If anything has had a long, strange trip, it is psychedelics. In the 60s these drugs had the signature of the counterculture all over them, invading art, music, writing, and politics with strange sounds, swirling patterns and outlandish ideas. Almost immediately came the backlash, and many people have been jailed a long time, basically for the act of “opening the mind.”

 And now psychedelics have emerged in a new costume, as important mental health medicines. Rick Doblin’s work in the 1990s began this last sea change, and the talk moved from the hopelessly vague “far out” and “outta sight,” of hippies to the careful and rather dehumanized language of clinical studies in journals. In this, their latest iteration, psychedelics are promoted as a medicine rather like aspirin is a medicine: predictable, efficacious and reliable in its effects – though this is more promotional material than reality.  

 They are, however, one of the few doorways into a genuine spiritual experience that we have in our materialist-based culture today. They can be life-changing and they can give us a new perspective that years of therapy, years of churchgoing, or years of most anything else might not give us. I believe that they help us with mental health issues through the action of the mystical experience, rather than enhanced brain plasticity resulting from the action of the drug. After all, if you have just seen divine light, your thinking, hence your brain, might become a little more flexible over the issue of change.

 My coming of age was in the 1960s, during that first wave of psychedelics, and so it is no surprise that my introduction to them was via Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendricks, and all that crew. I also encountered the mushrooms on a very green mountains of Southern Mexico, but soon after that, perhaps like America itself, I dropped out of dropping out for a while. It was not until 2003 that I encountered psychedelics again, this time as a therapist with a small private practice in the evenings, while I worked at the needle exchange during the day.  One of my evening clients was a heroin user who had taken the immensely powerful psychedelic ibogaine to help him kick the opiate. As we worked together, we found that Internal Family Systems therapy, with its orientation to the inner imaginal realms, was well suited to reengaging with the psychedelic spaces after the trip, and even possessed the possibility of dreaming the dream forwards.

 Back in those days the “Psychedelic Renaissance” had not yet taken off, but even so, as time passed I expanded into the other psychedelics, and worked with people who were coming for all kinds of reasons – for mental health issues, for behavior change, or as part of a spiritual journey. Or a combination. It felt to me that the Internal Systems Therapy plus psychedelics were working together something like an old-time prospector, searching for gold. In the psychedelic experience, the prospector sets a charge that blows everything up and sends rocks and soil flying all over. It’s an emphatic experience to go through and it leaves stuff all over the place. The therapy is the work of picking through these many fragments, searching for the nuggets of gold they may contain. Then, after the useful stuff has been gathered and assembled, the prospector may choose to set another charge, another explosive act of self-discovery, in the endeavor to find more gold.

 The first work with psychedelics is of course the preparation, which often involves setting an intention. This means nothing more than wishing for what you want. But figuring out exactly what it is that you want can be a surprising challenge. It is easy to come up with a wish list of accomplishments and emotional things you would love to have for yourself, but, harder to distill them all into a few words that will sum it all up. It should be a pithy sentence – say, ten words or less – because once you are tripping, your brain won’t be interested in all those subordinate clauses or extra items. As Henry David Thoreau put it, “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”

 Maybe the theme you choose is that you want to show up more for yourself in the world, or you want to extend compassion to the parts of you that can’t find a way to calm down, or maybe it is a reaching out to light, spirit, or whatever name you want to give that. Your intention may encompass an image you encountered in therapy, such as, “May the shield around my heart be opened,” or “May I get out of this stuck place.” With that, you would have something you can hold onto during your trip, to remind you of why you are here. That said, it is best to hold your intention lightly during the trip, because if some version of a higher power has something different in mind, it is pointless to fight it for too long.

 The psychedelic experience itself runs a disorderly gamut from ecstatic to terrifying, to blah, to purely somatic (i.e. a lot of shaking and trembling in the body) to, “what the hell just happened?” Each experience, naturally, will need a different kind of processing, in different ways for different kinds of people. We call this integration, but in this, as the poet Mary Oliver calls it, our “one wild and precious life,” we want to be sure that integration is not a rendering of the ineffable back down into something entirely intelligible and non-mysterious to regular linear world of traffic lights and deadlines. I prefer to think of disintegrating our regular world preoccupations and unchallenged assumptions into the larger spiritual perspective of the trip.

 Here’s an example of some post-medicine work: In her journey, Jean saw herself back in the garden of her childhood, where there was a golden merry-go-round which you had to put coins in to make work. There were many coins on the ground around it, and there was a woman who was picking up more than her fair share of coins, and a man who was picking up very few. That’s all she got in the journey, but in our work afterwards, Jean went inside herself, after the very simple fashion of ISF therapy, back to that garden, where she saw that the man was in fact her father and the woman her mother, each with their different own issues. In this “prospector’s” work of picking through the rubble for gold, she came to a place of more compassion for her mother and father, each after their own fashion, and became less conflicted about her family in a way that just doing the psychedelic alone probably wouldn’t have brought her to.

 I believe the primary reason we “journey,” or trip, or “do ceremony,” is to work on the things that impede the spread of love – things like our fears, our selfishness, our misconceptions about what is important, and our culturally inherited burdens that go from rage, to terror, to shame, to a sense of worthlessness. The many usual suspects. Psychedelics can take us to “another place,” where our sense of values gets rejiggered into something more closely aligned with what we call the spiritual – poor tortured word as it is – and our very sense of self gets rejiggered too, in that alignment. It’s a process of remembering, remembering, remembering who we are, and at the same time a loosening from the belief systems that keep us small, thinking that they have helped us stay safe. It is this ‘being who you are’ that we are looking for – not being “a character” or standing out as special in some way, but succumbing to what is true at the core. John Lennon said, “All you need is love,” but I think psychedelics would edit that to, “All you are is love.”

 For more on what I offer with psychedelics go to: www.afterthemedicine.com

There are things that are known and things that are unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Aldous Huxley

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.

Timothy Leary