#professor but he spent over half of the class showing us his published novels and his garden. idek.

[mhalachai]

advance snippet: Updating Wednesdays on Patreon (The Untamed)

So. Do I need to write an Untamed modern!AU with a college twist (Lan Xichen is a music professor in Canada) in which Wei Wuxian attempts to self-therapy himself by creating a graphic novel fantasy AU version of his life (aka the real story of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) and Lan Xichen attempts to rebuild his life after a toxic relationship ended? I mean probably not but has that ever stopped me?  here’s the intro snippet we’ll see how things go.

(Title is tentatively Updating Wednesdays on Patreon because i don’t know what to call this thing)

~~

The first day of August finds Lan Xichen in a coffee shop, tinkering with the syllabus for his new music theory course, when his phone pings with a message.

> Lan Wangji: Brother.

> Lan Wangji: Wei Ying has asked me to inform you that he will be publishing the first collection of pages in his new graphic novel on Patreon this afternoon.

Lan Xichen smiles at Lan Wangji's tone. For all that his little brother is more verbose in electronic communication than verbal, he's always so exact.

> To Lan Wangji: Can't wait! What's it about?

The little cursor blinks for a while as Lan Wangji continues to type. Lan Xichen just hopes that his brother-in-law's creative enthusiasm isn't running up against Lan Wangji's sensibilities.

Finally, a reply appears.

> Lan Wangji: Wei Ying wants me to tell you that it is completely fictional.

This gives Lan Xichen pause. Why on earth would Wei Wuxian, or Lan Wangji himself for that matter, need to make that declaration?

> Lan Wangji: It is a high fantasy xianxia story.

Before Lan Xichen can ask why that is causing this odd message exchange, another notification pops up on his phone.

> Wei Wuxian: Lan Xichen! Lan Zhan types so slow! It's just a different art style I wanted to try out and it snowballed from there!

> Wei Wuxian: I know you follow me on Patreon so you're going to get the notification this afternoon so I wanted to warn you hahaha

> Wei Wuxian: All names and places are purely fictional. I don't really have a sword.

Another message arrives, with all the information Lan Xichen needs.

> Lan Wangji: This matters a great deal with Wei Ying.

Lan Xichen smiles at his brother's words. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian have been together since their junior year of high school, through a great deal of personal difficulties on both sides, and are still as fiercely protective of each other as ever. He loves them both for it.

> To Lan Wangji: Thank you for the information. I'm sure it will be great.

> To Wei Wuxian: Can't wait to see it! Anything you do is always great.

No more messages arrive, so Lan Xichen goes back to considering how to change the quiz structure of his musical theory class to avoid a marking crisis with the evaluation of his ensemble class.

Finally, as Lan Wangji gathers up his papers to leave, one last message comes in on his phone.

> Lan Wangji: Thank you for your support. We all appreciate it.

Attached to the message is a photo taken of Lan Wangji's family, he and Wei Wuxian holding Lan Yuan between them. The toddler grins at the camera, his arms around Wei Wuxian's neck. Wei Wuxian's looks at the camera, dark circles under his eyes like he's working through the night again, while Lan Wangji only has eyes for his husband.

It's so wholesome and loving that a sliver of pain rakes through Lan Xichen's heart. He's happy for his brother. His brother deserves the world. Lan Wangji deserves being loved, and to love.

Not everyone gets that. Sometimes, that falls apart.

Sometimes, for some people, love is just an illusion.

Lan Xichen tucks his phone away and leaves the coffee shop.

~~

He gets home mid-afternoon, and spends a while stowing away the groceries he picked up on his walk. The neighbourhood has several Greek and Persian markets and he's able to buy most of what he needs on foot, saving the Chinese markets in Richmond for his weekly dim sum brunches with Lan Wangji's family when he can borrow the use of Lan Wangji's sensible and economical mini-van.

He doesn't drive any more, not since—

Lan Xichen stops and puts down the bag of avocados. His mind is a funny place, bringing up the oddest things at the most inconvenient of times.

He doesn't drive anymore. He doesn't need to, using the bus and the odd taxi to transport his instruments up to the university for performances. The public transit system is so much better.

Safer.

He goes back to putting away the vegetables, pulls out a cookbook (new, spine uncreased, bought for him by Lan Qiren for his birthday) and opens it at random. He's never had coconut curry salmon before, but he has all the ingredients.

Trying new things. He's supposed to be trying new things.

The recipes says it will only take half an hour to make, so he goes up to his office and turns on his computer to check his work email. The message fly fast and furious, some about the new department head, some about class enrollment, a few from students asking if they can get onto his waitlist. He replies to the most urgent, files the rest, then checks his personal email.

The notification from Wei Wuxian's Patreon is up, so Lan Xichen clicks it.

Then he sits back, frankly impressed. He's seen Wei Wuxian's comic style progress since the boy was drawing silly cartoons to entertain Lan Wangji in history class, but even he wasn't prepared for this.

The art is gorgeous. Stylized figures, intricate period costuming, rich backgrounds – it's truly a work of art.

Then he gets a better look the two characters' faces, and laughs out loud. It's Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, clear as day, with long hair and flowing robes. Wei Wuxian's even managed to capture that exasperated-yet-fond look Lan Wangji has whenever Wei Wuxian is being particularly loud.

The introduction is even better. "Join our hero Lan Wangji and dashing rogue Wei Wuxian as they battle deadly monsters and forge a path with demonic cultivation!"

Wei Wuxian hasn't even changed their names. True, he uses his mother's surname professionally, so Cangse Ying can't be easily tracked back, but still.

Lan Xichen wonders for a moment if Lan Wangji is okay with this, but then he notices that the project text is available in both English and in Chinese, with the Chinese written in Lan Wangji's style.

They worked on this together, then.

Trying not to think about why that makes his chest feel funny, Lan Xichen opens to the first page--

-- Which features a bruised and bloodied Wei Wuxian falling off a cliff while a horrified Lan Wangji screams after him.

Confused, Lan Xichen makes sure he hasn't accidentally read the last page first. No, this is the first. Still a little baffled, he clicks to the next page, sees the stylized banner that reads six years ago and relaxes. This is Wei Wuxian's style of using flashbacks to interrupt the narrative flow. Lan Xichen spent most of Lan Wangji's university years hearing his brother's despair for Wei Wuxian's artistic choices in essay form.

But enough about the past. Lan Xichen settles in to read the first chapter of the story, where Wei Wuxian and his siblings (Jiang Yanli drawn lovingly, Jiang Cheng with a bigger frown and more menacing eyebrows than Lan Xichen remembers) traveled to the Cloud Recesses (the sarcastic nickname Wei Wuxian gave to Lan Qiren's West Vancouver mansion) for cultivator lectures. Lan Xichen is there on the page, too, drawn taller and far more imposing than he is in real life.

The first encounter between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji is fantastical and improbable and, according to Lan Xichen's recollection, almost completely accurate. Wei Wuxian had mouthed off at Lan Wangji at the weekend orientation camp for their new arts high school, Lan Wangji glared the boy into submission, then later that night when Wei Wuxian tried to sneak back onto school grounds with alcohol, he and Lan Wangji had gotten into a fight. Verbal, instead of with swords, and without the supernatural murder victims, but Lan Xichen remembered everything else from Lan Wangji's indignant recitation on his return home.

He keeps reading, enjoying the art and the lyrical narration, and keeps enjoying it right up to the scene when Nie Huaisang appears on the page to offer Lan Qiren a present, Meng Yao standing right behind him.

Lan Xichen doesn't remember standing up, but here he is, two feet away from his computer, heart pounding. He hadn't—Why—

What was Meng Yao doing in a story about Wei Wuxian's high school years?

Taking a deep breath, Lan Xichen makes himself return to his desk. As far as he knew, he was the one who introduced Meng Yao to Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, when the boys were in university and after he and Meng Yao started dating--

Lan Xichen can feel his heartbeat slow, as he tries to breathe. He needs to stop this foolishness over Meng Yao. They dated before living together for a while, that was all. They broke up. It happens to people all the time.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji were in college for most of that time, anyway, living their lives. They barely knew Meng Yao, even if Wei Wuxian's sister married Meng Yao's half-brother. They couldn't know how badly Lan Xichen had messed up their relationship, how terrible he had been to live with. It was his fault that—

Stop.

Stop.

It's over. In the past. A story that has Meng Yao as a minor character isn't going to mess with Lan Xichen's head. He's not going to let it.

He exhales and makes himself look back at the screen.

Meng Yao only shows up a few more times. For some reason, he's the only character who isn't tagged with his own name. He's there handing over the present to Lan Qiren, standing in front of Nie Huaisang when the Wens arrive, then in two last panels in which he tells the on-screen Lan Xichen that he has to return to Nie Mingjue's side.

Lan Xichen's stomach sours. He and Nie Mingjue had been close, before Meng Yao came into Lan Xichen's life. After that, Lan Xichen hadn't had much time for anyone else. That was normal, Meng Yao always said. People in love only needed each other.

Lan Xichen picks up his phone, then puts it down. He can't ask Lan Wangji about this. It would be weird. Wei Wuxian must just be making artistic narrative choices.

The chapter ends soon after, with Wen Qing and Wen Ning welcomed grudgingly into Cloud Recesses. The next chapter is due up in two weeks, the page declares, and welcomes any comments or feedback. A few people are already posting, gushing over the art work and discussing the teaser from the opening page.

Wanting to be supportive, Lan Xichen writes a small review, complimenting the artistic style, the intricacies of the outfits, poses a query as to the different colour palettes between the first page (dark, red, menacing) and the flashback scenes in Cloud Recesses (light, airy, hopeful), then translates the comment into English and posts both versions up. If Lan Wangji is going though all the trouble of ensuring a bilingual experience, then he will too.

He should go start dinner, he really should, but some part of him is drawn back to the first panel in which Meng Yao appears. He's shorter than Lan Xichen remembers in life, the long hair and braids suiting his face.

It's been so long since Lan Xichen last saw Meng Yao. He's not sure what he's thinking. Is he wistful? Mournful? Sad?

He doesn't know. He never knows what he feels about Meng Yao, which was the problem. He's not normal about feelings. Even Lan Wangji, whose brain is a unique and complicated thing, looking for order and reason and patterns in an illogical and messy world, loves fiercely, feels passionately. Maybe he got all the love in the family, and Lan Xichen got stuck with the stunted and undergrown heart.

Stirring, he pages back to the first appearance of his on-screen twin. The Lan Xichen on the screen looks patient, kind, a smile hiding behind his eyes.

He hadn't realized this is how Wei Wuxian sees him.

He picks up his phone.

> To Wei Wuxian: What an incredible achievement! The art is amazing!

> To Wei Wuxian: Where is the story from? As it's a work of fiction and has nothing to do with your real life ;)

> Wei Wuxian: Oh hahahha the story is a collaboration of a bunch of ideas! I can't tell u more (sworn to secrecy by my collaborators) but so glad you like it!!!!!!

> To Lan Wangji: Did you do the writing? I love the dialogue.

> Lan Wangji: Wei Wuxian did most of the English. I made it better and did the translation.

> To Lan Wangji: Have you told uncle about this project?

> Lan Wangji: He prefers to speak of my composition achievements.

Lan Xichen puts his phone down and rubs his eyes. The old tension between Lan Qiren and Lan Wangji never goes away. It started in high school with Lan Qiren's disapproval of Wei Wuxian, continued into university with Lan Qiren's disapproval of Wei Wuxian as well as Lan Wangji's decision to attend a local university for musical studies instead of going to Julliard in Lan Xichen's footsteps, and outrage at the news that Lan Wangji asked Wei Wuxian to marry him before they even finished their undergraduate degrees.

The resulting years had been a long-standing cold war, with Lan Xichen trying to mediate in the middle. Even the arrival of Lan Yuan on the scene twenty months previous hadn't softened both sides into anything resembling ease.

If Lan Wangji doesn't want to tell their uncle that he and his husband are collaborating on a semi-biographical graphic novel, Lan Xichen isn't going to muddy the waters.

> To Lan Wangji: It sounds like you're enjoying the project.

> Lan Wangji: Working with Wei Ying on any project is enjoyable. I read that couples with young children should try to engage in a mutual hobby outside of parenting.

> To Lan Wangji: Very wise.

He wonders if he should ask about Meng Yao, types out a message to that effect, then deletes it.

> To Lan Wangji: I should start dinner – see you on the weekend for brunch?

>Lan Wangji: Yes.

Lan Xichen puts his phone down. The days are long in August and the sun still bright, but he's tired and he doesn't know why.

~~

anyway that’s where this whole disaster is going. new fandoms are fun. 

#the untamed #my writing #teaser snippet of a new story #i have 14000 words written #trying to get is mostly done before popping up on ao3

[scarletexlibris]

Crucial Stats:

Name: Alexander Stirling Scarlet

Age: Late thirties, born April 17th

Height: Five feet nine inches

Weight: One hundred and forty pounds

Hair: Dirty blonde

Eyes: Blue

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Sexuality: Demisexual, grey-aromantic

Religion: Agnostic

Relevant biographical information:

Born in Herne Hill, London, England

Orphaned after his parents, Paul and Claudia Scarlet, were killed in a car accident.  Raised by his neglectful high society aunt, Isolde Blackburne.

Graduated from Oxford with a degree in literature and spent years afterward trying unsuccesfully to get his own novels and short stories published. Constantly rejected for “unoriginality.”

Immigrated to America and started his criminal career at the age of twenty-five.  Lasted two and a half years as a prominent Gotham rogue before having a glass display case dropped on his head during an altercation with Batgirl (Barbara Gordon).

Spent a year in Arkham Asylum after his hospital stay, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  Was the victim of medical malpractice at the hands of Dr. Penelope Young, who would repeatedly verbally abuse him during psychiatric sessions and deliberately give him wrong medication doses.  Also bullied cruelly by Jonathan Crane, who took pleasure in “breaking him by talking.”

Burned the palms of his hands in a self-harm attempt to the point of permanent nerve damage during his criminal days.  Now wears leather gloves to cover them.

Found work at Gotham Academy a year and a half after his release with a clean bill of health and rehabilitation funding.  Now works there as a professor of English and drama.

Married Lydia Scarlet nee Limpet after five years of living with her. Now has four children with her—Isabella, Catherine, Amelia, and Jeremy.

Also considers Hayden Ayala and Samuel Robonico as part of the family, as well as Lydia’s extended family on her adopted father’s side.

Good friends with Kira Drake, Elsie Khalii, and Jervis Tetch. Frenemies-leaning-toward-friends with Edward Nygma.  Sitcom nemesis of Edgar Heed.  Sworn enemy of Jonathan Crane, Batman, and Gotham’s police force.

Still keeps his Men of Letters (his henchpeople from his crime days) as backup if he needs it.  Printer’s Devil is the sniper, Typesetter is the medic, Pressman is the muscle and electrician, and Footnote is the gopher and undercover agent.

Does not get along at all well with Headmaster Hammer and will go out of his way to disboey him behind his back.  Still very protective of the Academy’s students and trusts the members of Team Detective implicitly—he’s basically the Giles to their Scooby Gang.

Personal trivia:

Can whistle and read music, but not sing.

Always makes a little tutting or “oh!” sound when he’s annoyed, usually accompanied by rolling his eyes.  Also makes a lot of “thinking noises” when he speaks and talks with his hands.  Almost never uses slang.

Impeccable posture and a cat-like sense of cleanliness.

A very skilled gadgeteer as well as his eidetic memory and speedreading skills.  Incredibly well-read and inventive.

Has terrible eyesight, but refuses to wear thick bulky glasses as a professor.

Never loses an opportunity to whip out a pithy literary quote, but gets very frustrated when people misquote things and will instantly correct them.

Has an abysmal sleep schedule and will normally stay awake into the wee hours of the morning.  Very restless sleeper who tosses and turns a lot.

Owns three cats–two long-haired tuxedo cats named Ernest and Hercule and one ginger tabby named Lloyd.  Also gets along surprisingly well with birds.

Is liable to consume himself with work or fly into a screaming rage over the smallest slight during manic episodes, but usually sits at his desk without moving from it or speaking during depressive ones.  Extremely dilligent about taking his medications because he despises losing control.

Has post-traumatic stress reponses to prolonged discussion of Arkham Asylum or anything that reminds him of his time there.

Is the absolute living embodiment of the Superiority/Inferiority Complex and delights in being cheerfully passive-aggressive.

Favorite drink is English breakfast tea or Arabian coffee.  Favorite food is roast chicken.  Also snacks on peanuts when he’s anxious.  Favorite sweet is cherry Danishes.

Has a specfic cafe in the academic district he and Lydia like to order from.

Often underweight as a child because of his aunt’s ill treatment.

Favorite books are Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and The Time Machine.

Favorite movies are the original Universal Horror canon.

Favorite singer is Nat King Cole.

Disdains a lot of modern rogues and bemoans the needless violence and lack of “class”.

Can be a bit classist and elitist, especially in academic settings.

Walks everywhere if he can help it, only drives if he’s heading out of Gotham altogether.

Scrimped and saved to rent a small cabin for himself, Lydia, and the children whenever they need to get out of the city’s hustle and bustle.

A fairly strict, but still patient and fair teacher as well as parent.

First met Lydia in Blackgate Penitentiary after he was arrested the first time–she kicked his ass in a game of chess.

Once tried to discover Dream of the Endless’s secrets and ended up getting knocked out for a week of nightmares for his trouble.  Is very cautious about magic ever since.

Very overly protective of the things and people he loves, tends to be distrustful on their behalf.

Owns basically no casual clothes, always dresses in his Academy attire (the tweed jackets and dress slacks, not the pleather Bookworm suit).

Very self-conscious about his thinning hair and thus will not take off his hat unless it’s for someone he trusts.

Likewise doesn’t like to be touched unless it’s by someone he trusts, will swat your hand away otherwise.

Usually shows verbal affection more often than physical affection.  Can be extremely emotionally constipated, especially when he’s just starting to forge a relationship with someone.

Greatest fear is alienating his loved ones or making them afraid of him.

#(about the muse) #((Gonna pin this so people see it! :D ))

[gildy]

In Character

I spotted GILDEROY ALAN LOCKHART in Diagon Alley early today. Have you heard the rumors? Supposedly the HALF-BLOOD is affiliated with NO ONE. Born on APRIL / 1 / 1958, they are TWENTY-FOUR and identify as MALE (HE/HIM) and PANSEXUAL. They work as a BEST-SELLING AUTHOR; it makes sense, given they are FLAMBOYANT & SELFISH but also CREATIVE & RESOURCEFUL. When I think of them, I think of hands stained with ink, pictures edited with a clever charm, and a roguish grin that hasn’t failed him yet.

Faceclaim: Evan Roderick

Biography

Gilderoy Lockhart has been extraordinary since the day of his birth - no! Before even then! Rumor has it that he was performing magic while still in the womb, turning on faucets and levitating his sisters’ toys, among other miraculous feats. His mother tells the outrageously “true” tale that the lights in St. Mungo’s flicked furiously with his first breath, and shone brightly as he opened his eyes for the first time, as if the entire world was welcoming him into it. Surely that must have been a sign of something great and awe-inspiring! (The Healers insisted that it was an accident regarding a different level of the facility and a rather angry half-giant - and that Gilderoy himself had been a rather unimpressive baby, by all standards.)

Mr. Lockhart was a rather ordinary muggle man, with an ordinary job and ordinary features, although his hair was his shining quality - naturally wavy and a lustrous golden color, Gilderoy thanks his father every day for his beautiful locks. It is but one of many traits that make the whole of Gilderoy’s perfect existence - his mother’s magic makes up much of the rest. You see, dear reader, by the age of two Gilderoy was performing charms that even first years couldn’t master, and by five he was more skilled than any other child one could find. He was practically a prodigy - no, he was one. (This is false. Gilderoy was very clever, though, and could convince his mother that he moved things with his mind rather than his hands - she wasn’t exactly a difficult mind to crack.) However, there was a dangerous illusion created in the Lockhart household.

His mother, Eileen, was not shy with her exuberant love for her son. She neglected his three sisters for him, perhaps because two were squibs and the other had yet to show any magical predilections, but nevertheless it was no secret where her affections found priority. In her fanatic support, he became convinced that he was special, one of the few of his kind. That his acceptance to Hogwarts would be a monumental moment in history - the Gilderoy Lockhart, accepted into one of the finest wizarding schools in the world. This thought stemmed not only from his mother’s attitude, but from his family’s lackluster talents. His elder sisters, both squibs, made it seem as though magic was the rarity in the family, while in fact they were. Squibs were greatly uncommon, and two in one family was an even greater oddity. His younger sister was also magical, they would come to find, but she failed to perform anything in front of people - whereas she would make plants grow when no one was looking - so Gilderoy knew in his bones that he was special.

But Gilderoy Lockhart was, in fact, not special at all. Where in the muggle world and within his family, he was considered somewhat of a marvel - by his mother at least - in the wizarding world, he was only one of dozens of children accepted into Hogwarts. His mother failed to mention that all children with magical abilities living in the United Kingdom would be accepted, that whatever talent he thought he might possess meant nothing. Worst of all, not a single classmate cared for his perfect, wonderful hair; not a single professor saw him for the prodigy that he was. It was a shame! It was a tragedy! Not only were they missing out, but he was being deprived of the recognition that he so desperately deserved!

So, he spent his years at Hogwarts striving for such attention, in whatever way he could manage to find it. It did well for his marks, in a surprising turn of events. All that time researching different ways to see his name or face - or both - in some widely published form, resulted in proficiency with different charms and jinxes. (He was nowhere near the top of his class, but he wasn’t quite toward the bottom either. His mother comforted him by saying that the entire system was rife with favoritism.) His grabs for attention ranged from the extreme - carving his name into the quidditch pitch - to the tame - joining the Ravenclaw team just to hear Gilderoy Lockhart! called out by the commentator, which he often became distracted by.

Although attractive and reasonably friendly, his self-centered attitude didn’t gain him many friends. Upon his graduation, there were only one or two people he found himself writing to consistently - the others simply never replied to his letters. They were jealous, of course. He was off finding wonderful adventures! It just happened that those adventures weren’t his. After traveling to “find himself”, he ended up finding something different entirely - a get-rich-quick scheme with impressive results. A drunk patron in a bar in Morocco told him of her valiant run-in with a banshee. What a tale it was! There was mystery! intrigue! and, of course, a victory over the slain creature! The gears in his clever head began turning and as his pen magically dictated her each and every word, he had an idea - what if he simply took this story as his own? He had done it before, with Benjy Fenwick - of course, that was just for an article series in the Prophet, but it gained enough of a following that, should he write a book, he was sure it would be a hit. But, Benjy was distraught by Gilderoy’s betrayal, so he would have to go about this differently…

Memory Charms. He’d researched them quite extensively during his tenure at Hogwarts, but had seldom used them practically. So, he wiped the memory of her own adventure from the witch’s memory and wrote a book as if it was his  story. And it was a great success, more than he could have anticipated. Since then, he has published four other novels of exploits that were not his own, yet he claimed them to be. He has been in England for some time promoting his most recent work, Magical Me, an autobiography that could have been written by a fanatic follower, rather than the man himself. Witch Weekly just awarded him with their Most Charming Smile Award, too. Finally, the world was realizing what an extraordinary talent he truly was. Too bad there was a war going on, taking away all those front page spaces that should have been reserved for him. Who cares about Voldemort this, and Dumbledore that? Gilderoy Lockhart is the only person who matters, after all.

#let's get this bread y'all #bio

[thebrochtuarachs]

Arranged: Chapter 3

Modern AU. Set in 2018. Where Claire and Jamie are arranged to be married.

CH: 1 - 2

AO3

A/N: Sorry it took a while to write this. The past month just has been incredibly weird and strange. But I am happy this is up now, I had a wee writers block on how to make them go forward but I think I found the way. So excited to write what's next. Hope you like this chapter and it's always good to see and hear your comments and suggestions <3

CHAPTER 3: The First Afternoon

It was the morning after the dinner, Claire was on the bus heading to uni to start another day. Usually, she’d spent the 10-minute ride browsing through class notes but today, she found herself staring out the window and watching the city scene go by. Musing with recent events, Claire can’t help but think about Jamie.

Jamie Fraser wasn’t a stranger in her life. On the contrary, she cannot remember her life without him.

Looking back, she remembered their days, growing up in their family dinners. Jamie was two years ahead of her, he was basically in her life even before she knew it and they practically grew up together.

Sure, Jenny and Willie were also there in that scenario as well but with the recent arrangement, she focused on the times she was only with him. Before any of this, she only thought of him as a really close family friend but didn’t think they were really that close. But the more she thought about them, the more wrong she found herself.

She remembered playing in the green fields of their backyard, stealing toys from each other or playing tag; carpooling to and from elementary school for some years, heading straight to either of their house until a parent can come and pick them up; watching the same cartoons, singing the theme song together once it was on; how they would take afternoon naps after watching said show and be woken up exactly at 4PM for some afternoon snacks; how all of them - her, Jenny, Jamie and Willie -  would all play house or castle rescue, and how her and Jamie were always deemed the “king and queen” combo or the “prince and damsel” duo, where in the end, he would always save her; In some days, they would even have wedding scenarios played out as part of the story of happily ever after. It was all very innocent and fun, and at the time, no one thought any malice into it. It was just pure childhood fun.

Everything sort of changed when they entered high school. Jamie and Claire went to exclusive boys and girls catholic schools and naturally, they had their own circle and friends and their interactions were limited to their family dinners. Heading off to college, Claire took a pre-med course and Jamie took-up a pre-law course and now, she’s in medical school while he’s busy running the family’s publishing house business. Although they both stayed in Edinburgh, their paths never crossed as often as one would think.

However, despite growing up and somehow, maybe, growing apart, when they do see each other, they would talk and interact as they normally do – the long-time friends they are – and update each other on the status of their lives. All very civil, normal and nothing more.

What’s even more puzzling to Claire, now, is in these times and nobody ever teased them about the “what ifs” of them ending up together. Nobody ever spoke to them in that way, nobody gave an inkling about this merger ever happening. Nobody had a rumored crush on anyone. Nobody gave them any thought and no one gave her any indication to. As far as she knew, Jamie Fraser was and will always be just a long-time family friend in her life.

The shock of the engagement was wearing off but Claire was determined to get to the bottom of this. Jamie was right – their parents aren’t impulsive enough to set this up lightly. There is a deep, real reason for it and she will know it and put a stop to it.

-

“Darling, there you are!” Frank called as she stepped out of the car, breaking her thoughts of Jamie.

Frank – her very new and current suitor. They’ve been seeing each other for over a month and Claire was totally smitten with the professor right from the moment they met at the university library when he helped her carry her loads of medical books from the shelf to the table.

He make a joke – she can’t remember it anymore – but it made her laugh in what was a stressful exam week and she was charmed by his aristocratic elegance and wit. They got to talking after that and she found out he was a history professor and almost a decade older than her (though she thought he didn’t look like it).

She hadn’t told her parents about him because of what they might think of her dating a much older man and how it can affect their position in the university. She was a student (she can argue that she’s in medical school and not some undergraduate bimbo) and he was a teacher – that scenario doesn’t look good in any way, shape or form. Also, she wasn’t entirely certain of him yet -  so she’s taking her time to get to know him a little bit more before she allows him more into her life.

As they met in the middle of the courtyard, Frank noticed her somber aura. “What is it, Claire?” he asked, concerned.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just got up in the wrong side of the bed” she lied. He took it at face value and thought nothing more. Clearly, he doesn’t know her yet as he hadn’t caught up with the jig.

“Okay!” He said, really not noticing it. “I gotta run to class. I’ll see you in the afternoon?”

“Yes – No! I forgot I have a group meeting later and don’t know how long would that be. Uhm…maybe just call me later and see where I’m at?” She said. Frank just nodded and went on his way.

-

It was technically a groupmeeting – they were two people, that counts. She was going to see Jamie in a nearby coffee shop and start this ridiculous quest. The day went by with Claire mostly working on autopilot student mode. Her mind ran scenarios on where they should start to investigate, people they can ask favor for to look into their family company. They should also fix their schedules and think about how this will affect their studies. This investigation was going to take over their lives and both seem to be in agreement with it – Claire, simply, wants it to be over.

He was already seated when she arrived, her favorite beverage, hot and waiting, on the table. “Sorry, I’m late. The bus was late and there was so many people waiting in line…” Claire explained herself. “It’s no mind, Claire.” Jamie stopped her before she went on a long narrative. She just smiled and took her seat across from him.

“Oolong Tea” Jamie pointed to the cup. “I hope ye dinna mind me orderin’ for ye. I canna choose which pastry ye’d like today though, so I’ll let ye choose that one.”

“It’s fine. That’s what I was going to drink anyway and I’ll order the bread later.” Claire thought about how Jamie knew her drink but with their long history, she thought she shouldn’t be shocked about it. After all, she knew his drink even though the lid of the coffee cup hid its contents – it was black, three sugars.

“Where do we begin?” she asked, hoping it’ll shift her thought from their apparent familiarity.

“Well, what did yer parents say to ye again?”

“That this was a business merger of some sort, which honestly, doesn’t make sense. Your business seems to be fine, ours is as well. Do you have any idea about the financial status of your company?”

Jamie shrugged. He already knows falling numbersis not the problem but this was the ruse. As much joy it was to spend with her, it equally pained him for it to be this way. “I guess we can start there?” He suggested. “Let me call Rupert and Angus Mackenzie from Finance, I’m sure they can discreetly hand me the finances since…2010? I’ll just go that far back just in case.” Real reason was to accumulate as much paperwork to get lost themselves in.    

Since the Frasers and Beauchamps are both stakeholders in each other’s company, they both had access to the numbers for both companies. Acquiring the data was not that hard.

“Hi, Rupert! I’m okay, just settling back” Jamie said as he called Rupert. “Rupert, I was wondering if you could send me the year-end numbers of our company and the Beauchamps dating back in 2010? Yes, - No, I would just like to study the trends…”

“No need to explain. I got you, Jamie! I’ll send it in an hour.” Rupert answered back with a knowing laugh, interrupting Jamie’s ramble of an explanation. His parents must’ve set this up too. Jamie sighed hopelessly, thanked Rupert and ended the call.

“Files will be sent in an hour” Jamie said.

“I guess we got time to kill. Would you mind if I did a bit of studying? We’re already here and we gotta wait.” Claire asked.

“No, no, go ahead. I was just going to ask the same thing.” He replied with a smile as he started pulling out his stuff from his bag.

They were occupying in a four-seater table, the space just enough for each of them to claim a side. Claire put out her laptop, two medical books, a notebook and lots of pencils and ballpens. Jamie, also, pulled out his laptop, three novels, a notebook and lots of highlighters. Both silently went on their respective study sessions.

A little over a half hour in, Jamie disrupted Claire’s thought with a question. “Claire, do you need a refill?”

She looked up, a little disoriented. “Hm, what? Oh, yes, please, thank you.”

Jamie took her cup and went to bar to fill her tea with a fresh pour of hot water. He refilled his coffee too. As he set down her cup, Claire inadvertently let out a question. “How did you know I refill?” She was curious as to how much Jamie really knew her. She saw him turn a little shy in her question as he placed a hand on the back of his neck.

“Well, ye’ve been drinking Oolong tea since we were wee bairns and ye always made sure that the tea bag is always well-used and that meant two, maybe three, uses until it lost its flavor for ye. Also, you’re doing that eye-scrunch thing when ye’re thinking so hard of a thing ye canna or tryna figure out. Thought it a good time to distract ye.”

“Well, it was. Thank you” Claire said monotonously as she took a sip of her tea. “I see you’re still coloring your books with highlighters.” She said, pointing at his many colors of markers on his table.

“And I see ye’re still placing wee snacks on each paragraph in yer book.” Jamie retorted back and they shared a small laugh.

“It’s been a while since we studied together but it seems like some things never change”

“Aye, some things never do, Sassenach” Jamie said tenderly, looking straight into Claire’s eyes.

“Hey, you haven’t called me that in forever!” Claire exclaimed excitedly. “What does that mean again?”

“Och, nothing. It just means Englishman, or in yer case, Englishwoman. An outlander, not from Scotland”

“Right, right! That’s the only name you’d call me growing up, I almost forgot my own!”

“Really?” Jamie never knew the name meant possibly more than Claire let on and he was curious to know the story behind it. However, a ding on Jamie’s computer alerted them back to the task at hand.

“Ach, the email is here” Jamie informed Claire and she quickly got up, went over to his side, pulled out a chair and sat beside him. She peered so close at his computer their cheeks were almost side to side.

“Open it, open it!” Claire said, waving a hand to Jamie to hurry up.

“Patience!” he chuckled as the file filled the screen.

Both simultaneously groaned when the file they got was filled with so much number, just pure numbers, neither of them can make it out. Rupert must’ve made it so complicated, they’ll never figure anything out.

“Seriously, Rupert!” Claire rolled her eyes, annoyed.

“I’ll call him –“

“No. He might get suspicious if we ask so much and so frequently. We, erm, we…can figure this out”

“How about we call it for the day? We got the file, we can look at it tomorrow instead.” Jamie said, looking to prolong the evidence. If they start on this now, Claire will never stop for the rest of the afternoon and probably evening. “I got an exam I have to study for anyway. Unless, you want to have a go at it?”

Claire shook her head. She’s got to study too. “No, you’re right. I have to study too.” She sighed. “We have to talk about a schedule where this research is not going to interfere with our studies – which is our top priority”

Jamie just nodded. “How about we meet here every after class and maybe spend 2-3 hours looking at this, then we go back to our studies? Sounds like enough time to balance our day?”

They reached an agreement and let the investigation stop for the day. Claire reached for her stuff to pack but when she noticed Jamie didn’t move and just continued to go back to highlighting his pages. “Aren’t you going home or somewhere else to study?”

“Och, I’m already here and the ambiance is good, thought I’d stay until the evening.” Jamie replied with a sheepish smile. Claire looked around and the atmosphere was good. The smell of the coffee was inviting, the people were quiet, and a change of scene was probably what she needed to focus. It wasn’t bad either that she’s with Jamie, they were friends after all. With that, she put her stuff back on the table and decided to stay as well. Jamie stayed silent and they went on their own business but she saw the small tug in his lips and he smiled.

-

A loud ringing of the cellphone brought them out of their space. It was Claire’s phone and Claire’s mother calling.

“Hello, yeah – I’m sorry. I’m on my way home. No, just got lost in studying” Claire rapidly explained as Jamie could hear her mother’s rapid line of questioning. “Yep, I’ll be there in 15 minutes. Love you, bye”

“Ye’ll be there in 5” Jamie said. “I’ll take ye home”. It was already 8:00PM and they were going to miss dinner.

“What? No, Jamie. It’s fine. The bus by this time are probably not that full.” They were quickly packing their stuff while, also, quickly negotiating their travel plans.

“I have a car and we live in the same neighborhood. Ye canna argue with that logic, Claire.”

Claire grumbled but relented. It was certainly easier and convenient and again, Jamie was no stranger. On some unsurprisingly absurd level, she trusts him completely. She reasons it’s probably from the years they’ve known each other. Nonetheless, if Jamie acts inappropriately, she’ll just tell him to their mothers.

The drive home was quick and Jamie, being the true gentleman he was, insisted that he open Claire’s passenger door and walk her right in front of her doorstep. She was about to protest but his actions were quicker and for the fourth time that day, she let him…erm…look out for her.

“Thank you for a lovely afternoon. For the tea, the records, the study time, and the ride home” she said as she turned around to bade him goodbye. They were standing in a respectable distance from one another, just as friends do. “Would you like to stay for dinner? It’s the least I can offer for the tea.”

“Ah, no. My family is waiting on me too. I’ll have my hide if mam doesna see me on the table”

“Well, then, goodnight, Jamie.”

“Goodnight, Sassenach. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

#outlander #outlander fanfic #outlander fanfiction #fanfic #fanfiction #arranged #arranged au #jamie fraser #Claire fraser #Claire Beauchamp #modern AU #how do you make those gorgeous moodboards #ahihihihi #tb writes

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The Handmaid’s Tale: How Will Margaret Atwood’s Book Sequel Affect the TV Show?

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Margaret Atwood’s Testaments, out this September, is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. What is its relationship to the TV series?

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This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

As Game Of Thrones proved, when a TV adaptation overtakes its source material, problems can follow. Invention and expansion is required, but, even with the blessing of the original creator, on-screen continuation of a story is often treated by fans as unwelcome and non-canonical.

When Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale arrived in 2017, its first season covered the expanse of material from the very start to the very end of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel (epilogue aside, it closed on the same final image). For seasons two and three, the show expanded the dystopian world of Gilead, a fundamentalist patriarchal regime that, among other delights, forces fertile women into sexual servitude as 'Handmaids' to the ruling classes, and kept the story going beyond the reach of the book.

Now, with The Handmaid’s Tale renewed for a fourth season, and a sequel to the original novel arriving mid-way between seasons three and four, where does everything stand? 

What do we know about Testaments?

Publication date: Sept. 10, 2019

Published by: Penguin

Announced in November 2018, Testaments is Margaret Atwood's sequel to her 1985 modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale. It joins the story 15 years after the events of that novel. (A framing narrative for the original in the form of a fictional academic paper presented on the historical period of Gilead extends 200 years after those events, so technically, the sequel is filling in a gap instead of branching entirely out anew.)

Testaments' cover art (see above) was designed by artist Noma Bar, whose simplified designs contain hidden images, such as the ponytailed girl forming the collar of the cover star Handmaid. The back cover reverses the two images, with the Handmaid concealed among the ponytailed girl's clothing.

read more - The Handmaid's Tale: The Baby Nichole Crisis's Real-World Parallel

The new novel will have three different female narrators, Atwood has confirmed, though their identities remain under wraps. The sequel was inspired by everything readers have ever asked the author “about Gilead and its inner workings,” and by “the world we’ve been living in,” according to the Penguin press announcement. It will be unconnected to events in seasons two and three of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (which makes sense as they take place in the time directly after the end of the original, and Testaments is set a decade and a half later on). 

When asked by the LA Times why she was writing a sequel, Atwood explained that she’d been asked questions about Gilead by readers for 35 years. “It’s time to address some of the requests.” 

The Trump administration too, was part of her explanation. Atwood described herself “like all Canadians” watching US politics and thinking “What kind of shenanigans will they be up to next? What’s gonna happen next? I’ve never seen anything like it, and neither has anybody else. On one hand, it’s just riveting, and on the other hand, it’s quite appalling.” True and true.

Testaments isn’t Margaret Atwood’s first addition to her original novel

In 2017, an “enhanced edition” of The Handmaid’s Tale audiobook - as read by Claire Danes in 2012 - was released. This version by Audible not only added snippets of music in between chapters (to represent the cassette compilation tapes over which Offred recorded her story in the original novel), but also extended the epilogue. 

read more: The Handmaid's Tale Season 3 Depicts a Seismic Shift in Gilead

Originally, The Handmaid’s Tale novel ends with the ‘transcription’ of a fictional conference paper presented by an academic researcher in Gileadean studies, 200 years after the events of the story. It’s a sly, satirical piece of writing that concluded with the line “Are there any questions?” In the 2017 edition, questions are asked. Audience members – one voiced by Margaret Atwood – ask speaker Professor James Darcy Pieixoto a series of points about his paper and the workings of Gilead. During the Q&A, there’s even mention of the historical discovery of Aunt Lydia’s logbook from the era, which turned out to be a hoax. The session ends with a tease for the sequel, as the Professor tells his audience “I hope to be able to present the results of our further Gileadian investigations to you at some future date.”

On September the 10th this year, that’s exactly what's going to happen.

What is Atwood’s relationship to The Handmaid’s Tale TV show?

Atwood is a Consulting Producer on Hulu’s TV adaptation of her novel, which doesn’t mean, as she told Toronto Life back in April 2017, that she has the final say in story or otherwise, but that she’s part of the conversation: “It means that the only person who knows what the characters had for breakfast is me. I’m the historical consultant.”

Showrunner Bruce Miller told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2018 that Atwood “plays a huge role” in the series as “the mother of us all.” 

“She was in the writers' room very early in the season,” said Miller about the second season. “We've been talking throughout, and she's been reading everything. She's very involved. She's our guiding star, and always has been.” 

The team’s goal, he explained, is to “make sure the "Atwoodness" of the show stays front and centre. Even though we're going beyond the story that's covered in the book, in some ways, we're still very much in the world of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.”

In the season one premiere, Atwood had a dialogue-free cameo as an authoritarian Aunt who strikes Elisabeth Moss’ June during her training at the RED centre, where Handmaids are prepared for their postings:

%u201CI even did a cameo%u2014I got to whack Elisabeth Moss over the head%u201D: @MargaretAtwood on The Handmaid%u2019s Tale https://t.co/l9tmnT3Oke pic.twitter.com/YvMuugvNRv

— Toronto Life (@torontolife) April 26, 2017

Speaking to The Independent in June 2019, Miller confirmed that he is is regular contact with Atwood. “She reads all the scripts. She sees episodes, and so she feels the same way, I think – that it’s a good extrapolation of her world.”

So the expanded Gilead of seasons two and three, which travelled to the Colonies and the Econovillage, locations only mentioned in passing in the original novel, will not influence Testaments.

Seasons two, three and four of the TV show continue to draw from the book

Though The Handmaid’s Tale TV show outran the novel by the end of season one in terms of timeline, elements from the book are still being used up by  the television series. In season two, the first “Prayvaganza” was staged, a Gilead ceremony from the novel in which girls as young as fourteen are married off to men in a mass ceremony. 

In season three, viewers first witnessed the act of “particicution” by hanging as described in the novel, in which multiple Handmaids pull on ropes joined to one set of gallows, as a form of “salvaging.” Also in season three, June discovers and records a message on a compilation cassette in the basement of her latest posting, as a reference to the tapes on which Offred’s original testimony was discovered in the novel.   

Speaking to The Independent in June 2019, showrunner Bruce Miller described how June’s season three inner monologue line about her mother always wanting a "women's culture" and Gilead has created one, but not the one she envisaged, was taken straight from the book. “We spent kind of three years teasing that quote apart,” said Miller. “We have quotes from the book up all over the place."

So even though the timeline has strictly run out, we can expect details from the novel to emerge for exploration in future seasons of the TV show, and presumably the same will apply for Testaments.

Testaments will make the TV show harder to write

Speaking to The Independent about the relationship between the original novel and the TV adaptation, showrunner Bruce Miller brought up Testaments. “But now Margaret’s writing a sequel,” he said, agreeing that would make it “interesting”. 

“The degree of difficulty was 10 and now it becomes 10 plus,” said Miller. Navigating the expanded world of Gilead he and his team have created while remaining truthful to the vision Atwood lays out in Testaments will be some balancing act.

How many seasons will the TV show go on for?

Season four of The Handmaid’s Tale is expected to arrive in 2020. According to a very early plan by showrunner Bruce Miller, there would then be a further six seasons still to go after that. Miller told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that he had originally “roughed it out to around 10 seasons”, but has since confirmed to Mashable that there is no exact target in terms of the number of seasons, more a narrative point he wants to reach.  

“The ideal for the show's longevity is that when it's done there's something kind of nice and perfect that you can put on the shelf next to the book as a companion piece, said Miller. “There is no number, and considering that seasons can get longer and shorter has made that even more meaningless.”

Miller told Mashable he wants to take the story all the way to Gilead’s own version of the Nuremberg Trials after the fall of the regime, when Serena and Commander Waterford are forced to answer for their crimes. “We can go on for a very long time,” he promised.  

Keep up with all our The Handmaid's Tale season 3 news and reviews right here.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Feature

Books

Louisa Mellor

Jul 31, 2019

The Handmaid's Tale

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Margaret Atwood

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/yoga-meditation-and-psychedelics-would-you-take-drugs-during-your-practice/

Yoga, Meditation and Psychedelics: Would you Take Drugs During Your Practice?

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

ANDREW BANNECKER

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journey weekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

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This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” section below for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

ANDREW BANNECKER

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,” says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

See also 4 Energy-Boosting Mushrooms (And How to Cook Them)

Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

ANDREW BANNECKER

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and MultiDimensional Yoga and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

See also Chakra Tune-Up: Intro to the Muladhara

Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

See also This 6-Minute Sound Bath Is About to Change Your Day for the Better

The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

ANDREW BANNECKER

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers

Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation

Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation… This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm

“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

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[savrenim]

Hi! I love your works! What got you into writing and theater? How and where did you start? Just very curious because you are so good! Thank you!

Vaguely long answer (extremely long way too long I’m so sorry I think this is the most I’ve talked about myself on tumblr in years) under the cut because I ramble a lot about my own life and these two things have been stupidly important in my life?

Writing!

So I was a very solitary kid because ew what was being outside, that’s boring, which meant I spent every single day from about fourth grade, when I was finally allowed do this, to eighth grade, during recess and lunch, in the library reading. (Same in high school, except we had different periods and breaks and by that time I was in enough AP classes that it was usually homework I was doing.) I read so much as a kid. Then there were also the classroom libraries that were just, like, two shelves of books that you could read during class if you were done with your exercises, those I’d read every single book on the shelf since, like, second grade, although each grade new classroom new shelf so new books, but by third or fourth grade I was on my third read-through of everything on that grade’s shelf and was so bored of books that I’d read already and decided then and there that if there were no new books for me to read, I was going to write my own book to read.

I don’t think the .docs exist anymore of this really shitty story that I started in third grade that I’m pretty sure were about three triplets who were princesses and the Chosen Ones and had all sorts of magical powers but it was a world where everyone had different types of powers but theirs were more powerful because they were Special with a Capitol S…I think one could manipulate all water, one could make force fields (which, of course, she could use to fly, you can do anything with forcefields if you try hard enough) and I forget what the other one could do, probably control energy/electricity? It was somewhere between 30 and 50 pages of Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double spaced. The Princesses had to run away from someone trying to assassinate them and take over the kingdom and train and learn to use their powers and the only thing I remember is that their powers kept getting more and more ridiculous as the story went on as I got more and more creative with applications of them (like the water one made a boat out of water and they escaped in the ocean sitting in this water boat as it propelled along like that scene from The Incredibles except the boat was all water instead of Mom and Dash), it was a mess but it was a beautiful mess and now it is gone forever probably because I think my mother’s computer has crashed and been replaced a couple times since then. RIP.

I’ve never really stopped writing, like. I wrote a shit-ton of fanfiction in high school because I found a show that I really liked the world background and felt like not enough of the characters were explored so I just hit the ground running, I think there’s, like, 550k or so of fanfic I wrote on an account that I have buried at the bottom of fanfiction.net and will never reveal to anyone ever. There’s a draft of a novel from high school too, this one, like, 95k, and I still have it. I may or may not have been re-working it as a part of a 7-novel biblical apocalypse in space idea that I had for a while, but that all got put on hold when I started it feels more like a memory. Um. Since high school, I did NaNo four or five times and have vague half-drafts sitting around from a bunch of those, too? Then there’s an immense amount that Wayfinder has played into my writing, which will be covered in the theater section, but I’ve probably written somewhere around 200k for Wayfinder, and then I’ve participated at this point in 102 Wayfinder games, I’ve kept a list, and those feel like living in a novel for anywhere from two to five hours and are just…all life-changing in terms of gaining perspective. But yeah, there are a dozen half-finished drafts of this and that that I’ve got on my computer that maybe one day will become something, maybe won’t, they keep me warm on a cloudy day type deal.

I remember when I first entered college four and a half years ago I was really proud because I’d passed the landmark of having written 1 million words of fiction so far in my life. I’m probably around a million and a half now? I stopped counting. But I was obsessed at the time with the 10,000 hours rule which when applied to writing was the 1 million words rule so I officially thought I maybe Wasn’t Crap™ after that.

But, yeah, writing has always been a huge part of my life, and a mostly private part of my life? It was just something I did in my free time for me and if I ever shared it, it was fanfiction, and in high school that meant it was anonymous in that it was under a pseudonym and disconnected from me as a person in every other aspect and thus very compartmentalized. Never something I had to worry about confrontation or being judged about. As a kid I always wanted to be a novelist, like, do science and math and then publish cool science fiction on the side. I still want to do that, write and publish and original novel. Although it’s less of a life goal and more, like, if it happens it happens. I was worried for so long about getting a manuscript accepted by an agent or editor but as I’ve gotten older and older I’ve started hating capitalism more and more and would want anything I write to be available for free online, and my friend @ink-splotch has been talking to me and giving me advice about what self-publishing is like, (also go read her books) (they are the best in the world and I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of inspiration from just aaaah the writing style and the world mechanics and the casual folklore and treatment of side characters), but, like. Yeah. Maybe I’ll publish one day. I’m considering writing a sequel to it feels more like a memory and writing it as an original novel because the main things that the sequel deals with are the consequences of “what does a Seer mean in terms of modern physics” (as in our modern type modern, maybe even a bit in our future) and, of course, our favorite cast of characters still appears but it’s not terribly important that they be the specific historical characters and there’s a lot of issues surrounding “any story about these historical characters is a story that is intrinsically exalting slave owners” that at this point, like, if I’m writing a story that’s no longer set in the historical setting, why should I stick so solidly to the names of people that at this point have evolved very much beyond their historical counterparts and will probably eventually evolve past the direct musical interpretation too, when I could just change names and then have it be my own original fiction that could either stand on its own or be read as a direct sequel, and then it’s not connected to the atrocities that Hamilton characters are connected to, and also just I really do want to try my hand at original fiction again. So that might be on the horizon.

Um, writing. Yeah. I’m really only used to doing it for me. To be honest, it’s ridiculously weird to me the following that it feels more like a memory has gotten, and kind of uncomfortable at times? I mean, I wouldn’t change anything, I’m really grateful for the massive response and how much it’s mattered to various people, it’s not mine anymore, it’s a collective experience this attitude almost definitely also comes from my experiences at Wayfinder and mostly it’s just really weird to me how big of a part of my life this has become? Like, when I look back on 2016 and 2017 and maybe 2018 decades from now, they’re going to be the years when I was first doing math and physics research and publishing papers in scientific journals and applying to grad school and working on my cool shiny space thesis but also the years that I was writing it feels more like a memory, like, literally, there are pages and pages of handwritten scenes scrawled in my personal journals right next to mathematical calculations and notes and research and grad school lists. This fic has kind of really changed my life. It’s been a huge part of what I think about on a day-to-day basis, I’ve put an immense amount of time and energy and resources into it, I’ve learned so much about a bunch of subjects that were never relevant to my life before, I’ve made friends, I’ve started talking to people, also just, like, bouncing ideas around and going back and forth about the musical Hamilton and writing plans and writing techniques and James Madison has been one of the reasons I’ve gotten really close with a person that I consider to maybe be my best friend today. Even this blog has gone from “my Wayfinder friends and maybe a few campers follow me” to “holy shit a whole bunch of people that I don’t know, like, an entire order of magnitude more than the people that I do know, follow me now,” and it was just really…unexpected. I started writing it feels more like a memory for me. It was an experiment, it was just curiosity of trying to reproduce the sense of inevitability and growing doom caused by Aaron Burr’s dual role as narrator and character, it was never supposed to become…this.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really grateful, I think it changed me for the better, and this isn’t me going “I wish everyone would unfollow me so I could go back to being a hermit,” I’m just kind of…still in shock. That it’s grown bigger than me. And that maybe if I keep doing this writing thing, life won’t go back to normal, this is the new normal.

Anyways that was probably way more deep and introspective than you asked for, let’s move on to

Theater!

My father is a tenured professor at UCLA in the math department, he got a joint math-physics PhD from Princeton, he taught me how to do algebra over the summers before I learned to read, you can see where I got my math genes from.

My mother, who is an accountant and a damn good one too so also does a shit-ton of math, was really really into musical theater before she settled down to do taxes, and did a bunch of theater and singing, like, she was a Madonna impersonator once and totally toured Japan with an Elvis impersonator giving shows, she and my father met at a singing competition that she won and I don’t think my father ever got over it, she and my dad are divorced now but the person she’s currently with and has been her ~soulmate~ for forever she met because they were in a production of Lancelot and he was playing Lancelot and she was playing Guinevere.

(It’s really funny because actually the woman that I’m in love with and that if I believed in soulmates would defs be my soulmate, it’s scary how in sync we always are it’s like we can legit read each other’s minds, literally, and we consistently call each other at exactly the same time not having planned it and finish each other’s sentences and have been on the same page about everything for as long as we’ve known each other and also literally dated the same dudes vaguely in reverse order before we went “wait what if screw guys, we were dating instead” and she maybe hopefully will become my fiancé when I’m in a stable enough position financially to ask, I also met her through theater camp after we kept being cast in roles in which we were romantically connected to one another until we went “what if we did this in real life too.” So I guess it too runs in the family.)

I was in choir from, like, first grade on all the way through high school, religious choir in 1st-8th and then “we perform cool arrangements” choir in high school. My father coached me in signing lessons so I could be in the school-wide talent show in first grade. I was a total ham, I loved the spotlight. I took piano lessons for a little while? So I can sight-read. But, like, the theater side of things, I was in every single musical I was allowed to be from 7th grade, where they first let you into the drama program, through the three years I was in high school before I technically dropped out of high school. I ran lights and soundboard for a bunch of events in college because wheeee work-study jobs, so I was in on the technical side of theater too for a bit.

The real theater thing that I’ve actually been really involved in and really active in has been a summer camp called “The Wayfinder Experience”. It’s…I call it “gay theater camp” a lot because it really is, like, the amount that it is a safe space for LGBT kids is ridiculous, I’m pretty sure there are more non-straight and non-cis people in the community than not, and Wayfinder is just…absolutely unique in what they do. I found them when I was 15, a counselor from AstroCamp that I was absolutely enamored with went “you should really come to Wayfinder, I think you’d love it,” and I did mostly because I was absolutely enamored with them, and it changed my life.

Wayfinder is technically a LARPing camp, I guess, but they’re so much more than that. What they do revolves around these “Adventure Games” that are run, but there’s a huge amount of improv workshops and community-building exercises and spending time in nature and ridiculous games like Blood Rush which the best I can describe it is “Vampire Murder Football” but everyone hangs out, gets to be silly, gets to play all these really cool different things during workshops, but then also there will be a writer for any given week of camp that has prepared a whole world with its own mythology and history and geopolitical landscape and religions and important conflicts, we range in genres from high fantasy to cyberpunk to apocalypse settings to Westerns to just…anything that anyone can imagine. And the gamewriter will, over the course of the week, lead workshops where they tell everyone about this world they wrote and cast people as characters in it and everyone will do character development workshops where they flesh out their own backstories and make connections to other characters and are led through exercises that is everything from “how does your character walk” to “what are slang words that your little friend group uses” to “what do you dream about at night”. And then for game, the Sets and Props department turns the entire campus into an area in the world that the gamewriter designed, and everyone gets a full costume designed for them from the costuming department and then just for, like, three to five hours, we all enter the world that we’ve been learning about all week and just…act. Improvise. Like, there’s “flow,” or quasi-planned events that staff members who are cast as characters that generally have some power to shake and move things (i.e. politicians, respected scientists, mad wizards, evil Lords of the Dead) will be told “okay about an hour after game starts if these things happen do this or move things in this direction,” but otherwise it is the campers who are kind of deciding the fate of the world by their actions and their choices that they make fully in character.

So yeah. It’s like living in a novel. And I’ve gotten to do it 102 times at this point, for the first summer as a camper and then pretty much immediately I got hired as a staff member. I’m every once in a while a Workshop staff, aka leading forty-to-sixty kids in theater games and improv games and run-around games outside etc etc, I’m usually costuming staff which means wheeee so much sewing and organizing from our pre-existing costuming, although I’ve done Sets and Props a fair amount of the time too. I also was involved in the founding of the Frontier Adventures, which is an off-season year round program that every other month on Saturday runs a full day event and all proceeds go to the Hero Fund where kids who can’t afford to go to camp can get to go for free and so I was doing, like, directing and hiring and renting the land and organizing the schedule and just running those events for the last two years. I retired for the 2016-2017 season to concentrate on applying to grad school.

And then, of course, I’ve done a lot of gamewriting for Wayfinder. I’ve written and run four pretty serious games that I’m stupidly proud of—The Old Land, Octagon House, Requiem, and The Wishing Well. Writing a game is like nothing else in the world. It’s kind of like writing a novel, it’s certainly as much work as writing a novel, except you get to watch your novel come to life. You have to know your world inside and out—in the world background workshops, you’re going to have fifty kids throwing questions at you that are anywhere from “how’s the gay thing going” to “so you know your werewolf world has seven different moons for the seven different tribes of werewolves, and the sixth moon has an irregular orbit, first of all I’m assuming this is a rocky planet because it holds life so it can be at most four times the size/density of Earth but then also all of these moons are large enough such that their gravity makes them spherical, what does that do to the tides? As well as are tidal forces strong enough to affect volcano patterns on this planet, like it does on Jupiter’s moon Io? Also how in the world does the sixth moon have an irregular orbit, was it created more recently than the others or tugged into the gravitational well of the planet within the last few millennia, or—“ to, you know, more answerable questions like “how does [this part of the mythology] affect [this geopolitical issue].”

But it also just—it makes storytelling such a collaborative process. You write something, you dream up a whole world and the unique incredible people who live in it and the thousands of stories that make up their lives and the bursting potential of where a story can go, and then you hand it over, you give it to a community that you know and you trust and you’ve just met, you gift each of your characters to someone new, and then you watch as their bring your world to life. Your story isn’t your story. It’s the story of everyone who has experienced everything along with you. And it’s so incredible to be on the other end of it too, to be gifted a character and given the fate of the entire universe that rests on the decisions that you and your friends make in the moment. You live and you die and you laugh and you sacrifice everything and you find bravery within yourself that you never had before, and when you come out of it, you’ve…you’ve got fifty or sixty new best friends that maybe you haven’t known them in the real world for so long but you’ve bled (not usually real blood, we’re a summer camp for kids, after all) and sweat and cried and changed the world next to them, over and over, and it forms bonds of trust and a community in the real world unlike anything else.

So, yeah. Wayfinder has been a huge part of my life and my worldview and my experiences for the last…six years now? They’re my community, they’re my best friends, it was where I turned when I was scared and hurting and didn’t know where I was or how I was ever going to get through life and it was just…everything. And it sort of still is. So yeah. Gay theater camp. It’s the best.

I learned about Hamilton through Wayfinder, actually. I was Patient 2, but, like, I learned about it one day after Patient 0 learned off of an add on Amazon.com, Patient 0 showed it to Patient 1 who the next day when I was driving him and two other staff members to the cleanup for a Frontier showed it to me and then I infected, like, 100 campers within the next two months so I feel like I really deserve the title Patient 0 but technically I’m Patient 2.

I kind of really miss doing musical theater, like, theater on a stage type deal for an audience, I’m just way too busy now with math and physics things to consider that. But, yeah, theater, it’s great, it was a huge part of my childhood and then gay theater camp was the biggest influence on me during my formative years.

Hope that answers your questions!

#my life #my fic #anon #personal #gay theater camp #Wayfinder #The Wayfinder Experience #in which Sidus answers a question with way more personal details than probably intended #read this if you want to learn a shit-ton about who I am as a person I guess #long post

[mynameisbibliophile]

Story Time

This is a really long story about the worst professor I ever had. I’ve told this story before, but 2017 is the year to let go of things, and this is something I’ve held onto for way too long, so I’d like to share this story with anyone who has the time to listen to it.

When I was a junior in college (this was about 5 years ago), I was minoring in Creative Writing and there were very few options at my university for CW classes, so the second class I took in the time I was there was a Short Stories class, even though i’m pretty awful at writing short stories. The course that I chose was being taught by a fairly successful middle-aged writer who had recently landed a pretty big movie deal. I won’t say his name. It’s not important, and it’s not the point.

During our first class, he announced that no one was allowed to write sci-fi, fantasy, or anything including zombies, vampires, or the apocalypse. He said he wanted “serious fiction.” It didn’t seem totally unreasonable at the time, but now I know that his intention was to teach us to write the kinds of stories he liked to read/write, stifling our own creativity.

But I hadn’t learned that yet. He wasn’t a terrible teacher, but I didn’t learn much as I quickly grew tired of the sound of his voice and how much he liked to praise himself. The man couldn’t even remember my name, even though I sat right next to him in our horseshoe-shaped classroom arrangement.

We were supposed to write three short stories over the course of the class. The first story I wrote, a quick two-pager about a man who starts seeing classic literary characters hovering around his apartment, was one of my favorite pieces to date. The story was simply graded on completion, no muss no fuss.

When the second story came around, I had a burst of inspiration, but by the time I sat down to write it, it turned into one of the worst things I’ve ever written. These stories were supposed to be critiqued in class by our peers, three stories per every three-hour class (we only met once a week), but most of the time, the critiques turned into a one-man show: our professor lecturing on the good and bad until there was nothing left for any of the students to comment on. Not terrible, but not helpful.

During my first critique, my professor spent an hour and a half ripping my story to shreds. He never once said anything positive about it, and he never gave anyone in the class a chance to say anything either. One guy (who I am eternally grateful to) finally cut in and complimented my story, but he was quickly shut down.

After the torture was over, and I was thoroughly humiliated, I went home and got embarrassingly trashed on Dr Pepper and Everclear. I stopped paying attention in class, stopped taking notes, stopped trying to find inspiration for a story. For our next assignment, I wrote a rather boring piece that I wasn’t passionate about. It wasn’t as awful as the previous story, but it definitely wasn’t good. The day before my critique, I bought a six pack of my favorite beer and a package of Oreos to partake in afterwards.

During my critique, my professor called my story “contrived,” “stupid,” and “unoriginal.” At first, I thought I’d heard him wrong, but my only friend in the class assured me that I didn’t. When I got home that afternoon, I didn’t drink the beer or eat the Oreos. I was proud of that, but mostly I was just numb.

During the last week of class, we had to schedule an office meeting with our professor to discuss our final story edit. I had horrible anxiety before my meeting at the idea of having to face him alone, but I sucked it up and went to the meeting. He was nice enough at first, giving me pointers on my second story so that I could revise it for my final grade.

And then he asked where I planned to take my writing. This was an easy question for me because writing had always been the only thing I ever wanted to do. So I told him I was a novelist and had a few completed projects that I was looking to try and publish.

He asked me what genre I wrote.

I told him YA.

He rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, you mean teenage love stories?”

To this day, the only thing I really regret was laughing in that moment. It was a nervous, uncomfortable, unsure laugh that happened only because I was still trying to respect him as a possible authority figure. I still wanted a good grade. I still cared about graduating at the top of my class. I wish I hadn’t laughed. Because it wasn’t funny.

Yes, I write teenage love stories. And he writes garbage that never got him anywhere. But I digress.

That ended up being the last time I saw him. He was too busy at his Los Angeles premier to show up for our final class, and i was so relieved, I almost cried.

After that class, I found out I wasn’t the only one who’d been mistreated by this person who had so much potential. He’d destroyed a girl’s hard work by giving her a terrible grade that she didn’t deserve, effectively ruining her GPA and stripping her of her honors status. He tore into one of my best friends’ stories in a later class, and she didn’t write for almost three years because of it.

He also did other things, worse things I think. A year after I finished with his class, a friend of mine approached me. This professor was up for tenure, and a bunch of students wanted to report him to the Dean so that he wouldn’t get it. They asked me to join in the report. I agreed.

I prepared my story, ready to keep this man from tearing down others, but for some reason, the other students never went through with reporting him. I wish I gone through with it, but he ended up not getting tenure, and about two years later, he took a job at a university out of state.

There’s a point to this story.

I’ve been writing novels since I was 15. For ten years. I’ve received horrible feedback, a flood of rejection letters, more negative comments than you could imagine.

But more than any of that, this single professor’s words hurt me so much that I didn’t write again for almost six months. That was five years ago, but I still think about it ALL THE TIME. His words still echo in my head.

And during a particularly difficult time in early 2016, I started to believe his words. I started to think he’d been right all along. I almost gave up.

My debut novel is going to be released on June 5, 2018, 6 years after that stupid class, when I almost stopped writing because I thought I would never have anything to offer.

I used to imagine what I would say if I my books were successful, what I might say if we ever bumped into each other somewhere (he probably wouldn’t even recognize me). But now I know I wouldn’t say anything. I would just walk away with the knowledge that I survived the awful things he said to me and that I accomplished my dreams despite him.

It’s time for me to let it go and move on because I got what I wanted without his help.

If you sat through this awfully long story, thanks. I just needed to get it out so I could let it go.

#writelr #writlr #sorry this is so long #you don't have to read it #I just needed to write it

[mhsn033]

Coronavirus in South Africa: Why the low fatality rate is misleading

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As coronavirus infections surge, at ferocious dart, across South Africa, I’ve spent the closing couple of weeks utilizing via this huge country looking to treasure where and why issues are going both fair appropriate and inferior.

Right here, in seven features, are some early conclusions and, perhaps, some more classes for the remainder of the continent.

1)The fog of battle

Be cautious of statistics, even right here in South Africa, which has about a of essentially the most nice looking recordsdata sequence on the continent.

And be some distance more cautious of memoir-essentially essentially essentially based assumptions.

Some observers possess rushed to celebrate figures showing to existing an impressively low fatality price for Covid-19 sufferers in the country – 1.4% compared with 15% in the UK. Can also or no longer or no longer it’s some distance thanks to a gorgeous younger population? Or perhaps Africans revel in some special immunity, genetic or in every other case?

The brief solution is No. Or moderately, or no longer it’s composed some distance too early to tell.

Within the occasion you assessment, for instance, fatality rates for confirmed virus sufferers in South Africa’s predominant hospitals, they are nearly precisely the same as these in Italy or the UK.

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But in the occasion you enhance the statistical pool beyond clinical institution admissions, then every country and every province is the use of mainly diversified criteria and diversified methods.

“It turns into meaningless,” College of Witwatersrand vaccine professional Prof Shabir Madhi instructed me.

He features out that so tiny testing is going on across the remainder of the continent that it’s very no longer going to plot any worthwhile conclusions or comparisons. His hunch is that – as with the Swine flu pandemic of 2009 – we can most efficient know the virus’ comely influence in Africa in several years.

2) Anxiousness of hospitals

Staying on the trouble of statistics, South African researchers possess published alarming details about 17,000 extra deaths which seem to existing foremost below-reporting of fatalities from Covid-19 right here.

As the researchers point out, a rising apprehension of going wherever shut to hospitals or clinics – no longer fraudulent in some locations – may perhaps perhaps well well neatly be a foremost part.

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This methodology that many folks with the virus are death at dwelling, whereas others are succumbing to diversified ailments in resolution to searching for medicine.

Testing for TB has, for instance, declined by about 50% in contemporary weeks, and there became once a 25% bargain in immunisations in South Africa.

The answer? There is no fleet repair to this, nonetheless local health departments want to influence a nearer job of working with their communities, to possess belief both with sufferers and with employees who possess most often reacted to novel infections and capacity exposure by, for instance, closing down complete clinics for weeks.

3) Beware white elephants

In Port Elizabeth, a enormous novel coronavirus “area clinical institution” has been built by the non-public sector. But, as of closing week, most efficient round 30 of its 1,200 beds were being venerable thanks to a shortage of foremost employees and oxygen.

“Brainless,” acknowledged Professor Madhi, dismissively when speaking about the clinical institution.

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The provincial authorities in Gauteng has built one thing nonetheless again, infrequently any of the beds are both staffed or possess oxygen gives, leaving the facility nearly empty, and prompting volunteers and non-public donors to step in to do away with a see at to rescue the trouble.

“Oxygen is the novel forex,” one doctor instructed me, complaining that more than half of of the facility remained “a white elephant” and that plans to add one other 700 beds would be a complete raze of time and money if the local authorities failed to possess clear additional oxygen gives and hire the clinical employees required.

4) Right here to pause

“The storm is upon us,” acknowledged President Cyril Ramaphosa closing week, and his possibility of weather metaphor became once appropriate. After all, wars – the virus analogy favoured by many global leaders – are inclined to complete, whereas the weather will continuously be with us and so, perhaps, will this coronavirus.

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Within the absence of a vaccine, herd immunity, or foremost behavioural change, several consultants possess instructed me they assume South Africa may perhaps perhaps well well have to treat Covid-19 the same methodology it has dealt with TB (which composed kills some 200 folks on daily foundation right here) and HIV, and learn to live with the virus on a protracted-interval of time foundation.

5) Flooring Up

Plenty has been written about the energetic, generous, and on occasion effective role played by South Africa’s non-public sector in serving to to take care of the virus. But, as neatly-liked, it’s local communities and little organisations which possess essentially the most difference in such crises, and which are all too most often no longer accepted.

Medical doctors in Cape City instructed me that it became once the clinics that loved the closest long-interval of time relationships with local communities and understood essentially the most nice looking diagram to talk with them.

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The Cape City Together Fb page is a respectable portal in which to explore the categories of grass-roots work that is thriving during the lockdown – the Group Motion Networks, for instance – and that will but support to reconfigure a number of the enviornment’s most unequal, and siloed societies, once the instantaneous storm has handed.

6) Exposing the rot

It became once a revealing second. Within the midst of this health crisis, highly effective figures in South Africa’s governing ANC were caught pushing to reinstate two senior figures who had been implicated in one of essentially the most egregious corruption scandals of the country’s democratic technology – the looting and collapse of the rural VBS financial institution.

It became once a sobering reminder of the institutional rot all via the ANC, where competence and honesty are on occasion valued no longer up to occasion loyalty, and where a culture of “cadre deployment” has left some key verbalize establishments – hospitals and health companies, for instance – managed by unqualified occasion hacks.

“Within the occasion it’s foremost to never possess sturdy management programs, you may perhaps perhaps well well perhaps’t change the trouble in a single day, during a scourge,” one senior doctor in Johannesburg complained to me, arguing that Gauteng’s provincial health division became once nearly as incompetent as the Eastern Cape’s.

You are going to additionally be involving about:

Within the aftermath of this crisis – and I endure in thoughts one thing similar being published on a village-by-village foundation following the Asian tsunami – the quality of local leadership looks likely to be a defining part in distinguishing between the successes and the failures.

7) Masks, masks, masks

As the UK agonises over the specifics of when and where and essentially the most nice looking diagram to position on masks in public, it’s encouraging to worth how like a flash, and pretty obediently, South Africans possess knuckled all the diagram down to the enterprise of face-defending.

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Sure, there are huge and rising frustrations right here, no longer least in the hospitality and alcohol industries, as they battle with the implications of the authorities’s on occasion erratic, contradictory lockdown suggestions.

As an instance, why can passengers squeeze onto a minibus nonetheless folks no longer consume in drinking locations?

But many clinical doctors right here seem convinced that masks will worth to be the one major step in tackling the virus, in particular in crowded townships, where social distancing is a shut to impossibility.

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[cedarrrun]

Psychedlics are having a moment. Psychiatrists are administering magic mushrooms in medical centers while yogis host ceremonies with psychoactive tea. This resurgence in research and recreational use may have something to teach us about spiritual enlightenment. Here, we explore the potential role of psychedelics within a yoga practice or as therapeutic treatment.

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journey weekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

See also This is the Reason I Take the Subway 45 Minutes Uptown to Work Out—Even Though There’s a Gym On My Block

“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction

This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,” says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

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Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

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Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

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The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

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“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

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Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

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Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

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“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

[chocolate-brownies]

Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?

Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?:

Psychedlics are having a moment. Psychiatrists are administering magic mushrooms in medical centers while yogis host ceremonies with psychoactive tea. This resurgence in research and recreational use may have something to teach us about spiritual enlightenment. Here, we explore the potential role of psychedelics within a yoga practice or as therapeutic treatment.

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journeyweekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

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“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

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This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,�� says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

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Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

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Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

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The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

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“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

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Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in theJournal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

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Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation… This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

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“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

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Psychedlics are having a moment. Psychiatrists are administering magic mushrooms in medical centers while yogis host ceremonies with psychoactive tea. This resurgence in research and recreational use may have something to teach us about spiritual enlightenment. Here, we explore the potential role of psychedelics within a yoga practice or as therapeutic treatment.

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journey weekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

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“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

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This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,” says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

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Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

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Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

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The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

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“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

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Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

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Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

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“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

[amyddaniels]

Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?

Psychedlics are having a moment. Psychiatrists are administering magic mushrooms in medical centers while yogis host ceremonies with psychoactive tea. This resurgence in research and recreational use may have something to teach us about spiritual enlightenment. Here, we explore the potential role of psychedelics within a yoga practice or as therapeutic treatment.

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journey weekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

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“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

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This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,” says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

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Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

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Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

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The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

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“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

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Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

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Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

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“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

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Would You Consider Trying Psychedelics to Take Your Practice to Another Level?

Psychedlics are having a moment. Psychiatrists are administering magic mushrooms in medical centers while yogis host ceremonies with psychoactive tea. This resurgence in research and recreational use may have something to teach us about spiritual enlightenment. Here, we explore the potential role of psychedelics within a yoga practice or as therapeutic treatment.

Top yoga and meditation teachers Sally Kempton and Ram Dass share their personal experiences with psychedelics as we explore the latest trends in research and recreational use.

When a friend invited Maya Griffin* to a “journey weekend”—two or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakening—she found herself considering it. “Drugs were never on my radar,” says Griffin, 39, of New York City. “At an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family member’s mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didn’t touch them.” But then Griffin met Julia Miller* in a yoga class, and after about a year of friendship, Miller began sharing tales from her annual psychedelic weekends. She’d travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a “medicine man” from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these “medicines” that had helped her feel connected to the divine. She’d talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.

This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelics—such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants that’s extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience that’s over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or “acid,” which is chemically synthesized from a fungus), and Ayahuasca (a brew that blends whole plants containing DMT with those that have enzyme inhibitors that prolong the DMT experience). Miller described it as a “choose your own adventure” weekend, where Griffin could opt in or out of various drugs as she pleased. Griffin eventually decided to go for it. Miller recommended she first do a “mini journey”—just one day and one drug—to get a sense of what it would be like and to see if a longer trip was really something she wanted to do. So, a couple of months before the official journey, Griffin took a mini journey with magic mushrooms.

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“It felt really intentional. We honored the spirits of the four directions beforehand, a tradition among indigenous cultures, and asked the ancestors to keep us safe,” she says. “I spent a lot of time feeling heavy, lying on the couch at first. Then, everything around me looked more vibrant and colorful. I was laughing hysterically with a friend. Time was warped. At the end, I got what my friends would call a ‘download,’ or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time and I found myself having this sense that I needed to carve out space for a partner in my life. It was sweet and lovely.”

Griffin, who’s practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to “pull back the ‘veil of perception,’” is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. They’re embarking on journey weekends, doing psychedelics in meditation circles, and taking the substances during art and music festivals to feel connected to a larger community and purpose. But a renewed interest in these explorations, and the mystical experiences they produce, isn’t confined to recreational settings. Psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, a psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, are being studied by scientists, psychiatrists, and psychologists again after a decades-long hiatus following the experimental 1960s—a time when horror stories of recreational use gone wrong contributed to bans on the drugs and harsh punishments for anyone caught with them. This led to the shutdown of all studies into potential therapeutic uses, until recently. (The drugs are still illegal outside of clinical trials.)

Another Trip with Psychedelics

The freeze on psychedelics research was lifted in the early 1990s with Food and Drug Administration approval for a small pilot study on DMT, but it took another decade before studies of psychedelics began to pick up. Researchers are taking another look at drugs that alter consciousness, both to explore their potential role as a novel treatment for a variety of psychiatric or behavioral disorders and to study the effects that drug-induced mystical experiences may have on a healthy person’s life—and brain. “When I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,” says Charles Grob, MD, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted a 2011 pilot study on the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. Now researchers such as Grob are following up on the treatment models developed in the ’50s and ’60s, especially for patients who don’t respond well to conventional therapies.

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This opening of the vault—research has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerland—has one big difference from studies done decades ago: Researchers use stringent controls and methods that have since become the norm (the older studies relied mostly on anecdotal accounts and observations that occurred under varying conditions). These days, scientists are also utilizing modern neuroimaging machines to get a glimpse into what happens in the brain. The results are preliminary but seem promising and suggest that just one or two doses of a psychedelic may be helpful in treating addictions (such as to cigarettes or alcohol), treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. “It’s not about the drug per se, it’s about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,” says Anthony Bossis, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine who conducted a 2016 study on the use of psilocybin for patients with cancer who were struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential distress (fear of ceasing to exist).

Spiritual experiences in particular are showing up in research summaries. The term “psychedelic” was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean “mind revealing.” Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they don’t always produce hallucinations, and as entheogens, or substances that generate the divine. In the pilot study looking at the effects of DMT on healthy volunteers, University of New Mexico School of Medicine researchers summarized the typical participant experience as “more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.” In a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine gave a relatively high dose (30 mg) of psilocybin to healthy volunteers who’d never previously taken a hallucinogen and found that it could reliably evoke a mystical-type experience with substantial personal meaning for participants. About 70 percent of participants rated the psilocybin session as among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. In addition, the participants reported positive changes in mood and attitude about life and self—which persisted at a 14-month follow-up. Interestingly, core factors researchers used in determining whether a study participant had a mystical-type experience, also known as a peak experience or a spiritual epiphany, was their report of a sense of “unity” and “transcendence of time and space.” (See “What’s a Mystical Experience?” on page 59 for the full list of how experts define one.)

In psilocybin studies for cancer distress, the patients who reported having a mystical experience while on the drug also scored higher in their reports of post-session benefits. “For people who are potentially dying of cancer, the ability to have a mystical experience where they describe experiencing self-transcendence and no longer solely identifying with their bodies is a profound gift,” says Bossis, also a clinical psychologist with a speciality in palliative care and a long interest in comparative religions. He describes his research as the study of “the scientific and the sacred.” In 2016 he published his findings on psilocybin for cancer patients in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showing that a single psilocybin session led to improvement in anxiety and depression, a decrease in cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness, improved spiritual well-being, and increased quality of life—both immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. “The drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,” Bossis says.

Learn if psychedelics complement a yoga practice or promote healing.

The Science of Spirituality

In addition to studying psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients, Bossis is director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project (a sister project at Johns Hopkins is also in progress), which is recruiting religious leaders from different lineages—Christian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imams—and giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. “They’re helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,” says Bossis, who adds that it’s too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, conducted in 1962 by psychiatrist and minister Walter Pahnke. Pahnke was working on a PhD in religion and society at Harvard University and his experiment was overseen by members of the Department of Psychology, including psychologist Timothy Leary, who’d later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, who’d later return from India as Ram Dass and introduce a generation to bhakti yoga and meditation. Pahnke wanted to explore whether using psychedelics in a religious setting could invoke a profound mystical experience, so at a Good Friday service his team gave 20 divinity students a capsule of either psilocybin or an active placebo, niacin. At least 8 of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported a powerful mystical experience, compared to 1 of 10 in the control group. While the study was later criticized for failing to report an adverse event—a tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to return—it was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms “set” and “setting,” commonly used by researchers and recreational users alike. Set is the intention you bring to a psychedelic experience, and setting is the environment in which you take it.

“Set and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,” UCLA’s Grob says. “Optimizing set prepares an individual and helps them fully understand the range of effects they might have with a substance. It asks patients what their intention is and what they hope to get out of their experience. Setting is maintaining a safe and secure environment and having someone there who will adequately and responsibly monitor you.”

Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of life—a sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if it’s dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. “As counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dying—to go ahead. They won’t die physically, of course; it’s an experience of ego death and transcendence,” he says. “By moving into it, you’re directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.”

In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center that’s made to look more like a living room. Participants lie on a couch, wear an eye mask and headphones (listening to mostly classical and instrumental music), and receive encouragement from their therapists to, for example, “go inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.” Therapists are mostly quiet. They are there to monitor patients and assist them if they experience anything difficult or frightening, or simply want to talk.

“Even in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,” says Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. “I’m happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.”

The Shadow Side and How to Shift It

While all of this may sound enticing, psychedelic experiences may not be so reliably enlightening or helpful (or legal) when done recreationally, especially at a young age. Documentary filmmaker and rock musician Ben Stewart, who hosts the series Psychedelica on Gaia.com, describes his experiences using psychedelics, including mushrooms and LSD, as a teen as “pushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.” He says, “I wasn’t in a sacred place or even a place where I was respecting the power of the plant. I was just doing it whenever, and I had extremely terrifying experiences.” Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. “They’d say to bring an intention or ask a question and keep revisiting it throughout the journey. I was always given something more beautiful even if it took me to a dark place.”

Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a “sacred psychoactives” class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, young people had rites of passage in which they might be taken aside by a shaman and given a psychedelic plant or be told to go spend the night on a mountaintop. When they returned to the tribe, they’d be given more privileges since they’d gone through an initiation,” she says. Mars says LSD and mushrooms combined with prayer and intention helped put her on a path of healthy eating and yoga at a young age, and she strives to educate students about using psychedelics in a more responsible way, should they opt to partake in them. “This is definitely not supposed to be about going to a concert and getting as far out as possible. It can be an opportunity for growth and rebirth and to recalibrate your life. It’s a special occasion,” she says, adding, “psychedelics aren’t for everyone, and they aren’t a substitute for working on yourself.”

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Tara Brach, PhD, a psychologist and the founder of Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, says she sees great healing potential for psychedelics, especially when paired with meditation and in clinical settings, but she warns about the risk of spiritual bypassing—using spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: “Mystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the ‘fast track,’ and now that they’ve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.” She also says that recreational users don’t always give the attention to setting that’s needed to feel safe and uplifted. “Environments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,” she says.

As these drugs edge their way back into contemporary pop culture, researchers warn about the medical and psychological dangers of recreational use, especially when it involves the mixing of two or more substances, including alcohol. “We had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the ’60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,” Grob says. “These are very serious medicines that should only be taken for the most serious of purposes. I also think we need to learn from the anthropologic record about how to utilize these compounds in a safe manner. It wasn’t for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individual’s identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.”

Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.

Yoga’s Psychedelic Roots

Anthropologists have discovered mushroom iconography in churches throughout the world. And some scholars make the case that psychoactive plants may have played a role in the early days of yoga tradition. The Rig Veda and the Upanishads (sacred Indian texts) describe a drink called soma (extract) or amrita (nectar of immortality) that led to spiritual visions. “It’s documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,” say Tias Little, a yoga teacher and founder of Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also points to Yoga Sutra 4.1, in which Patanjali mentions that paranormal attainments can be obtained through herbs and mantra.

“Psychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both ways—helping or harming,” says Ganga White, author of Yoga Beyond Belief and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. “If you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicine—there’s a saying like this in the Bhagavad Gita.”

White’s first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. “I was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,” he says. “I saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.” That year he started going to talks by a professor of comparative religion who told him that a teacher from India in the Sivananda lineage had come to the United States. White went to study with him, and he would later make trips to India to learn from other teachers. As his yoga practice deepened, White stopped using psychedelics. His first yoga teachers were adamantly anti-drug. “I was told that they would destroy your chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,” he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice “duplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialism” in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were “analog to true experiences.” He started combining meditation and psychedelics. “I think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,” he says. “It’s like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.”

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Meditation teacher Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It, shares the sentiment. She says it was her use of psychedelics during the ’60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the tantric tradition. “Everyone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didn’t have yoga studios yet,” she says. “I had my first awakening on acid. It was wildly dramatic because I was really innocent and had hardly done any spiritual reading. Having that experience of ‘everything is love’ was totally revelatory. When I began meditating, it was essentially for the purpose of getting my mind to become clear enough so that I could find that place that I knew was the truth, which I knew was love.” Kempton says she’s done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for “psychological journeying,” which she describes as “looking into issues I find uncomfortable or that I’m trying to break through and understand.”

Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didn’t have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. “I was experimenting as a young person and there were a number of forces shifting my own sense of self-identity and self-worth. I landed on meditation as a way to sustain a kind of open awareness,” he says, noting that psychedelics are no longer part of his sadhana (spiritual path).

Going Beyond the Veil

After her first psychedelic experience on psilocybin, Griffin decided to join her friends for a journey weekend. On offer Friday night were “Rumi Blast” (a derivative of DMT) and “Sassafras,” which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. “Once I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentional—almost like the start of a yoga retreat,” she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. “I was lying down and couldn’t move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,” she says. After about five minutes—the length of a typical peak on DMT—she sat up abruptly. “I took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.” Next up was Sassafras: “It ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.” Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. “It was a hyper-color world. Plants and tables were moving. At one point I started sobbing and I felt like I was crying for the world. Two minutes felt like two hours,” she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, “The experiences will never leave me. Now when I look at a tree, it isn’t undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, ‘What am I not seeing that’s still there?’”

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The Chemical Structure of Psychedelics

It was actually the psychedelic research of the 1950s that contributed to our understanding of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood, happiness, social behavior, and more. Most of the classic psychedelics are serotonin agonists, meaning they activate serotonin receptors. (What’s actually happening during this activation is mostly unknown.)

Classic psychedelics are broken into two groups of organic compounds called alkaloids. One group is the tryptamines, which have a similar chemical structure to serotonin. The other group, the phenethylamines, are more chemically similar to dopamine, which regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses. Phenethylamines have effects on both dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems. DMT (found in plants but also in trace amounts in animals), psilocybin, and LSD are tryptamines. Mescaline (derived from cacti, including peyote and San Pedro) is a phenethylamine. MDMA, originally developed by a pharmaceutical company, is also a phenethylamine, but scientists don’t classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and “empathogenic” qualities that help a user bond with others. The classics, whether they come straight from nature (plant teas, whole mushrooms) or are semi-synthetic forms created in a lab (LSD tabs, psilocybin capsules), are catalysts for more inwardly focused personal experiences.

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“Classic psychedelics are physiologically well tolerated—with the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,” says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. “But psychologically there are serious risks, particularly for people with underlying psychiatric conditions or a family history of major mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoia—which often resolves fairly quickly in the right set and setting, Grob says, but can escalate or lead to injuries in other scenarios. In extremely rare but terrifying cases, chronic psychosis, post-traumatic stress from a bad experience, or hallucinogen persisting perception disorder—ongoing visual disturbances, or “flashbacks”—can occur. (There have been no reports of any such problems in modern clinical trials with rigorous screening processes and controlled dosage and support.) Unlike the classic psychedelics, MDMA has serious cardiac risks in high doses and raises body temperature, which has led to cases of people overheating at music festivals and clubs. There’s also always the risk of adverse drug interactions. For example, combining Ayahuasca with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) used to treat depression can lead to serotonin syndrome, which can cause a rise in body temperature and disorientation.

Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.

Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation

Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.

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Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”

When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”

Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.

Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.

“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”

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Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”

Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.

To Journey or Not to Journey?

In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”

In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”

Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”

Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.

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“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”

A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”

* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

What’s a mystical experience?

Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:

• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)

• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence

• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)

• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)

• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)

• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)

from Yoga Journal http://bit.ly/2RHZqFV

#Yoga Journal

[seanpatricklittlewriter]

Six Days...

Six days and counting until I show up at Mystery to Me to promote LORD BOBBINS AND THE ROMANIAN RUCKUS, LONG EMPTY ROADS, and the future TeslaCon books.

I am starting to hit that point where my nerves start kicking in. I like that feeling, that jittery, intense, "pre-stage" feeling, but because my brain is a hateful beast, it starts kicking out worst case scenarios into my consciousness. Like, for example, having no one show up.

When I published my first book, I did it through iUniverse because, at the time, they had a deal that would put books into Barnes & Nobles. As part of that deal, I got to do my very first book signing, and that signing was that the Barnes & Noble in Rochester, Minnesota.

That was a good day for learning lessons, I think. I showed up, the manager put me at a tiny table in the corner of the store, and for four straight hours, I was ignored by all who passed by. No one talked to me. No one bought a book. No one did anything but pretend I was furniture. It was a humbling day, but it did put realistic expectations of book selling into my head forever. Now, I never expect any sales, therefore any sales I do get are simply gravy.

The full day of no sales/signings has happened several times to me. I participated in the Minnesota Book Festival years ago. It was $60 to buy half a table. I did, I went, and sold nothing. However, I spent the day meeting other independent authors and I traded books with them. It wasn't a complete loss, but almost eight hours of sitting at a table and selling nothing taught me to never purchase space to sell my books. Madison Author Daze is coming, and I received an invite to that, but they want $125 for an author to set up a table. I'd never see that money again. I'll stay home, probably sell the same amount of books, and not be out a buck-and-a-quarter. I've learned, over the years, that if you have to pay to sell your books, it's probably not going to work out for you.

I did the Southwestern Wisconsin Book Festival in its first year of existence. Their deal was that the table was free, but you had to give them a $2 or $3 cut on every book you sold. They had a central register and all sales went through them. Easy enough for the writers. I spent the day sandwiched between a Christian romance novelist and a woman who wrote serial novelizations of a long-dead TV show. It was an interesting day. We were all generally ignored by everyone. Very few people attended the festival. It was an almost ten hour day of staring at my computer screen (because thankfully, I'd wised up enough to bring along work by this point). Toward the end of the day, some of the writers were so frustrated with the lack of attendance and sales, that they started going around trying to pitch their books to the other writers. I learned that day to not do that. It was really obnoxious. If the sales are there, fine. But, realize that they will most likely not be there. That's just the nature of the game.

Writer Louis Leung, on Twitter, said that if you start thinking about the bottom line, you're not a writer, you're a businessman. Businessmen make horrible writers. Write the book you want to read, and if you're lucky, other people do, too.

That's all I do. That's all I have ever done. It's hard not to dream of pie-in-the-sky when you get an email from a production company in Hollywood that says, "Hey, we're interested in optioning your book for a potential movie or series," but I've learned there that those conversations almost never go beyond the initial contact. So, here's my advice to writers: set your bar low. As low as you can possibly set it...and then lower it another twenty feet. That's a realistic expectation to being a writer.

I know that some people will show up to the event on Friday, and I will be forever in their debt. Anytime you put yourself out there like this, there is always the potential of no one showing. Even if you're a traditionally published author. (I went to an event not long ago where only myself and one other person showed up.) Until I actually see people there though, my brain will keep showing me loops of me sitting in the corner of the store, covered in dust, while spiders spin webs around my motionless form.

In other news: one of my favorite teachers ever, one of my college professors from UW-Whitewater, died of cancer this past week. Dr. Tremblay was the director of WSUW, the campus radio station at Whitewater where I spent most of my time. I loved being on the radio. It was what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time around Dr. T. He was a New Englander with a very distinct hitch in his speech. Myself, being an incorrigible mimic, used to do an impression of him on the campus radio station. One time, I went off on a tangent during a show, doing my Dr. T impression. After we went back to music, the station phone rang. (It was a college station--the phone RARELY rang.) My buddy John answered it, then held it out to me. Tremblay had been listening (of course). "Listen, Mr. Funnyman," he said. "Where's that sense of humor in your assignments?" So, after that, I had to be funny in his class...or else. When he was giving tours of the stations to people, if I was there, he would make me imitate him.

He was a good dude, and a great teacher.

See you on the other side, Dr. T. The Patriots still suck.

--Sean

#steampunk #steampunk books #steampunk novel #lord bobbins #lordbobbins #teslacon #mysterytome #book signing #dr. wilfred tremblay

[sociologyontherock]

Stumbling up the Academic Ladder to Oxford

By Bernie Hogan

 EDITOR’S NOTE: Bernie Hogan grew up in Gander. He completed a BA degree at Memorial University in 2002 and MA and PhD degrees at the University of Toronto. He is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where he has worked for almost a decade.

At Memorial University I studied both sociology and computer science. I imagine it’s still an uncommon combination (though I wish I could change that). With these skills I became an early entrant in the emerging field of computational social science.

Looking back on my academic life after MUN, it surprises me to this day how much was presaged during my time as an undergraduate there, from my aloof friendliness to my interests in networks, technology, and identity. Since leaving, it feels like I’ve been falling up the stairs on the way to an academic career. For example, I did my degrees at the University of Toronto, after being the last one admitted from the waiting list. I similarly ended up applying to Oxford only after having received a rejection to what I thought would be an ideal post-doc at Statistics Canada in Ottawa. Some of the lessons learned from this trajectory are to be a little bold, but friendly, stay true to your talents and find great people to work with. And don’t be afraid to admit you have a lot to learn.

 Case in point, when I first went to Toronto to look for an apartment, like a proper friendly Newfoundlander, I just strolled in to Professor Barry Wellman’s office. “Hi there, I’ll be a new student in the fall”. “Do you have an appointment?” he replied with some consternation and formality. “Umm…no, but I was in town so I wanted to see who would be teaching me”. “Right. See you in the fall!” Tail between my legs, I left Professor Wellman’s office thinking I might have much to learn about how things work up there.

 I did meet up with Professor Wellman in the fall. In fact, we hit it off well, and I’ve now published over half a dozen articles with him mainly extending his notion of “networked individualism” and my interest in representing and visualising social networks (or the connections of who knows who). I bonded with my cohort at Toronto, including MUN faculty member Rochelle Coté and got used to life in the big city. I was part of a team exploring how new media could intervene in the personal lives of people. Keep in mind, this was at a time when Canada was just getting used to cell phones. Friendster was a novelty and Facebook wasn’t even invented when we first went into the field. In the six years I spent in Toronto it felt like the world had changed. In 2007 Toronto was the first city in the world to hit one million members on Facebook. Around that time, the first iPhone was released. In this context I started examining the shift from self-reported personal networks to these new online networks.

 I showed how to create social networks from online websites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter and the reigning champion of online social networks: Facebook. In the penultimate year of my PhD studies I gave a major talk on this new field as a keynote in York, England. Half a year later I gave a follow-up at a Royal Society event in London. While there, I was intrigued to day trip to Oxford and especially to this nascent Internet Institute for the social sciences of the Internet.

 I emailed to ask if I could come and get a tour (having learned about advance planning by then). The admin replied and said “Great! Your talk is schedule for the day after tomorrow at 2pm.” Little did I realise that this was to serve as a proto job talk. I went in, talked about what was happening in Canada and had a major professor berate me for not including texting/SMS in my models. As a European, she simply did not understand Canada’s crazy texting pricing. Again, I felt like I had lots to learn, but at least this time I was told (a few years later) that I did make a fine impression.

 When I finished the talk, I asked the admin if there were any tourist highlights in town. She said there was a wax museum tour called the Oxford story, “but it ain’t Disneyland”. I went to the building, a close walk to the Internet Institute and purchased one ticket. I went in and sat at a wooden desk. It was on-rails and moved slowly through the history of Oxford, from the early days of the conflict with the townspeople that led to the formation of Cambridge, through Halley (of comet-based fame) to more modern times. Having never been to Disneyland, I thought it was pretty decent. Sadly, other tourists didn’t feel this way and the exhibit has been shuttered to make way for more Harry Potter wands and knock-off shirts.

 Not long after this trip, I was asked to apply to be a post-doc at their department. I applied and received the offer that day. They then emailed me a few weeks later to say they were starting a Master’s program and wanted to ensure they had full-time faculty. As such, would I be interested in having an open-ended contract rather than a two-year one. Wasn’t this something that I was supposed to negotiate, not them? Well, it’s coming on ten years and I’m still here, having moved up from Research Fellow to being Senior Research Fellow and I’ve learned a few things about this place in the meantime.

 One of the things sociology teaches you is how cultural capital is used to make distinctions. What music you like, the food you drink and how effectively you talk about any manner of topics can reveal your class and your heritage. Oxford, unsurprisingly, is one of the world’s prominent exporters of cultural capital. You can never be overdressed in this town, tourists come in droves to get some of the culture and education by osmosis, and the high street shops sell bowties, suspenders, and ceremonial gowns. Despite what the admin says, sometimes it feels like Disneyland for bookworms as the city’s heritage is endlessly recounted and repackaged to these tourists, especially during the summer months.

 Oxford is nevertheless a very lively and accommodating place for academic discussion. And the stories are true: the most interesting and lively discussions happen at the pub after the work day is ostensibly over. Social life in Britain in general revolves around the pub. We don’t go home for supper here. After work often times we head straight to the pub, eat some sad excuse for a burger and stay late. In Oxford, this is sometimes punctuated by formal dinners at high table. Think dining with Harry Potter’s faculty minus the magic (as far as I can tell).

 I’ve learned a number of other things while here as well. Mummering actually comes from the Oxfordshire tradition of the Mummer’s play, but instead of going house to house, they travel from pub to pub. And many a Newfoundland phrase, from “whataya at” to “go away witcha b’y” are really just southern Irish.

 But I’ve also learned what good luck, a good attitude and a good education can do. My best cited work is a critique of the use of Goffman online. I still feel like everything I learned about Goffman, Stephen Riggins taught me in his mass media course. As another example, my department is about to start its second masters, in Social Data Science. There’s a clear line from MUN’s vocational languages in my computer science undergraduate to this cutting edge program here at Oxford as I was the one to build this bridge at my department years ago.

 My work these days has come full circle in other ways. After spending almost a decade in digital social research and teaching how to extract networks online, I’ve returned to offline networks. Corporations have wised up to the fact that their social network data is of value and they are doing their best to keep it under wraps. My two Facebook social network visualizers NameGenWeb and CollegeConnect have been shuttered, caught up in this shift to more privatized networks and away from open access. In this context and alongside one of my very talented graduate students, Joshua Melville, and an amazing cross disciplinary team at Northwestern under Michelle Birkett, we are developing Network Canvas <http://www.networkcanvas.com/>, a suite of tools to advance personal network capture using touchscreens and tablets. Its old wine, but the bottle is very new and hopefully more accessible to ever more researchers.

 Having had so many people believe in me as I stumble my way up the academic ladder, I hope that these tools can help give a leg up to those looking for new and novel ways of advancing their research. We are currently in alpha testing and expect a full release in 2019. In the meantime, I look forward to discovering where I will stumble up to next.