0:00:00.4 April Pride: This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

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0:00:06.3 Natasha Leonard: This goes back to psychedelics and one of the bigger experiences I’ve had is that when you look at life in a dualistic fate way of yes, no, right, wrong, black, white, good, bad, that’s the way a child actually thinks. The ability to step outside of that and have empathy and connection and understanding is a reflection of maturity.

0:00:32.9 April Pride: Nothing else can give you the childhood you missed and launch you into maturity in the same way as potent plants. Welcome to the High Guide, I’m your host April Pride. For today’s episode we’re doing something a little different. I asked McCarter Gets High if I could share a portion of her episode featuring Natasha Leonard of 1906 who you heard at the top of the show. I met Natasha at a weed conference in Vegas 4:00 AM in the morning in 2017 and had the pleasure of enjoying a variety of plants with her ever since, but not recently enough. The formulation she was crafting with 1906 when we first met, that was some of the first talk I had about including other plants in edible formulations to really expand upon the entourage effect, because after all, all plants contain cannabinoids, terpenes and flavonoids. I also happened to gift a guy she knows in Colorado a vape pen of DMT, but that’s a story for another time. Let’s meet our High Guides in today’s episode.

0:01:37.1 McCarter: What’s up, everyone? You’re listening to The McCarter Get High podcast, your one-stop shop for all things plant-based medicine. I’m your host McCarter.

0:01:46.7 Natasha Leonard: Hi everyone. I’m Natasha Leonard. First and foremost, I’m a human. [laughter] I work and have been working with 1906 for the last three and a half years with Peter Barsoom, the CEO and Co-Founder and our awesome team. My titles, I’m the Director of Corporate Development. Prior to working with 1906, I helped launch and define the dispensary channel for Pax vaporizers and launch that in Colorado and California. I worked with brands like Thanks, Lord Jones, Bebo. And prior to getting to the cannabis industry, I worked in the natural food space with a lot of different start-up natural foods, CPG brands, Udi’s gluten-free foods, Simple Mills, Teatulia. I would say in general, my interests are deeply in plant medicine, and the application that that has for improving mental health and just general life stuff.

0:02:35.3 McCarter: When we do get high, we want to come into a different state of mind, we want a new perspective, and that’s another reason why I started this podcast. I wanna know individually why people get high. Why do you get high? And I ask people that all the time. I wanna know… Because people do wanna get high, what age, if you don’t mind me asking…

0:02:58.4 Natasha Leonard: That I first got high?

0:03:00.4 McCarter: Yeah.

0:03:00.8 Natasha Leonard: I was definitely 15.

0:03:00.9 McCarter: Same.

0:03:01.4 Natasha Leonard: Yeah. [laughter]

0:03:02.0 McCarter: 15 is the age. It is.

0:03:04.9 Natasha Leonard: For sure. And the other part of that too it’s really funny. And I don’t know what your experience was like, but the friends that I met, the girlfriends that I made in high school are still some of my best friends today. And there’s photo of that, in high school, we all had our own bong that we would all hang out on the patio and just session our own bongs. And I’d love those girls.

0:03:24.1 McCarter: But let’s talk about Psilocybin.

0:03:25.8 Natasha Leonard: Let’s? I love the mushrooms.

0:03:28.9 McCarter: When were you first introduced, experience? Tell us everything.

0:03:34.0 Natasha Leonard: My first experience was actually pretty big and changed my life.

0:03:37.7 McCarter: Wow.

0:03:39.7 Natasha Leonard: I was probably 18. I had tried mushrooms when I was younger.

0:03:43.1 McCarter: Sure.

0:03:43.4 Natasha Leonard: Just like a little bit.

0:03:44.2 McCarter: A wee bit.

0:03:46.0 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, we bit [0:03:46.9] ____, but I had my first real cathartic experiences when I was 18 and it changed my life. I was in a safe place with a family member and I had a really… My mom died when I was a child of a brain tumor when I was six-years-old.

0:04:01.1 McCarter: Oh my gosh.

0:04:01.5 Natasha Leonard: And there was just a lot of other stuff that happened.

0:04:03.6 McCarter: That’s horrible.

0:04:04.5 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, in my life.

0:04:05.3 McCarter: I’m so sorry to hear that.

0:04:06.5 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, it was unfortunate. And a lot of other stuff happened in my life. And when I was 18, I had a really big experience and I never really cried from the time, I like realized after the fact, I had a huge cathartic moment. And I realized I hadn’t really cried for the majority of my life from the time I was six-years-old until I was 18.

0:04:24.4 McCarter: Wow.

0:04:25.3 Natasha Leonard: And then I really realized in that experience that [chuckle] the psilocybin and the mushrooms were an ally in accessing trauma that I think that pretty much everyone has something, right?

0:04:37.4 McCarter: Yes, absolutely.

0:04:37.6 Natasha Leonard: And to get at that in a way, and to move that more than even getting at it, right? It’s not good enough to get at it, you have to move it.

0:04:46.7 McCarter: Yes.

0:04:47.2 Natasha Leonard: And I had that experience in Spades, and I honestly have been a benefactor of plant medicine since then.

0:04:56.5 McCarter: Wow.

0:04:56.7 Natasha Leonard: And I’m an active participant in that community.

0:05:00.9 McCarter: What about DMT?

0:05:02.0 Natasha Leonard: I love DMT, have you ever done it?

0:05:03.9 McCarter: I just did DMT just two days ago, and I’m in love with it.

0:05:07.9 Natasha Leonard: Yeah.

0:05:09.1 McCarter: I have it in a vape pen with cannabis terps.

0:05:12.0 Natasha Leonard: Oh wow.

0:05:13.0 McCarter: Yes.

0:05:14.0 Natasha Leonard: The plant getting out there.

0:05:15.4 McCarter: Yes.

0:05:15.9 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, yeah. Tell me about your experience?

0:05:18.4 McCarter: I’m new to that. So what happened was, my friend and I, my friend Anabelle, she was on the podcast, we were just drinking, having a good time on Thursday night, this was… And she lives right off Pearl Street. Her community is really fun. But we were just drinking and we had been eating some mushrooms as well, and obviously, always smoking weed. I’ve been high for about, I don’t know, eight, nine years now. But my friend gave me this DMT cartridge with the cannabis terps, but it tastes like mothballs.

0:05:57.2 Natasha Leonard: Yeah.

0:05:57.5 McCarter: It taste terrible.

0:06:00.2 Natasha Leonard: It has a unique flavor.

0:06:00.5 McCarter: Yeah, so… But then other people… I had a few friends try it and they thought it tasted like roses, and I was like, “Oh no, I had to… ” So then we were just sipping in at first, and I didn’t really understand how to do it.

0:06:13.9 Natasha Leonard: You gotta blast off.

0:06:15.0 McCarter: Yeah. So we really… Then it was just she and I and we were like, “Okay, let’s actually take a few really deep hits of this.” And basically… Oh my gosh, I just… Your whole body gets warm and you’re just in this feeling… So for me, I was kind of like stuck… Well, we also realized you had to close your eyes for…

0:06:38.0 Natasha Leonard: Oh, you didn’t have visuals.

0:06:39.4 McCarter: No, we closed our… We had visuals when we closed our eyes.

0:06:42.8 Natasha Leonard: Oh, interesting.

0:06:43.9 McCarter: But then Anabelle said…

0:06:45.2 Natasha Leonard: I’ve seen that too, but it’s just interesting, you only had it internally. That’s cool.

0:06:48.5 McCarter: Yeah. But then Anabelle said that when she opened her eyes and closed them, she couldn’t tell which one was which, but I could tell. For me it was much… It hit harder when my eyes were closed. So basically, I don’t know, I just had this warm feeling all in my back and the visuals I could just see all of these color spectrums, and the only way I could keep track of time was by the music playing, and it just… I feel like it’s what you feel like when you’re on fentanyl or morphine or something…

0:07:25.8 Natasha Leonard: I don’t know, I’ve never done those things.

0:07:27.2 McCarter: Me either, but I just… I am gonna guess and say that I feel like that’s what it was. But I don’t know, I felt like I could come just in and out of this really amazing euphoric feeling.

0:07:39.4 Natasha Leonard: Oh, interesting.

0:07:41.2 McCarter: But I didn’t… I didn’t really take a huge, huge hit

0:07:46.2 Natasha Leonard: Would you say you had a multi-dimensional experience?

0:07:48.4 McCarter: Oh yes, yes.

0:07:49.2 Natasha Leonard: Okay, good. Yeah.

0:07:49.7 McCarter: Definitely.

0:07:50.2 Natasha Leonard: DMT is a multi-dimensional experience.

0:07:53.2 McCarter: Yes. It felt like I was in and out of kind of like parallel universes

0:07:57.2 Natasha Leonard: Oh, for sure.

0:07:57.9 McCarter: Yeah.

0:07:58.5 Natasha Leonard: I recently had a wild DMT experience, but…

0:08:00.4 McCarter: Let’s hear about it.

0:08:01.2 Natasha Leonard: Well, I did some ayahuasca, actually my first time doing ayahuasca…

0:08:05.4 McCarter: I haven’t done ayahuasca yet.

0:08:06.7 Natasha Leonard: I just tried it for my first time recently, I just had not… I had… A lot of people had invited me to do it, but I really wanted to make sure I was in the right space and…

0:08:13.2 McCarter: Totally.

0:08:14.7 Natasha Leonard: Really go there in comfort, and I did. And it was funny, I drank four cups of ayahuasca and I didn’t really feel…

0:08:21.7 McCarter: Whoa.

0:08:22.3 Natasha Leonard: Which I feel like everyone… When I had heard about it, obviously, I’ve done every other plant but that, and I had heard so many different experiences of the experience and how intense it was, and I had the most beautiful, sweet, loving experience. I was in the desert and I was sitting in a beautiful recliner, covered in blankets, in the desert, just looking out into the stars. The friend I was with was definitely having a more, I would say, centralized experience on her mat and had a deep experience, but… Yeah, mine was really beautiful and it was funny ’cause finally I was like, “Alright, well… ” It was really a light high for me compared to some of the other plant experiences that I’ve had, but beautiful and very wise. It was the wisest plant I have ever experienced. You can have conversations with ayahuasca, it’s weird.

0:09:07.8 McCarter: Whoa.

0:09:07.9 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. But I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna go get a snack now, ’cause it’s snack time. It’s getting late. I didn’t really eat anything… ”

0:09:15.4 McCarter: You’re like, “I think I’m hungry.”

0:09:16.8 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, something, I don’t even know. So I go inside and I get an apple and I drink some bison bone broth…

0:09:22.0 McCarter: Wow, so healthy of you.

0:09:23.5 Natasha Leonard: Well, yeah, you gotta take care of yourself, you know?

0:09:25.4 McCarter: Yeah. I thought you were gonna be like, “Got some chips.” [laughter]

0:09:27.9 Natasha Leonard: No. No, I didn’t eat any chips. I might have eaten some sweet potato chips, maybe I like those

0:09:31.8 McCarter: I love sweet potato chips.

0:09:33.9 Natasha Leonard: Yeah, me too. And I’m sitting there and I started drinking the bone broth and all of a sudden the flower started looking at me, and I was like, “Oh man.” ‘Cause I’d done DMT before, smoking it, and I was like, “Oh, whoa,” because obviously that’s one of the things on ayahuasca, it’s a DMT containing plant right?

0:09:48.8 McCarter: Mm-hmm.

0:09:49.8 Natasha Leonard: I’ve only smoked DMT, but apparently when you ingest a lot of it, it is very much likes bone broth to be a mix. I… These flowers started looking at me, I said to my friend who I was with, who was high sitting for me and I was like, “I’m about to blast off,” and she’s like, “Are you okay?” I’m like, “Yeah, but I’m going back to the ceremony space,” ’cause I was in this beautiful place in New Mexico with this little casitas, it was very nice. And so I couldn’t get outside the door, and I started walking on the gravel and it looked like pop rocks. “Oh,” as I was stepping on the gravel was like… These little rainbows were like spraying out of the ground, I was like, “Oh my gosh, make it to the ceremony space.” I make it to my mat and at this point, my friend had to come back and we were laying in the mattress with our friends, it was all just really good friends who sat for us and we’re all laying together, just enjoying each other’s company, and I was just… Yeah, having the most amazing visual experience I’ve ever had in my life, rainbows were literally icicling out of the ceiling and the lights, and we had this beautiful altar and it was active. It was a wild. And then when I closed my eyes, it was into the kaleidoscope.

0:10:56.3 April Pride: I hope you enjoyed listening to today’s episode, which was a segment from McCarter Gets High Podcast. Seek it out and follow. A big thanks to our High Guides McCarter and Natasha for sharing their high times with us so we know to have external visuals and breath deeply next time we’re passed a vape pen with DMT. Thanks for listening to this episode and join me, April Pride, every Friday at 1:00 PM in Clubhouse where we cover all things A-Z regarding plant medicine. Of course, you’ll find a new episode of The High Guide every Friday. Subscribe and follow wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re looking to stay in closer contact, give us a follow on Instagram @thehigh.guide.