LSD & YOGA gecombineerd, voor een mystieke ervaring:
https://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/yoga-meditation-and-psychedelics
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.
Amanda Tust
Feb 8, 2019
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 âjourney weekendââtwo or three days spent taking psychedelics in hopes of experiencing profound insights or a spiritual awakeningâshe found herself considering it. âDrugs were never on my radar,â says Griffin, 39, of New York City. âAt an early age, I got warnings from my parents that drugs may have played a role in bringing on a family memberâs mental illness. Beyond trying pot a couple times in college, I didnât touch them.â 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. Sheâd travel with friends to rental houses in various parts of the United States where a âmedicine manâ from California would join them and administer mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics. Miller would tell Griffin about experiences on these âmedicinesâ that had helped her feel connected to the divine. Sheâd talk about being in meditative-like bliss states and feeling pure love.
This time, Miller was hosting a three-day journey weekend with several psychedelicsâsuch as DMT (dimethyltryptamine, a compound found in plants thatâs extracted and then smoked to produce a powerful experience thatâs over in minutes), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or âacid,â 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 âchoose your own adventureâ 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 âmini journeyââjust one day and one drugâto 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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âIt 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,â she says. âI 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 âdownload,â or the kind of insight you might get during meditation. It felt spiritual in a way. I wasnât 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.â
Griffin, whoâs practiced yoga for more than 20 years and who says she wanted to try psychedelics in order to âpull back the âveil of perception,ââ is among a new class of yoga practitioners who are giving drugs a try for spiritual reasons. Theyâre 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, isnât 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 1960sâa 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 personâs lifeâand brain. âWhen I entered medical school in 1975, the topic of psychedelics was off the board. It was kind of a taboo area,â 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 â50s and â60s, especially for patients who donât respond well to conventional therapies.
See also 6 Yoga Retreats to Help You Deal With Addiction
This opening of the vaultâresearch has also picked up again in countries such as England, Spain, and Switzerlandâhas 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. âItâs not about the drug per se, itâs about the meaningful experience that one dose can generate,â 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 âpsychedelicâ was coined by a British-Canadian psychiatrist during the 1950s and is a mashup of two ancient Greek words that together mean âmind revealing.â Psychedelics are also known as hallucinogens, although they donât 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 âmore vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness.â 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 whoâd 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 selfâwhich 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 âunityâ and âtranscendence of time and space.â (See âWhatâs a Mystical Experience?â 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. âFor 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,â 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 âthe scientific and the sacred.â 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 lifeâboth immediately afterward and at a six-and-a-half-month follow-up. A study from Johns Hopkins produced similar results the same year. âThe drug is out of your system in a matter of hours, but the memories and changes from the experience are often long-lasting,â 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 lineagesâChristian clergy, Jewish rabbis, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hindu priests, and Muslim imamsâand giving them high-dose psilocybin in order to study their accounts of the sessions and any effects the experience has on their spiritual practices. âTheyâre helping us describe the nature of the experience given their unique training and vernacular,â says Bossis, who adds that itâs too early to share results. The religious-leaders study is a new-wave version of the famous Good Friday Experiment at Boston Universityâs 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, whoâd later become a notorious figure in the counterculture movement, and psychologist Richard Alpert, whoâd 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 eventâa tranquilizer was administered to a distressed participant who left the chapel and refused to returnâit was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment with psychedelics. It also helped establish the terms âsetâ and âsetting,â 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.
âSet and setting are really critical in determining a positive outcome,â UCLAâs Grob says. âOptimizing 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.â
Bossis says most patients in the cancer studies set intentions for the session related to a better death or end of lifeâa sense of integrity, dignity, and resolution. Bossis encourages them to accept and directly face whatever is unfolding on psilocybin, even if itâs dark imagery or feelings of death, as is often the case for these study participants. âAs counterintuitive as it sounds, I tell them to move into thoughts or experiences of dyingâto go ahead. They wonât die physically, of course; itâs an experience of ego death and transcendence,â he says. âBy moving into it, youâre directly learning from it and it typically changes to an insightful outcome. Avoiding it can only fuel it and makes it worse.â
In the research studies, the setting is a room in a medical center thatâs 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, âgo inward and accept the rise and fall of the experience.â 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.
âEven in clinical situations, the psychedelic really runs itself,â says
Ram Dass, who is now 87 and lives in Maui. âIâm happy to see that this has been opened up and these researchers are doing their work from a legal place.â
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 âpushing the boundaries in a juvenile way.â He says, âI wasnât 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.â Years later in his films and research projects he started hearing about set and setting. âTheyâd 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.â
Brigitte Mars, a professor of herbal medicine at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, teaches a âsacred psychoactivesâ class that covers the ceremonial use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, in Native American traditions, and as part of the shamanic path. âIn 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, theyâd be given more privileges since theyâd gone through an initiation,â 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. âThis 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. Itâs a special occasion,â she says, adding, âpsychedelics arenât for everyone, and they arenât a substitute for working on yourself.â
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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 bypassingâusing spiritual practices as a way to avoid dealing with difficult psychological issues that need attention and healing: âMystical experience can be seductive. For some it creates the sense that this is the âfast track,â and now that theyâve experienced mystical states, attention to communication, deep self-inquiry, or therapy and other forms of somatic healing are not necessary to grow.â She also says that recreational users donât always give the attention to setting thatâs needed to feel safe and uplifted. âEnvironments filled with noise and light pollution, distractions, and potentially insensitive and disturbing human interactions will not serve our well-being,â 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. âWe had a wild degree of misuse and abuse in the â60s, particularly among young people who were not adequately prepared and would take them under all sorts of adverse conditions,â Grob says. âThese 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 wasnât for entertainment, recreation, or sensation. It was to further strengthen an individualâs identity as part of his culture and society, and it facilitated greater social cohesion.â
Learn about the pyschedelic roots of yoga.
ANDREW BANNECKER
Yogaâs 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. âItâs documented that yogis were essentially utilizing some brew, some concoction, to elicit states of transcendental awareness,â 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.
âPsychotropic substances are powerful tools, and like all tools, they can cut both waysâhelping or harming,â says Ganga White, author of
Yoga Beyond Belief and MultiDimensional Yoga and founder of White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, California. âIf you look at anything you can see positive and negative uses. A medicine can be a poison and a poison can be a medicineâthereâs a saying like this in the
Bhagavad Gita.â
Whiteâs first experience with psychedelics was at age 20. It was 1967 and he took LSD. âI was an engineering student servicing TVs and working on electronics. The next day I became a yogi,â he says. âI saw the life force in plants and the magnitude of beauty in nature. It set me on a spiritual path.â 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. âI was told that they would destroy your
chakras and your astral body. I stopped everything, even coffee and tea,â he says. But within a decade, White began shifting his view on psychedelics again. He says he started to notice âduplicity, hypocrisy, and spiritual materialismâ in the yoga world. And he no longer felt that psychedelic experiences were âanalog to true experiences.â He started combining meditation and psychedelics. âI think an occasional mystic journey is a tune-up,â he says. âItâs like going to see a great teacher once in a while who always has new lessons.â
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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 â60s that served as a catalyst for her meditation practice and studies in the
tantric tradition. âEveryone from my generation who had an awakening pretty much had it on a psychedelic. We didnât have yoga studios yet,â she says. âI 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 âeverything is loveâ 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.â Kempton says sheâs done LSD and Ayahuasca within the past decade for âpsychological journeying,â which she describes as âlooking into issues I find uncomfortable or that Iâm trying to break through and understand.â
Little tried mushrooms and LSD at around age 20 and says he didnât have any mystical experiences, yet he feels that they contributed to his openness in exploring meditation, literature, poetry, and music. âI 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,â 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 âRumi Blastâ (a derivative of DMT) and âSassafras,â which is similar to MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known colloquially as ecstasy or Molly). Saturday was LSD. Sunday was Ayahuasca. âOnce I was there, I felt really open to the experience. It felt really safe and intentionalâalmost like the start of a
yoga retreat,â she says. It began by smudging with sage and palo santo. After the ceremonial opening, Griffin inhaled the Rumi Blast. âI was lying down and couldnât move my body but felt like a vibration was buzzing through me,â she says. After about five minutesâthe length of a typical peak on DMTâshe sat up abruptly. âI took a massive deep breath and it felt like remembrance of my first breath. It was so visceral.â Next up was Sassafras: âIt ushered in love. We played music and danced and saw each other as beautiful souls.â Griffin originally planned to end the journey here, but after having such a connected experience the previously night, she decided to try LSD. âIt 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,â she says. Exhausted and mentally tapped by Sunday, she opted out of the Ayahuasca tea. Reflecting on it now, she says, âThe experiences will never leave me. Now when
I look at a tree, it isnât undulating or dancing like when I was on LSD, but I ask myself, âWhat am I not seeing thatâs still there?ââ
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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. (Whatâs 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 donât classify it as a classic psychedelic because of its stimulant effects and âempathogenicâ 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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âClassic psychedelics are physiologically well toleratedâwith the exception of vomiting and diarrhea on Ayahuasca,â says Grob, who also studied Ayahuasca in Brazil during the 1990s. âBut 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.â Psychedelics can cause fear, anxiety, or paranoiaâwhich 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 disorderâongoing visual disturbances, or âflashbacksââcan 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. Thereâs 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.
