A common narrative in the psychedelic space is that having a psychedelic experience is like undergoing 10 years of therapy (or another number of years), condensed into just several hours. A headline for a 2023 piece in The i Paper reads ‘How a five-day, £4,000 psychedelic retreat saved me 10 years of intensive therapy’. Mark…
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Because of the influence of ‘set and setting’, not everyone’s psychedelic experience is the same. Various aspects of ‘set’ (e.g. beliefs, expectations, mood, personality, intention, level of restfulness) and ‘setting’ (e.g. culture, environment, music, people present) interact with the drug and the dose to produce a particular kind of experience. This includes the visual qualities…
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In the fourth stage of metta bhavana – the Buddhist meditation practice aimed at cultivating metta (loving-kindness) – the focus is on directing goodwill towards a ‘difficult’ person. Normally, this difficult person is someone you are personally involved with, who is a source of tension, conflict, or emotional pain. But there are many ‘difficult’ people…
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As the push for the legalisation of psychedelics continues, questions around safety and harm reduction should continue to be raised. If psychedelics were legalised for non-medical use in certain US states and countries, they would need to be regulated. But there are differing opinions on what this model of regulation should look like. The commercial…
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In my last post on hagioptasia, I touched on how this tendency to project an aura of specialness onto things manifests itself in dreams. It is hagioptasia that makes dream scenarios, on the one hand, carry an atmosphere of magic and sentimentalism, but it also, on the other hand, makes them somewhat painful. Assuming one…
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