Hello everyone and welcome to the Awaken Together podcast.
I'm Jen.
And I'm Kat.
And today we are going to go into I think Kat's favorite subject of study.
We are going to talk about psychedelics and plant medicine.
So this is the top episode that if my family hears they will be definitely triggered.
I have had the most beautiful experience with some of these things and I know Kat has too.
So we're really excited to share it with you.
It's your own personal experience.
Talk about what it looks like in society and why and really go into like the details on
all of this, which Kat has it ready for us.
But the first thing I wanted to preface was, yeah, this obviously has a shadow side.
If you listen to our last episode, we talked about addiction and escapism.
And I think a lot of these substances have gotten a really bad reputation.
And yeah, Kat, I just want you to explain maybe why we have such a negative light in
society on some of these things in the first place.
For sure.
Happy to.
The reason I'm so passionate about this topic is because it's like it's kind of that counterculture
introduction of things that just aren't normally talked about.
And I love leaning into those things.
So that inner rebel Kat has my Aquarius energy.
Yes.
So we'll have to start with a little history lesson then we'll take it back to the war on
drugs President Reagan and Nancy Reagan.
Just say no.
This was coming out of time when psychedelics were gaining such momentum in the healing
space.
It was the hippie era era and everyone was turning on.
That was the name that they called for tripping at the time.
And music festivals were huge.
People were.
What was the Tim Leary coined a phrase?
I think it was like turn on drop out.
It was something like that.
I'm probably butchering it.
But it was about how people shouldn't just be enlisting in the military to go fight a
war that we had nothing to do with as citizens really risking your life for the government.
Like now just do these drugs basically was his message, which he was pretty radical for
then and now.
Lots of thoughts and feelings on him.
But but yeah, that was kind of his message.
And Reagan had a big problem with that and just everything that was happening, low enlisting
numbers people actively going against that, which was bad for government bad for his image
as the head of the American society.
And so they started this whole propaganda against it, which was the war on drugs, which
was just say no and painting what the effects of drugs could do to people on their on their
brains.
I think I remember.
Do you remember this one?
I think it was an ad and it was like a skillet and they cracked an egg and it said, this
is your brain on drugs.
Yeah.
And we can't we were really raised in the like DARE program.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
The DARE shirts like all the funny like talks.
Yeah.
And we painted an image that if you ever exposed to any of this stuff, like your life is going
to just like fall apart, like you will be the yeah, on the bad side of society.
That's that's the picture that was definitely painted for us young too.
Yeah, exactly.
And so now after really decades of having no research done on the subject because it
was so frowned upon for so long and made illegal, now they are just beginning to deepen these
studies and the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy has been named the new frontier.
So there's a lot of hope.
And I even heard once that one psychedelic trip when handled with intention and done
correctly can have similar healing effects as seven years of therapy.
And that's because it really catalyzes healing.
It's not the drug.
It's not the medicine itself.
It's you actually doing the work, but it acts as a flashlight.
And I think the problem with this with the reputation of psychedelics and plant medicine
comes when people haven't been treating it with care.
People who have been abusing it, like we talked about in our last episode, using it to numb
and check out and escape.
So the opposite of that is what's actually necessary in order for us to have those healing
transformations.
Yep.
And I would love to hear which ones are derived from plants and which ones are coming from
something else.
Just give us the layout of what we're working with.
Yeah, for sure.
So the most common psychedelics and plant medicine that you've probably heard of before,
maybe not, they're cannabis, weed, psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, also known as MOLI, ketamine,
DMT, and ayahuasca.
They have some overlap.
And LSD.
Those are the big ones.
The ones that are derived from plants are cannabis, psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca.
Those are all naturally occurring and found in the wild and have been used for centuries
by ancient civilizations as a part of ceremony and ritual.
And MDMA, ketamine, and LSD are made in labs.
They have been manufactured.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Give us the goods.
So I was going to share my personal story.
I had my first experience with mushrooms when I...
I think it was probably age 20 when I first did it.
I had obviously been very reckless with weed and substances in general, but I knew to take
mushrooms more seriously.
I remember Googling a bunch of what I should do beforehand.
I was very nervous, extremely nervous.
Coming off of that religion trauma too, terrified of any decision I could ever make, thought
I would always be ruining my life.
So I went in, obviously, in a very rough head space, but I did a lot of studying on it beforehand
and really got to read a lot of people's stories that were incredible experiences, very life-changing
experiences.
And so I was like, I think this could be a really good thing.
So I remember I took it.
I had a very good day leading up to consuming and I went into what would be a 13-hour mushroom
trip.
Wow.
Long.
Oh my God.
Long.
But the most magical 13 hours of my entire life, I have even told Dani that I think that
experience beats our wedding day.
And I hate to have to say that, but it was just a really magical day.
And I went outside for it.
I read on all the blogs that going outside was going to be so much better.
I did it with two friends that were a very safe space and we all took the same amount.
And yeah, I basically walked around a woods in the forest and I felt like I was a full
spiritual being.
I felt so aligned with nature.
I felt like I could feel every single thing around me and it was so beautiful.
I hugged a tree for probably, I mean, time got real weird in those 13 hours, but I think
I was with that tree at least two hours connected in touch.
And I felt like the tree told me every single thing about its life.
And I have never had a relationship to trees like the same ever since that.
Like every tree, I feel so much respect to because I feel like I really met one of their
family members.
It was so beautiful.
And yeah, I just looked around and seeing all the colors and seeing everything, feeling
everything.
Oh my gosh, talk about my clear sentience and just already what I picked up.
It was the most profound connection to my senses I had ever experienced.
And yeah, I didn't even quite know how to go back to normal life after because I was
just in this state of bliss and I was so freaking happy.
I went into work the next day and I was like the most joyous person and everything felt
alive and real and beautiful.
And I just felt like, yeah, it like lifted a veil of, I guess, like, yeah, I don't think
I had really felt connected to anything around me.
I think I was really starting to feel disconnected and it like replugged me in.
I guess that would be the best way to describe my first experience.
And yeah, every single thing just kind of shifted and felt different after that.
Tell me about one of yours.
Oh my gosh, that's so amazing.
Wow.
In 13 hours.
Yeah, what a first run.
Yeah, I did not microdose.
I went hard.
And yeah, I think you did it right though.
It was a magical experience, it sounds like.
Yeah, it really was.
It's all you can hope for.
I remember thinking one other thought that popped up was I know what all the movies have
been trying to tell me, like all the weird trippy movies.
I remember having this like, oh my gosh, yeah, all the signs have been there all along, but
I needed to do this.
It was like having such a spiritual connection of like, oh my gosh, this has needed to happen.
And oh my gosh, yeah, so beautiful.
And I think the best way to put these experiences is that they're mystical.
Yeah, very mystical.
Very mystical.
And it takes the reality that you feel like you're stuck in and it allows you to see that
there is more than what our eyes can even perceive, which we know that scientifically,
but when you experience like a shift like that, yeah, it's very profound.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, my first time taking psychedelics was a little different.
I had not done research on it and I was actually dosed.
Dosed means that you were drugged basically.
So sad.
So I was a freshman in college, so I was what, like 19, 18, 19 at the time.
And I was living with a few roommates, there were four of us, and we had gotten tickets
to the Further concert, and Further is a Grateful Dead tribute band, if you're unfamiliar with
them.
And so that was a vibe.
I think we maybe had an edible before going in and just had a couple drinks, and I was
really planning on it just being that, you know?
But one of my roommates, she had a friend visiting from home at the time, and this friend
was a little wild.
And so yeah, just before we headed out to the show, we were just talking about psychedelics.
It was a very foreign concept to me at the time.
And we were talking about how we were curious about it, and maybe one day that could be
something we'd try after doing research like you and sitting with it and deciding.
And yeah.
So we go into the show, and already just there were people who were from all different walks
of life.
There was someone waving a sign saying, who's got my miracle?
Looking for my miracle.
And she was looking for a ticket.
But she was wearing full dreads, flowy skirt.
Got the full hippie experience.
Total deadhead.
And I was like, oh, wow.
I'm like a preppy college student at the time, and it was just a different world to me.
I hadn't seen that.
So we walk in, and I'm not going to say her name.
My roommate's friend, she just starts walking around the Mullen Center at UMass saying,
acid, acid, who's got acid?
And we're like, shut up.
This is our school.
We could get arrested.
What are you doing?
You can't do that here.
We know you're visiting, but that's not cool.
That's not going to fly.
And the next thing we know, this guy pops up, and he's like, I do.
We're like, what?
How does that work?
And so we're following.
She just starts following this guy into the show, and it's dark in there in the bowl,
you know, when the show is happening.
And we're like, oh, God, what's happening?
So they do their little drug deal, and we're just trying to watch the show and settle in,
look around to find some seats.
And then she turns to us, and she goes, me and my other friend, she goes, let me see
your tongues.
And we're like, why?
And she goes, I just want to see the color.
And we're like, okay, this girl's weird, but like, we'll show her our tongues.
And so we stick our tongues out.
And then she puts something on them.
And she goes, so that's acid.
That's LSD.
You don't swallow it.
Just leave it on your tongue for a little while.
And I'll tell you, like, when you can take it off.
And don't worry about it.
You can pay me back later.
Wow.
And we were just like, what?
And so we listen because we didn't really know what else to do.
We're kind of shocked, taken aback.
And then the music started and time goes by.
And I start looking around and it was a full tab, which I mean, nowadays, I don't even
take a full tab.
We went hard too.
We both went really hard.
Really hard the first time.
And so colors were being just, you know, shown all across the stadium.
And I remember having this thought of like, I can taste what those colors look like.
Yeah.
Sensory stuff comes up.
Sensory.
It was wild.
And then my other friend just started crying.
And I just turned to her and I was like, what's wrong?
Everything's just so beautiful.
It was just very intense.
Later on in the night, this ended up being, I think, like a 12-hour experience as well.
But I remember looking in the mirror and feeling like, who is that alien that I'm looking back
at?
Yeah.
It was a lot.
It was very intense.
And I should also preference, you know, I was 18, 19 years old and I didn't really have
much of a relationship to myself at the time.
And I think that was really reflected in how this journey unfolded for me.
Yeah.
It's starting.
And that's part of the issue, right?
If these can get more regulated, more studied, more looked at, more openly accepted, we can
probably go about it a much better way than the way that a lot of people are exposed to
it, which it kind of ends up having a shadow just from the way that most of them are illegal.
Most of them are, you have to get in sketchy ways.
And that definitely already puts a cloud over what could be a very beautiful experience
and why those things even exist, which I do think they are very, a lot of people believe
these plant medicines are very linked to a spirit that can be very loving and very guiding
and that there's a very, there's like a, just a stronger, more in depth reasoning behind
these things.
But what I want to know is from that, from that event, when did you get into being able
to treat it more sacredly and use it more regularly in your life?
Yeah.
I'm glad you asked that question because after that first experience, I said out loud to
many people, I'm never doing that again.
Because it was a lot, I actually felt pretty bad the next day.
I think it took all of my serotonin at once and I just felt really crappy and I felt the
guilt because it was so frowned upon and I wasn't planning on it.
It was just a big shock to my system.
So I actually didn't touch it for maybe five years and I was pretty closed off.
I was glad that I had that experience at the end of the day, but it wasn't something I
was itching for again.
And then hearing from some friends who had positive experiences and had taken it purposefully
and with intention and hearing their takeaways, that's when I began to get curious about it
again.
And so me, Kyle, my best friend and two of our other friends, we booked an Airbnb one
weekend and it was summertime and it was on this lake and we decided that this was going
to be my reintroduction and a first introduction to, Kyle didn't do it at the time, but like
my best friend and some other people who were there too.
So that experience, we were really intentional with it.
I was really careful.
I had done so much research by that time because I didn't want to completely have just go in
headfirst like I did the first time.
And so we had less and it was LSD again and we set intentions.
And so we literally took a moment to go around in a circle and just share what we were looking
to gain out of this experience.
And this was a time in my life where I was working, I was out of college at the time
I was working my first job, didn't love it, knew it wasn't what I wanted to do forever.
And so I was just looking for kind of a purpose, which is a big intention to look for from
a trip.
But the way that this transpired, I learned so much about myself on this second journey
and it changed my relationship with the drug, with the medicine to a point where I wasn't
itching to do it again after I felt like I learned so much that I needed to journal and
really integrate the experience.
And the big difference was the set and the setting.
And I took the right amount.
I was confident about that and the setting was right.
I wasn't just in a crowd of people where I was uncomfortable.
I was surrounded in a quiet place in nature with my best people.
And that was a massive difference.
And I've taken it many times since then in different capacities, all controlled with
intention, focused on the set and the setting.
And it has changed my whole relationship with myself.
Yeah, I shared before with that first trip of how I looked in the mirror and I saw just
a foreign being.
It looked like an alien and I thought it was really scary.
It was really creepy.
And fast forward to now that I have so much more self-love for myself and have learned
to appreciate the wrinkles I have, my gray hairs, just myself as I am now whenever I
look at myself in the mirror and I'm under the influence of psychedelics, I feel so much
love for myself.
And I do this off of them too, but it's just so much deeper.
It's just so much deeper.
And I just give myself a little smile.
It's called the Steven Journey.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's a really big, obvious transformation for me.
Yeah, beautiful.
Yeah.
And I have also had many experiences since that.
And yeah, they all kind of come with their own journey, their own lessons.
I've definitely set different intentions at the beginning.
And I do think it surfaces a lot up.
I do kind of believe now, like in retrospect, looking back, that I do think some level of,
I guess maybe being more open to a spiritual journey or having maybe done a little bit
of work on yourself first could be a nice precursor.
I guess for some, like having, you know, taking one of these substances when they're so regiment
and so boxed in, it could be the only thing to make you shift because you might not even
realize there's a whole other world of this stuff.
But I do think kind of starting a little bit of self-awareness first can make the experiences
a lot more powerful.
I think the more that I got on my spiritual journey, the more that those experiences were
more in depth.
And yeah, I feel like they are profoundly spiritual.
I don't know if my first one was as spiritual.
It was kind of just like wonder.
Now I think I've had like way more, even more spiritual experiences happen along my trips
as I've gotten deeper into that world.
But yeah, one of the life after starting psychedelics, it really, it continues to lift the veil of
what our reality even is.
I think we can feel kind of bland and hopeless with how regiment our world is and how many,
yeah, you can always find something wrong, right?
You can always find something wrong.
It's very easy to get stuck in a negative vortex.
And it's kind of rightfully so to be stuck in a negative vortex because there is a lot
of suffering.
And once I've had that, the psychedelic experiences under my belt, I think I was, it was so much
easier to beauty hunt.
It was so much easier to find a way to kind of restructure what I was seeing in front
of me.
I also think that it helped my imagination and knowing the power.
I speak about that a lot on my social media page is the importance of imagination.
But I know that I can hone in on a color in my environment.
I know that I can try to turn little things I'm seeing into faces.
And I know I can find like a sense of play even amongst the most difficult times.
And I don't think I would have really linked that enough without having my psychedelics
under my belt.
What about you for life after?
Yeah, I totally agree with all of that.
So the magic that happens in the brain with psychedelics is that it lights up areas all
at once that don't usually get lit up at the same time.
And so that provides us with access to our minds in ways that we have really never accessed
them before.
And the only way to continue this is through states of meditation.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more too.
But yeah, things are more magic.
Like it's really it's hard to put it another way, but you just feel a deeper connection
with your place in the world.
I'll look at a tree now and be like, oh, yeah, like we're all here together.
That's just as alive as I am.
And a deep reverence for animals and other people and people's journeys.
And yeah, just kind of putting the ego aside and fully being present to, you know, whatever
comes up.
So it helps me tap into my feelings.
It also, you know, I will share that coming up on psychedelics is a pretty intense experience.
And like you were just mentioning, Jen, like doing that self work leading up to it can
be super helpful to establish those like coping and grounding mechanisms for when that time
comes because it is an overwhelming feeling.
You're out of you're somewhat out of control compared to normal.
So if you've never practiced any form of surrendering, it's going to feel like it's taking over.
Like it can be overwhelming if you're not used to any form of surrendering.
I think exactly.
And once you make it past that hump, which you always do, it's never like up there forever.
It is just like a hump that kind of dips down.
Once you make it through that, like I have just learned to trust myself in any situation
because when that happens time and time again and you see yourself through and you learn
to talk to yourself from your highest self, not your inner critic, that's when you learn
how to do that and return to that in everyday life.
And that is probably my greatest gift from psychedelic medicine is talking to myself
in a really positive, loving way and knowing that I'm going to get through whatever is
headed my way.
I love that.
I love that takeaway.
So good.
Yeah.
So clearly the effects are not all bad from any bad campaigning.
Like I learned to see the world as the most beautiful place in the entire world and Kat
learned to deeply love and connect with herself to great things.
And yeah, I really think about, yeah, were these things given to us for a reason?
There's always that you can ponder on and what the world would look like if everyone
had an experience like that under their belts, because I don't think the structure that we've
created would look anywhere near the same because I think a lot of the way we structured
the world has come from this more regiment way of thinking.
And so, yeah, I think that giant hippie movement that happened at that time, people were unboxing
themselves feeling wild.
And of course, that got spun around to look at these drug addicts.
Yeah, they're crazy.
They're not thriving in society.
It's actually just as sickening to thrive in a society that's built the way we have
been.
And I think that was really pretty.
So I think that was recognized at that moment, but somehow the other force won at that time.
And I think us coming back to these old studies that have been dormant and psychologists getting
more access to being able to use these things, if we can get that sense back and we can really
actually this time stay on that research and not let the other side win, the side that
like wants to keep the structure that's clearly causing so many people to feel sick and stuck
and dead inside.
And part of the reason we're having such a fallout in mental health, like these things
are needed.
And when you're with a whole safe group that is experiencing one of these like plant medicines
or psychedelics, like the whole guard goes away.
Something that you've yeah, you can remove your ego so easy and the connectedness that's
below that is so magical that yeah, it makes you realize that we can do a lot of change.
Like we can really change a lot of this.
We're not as stuck as we think, but there's so many people that haven't experienced these
things.
So I hope that this research continues to blossom because what the world would look
like if we all knew of this aliveness would be like vastly different.
And I really believe that 100,000%.
It's uplifting the collective consciousness and wow, what can come of that?
This is really just the launching off point, which is what's so exciting.
This work is continuing now.
And so to give you all a little update on where this stands, like with the studies,
there's four phases of trials that these medicines have to pass.
And to give you a little insight on what these different medicines can be used for, I have
a little bit of information to clarify on that.
Ketamine is known for helping people with anxiety and depression.
MDMA is heavily being studied right now for healing trauma in PTSD.
Mushrooms for OCD, depression, anxiety, and overcoming addiction, which is fascinating.
And cannabis for pain management, helping people who deal with seizures, and more things
like that.
So right now ketamine is the one psychedelic that has been approved.
And it has actually been approved for quite some time, which was a little surprising for
me to learn about.
But the ones that are kind of next up on deck are MDMA and psilocybin.
They're one phase away.
They're in phase three right now.
Phase four means they've been approved.
And then LSD is in phase two.
So that's where they stand right now.
And Jen and I are super excited to share that we are going to be co-workers, officially,
working for a company called Mind Bloom.
We recently got jobs as psychedelic guides.
So we're going to have so many things to share, I'm sure, from just what we get to experience
inside that world.
But yeah, we're really passionate about these things.
Being able to help make greater leaps of change than what we have been seeing.
And I think that we're really desperately needing that.
So we're very inspired to be on the forefront of working with clients that are getting to
legally experience these substances and move through it.
And there's been profound research on the benefits of these things.
And I think the more research we have, the more it'll continue to dismantle the stigma
that's behind a lot of these things anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, 100%.
And a little bit more on ketamine, since that's what we'll be guiding people through.
With Mind Bloom, you are set up with a clinician.
So you have that doctor figure to get the dosage right, find out if you're even a match,
because pretty much anyone who's dealt with anxiety or depression can be, unless you have
some family history of schizophrenia, bipolar, mental health issues like that in the past.
So that is taken a look at very seriously.
And then you're guided through the experience.
And then what we will be doing is help people integrate that experience into their lives.
So it's not just one siloed aha moment, but something that you can actually digest and
think back to when you're in stress triggers of how you want to talk to yourself and see
the world.
So that's very exciting.
It's also one of the only rapid acting antidepressants right now, which means that you don't have
to take it every single day like you might well butrin, Prozac, other things, other pharmaceuticals
right now that people have become dependent on.
So it's moving away from that and moving into a new way to think of healing and therapy.
That's so beautiful.
And I think me and Kat, our personal experiences with it, which I noted while we were both
talking about it, was we've handled it with a lot of respect and not overdone it.
I think it's very important to keep remembering the stuff is meant to be sacred.
I think, I mean, if you're in that world and you've been exposed to it a lot and you've
seen it, there are so many people that use it unintentionally, use it in, they don't
see it as being a sacred experience.
They do it more as a party escape.
And so remembering that, yeah, we want to treat these things sacredly.
And I really do think if we look at it from an energetic standpoint, you put this very
positive mindset going in and you really say and set the intention that I want to align
with this experience or this experience, this is what I'm needing.
I really think you can get that out of these things.
So if you have people around you that have over abused these things, you can always,
it's important to remember that we need to bring it back to these things being sacred
because that's part of how we're going to make the collective change for these having
a positive reputation.
We want to see people using it the right way at the same time.
Exactly.
They're powerful tools for healing when they're used correctly.
When they're abused, it can be just as reckless as driving a car erratically.
If you do that, you're going to crash.
And so that's the main thing we want to really emphasize behind this is it just needs to
be done the right way.
Yes.
And yeah, I hope that this was insightful.
Kat, do you have some resources that we can go to?
Because I know you have read some good stuff on this.
Yes.
I'm constantly trying to further my own education on this subject because it's constantly evolving,
which is what's so exciting and great about it.
So I have two to keep it really digestible for now.
One is a book called How to Change Your Mind, and this is by Michael Pollan.
The reason I love this book is because it gives a really neutral and scientific way
to approach all of these different psychedelics and plant medicine.
And he actually shares his experience on each of them.
So he is, you know, if you know Michael Pollan, he's a big foodie.
And so his book on this, I think, was a little bit surprising to some people.
But he is a big proponent for deepening education on the subject.
And it is such an informational book.
And if you're looking to grow, you know, even just open your mind about the topic, I would
really recommend that.
And then another documentary, if that's more your speed watching, is called Dying to Know.
And this is a documentary with Ram Dass and Tim Thieleri.
If you haven't met those people and your journey or studied them, yeah, start that deep dive.
They pop up over and over again once you're in the world of spirituality.
Absolutely.
Especially Ram Dass.
Like, he is so near and dear to our hearts.
Oh my goodness.
He will be here now.
So many beautiful talks with him.
And yeah, so you're welcome for that.
And we've said this one before, but Fantastic Fungi will reiterate too, because I thought
that documentary is newer and amazing and really got me like pumped up about this subject
in general too.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Kat.
Thank you, Jen.
We will see you guys next week.
Don't forget to go rate us on the Awaken Together podcast on Spotify and Apple.
And you can add us on Instagram at AwakenTogetherPodcast.
Bye.
See you next time.
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