Psychedelic Revival: An Evolution in Healing
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Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Sean Lawlor. Sean is a psychedelic therapist and writer. He’s completed a three-year master’s program in mindfulness-based transpersonal counseling at Naropa University, and he currently practices as a ketamine-assisted therapist. As I mentioned, Sean’s a writer and he’s a beautiful, engaging, funny, passionate, someone who writes from a place of both research and personal experience, someone who invites you in and connects. And with Sounds True he’s written a new book. It’s called Psychedelic Revival: Toward a New Paradigm of Healing. Sean, welcome.
Sean Lawlor: Thanks, Tami. It’s great to be with you.
TS: It’s great to be with you. And of course as I was thinking that I would see you again. I remembered the first time we met because it had an air of magic to it, which is you came up to me while I was sitting outside at our little neighborhood breakfast, lunch spot, a diner, and normally when someone comes up to me, I cover my eyes and hide and try not to connect, but I invited you to come sit and eat with me. I didn’t even know who you were, but there was such a feeling of connection and affection and I always feel that when I’m with you.
SL: It’s cool hear because yeah, I think fondly that moment, it had a magical feel to me too. I remember I was sitting inside and looked out and saw you and we’d never met, but you have an aura about you and your glasses. There was something that sparked my recognition and I’d just signed the contract with Sounds True a few months before and I was pretty terrified to come up and say anything to you. I was very intimidated, but I was like, I got to go say hi, and you were super kind and I was afraid. I’m going to be very nervous sitting here. But within a few seconds I just felt at ease, because you’re someone who’s just like you. You’re just yourself. And that’s just so relaxing for me.
TS: Yeah, for you and me it was relaxing. Not everybody experiences it that way, but it worked well in our favor. OK, here, your new book, Psychedelic Revival. Rosalind Watts, who is a clinical psychologist and developer of the ACE model, someone very well respected in the field of psychedelic research and therapy says, “If you only buy one book about psychedelics, make it this one.” Big statement, big statement, but you cover a lot of ground. This book is more than 400 pages. It took you three and a half years to write. Tell us a little bit about what you were attempting to accomplish in Psychedelic Revival.
SL: Well, it started out, the working title was the “Big Book of Psychedelics and Healing,” and the idea was to cover a lot of ground and give folks a trustworthy source to turn toward because this whole psychedelic field or space or whatever it’s called is gaining steam and has been gaining steam for years and lots of people just are kind of overwhelmed with all the information. It’s a completely new narrative coming back around. So, yeah, there’s some great books about psychedelics, but most of them are very specialized on maybe one substance or just the science or just the kind of historical use in various cultures.
And so the idea was to give kind of a sweeping overview portrait that could help answer people’s questions on a variety of questions depending on where they flipped through, and hopefully to help them make wise and informed decisions, because these are really powerful substances or plants or fungi. And the narrative that’s kind of come out in recent years around the mental health applications sometimes has a way of watering it down and making it sound simpler than it is, which can get people into trouble. Because then they might take something they didn’t know they were taking or take too much. And I wanted to look at the real dangers and risks as well for kind of a balanced portrait.
TS: Can you tell me, Sean, what is the current narrative that you’re critiquing? How does it go? What does it say that leads people astray?
SL: Well, it’s interesting because kind of changing it seems right now, but the one that I was kind of responding to throughout the writing process of this book, it was really driven by a lot of the research of MAPS. Oh geez, if I can remember this right now. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and Johns Hopkins University who have been leading the charge with research with psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms and MDMA for MAPS. And the idea was essentially that in a therapeutic context, in an intentional context with a trained clinician or person that taking these molecules because in these contexts they’re molecules, not plant or fungi, that people experience rapid healing of depression, rapid healing of addiction, that people have profound mystical experiences that completely change their lives.
And it’s a really amazing thing about psychedelics that that is possible, that those things can happen, but it kind of grabbed more attention, I suppose, that reality is that it can happen, but it doesn’t always happen. And sometimes they can be really challenging and destabilizing and that doesn’t mean you did something wrong. People sometimes will think they did something wrong if they don’t have those amazing experiences, but that’s not true. It’s just I think that narrative needed to broaden. And I think that’s happening.
TS: In Psychedelic Revival, as I was reading through the book, I started having the experience that what you were offering was not something simplistic at all, but instead you were kind of pulling apart these different threads, if you will, so we could look at them individually. And I had the experience of looking at a big foldout map and it was like, this is what will happen when you travel over here to this country and experience, and this is what happens over there. And they’re different. They have different weather patterns, and you pack a different backpack and you meet different people. And first of all, I’m curious what you think of this metaphor that occurred to me while I was engaging with the Psychedelic Revival.
SL: I like it. I’m flattered by it. Yeah, I appreciate it.
TS: OK. All right. And then part of opening the map, you very carefully in the beginning said, we need to look at substances and plant medicine and not just throw them all together into one grouping and call it generic psychedelics. Here you come. So, help me understand in your own cartography and parsing, if you will, the kinds of categories and how you look at the psychedelic substances you write about, how did you put them in their various buckets?
SL: Yeah, that’s its own challenge with these things, the categories, but it’s helpful at least for our world. So, yeah, I kind of split things into psychedelics and plant medicines. There’s some gray area, but psychedelics kind of looking more toward specific molecules that are either extracted from a plant or a fungus or just synthesized in a lab without any kind of plant-based source. And then plant medicines more grow naturally. Sometimes it’s just something that grows naturally that when consumed in some kind of way produces psychoactive effects. Sometimes it’s a combination of different things brewed in a particular way, but often these plant medicines have a kind of cultural, a deep well of history in a cultural container, a lot of meaning interwoven with them in a particular indigenous group that is using them or groups in lots of cases. So, yeah, I’m more in the western mindset, so more familiar with the psychedelic side of things.
So, yeah, there’s more chapters on that than plant medicines. But yeah, so at this point I was kind of looking at differences between the different psychedelics that are making headlines in recent years, because that’s, I guess, one last thing to touch on about the narrative is that it could have this effect like you were suggesting Tami, of saying that all psychedelics are the same, basically. All of these could help any mental health condition, depression or addiction or PTSD, and you can kind of replace them one with the other. And I even saw that extend to plant medicines where people would take a super powerful medicine like ayahuasca, it comes from the Amazon and think it was going to do the same thing roughly as MDMA, which is an amphetamine that’s synthesized in a lab. So, yeah. Should I chat about some of the differences?
TS: Yeah, what I’d love to know as you go through the differences, the most important differences we need to respect and what you see as the risks and benefits associated with each psychedelic substance or plant medicine. Because I think that’s really what people are bringing to the conversation. They want to know I have this X, Y, Z thing that I’m trying to solve, whatever it might be, trauma, a past life memory that is haunting me, a need for spiritual opening, anxiety, depression. I’ve never had a mystical experience. People are coming with all different kinds of needs and trying to assess which direction do I go in and what’s the risk, what’s the possible upside, what’s the possible downside? So, that’s what I’d love to understand from your lens with some of the most popular choices.
SL: So the risks and the reasons people would seek that particular one out?
TS: Yeah.
SL: OK. Let’s see how I do with this. So, I guess starting with psilocybin, which is one we hear about a lot and have been hearing about a lot for a long time, I think I mentioned already, but it’s the active alkaloid in mushrooms and psilocybin magic mushrooms. And so this has been researched heavily at Johns Hopkins University and many other places, at this point. It’s kind of been at the forefront of this whole revival as I’m calling it. So, people are often seeking out psilocybin for depression and also for addiction. And those are kind of primary ones in terms of mental health diagnoses. Risks, let’s see, a lot of the risks are common across the psychedelics. Honestly, the biggest one would be destabilization or a psychotic break that can happen particularly at a high dose of any of the psychedelics. Let’s see. That’s kind of a primary one. Yeah.
TS: Let’s talk for a moment about, you said destabilization, potentially psychotic break. Is that risk seriously mitigated and you don’t run if you take a lower dose and is this like, oh, if that’s your concern, start with a really small amount and of course work with someone like yourself who’s been trained in some fashion to be a guide. So, those are big mitigating factors, of course.
SL: Yeah, definitely. A lower dose would definitely mitigate the risk significantly. Same with the context where you’re taking it, your approach and kind of your general life situation at the time. If your life feels like you’re juggling 10,000 balls at the same time and there’s falling all over the place, it’s pretty unlikely that a powerful psychedelic is going to suddenly limit that to something manageable. It might even toss some more in there. They’re kind of disruptive in certain ways. So, yeah, things like that in a family history of things like schizophrenia or other like-minded diagnoses are important to look out for. And I’m saying this and it’s also still really rare that this happens, but it does happen. And so yeah, keeping the dose low-
TS: Let me ask another question too. Let’s say someone is like, I’m not really that stable. I’m being buffeted about by my life right now and by current events and all kinds of concerns. That’s why I want to take a psychedelic. Do I have to be stable in order to be able to approach one of these agents effectively?
SL: I think it kind of depends on what we’re actually talking about with “stable.”
TS: So let’s keep going. Well, and let’s keep going with which psychoactive agent too, but define both from your perspective. We’re going to keep going here, Sean.
SL: Define both—
TS: Well, you said what you mean by stable, and then I said, and let’s keep talking about… Because this is the thing that I immediately got from your book. We can’t talk about substances and plant medicine all, like it’s one kind of generic thing. We can’t do it. We have to get more nuanced than that even to have an intelligent conversation here.
SL: Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s see, in terms of the stable question, I mean certainly if someone is hearing voices, if someone is losing touch with a sense of consensus reality or objective reality, it’s tough to define what that is too. But if friends have expressed concerned about that, if someone feels like they’re disconnected from the way of things, it’s pretty unlikely that a high dose of psychedelics in particular is going to reverse that. And it might exacerbate it. If someone feels unstable because they’re really stressed and really anxious about the political situation or the environmental situation or their individual life and just all the things that they’re having to do, that’s a much safer bet to take a psychedelic, particularly at a low dose when it comes to something like psilocybin or LSD, which fall in the subcategory of classical psychedelics, which we could talk about too.
But I’m actually working in my clinical practice with a lot of folks who are struggling with that kind of stress and anxiety with ketamine-assisted therapy and finding that that can be tremendously helpful because ketamine is kind of a strange addition to the psychedelic category because it’s an anesthetic and it was developed specifically as an anesthetic, and it’s been used continuously since the sixties as an anesthetic in the battlefield, in the military, in veterinary clinics, in ambulances, all over the place.
And then people found at certain doses that there are psychedelic properties, but it still has this very different quality than something like psilocybin where you might have clear visions or feel super connected to nature. I’d say psilocybin feels more embodied and evocative. Ketamine feels way more dissociative. People often have out-of-body experiences, but it can be incredibly calming and soothing to the nervous system. And so if people are locked in a fight or flight kind of state and have lost touch with anything other than that, ketamine can kind of calm things down and reconnect them to something that feels more fundamental, more calm, more resourced in themselves, and then you have that to work with therapeutically. So, yeah, we kind of detoured there into ketamine.
TS: That’s good. Let me just ask you a… well, we’re going to talk about a lot of these different psychoactive agents. You work with ketamine-assisted therapy, and when I hear this word, people being disembodied or “disassociated,” and I think, well, wait a second, aren’t we through mindfulness based therapy and counseling, supposed to be entering more into an embodied state and more in touch with what’s happening at a felt sense inside? So, I’m curious how you make sense of all of that as someone who counsels and works with people.
SL: Yeah, that’s such a good question. So, I work with lower doses of ketamine through oral administrations via troches or lozenges that people get prescribed. And those are less dissociative experiences than probably the more common experiences of intravenous IV or intramuscular injections where within a minute of getting the dose, people will feel like they’re off this planet and out of the room completely. I kind of felt with that personally, and it’s wonderful for a lot of people, but it’s a little too removed and I found that the lozenges and troches do keep people more connected to their bodies, but either way, it seems that when the effects are wearing off, there’s this interesting period afterwards where people are still kind of in the experience but not fully in it, where it kind of allows people to maybe access somatically certain sensations, emotions, or I’m trained in internal family systems therapy, like a part of themselves perhaps that has been exiled or lives there.
People can access it more gently. So, yeah, I think it’s important not to lose the body in this process and kind of move away from sensations, but rather to approach it in a way where we’re creating a more supportive internal and external context to turn towards sensations that are challenging, turn toward difficult emotions, memories, experiences, and process them.
TS: All right, let’s keep going with making some major distinctions here. Keep going, Sean. Pick a different psychoactive agent and describe it to us.
SL: All right. MDMA is another big one. I cannot pronounce everything it stands for. I do know at the end of it is methamphetamine though. So, MDMA, I’ll say this with an asterisk, but it’s what people on the street call ecstasy, but the asterisk is not all ecstasy is MDMA. It might be riddled with other intoxicants, other things. So, just a little PSA, I guess, if you indulge in any of these things, it’s always wise to test your substances and there’s legal test kits available online. But yeah, MDMA is a more recent addition to this psychedelic category as well. It is much less visionary, like people who take psilocybin for instance, or LSD, which are much more similar to each other than they are to either of these other two, they could close their eyes and have really bright and vivid imagery just see some incredible things.
And the physical world itself, if they open their eyes might appear to be moving or just a whole load of things that can happen. It’s very unlikely that that will happen with MDMA, it could, but it tends to be more stimulating. The heart rate will go up usually significantly, and it’s much more somatic. People really feel a lot in their bodies, a lot of sensations. And oftentimes it can be amazing. It got the nickname and ecstasy for a reason. And so that’s being researched heavily for PTSD and has been for a while through MAPS, kind of for some of the reasons that I was describing a bit ago, that in this state people are able to access their trauma a little more and to meet it from a place of love instead of fear or shame or if there is fear and shame, they can meet that fear and shame from a place of love.
The ecstasy, the MDMA, just creates that kind of loving context. But it can be challenging as well with the kind of upper quality, the amphetamine aspect of it. People can kind of sweat and can feel nauseous. Your teeth will kind of grind against each other sometimes. Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s much more similar to something like Adderall kind of pharmacologically than either psilocybin or LSD or ketamine.
TS: Just to ask a question, Sean, one of your points in the Psychedelic Revival is that it’s not like these substances are “magic pills,” that’s my language, that do all the work for us, that there’s a level of engagement that we need to bring to make the healing and the benefits real in our life. And I wonder when you have something like MDMA and you’re like there, you could have this loving environment in which trauma is experienced, but in this field of loving acceptance. What’s the inner work, if you will, if any, that’s needed to be brought with me in this process? Or is it like, no, just, Tami, take the MDMA? And you can tell I am outside of this field asking these questions that I hope are beneficial to other people who perhaps don’t have very much experience like I don’t have very much experience, so I’m just asking what do I have to bring to it?
SL: Yeah. And are you referring to the MDMA experience itself, or—
TS: I’m thinking of that as you’re talking about trauma and trauma healing and what’s required for the experience to have lasting effects. What does the individual need to bring to it?
SL: Yeah, another great question that kind of comes around to this idea of intention that is such a big buzzword in this field. So, first of all, I just think that anyone who takes these in a therapeutic context to try and work on themselves and try and heal, it takes a lot of courage. And I have just a lot of respect for people who are willing to do that, because one of the only known things about this work is that you can’t know where it’s going to go exactly. And that’s scary, because you know it can be challenging and don’t exactly have control over every aspect of it. So, I think courage is an important one, and that comes with recognizing this could take me to heaven and feels a bliss, or it could take me down to a really dark place and I accept either one and will turn toward what’s there and try and be with it and meet it as fully as possible.
So, I think that kind of ties into openness and openness to the experience itself. And that’s different than driving a car in and trying to keep a tight grip on the steering wheel so that you can go and turn toward whichever trauma you think that you need to heal or whatever it is that you have in your mind as the thing. Because in the experience, the non-ordinary state, it might come up that it’s something completely different, something that you haven’t even really honed in on that is kind of at the roots of things, maybe a passing comment or maybe a certain context when you were growing up. So, yeah, that courage and openness to turn toward what’s there, and especially to meet it from a place of love, from a heart-centered place to be able to forgive yourself, to feel compassion for yourself and to try and lean into that because that can be really, really hard for a lot of us, and especially when it comes to our deepest shame.
But I think that is really a key in terms of long-term healing like you were asking about, because that can really transform the whole inner system when there’s shame. Again, the kind of IFS lens I look through is that we build up all these protective parts and behaviors to go through life so that we don’t have to feel that to keep it at bay. And that can be really stressful. That can make us feel like we need to be in control all the time. And so if we can meet that deep shame from a place of love and that part of ourselves doesn’t feel like it has to hide anymore, the whole system can relax more on a day-to-day basis. And it takes tending to, to continue to bring that sense of love or forgiveness into the day-to-day life. But to have that experience can just really process things that have been stuck in the body and in the spirit, or however you conceive of it since the traumatic event occurred.
TS: What’s happening in the MDMA experience sort of operationally, if you will, whether that’s because of neurotransmitters or whatever is going on such that this love field is available, that’s not available to a lot of us a lot of the time.
SL: Yeah. The narrative that I’ve heard, and this field is so rapidly evolving, it could be changing as we’re speaking, but the narrative I heard said for many years was that that has to do with oxytocin. That oxytocin is released from the brain and kind of dumps into the system and that it’s like the love hormone. And I want to caveat this that you can probably already tell I’m not a neuroscientist and I’m not trying to pretend to be, so this is a student talking about this stuff. But in terms of that specific love feeling, it tends to be associated with oxytocin, but it could be a cumulative effect. MDMA seems to work on the most neurotransmitters simultaneously of the ones that I mentioned, at least in what I’ve read, that there’s a big dump of serotonin and dopamine as well, that dopamine re-uptake is inhibited, so it’s kind of more readily accessible and norepinephrine kind of adrenaline.
So, all of those things together can kind of apparently create this effect. And lone last thing, just in terms of risk to be aware of is can leave you feeling really depleted as well, that it doesn’t happen to everyone and rest and good diet can be helpful. But lots of times after MDMA people have a really significant crash either later that day or the next day or even two days later where they could feel really, really low. So, it’s helpful to bear that in mind so that in low place you can kind of remind yourself that this is kind of a neurophysiological phenomenon happening and it didn’t negate what you just experienced.
TS: And just to circle back around to something that I mentioned that’s really important to me, when lasting transformation happens versus when it doesn’t after a profound event, what factors have you seen in place that support that and help that? And when it’s like, oh, not only did I fall down afterwards and depressed, but I was more depressed and I stayed more depressed and no, what allows you to say, oh, I touched something that’s now a living resource for me?
SL: Yeah, let me know if I’m not quite answering your question here, but what comes to mind is kind of boring stuff, honestly like habit change. Changing little things of your day-to-day life, especially if the particular psychedelic that you took gave you a kind of insight of like, oh, this little thing I do every day kind of unconsciously is actually contributing to this feeling of smallness or this feeling of stuckness. And so making those little change kind of helps rewire our nervous system and our brains, apparently. That’s kind of another big thing about what these psychedelics do.
A few of them in particular like the classical psychedelics that they make the brain more neuroplastic and more malleable for a certain period of time afterwards. So, it’s high time for habit changes like this. I think that when people have these profound peak experiences and then go right back into the same circumstances that they were in without changing anything, that the circumstances themselves more often than not almost reignite everything that was there before. So, those kind of boring little habit changes that are hard to do but orient you toward a more healthy and balanced version of yourself.
TS: Terrific. Thank you. No, it’s a good answer. Now you use the word psychedelics. Is that a word that refers to everything we’re talking about, whether it’s plant medicine and all of the compounds and substances, is psychedelics an umbrella enough term that it covers everything?
SL: I don’t think so. I tried to keep them distinct in the book, because yeah, I feel from some personal experience, little personal experience, but also from meeting a lot of people that a lot of these plant medicines are entering a really different world. And it can be really, I mean, you could say that with some of the psychedelics as well, but some of them, like ayahuasca and peyote are just so interwoven with a specific context and specific rituals and ways of being approached and taking them and mythologies and worldviews. And yeah, it seems there can be kind of a clash between the western mindset and some of those. And yeah, it’s hard to take that category all the way. There’s certain [INAUDIBLE]—
TS: OK, so we’re going to use the word psychedelics for the substances that are human created in a lab or a compound or something like that. And you’re going to use plant medicine as a term for things that are plants and that have a cultural context and are embedded in the land in some way. And I know as part of writing the Psychedelic Revival, you write about ayahuasca and peyote. You also write about some other plants as well. Tell us a little bit about why someone would be drawn to peyote and ayahuasca as let’s say two of the more well-known plant medicine options and what some of the benefits and challenges are.
SL: Yeah, ayahuasca seems to be kind of the big one that of all these plant medicines, ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms themselves, which like we were talking about before, the show is distinct from extracted psilocybin. But yeah, ayahuasca, this brew that comes from a vine and a leaf native to the Amazon and has been used by several different cultures across several different South American countries for honestly, we don’t know for how long. Some people think a couple hundred years, some people think several thousand years. And a lot of people, I mean, I think I started hearing about this as early as like 2016, and I’m sure it was going on way before that, but it seems to have just gotten kind of more popular since a lot of people in the United States and Canada and European nations are traveling to Peru or other countries in that area to take ayahuasca with people who at least advertise as being wisdom tradition holders.
And so that’s a really big risk for people taking ayahuasca that way is the kind of economic boom that has come from this western tourism has attracted some kind of con people who don’t actually have deep footing in a particular lineage or tradition. They don’t really approach things from a caring attitude, but see this opportunity to get a website created and make a couple thousand dollars per person who comes down, which has a ton of money there. So, yeah, risk there is if someone feels called to it to just really do research, read whatever you can find online to try and find reputable places.
Yeah, I had experienced it two times, ayahuasca. Both times in the United States when people from Columbia, wisdom holders in a tradition down there who call it yajé, came up and brought the medicine to the states. So, for me, it was just so much more powerful than anything I’d ever experienced. And that included several three and a half to five gram experiences of psilocybin mushrooms, which is a pretty high dose, especially at five. And yeah, I didn’t feel like I had a context to understand any of it.
It really felt like the visions that I was having, which were some of the most powerful and clear I’ve ever experienced, we’re very connected to the jungle, lots of vines. And you hear this a lot with people who take it, vines and snakes and something like flora and fauna. And it felt like I hadn’t been initiated sufficiently into whatever this was, and I was pretty lost and didn’t know what to do with it after. And I still sometimes think I don’t really know what to do with that. Yeah, I might’ve lost the original question, but that’s just kind of getting at another risk.
TS: But you sound cautionary, you sound cautionary around ayahuasca, and one thing that occurs to me is the ceremonialists, or I’m not sure what the Ayahuascaros who are bringing that ceremonial medicine to the United States and Canada and who knows around the corner from my house, they could be having a ceremony right now with eight people or 10 people. There’s the question of what’s trustworthy there, but it’s also, it’s not culturally embedded at that point. They’re in a suburb. And so I’m just wondering what your thoughts are about that.
SL: Yeah, I think where I took it wasn’t quite like a suburb, but it was in the United States and it’s like in a cabin in the woods. And it did feel like taking it in a place that was far from its home, something didn’t feel quite right about that. It is hard to speak with anything that I could even feel like approaches objectivity with this because I had had such intense personal experiences. And so those really influenced my feelings. And I do know a lot of people who have just been so powerfully transformed in this incredibly positive way from ayahuasca, both in the suburbs or in the jungle. So, I personally think it’s not ideal, but some people do seem to bring a lot of intention and ceremony and wisdom, and I guess in our economic climate, that’s where they can give it.
TS: Sean, you’re such a balanced presenter. It’s one of the things I really like about you and humble and you own your own personal experience. I really appreciate that about you. Now, what would you say about psilocybin mushrooms compared to the compound of psilocybin and LSD? How does that all compare in your mind?
SL: Yeah, I’ve only experienced psilocybin mushrooms. I’ve never experienced synthetic psilocybin. I know that the western world became aware of psilocybin mushrooms through these kind of infamous visits of certain folks, R. Gordon Wasson and Valentina Wasson in the 1950s to a certain region in Mexico where they met Maria Sabina, who’s a very famous Mexican curandera, who kind of held the lineage of her particular region with these psilocybin mushrooms. And she shared it with these people. And I guess in terms of any broad kind of knowledge, no one was aware of them before in the western kind of capitalist world, at least the United States. And that kind of brought them to the states and beyond. And it wasn’t too long after that where Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who not invented but found LSD, discovered LSD, he also discovered psilocybin as the active alkaloid in these mushrooms that have been brought back from Mexico.
And there’s a famous story that he and Wasson went down to Mexico and gave Maria Sabina some of these pills of extracted psilocybin. And she said that it has the same spirit. So, there’s just kind of a debate of whether they are the same thing or whether taking it in this extracted form is kind of diluting it and actually removing some of the medicine. But really you’re only going to get synthetic psilocybin in a FDA trial or some other kind of scientific trial right now. It’s not something that’s on the street and mushrooms grow everywhere. So, yeah, it’s like mushrooms come from this particular lineage in Mexico in terms of our cultural awareness and their impact on our culture over the last several decades, but they also kind of seem to grow everywhere and a lot of places at least, and can flourish in many places. So, I guess they don’t feel as tied to a specific culture and a specific practice. But yeah, either way, a lot of intention for the approach is always good.
TS: Let me ask you a personal question, Sean. You invested three and a half years in writing Psychedelic Revival, and you work, as I mentioned, as a ketamine-assisted therapist. Why have you devoted your substantial bright light force of a human, your energy into this arena? Why? What’s your motivation? What’s driving you?
SL: That’s a good question. Let’s see. I mean, an overarching thing is I just have found this fascinating for a really long time since before my first experience, which is when I was 21 and I’m 36 now. At that age where I have to think about it. And yeah, it was amazing to me that you could have these experiences and see the world through these different lenses and explore what is consciousness, what is reality? So, I love those kinds of questions around it. And I also attribute a lot of meaning to those early experiences. I felt like mushrooms, which psilocybin mushrooms were my first two experiences, and then LSD, those two in particular, it was like they just kind of made a super highway to my heart, and all of a sudden I was deeply connected to my heart in a big way that I hadn’t. It felt similar to being a kid, but I hadn’t really remembered what that had felt like.
And it just felt so valuable and it had remained a reference point for a really long time. I think people are drawn to intoxicants and a lot of the ones in this culture like alcohol kind of, I’m not necessarily judging alcohol, but it’s a depressant. It kind of removes us a little more from life, and these intoxicants seem to bring me more into life. And I got so energized when I started learning about psychedelic therapy and that it was coming back around. Because I’d been reading about this stuff and learning about it for so many years, and I never in a million years would’ve thought that it was going to have this revival after the sixties and everything.
I also just love the sixties. I’ve loved that music and learning about them since I was in high school, and I believed in what I was learning about it that these things can really help people heal in a different kind of way than most of our established systems in the western culture. They can really, I guess, to borrow from Michael Paul and change your mind and expand consciousness. And I just wanted to be a part of that for people and for our culture, wherever it goes, well, not wherever it goes, the good directions it goes, I want to help steer it away from the darker directions.
TS: Do you think it’s fair to say from your perspective, that taken in the right way with the right guidance, preparation, intention, integration, that this can be a shortcut for people in their healing, growth and evolution?
SL: Yeah, I do. I don’t think that’s always the case. It can be a shortcut that may be a lot more wild than the long way. The long way might be kind of a familiar path, but this is a shortcut, but you might be going through some thorny woods or whatnot. So, yeah, it’s kind of a deep dive that can get you there faster and expedite the therapeutic process for sure.
TS: Speaking of the thorny woods, you talked about the courage that it takes because you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it sounds like now one of the things that could happen is I could get stuck in a thorny wood. Tell me what’s it reasonable to expect? And I realize we’ve talked about a lot of different psychedelics and then also ayahuasca, but this is kind of some of the hard stuff that could happen, the reasonable hard stuff, not the major weird outliers, but the reasonable hard stuff you should be statistically prepared for.
SL: Yeah, yeah, definitely re-experiencing difficult memories, traumatic memories, and when I say re-experiencing, I mean up to and including feeling like you are back in that experience and feeling the full intensity of what you felt in that moment. So, that for sure, feeling uncomfortable, nauseous in the body, a lot of fear and disorientation. Those would be big ones. I think if you kind of think about what are the more difficult things in your life right now, which is very subjective, maybe one person’s haunted by memories, another person is very stressed about where their life is going more futural. I think it is reasonable to anticipate the possibility that the most challenging parts of your life are going to enter into the experience at some point and quite possibly be amplified. You’ll feel them in a bigger way, the maybe habitual defense mechanisms or walls that you’ve constructed to keep them at bay so you can function may come down and you get kind of flooded by these kinds of feelings.
TS: In terms of re-experiencing traumatic experience, what keeps it from being re-traumatizing and instead turns it into a healing experience?
SL: Yeah, I think that’s a big reason why there’s such a conversation around therapy and these, taking it in an intentional context because that is a real risk, particularly in recreational settings, when if you’re re-experiencing something, maybe you don’t have someone there to help you and you might stay stuck there until you can move again. So, having someone there, ideally, I think like a trained therapist, a trained facilitator, and that’s a broad term there kind of purposely, because I don’t think therapists are the only people who can do that, even if that’s kind of the way the culture’s trending. So many people have been doing this longer than me, even though I have a title of therapist.
And so someone you really trust there, or at the very least on call so that if something came up, like you have something arranged where you can press a button on your phone or they’re going to come check on you. And ideally ongoing therapy after that with someone who knows that you’re having this experience, they know you already. Therapy or coaching, something like that where the work continues and if something feels stuck, you can continue to work with it and not just be left in that kind of retraumatized state.
But safety is really probably the biggest thing with that, just to be able to feel safe with someone else in a particular setting to just really establish that beforehand so that you can reconnect to a sense of safety that you probably didn’t feel in that initial experience that has come back around. And then the safety can help recontextualize the memory.
TS: There’s one more substance, Sean, that I’d love for you to touch on, which is DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Heard about these substances our listeners may have as well. Bring some of your clarity to bear.
SL: So, these two are often confused because they both have DMT in the title, so it makes sense. So, there’s DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, and these are two different chemicals. So, DMT is actually found in ayahuasca. It’s the kind of psychoactive alkaloid of ayahuasca and it’s found in many other places in nature. And 5-MeO-DMT is kind of most famously found in the venom of a particular toad. The Sonoran Desert toad, bufo alvarius, and I don’t know how people discovered this, but they discovered that the venom that this toad secretes when it’s afraid, if it’s prepared a certain way and vaporized that people have really profound, really, really intense journeys. So, there are some similarities between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. The biggest one is duration. They’re both really short, where a trip might last for 15 minutes or 20 minutes, and they both have a really rapid onset after being smoked or vaporized or taken intravenously.
Within seconds people will have a really, really powerful experience starting. The content of those experiences is where they seem to differ significantly. A friend of mine, Rafael Lancelotta, who’s been a big researcher in 5-MeO-DMT for a while, described the difference as, or at least a part of the difference as with DMT you kind of maintained this role as the observer or the witness of the experience. You are going on this journey and seeing these things, having these interactions, which I’ll touch on in a second. Whereas with 5-MeO-DMT, it’s more like you are the experience. There’s no observer, there’s kind of a non-duality of fusing with everything, is how people often describe these really powerful experiences. So, yeah, you don’t hear as much about visions on 5-MeO-DMT. People will describe a kind of bright light. I’ve often heard it compared to the Big Bang, people feel like they’re experiencing the Big Bang.
There’s really, really powerful stuff. And for DMT, it’s quite a bit stranger. People have pretty consistently over the years described encounters with what they call beings or entities that they all, pretty much, most people it seems who take DMT and have these kind of encounters come back and feel confident that it wasn’t just a trip or hallucination, that whatever they were in contact with was real. And they describe kind of going to a different place across a certain threshold. And people will describe very similar phenomenon even if they don’t know each other or whatnot. So, yeah, DMT is quite a bit stranger in that regard. People don’t really know what to make of that, but people are looking into it. But yeah, 5-MeO-DMT is appearing more in the research in the kind of mental health research.
TS: For what types of conditions?
SL: For depression, and I believe for addiction as well. At the very least, I’ve heard a lot of people attribute significant healing of addiction to 5-MeO-DMT.
TS: And have you tried both of these substances? Do you have your personal reports here or not?
SL: I have not. I have tried DMT, but it was a small dose, so I just kind of got a sense of it, and I didn’t have that really far out experience, and I haven’t tried 5-MeO-DMT. I think a lesson for me on this journey was discernment in terms of this journey of learning about this stuff is discernment of what do I feel drawn to instead of just like I should take every single one so I know what I’m talking about. And I’ve never felt drawn to 5-MeO-DMT and really high dose DMT for that matter. Enough people that I’ve talked to who kind of regretted having taken it, which was more in recreational settings, but I just kind of try to pay attention to the signs or messages that I feel like I’m receiving in my subjective experience. And there’s something about both of those that’s kind of like, yeah, at least for now stay back.
TS: What suggestions do you have for people in developing their own discernment?
SL: That’s tricky, especially if you haven’t tried any. I believe a lot in the power of reflection and mindfulness practice, meditation and journaling, and there’s kind of a core concept in psychedelic healing that I haven’t mentioned that’s referred to as the inner healer or an inner healing intelligence. The idea that the psychedelic substance kind of potentiates or catalyzes this inner process that moves us toward healing and just kind of knows where we need to go that is kind of subconscious or maybe transpersonal, I don’t really know. But the same way that our body heals like a wound that’s been there when it’s put in the right kind of circumstances, the ideas that our kind of emotional body or mental bodies have the same mechanism and it doesn’t need psychedelics to come to the forefront. I think this can be accessed through meditation or through a variety of contemplative practices that we feel bring us toward our authentic selves or whatever is most central to who we are.
And so I would really trust engaging in that practice. For me, it’s journaling. That’s a contemplative practice for me. Not having a specific agenda, but just kind of following my mind and following what feels like it has life. Because there’s a different feeling around what feels like it has life to it versus what I feel like I should do, or maybe I want to do. This feels like very up here in the head and it’s almost coming from something else, and it feels more in the heart when it is aligned with me in the chest. And so I think developing kind of that discerning capacity through quiet stillness, reflection and leaning into it while also educating yourself about what the particular substance is. So, it’s based on more than just the word.
TS: Sure. And it sounds like from what you’re saying that this voice or intuition or knowing of the inner healer helps us make our discerning decision, but then also you said something kind of partners with the psychedelic substance in some way, and I was curious to understand that a little more what you meant by that.
SL: Yeah. Let’s see. I guess what I’m getting at is that this intuition, inner healer, whole bunch of words we could use for this, it’s kind of tends to be unconscious somewhere in the background. And as the psychedelic comes on, it can bring it more into consciousness that maybe a lot of our ego constructs and the personas we build or the parts that we have that we operate through box in our senses of identity and who we are and what we want. And with those kind of going more offline for a bit, this unconscious phenomenon is able to just take its course, the psychedelic invites it to be there more fully and to guide the way.
TS: I listened to a podcast before recording this podcast where you shared that as part of the writing of Psychedelic Revival. Part of what made it interesting is if you’d hit a place where you were like, oh my God, I’m bored. You would stop because you wanted the writing to be something that you were engaged in, knowing that the reader would also be engaged, and you did a good job with that.
SL: Thanks.
TS: For a 400-plus-page book, you give the reader a reason to keep turning the page. You really do again and again. But that one of your tools, this is what I heard in the podcast, was microdosing as needed to help you in the writing process, keep it as engaging as it was, keep you as engaged as you were. And I’m curious, just if you could give us a little bit about how you’ve experimented with microdosing and what you’ve found.
SL: Absolutely. Yeah. I love ending on that point. Microdosing can just be such a wonderful entry point into all this stuff for people who are interested, but tentative because it’s a very, very small dose, one 10th of a therapeutic dose to the point that you’re probably not going to have many noticeable effects, maybe some, but they’re real subtle. And—
TS: Are you microdosing right now?
SL: I’m not, no, not right now.
TS: I’m not either. I just wanted to check.
SL: So, the two main psychedelics people use for microdosing are mushrooms and LSD. I used LSD microdosing for various points along this book writing journey, because I found that that could help stimulate creativity and connect me to more of a heart-based place, kind of more jovial in spirit and re-energize the process if it was starting to feel kind of stale. And yeah, usually people follow, well, I wouldn’t say usually, it’s recommended that people follow a specific protocol. A common one is one day on, two days off, maybe do that or one day on, one day off another day. I wasn’t really following an exact science to it, but yeah, I just would measure out a small dose.
With LSD it’s hard because it’s such a powerful molecule you measure in the micrograms, so tiny, tiny. But yeah, I was able to measure it out and it just seemed to kind of open a portal of creativity where there might’ve been stuckness, and maybe it’s a placebo effect. That’s what some people are researching. But the guy who kind of popularized it in the first place, Jim Fadiman, who I have to credit for the title of this book, he’d said that in our interview. He said that that’s kind of how he started microdosing. He was kind of stuck on a book and took some to stimulate more creativity.
TS: I’ve been talking with Sean Lawlor, he’s the author of the new book, Psychedelic Revival: Toward a New Paradigm of Healing. And Sean, I just have one final question for you. You said, “I never really knew that there would be in my lifetime a psychedelic revival.” Wasn’t expecting it, didn’t know that would happen however many, 10-plus years ago. You didn’t see it coming exactly. Do you have a sense, your own perspective on why this is happening now? Is it because of the pressure that’s on us in terms of humanity evolving, which I think one could clearly nominate for conscious evolution to happen, and for us to go through these very dark times, we need all the help we can get, and psychedelics have come, they’ve used their own agency to come and help us, or no, humans are choosing this because we need acceleration in our healing and growth. What’s your vision of it, the psychedelic revival now?
SL: Yeah, it’s kind of two lenses that come to mind. One is, I guess more kind of practical, just the fact that once psychedelics became illegal, most of them at least, in a period between the very late sixties and early to mid-eighties for MDMA, that people have been working their butts off to change these rulings and get them rescheduled, and they’ve dedicated their lives to pushing back against FDA or DEA decisions and go through the bureaucratic gauntlet to get us where we are. So, yeah, there’s a lot of unsung heroes of this whole movement that we’re told for decades by who knows how many people that they were nuts, and this would never happen, but they just believed in it so wholeheartedly and kept at it. So, yeah, I think that’s big reason. It’s just the backlash was so severe to the 1960s and some of the both responsible and irresponsible uses of psychedelics back then that it’s taken this long to kind of open the doors a little more through science, primarily through the data.
And yeah, I do think of it in a way that there’s something that is being called out for, or something that western culture, at least us culture that I’m a part of, is crying out for a kind of collective ailment of isolation and anxiety and fear and loss, irreparable loss. And yeah, people don’t feel healthy and they don’t feel like the systems that we have are healing them in the ways that they need that feel deeper than just what can be measured in a lab or in a doctor’s office. And I think we’ve seen this through tons of different forms with different eastern healing traditions coming more to the West.
And I think that this is kind of a big development in that trend, that there’s a calling out for these new forms of healing because people know even if doctors or other people are telling them otherwise, people know that it’s this really deep part of their heart or their soul or however they conceive of it that is sick and in need of healing. And psychedelics seem to present a way to contact those depths and heal and kind of meet that deep, deep need.
TS: Sean Lawlor, author of Psychedelic Revival: Toward a New Paradigm of Healing. Sean, I really just love being with you and feeling your sincerity and your goodness and what a beautiful book you have created and are offering the world. Thank you.
SL: Thank you, Tami. This book would not be possible without you and all your amazing trailblazing work since the 1980s. So, yeah, thank you so much, and thank you for having me. It’s been a real gift.
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