could optimize stuff and also how I could make it last longer in my system. We had taken the idea of breaking down the mushrooms with I believe it's like lemon water and making it a tea so that it would break down and start easier in the system and maybe last longer and well it didn't so that was interesting. Figured maybe it might have something to do with like the diseases I have physically my absorption issues with my stomach and my gut who knows. Anyway it just was odd and then I didn't do it for a while. And so again this is 2020 I still did have mushroom so and I had learned about micro dosing so I tried micro dosing like basically following a general protocol that's followed in the space of taking it in a stacked format with I don't remember exactly what so I'm not going to say it but basically a way to like absorb it better and get it into your system than just taking it and so it was one day on and two days off and I tried doing that and whatever it was stacked with would really wreck my stomach and just make me get into a lot of pain and nauseous and everything was put together so I was unable to separate it so I tried micro dosing at the time like maybe in July for a few weeks or months and I just didn't want to tell earth pain so I stopped and I also wasn't really feeling any benefits quote unquote in my mood or my experience so I didn't feel like it was worth it so I stopped and went away for a while and tie passed and I really didn't have like any sort of concrete plan of trying anything again but in December of 2020 I got access to a like the going back to DMT I talked about not having the proper tool to experience EMT with and then I got access to set proper tool so I thought it would be interesting to try it just to see how different it would be with the proper tool and I did I tried once and let me tell you how vastly to different it was than the experiences before in that it was just so strong and visceral and quick and I definitely see why the tool was worth it and it was awesome. I mean it did not have that profound effect on me of like giving me some sort of realization and I also didn't really feel like I was called to do it in the sense that like I needed to do some exploration and it just I was called to it the way I was before but it was you know for the purposes of doing it so I don't know if I was going to get some sort of huge realization from it this time around but I did have a very profound like transcendence to that place within me and it lasted a bit longer and it was just so from a visual standpoint like immersive and beautiful and it just let me feeling really nice after so that was cool and then in February of 2021 this was kind of unplanned but staying in vague terms again I should also mention like of course I'm being vague about things and they're intentional as much as I go into as much detail as I can about myself because I have nothing to hold back about myself but if it involves anything or anyone outside of me I'm protecting their identities for obvious reasons so anyway February of 2021 I was with some people that are close to me and they decided to have a communal mushroom trip and do like four grams each and so I was really hesitant about doing it because I was like I didn't want to have the experience I normally have and just like bring the vibe down and massive love of people but also I really wanted to try again and see if things would be different for me and if maybe with time passing things would change and maybe I just needed to try it a few times like I had done the past and get used to it or my brain get used to it and maybe it'd be different also maybe being around other people might change it because I was doing it as a solo thing before being sat like trips at but doing it alone versus like with other people doing it so I decided completely on my own accord to do it alongside them and I didn't really like plan for it or like set myself up for it that day but I just did it and I did four grams and want to take a wild guessist of that one it went like the previous ones but more extreme this time it was so painful it was just full of sadness and fear and pain and all of these emotions not anger interestingly which makes a lot of sense with the context of my story later but all of the other things and there were intrusive thoughts like running rampant and screaming and again context like brief context still not in proper Osteat treatment working on any sort of intrusive thoughts I don't have the language for it this is just what I'm calling it now but just really loud thoughts that I believed and were like the things that I guess I suppressed or worked hard not to fully think about because I was doing compulsions but couldn't really do that on the trip I could only do mental compulsions that's a whole other story but the point is it was so bad and by bad I mean just like a bad experience for me the difference was though that this time for some reason I started bawling like halfway through and just started bawling and bawling and bawling and there didn't seem like a reason like of course I was having the thoughts and feelings and the experiences but like attached to the bawling there was not like a glaringly obvious reason it was just like the culmination of everything and I was just purging is what it felt like and the people around me were having a jolly old time and then I was bawling which obviously I also felt really horrible about in the moment like to what I felt perceived as like burdening other people and I guess like in retrospect when we talked about it they said that it really gave them a lot of insight into me and like also let them access their range of emotions which was nice but like in the moment for me it just felt so deeply like uncomfortable and it was very new for me because I didn't normally cry or feel that extent of pain because now what I have context for is like I did everything in my power to not feel things and I had trained my body to not feel things for a very long time and I also like did compulsions to avoid feeling things amongst other reasons so the state of defensive or defenselessness and just having some sort of access to that limbic part of me of those feelings I had suppressed just just came out for like hours and into my transition back into sobriety just happened and like I stoked my entire head I was like my body was pounding like it was so you know physically uncomfortable but also just like it just happened and the people around me the person who was tripsing us just like kept reassuring and telling everyone that I was just purging something and they were right didn't know exactly what that was but this time when I came out of it I did find some insight in a way that I hadn't found before and that insight was some knowing that I lived my life not feeling into my body or feeling alive and I had this like awareness of the fact that I had dissociated from my body for so long because of so much physical trauma I had gone through especially you know sexual abuse as a child and like coping with that by dissociating from my body and then also being in chronic pain since I was a child and having so many physical illnesses that are racked so much pain onto my body not to mention as I've now learned since like the other illnesses I've had like psychological physiological all of them come together and just like come through in pain responses it's kind that's actually the research I do in the lab right now like the role of the amygdala in chronic pain like so anyway like there's just so many versions of my body experiencing pain and experiencing violation and abuse that I had just lived and learned to not feel my body and so I had like a lot of awarenesses and realizations like through that trip in this process of like kind of seeing if I can just put into words it's like seeing visions of myself in the way I act and like having thoughts associated to explain those ways I act like things as simple as like rejecting my body's needs to go to the bathroom most of the time and like sitting in pain and not like acting on it and avoiding any sort of physical exertion that made me feel into the pain and tiredness of my body that had already experienced and avoiding physical interaction with things and people that would cause me to feel my body just like so many examples of that and like feeling emotions too but mostly at the time it was showing me physically that so I came out of it with this awareness and then one would think like the hope would be to act on set awareness and I did have that hope but again I didn't really have the tools or the support around me to take any of that and integrate that into action and I was doing all of this on my own plus with the abusive therapist once again that is touched upon in great detail in the previous episodes so in that very gas-lighty weird experience like I didn't really get to integrate that so what I what little I had was just like an awareness and it stayed with me and I've worked to bring that awareness to help understand things as they happen sometimes but it's been a longer process and maybe it could have been so that's helpful to know for people again like I wish things could be different for other people and it's also worth mentioning that it's hard in general even if you aren't in a weird unethical abusive therapist relationship to bring up these experiences in the context of therapy with therapists or providers who might still be in the camper belief of psychedelics being harmful or stigmatized and just like living from the war on drugs perspective so I just really want to validate that and honor that for people who are going through that and I would just hope that if you have the capability resources you can seek out support from someone who is validating an understanding of the current research and supportive of autonomy in one's body and allowing you to have agency and then work through integration with you and if not there are other resources out there peer support lines like fireside project and other resources that do support you from a peer perspective in doing so and And I would love to bring awareness to those resources, so I'm going to work on that. But nonetheless, I just want to take knowledge at as well. That played a huge role in my experience because I didn't have anyone to really do this with other than the people I trusted in my life, but not from a more zoomed-out provider supportive perspective, given the context of my pathology and things that weren't even identified or probably treated at the time. So there's that. And nonetheless, still a really deeply uncomfortable mushroom experience and didn't, to be honest, I didn't really feel like I wanted to do that again. At the same time, I did feel a lot of like a weight lifted off of me from purging that much of pain and fear and sadness. So I did know that maybe you'd be good for me to do it again and have to just perhaps tolerate that very uncomfortable trip and maybe accept as a foregone conclusion that that might be the case for me. And that's what mushrooms do to me for the foreseeable future, but like tolerate it for the sake of that purging. But yeah, it wasn't a very attractive option. It felt like it might be something I need to reserve if all else fails or if I am at rock bottom. So, because of that, from February 2021 onwards, I actually haven't had a big mushroom trip since, but I will give context for that as we move forward. So that's around February of 2021. Move through 2021. Don't really experience any psychedelics. We'll have a general upward trajectory of my life and still suffering greatly for a lack of a better term. All that's covered in the previous episodes. The only like super notable or relevant aspect of 2022 that comes into play with psychedelics in my mental health in general is shortly after the mushroom trip. It happened to like kind of overlap with what I talked about the last episode of basically my OCD relapsing in the physical sense and me coming to terms with the fact that I indeed did have OCD contrary to what the abusive therapist I had in the past gassed me into not believing. And I'd also broken ties with that therapist had been a few months in, not seeing her, and I also started psycho educating myself from the internet and advocacy about what real OCD was. And then in the like end of first quarter to middle of 2022 is when I started finally accessing evidence-based treatment for OCD going through exposure response prevention, which again came with so many complications with my comrade PTSD, but nonetheless what's super important about all of that is that I finally started having contacts for my OCD and starting to get a grasp on at least understanding my obsessions and my compulsions and my mental compulsions in particular and being able to understand what intrusive thoughts were, even if treatment was not going as swimmingly as it could, I started understanding that part of myself and having a revelation, like just a whole, like having glasses put on me for the first time, being able to see myself in my mind through all the crap of what OCD had me believing for so long. And so that was super relevant because I started being able to contextualize and put pieces together of my past and my experiences on psychedelics and having a concept of the intrusive thoughts that would come up and the compulsions I would do both on mushrooms and EMT, especially the mental compulsions and just starting to contextualize and understand what the heck that all was, or at least what I think that was, and it made such a difference in understanding why things looked different for me perhaps and they did for most people who I had heard about psychedelics from and people whose trips I learned about and generally the trends, quote unquote, of what the general range of trips looked like and how mine seemed to fall out of the sense of normalcy almost all the time and maybe it just wasn't me being like defective or wrong or doing it fully wrong consciously at least, but I had a different condition and my pathology and what came up during those trips and in life in general was different than what I learned about and that's one of the many reasons why I'm so, so passionate about talking about this openly and honestly because had I one understood OCD in general to even if I understood OCD had I heard about experiences of people like me who have OCD going through this and it normalizing those experiences so much shame and perhaps unnecessary suffering could have been avoided. Things could have been done differently, I could have had the support going through it, I could have maybe chosen not to do it at all and I can't change anything from the past, but for better or for worse there was no voice I had of someone with OCD that I could look to or many people because it's you know there might be one person but that could be an outlier versus many people and having a commonality between people and of course that doesn't just go for OCD, it goes for so many other experiences that I have that I don't find reflected in trip reports or experiences shared by other people you know having PTSD, having comorbid OCD and PTSD which it's a whole other conundrum based on you've heard before from me and the unique intricacies of that how that shows up in cognition and mental compulsions and of weighted behaviors and all of those things and of course like the interdepressive disorder, panic disorder, anxiety, my eating disorder experiences like being in a religious cult, the thoughts and habits that come from that almost dying from young adult cancer, cancer in general, being raised in a very abusive and unsafe situation coming from an ethnic minority group being the child of immigrants like there's so many aspects of our identities and pathology too and but even so just like our experiences that give rise to different psychedelic experiences, what comes up, what perhaps commonalities or common trends there are in the way that their mechanisms if not you know if you want to label them healing or just even maladaptive mechanisms, what rises from certain trends and common experiences and things that tie us together so it's just so important to have a wide variety of perspectives and true honest experiences to be able to not just learn from from an anecdotal way but to lend itself to research, I mean the research being done right now most of the time sites anecdotal evidence first and anecdotal reports to then found the basis of why research is being done in a certain population because of anecdotes because we can't just you know make causation and assumptions off of anecdotes but they do find or create the basis of research so it's so important for more people to be talking about it so that research can have more data to go off of and guide its research in fact in the title of this it goes it talks about me going from psych and not to researcher and in fact my lived experience with comorbid OCD and PTSD led me down a rather I guess productive if you want to call it that rabbit hole of realizing as a researcher that comorbid OCD is not being considered in psychedelic assisted therapies for PTSD and the ways being done right now and the contraindication of treatments and the very high comorbidity and that came from my lived experience and then me happening to be the researcher it could be anybody else though like understanding that comorbidity as a human also having psychedelic experiences and then like taking that data and applying it to how research is conducted and assessed and designed to be not just the most effective but also the most safe so that's a whole tangent on why not just me but we should be allowed and encouraged and safe to share our experiences and you don't need to be a researcher to be able to assess your experiences and share it you can just share it and someone else can assess them I just happened to do both but anyway came out of 2021 when it's 2022 and a lot of life change in terms of my research and my master's program and just a lot of stressors and a lot of things happening which we're talked about last episode so that will fill the context but nonetheless things are going in multiple directions like on some hands in terms of my life and the expansiveness and the opportunities were just becoming so plentiful and abundant and things were going really well on that front and then my mental health was simultaneously deteriorating and I was entering into a major depressive episode and I had stayed wary of using psychedelics ever since I started OCD treatment and that last mushroom trip at the beginning of 2022 because I was just going through the treatment and healing process or trying to assess. best as I can and I didn't really want to do anything to majorly interfere with that. And I also just like didn't honestly feel super called to what I felt like was going through torture through those experiences. I also just wanted to I realized how unaware I was of my mind and my conscious experience and I wanted to get a better grasp on that maybe a little too much, but nonetheless I was just airing on the side of caution. But in 2022, due to a number of reasons and also not being able to get consistent OCD treatment anymore and kind of stalling out with OCD and PTSD treatment and then depression really taking in, I was just not doing well and I was also having I was just in so many commitments over the summer of 2022. I was like flying out basically every other week at different conferences and events and commitments, which I'm so grateful for. But like on top of that and being in full-time lab and just the stressors of my life, I was really, really not doing well. And I decided to try microdosing mushrooms to see if it would make any difference in just giving some sort of antidepressant effect, some sort of relief just purely out of curiosity, even if it was placebo if it was able to help me in any way. And this time, I microdosed mushrooms, again, the same protocol is like 0.2 grams, which is like a, obviously a sub threshold dose of, it wouldn't like make any trip or anything, but it was enough to perhaps do something. It was kind of like the overall recommended middle ground of like microdosing dosages for psilocybin mushrooms. And it was not stacked with all of the other things I had previously tried back in 2020. So it was just psilocybin mushrooms like on one day, off two days, and admittedly I might have gone like off more than two days because it was hard for me to remember amongst you know, being really depressed and busy, but at least on one day and maybe off two or more days and then on one day, whatever I can remember again. And I can't tell you for sure what it did and what contributed, but it helped me get from basically like almost dysfunctional and not being able to get out of bed and having to cancel everything in my life to being able to hold on by like a thread or half a thread. So it helped me like, I would say 10 to 15 percent. Eh, maybe generous, like I'll say 10 percent, which was great. Not enough that I knew I needed a far more intervention than that, but to get through the self-imposed limitations of my life through 2022 and the chaos it was and the commitments and the intensity of my graduate school experience and applications for programs and my laboratory work, like it got me through roughly to the end of the year. I mean, I kind of tapered off from microdosing around like October, November-ish because I was going to go into an intensive ketamine treatment situation, which we'll get into. But it kind of that or circumstance or placebo or a combination of all of it helped scaffold me for that time is what I'll say. As a scientist, I would love to know the answer. I'd love to be able to isolate these variables and do some causal experiments on my own brain or go into my circuits and see what was active, what changed, what was plastic, what wasn't all of it, but I can't. So I'm only just telling you all of this. This whole entire thing pretty much is anecdotal with my perception of things and maybe some educated guesses or just thoughts about stuff because I can't really turn my researcher off fully the researcher in me. Anyway, so that was the extent of the microdosing through a good amount of last year and then in between ending microdosing for the purposes of starting to prepare for and kind of clear myself of things so that I could be as fresh as possible for ketamine in my mind, like just really clearing out my system of anything that could interfere with the ketamine perhaps. I did have an unplanned experience that I don't really often have unplanned experiences, but I was in a situation with really, really safe and trusted people who happened to be engaging in an MDMA experience or ceremony or whatever you want to call it and I had no idea that would be happening and I was given the opportunity to participate with absolutely no pressure at all. It was completely up to me and previously if I thought hard enough about it I probably would have not done it because I really didn't want to have another like horrible situation amongst all these people around me and you know ruin everybody because you know I'm thinking about other people that's just my MO but also like I wouldn't want to just like subject that to anyone or myself. But there was something in me that just also wanted to be a little flexible and just was curious and had not experienced MDMA before and just felt really safe with the people I was around and thought that maybe if I took like a mid level like low mid level dose like the worst I could happen is I mean I can't know the worst but likely a bad-ish possibility but tolerable possibility would be that I could just have a bad experience and go to bed and try to deal with it or things could be different and MDMA does work differently than classic psychedelics it's labeled under the umbrella of psychedelics for psychedelic assisted therapy generally speaking but it's technically an empathogen and it doesn't really like like create a trip in terms of hallucination and changing you know perceptions of visual reality or things like that it's more so like an internal experience generally speaking this is just like a very base explanation like there's so much more science behind that that we will get into another day but for the purposes of my anecdotal experience I knew that and I figured I just I decided to do it and it was so interesting it was basically me like sitting in one position curled up in a college for like I think like six to seven hours maybe and just feeling so much love and presence and care for everybody around me and having so many heart to heart conversations with people and feeling so loved and loving people so much like and it's funny because like I I have all that love in me but I realized how much I'm afraid to share it and show it because I've been considered to be too much for so long and I got so much judgment and feedback in the past especially in my childhood of course of being too much and not being accepted and realizing how much I was afraid to be myself and share how much I love people and care about people outwardly and how afraid I was of being not reciprocated or even just not judged so that was beautiful and healing and not at all what I expected and I just felt really nice I mean like a head of sense of dread within me the whole time that I kind of have gotten acquainted to but it was far quieter than normal and it was mostly just beautiful and present and unexpected and amazing and then it gave me hope it gave me like it felt like another bump of a lifeline to get to December when I knew I was going to be doing my head of mean treatments and I would be getting more intensive help for the copious amounts of pain and suffering I was experiencing and that was beautiful and it also just like helped me connect to people in a way that was different and it helped me start breaking out a little bit from the isolation I had been imposing upon myself and the limitations of connecting to other people from so much trauma especially from the Colton just from abuse from people in the past so and also like rejection from a very deep level of people so it was beautiful and I would love to try it again but that's my one experience at the M.A. and it contrasted with the rest of my experiences with psychedelics except for objectively I because it wasn't planned and also I had to immediately like travel after that and then go back into like the grind of the very very stressful life I was in and in that very sensitive, overwhelmed state I didn't really get a chance to or a chance to integrate that experience and I felt very destabilized and it wasn't I wouldn't do that again if I planned it and I don't have regrets but there once again wasn't really a chance to integrate though I did have a lot more awareness and support that I have ever had in a psychedelic experience in the past so that was beautiful and there's just many factors of an into it So that really took me to December when I started my very intensive ketamine treatments and I will say that I'm gonna give you an overview of that today like just The quick and dirty because the entirety of my ketamine Experience is gonna be its own episode because there's a lot of questions about it It involves a lot more factors because it was for the first time of my remote, you know any of my psychedelic umbrella experiences It was clinical. It was I mean it was even covered by insurance. It's that level of clinical. It was for many different purposes It was a lot more controlled and it was a lot more lengthy and intense and sense of how Numerous it was so it's its own thing and had so many side effects and whatnot But the quick and dirty of it is that I Then went through intensive ketamine treatments the end of December beginning of January and it was technically for chronic pain But the chronic pain protocol is basically like three to four times the amount of what it would be for a Quote-on-quote mental health protocol by the standards of what's done in general I be infusion ketamine clinics that don't include assisted therapy so I chose this for financial reasons and for Medical reasons and also just to try it and I was really really desperate for something different and so I went through just so much ketamine for like weeks straight and It was like five to six hours a day and a lot a lot a lot came out of it, but in some it helped me in the short term it helped my depression and my general state of being by I would say like 15% sometimes 20% It was a noticeable difference. It wasn't like completely life-altering and forever like I'm great wouldn't that be nice, but it was Significant enough it did not help me with my OCD Didn't help me with my PTSD or like other things, but it did help with depression and just like overall affect and it gave me more energy and It didn't actually help me with the chronic pain which is a whole other story, but in terms of mental health it did you know help me some and It gave me very intense experiences on the ketamine itself and then after and What I'll say here in line with everything I've shared with my other Psychedelic experiences is what I experienced on the ketamine. There was I mean a lot of days of it to different It was like five to six hours multiple days in a row and then like again multiple days in a row for weeks and most of them were very very quote-unquote bad like There were maybe one or two that were really awesome like it was really bad at the beginning and then it got really great and I had this just like epiphany that I I am meant to be myself and I am different and that's okay and I am a sea turtle which I will get into in the next episode but I I'm one of the great experiences I had was I Realized that I am a sea turtle that's been trying to live on land and I've been flopping around and I've succeeded enough and I look like I can do it and I can get by but what I'm in the sea I am myself and Not literally I'm a sea turtle, but that's a metaphor for the whole experience and the knowing and the Identification of that metaphor for me and that liberation that came from it which is beautiful but the vast majority of It I should say and the vast majority of it was me going in and having just copious amounts of All of the worst and truths of thoughts and fears I have and just reliving so much and being faced with so much to the point that one day the entire Experience I had was feeling like I should in my life like It was that extreme and it was so jarring because it was six hours of that multiple days and I would come out and you know, it's one thing to be medically coming out of that intense experience but two The feeling couldn't go away and it really felt like it would last forever and It was so hard to live that way, but it did lift after you know days of recovery and What I got out of that in some was I Realized maybe at this point in my life maybe forever psychedelic experiences for the most part will likely bring up very suppressed uncomfortable feelings that I Don't access as much in my regular life as much as I'm working on it and it is improving There's so much that has been stuffed down that I have not been safe to feel or have not felt safe to feel and experience and so much to unearth and purge and process and Psychedelic seem to if I'm labeling it as such and I can be totally wrong wrong or off but the way I feel and see it it's A place for me to uncover and Let out everything and like purge in a very like macro way up to Start Lessening that load and so that might be happening for a while and what's interesting about going through that Ringer of every single day doing that on ketamine over and over for like six hours at a time and not having a break and Is I almost like developed a muscle to be able to tolerate that more than I did before and It gave me a willingness to continue to tolerate that because it gave me Hope and it gave me Just like started showing me cracks of the sunlight of what's possible through going through that process as much as it Really really sucks and I and like morning and grieving the past and the present of not getting to just have like a super happy son shiny ethereal fun Experience of explore my consciousness and connecting to myself like it might just be super fucking painful and hard and yet Something about doing that over and over on ketamine showed me that I can and There likely will be something more beautiful on the other side and it's worth it and I deserve it and I don't need to run away from it so it's really Motivated me to continue to do this in a healthy way in a much more conscious and supported way And allow myself those experiences on mushrooms and otherwise to continue my healing process and Again, long story short with ketamine because there's so much to unpack here in the ketamine episode, but I actually can't continue doing ketamine like the plan and what was told to me was that I needed to do this for a while repetitively and that's the way it's prescribed and for the chronic pain protocol and also just in general the way the pharmacology of ketamine works so differently than psychedelics traditionally It needs to be done in far more doses and far more often for a long amount of time To have a substantial difference in someone or to make a substantial difference but I Long story short can't tolerate the effective that whole process like my body can't and it has very violent reactions to a lot of the things involved in the process and I literally like can't keep doing it and which really really sucks because I would love to read the benefits, but what I can do is utilize other psychedelics to Not a one-to-one analogy, of course, they're different psychedelics, but with similar mechanisms perhaps even more mechanisms I can utilize those to continue this process. I'm in in a healthy and supported and safe way and Now I know I can tolerate those other psychedelics and I'm willing to do so in a way I wasn't before ketamine so that's kind of what my future looks like and I know that's vague because I don't Have the exact plan? I have ideas, but I can only update you and I actually do them. I can tell you that I plan in the soon future because the ketamine is definitely wearing off and I can tell as soon as I have A little bit of time enough time to do it and then have an integration period so that I'm not jumping right back into the intensity of the chaos of my life right now soon I will be utilizing likely psilocybin mushrooms in a dose to be able to just Have an experience and do what it does in my brain and system and I also will have the support of my therapist to integrate and you know Continue to heal in a supportive way so That is my experience as a psycho knot and what psychedelics so far. And what brought me to the research obviously is my fascination with everything and trying to understand what can give rise to such profound effects in people and the maladaptive aspects in people that's not as studied or known and what dictates what will work in certain people versus others and really like my true just what drives me every day is like understanding the underlying pharmacological neuropsychopharmacological mechanisms down to the systems cellular and molecular levels in our brains and nervous systems and bodies of like what they're doing and how that results in such effects in people. So it also, as I said before, informed my very long rabbit hole of research project that I've done a systematic review on the effects of MDMA-sisted therapy for PTSD on comorbidocD and then at large applying that to psychedelic-sisted therapy for PTSD for comorbidocD which came from my lived experience of understanding the very unique, functionally dynamic comorbidity of OCD and PTSD and then applying it to the framework of psychedelic-sisted therapy for PTSD. So I am a researcher through and through that's just how my brain works and that is each part of my journey too and I'm so grateful to people to finally just share all of this with all of you and I know that there's so much more I could have touched on and so many questions that y'all might have for me and that's why this is an open-ended conversation to share your thoughts, questions, curiosities, anything you want me to go deeper into, any clarification, questions you have, more thoughts or questions around my decision-making process, how these played into my various conditions and experiences more into the phenomenological awareness of my trips just I'm open to answering whatever that you're wondering about and I will soon be going into from start to finish my experience with ketamine and the added-assisted therapy I got, I forced into it for my mental health and chronic pain and what that looked like in a clinical setting versus what I've experienced on my own so far. So thank you so much for hanging with me and for allowing me the safe space to share everything part of my journey, this very real part of my life that drives and influences so much of my perspectives now as a human, as an advocate, as an activist, as an organizer, of course, as a researcher, as a mental health peer specialist, as someone supporting other people and I just hope that this story gives you context around conditions that are not talked about as much about experiences that are not shared about as much if you experience anything similar or analogous to me and it just gives you a raw and honest account of how one makes decisions given the information they have and how sometimes it's not enough and sometimes things don't go the way you think it will and just gives you the empowerment and agency to make your own choices for your own exploration, your own healing, whatever you seek out clinically, independently or don't seek out based on this because that's so valid and so important too for yourself, especially for people of Asian and South Asian descent to see someone openly speaking out about their experiences and knowing that it's okay and they're safe and they're allowed to be open and honest about their mental health and their psychedelic experiences to experiencing and exploring other states of being and consciousness and just knowing that you're not alone to everyone that you're not alone. So thank you for holding this space. Thank you for being here with me. I can't wait to share more with you in the upcoming episodes about the actual research behind everything, talking to the people doing the research, talking about my own research, going into the extremely exciting to me, like nerdy pharmacological psychotherapeutic parts of psychedelics and how they're being studied right now, talking to other people about their experiences and just having this conversation be open and allowing the space to grow together as always. So thank you for being here and if you enjoyed the show, if you've been enjoying this space of openness and honesty and curiosity so far, please support the show by leaving a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast, if it's multiple places even better, I can't tell you how much of a difference that makes because ratings and reviews are what help us grow in our community and what really establishes us as a safe space for the people who are looking for these conversations and it also helps us, you know, have conversations with people who are taking the time out of their day to talk on the podcast and allows me to be able to show people that people are interested in these conversations 'cause I know y'all are, y'all tell me. So if you can show me through a rating and review that would mean the world and if you can share this podcast this episode with anyone who's interested in psychedelics and personal lived experiences, coalescing with mental health and some science involved and sharing the podcast in general to just share the show, the episodes that resonate with you and help other people know that they're not alone, that would mean the absolute world to me and please keep letting me know your thoughts and your questions and help co-create this podcast with me and allow me to create a space that is supportive for you because ultimately this is for all of us and your opinions and thoughts and ideas matter and make this podcast what it is. This episode exists because of y'all and your endless questions about this topic. So thank you so much for being here for supporting the show. I can't wait to see you next time and have a beautiful week. See you next week on a chat with Emma.